Spiritual Helps

Eternal Father, it is amazing love, that You have sent Your Son to suffer in our place, that You have given us the Holy Spirit to teach us, to comfort us, and to guide us, and that You have allowed the ministry of angels to wall us around; because of the life, death and resurrection of Your Son, all heaven is available to help the well-being of poor worms like us. Permit Your unseen servants to be ever active on our behalf, and to rejoice when grace increases in us. Don’t let them rest until our conflicts are over, and we stand victorious on salvation's shore. 

Lord, grant that our proneness to evil, deadness to good, and resistance to Your Spirit's work, may never provoke You to abandon us. May our hard hearts awake Your pity, not Your wrath. And if the enemy gets an advantage through our sin, let it be seen that heaven is mightier than hell, that those for me are greater than those against me. Arise to our help in richness of covenant blessings, keep us feeding in the pastures of Your strengthening Word, searching Scripture to find You there. 

Father, if our waywardness is visited with Your discipline, enable us to receive correction meekly, to bless the reproving hand, to discern the motive of rebuke, to respond promptly, and do the first work. Let all Your fatherly dealings make us a partaker of Your holiness. Grant that in every fall we may sink lower on our knees, and that when we rise it may be to greater heights of devotion. May our every cross be sanctified, every loss be gain, every denial a spiritual advantage, every dark day a light of the Holy Spirit, every night of trial a song. 

Based on The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions, edited by Arthur Bennett