Sublime

Prayer gives God the gifts of our intention, our energy, our hope to use to create deeper human belonging, greater engagement, richer connection.

1. End your prayer with specific praise concerning God’s greatness. Focus your praise on His omnipotence (power), His omniscience (knowledge), and His omnipresence (presence). 2. With the psalmist let us “praise God because He has done it.” Look back at the devotional hour and praise God for hearing each of your requests. 3. Let your spirit “rejoice”

“We pray to the Ever-Merciful when we get stuck,” as the Eastern maxim has it. Otherwise, we seem to get along all right in our workaday world without Him.

Prayer O Lord, you have said that those who cry in this life, you will console in the next life. Grant to me, then, the grace to cry for my sins, give me a truly contrite and humble heart, grant me through your infinite mercy that spirit of sorrow for sin that you promised to change into eternal joy in heaven. Amen.

As you come before God in the weeks to come, intentionally look for examples in Scripture of surrender. As you look at people in Scripture, pay attention to some of the common barriers to surrender. Notice what God did as a result of people’s willingness to surrender. As you spend time in God’s Word, search for verses and truths about God’s charact

To acknowledge that we have absolute need of the mediator, Jesus, means a practical acceptance of the fact that, to attain to God, we must die with Jesus: not of ourselves, or by ourselves, but `in him'. I must enter into his death. This death is a death to my self-centredness and self-possession. It is an ecstasy: a going right out of myself to be

O God, whose mercy is ever faithful and ever sure, who art our refuge and our strength in time of trouble, visit us, we beseech thee—for we are a people in trouble. We need a hope that is made wise by experience and is undaunted by disappointment. We need an anxiety about the future that shows us new ways to look at new things but does not unnerve