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
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