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- The Boldest Prayer You Can Pray
The boldest prayer you can pray that God will always answer is this:
“God, show me more of Your love.”
There are seven or eight prayers that the Apostle Paul prays in his letters to the New Testament churches. I love to sit down with them to shape my own prayers, and one that I have come back to over and over in the last few years is Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesians 3:
“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
If I could sum up the theological truth behind this prayer it would be this: there is more.
Christ’s love for us is neverending, and we will never be done understanding the depths and lengths and height and breadth of Him. In fact, in 10,000 years, when we are standing on the sea of glass together, we will still be comprehending new depths of the ways in which God loves us — because it never ends because He never ends!
Yet, many of us feel guilty to pray a prayer like “God, show me more of Your love,” for various reasons — feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt, the feeling like we’ve seen all there is to see, a vague sense of boredom with prayer or God, or the sense that we should spend more of our time practicing gratitude and contentment than asking for more. (Maybe take a moment and ask yourself — which of those things comes up in my heart when I imagine asking God to show me more of His love?)
In Teresa of Avila’s commentary on Song of Songs, she opens with her reflections on the preposterous prayer at the start of the song: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (1:2).
This line, in many ways, is the Song of Songs version of Ephesians 3:18-19. It’s the bride telling her bridegroom: “Come and love me! Show me more of your love!”
Teresa writes in her commentary on this verse:
“O my Lord and my God, and what words are these that a worm speaks them to its Creator!…But the soul that is enkindled with a love that makes it mad desires nothing else than to say these words.”
Perhaps we feel the same way about the prayer “God, show me more of Your love.” It’s too bold! We need to be grateful for what we’ve already received! We are not worthy or we need to get it together or we need to be more reverent or a whole host of other excuses of why there are better prayers to pray.
But that, in my opinion, is what makes this the boldest prayer you can pray. It is an audacious declaration both of who God is (Limitless Love!) and a bold declaration of who we are (forgiven and free in Christ, more loved than we can even know, and on the journey of growing into an ever-deepening knowledge of that love). In some ways, it is an incredibly worshipful prayer because you are coming into agreement with the truth that you are made to be loved by God, and nothing will satisfy you but God’s love. It’s a declaration of hunger, dependency, and loving longing for the only One that can meet your deepest needs, and a refusal to settle for anything less.
So, I’d love to encourage you today to do two things:
Get really honest about what keeps you from praying that prayer in this season of your walk with God.
Pray with boldness, tenderness, confidence, and hunger:
“God, show me more of Your love.”
And see how God answers it.