Broadway Baptist Church - Louisville, Kentucky

A Prayer for an Honest Faith

God of truth,

whose light lays bare falsehood

whose eyes see through facades

whose ears hear our harmless fibs and our hurtful lies

We pray you would make us honest people.

Help us to be honest with others.

When we say we will pray for those who are sick or those who are grieving, as we do today, may we remember to pray faithfully.

When we tell someone we love them, grant that our actions might not put the lie to our words.

When we claim to be people of faith, help us to stretch ourselves and our living beyond the temperate and the practical. May a true faith call us to risk loving the villain, forgiving the scoundrel, embracing the criminal, and forgiving the friend or family member who hurt us when they did something thoughtless and stupid.

When we claim to be disciples, help us to follow honestly, if not perfectly. Grant that we would seek to find your path through the wilderness rather than plodding with the masses down the sidewalk of the same ol’ same ol’.

Help us to be honest with ourselves.

Forgive us when we look in the mirror see little or nothing of value. Rebuke us when we lie to ourselves by believing that we, as your beloved child, do not count.

Forgive us also when we deceive ourselves into believing the person in the mirror counts above all else. Forgive us when we place ourselves at the center of our own little galaxy, demanding that everyone and everything revolve around us.

Help us to be honest with you.

In this world where sometimes we need to wear masks, and where sometimes we wear them even when we do not need to, because we are afraid, nurture in us the courage to leave the masks behind when we come to you in prayer.

In this world that conspires with us when we want to believe the rules don’t apply to us, grant us the clarity to see the lines where they really are drawn, and the sincerity to confess that we have crossed them.

In this world that draws around us circles of prejudice and provincialism, lend us your truthful eye so we can see how rarely we dare to move outside our circles of comfort. Help us to see how small we have made our world so that we can know the fulfillment of crossing lines you yearn for us to cross.

Finally, Lord, grant that we would move beyond happy talk in our prayers. When we are angry, even with you, help us to say so. When are frustrated, even with you, help us to say so. When we look into the hollow face of the cancer patient, when we recoil at the horror of bombs in the streets of Baghdad, when we wonder at the capacity of people to hurt other people, and when the thought rolls in from the horizon of troubles: “Why, O God, did you create such a world?” help us to set our lament before you as plainly and honestly as the psalmist does.

Help us, O God, to come to you as we are, to own up to what we have done and failed to do, to name what we feel, so that by speaking to you honestly, we might find the capacity to love you more deeply.

Amen.