Pastoral Prayer

God, we come before you tonight tired, exhausted, and spent. This year, and quite frankly, this month have been on a strain on us personally, locally, nationally, and globally. Division, quarantines, hateful rhetoric, civil unrest, changes plans, deaths, job loss, and so much more have pierced us from every side. Our mental health, physical health, and attention spans have all been decimated. If anything, this year has shown us that we are not sufficient on our own. 2020 has shown us that we are not in control. It’s shown us our weaknesses and our idols. It’s shown us that our world is broken and in need of healing. With all of our options spent, all of our worldly saviors and idols still in their proverbial graves, we come before you seeking one thing and one thing only:…..Jesus.

It’s Him that we seek tonight. It’s His Gospel we need. It’s His glory we want. It’s His beauty we long to gaze upon It’s His mercy we want to wash over us. It’s His power we need to sustain us. And it’s His joy that want to fill our hearts through His Spirit.

Father your Son is incredible.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And we, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present us holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed we continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that we heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven.

We want to praise Jesus’ name tonight. In glory, in perfect satisfaction and joy, we will praise His name for all of eternity future with all of the saints. Give us a foretaste of heaven tonight as we seek to praise Jesus’ name.

As we prepare to worship, our pray is the same as the Apostle Paul’s in His letter to the Ephesians.

“For this reason we bow our knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant we to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith—that we, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”