A Prayer For You Today

Dear friends,

One Sunday morning a month, the elder board meets for breakfast, a study, and prayer. This past Sunday, we began working through a new book. The title is straightforward—Prayer by O. Hallesby.

One of the earliest lines we read was that our helplessness is the key to prayer. Our helplessness is the very essence of prayer. What a mercy. Weakness is the way!

A prayer for you today

Almighty God, maker of all marvels, any good thing we know, see, or can imagine has its source in You. Protect our hearts against the slow poison of our perpetual desire to be relevant and adored.

Rather, give us a zeal for Christ, for the truth, and others, expressed by genuine love and an unself-conscious delight in the beauty of all people.

When pride intrudes, when we exult in our seeming success, or the illusions of our own originality and significance, remind us there is nothing new under the sun, that all we have has been granted as a trust.

Then lead us instead to invest our talents as a means to serve others, from a posture of right humility--for all gifts You have distributed to Your people are given, not that we might build our own little empires, but that we might collectively build up Your church, and care well for our culture.

So let us labor to create hospitable works that serve well all who will encounter them. Bless us with eyes to see our limitations of time, skill, opportunity, notoriety, and resources-as a gift of grace to be enjoyed, and paths to run along that will yield true creative freedom, teaching us that our weaknesses might render us a better conduit for Your strength, making of us a co-laborer more compassionate with the weakness and needs of others.

Finally, Father let us faithfully and purposely work grace and beauty into the lives of the people around us in the places You have assigned to us in Christ's name. Amen.

God bless you and help you in all things great and small.

Pastor Joe