A Prayer On Valentine's Day

Well, it’s Sunday and so normally we would pray together using shared prayers that folks in churches around the world are praying.  However, it’s Valentine’s Day today and it just seems like it would be wrong to not think a bit about God’s love for us and our response to it.

This day is meant to remind us of love and hearts joined together in friendship and commitment.  God desires to have a deep and satisfying personal relationship with us.  God has shared His heart with us, invited us to share our hearts with Him, and generously expressed tenderness and kindness towards us.  We’ve often been too busy with pursuing relationship with other human beings to give much attention to God’s offer of love and friendship.  As good as those relationships are for us, they will never give us what we need at the deepest places of our heart.  Only God can meet us there and make us fully human – as he intended – so we can then live well in loving relationship with others. 

Many cards and gifts with hearts on them are exchanged with friends and loved ones today.  God is offering to us a beautiful heart – a healed and forgiven heart, a heart we desperately need to replace our broken and wounded hearts.  Without God, our heart truly is as hard as stone.  It’s filled with revenge, with hateful anger, with resentment, with bitterness and self-righteous judging. It’s been scarred for too long by broken tapes of hatred and condemnation.   There’s no “fixing” that stuff.  We actually have to hand over that dead and dried up heart and exchange it for one that is living and soft and real. 

“I’ll pour pure water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.” Ezekiel 36:25-27

Lord we want give You our hearts today.  Pour pure water on us and scrub us clean.  Give us that new heart and new spirit that we so desperately need.  Remove the stone heart from us and replace it with a heart that wants Your will not our own, that follows Your commands rather than wandering off in destructive self-will.  We need healing.  We need Your kind of love that looks beyond the frailties and failures of others and allows Your powerful love to overcome difficulties between us.  Help us today, God, to live as Your beloved sons and daughters and to share that love simply and consistently with others.

I love this verse:

See what amazing love the Father has given us! Because of it, we are called children of God. And that’s what we really are!  1 John 3:1

Some of us missed tenderness in our homes while we were growing up.  This lack of love and compassion may have driven us down difficult paths.  What a joy to discover that someone really loves and cares about us.  That someone is God who offers us the unfailing love and tenderness we have always wanted.  This Valentine’s Day let us truly celebrate the lavish love God pours out on us and then in turn reach out to others and pour out this wonderful love from God to them through us.

Loving God, We can call out to You today. We are so grateful that we can speak to You as often as we like.  You never get tired of listening to us.  You are interested in all things that concern us.  You just wait for us to notice You reaching out to us with love and tenderness and inviting us to come close to Your heart.  There really is no better friend we could have than You.

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

You loved us so much that when we were a mess and unable to make ourselves attractive to You, You sent Jesus to die for us so we could be made clean and whole.  Filled with Your goodness because of Jesus, we want to reflect this same love to others. 

Your word reminds us:  A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. John 13:34-35

So, Loving God, on this Valentine’s Day, help us to recognize and respond to the many expressions of love and kindness You send our way.  Help us many times today to pause and give thanks for Your faithful and unfailing love.  You are the best friend and companion a person could ever have.  Amen