Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Today’s text

1 John 3:21-22

“Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.”

Prayer

Holy Risen Joy, you do not intend us for condemnation but for the bliss of boldness. You invite us to live in confident expectation of your constant blessing. Our hearts are weak, troubled easily, distracted and disturbed by sorrows and disappointments, by the weight of our labors and the stirrings of our stress. Confident joy eludes our grasp, sinking our souls and weakening our arms and efforts.

Fill our hearts with … you. Fill us with your risen life that we may arise in joy to the challenges we face, throwing our minds and full being into the tasks you have given us as we grow into your service. Do not allow us to languish, but lift us to the joy of knowing the indwelling of your love.

Then our hearts will not be downcast but ready and willing spirits will arise from our depths, and we will fear nothing, not our weaknesses or sins, not threats from without or within.

No, we will live. We will live filled with the boldness of your risen and deathless life. Joy will overflow our hearts, and we will be that portrait of your salvation that you intend.

And you will hear our prayers, for they will arise from Spirit to Spirit, from your life within us to your life ever beyond us, a holy circle of loving in which you catch and fill us with the boldness of everlasting joy.

So capture and fill us, I pray, that we may know no condemnation but only the joy of the Eternal Loving you are. You alone are life, and we who dwell in grayness hunger to live in the full light of day. Amen.

Pr. David L. Miller