A prayer for a healthy Church

A prayer for a healthy Church

Our God and father, we thank you that our security is found in our being in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that we are secure in your plans, purposes, character and grace. We are not safe because we live in the right part of the world but only insofar as we are found in you. And yet, our Father, you call us to be a dynamic people, not merely resting in our security but changing and actually going somewhere. So we thank you for all the evidence of faith, love and hope amongst us in our labour, hard work and endurance but we long that this fruit would continue to be seen amongst us in increasing measure.

Our father we thank you for the gospel and we pray that we would be a Church that knows its health depends on this: that you have loved and chosen us. Father help us to continue to be a gospel-believing Church where we have turned, and daily turn, to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead – Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath.

And father as we hold on to the gospel may we also be a gospel-bearing Church – where the Lord’s message sounds out from us into our community and beyond. We pray that our lives and our words would bear witness to the gospel.

We thank you God for your Word. May we receive it and love it. Would you continue to enable us to hear it and may we allow your word to be at work amongst us even as the world is at work against us. May it be at work so that we are not unsettled by trials. May we not merely survive in a hostile environment but may we thrive, growing in faith, love and hope.

May our lives be pleasing to you as we seek to allow our faith in the gospel to be more consistently worked out in every area of our lives – particularly, but not exclusively, in the area of sexual purity would you help us to stand against the tide of our culture. Would our lives be pleasing to you as we seek to love each other in increasing measure to the point of overflow. Would we see ourselves as givers as well as getters, as those who contribute to the life and mission of the Church without hindrance.

And may our lives be distinctively as our hope in the personal and public return of Jesus shapes our attitudes towards death and our motivations in this life. May we be characterised by being people who are ready and eagerly waiting your return and who encourage each other to do so.

And, our father, as we wait, would you guard our relationships within the church. May we live at peace with one another. As we relate as leaders to members may we be characterised by love and respect, and between members may our relationships be oiled with patience. Above all would we be joyful, prayerful and thankful, seeking to let your words speak to us and thoroughly shape us as we look forward to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Finally may we rest in your faithfulness, that you who have called us will do it.

Amen.