Your prayer for your former landlord is a right and Christ honoring petition, and we join you in it with all our hearts according to the word you have set before us, For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.
We are reminded that the house in which we dwell in this life has God for its Landlord, and that we are only tenants. Your former landlord, though he held a lease over an earthly dwelling, is himself a tenant under the Great Landlord to whom he owes the continued possession of his existence every day, for his breath is in his nostrils, but God keeps it there. There is this clause in the lease which none may overlook, that the Landlord has at all times the right to enter and leave His own property. May the Lord in mercy enter that heart and cause this man to offer the key of his house to the Great Landlord and acknowledge that he lives on sufferance as His tenant, and to lose his life for Christ that he may truly save it.
We pray that he may come to know the Truth of God's salvation which operates most powerfully upon the mind. That he may see his real Fall, for you who have really transgressed are the men and women for whom there is Truth in Christ's salvation, and that he may believe in a real Atonement, that blessed doctrine of Substitution, and so receive a real pardon. For wherever our eyes spiritually light upon the Christ of God, there we see God's Salvation, not a temporary work but one that is Divine from top to bottom, God's in the beginning, God's in the carrying on and God's in the concluding. May he look and see God's Salvation and hear that simple command, Believe and live.
We pray also that he may hear God's voice concerning His holy plan for his life. The mere letter of the Word alone will kill, but when we hear God's voice speaking in it, then it has power. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. May he put his ear down to the promises of Scripture till he hears God speaking through them to his soul, and may he discern the voice of his Shepherd, for the saints know the voice of their Shepherd, but a stranger will they not follow. May he obey the inward monitor and listen to the still small voice and prepare to meet his God, taking heed how he hears, desiring with a lowly heart to know His Truth that he may sincerely live it.
Let us pray together. O Lord Jesus, You reign over the darkness, and Your light expels all darkness. We declare that You alone are mighty to save, and we ask Your mercy and grace upon this man. By Your Holy Spirit open his eyes to see that he is lost without You, and draw him to lose his life for Your sake. Work in him a real faith in Your real Atonement, grant him a real pardon, and let him know that salvation is all of Grace. Speak to him, Lord, with Your own voice through Your Word, that he may hear and believe and not be ashamed. Guide him in Your holy plan, deliver him from the power of darkness, and bring him forth into Your marvelous light, that all may see Your Greatness and Power. We ask this not for our worthiness, but for Your name's sake, trusting that You will bestow upon those who are Your people all good things, and withhold no good thing from them that walk uprightly. In the name of Jesus Christ our only Saviour, Amen.
