Sunday Morning Prayer by Dr. Joseph Parker – December 25, 2016

25 Dec Sunday Morning Prayer by Dr. Joseph Parker – December 25, 2016

Come to us, Lord, in thine own way, and according to thine own measure; only delay not, but come quickly! We live when God is with us; without God we cannot live. We pray thee, therefore, at the Cross cf our Saviour, to come; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, dwell with us, break bread to us, reveal thyself to us, and give us a perpetual blessing. We rejoice when we see God; it is like seeing the morning light, the summer glory, the noonday in all its cloudlessness. Say to our souls that have been mourning thine absence, The winter is over and gone, and the time of the singing of birds is come. May the birds of heaven make their nests in our hearts, and sing to us songs of the summer-land. We bless thee if our hunger has led us to thy table, then the hunger was sent from God; we rejoice if our thirst has brought us to the right fountain, then was our thirst no accident, but part of God’s leading and education of the soul. We rejoice that in our Father’s house there is bread enough and to spare; and as for the river of God, it is full of water. Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, after love and beauty and purity, and divinest fullness of thought and life, for they shall be filled. Giving doth not impoverish God; withholding doth not enrich the Lord. Thou hast been giving unto us with both hands since we were born; thy right hand has been opened in power, and thy left hand in succour and tenderness. We have nothing that we have not received; it is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed; we are the children of compassion, we are spared by the tears of God. We rejoice that all this highest thought of our souls takes us to Calvary. The Cross is the river of God, the fountain of joy, the beginning of immortality; yea, in it we see all figures and emblems signifying purity through pardon and peace, through righteousness, and bringing us into closer alliance with the living God. We would live on Calvary; we would build our house near the Cross. We can only live in mercy, for we are inclined to sin every moment; our prayer is but occasional, our sin is permanent. Yet we have hope in God through Christ; the Cross was not set up in vain, the Lord cannot be foiled in battle. Thou dost mean to save this little world, every man, woman, and young child in it; thou wilt lose no lamb from the flock. We leave it all with thee, only give us the answering heart when thou dost send to us the appeals of thy grace. Make us great in goodness; may we be strong and valiant in modest courage; may we derive all our strength from God; then shall our weakness be strength, and our extremity shall be God’s opportunity. Help us to be better men, in innermost thought, in nobleness of aspiration; make us eloquent in secret wordless prayer; may we commune with God all day, all night, then the morning shall give us a baptism of dew, and the day shall be succeeded by no gloom or darkness of night. Holy Spirit, dwell with us; come down out of heaven upon us, and abide upon our shattered lives, a new hope, a new defense, an inextinguishable glory. Rebuke us, but in mercy; let not thy rod smite us in all its scourging power, for which of the sons of flesh hath strength enough to stand against the scourge of God? We own our sins; we do not get rid of them by confessing them, but if we confess, thou art faithful and just to forgive, and thus by the divine act we have release from the guilt and the torment of sin. Behold how we have wasted our prosperity; we have written our own name upon it, and we have swollen ourselves with pride in the presence of the poverty that has fallen at our feet, and we have said to ourselves, Behold, we are not as other men. We have not been kind to the point of nobleness; we have given nothing, we have kept all we could, and therefore nothing has been given. If anything has been parted with, it has been forced out of us by shame, by social pressure; we would have kept it, every crumb and farthing, if we could. So we are before God as criminals: give us to know that we are pardoned by feeling that we can do the wrong no more. Wherein any have been just and generous and good, beneficent and useful, they desire to trace all to the action of the Holy Ghost. Not unto us, not unto us, say they, but unto God’s name be all the glory. We think of our loved ones at home, and far away, especially those who are weakened by pain, who have not been able to do their day’s work, and therefore have lost their day’s bread. We think of the weary, and the sad, and of those who are saying, Is this never to end? is the darkness always to deepen, and is the wind always to be filled with the sound of howling wolves? Oh, the heartache! Oh, the world’s great misery! Saviour of the world, is it our impatience that prays or our faith, when we say, Lord Jesus, come quickly! Amen.

– People’s Bible, The – The People’s Bible – Mark – Luke: Volume 21.