Commending Your Children to God in Prayer
When my children were growing up I made it a
point to pray for each of them regularly and asked the Lord to fill in for my
parental shortcomings. Sad to say, now that they have grown up, I don't pray
for them as often as I ought. I should do much better. And, as I think about
it, when I do pray for them I don’t always pray for the right things. This is
one element of my daily devotional discipline I wish to improve.
Toward that end, I recently purchased a copy
of the revised Concordia edition of Starck’s
Prayer Book. Originally written in German during the 18thcentury
and first translated into English in 1921, this wonderful little book stands up
quite well to the test of time. It contains prayer for many occasions and
situations, but the one that really caught my eye is entitled “Believing
Parents Commend Their Children to God in Prayer.”
The prayer includes a number of things you
would normally expect to hear in such a prayer: thanksgiving to God for the
gift of children; as well as petitions for help in raising them in the
discipline and instruction in the Lord, that they would be well-grounded in the
Christian faith, that they would lead godly lives, that the Lord would protect
them from spiritual and physical danger, and that He would continue to provide
for their temporal needs. But it also contains a paragraph that is just as
important as all of them, but which most of us probably don’t think to pray. Or
if we do think of it, we never voice it because it goes right at the heart of a
parent’s deepest fears. Starck writes:
But if it should please
You to make my children a cross to me, either by their sickness, or death, or
any other calamity that I might have to see them suffer, grant me patience in
such affliction, and remind me that nothing happens without Your divine
direction, that my children were Yours before they were mine, and that You have
sovereign power to take them again to Yourself. But if it is Your design by the
suffering, misfortune, and death of my children to draw me to You, in order that
I may recognize also in them that Your visible gifts are perishable, to stir me
up to love You alone, the true and perfect God, keep me while traveling this
thorny path in firm confidence and hope in Your almighty power, which can end
and mend all things, even the crosses of my children.
Starck lived in a day and age when the loss
of a child (or children) was all too common. In the days before antibiotics and
modern medicines, every sickness was considered to be potentially crippling or
even lethal, particularly among children. God has blessed us with many advances
in medical science since that time that make the death of a child a rarity in
our day. Praise the Lord! But that blessing has also come with a downside: our
sinful minds have tricked us into believing that bad things can’t (or
shouldn't) happen to us—they certainly shouldn't happen to our children!
But the reality is that we live in a fallen
world. Bad things do happen. And even if disease or death are not an obvious
threat there are many other perils and trials that we must all face on a daily
basis. Each one of us has to take up his own cross. But we don’t have to carry
the burden alone. Our Lord will do that for us. We have not, because we ask
not. That’s why one of the best gifts we can give our children (and receive
ourselves) is to pray for them. No, God doesn’t always answer our prayers just
when or in the exact way that we would want, but He does promise to hear our
prayers and to answer in a way that is best for us and for those for who we pray in Jesus' name. A prayer like Starck’s helps
me to remember that.
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