
Pray with me.
Our Father, each day, we are reminded that so many things are not as they should be.
Our hearts long for Eden – for a world of perfection, a world free from sin and its effects, a world of face-to-face perfect fellowship with you.
But year after year, month after month, day after day, we come face-to-face with the reality that our world, our hearts, our lives, our relationships – they are all broken, marred, scarred, and stained with sin and its effects.
Our world is full of war, hostility, starvation, deprivation, plague, disaster, immorality, rebellion, and death.
Our nation does not love you, does not follow you, does not submit to you. Our nation murders million of unborn lives. Our nation has distorted marriage, gender, and sexuality beyond recognition.
Our communities are filled with more of the same. There’s strife in school board meetings, lawsuits between neighbors, envy, theft, rape, murder, dishonesty, financial misdealing, injustice, and lawbreaking.
Our very homes remind us that things are not as they should be. Something is always broken, always leaking, always needing repair, never right.
Our families are marred by sin and its effects. Relationships are often strained or broken because of sin. We’re not as close as we know we should be. We often can’t have conversations the way we want to.
Our marriages are challenging because we’re selfish, because we do not reflect the gospel and your character as we ought. Our parenting is challenging because we’re sinners and our kids are sinners.
Our very physical bodies are constantly groaning under the burden of age, the inescapable, ever-encroaching reality of death and decay faces us day after day.
Our hearts in their natural state are deceptively wicked above all things. Even as redeemed saints, we still often love and long for what we should not and do not love and long for what we should as we ought. We’re regularly deceived by the lusts of deceit and we don’t cling to your Word and believe your precious promises as we ought. We rightly see ourselves as Paul did as the chief of sinners.
In the midst of all this brokenness we are tempted to look elsewhere for solutions and salvation.
We wrongly look to politics and political leaders to solve our problems. We sinfully try to take control and build our own personal kingdoms.
We maniacally try to repair our homes to perfection and make everything bow to our supposedly sovereign will.
We look to godless ideologies and therapies to transform our relationships and hearts only to be left with more brokenness.
We hope in the preservation of our bodies through all kinds of temporal means as if diet and exercise and asceticism and deprivation can save us.
But all we need is purchased for us and is supplied to us through the life, death, and resurrection of your Son.
Oh Father, turn our eyes to Jesus. Turn our eyes, our hope filled, faith filled eyes to Jesus. He is all we need. He is sufficient for all of our brokenness.
Through Jesus, you promise a new heavens and new earth in which you will dwell among your people as our perfect King ruling your perfect people.
Only through Jesus can we see any kind of change in our nation and our communities as individuals come to bow their knee to His Lordship and trust in Him for salvation.
In Jesus you are making your people to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests.
In Jesus you promise us eternal dwelling places.
Through Jesus you adopt us into your family. You are our perfect heavenly Father, Christ is our perfect older brother, we are brothers and sisters in Christ in this gospel family bound together in love and harmony through the work of your Spirit.
Through Jesus we look forward to the resurrection and perfection of our bodies.
And through Jesus and in Jesus are our hearts and minds transformed by the gospel.
Through Jesus you are making all things new. Help us to look to Jesus, to hope in Jesus, to trust in Jesus alone.
It’s in his name we pray, amen.