Prayerful The Bible is Not a Sex Manual

Almighty God, You who parted the waters and broke every chain,

I come to You this morning the way my grandmothers came — not with a rulebook in hand, but with a hunger in my soul. For too long, some have shrunk Your living Word down to a list of bedroom regulations, as though the God who thundered from Sinai and wept over Jerusalem had nothing grander on His mind. But Amos saw different. Amos stood in the marketplace where the poor were sold for a pair of sandals and cried out, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

That stream, Lord — it doesn't trickle through our private lives alone. It floods the courtroom. It rises in the schoolhouse. It rushes through hospital wards where Black mothers still die at three times the rate of their neighbors. Your Word is not a manual for policing bodies; it is a manifesto for liberating them.

So teach me to read Scripture the way the enslaved read it — searching not for who to condemn, but for where You are setting captives free. Let me hold Your Book the way Fannie Lou Hamer held it: as a weapon against every system that crushes the image of God out of Your children.

Carry me past the shallow waters of legalism into the deep river of Your justice, where mercy and truth meet, and where every soul is treated as sacred ground. In the name of Jesus, who touched the untouchable and loved the unloved — Amen.