A Prayer for Confidence In God’s Love

 

 

Heavenly Father, Amazing love, how can it be, that thou, my God should die for me. Amazing love, we can read about it, we can talk about it, we can claim to believe it but we can not comprehend it, we can not fathom it.   The words that, “You so loved the world, that You gave Your only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him has eternal life,” are too deep for us, too inconceivable for us, to truly understand.

 

Father, we confess that in all honesty, there are times when we question Your love.  Times when we have asked: Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why do good people suffer from such horrible diseases as cancer, Alzheimer’s and HIV?   Why is one small innocent town in Iowa destroyed by tornados and sin-city basks in the sun of summer?  Why are earthquakes and cyclones taking the lives of tens of thousands in far away lands and we who sit on faults and deep cracks in the earth, experience only slight trembles?  Oh, we can give simple answers.  We know that we live in a fallen world, and that the whole world travails and groans under sin, but this morning we are not struggling with the awful consequences of sin, we are asking why You permit such things to happen?  Could it be that You seek to develop in each of us a stronger and more stubborn faith?  A faith that even in our most trying times is able to say with the Psalmist of old, “Still I am confident of this, that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

 

Yes, Lord let us be confident of Your love, Your grace, Your wisdom in times of trouble; in times when the heavens seem closed to our prayers and You seem distant and uninterested in our pain and our problems.   Give us to believe that behind every disaster, every pain, every loss, there is a loving heavenly Father who stands ready to comfort and console, to give grace and goodness, hope and help, crown and conquest.  Let us not judge Your power and Your love by the circumstances and conditions of life.   Earthquake and hurricane may destroy and kill; a drunk driver on the highway and a  gang banger on our streets may take a life or send one to a wheel chair forever, and yet we know You to be the God of love.   Dare I say it, even when there was an Auschwitz and a Dachau You were still a God of love.  Man’s inhumanity to man we will never understand, but Your undeserved, unmerited love remains as one of life’s great absolutes.  Give us, we pray, that tenacious, tough, strong and steel like faith that refuses to believe other than that Your love is established in the heavens.  We will not believe otherwise.

 

Father we believe, help thou our unbelief.  In Jesus name we pray.  Amen.