Robert Hawker: Piercing Heaven – Puritan’s Prayers

In your beauty, blessed Lord, we see a fullness of grace, truth, and righteousness. It corresponds exactly to the wants of poor sinners—your blood, to cleanse. Your grace, to comfort. Your fullness, to supply.

In you there is everything we can want: life, light, joy, pardon, mercy, peace, happiness here, glory hereafter.

Do I not see you, my King, in your beauty, when I behold you coming with all these for me? So I must cry out with the psalmist, “I will love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my strength and my song; and he is become my salvation.”

And that is not all. Because when I see the King in his beauty, I see him also in his love. Yes, blessed Lord, you are so beautiful, for you have so loved poor sinners that you give yourself for them.

And we know that our love for you did not come first, but your love to us came first. Your love prompted ours. Your love filled our hearts and, by your Spirit, first prompted our minds to look toward you. That makes you lovely indeed.

And now, Lord, every day’s view of you increases that love, and brings home your beauty more and more. The more often you stoop to visit my poor soul, the more beautiful you appear.

Every appearance, every view, every glimpse of Jesus, tends to make my God and King more gracious and lovely to my soul, and adds fresh fervor to my love.

Come then, you blessed, holy, lovely one, and ravish my spiritual senses with your beauty, that my whole soul would be filled only with the love of Jesus every day. Until that day when, from seeing you here below, through your grace, I come to look upon you, and live forever in your presence, in the full beams of your glory in your throne above.

Amen.