Morning Exercises#5
O LORD my God, You are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty, and you cover yourself with light as with a garment. You stretch out the heavens like a tent curtain. You lay the beams of your upper chambers in the waters. You make the clouds your chariot, and you walk upon the wings of the wind.
I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be withheld from you. You speak and it is done. You command and it holds fast. You have made me glad and I will sing for joy at the work of your hands.
How great are your works, O LORD. Your thoughts are very deep. A senseless man has no knowledge, nor does a fool understand this: That when the wicked sprout up like grass and all who do iniquity flourish, it is only that they might be destroyed forevermore. But you, O LORD, you are on high forever. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. Your dominion endures throughout all generations.
You are Light, and in you there is no darkness at all. If I say I have fellowship with you and yet walk in the darkness, I lie and do not practice the truth. Please forgive me, Father, for I have walked in the darkness. I have not kept close fellowship with you. I have turned aside to my own ways and have forgotten my Creator in the days of my youth. Bitterness, anger, wrath, malice, and evil speaking have poured out my heart, through my mouth. I am a man (or a woman) of unclean lips. I live among a people of unclean lips, and there is no health in me.
Have mercy, O God. If you kept record of the sins of your people, O Lord, who could stand before you. But there is forgiveness with you that you might be feared. Redeem and rescue me for Jesus’ sake. Cleanse my conscience with His blood, and remove from me the way of evil.
Keep back your servant from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and acquitted of great transgression. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my Rock, and my Redeemer. Help me to hide your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
Fill me with the Holy Spirit and with the fruit of His presence. Help me to love others patiently and to be kind. Restrain my jealous heart. Help me to neither brag nor boast, and not to think more highly of myself than I should. Help me never to be rude or self-serving in my actions. Make me be slow to anger and patient so that I might suffer long with those who annoy me. Help me to feel my own irritability more keenly than I do the annoyance others cause me. Help me to see your hand testing me in the petty frustrations of the day and grant me the quiet heart of weaned child on its mother’s lap. Do not let me be the kind of person who keeps a record of the ways others have wronged me. Grant me heart ready to forgive.
Father, remember the day your Son died in my place, for my sins. May his sacrifice rise before you like the evening offering, a sweet and fragrant aroma, that you would remember my sins and lawless deeds no more.
Insert your own prayers here. Ask God to…
Make you sensitive to His presence all day.
Open your eyes to His providence that you might learn to connect all the events, people, and things that touch your life as part of His plan for you. Pray for joy in the trial, and a spirit of faith and submission.
Grant you a sensitive conscience, gripped by a sense of his glory and divine majesty.
Incline your heart towards His precepts.
Enlarge your heart that you might run in the course of His commandments.
Pray for your family, friends, church fellowship, and pastor. Remember anyone you know who finds themself in trouble, trial, or need. Ask God to draw near to them and satisfy their every good desire and the work of faith with power. If they are sick, ask for healing and that God would use this time of weakness to restore their soul in the pathways of His righteousness for His Namesake.
Finish your prayers with this doxology: “Now to Him who is able to keep me from stumbling, And to present me faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, To God my Savior, who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever.Amen.” (From Jude 24–25).