Daily Devotionals: (June 23rd): Prayer for Hope in the Resurrection

Reading: Reading: “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.”—Isaiah 26:19

Lord, Keep me ever in the frame I should wish to be found in when my Lord comes. May the lamp of faith and love be brightly burning. May it never be mine to be awakened by the midnight cry to the dreadful consciousness, “My lamp has gone out.” May I rather be among the number of “waiting servants,” who, when their Lord comes and knocks, ”are ready to open to Him immediately.”

Lord, impart to all near and dear to me this day the same spiritual and eternal blessings I ask for myself. May they, too, be united to Jesus, “planted in the likeness of His death,” that they may be found also “in the likeness of His resurrection.” May we all seek to bear an increasingly holy resemblance in love one to another and to our great living Head, in whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named; and if for a little while separated by death, may we on the great day of His appearing be reunited in bonds that shall know no dissolution.

Lord, I commend myself to You. Prepare me for living, prepare me for dying. Let me live near You in grace now, that I may live with You in glory everlasting. Let me be reconciled submissively to endure all that Your sovereign wisdom and love seem fit to appoint, looking forward, through the tears and sorrows of a groaning and weeping world, to that better day-spring, when “I shall behold Your face in righteousness,” and be “satisfied, when I awake in Your likeness.” And all I ask is for the Redeemer’s sake. Amen.

Adapted from the Rev. John McDuff, D.D., The Morning Watches, 1852.

John Ross Macduff was born at Bonhard, near Perth, on May 23, 1818. After studying at the University of Edinburgh, he became parish minister of Kettins, Forfarshire,  in 1842. In 1849 he moved to St. Madoes, Perthshire, and in 1855 to Sandyford, Glasgow. He received the degree of D.D. from the University of Glasgow in 1862, and from the University of New York about the same time. He retired from pastoral work in 1871, moved to Chislehurst, Kent where he died in 1887.