God is calling us to prayer. Last week, the pastoral support team and official board prayed with me concerning our church, and I know their prayers continued into Sunday. (Praise God for prayerful church leaders!) Then yesterday, as the sermon closed, the Lord led us to stop everything and pray together.
2 John 1:9 says, “Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God.” And Matthew 7:21-23 says:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day (the day when Jesus will return in judgment) many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
I’ve known these passages for years, but I’ve never felt the fearsome reality of them as strongly as I do right now. We must “take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:12-13).
Many of you have been praying for me, and I appreciate it. Please do pray for me, but more importantly, please pray with me. Let’s pray like Paul, in Colossians 1:9-10:
Asking that [we] may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord,
fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.
I invite you to a special prayer meeting this Thursday at 7:00 p.m. at the church. We will pray for our lost loved ones and neighbors, our church, the Church, and the nations. “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him,” (1 John 5:14-15).
If you cannot join us Thursday, we will also gather for prayer Sunday morning at 9:00 a.m., as we do every week – but this week focusing especially on the things mentioned above.
In Christ.
