O God, we thank you for all those
in whose words and in whose writings your truth has come to us. For the
historians, the psalmists and the prophets, who wrote the Old Testament; for
all those who in every generation have taught and explained and expounded and
preached the word of Scripture: we thank you, O God.
Grant, O God, that no false
teaching may ever have any power to deceive us or to seduce us from the truth.
Grant, O God, that we may never listen any teaching which would encourage us to
think sin less serious, vice more attractive, or virtue less important; grant,
O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would dethrone Jesus
Christ from the topmost place; grant, O God, that we may never listen to any
teaching which for its own purposes perverts the truth.
God, our Father, establish us
immovably in the truth. Give us minds which can see at once the difference
between the true and the false; make us able to test everything, and to hold
fast to that which is good; give us such a love of truth, that no false thing
may ever be able to lure us from it. So grant that all our lives we may know,
and love, and live the truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.[i]
[i]
William Barclay, Prayers for the
Christian Year (New York: Harper, 1965); quoted in Vernon Grounds, “The
Truth About Truth,” Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society, Volume 38, No. 2 (June 1995), 228-229.
