A PRAYER FOR PREACHERS by Jim McGuiggan

https://web.archive.org/web/20160316144512/http://www.jimmcguiggan.com/reflections3.asp?status=Prayer&id=1411

A PRAYER FOR PREACHERS

Sovereign Lord and Holy Father, forgive us who are called to gospel for you—whoever we are and whatever our place in life—forgive us for every word or gesture that would take the hearts and minds of those who hear us away from you and your blessed Son, Jesus Christ. Because we are sinful, in our foolishness we are prone to come to linger on our faithfulness or our skill, wisdom or popularity. It is not to our credit that others might not know that we do this but bless us indeed by making us aware of it and aware that you are saddened by it for then we have the opportunity to renounce it.

Permit us to apologize and in your patience and kindness will you continue to entrust us with your precious gospel for in our better moments we desire to be faithful servants and yet we fear that we may be under the spell of self-love for a long time. Because you are faithful and because we can do nothing praiseworthy without your constant help we make our request with assurance that you will in your own good time and by your many chosen means provide what we need to honor you always.

Deliver us from smooth sophistication and posing and from well-expressed humanism that adds some verses for religious coloration and is made a substitute for gospeling. For your Church's sake keep us from parading our cleverness and from religious lecturing that starves your needy people and weakens them in the face of the task you have commissioned it to carry out.  Deliver us, too, we pray, from the kind of humility that calls attention to itself and therefore ceases to be humility; forbid us to be lazy and call us to be workmen who need not to be ashamed, not to be dabblers so that by your Spirit in our prayerful diligence you will enrich us with the truth you entrust us to speak that we too might be transformed as you wish our hearers to be.

Do thou protect us, we ask, for we have no other who cares so much for us all and for your own glorious purpose in Christ who alone makes us worthy and for the sad and sinful world that you so love and wish to come to know and love and live the Story. In Jesus Christ this prayer.