our Father in the heavenly realms
Therefore, you should pray like this: “Our Father in the heavenly realms…” (Jesus speaking, from Matthew 6:9a)
Among the many elements of our Sunday morning liturgy when we gather as a church family at Grace Church, we often have multiple instances and kinds of prayer. We may pray together as a congregation out loud, we may have moments of silence for people to pray, or we may have one of our pastor/elders lead in a pastoral prayer.
It was this last type — a pastoral prayer — that I lead us in yesterday. As you’ll see below, I took my lead in structuring the prayer from the well known prayer outline, A.C.T.S. —
Adoration
Confession
Thanksgiving
Supplication
I’m posting it below in its entirety as a way to model what leading a church, family, community group, or small gathering of friends may look like, and in the hopes of being an encouragement to you.
Grace be upon you.
Father,
There is no one like you—you are the one who brings death and gives life, you are the one who wounds and heals, you are the one who caused breath to enter us so that we might live, and you are the fountain of living water who fills us with all we need. Father, we praise you. Father, we adore you.
And Father, we confess that we have dug cisterns for ourselves at times that are cracked and cannot hold water, instead of turning to and adoring you. We come on our knees this morning, and we confess our sins, knowing that you are faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We confess our sins, coming into the light, in the confidence that the blood of Jesus will cleanse us from all our sins. We confess our sins, in the great hope that the great Advocate, Jesus, Messiah, the righteous one, will remove your righteous wrath from us through his atoning sacrifice for us. We confess.
Father, our hearts our filled with gratitude, and so we come before you with thanksgiving this morning. Father, we don’t know why or how you decided that the best way to water the earth was to suspend water in the sky with an infinite variety of shapes, most of them weighing over 1.1 million pounds, and the big ones coming in at 1 billion pounds, and yet looking like weightless cotton balls that we call curiously call clouds. And Father, we thank you for the deep blue sky in which you have placed them, and we thank you for mountain ranges that shove themselves over 14,000 feet into the air and yet don’t come close to touching either of them. Father, we thank you for streams and rivers and brooks that run through them, creating a soundtrack that calms the soul. For these and a trillion other things you are upholding by the word of your power this morning, including us, we express our thanksgiving.
And so, finally, Father, with our hearts rightly ordered, we bring just a few supplications before you. We ask for your protection over our missionaries, Scottie and Heidi, re-entering their home country at the same time another missionary was brutally murdered. Guard them, keep them, sustain them as they courageously choose to stay, for the sake of Jesus and the nations. We ask for your healing for our faithful brother Ron who is facing some challenging medical circumstances right now, and so he needs your direct intervention and healing. You are able, you can do this. We bring before you a young 17 year old girl who was in a very serious car accident recently, and continues to struggle with pain, and needs your healing—bring her peace through your presence, and wholeness in her body. Father, we’ve just heard the amazing news over the past few months or so of four (!) young couples whom you have blessed with pregnancies, the gift of life—hallelujah! You are doing the miraculous, knitting together humans in the womb.
Oh Father, how easy all these requests are for a God like you.
Yes, and very amen, in Jesus’s name.
