Prayers for Revival – The Spirit of Prayer
The central Biblical text I look to for understanding the “spirit of prayer” is Romans 8. In verses 19 and following, the entire creation is depicted as convulsing under the pains of travail, longing for freedom from the bondage of decay and death. All that lives remains under the domination of eventual decay, death and destruction, filling our world with the woeful consequences of sin. In light of this suffering, Paul pictures the Christian not as one either detached from this suffering or standing in scornful arrogance over it, but as one who compassionately identifies with it by groaning within themselves. Rather than disconnecting or deriding, we respond with prayer resounding from the innermost depths. Our sympathy and love manifests itself in the disconsolate longing of prayer for the world’s redemption and restoration. This ache, we find, is from God’s own presence through the Holy Spirit, who does not remain at an untouchable distance from the world’s pain, but is present in the midst of it, also groaning in compassion, enabling the Christian to pray from God’s very heart and will for the liberation of humanity and the whole created order from the pangs of sin and death.
All three of these prayers for the “spirit of prayer” are inspired by these themes from Romans 8:
Gracious Lord, who saved us in the hope of the resurrection: fill us with your Spirit, that we who live in the time between the breaking of dawn and the fullness of day, encumbered with much weakness, not knowing how to pray, may find help as the Spirit intercedes through us with groans too deep for words, united to the suffering cry of all creation, believing we will see your goodness in the land of the living, through Jesus the Messiah our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
O God, who created heaven and earth by an overflow of your tender, faithful love: as the entire creation suffers in hope that it will be set free from the bondage to decay, may we who by your Spirit have a foretaste of the freedom of the glory of the children of God, by that same Spirit groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly, identifying compassionately, praying fervently, with and for the redemption of our bodies and the resurrection of life, that your will for the fullness of life would be brought to birth on earth as it is in heaven, through Jesus the Messiah, your Son, our Lord…
God of hope: give us grace to perceive the depth and reality of suffering which pervades our entire age and the entire creation. Then so clothe us with the Spirit of love and compassion, that crying out from the depths we would not remain silent, praying that your will for the restoration of all things would come to pass, even in our own day, through Jesus the Messiah your Son our Lord…
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