Please find below the notes from the Elder's Prayer this past Sunday.

Our father, our King, 

We look to you as we do each Lord’s Day with hearts full of joyful worship, celebrating your patient faithfulness toward us. 

We thank you for your work among us. We thank you for the kindness you have shown us through your Son. 

We thank you for the work of our partnership in the gospel as a church. We pray that you would, by your grace enable us to press on in the work of the gospel.  

There are unforeseen obstacles ahead. There will be challenges to our fellowship, challenges to our unity, challenges to our faith, challenges to our love.  

We need your grace, your kind, caring, strong, wise hand to guide us, to uphold us. 

We thank you that you promise to do just that. The work that you have begun among us you will perfect it.  

We do not have hope in ourselves or because of ourselves.  

We have hope because of you. We have hope because of the blood bought, resurrection secured promises of your Word that through the life, death, and resurrection of your Son, you will be faithful to carry us through to the end together.  

We have your grace: although we deserve your wrath, through the merit, the work of your Son, we have your favor, full, unmeasured, boundless, and free. We pray that you will continue to sustain us by your grace.  

We pray that our love for you, our love for one another, our love for the lost would abound and grow exponentially. We pray that we would love not according to the world’s standard, but yours. We pray that we would love not according to our feelings and whims, but according to and enabled by the truth of your sufficient Word. 

We pray that we would love what you love and deem as worthy and valuable what you deem as worthy and valuable. We pray that you would raise our affections for you, for the truth, so that we would be inclined toward what is truly supreme. 

We pray we would see as excellent what is truly excellent. You are better. Your will is better than our own.  

Might it be true of us that for us to live is Christ and to die is gain.  

Might we persevere and produce righteousness through the work of your Son in us and through us, to your glory.   

Amen.