Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Prayer of Praise for the Grace Having Endured Pain

My All-Sufficient Father
through Your Holy Spirit
Incarnate in Your Son
Perfect and eternally voluminous in the power of Your grace, by the love of Your provision, You made it possible for me to endure; and today, because of it, I exemplified Your gospel’s spirit, which is alive, as a testament to the risen reality of the Lord Jesus.
Praise is due Your name for the truth indwelt in the power of Your grace, which demolishes strongholds, setting up victory from the throes of defeat; on weakness is that victory borne.
The power of Your grace knew the pain I had to endure, which became a panoply of bedlam threatening to overthrow my spirit.  Yet, You came!  I sought You, and You came.  You came because You are real; alive and tangible in the experience of my life.
You said, “Calm down!” and such a loving rebuke, spoken with robust tenderness, reverberated within my soul, resonating before resting, reviving my hope, even in the tremulous seconds where the spirit enemy circled, enjoying what would’ve been without Your help the imminent demise of its prey.  In the moment You wrested from me the odious anxiousness that defeats me through a busied, bothered, and battered mind.  You healed me when You came into my heart, so my heart could rescue my mind by cogent awareness to take courage!
Praise is Yours for Your Teaching Spirit; that You teach a lesson, through the power of Your grace, that only needs to be experienced once.  Once!  Power!  A power indwelt with the persuasiveness of truth.  An experienced power.
Praise is Yours alone, God of my being, even for the grace You extend when I fail.  Especially when I fail!  Your rebuke is a tender rod of encouragement, for me to get up, to get hope, to get going, through the getting of faith.
Praise.  For, in You is true and genuine resilience — for me, for all — for You, through Jesus, are the Way, the Truth, the Life.  Alone, through You.
AMEN.
***
Experience comes to be irrefutable in the golden mean of the truth we cannot otherwise know.
One day of pain, patiently endured, through the surrender of one won to dying, teaches us, that to suffer well is to live right.  It isn’t for long.  Then eternity.  And, in this suffering well, patiently enduring, is the gospel power won for all those who trust their entire momentary lives to Jesus.
One day of pain is all we’re asked to endure.  Then another.  And again.  One day’s endurance secures us the confidence that we can do it again and again, to the glory of God.  But only by going against all reason and rationality, for the gospel is an upside down reality.
The gospel goes against all reason and rationality,
for the gospel is an upside down reality.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.

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