A Prayer to Remain

Father, you are the gardener, and your Son is the true vine, and by your grace we are branches. We confess that we often try to bear fruit on our own, straining after results and growing tired and thin. Apart from him we can do nothing. Teach us that lesson again today, gently if you will, but teach it.

Help us to remain. Keep us close to Jesus through his word, through prayer, and through his people. When we drift, draw us back before we dry out.

We ask for courage to accept your pruning. Some of us are being cut back in this season, and it hurts, and we do not always see what you are doing. Remind us that pruning is for fruit and that the knife is in loving hands. Do not let us mistake your care for rejection.

Let your joy be in us and let our joy be complete, not in spite of obedience but through it. Make us people who love one another as Jesus loved us, and who lay down our lives in the small daily ways that friendship asks. We pray in the name of the one who chose us and appointed us to bear fruit that lasts. Amen.