– Please note that references in parentheses (X) refer to books of the Bible unless otherwise specified.
In a previous blog, A Prayer of Love, I share a prayer focused on God’s love – believing,
declaring, receiving, and sharing God’s love for us in this world. In my very first blog post,
Knowing the God Who IS Love, I set forth a foundational introduction and invitation into this life-
changing revelation. Based on the original, true Jesus, and the overall integrated Jesus-biblical
vision, I believe the absolute most foundational and central truth that God IS love, and that God
shares God’s love with us all, all the time. God’s love is the very heart of life and faith and hope.
Everything truly is all about God’s love, and God’s love shared with others. The prayer of love
which I share on that basis in that earlier post simply offers one clear way for us to be rooted
continually in God’s love.
In this post, I share another prayer, of further affirmations. This continues to express and affirm with gratitude the vast goodness that is our life in God’s love. This prayer of affirmations speaks,
I believe, with the spirit of Psalm 103: Remember all God’s blessings! God’s love blesses us in
many ways, transforming our lives, and our vision for living from its very core outward into all its
active expressions. One such blessing, again in the spirit of so many Psalms, takes shape as
God’s love defines and renews our very identity into who we are in God’s love for us. This
prayer further expresses such affirmations of our true personal identity in God’s love.
Simultaneously, our lives with God are about everything. Our identity in God’s love flows into all
the ways we live in and live out God’s love in this world – through all that we are, say, do, serve,
and enjoy in God’s creation. So this prayer of affirmations also expresses how our heart identity
in God’s love shapes our active lives in all dimensions in this world. I hope that praying these
affirmations will help renew us all into so much more of the fullness of living out God’s love.
In the process, these two prayers together promote a vital complimentary purpose. The prayer
of love I shared earlier emphasizes that simple heart of Jesus and the overall integrated Jesus-
biblical vision: God is love, for us! This second prayer affirms that truth more specifically into the
fullness of our lives, and further extends that heart-reality into the breadth of living in this world,
into everything that Jesus and that whole Jesus-biblical vision is all about. Praying with a simple
focus on God’s love renews our identity in that most central reality. The prayer I share here also
carries us “further up and farther in” (C. S. Lewis), into how our heart reality in God’s love also
redefines, renews, and empowers all dimensions of our living through God’s love in this world.
How can we pray in light of the most central truth of Jesus and the Jesus-biblical vision? By
praying God’s love for us. How can we pray personally in light of the fullness of Jesus and the
Jesus-biblical vision, from start to finish? The prayer I share here offers one way to press further
into that glorious and endless horizon of all God’s loving blessings (see Philip 3)…
In that context, let me also add one more note of realistic honesty here. I am quite mindful, from
my own experience, as well as the tremendous stresses and crises and concerns all around us
in today’s world, that we do not necessarily always feel so good about everything. And honestly,
even prayers like this do not always make us feel good, or perhaps at least not so easily and
immediately. I do not think that the first purpose of prayer is to make us feel good – though that
may at times and in some ways, and perhaps more so eventually, become a further blessing of
praying. I do not pray these prayers because I have fully arrived in these matters, but precisely
because I am still on the journey these prayers envision, often more in stages of struggle and
even still just “crawling toward the lamb” (Larry Norman). And that is why praying is so helpful.
The first and deepest purpose of prayer is to root us continually in the reality of who God is for
us – and that is all about God’s love for us, how God establishes and sustains us in God’s love,
and how God enables us to share God’s love in this world. It is in that light that we most need to
pray, to be renewed every day in God’s love, to nurture God’s true definition of our identity and
living, in the face of all the other distortions swirling around us in this world. This prayer of
affirmations offers one way for this identity and hope to be renewed in us on a frequent basis, as
an instrument for God’s empowering love to fill us each new day.
~~~~~
A Prayer of Affirmations
Thank you God that you love me. Thank you that you love all of us.
Thank you that I am created in the dignity of the image of God
– along with every human person.
Thank you that in Jesus the Messiah, I am a beloved child of God,
with all our brothers and sisters in Jesus.
Thank you that I, and we together, live in Jesus’ new kingdom reality:
love and compassion, healing and renewal, peace and justice, joy and hope,
in the fullness of life.
Thank you that I, and each of us, live in Jesus’ sacrificial love,
with which he ransoms and sets us free from the dominion of darkness,
forgives our sins,
and so enables us to live in God’s grace and blessings.
Thank you that we live in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection,
which guarantees our fully human resurrection in God’s new creation.
Thank you that the Spirit of Jesus lives within me,
so I can bear the fruits of the spirit in my living:
love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Thank you that we can celebrate the blessings of God’s good creation,
we can already now live into the beginnings of God’s new creation,
and we can look forward to Jesus’ return when God will complete this new creation reality.
Thank you that we can share now in following Jesus the Messiah,
through growing in living out his radically new ways,
in all dimensions of our living,
to serve in the fullness of his new reality coming on this earth as it is in heaven.
In our baptized identity, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen:
so it is, so it will be!
Readers are also encouraged to explore more reflections in this series: Waves of Renewal for Our Time
God so loved the world… God is love!
Then I saw a new heaven and new earth…
and the tree of life…
at the middle of the great street of the city…
and the leaves of the tree
are for the healing of the cultures.John 3; 1 John 4; Revelation 21, 22
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