A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

Another Prayer for the Family in the Morning.

O Lord our God, who art in thine own nature glorious and full of majesty, infinite in goodness, wisdom, power, bounty, truth, and all perfection, most just in all thy ways, and holy in all thy works, and our most gracious Father in Jesus Christ, we thine unworthy servants, finding and feeling our selves loaded with the unsupportable weight of our manifold and grievous sins, do come unto thee for ease, and being sick in sin, even unto the death, do flee unto thee the alone Physician of our souls, that we may be eased and cured, and do here lay open before thee our miserable estate and condition, that thou mayest magnify thy mercies in our recovery. We confess our hereditary diseases, and that original leprosy of our bodies and souls, whereby they were infected and corrupted, even in our first conception, and so disabled unto thy service, that we cannot of our selves think a good thought, nor so much as entertain into our hearts a desire to come out of the miserable thraldom of sin and Satan. Our wisdom is enmity against thee, and we are not capable of that knowledge which thy Spirit revealeth. All the imaginations of the thoughts of our hearts are only evil, and that continually; our consciences are loaded with dead works; our wills crooked and rebellious, still resisting all good motions of thy Spirit; our hearts hardened through the deceitfulness of sin; our affections, desires and passions so disordered and poisoned with natural corruption, that they are become filthy and loathsome sinks of sin; and all the members of our bodies, the ready instruments of our defiled souls for the acting of all abominable wickedness. So that being, through his natural corruption, a sinful generation and viperous brood, we have justly deserved, that thou shouldest reject and pursue us with thy wrath, though we were free from all other sins, saving those alone whereof we were guilty as soon as we were borne. And yet (alas) we have not stayed here, but have added unto this our original sin, innumerable numbers of actual transgressions, by breaking thy whole Law, and every Commandment thereof, in thought, word and deed, both in the omission of all duties therein required, and in the commission of the vices and sins therein forbidden;