Rev. Dr. Mateen Elass is senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Edmund, OK. This prayer was offered at the Presbyterian Coalition, Y’All Come meeting, in Chicago, August 17, 2010. Used with permission.
O God, King of Zion clothed in majesty, You are our sure defense. Great You are and greatly to be praised. The whole earth is full of Your glory. Together with the seraphs we cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” and feel the foundations of the thresholds of heaven and earth shudder under the weight of Your effulgence. With Isaiah we lament, “Woe is me, for I have unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people with unclean lips…. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!”
Our guilt is ever before us, Lord. Though You have brought us into Zion and unveiled to us her strongholds, and urged us to number her towers and survey her soaring ramparts and know the safety of her citadels, yet we continue to live in fear of the forces of darkness. While we should be telling the next generation, “This is our God, the Prince of life who has conquered the grave, the Victor who holds the keys of death and Hades, our God forever and ever,” we instead have huddled behind fortress walls, afraid to emerge from the shadows to follow You in reclaiming Your Kingdom.
We have received Your appointment as heralds, to go out into the fields of harvest and trumpet Your coming, secure in Your strong hands. Yet we feel like lambs cowering before wolves. Forgive our paralyzing fear, Lord; our disobedience born of unbelief. We call ourselves evangelicals, but we want to hide in Zion. Only reluctantly have we engaged the world; only with diffidence have we called out the enemy and unsheathed the sword of truth.
We confess that we have loved our church positions more than Your Kingdom, that we crave the sweet aroma of praise so much more than the acrid smoke of the battle field. As we face the prospect of protracted struggle which will tax already bone-weary bodies, many of us want to silently slip away into anonymity. But You have called us to march in Your strength, and promised Your victory. So we will go. Protect us, Lord Jesus, from the doubts that assail us. But equally, gracious God, protect us when You work mightily through us in the fray—protect us then from believing our own press clippings. As the realms of darkness must retreat from Your light, as the gates of hell must shatter before the advance of the church militant, spare us, we pray, from the hubris of our fallen hearts: “Even the demons are subject to us….” Help us to remember in times of victory as well as setback that because of Your sovereign, electing grace our names are written in heaven, and in that truth find our joy.
So we raise our Ebenezer in tribute to Your unmatched work of salvation, grateful beyond words that You sought us when we were strangers, wandering far from Zion, and to rescue us from danger interposed Your precious blood. Gladly with the saints of all ages we confess:
O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be.
Let Thy goodness like a fetter bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart; O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above. Amen.
This prayer first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Sep/Oct 2010).
