Day 3: Unrestricted Blessings
Your Father in heaven… causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45).
Our Father, God of lavish love, You are a God of abundance and grace beyond limits. You are compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. You do not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities (Psalm 103:8,10).
In His revolutionary teaching in The Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus taught us a whole new outlook on life, and love, and forgiveness and relationships. As we consider His teachings, our focus is often on the “difficulty”—in our mind even the impossibility—of what He asks of us.
Our demand for justice, our preoccupation with fairness, and our desire for self-protection cause us to balk at such magnitude of self-denial love, compassion, and forgiveness as our Lord describes. And the irony is that even as we struggle, or even refuse to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:43), we can easily overlook that the Lord Jesus demonstrated exactly what He taught: God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
Like the unmerciful servant in the Lord’s parable (Matthew 18:23-35), we create mental barriers of deep resistance to the radical love, grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness You ask of us. But You have taught us to pray to be forgiven as we forgive (Matthew 6:12).
Father, You are patient with us; forgiving to us: As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him; for He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:13-14). You know the struggles of our sin-nature. But grant us a willing spirit (Psalm 51:12) so that we do not continue to resist and rebel (Isaiah 1:20).
Open our hearts to receive and embrace Your word, Your truth, Your way. Help us to allow You to move us forward from where we are into the radical love and grace to which You call us.
You pour Your unrestricted blessings over all our lives—You lavish Your providential sun and rain over the evil and the good, the righteous and the unrighteous. Teach us to love unreservedly like You that we may be children of our Father in heaven (Matthew 5:45).
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