Tuesday Prayer: 52

This is my 52nd 'Tuesday Prayer' post. This represents a full year's worth of weekly posting - though, as I have repeatedly noted and apologised for, it has taken longer than an actual year - and has been an entertaining journey. Feedback has included texts, emails, comments, and angry conversations in corridors at two theological colleges. This final post, then, I want to share a prayer whose basic form has changed my life, and whose deeper request to God is something I find deeply powerful.

Readers will know that my journey is one through and around different Churches and spirtiualities. And the thing that I find easiest to identify with, that I first learned in the Vineyard Movement which I love, and is prayed in churches of all kinds around the world is a simple prayer, a prayer of invitation:

"Come, Holy Spirit"

Some people do not like that prayer. There are lots of things I do not like, or disagree with, or think are wrong. But one of the riches of Church History is that prayer, the Latin Veni, Sancte Spiritus, which those of us in the Vineyard/Third Wave tribes and movements see as a key prayer for ministry and mission. 

The prayer, though, is deeper and older than that. And it is also more than three words:

"Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love. 

Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created.

And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

Let us Pray. O God, Who didst instruct the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant us in the same Spirit to be truly wise, and ever to rejoice in His consolation. 

Through Christ our Lord,

Amen"

I think that this is a deep, beautiful and world-changing prayer. To re-ignite the passions of followers of Jesus. To long for God's renewing of the earth and the sending of the Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that binds the church together through disunity, geography and history - and it is through Christ that we are the Church.

I love this prayer. Both the shorter version, which I believe can be prayed in all times and all places as an invitation or a request or a desperate plea, and the longer version, which I think points beyond its short form to the challenge of knowing God.

But what do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

___________________

Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  Norwegian O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and Donald Macleod, Mary Prokes,  J. C. Ryle (again!), Andrew Murray,  Martyn Lloyd Jones, Hudson Taylor, recently about Ffald-y-Brenin,  some of my own words, and my friend Nick Parish, Joyce Huggett. More recently I've shared a prayer of remembrance from the C of E, some of the words of Paul, an Anglican Prayer for Advent, Peter Lewis, Tim Keller, and most recently my friend Robin Ham, the Book of Common Prayer, 1 Timothy 2, and last week a challenge from Myung Hyuk Kim.