Our Father in heaven, we confess that as children of Adam we have sinned, both in him our covenant head and by our own immediate actions. You created us to be Your covenant representatives, to subdue and rule the earth for Your glory and our neighbors’ benefit by transforming wilderness into garden that we are then to cultivate and guard. But we chose to seek our own glory instead, and soon every imagination of our hearts was only evil continually, and so in Your justice You judged us and the whole earth by a flood, and all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. You blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens.

Yet by Your grace You saved Noah and those who were with him in the ark, and again by Your grace You said in Your heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Ever since then You have kept that promise, for Your name’s sake, so that every day You make Your sun to shine and Your rain to fall on the just and the unjust. You sustain all the cycles on which our life depends. Though we are sinful, and often instead of ruling the earth to Your glory we abuse it to our own selfish ends, nonetheless You still have gifted people through the ages to enhance its fruitfulness, its beauty, and its safety—people like Your servant Norman Borlaug, whose painstaking breeding of different seeds of wheat and maize, of potatoes and rice, and of many other foods, multiplied their yields two, four, six times and more, enabling hard-working farmers around the world to feed not only themselves and their own families but also many others, so that fewer and fewer men, women, and children around the world suffer the hunger that plagued their ancestors for thousands of years.

We thank You for that common grace, heavenly Father, and we ask You to enlarge it, to enable growing numbers of people to exercise a godly dominion that multiplies their productivity, lifting many millions more people out of poverty, while protecting the beauty of Your earth.

But Father, even more we pray for the salvation of souls.

You have warned us that though You have sustained seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, You will not restrain Your just wrath forever. If You did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if You did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes You condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly;  and if You rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then You know how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment at Christ’s return in judgment.

You warned us that scoffers would come in the last days, saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water, by Your word,  and by means of these You flooded the world that then existed, and it perished. By Your same all-powerful word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

So, Father, we beg You to awaken our unbelieving neighbors to the truth that that with You one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. You are not slow to fulfill Your promise as some count slowness, but are patient toward Your elect, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But, Father, the Day of the Lord will come, like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought we, Your children, to be? Surely not, as some mistakenly think, people who care nothing for Your world because judgment is coming. Rather, we should live lives of holiness and godliness, including by our use of the earth and everything in it for Your glory and the good of our neighbors, even while we wait and even yearn for the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to Your promise we are waiting now for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

So, Father, for the sake of Jesus the Last Adam, our new covenant Head, and by the power of Your Holy Spirit, since we are waiting for these, make us diligent to be found by You without spot or blemish, and at peace, counting Your patience as salvation. Make us faithful to proclaim to our lost and dying neighbors that forgiveness and reconciliation with You are available to all who will repent of their sins and trust in Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for our sins according to the Scriptures, who was buried, who rose again from the dead on the third day according to the Scriptures, so that our faith is not in vain. Make us steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in Christ our labor is not in vain.

Through Christ, Father, You have reconciled us to Yourself, not counting our trespasses against us but giving us the ministry of reconciliation, making us ambassadors for Christ, who knew no sin but became sin for us that by Him we might be made Your righteousness, and who appeals to sinners through us to be reconciled to You. Give us the same passion that Christ’s apostles had to go to the lost and say, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[Scripture passages on which this prayer is based include Genesis 1–3, 6–8; 2 Peter 2–3; 2 Corinthians 5; and 1 Corinthians 15.]