Father,
Thank you for giving us your written Word so that we can know you, your character and your high-level purposes. Thank you that your Word and your Spirit equip us with the knowledge, conviction and hope needed to move forward and navigate our broken selves and the broken world around us. Thank you for the power and goodness in your gospel.
Please help us and our communities as we struggle to make difficult and awkward decisions about how and when to be physically present with people in this time of pandemic. Please give us grit, humility of perspective, and endurance. Please help us, at Communion Church, to stay connected with each other through available means. Please help people and churches with whom we are connected in both faith and purpose. Please sustain the people of Roots Church in Stanwood. Please provide for the physical, spiritual and emotional needs of Chad and Jamie Dimon, Kelly and Trisha Huckaby, Adam and Janelle Lamont, Matt and Carolyn Monson, and others serving in sensitive areas around the globe. Please continue giving your people from every nation, tribe, people and language, what they need to faithfully live out of love for you and love for their neighbor. Please continue to bring more people to yourself.
Father, your Word tells us that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and that the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. So we, in our perishable flesh-and-blood state, would have no reason to hope for the imperishable inheritance of your kingdom, were it not for the reality of your work in the gospel. In the life and death of Jesus, you did what it took to make a way for the perishable to inherit the imperishable.
We see in your Word a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. When your perishable, mortal people put on immortality, and inherit the imperishable, the saying will come to pass:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Father, please enable us to be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that our labor is not in vain.
Thank you that we can publicly pray aloud together, saying:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil:
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever.
Amen.