Growing Through Prayer – A Mom and Dad’s True Calling
Lord, my highest calling is to introduce my children to you. Your strength is able to keep them going. Your wisdom can guide their choices, relationships, and dreams for the future. You offer comfort in their pain, healing for their hurts, and forgiveness for every failure. In you they can discover abundant life and the joyful hope of eternity with you. I pray you will use me to reveal the reality of Christ to my kids.
Bear the Spirit’s fruit in me so they experience your patience and kindness, gentleness and goodness, faithfulness and joy. Give me self-control to use my words carefully and keep my emotions in check. Let your peace in my heart breathe quiet peace into our home. (Galatians 5:22-23)
Lord, how can my kids “call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Romans 10:14) Move through my words to teach your Word and share the Gospel so my kids can come to a saving knowledge of you. Surround my children with godly leaders and teachers who help them comprehend your truth. Make your Word alive in my kids’ hearts so they hear and believe.
Just as you’ve forgiven me of all I’ve ever done, give me compassionate grace for my children. Teach me the delicate balance of effective discipline and tender mercy. Make me “quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger” so my kids can approach me at all times without fear. (James 1:19) Let my unconditional love reveal the greater love they can find in you.
Lord, Jesus came “to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10) Seek my children’s hearts until they’re found in you. If they have lost their way by denying Christ and rebelling against your ways, save them by your power. Pursue them as their shepherd, to “search for the lost and bring back the strays,” and to “bind up the injured and strengthen the weak.” (Ezekiel 34:16) No matter what kind of temptation, confusion, or sin they battle today, restore them to faith and obedience to you.
My children are in your hands. You created them and know every detail of their hearts and minds. You, too, long for my kids “to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4) Your love will never fail them, and your power is strong enough to hold them forever. May I trust you completely to call my children out of darkness and into your wonderful light. (1 Peter 2:9)
Amen.
Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk,
so that by it you may grow up in your salvation,
now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
As you come to him, the living Stone—
rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—
you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house
to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
(1 Peter 2:2-5, 9-10)
