What does your plan for your daily devotion times look like? One of the elements in my daily devotions that I’ve been including this year after my Bible reading time is reading Puritan prayers from a book called “The Valley of Vision.” I was given this book by a dear friend, and have found it both convicting and inspiring.

The Puritan movement was focused in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the influence has lasted up through modern times. Their devotion to the Lord, depth of spiritual thought, passion for piety and mortification of sin are elements deeply needed and often neglected in the modern evangelical movement. Prayer and meditation were essential components that led to the strength of the Puritan movement. As I’ve been working through the devotionals (one extended prayer each morning), I’ve been struck with their content, which ties with the title of the book. Nearly all the prayers are laden with two key themes: a central vision and elevation of God and an utter loathing of self, particularly the sin which is so common to man. The writers of these prayers pull no punches as they blast their own dastardly inclinations to willfully rebel against the Almighty. Praise God for the glorious Gospel, for through that message alone do we have any hope of life.

As I ponder these prayers each day, I’m struck with how easy it is for me to rationalize or minimize my sin, or to move quickly past it to the forgiveness there is in Christ. The writers of these prayers spent long hours in “the Valley,” and in that place God granted them “the Vision” of who they are, who God is, and how we relate. Sometimes it is only in the “valley,” when we are overcome with our own unworthiness and can only look up to Christ, that we have a proper vision and perspective of what is true, right and worthwhile. In that moment we see clearly our weakness and His strength, our poverty and His riches, our sin and His righteousness, our ugliness and His beauty, our failure and His victory, our need and His sufficiency.

One prayer begins, “O Lord, Thou knowest my great unfitness for service, my present deadness,  my inability to do anything for thy glory, my distressing coldness of heart. I am weak, ignorant, unprofitable, and loathe and abhor myself.” Not a very popular message in today’s society that preaches “self-esteem” and “self-help.” (p.180) In part of today’s prayer I read, “Give me a holy avarice to redeem the time, to awake at every call to charity and piety, so that I may feed the hungry, clothe the naked, instruct the ignorant, reclaim the vicious, forgive the offender, diffuse the gospel, show neighbourly love to all. Let me live a life of self-distrust, dependence on thyself, mortification, crucifixion, prayer.” (p.191) As one prayer ends, “Grant that I may always weep to the praise of mercy found, and tell to others as long as I live, that thou are a sin-pardoning God, taking up the blasphemer and the ungodly, and washing them from their deepest stain.” (p.113)