Well, I am all out of prayers from the 4th century bishop of Nazianzus.  I hope they were a blessing.  I appreciated how he committed his day to be a sacrifice to the Lord (Rom 12:1-2), he repented in constant failure as a sinner, and even moreso, how his desire for obedience was wrapped up in the person and work of Christ.  

He closes the first prayer with “my delight, my Christ: you bring it home.”  What a wonderful meditation.  The aim and goal of the heart is set apart and the means by which one accomplishes any kind of obedience is clear.  Only Christ can give us the grace and strength to allow us to come home from a day without falling into our temptations.  Notice also that the chief enemy is our sin and passion within, not someone or something outside of us.

In the second prayer he calls Christ his light in contrast to the darkness that he has surrounded himself with in his sins.  The failure is Greg’s and his sin is primarily against Christ.  It is  Christ that forgives and gives new life.

Finally, the last prayer closes with a command to himself to remember his salvation.  What peace this brings to us as we recognize our failures and look to prayer the first prayer of consecrating the new day to Christ.  If we do not remember the gospel for our past failures, we will not have the courage to approach a new day in his grace and will enter the day already having lost the battle.

I hope this was an encouragement for how we ought to pray, live in obedience, rand repent of our sins according to the gospel.  

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