Hebrews 10:24-25 (MSG) So let’s do it—full of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside and out. Let’s keep a firm grip on the promises that keep us going. He always keeps his word. Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out, not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on, especially as we see the big Day approaching.
Sunday night I called our church to a FAST AND PRAY today (Wednesday, September 18th) and I’m asking you to join me.
Could you skip one meal and pray? One of the things I mentioned is that the harder we work in this recent season the more it seems our unseen enemy pushes back. Even while we were praying mid breath in Church about our kids being safe on the streets, some of us had to rush out of the Church because one of our kids was in a fight down the block. In this past season have seen many brothers and sisters in a fight for their lives against addiction, anxiety, depression, and heavy burdens in their families.
While we have reached out like crazy, and seen many new folks interested in the Church community and reached out to through a very fruitful summer, which included watching some folks come to faith in Jesus and get baptized. We have also seen people take steps back away from the community and their faith.
I believe sometimes we just have to push back against the grain of the world, our flesh (our selfish desires… what we think we want to do) and the Devil. So please consider skipping lunch or dinner today, and pray this prayer along with us, in addition to however else the Holy Spirit moves you to lift us up. We need you. We need your presence, we need your prayers, and your service, every single one of us becomes an essential brick in the household of faith, hope, and love that is the Church. God has planted a beautiful thing in Gloucester City, but every one of you is so important for helping it to grow up into what it has the potential to be.
“Lord we come to you hungry not because we got it all figured out, not to show anything of our selves, but exactly because as a Church family and as individuals, we need your healing, we need your restoration, we need you to feed our souls. Help us to slow down enough, help us to quiet our souls enough, help us to be honest enough with ourselves to see that things are not right, to see that we are more messed up than we can admit.
But you are also at work in the darkness in more ways than we could ever imagine. We ask that you would pour out your Holy Spirit on us! Let us be a Church of deep commitment, where we live out the vows we made to share each other’s burdens and joys, to show up in each other lives, to renounce the evil in our lives and to continue to grow in our faith.
Holy Spirit! Break the heavy chains of addiction, break the bondage of depression, break the back of debt, and set us free!
Lord Jesus, Lord forgive us for our willfulness.. Forgive us for our trying to just muscle our way through life without You or anybody else. Forgive us for loving things that bring us cheap counterfeit happiness and rob from us lasting joy and power to be the kind of people you are calling us to be.
Father make our Sunday services refreshing, fill your Church with love and peace, and then fill it with our friends and family who need you. May we not only be known for service, known for acceptance, but also be a community known for deep life transformation, may we be known as the place where all can come, and feel at home, and at peace no matter what we’ve been through, because you are working that deep on our hearts.
Work in us we pray, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.”
One response
Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I really like to worship will you but am in distance Africa Rwanda. But no matter of distance I will do fisting with you, may God bless you