Patience & Kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4–8)
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
– 1 Corinthians 13:4–8
1 Corinthians 13 is known as the love chapter. It is a supernatural Spirit-inspired picture of love. And I just want to read these verses and pray them over our lives as I read them, instead of just reading them and then talking about them, then praying. Let’s just pray them. This is one of those places in God’s Word where it’s just so easy to read and pray simultaneously because there’s not a lot of explanation needed. So let me pray this over us. Straight from God’s Word.
Oh God, we praise you for the picture of love that You’ve given us in 1 Corinthians 13, and we pray that all of these attributes, characteristics, and expressions of love that we read here would be evident in our lives today. God, we pray that You would help us to be patient and kind.
Help us not to envy or boast, deliver us from pride. Oh God, we pray for the humility that comes with true love for You and others. We pray that You would keep us from being arrogant or rude in any way. God, we pray for humility and kindness. We pray that today You would keep us from insisting on our own way. God help us to yield to Your ways above all, and God help us to serve others in what is good for them.
God, we pray that You would keep us from being irritable or resentful. Oh God, guard us in every moment in our minds, our thoughts, our desires, our words, and our actions. Keep us from being in any way irritable or resentful. God, we pray that we would not rejoice at wrongdoing, but that we would rejoice with the truth. We pray that we would grieve over evil, run from temptation to sin, and rejoice in experiencing life and truly walking with You according to Your Word.
God, we pray that You’d help us to bear all things. We pray for endurance over each other amidst whatever we’re walking through in our lives. We pray that You’d help us to believe all things, to live by faith today, to trust in Your truth, to trust in Your Word with hope. God, help us to live today with the steadfast hope You have given to us. The hope that we have in You that supersedes any suffering, challenges, or despair that we might experience in this world. We pray that You help us to hope all things and endure all things, knowing that love never ends. Love like this never ends.
God, we pray that this kind of love would mark our lives today, and we confess our need for You, oh God, to produce this kind of love in us. We confess that we are naturally prone to being impatient, unkind. We’re prone to envy, to boast, to be arrogant, to be rude, to insist on our own way, to be irritable and resentful, and to rejoice at wrongdoing and even to run toward sin.
God, we pray that you would help us to love in all these ways. We pray that You’d help us to grow today, that by this time tomorrow we would be more in love with You and that we would love others selflessly as Your Word describes here in meaningful, specific, practical ways in our lives.
And in this, oh God, we pray that Your love would spread through us today. We pray for the spread of your love to the people around us, everybody we interact with today, through their interactions with us.
A Prayer for the Paraiyan People
And God, we pray for the spread of Your love around the world. We pray for the Paraiyan people of India and Sri Lanka. For 2.3 million Paraiyan men, women, and children. God, we pray that they would be reached with the good news of Your love in Jesus, that You would bless Your Church and the love of Your Church spreading through them to the Paraiyan people of South India and Sri Lanka, all for Your glory as the God who is love. In Jesus’ Name we pray all of this. Amen.
