Heavenly Father, may You be honoured in all we say and pray. May You be glorified in all we do, may the holiness of Your name be magnified, may the favour and grace You lavish on us be used rightly by us and those who are blessed through us.

Lord, I know that what I’ve already said is impossible; it cannot come to pass unless Your Son, Jesus of Nazareth, empowers these words so they are made effective by His love and commitment to us. We touch, by faith, the fringe of His prayer shawl, the hem of His garment, the tzitzit of His tallit, and we ask Him to speak on our behalf to You as our mediator.

We confess to wasting time, wasting money, wasting resources, wasting effort. We confess that sometimes we’ve done this deliberately and so have brought ourselves into complicity with the spirit of wasting. That unholy alliance has caused us to self-sabotage during the times we didn’t want to waste those things you’ve given us to steward. We wanted to be productive, creative, diligent and responsible but we’d already been lured by the spirit of wasting into irresponsibility, laziness and negligence. And sometimes we flip-flop between the two—we overwork and then we underwork. And either way we have no peace. Nor do we have the true rest You have designed us to enjoy and find an overflow of Your blessings within it.

And so, Father, we ask Your forgiveness for our failings, and for our agreements, alliances, covenants and acts of complicity with the spirit of wasting. We repent of, and we also renounce—we say a forever ‘no’—to these agreements, alliances, covenants and acts of complicity with the spirit of wasting and we ask You to annul them. Of our own strength and willpower, we’re not going to get far in changing so, once again, we ask Jesus to empower these words and to nail to His cross any covenantal pacts and partnerships with the spirit of wasting, there cancelling them through His atoning blood.

We ask You to forbid any retaliation against us for the dissolution of this covenant and we ask You to rebuke the spirit of wasting and her allies for any attempts to reinstate wasting in our lives.

Lord, in those relationships where I have the rightful authority to speak on behalf of my family, I ask that this spirit and her allies are rebuked for not taking ‘no’ as ‘no’ when we have tried to cut ties with wasting.

Lord, I also ask that Jesus as the Redeemer of Wasted Time and as the Restorer of Appointed Time be given charge of the blessings of time in my life, and renew them and refresh them as He sees most fitting.

And I ask this in His name, and through His mighty mediation on my and our behalf, and through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.