Chrysostom
Beloved of All
Your thankfulness is right and good, for His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness never fails as Lamentations declares. To begin prayer with gratitude even in sorrow is to stand on firm ground.
We have heard your confession and your pain. To wait so long, to pray for a godly marriage, and then to find yourself bound in a hard marriage to one who does not return your love is a heavy trial. Your resolve to love and to keep covenant for life, though it goes against your natural feeling, honors the Lord who made marriage a lifelong covenant of one man and one woman. Do not despise that faithfulness. Repentance where it is needed is precious to God, and He sees the struggle to remain steadfast when love is not returned. He will give grace for what you cannot do in your own strength, for apart from Christ we can do nothing.
Your desire to continue in prayer for your wife that she would be saved is according to the apostle's heart in Romans 10. Paul grieved deeply for his own people and still prayed for them, even while he taught the deep mysteries of God's sovereignty. We do not know how to pray as we ought, and often we do not know what is best to ask, but the Spirit Himself helps us and intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered. So continue to bring your wife before the throne of grace, asking not for a mere outward change but for true repentance unto life, regeneration and faith in Jesus Christ alone, for there is no other way of righteousness. Pray also for your little one, that the Lord would protect, direct, and nourish that child in His Word and bring him up in the instruction of the Lord, under godly authority.
At the same time you are right to ask for grace to do both, as Ecclesiastes says, to lay hold of one without letting go of the other. God does not call you to cease intercession, nor does He call you to neglect pressing duties. He calls you to learn to meet urgent needs, to set in order what remains, to strengthen what is ready to fade, and to care for the flock among you. The cross makes us a new creation and calls us to seek the new things of grace. That means giving yourself to what is now before you, to sound teaching, to prayer meetings, to Bible study, to making disciples, and to doing good to all, especially to fellow believers, for every believer is sanctified and is our brother and sister to be served.
Therefore we join you in prayer to our Father in heaven:
We ask Him to keep you abiding in Christ, to grant wisdom and full knowledge of His will, and love abounding with insight. We ask Him to open doors for the gospel that no one can shut, to give favor as a shield, and to empower you to speak His Word with clarity. We ask Him to help you run in such a way as to win, laying aside encumbrances, forgetting what lies behind and pressing toward the upward call, abiding in His Word and keeping your own life and teaching with care. We ask for grace to fulfill every pressing need and to be fruitful in good works, and for protection from temptation, from sin, from evil people and from the evil one. And we ask, according to His almighty power for whom nothing is impossible, for the salvation of your household, for an effective witness to friends and to the lost, and for the edification of all who hear.
Be encouraged that God who hears prayer is building His church and has not forgotten you. Offer your prayers with holy hands without wrath, enduring all things for the sake of those He has chosen, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. He who is faithful will supply the grace for both, to intercede and to labor, until He brings to completion what He has begun.
We have heard your confession and your pain. To wait so long, to pray for a godly marriage, and then to find yourself bound in a hard marriage to one who does not return your love is a heavy trial. Your resolve to love and to keep covenant for life, though it goes against your natural feeling, honors the Lord who made marriage a lifelong covenant of one man and one woman. Do not despise that faithfulness. Repentance where it is needed is precious to God, and He sees the struggle to remain steadfast when love is not returned. He will give grace for what you cannot do in your own strength, for apart from Christ we can do nothing.
Your desire to continue in prayer for your wife that she would be saved is according to the apostle's heart in Romans 10. Paul grieved deeply for his own people and still prayed for them, even while he taught the deep mysteries of God's sovereignty. We do not know how to pray as we ought, and often we do not know what is best to ask, but the Spirit Himself helps us and intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered. So continue to bring your wife before the throne of grace, asking not for a mere outward change but for true repentance unto life, regeneration and faith in Jesus Christ alone, for there is no other way of righteousness. Pray also for your little one, that the Lord would protect, direct, and nourish that child in His Word and bring him up in the instruction of the Lord, under godly authority.
At the same time you are right to ask for grace to do both, as Ecclesiastes says, to lay hold of one without letting go of the other. God does not call you to cease intercession, nor does He call you to neglect pressing duties. He calls you to learn to meet urgent needs, to set in order what remains, to strengthen what is ready to fade, and to care for the flock among you. The cross makes us a new creation and calls us to seek the new things of grace. That means giving yourself to what is now before you, to sound teaching, to prayer meetings, to Bible study, to making disciples, and to doing good to all, especially to fellow believers, for every believer is sanctified and is our brother and sister to be served.
Therefore we join you in prayer to our Father in heaven:
We ask Him to keep you abiding in Christ, to grant wisdom and full knowledge of His will, and love abounding with insight. We ask Him to open doors for the gospel that no one can shut, to give favor as a shield, and to empower you to speak His Word with clarity. We ask Him to help you run in such a way as to win, laying aside encumbrances, forgetting what lies behind and pressing toward the upward call, abiding in His Word and keeping your own life and teaching with care. We ask for grace to fulfill every pressing need and to be fruitful in good works, and for protection from temptation, from sin, from evil people and from the evil one. And we ask, according to His almighty power for whom nothing is impossible, for the salvation of your household, for an effective witness to friends and to the lost, and for the edification of all who hear.
Be encouraged that God who hears prayer is building His church and has not forgotten you. Offer your prayers with holy hands without wrath, enduring all things for the sake of those He has chosen, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. He who is faithful will supply the grace for both, to intercede and to labor, until He brings to completion what He has begun.
