The Prayer Of One Learning To Love

"Dear Lord, help me subdue my baser parts,
That endless strive my actions control;
Forever seal impotent anger's darts;
Slay ego in solitude's hidden hold;
May greed wither away on spartan vines.
Teach my tongue never to utter complaint,
Have my ears reject tales of others' crimes.
Give no place to hate, or voice to cruel spite,
Nor life to evil's sway by hell's creatures;
Keep my mind from dwelling on lusts of night;
Banish from my life all demon teachers.
Dear Lord, please come back to us very soon;
I will sing only Yours, no other tune.

Prayer is talking to God, or thinking, giving Him praise and making requests. He receives all our words, and it pleases Him, especially when we ask for help in improving ourselves. The most important gift we can make to Him is to love others, and you can see in the poem above a few of the ways we can love others. Pride, ego, angry words, greed, gossip, revenge, lust, and many other such negatives from us to others is the opposite of love. These are natural reactions of our human natures; it takes a lot of determination to rid ourselves of these evils. Becoming a believer in Jesus requires us to hate these things and to work hard to eliminate them.

Perhaps the most difficult of all is to show love for those who despise us as Jesus taught in His Sermon on the Mount. No one in the world had ever taught such things, or heard them, especially the Jews, who had been taught from childhood the creed of an 'eye for an eye'. They were astonished when Jesus said,

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery'. But I tell you that any one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:27-28)

It is easy to see why most people find it difficult to follow Jesus' commands. This is one of them. By the way, if you read the Qur'an, the 'bible' of Islam, you will easily see that Jehovah God and the god called Allah, are not the same being. God is a God of love, as the Bible testifies; but the Qur'an shows that Islam is based on fear.