A prayer based on Hosea 6-7.

<aside> 🙏🏻 Our God and our King, We acknowledge that You are great and that You are good. There is none like You, O LORD. Yours, is the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. You are merciful and gracious, righteous and just. The healer of sinners. It is right therefore that we praise and adore You. That we give to You the glory due to Your Name. That we love You with all our hearts and have no other gods before You. That we trust You with all of our lives and seek to obey all that You have commanded.

Father, as we acknowledge Your greatness and Your goodness, we too need to acknowledge our faithlessness and sinfulness.

Forgive us if we have been superficial in our faith. For saying the right words, for putting on a show, for pretending to be keen followers of Jesus; when our hearts are really far away from You.

Forgive us if we have been careless in our faith. For allowing sin to smoulder away, unaware that it is ready to explode into flames and cause great harm to ourselves and to others. For not killing it. For leaving it unchecked.

Forgive us if our faith has been full of compromise. That instead of being distinct, we are indistinguishable from the world around us. For not being like a city on a hill. For not shining like stars in the universe. For being of the world.

Forgive us if we have been complacent with our faith. For living off our past relationship with You. For being infrequent in confessing our sins and acknowledging our need for forgiveness. For a lack of interest in reading and hearing Your Word. For no longer being as keen to gather and serve Your people. For losing our enthusiasm to speak of Christ to others.

Forgive us if we have been avoiding You. Looking to and relying on other things to be our Saviour and to give us what we really need, whether intentionally or unintentionally. For not casting our anxieties on You. For not seeking You our great and good God in prayer.

And forgive us if we have been useless to You because of our faithlessness. For being ineffective in what we are called to do, just like a faulty bow, that if it hits anything at all, it’s not the target.

Yet we thank You, that in spite of all this, You still say to us, “I long to redeem You!” That You long for us to be more faithful, more committed, more careful, more zealous, more useful in our walk with You. That You call us to return to You and have made this possible through Your Son. Thank You Jesus that You were torn to pieces, injured for us, killed on the cross, so that we might be healed of our sins and unbelief and have our wounds bound up. Thank You Jesus that You rose on the third day so that we might live in God’s presence and in a right relationship with Him for all eternity.

We pray now, that by Your Spirit, which lives in us, You would help us to acknowledge the LORD in all our ways. Help us to avoid the temptation to be superficial, to be careless, to compromise, to be complacent in our faith. Give us the strength we need to press on in acknowledging You by walking in a manner worthy of Your Name, which has been put on us.

Amen.

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