Today, Great Savior, work in us powerfully so that our hearts, minds and wills are centered in Your mighty love. Help us, O King, not be distracted by even the best of all those lesser things which beg for our attention. May your Love ride on the top of every powerful worship song. Cause Your love to linger at a greater decibel than the most potent syllable in any sermons that capture our minds today. With each sacrificial work of ministry, both the noticed works and the hidden works, please establish Your love as the abiding fragrance, permeating the atmosphere, long after the acts of service are all completed. Our Sundays are busy, but will they be blessed? If we first rest in Your love and then move in Your love, then today will certainly be blessed by You.
May we recognize in children’s eyes a longing for love, and may we intentionally become the conduits of Your love straight into their hungry hearts. May the lonely and the elderly and the weak and the unlovely find that they are treasured by us. I know that my own morning will be filled with conversations, assignments, duties and demand – will I be deep enough to keep the remembrance of Your love in the forefront of my mind and my mouth? Will the sun set tonight with me thinking of my own weariness or Your faithfulness? Today, Jesus, we will all be tempted toward selfishness, smallness of heart, and inner-restlessness when we sense that things will be not be just as we had hoped they would be – will we then operate in love, or in the elongated shadow of our disappointments? Savior, You seemed to love everyone equally, but we must honestly confess that we do not usually operate like You do. We are conditional lovers and we long to be so much more than that today.
We choose love over our complaints. We choose love over our fears. We choose love over our desire for personal security. We choose love above our preferences, traditions, standards and assumptions. We want love to have the last word in any conflict which finds us. We take the key of Your love and unlock our own chains by proactive faith. We will not be slaves to lesser things, and we will not fail to escape the plantation which has imprisoned us to such pitiful acreage, worked over and over again by our own hands, but bringing no harvest to our starving hearts. Fertilize the works of our hands with Your immeasurable love. Rain on our crops with kindness, grace and compassion towards those whom we have opportunity to serve. We will be free, and it will be because of the transforming might of Your love which changes our hearts whenever we yield to You.
You, Lord Jesus, have ruined us for this world. We do not want it anymore. We have tasted and seen that You are gloriously good. We have peeked into Your treasury and cannot be satisfied with religious fool’s gold any longer. Your apostle, John, told us that perfect love casts out fear, and that those who fear have not been made complete by Your love (1 John 4:18). We are no longer slaves to fear because You have emancipated us to love others with all that beautiful love which You have poured into us. Make us pipes and never again bowls, storing up within ourselves what You intended to pour through us into others. Make our worship of You complete by not only filling us, but spilling us. This is my heart’s cry. This is my intercession for Your people. We cannot bear the thought of obscuring You today from onlooking eyes who have yet to see You as You wish to be seen.
Down with the veil! Up with the banner! The King is reigning in His place today.