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.
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