Guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior, and my hope is in You all day long (Psalm 25:5).
Our Father, You are our God for ever and ever; [You] will be our guide even to the end (Psalm 48:14). Oh how we need You to guide us in Your truth!
As we take stock of where we are, Lord, we understand our desperate need of Your help, Your guidance and Your protection to carry us into the future. All around we see the rising tide of deception and falsehood, dishonesty, and clever manipulation.
Oh Father, deliver us from evil! Deceit, corruption, and lack of integrity are relentlessly eroding standards and basic protections at all levels of government, organizations, institutions, and media; and we are constantly struggling against the harmful results. The hypervigilance is exhausting, and it seems impossible to outpace the furious onslaught from every direction.
We are becoming more and more vulnerable and exposed as carelessness, greed, fraud, duplicity, cheating and sham compromise even the safety of our food, our water supply, our health care processes, and our everyday goods and services.
We encounter risk at every turn—in ordinary transactions, in social interactions, in necessary operations. We increasingly have little or no recourse, especially the most vulnerable among us. Our elderly are preyed on, our lonely are exploited, our young are endangered, our poor and marginalized are abandoned and deserted.
God, help us! It is frightening to think of a world without core principles, without firm standards of integrity. Left unchecked, our progressive decline in truth and soundness will undoubtedly lead to the dire conditions described by the prophet Isaiah:
So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey (Isaiah 59:14-15).
Yet, Lord, we have hope, knowing that You are Sovereign, knowing that You are faithful. When we are tempted to give in to fear, to look in despair at all that spirals ever downward, let Your words of reassurance fill our soul:
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness (Lamentations 3:21-23).
Thank You for Your faithfulness, O Lord! Thank You for Your unfailing compassions. Thank You that they are new every morning, year in, and year out. Thank You that in a world of falsehoods and deceptions, You are the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).
Thank You that that makes all the difference. Guide us in Your truth and teach us—our hope is in You all day long, all year long, all life long, and into eternity.
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