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January 1 - December 31, 2019
Lord, my mind is as much part of me as the rest, and my whole self is yours. Give me both zeal and knowledge—not just one or the other. Amen.
Father, when I see Jesus being so careful, respectful, and kind to all, I am convicted that my words, humor, and actions often fail to honor boundaries. Fill my mind with the truth that “my neighbor” is “the holiest object presented to my senses.”189 Amen.
Father, I praise you I’m not saved by my works but by Jesus’. Yet the quality of my life matters immensely, because I represent him. If I do not love, I make Jesus look ugly to the world (John 17:24). Don’t let me embarrass my loving Savior. Conform me into his likeness. It is urgent. Amen.
Lord, in our culture, intolerance is a great sin, but self-righteousness and sanctimony are encouraged. The gospel shows me it’s neither. We cannot tolerate sin, but neither can we oppose it with an ounce of superiority. Raise up a whole generation of Christians of whom this is true. Amen.
Lord, you were not smitten with our beauty, and yet you made an eternal covenant with us. You came and died and made us your own and now you are patiently making us like yourself. Your covenantal love is my life! Teach me to practice covenantal love in my family and friendships. Amen.
True sexual chemistry, then, grows from the whole relationship, rather than the relationship being based on sexual chemistry.
Lord, let your people have marriages—and find marriages—in which spouses both know your Word, love it, and teach it to one another, their family, neighbors, and friends. Let our families be schools of the Bible, and Christian spouses one another’s colleagues. Amen.
Lord Jesus, “you loved us to the end” (John 13:1). You kept your vow to the end of your life and now are committed to us until the end of time. Let us too be known as people who keep their word, who finish what they start. Especially reproduce this long-term love in our marriages. Amen.
Lord Jesus, show husbands how to love their spouses as you love us. Amen.
Lord, make our Christian families not merely loving places but also disciple-forming communities. Make parents priests and shepherds who lead each other and their children into “the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). Amen.
Sex should instead be a way to both display and deepen full trust. It is a radical, unconditional, deeply personal means of self-donation. It is God’s created way to say to someone else, “I belong wholly and exclusively to you.” If you use it to say that and mean that, as time goes on it will enable spouses to indeed become more indissolubly one and each other’s.
Proverbs teaches that the ultimate goal of parenting is neither mere control nor affirmation but to teach their children to become wise and righteous.
We should do for our children what our heavenly Father did for us when he sent Jesus to us with his fatherly teaching
Lord, our societies are filled with many powerful influences so antithetical to the teachings of your Word. More than ever, parents need to be teachers of their children, but how can they compete with social media? We need your wisdom and the Spirit’s work in our children’s hearts. Amen.
Proverbs directs parents to do discipline and punishment, but behind it all must be a love and delight in the children that is obvious to them. A family needs the constant, every-hour expression of love, joy, and wonder. You must “catch your child being good” and jump on every opportunity for praise. Avoid falling into a habitual, ongoing tone of mutual exasperation and complaint
Lord, you said your prophets would turn the hearts of parents toward the children and the hearts of children to their parents (Malachi 4:6). Now, by your grace, put that spirit in our Christian families, and in all believers, that we might take delight in one another across the generations. Amen.
While parenting requires far more than discipline, it never requires less.
If you crumple and refrain from discipline, you are loving only yourself, not them.
Lord, our children are infinitely precious image bearers and hereditary sinners. In our churches help us to raise our childern with both truths about them solidly in view, with love and firmness, with truth and tears. Amen.
Lord Jesus, you awakened love for your name in us through the wisdom of your words, the beauty of your life, and the unconditional nature of your love. Oh, teach us how to do the same! Let us as parents, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors, draw our children to you, we pray. Amen.
Lord, we can feel either too responsible for our children’s choices—or too little. We know you put us as parents and adults in their lives to point them to you, but their hearts are in your hands, not ours. Give us more consistent, godly lives for their sake, and help us to entrust our children to you. Amen.
Father, many have mixed feelings about their parents. But help us look over their shoulders to you, our true Father, who gives us the love we need, and has given us our parents to serve us in so many ways. In the light of these truths, show us how to honor them. Amen.
Lord, no one is an island, and what I do in private affects how I live with others around me. My sins are first and foremost against you (Psalm 51:4), but second, and seriously, they are against my fellow human beings. Impress this on me, as one of the many ways you keep me from sin. Amen.
Lord, centuries before the famous words that the “content of our character” is more crucial than racial and family ties, your Word said the same.212 Do not let us be blinded by family loyalty and love to the flaws and shortcomings of our kin. Amen.
There are friends who are better than siblings (18:24) and colleagues who are as well (17:2).
Father, many are bound and shaped by bitterness toward family members. Perhaps no resentment can distort our lives and relationships more. Show us your grace—which both chastens us and lifts us up—so we have enough humility and joy to forgive even the most grievous sins by our family. Amen.
Lord, we know of prodigal sons or daughters, either our own or a friend’s, whose foolish paths are breaking hearts. Give us a resolve to pray extraordinarily for them. Then use our prayers in our lives and theirs. Get glory for yourself and joy for us by bringing them home—not just into our families but into yours. Amen.
Lord, may I be neither envious nor disdainful, neither too overawed nor intimidated, by wealth. You blessed Abraham, Job, and David with great wealth but only as they put it second to faithfulness to you. Make me like them. Amen.
Father, it is easy to be a Rich Young Ruler who trusts his money too much to lose it in sacrificial giving. But your Son was the true Rich Young Ruler, for his wealth was infinite, his sacrifice unimaginable, and all for us. Make us like him in our stance toward our money. Amen.
If you don’t take the initiative to find work you choose to do, you will in the end find yourself doing work you are forced to do
Father, root out the motives of fear, pride, and self-pity that can make me dishonest. And make me as unlikely to believe lies as to tell them. Make me like your Son my Savior, who told and held to the truth to his own hurt. Amen.
Lord, you call me to careful, painstaking due diligence in all things, and then you assure me it is all under your sovereignty and according to your plan. Strengthen awareness in my mind and my heart for both the solemn charge and the wonderful assurance. I cannot work well without both! Amen.
God wants you to value workmanship over success. He wants you to take enormous pride in work well done and give far less thought to how much money the work makes.
Lord, give me the wisdom to seek skillfulness, but not be taken with my own cleverness. Give me the discernment to perceive excellence, but not be enamored of pedigree and credentials. And with this wisdom, make me a better worker, to your glory and to the good of my neighbor. Amen.
Lord, save me—and those I know and love—from prosperity, and especially sudden success or fame. What our society covets, your Word warns against. Let those among your people, who come by your Providence into more riches and power than the rest, receive a due sense of their heightened responsibility as servants before you. Amen.
Wealth gained by fraud will never satisfy. You will end up with a mouth full of gravel (20:17).
Lord, I can feel the power of wealth to corrupt me even when I do my taxes, or when I just don’t want to know how my bank uses my savings. Protect me from the small compromises and slow hardening of the soul that money can bring. Amen.
You can’t live without breathing, but no one wants to live just to breathe. And you can’t have a business without profit, but no one should be in business simply to make money.
Lord, give men and women in business—whether by conscience (Romans 2:14) or the regenerating power of the Spirit—the understanding and moral conviction that commerce is not, ultimately, about profit. Amen.
Lord, give us a conscience and concern for the vulnerable so that we don’t make a profit from the young by selling corrupting entertainment, or from the elderly people by selling useless products, or from poor people by selling them mortgages they can’t afford. I pray that you would move us to do justice as a nation. Amen.
Wealth has the power to absorb your time, energy, and imagination so you have too little left to pay attention to more important things.
Father, I don’t want to be like the fool who broke his back to build up his business, all with a view to future years of ease that never came. Make me “rich toward God” now. Meet me in prayer. Conform me into the image of your Son. Grow me in the fear of the Lord. Amen.
Lord, there is a kind of justice in that those with the greater blessings also receive greater responsibility and burdens. I ask by your grace that if you deign to bless me with greater success, I might grow in the greater wisdom, humility, and love necessary to bear it. Amen.
Lord, wealth seems to offer such good things—security, consequence, and power to do deeds of mercy. Yet without wisdom it can deliver none of them. Therefore, Lord, I ask that you not grant me any financial success unless you bless me with character, a good conscience, and strong relationships. Amen.
When wealth becomes your identity, you come to feel that people are not just below you economically; they are below you.
“one who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.”
Lord Jesus, what a revealer money is! If I look at what I spend money on most effortlessly, almost without thinking, I see the real functional joys and trusts of my heart. Let me behold your glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) until these other things lose their grip on my heart and desires. Amen.
We love God with our money when we treat it as his, not ours, and send it out to the things he loves.
The more we give away, the more like our God we become. And that is blessed.
Let me use my money to love people who are poor, to love people who don’t know you, and to love people with needs in my family and Christian community. Amen.
