Beloved friends, fellow sojourners … if you are sick with sin, then please run to the great physician and confess to Him your great need.  We will never be a community without sin, but let’s live with the freedom of people who have no need for secrets.

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How long?

How long will this brutality last? How long until the land where you have shown your covenant faithfulness to a people over millenia will get to experience your peace, your presence, your mercy?

What if were to remember and to believe that God exists, and what if we allowed that reality to interrupt our view of absolutely everything else?

I want God to do something significant in our midst.

I want Him to interrupt our programming plans. I want Him to pour His Spirit out into our people leading to repentance, salvations, healings, life-change, humility, generosity, mercy and forgiveness the likes of which we have never seen. I really want God to stir up a reviving Spirit in our midst. We, of course, have no control over any sort of true work of God, but I have been thinking about what sorts of hearts are ripe for this sort of work.

If God began to stir in that sort of way in our midst, would we be ready? Would we be receptive? Would we stick around long enough to see it for what it really is?

These are my prayers for us as a church in the years ahead, however many of them the Lord allows. I pray that you would be filled with the knowledge of His will. I pray that you would walk in grace in a manner worthy of the Lord, pleasing Him and bearing fruit in good works! I pray that you would be strengthened with all power from God, and that His power would sustain you for endurance and patience and supernatural joy which overflows in hearts full of thanksgiving. I pray that you would remember, and believe, and be certain that He has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints, and I pray that this would liberate and motivate you to live for Him!

Pray for the church in Ukraine. May the Lord give them supernatural bravery and protection. Pray for the church in Russia. May the Lord use them as peacemakers able to speak boldly and persistently to those in power. Pray for world leaders who are able to influence future outcomes. May the Lord give them wisdom, humility, boldness where needed, and a heart for the good of the people they serve.

You see, prayer is a wonderful declaration of weakness, of need, of humility. By its very nature, prayer declares that we are not God, and that we need someone stronger and wiser than us to help. It also declares, in that moment, that the God of the Heavens is that one that we need, and we anticipate that we will be met by Him with mercy, gentleness and love.