1 Corinthians 13:4–8… This is one of the more famous passages, well-known passages in the New Testament, this description of love. I want to read it and just lead us to pray through it. To pray for this kind of love to mark our lives.
Prayer for Patience, Kindness, and Humility According to 1 Corinthians 13:4–8
1 Corinthians 13:4, “Love is patient.” God, we pray for patience in our lives and our relationships with others. Help us to love others with patience. To think that you would inspire that to be the first word describing love in this chapter. God, we pray, help us to be patient and kind. God, help us to be kind toward everyone around us. We pray for a gentle, quiet spirit in love for the people in our homes. For the people we work with, go to school with, for people in our churches. For everyone we interact with in the world, we pray for kindness, the kindness of Jesus to flow through us.
Love does not envy or boast. God, please guard us from all envy. Help us to celebrate others’ strengths and the grace that you’ve given to others’ lives. Help us be content with the grace you’ve given to us and not to be proud or boast in it. God, we pray that you would deliver us from both envy and boasting that is not arrogant or rude. Oh, God, we pray for humility in our lives and our relationships with others. We pray that you would deliver us, free us from all arrogance. Make us humble in our love for others and never rude. God, help us to speak kindly, gently, and to think and desire that which is good for those around us always. Love does not insist on its own way.
God, we pray that you would deliver us from all self-serving and self-seeking, that we would love our neighbors as ourselves, we would desire their good, not insist on our own way. It is not irritable or resentful. God, we pray you’d help us today not to be irritable and not to be resentful. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Prayer for Joy, Hope, and Benevolence According to 1 Corinthians 13:4–8
Oh, God, help us to have joy over what brings you joy, and in this way to love others to be joyful about that which is good through our love for others. Love bears all things. God help us to bear with other people today to assume the best about others, to not be quick to criticize others or cancel others. Lord, help us to bear all things, believe all things. God, we pray that you would help us to pray with faith for others, to walk in faith for the sake of others.
Love hopes all things. God, we pray that you’d help us to live today not in despair, but as ones who’ve been delivered from despair to live with a hope in our own lives and for others’ lives. Love believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. God, we pray for enduring love in and through our lives, love for other people that endures, that lasts. It doesn’t come and go and fade. We pray for enduring love, knowing that love like this never ends. God, we praise you for your love for us in all these ways, for your patience and your kindness toward us, for your humility, Lord Jesus in dying on a cross for our sins, for laying aside, for laying down your life for us.
God, for rejoicing over us, for bearing with us, for bringing about faith in us, for giving us hope, for a love that we know from you will last forever. All glory be to your name. Oh God of love, you are love, and we pray that your love would mark our lives today and every day. God, we pray that you would help us to love you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love others as ourselves.
Prayer for the Embera-Baudo People
Lord, we pray for the spread of this love all around the world through us today and to people who don’t know this love, God for the Embera-Baudo people of Columbia. God, this small people group of just 6,700 people among whom there are no known followers of Jesus.
God, we pray that you bless the church in Columbia, to love the Embera-Baudoeople and reach them with the gospel. And God we pray the 1 Corinthians 13:4–8 kind of love would transform this people group. Oh God, we praise you for this beautiful, glorious description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. We pray that it would mark us as your people, as the people who have been loved like this by you, and have your Holy Spirit inside of us to love others in all these ways. May it be so. In Jesus’ name, we pray according to your Word. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
