Silas
Beloved of All
It is good to join you in thanking God for His faithful Word and for the hope we have in His power to save and to restore. Your prayer reflects a right understanding that the work of salvation belongs entirely to the Lord and that all glory belongs to Him alone.
You have planted and others have watered, but only God gives the growth. That truth from 1 Corinthians 3 takes the pressure off of us and puts our confidence where it belongs. Like rain and snow that come down from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, so the Word of God that has been sown will accomplish the purpose for which He sent it, as Isaiah 55 promises. The seed is the Word, and God is faithful to use it in His timing.
At the heart of your request is repentance, and that is exactly where Scripture puts the emphasis. John came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, calling people to confess and turn. Jesus came with the same call, saying He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, and He welcomed publicans and sinners who responded. Even when He spoke to the churches in Revelation, His repeated word was to repent and be changed. True conversion is always marked by that turning, a change of mind and life that only God can work. It is His kindness that leads us to repentance according to Romans 2, not harshness, but a patient kindness that opens the heart to see sin as God sees it.
We can pray with you that God in His kindness would continue that work in your wife's heart and in the hearts of your extended family, including parents and children and those who will come after. We ask that the Holy Spirit would do His work of convicting of sin and revealing truth, as Jesus promised in John 16. Before honor comes humility, and God in His mercy often humbles us so we will come to our senses, as we see with Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 who was brought low and then lifted his eyes to heaven, and as we see with the prodigal in Luke 15 who came to himself and returned home. Praying for that humbling is an act of love, because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and He desires that none should perish but that all should come to repentance.
We also join you in praying for protection from evil, deception and temptation, and that each one would receive a love for the truth so as to be saved. God orders the steps of those who seek Him, and we see in Acts how He brought an evangelist to a man reading Isaiah, sent a believer to find Saul, and directed His servants to those who needed to hear. He can still bring the right person across the path at the right moment to speak truth and to show His kindness.
Continue to pray fervently, trusting that the prayer of a righteous person through faith in Christ has great power and that God rewards those who diligently seek Him. He who began a good work is faithful to carry it on to completion until the day of Christ. We do not ask God to bless anything outside His good design, for marriage is His lifelong covenant of one man and one woman and all intimacy belongs within it, and salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. So we pray for repentance where there is sin, for cleansing and restoration where there is brokenness, and for lives that are made whole and ordered around Christ.
May the Lord keep you and your household, your family and all who have heard His Word, and may He answer beyond what we can ask or imagine, so that from Him and through Him and to Him may be all glory in Jesus name.
You have planted and others have watered, but only God gives the growth. That truth from 1 Corinthians 3 takes the pressure off of us and puts our confidence where it belongs. Like rain and snow that come down from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, so the Word of God that has been sown will accomplish the purpose for which He sent it, as Isaiah 55 promises. The seed is the Word, and God is faithful to use it in His timing.
At the heart of your request is repentance, and that is exactly where Scripture puts the emphasis. John came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, calling people to confess and turn. Jesus came with the same call, saying He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, and He welcomed publicans and sinners who responded. Even when He spoke to the churches in Revelation, His repeated word was to repent and be changed. True conversion is always marked by that turning, a change of mind and life that only God can work. It is His kindness that leads us to repentance according to Romans 2, not harshness, but a patient kindness that opens the heart to see sin as God sees it.
We can pray with you that God in His kindness would continue that work in your wife's heart and in the hearts of your extended family, including parents and children and those who will come after. We ask that the Holy Spirit would do His work of convicting of sin and revealing truth, as Jesus promised in John 16. Before honor comes humility, and God in His mercy often humbles us so we will come to our senses, as we see with Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 who was brought low and then lifted his eyes to heaven, and as we see with the prodigal in Luke 15 who came to himself and returned home. Praying for that humbling is an act of love, because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and He desires that none should perish but that all should come to repentance.
We also join you in praying for protection from evil, deception and temptation, and that each one would receive a love for the truth so as to be saved. God orders the steps of those who seek Him, and we see in Acts how He brought an evangelist to a man reading Isaiah, sent a believer to find Saul, and directed His servants to those who needed to hear. He can still bring the right person across the path at the right moment to speak truth and to show His kindness.
Continue to pray fervently, trusting that the prayer of a righteous person through faith in Christ has great power and that God rewards those who diligently seek Him. He who began a good work is faithful to carry it on to completion until the day of Christ. We do not ask God to bless anything outside His good design, for marriage is His lifelong covenant of one man and one woman and all intimacy belongs within it, and salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. So we pray for repentance where there is sin, for cleansing and restoration where there is brokenness, and for lives that are made whole and ordered around Christ.
May the Lord keep you and your household, your family and all who have heard His Word, and may He answer beyond what we can ask or imagine, so that from Him and through Him and to Him may be all glory in Jesus name.
