Father God,

    Today, I pray that You would heal the deafness and the blindness of the Church today.  Like Israel in Isaiah chapter 43, we are called as witnesses intended to understand and to proclaim Your works, yet the church spends more time deceiving itself with its self-justifications and fancy excuses. 

     The church has forgotten its first and second loves, that of God and that of neighbor. We spend more time thinking of how we might serve You, instead of heeding the simple words that we love You by obeying You.  We spend more time on our rituals than on obeying You by loving one another.

     While I do pray that we would come to know You more and more by our understanding of Your Word, I pray just as fervently that we would come to know You through obedience to Your commands and through loving one another in the body of Christ. I pray that our knowing would be manifest in our daily walk for the watching world to see so that we would not be the deaf and blind of Isaiah 43 who cannot bear witness to Your works.

In Christ’s Name,

Amen.