A prayer based on Matthew 8:1-4.

<aside> 🙏🏻 Our God, our Holy One, Father, Son and Spirit. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil. You cannot tolerate wrong. We praise You that You are righteous and You are good. We praise You that You are just and You are wrathful. That You hate sin. That You will not let wickedness be in Your presence and You will punish it. And because of this, heaven now and the new heaven and new earth to come, will be a home of righteousness and nothing unclean will be able to spoil it.

Yet, we confess, that as wonderful as Your place and Your presence is, we cannot enter in. We are unable to ascend the hill of the LORD. We are unable to stand in Your holy place. Because we do not have clean hands and a pure heart. We are dead in our sins. We, symbolically, are wearing graves clothes and living where the dead live. We are unclean in Your sight because of our rebellion against You and disobedience of Your Word. And our sin is not skin deep. It is part of who we are. That when we fail to do what You want us to do, and we do the things You don’t want us to, they are just visible symptoms of the real problem that lies beneath. That are our hearts are rotten to the core.

How we need to be made clean. Not just have a reformation of our outward behaviour, but to have a new clean heart, so that we can be acceptable in Your sight. Thank You Lord Jesus, that when we come to You; in our hopelessness, in our helplessness, undeserving as we are, and say to You, “Lord, if you are willing you can make me clean”, You can! You are willing to make sinners, willing to make us clean. You are able to make sinners, willing to make us clean. Because when You died on the cross, You took upon Yourself all the uncleanness of Your people. You took all our sin, all our rebellion, all our shame and guilt; everything that would exclude us from God’s presence – past, present and future – and received all that this deserved. You were abandoned by Your Father. Forsaken. Punished. You died so that, by faith, we can be made clean, be made right with God, and welcomed into His holy presence.

What grace! What love! What compassion! You have shown to us who believe in You.

So we come to You again now, asking for forgiveness for all the ways we have fallen short of Your glory and for all the times, this past day, this past week, we have transgressed Your commands. As we trust in You for forgiveness, by Your Spirit, let us hear Your voice say to us again, “Be clean!” And would You help us to go to others with this unbelievable news, that if they come to You, they can be made clean and forgiven of all their sins too, because You are willing and You are able. We give You all the glory and praise that this is our testimony.

Amen.

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