With All Our Prayers by Rogers John B.;

Author:Rogers, John B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 2015-01-06T22:51:04+00:00

The Fruit of the Spirit

Pentecost

Eternal God, on this Day of Pentecost we come before you with joy and gratitude for the gift of your presence in your world and in our lives by your Holy Spirit. Creation itself testifies to your readiness, before the foundation of the world, to be God not in isolation, but in relationship. From the beginning you spoke to your creatures and you heard their cries. Your very name is your promise of your presence with us: “I am who I will be . . . I am the One who will be there with you and for you.” In Jesus Christ your word of promise became flesh and dwelt among us — Emmanuel, God with us. Before his death Jesus promised his disciples that you would send the Holy Spirit to be with them forever. The risen Christ promised his presence with us always. At Pentecost your Spirit spoke clearly and compellingly to the gathered multitude “from every nation under heaven,” and has since empowered, directed, and corrected your church in every generation according to your word.

Hear our prayer this day, Lord God, for the continued presence of your Spirit to guard and guide us as we seek to serve you in these days. Remind us that life in the Spirit looks upward and outward far more than it looks inward, and that the Christian life is, above all, gracious and grace-filled, and not a harsh, burdensome, hard-nosed legalism. Grant that our lives and our life together might bring forth an abundant harvest of those fruits of the Spirit that point to the rule of grace that is the kingdom of God in the world.

Help us, O God, to bear the first fruit of the Spirit: love — the “more excellent way” that leads us out of self-centeredness and self-absorption into engagements marked by generosity and relationships grounded in a spirit of graciousness. By this foremost spiritual gift, deliver us from jealousy and boastfulness, arrogance and rudeness, ill-temper and resentment into a determined good will ready to “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things” and to remain steadfast in faith and friendship against whatever life throws up before us.

Create in us, we pray, the fruit of joy — the un-summoned welling up of gladness that fills the heart, that delights in your goodness and grace, and in the good and gracious things that happen to us, undeserved, in the working out of your providence — that this joy may flow from our lives into the lives of others in a wider harvest.

Make us people of peace, O God, peace that is more than the mere absence of conflict or the lessening of anxiety, but that upholding sense of serenity, even in stressful times and hostile circumstances. Grant us that poise and inward calm that comes from unfaltering trust in your care and safekeeping. And by your Spirit of peace make us instruments of your peace wherever and among those of your children to whom you direct our lives.

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