A Father's Day Prayer, for Fathers who feel like failures.

Great and Merciful Father, 

I approach Your holy throne today despite my many failures, my many sins, in the name of Jesus Christ. Thank You for the glorious truth that His pure, noble, and honourable life has been attributed to me by faith, and He has paid the unfathomable price of my sins with His very blood. Thank You. 

Father, today I want to lift up my brothers who feel the immense gap between their conduct in relation to their wife and children, and Yours. 

Those who would confess freely that no one will ever attain to the perfect and holy care that You provide, and yet feel as though their inability to overcome sins such as anger, criticism, lust, selfishness and pride have simply been clinging to them for so long, and with so little improvement, that there must be something deeply wrong with them—maybe that they are even not one of Your people. 

I am lifting up those who are up at night wondering what sort of damage they have done or are doing to their children as they grow, and even sometimes if it would not be better for their children to grow up fatherless, than to have a father such as they. 

Please meet us Father. Please meet us in those moments of crushing failure and sin. Bring Your presence, even if You must come with rebukes as you did with Job, it is better to have you speak a rebuke than remain silent in our day of doubt and distress. 

I ask for those of us who find refuge in self-pity rather than in You, that You would lift our eyes. Lift up the eyes of those who find a strange sort of refuge in rehearsing our shortcomings and telling ourselves that we might as well quit. 

Remind us that Your normal, everyday way of glorifying Your name on this earth is by finding the biggest failures and doing the greatest work through their incompetence and even their sins. 

Remind us that our one job is to keep fighting, no matter what lies we encounter. 

Remind us that no matter how often the sword of the Spirit slips out of our hands, or how often we let the belt of truth come loose, while we are alive there is always opportunity to tighten them back up, and replace the armour through repentance and faith. 

Remind us that the one who is found fighting is the one who will be given the crown, and that although we may experience some victory in this life, our experience of victory is waiting for us. 

Remind us also that for us to need to see a probable victory in our future to persevere, means that we may be worshipping victory, and not Jesus. That it is in the moments that we endure with no possible victory in view, are the moments we declare that “Jesus is worth it, even if my whole life is nothing but failure…”

Finally, remind us that our families are in Your hands. That though we dare not slacken our vigour as we fight our sin, even our sins are part of Your plan to shape and mould our families into the kind of people that You want them to be. 

Strengthen us for the next step today, and give us eager hope that You will be there for the step after that. 

I ask these things in Jesus name, Amen.