"O Lord, in the morning I will direct my prayer to You."
"What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits
towards me?"—Psalm 116:12
O God, I adore You as the Author and Giver of every good
and every perfect gift. You are daily loading me with Your benefits. Every
returning morning brings with it fresh causes for gratitude—new material for
praise. I bless You for Your temporal bounties—"how great has been the sum of
them!" While others have been pining in poverty, or wasted by sickness, or
racked in pain, or left friendless and portionless, You have been making
showers of blessing to fall around my dwelling. I laid me down last night and
slept—I awoke, for the Lord sustained me. I might never have seen the morning
light. Mine might have been the midnight summons to meet a God in whose
righteous presence I was all unfit and unprepared to stand. And yet I am again
spared, a monument of Your goodness. Oh, enkindle a flame of undying gratitude
to You, on the clay-cold altar of my heart. I mourn and lament that I am so
little and so feebly affected by the magnitude of Your mercies, and especially
by the riches of Your grace and love manifested in Jesus—that my affections
are so little alive to the incalculable obligation under which I am laid to
Him who has "loved me with an everlasting love." I am doubly Yours. Creation
and redemption combine in claiming all I am, and all I have, for You and Your
service. Good Lord, preserve me from the sin of insensibility to Your
unwearied kindness—of taking Your mercies as matters of course, and thus
living in a state of independence of You. May my whole existence become a
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving—may all my doings testify the sincerity
and devotion of a heart feeling alive to every gift of the great Giver; and,
especially, may I be so brought under the constraining influence of redeeming
love, as to consecrate every power of my body and every faculty of my soul to
Him who so willingly consecrated and shed His very life's blood for me.
Lord, this day shine upon me with the light of Your
countenance; may every mercy I experience in the course of it be hallowed and
sweetened by the thought that it comes from God. And, while ever mindful and
thankful in the midst of present mercies, teach me to keep in view the
crowning mercy of all—the hope of at last sharing Your presence and full
fruition, and of joining in the eternal ascription with the ransomed multitude
above, who cease not day nor night to celebrate Your praises.
Bless all near and dear to me. Defend them by Your mighty
power. Give them, too, gratitude for mercies past, and the sure and
well-grounded hope of a glorious inheritance in that better world, where mercy
is unmixed with judgment, and joy undarkened by sorrow. And all I ask is for
Jesus' sake. Amen.
"Cause me to hear Your loving-kindness in the morning, for
in You do I trust."