Prayer
Compassionate Lord, Your mercies have brought me to the dawn of another day. Vain will be its gift unless I grow in grace, increase in knowledge, and ripen for spiritual harvest. Let me this day know You as You are, love You supremely, serve You wholly, admire You fully. Through grace let my will respond to You, knowing that power to obey is not in me, but that Your free love alone enables me to serve You. Here then is my empty heart, overflow it with Your choicest gifts; here is my blind understanding, chase away its mists of ignorance.
O ever watchful Shepherd, lead, guide, tend me this day; without Your restraining rod I err and stray. Hedge up my path lest I wander into unwholesome pleasure, and drink its poisonous streams; direct my feet that I be not entangled in Satan's secret snares, nor fall into his hidden traps. Defend me from assailing foes, from evil circumstances, from myself. My adversaries are part and parcel of my nature; they cling to me as my very skin; I cannot escape their contact. In my rising up and sitting down they barnacle me; they entice with constant baits; my enemy is within the citadel. Come with almighty power and cast him out, pierce him to death, and abolish in me every particle of carnal life this day.
Reading
Isaiah 55 & 1 Peter 1.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”Genesis 1:1.
Meditation
You were made by a holy God. You were made by a being who is beyond you as you are beyond an ant – although even here we find a problem with the analogy, for the distance between you and an ant, although vast, is measurable! Not so the distance between you and God, it is immeasurable. His greatness is unsearchable. In Isaiah 55:8 we read: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
God’s holiness is the infinite expanse of separation that exists between him and us. At least, separation in terms of the nature of who we are in comparison to who he is. However, although he is a holy God, limitless in his being, unthinkably he still calls us to be like him. He calls us to be holy as he is holy (1 Pt 1:16). There is and can be no fellowship between you and an ant, but between God and us the unimaginable has occurred, for he made us in his image, having a reflection of his own dignity, worth, and glory. Even more profoundly, however, Christ the Son of God has come and became one of us. We may, then, be holy as he is holy.
Now being holy as he is holy does not mean that we become like God, but rather that we come to know him and are increasingly (and eternally) transformed to be like him. God made you to know him, to reflect his glory back to him just as the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, eternally reflects the glory of the Father. That’s the calling that is on your life – to know God and, really, that’s the purpose of the Pentateuch. It’s the purpose of the whole Bible. You see, God knows you intimately. Consider the words of Psalm 139:
“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
Be ye doers of the word…
The Lord knows you, but he also wants you and I to know him. This is the greatest and highest calling of our lives: to be holy as he is holy. To be set apart for him, to know him and be known by him and be like him. That’s what it means to be holy as he is holy. So let me ask you: Do you know God? Do you want to know him more? That’s why you exist! So seek him – seek to know him with all your heart. Open up your Bibles each day and devote yourself to seeking him. Pray each day and ask him to reveal himself to you, come and worship him together with his people – commit to doing that as often as you can. Why not take a moment to pray now and ask him to help you to know him more? That we may be holy as he is holy. SDG.
Prayer of confession & consecration.
Holy Lord, I have sinned times without number, and been guilty of pride and unbelief, of failure to find Your mind in Your Word, of neglect to seek You in my daily life. My transgressions and short-comings present me with a list of accusations, but I bless You that they will not stand against me, for all have been laid on Christ. Go on to subdue my corruptions, and grant me grace to live above them. Let not the passions of the flesh nor lustings of the mind bring my spirit into subjection, but rule over me in liberty and power.
Go on with Your patient work, answering 'no' to my wrongful prayers, and fitting me to accept it. Purge me from every false desire, every base aspiration, everything contrary to Your rule. I thank You for Your wisdom and Your love, for all the acts of discipline to which I am subject, for sometimes putting me into the furnace to refine my gold and remove my dross.
Deliver me from every evil habit, every accretion of former sins, everything that dims the brightness of Your grace in me, everything that prevents me taking delight in You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Today’s prayers were sourced, with thanks, from: https://eternallifeministries.org
Day 5: Be holy as he is holy (Gen 1:1).