Phillip Doddridge: Piercing Heaven – Puritan’s Prayers

O injured, neglected, provoked Benefactor: when I think but for a moment of all your greatness and goodness, I am astonished at the indifference in my heart. I blush and cannot lift up my face before you.

I have played the fool and made a significant blunder. And yet this foolish heart of mine would make its having neglected you so long a reason to keep neglecting you.

Every one of your rational creatures should be all duty and love for you. Each heart should be full of a sense of your presence. A desire to please you should swallow up every other desire.

Yet you have not been in all my thoughts. And faith, the end and glory of my nature, has been so strangely overlooked.

I know, if matters rest here, I perish. Yet I feel in my perverse nature a secret reluctance to pursue these thoughts. I am prone to lay them aside for now, or even to dismiss them entirely.

My mind is perplexed and divided. But I am sure that you who made me knows what is best for me.

So I ask that you will, for your name’s sake, lead me and guide me. Do not let me delay until it is forever too late.

Pluck me as a brand out of the burning. Break this fatal enchantment. Let me finally come to the place where I am not tempted to wish you never made me, or that you could forever forget me. The place where I fail to recognize my best hope, and perish.

O God, let me hear and obey you! Let your grace teach me the lesson I am so slow to learn, and let it conquer the strong opposition in my heart. Hear these broken cries, for the sake of your Son. He has taught many others who are just as stubborn as I, and he can “raise up children to Abraham out of these stones.”

Amen.