An Hour of Prayer # 6

Dear Church Family

 

   I continue to write to let you know you are all in my prayers several times a day.

 

   An Hour of Prayer number 6, half way through the list, today is Petitions, you get to ask for things you need. Jesus taught in the sermon on the mount, Ask, Seek, Knock, and give us this day our daily bread. We have permission to pray for those things, as a part of others.

 

   On that note, I am asking you to pray about our petition to you for your financial support, and being generous. Especially in this difficult time, we really need everyone to increase their giving. We can continue to make a difference and change people’s lives for the better. There is more to come about this really soon. Watch your mail boxes.

 

   It looks like this pandemic is going to be with us at least through the rest of the calendar year, so I want to offer small group support to as many as would be interested. For August, we will do an old fashioned John Wesley small band/class idea. More details to come,

 

   When September rolls around I would like you to sign up for a small group study, daytime or night time versions, on Think Like Jesus, ways to grow in your faith and understanding for living in a world where we really need to know for ourselves what our faith is all about. It’s the first of a three part series going for about 8 weeks each of Think Like Jesus, Be Like Jesus, Act Like Jesus. This study will match the sermon series in the fall.

 

   We would love to share your talents with our church family. If any of you have recordings of something that happened at our church, it would be great if you send them to me, so I can use them in our zoom worship experiences. Let me know if you have something you would like to share. We can certainly add them to our You Tube Channel.

 

   I’m afraid that we are not going to get back to the way things were in February, so we have to learn new ways of being a church family. It is more difficult than we first imagined, and so we are trying to be a church, much like the first century, that met in small groups, since there weren’t any church buildings until nearly 300 years into Christianity, when Emperor Constantine declared that Christianity would be the official faith of the Roman Empire and designated buildings for that purpose. Partly to make sure that all the citizens where actually going to worship. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.

 

   I used to joke that being the pastor of a church was like playing chess on three different levels at a time. I saw that once on Star Trek, but now I’m convinced it’s even harder than that because we can’t do church the way we had gotten into the habit of doing. We are letting the Holy Spirit, show us a whole new way of thinking. We are still in the business of making disciples. So your thoughts on how can I help you be a better follower of Christ is what I’m trying to figure out, and then help you with that.

 

Blessings and Peace,                        Pastor Jeff    

An Hour of Prayer # 5

Dear Church Family

   Here is the fifth week of our learning to deepen our prayer lives during this pandemic. It seems our need for prayer is increasing with the rising number of Covid-19 cases. Three days in a row now, over 1,000 people have died from it across the country. Please pray for the families of those who have died, for the first responders who are again being overwhelmed with responsibilities and pray for the development of a vaccine, soon. See we have a hard time waiting because we know we want the cure now.

   Those comments can help us to think about what to pray for. By watching what is going around us we will see what needs to be prayed for. Watching will also give us a glimpse of what God is doing to help sustain us in this time.

   Watching is a time of spiritual observation (perception), to be on the look out, to be spiritually aware of matters to pray for. Ask God for insight, discernment, wisdom, to know on what to focus, and what your priorities should be. Ask the Lord what is on God’s heart and on God’s agenda. An opportunity to do what Jesus said “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and everything else you need will be provided.”  Matt. 6:33.

   Watching is also a way of learning so that we can grow in our spiritual journey with God. Jesus often asked the followers to come and see what he was doing. To come and see where he was staying, so they could learn from him by being present. I’m watching several webinars to help improve my skills at leading our church in this very different time than any of us had anticipated. Watching how to help us raise the money we need so that we don’t close down our ministries. Watching how to do zoom meetings, so that they can go better. I’m very close to learning how to do a Bible Class all online in zoom and will be doing those shortly.

   Watching is also how we will discover that God is creating again, new things that will bless us as we go along. On Sunday I’m sharing some ideas about how we can watch what God is doing in other places, that will benefit our life together as God’s family. I’m inviting you to watch our zoom and to invite as many people as you can, to watch along with you. When the Zoom information goes out on flash, you are encouraged to mention this to your friends and neighbors, those in your apartment complex, your family, your neighbors, your co-workers, your children’s friends etc. so they can join you in seeing what God is doing to help us in this time of stress and discouragement.

   Pay attention to how God is working around you, so you too can say, see what new things God is doing, it is marvelous in our eyes. God’s blessings be upon all of you, while we are absent, one from the other.

Pastor Jeff

An Hour of Prayer 4

Dear Church Family

   As we gather tonight for prayer at 7 pm for AWE, let me offer a couple of ways to deepen your prayer life and find strength to deal with the challenges and uncertainties we find ourselves in.

   Week Four in the spending an hour with God covers Praying Scripture. It’s realizing that the Bible is full of prayers of God’s people, like us, who find ourselves in a variety of difficult circumstances. By becoming more familiar with the Bible, especially the book of Psalms, we will find a lot of prayer lessons and examples on how to pray.

   Praying Scripture is to feed you spiritually and to pray according to God’s agenda and revelation. The Word is our prayer manual, so pray God’s promises to Him, creating faith in your heart. Ask God what promises you can claim and how you can apply His Word in your own life and prayer time.

   Jesus offered us the power of answered prayers if we followed the will of God for those requests, knowing ahead of time, that God loves to move God’s program and love into the world, God will gladly answer prayers that do the same. You might want to try reading 5 Psalms a day and pray the prayers you find there for yourself. Put your situations and challenges and setbacks into the prayers of the Psalms, and you will see what I mean.

   James, the brother of Jesus, who became a part of the disciples after the resurrection said we don’t have answers to prayer, because we don’t ask.(James 4:2b) So we need to be willing to ask, following the promises of answers when we follow the plans God has for us.

   I’m ask God to influence all of us for greater generosity. We all need to pray that NBUMC will have the financial resources, especially in this pandemic time, to be able to keep doing the things that are important to us. So if you would begin, maybe pause at 10:10 am or pm, and ask God to help provide financial resources for our church that would be awesome. You can be an answer to all our prayers with an increase in your giving. Even a $5 or $10 dollar a week increase will make a huge difference when we are just under our target of keeping everything and everyone in place for ministry.

   May God bless your prayer time and your growing awareness of God’s work in the Scriptures and in the community, the family of God right here. Be sure to tell your friends, and send them the email that comes each week, for joining us on Zoom.

Prayer for Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen. (From Richard Rohr, email devotions)

   May God’s peace be with you all.

Pastor Jeff

An Hour of Prayer 3

 Dear Church Family

   We are beyond the fourth of July now, and heading into the slow(?) part of summer. We have the time to continue our prayer for an hour journey with today’s third segment. As I have said in the past, we can use all twelve to pray for an hour or develop each 5 minute segment and let it guide us in developing a stronger prayer life. We need more prayer now more than ever. It will be helpful to have more resources and tools for that struggle in this time of waiting and wondering in the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases around us.

   Week Three is about Confession. Confession of sin and humiliation is an act of admitting your sinfulness to God and of cleansing you, as the Temple of God, allowing you entrance into God’s presence. This is a time of introspection and allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal all unconfessed sins. Don’t ask God to change your circumstances, but to change you and forgive you. Sin can be doing something wrong, or simply missing the target that God had hoped for you.

   Confession allows you time to talk to God, knowing that God already knows everything about you. You don’t have to worry about hiding anything, God already knows all about it. Confession allows us to deal with the challenges we face and to ask God to make better, what has gone wrong, or we have done poorly, or have misunderstood about God’s intention.

   Confession is all about getting a second chance to get this right this time. Confession helps download or remove the obstacles, the clutter in the way, so we can have a clear and clean workspace. It can be the beginning of a great relationship to God and through God to others. Sometimes we confess to God, sometimes we should confess to one another so that we can get that fresh start. There may be something in the way, that once taken away and dealt with, can begin a great new relationship. This could be in families, neighbors, workspaces, fellowship groups etc. wherever some trouble has been brewing.

   The result of the confession is of course feeling and knowing deeply that you are forgiven and loved more than you thought possible. Forgiveness is our theme this Sunday and in the midst of struggles in our culture over the way we have treated people who are different than we, confession and pardon might be just the power to renew us all, as a community and as a country.

   Join us on Wednesday nights for our AWE service at 7 pm. It is a time for prayer and reflection for equipping us for life in this world we live in. Next week’s five minute prayer thoughts are on Praying Scripture. Where do we find help for our prayer life?

Blessings

Pastor Jeff

An Hour of Prayer 2

Dear Church Family

   Today continues an attempt at a weekly letter to our church family as we endure the pandemic we know as Covid-19. I hope that you can find these components of growing your prayer life helpful to your own journey of faith. We need a deeper connection to God, the first great commandment of Jesus, to help us navigate both the suspension of normal life because of the pandemic, and the attempts to find a way forward with the social challenges related to racism and our need to find ways to connect to our neighbors, the second great commandment of Jesus.

   On Wednesday June 24, at our AWE service, I offered how to pray for an hour, by dividing up the hour into 12 5 minute segments. It is based on an article I read summarizing the book The Hour That Changes the World by Dick Eastman Blessings on the ways you grow in prayer. You could even just emphasize one element for a few days.

2. Waiting on the Lord

Waiting on the Lord is an act of surrender to, and of love and admiration for God, and is often wordless worship. During your silence before God, tune into God Himself and direct your whole being to Him and commit yourself to Him anew. During this time, do not express your thoughts in words, simply concentrate on God the Father, His Son Jesus your Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit.

   We have a really hard time with waiting. Just look at how we are reacting to the Cabin Fever experience around this pandemic. We are dying to get out of the house, and in some cases, literally. Eight states have now set new records for daily cases of Covid-19. God can help us with that, but it’s called waiting. One of my favorite passages of Scripture, because I find it so helpful, is from Isaiah 40:29-31 “He give power to the faint, and strength to the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young shall fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” (NRSV)

   Waiting is like watching the toaster after you have pushed the bread down, something good will pop back up, but you stare and hope that it won’t take as long as it normally does. We should recognize that waiting for the Lord is so that something good will pop up, but it’s in God’s timing not ours. One of the things we can do is count to ten, by naming ten things you are thankful for from God’s gifts to you. Look around, and maybe come up with something you have not thanked God for in a while. Look back a year or two and see if you’ve forgotten an answered prayer along the way.

   Remember it’s the Lord we are waiting on. The Creator of the Universe, the one who loves us so much that all is forgiven, and eternal life is promised for those who rely on the Lord. Just think how the disciples felt both over the weekend after Jesus was crucified, and the ten days between the Ascension of Jesus back into heaven the coming of the Holy Spirit.

   Join us for AWE tonight at 7 pm. Remember we will celebrate a Virtual Holy Communion on Sunday. Be prepared with your own version of the elements, bread and juice/wine.

   Blessed day to every one.

Pastor Jeff