Prayer for Mercy

In Your gentle mercy, Lord, guide our wayward hearts, for we know that left to ourselves we cannot do Your will.

That prayer comes from Lauds this morning. It is a beautiful prayer of humility in which we place ourselves completely at the mercy of God, knowing that we cannot do His will of our own strength or power.

We like to be self-sufficient. We want to believe that we can do anything we set our minds upon. We can thank the philosophers of the Enlightenment for increasing our belief in the capacity of man to become god unto himself. Yet, as I have mentioned before, this philosophy has born little fruit other than increasing mental illness.

In humility we find the counterweight to insanity. By admitting that we cannot do the will of God on our own and that our wayward hearts are not within our control, we discover what we can do through the power of Christ who strengthens us.

In Your gentle mercy, Lord, guide our wayward hearts, for we know that left to ourselves we cannot do Your will.