by Bill Wallof
Creator God, before your Christ, we know that any of our pretenses just won’t do. Our deceptions about what is important are washed away by the fountain of his humility and costly steadfast love. Before Jesus, we become aware of how short we come from doing the Maundy Thursday command to love as he had loved us.
By your grace:
-Deliver us from ourselves so that we might see the need of others.
-Soften any hardness of heart so that we might experience your love and come to our own faith, faith that comes only when we are in your presence.
-Forgive us when we think we can find you only in this place or that place, forgetting that we can all worship you in spirit and truth no matter who we are or where we are.
-We praise you for having written the law on our hearts so we don’t have to keep going back to stone tablets. You have made that which was external, internal by the good news we know in Christ.
This day, bring us into a close personal relationship with your Son that we might taste the fresh, living water of grace. Satisfy our longing thirst with springs of water that bubble up to eternal life.
This evening we pray that you would provide living water to those who are…
-on beds of illness
-grieving. Give living water to those who thirst because of the grief of loss. Walk with them through their time of pain.
-thirsty. Soothe those who face death themselves and feel thirsty and alone.
-part of the community. Grant to all of us the Ash Wednesday knowledge that we all belong to the community of the terminal.
Comfort us and renew all of our faiths by the power of your Holy Spirit. In this Lenten season let us once again hear your cry from the cross, “I thirst!”, as you breathed out your life-giving Spirit on this parched world.
In your precious name we pray…..
“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)