Elder's Prayer

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

We thank you for bringing each and every soul to this place, Father, and we praise you for each mercy and grace and fulfilled promise to give us our daily bread that has made our being here possible. 

We pray, trusting in the continuance of your faithfulness, and entreating your exceeding kindness. Through the precious intercession of Christ, hear our prayers, and drive out the enemy from our thoughts. 

Increase our faith, Father. We are children of doubt, redeemed to hold fast to you, but we are weak, supremely selfish, and self-dependent. Through this service today—the praying, the singing, the teaching and preaching, the offering up of our tithes and offerings, the discipleship and fellowship—expose our weakness, draw us to repent of our besetting skepticism, and chase away the shadows of our insistence on our own vision and demands. 

We petition you for our fellow believers throughout the world who face the darkness of persecution and the oppressive wasteland of counterfeit truth.  

We entreat for our brothers and sisters in China, Myanmar, North Korea, and Pakistan, in Somalia, Mali, and Sudan, in Iran, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, in Venezuela, and so many other locations, who have a choice between worshipping you and facing prosecution, imprisonment, and death or denying you. Encourage them, give them your joy and peace in their affliction, preserve them when they waver, comfort them and their families in their hardships, bring them to exult in Christ and to exalt Christ in the audience of their oppressors, and leave their accusers speechless. 
 
We pray for our brothers and sisters in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, in Kenya and South Africa, in India, South Korea, and Australia, and in our own country, who are feebly holding to Christ amidst the perverse teaching of the Prosperity Gospel. Bring them to see the barrenness of pursuit of material things, drive them to read extensively and think deeply on your Word, raise in their hearts and consciences a thirst for your holy worship, and draw them to eagerly pursue the spiritual riches of repentance, dependence on your wisdom, and submission to your will. Give them loud voices to testify of the deep spiritual riches in the knowledge and wisdom of God, and may those who hold to this false Gospel be left without answer and argument in the exaltation of your truth. 

“Guide our understanding, give us kingdom thoughts, and lead us to your spiritual joy—through Jesus Christ your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever,   

Amen."