Praying Together Across Our Community

There is something lovely about praying aloud with other people.  In some church services where I have been people pray in unison things like the Lord’s Prayer or as I was growing up most church services had a Psalm that was prayed responsively – one verse to the leader and one to the congregation.  In some churches overseas people are invited to pray and they all pray personal prayers aloud together.

Today, would you join me and together let’s speak to God.

We begin by asking God to help us seek and find him because we are promised in the Bible that if we will seek God with all our hearts we will find Him.

You will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.  Jeremiah 29:12-13

Gracious and holy Father, please give us intellect to understand you, reason to discern you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, a spirit to know you, a heart to meditate upon you, ears to  hear you, eyes to see you, a tongue to proclaim you, a way of life pleasing to you, patience to wait for you, and perseverance to look for you. Help us so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.

We give thanks for people around the world whom God has created and brought together into the family of God and ask God to help us be there for one another. 

O God, who created all peoples in your image: We thank you for the diversity of races and cultures in this world. Show us your presence in those who differ from us, and enrich our lives with their fellowship, until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children.  Amen.

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in suffering tend to one another, and in homelessness, loneliness, or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, until the disciplines and testing of these days are ended, and you again give peace in our time; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

We end our prayers in these moment by offering all that we are and experience to God.

Dear Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: We hold up all our weakness to your strength, our failure to your faithfulness, our sinfulness to your perfection, our loneliness to your compassion, our little pains to your great agony on the Cross. We pray that you will cleanse us, strengthen us, guide us, so that in all ways our lives may be lived as you would have them lived, without cowardice and for you alone. Show us how to live in true humility, true contrition, and true love. Amen.