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A devotional to uplift you...
"Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
This prayer has been prayed by Christians for many centuries. Generally, when people pray this "Jesus Prayer," they repeat it over and over, letting the words sink into them. In the middle ages in Constantinople it actually became a quite controversial practice for a while, for obvious reasons--it did not seem like authentic Christian prayer, but more like a pagan chant, and the claims of some practicioners of a mystical experience of "union with God" sounded downright heretical. But John of Damascus, a gifted orator, so eloquently defended the Jesus Prayer that its use was approved by the Patriarch of Constantinople and its popularity spread. Indeed, as late as the twentieth century entire congregations have used the Jesus Prayer as a devotional technique--one observer wrote,
"The participants did not tire of their song. Did they sing it 1,000 times? Or more? We lost, like them, any sense of number or time."
So what is the value of this prayer? Its words, all biblical, describe and glority Christ, then ask forgiveness from him. Why is this so central? Because, unlike most of our prayers, it gets at the very heart of our relationship with Christ. Yes, it is important to intercess for others; yes, it is important to thank God for great and loving acts; but at the heart of our relationship with God in Christ is our own need for justification, for forgiveness, for salvation, for mercy. The Jesus Prayer gets to the heart of things; Christ is great; we are sinful; we need Christ. For those who have become proud, it has a great power of humility. But this prayer is more than that. As we let these words sink into us, we recognize the truth behind the words--Jesus, as our sacrificial Lamb, has already had mercy on us, more mercy than we can possibly comprehend, but as we pray we simply glimpse it, glimpse the beauty of the merciful love of God. And as our lips continue to make the sounds, we feel the joy of Christ's presence in our lives and even with us as we pray. We are marvelously aware of the great love of God. And that supernatural sense of awareness brings us closer to him than we have ever felt before.