Father,

How amazing it is to think of your greatness.

Father you are MIGHTY and WISE! You created the universe, you gave it laws that we study and marvel in!

You are ALIVE! You are not the figment of our imagination, nor a man-made construct whose sole purpose is to alleviate your fears.

Father, you are GOOD! You are not a tyrant, nor are you indifferent. You care about your creation even as your creation is so much smaller than you.

And how AMAZING are your works Father! You keep the world going! You made the world good and enjoyable. You selected a people for yourself and showed faithfulness over the ages! You are not a distant God, but one who sent prophets to reveal Himself. And when the prophets were rejected, you sent your very Son!

Father, you are LOVING! We can imagine a powerful and mighty God. We can even imagine, unwillingly, an angry God. But a loving one? Who really, sacrificially, personally, deeply loves somebody else in this world?

Father, you are not a God who doesn’t know our weaknesses or looks upon them with contempt. Your Son, Jesus Christ, became man, lived our lives, suffered our pain, took away our punishment. In our sin, we rejected you and we cursed you and we killed your son. But you didn’t let that stop you. You kept loving your rebellious people.

Father, we confess we don’t worship you the way you want to be worshipped. Your glory, your might, your love are many times too condemning for us. We don’t love our neighbors. We envy them and hate them because they have more and better stuff than we do. We hate them because they seem happy and we are miserable. We confess we come to you to be served by you, to be delivered by you and the moment we are we reach out for our past idols because they are the work of our hands and they are tame, they don’t make big demands of us. We confess that we don’t read your word and don’t meditate on it in our hearts. We dwell on our emotions and our human thoughts as the guiding light of our lives.

Father forgive us our sins, our rebellion. In the name of Jesus, your Son, forgive us our sins and help us hope in you.

Father, we are thankful for the Lord Jesus. It is by His sacrifice alone that we can be forgiven, that we can have peace with you. Our good deeds are not enough to wipe away our transgressions, but Jesus’ righteousness is sufficient because He is your Son and because he lived the perfect life we should have lived. We thank you that you opened our eyes to who you are and who he is and that you did not leave us in our sins.

We are also very grateful that we get to participate in your love for your people. We are grateful that our church could serve R and E in NQ this week. We pray that you bless them and encourage them. We pray they would be able to learn the language quickly. We also pray for W and C that they would be able to get there soon and that W would be able to preach your Word well and feed R and E with your word. We pray that both the B and the Y would hear the Gospel in their own languages and repent and believe.

Lord, we thank you that you work all over the world. We thank you also for the fact that your word is being preached in N in spite of so many physical and spiritual obstacles. We thank you for the work of the NGC and that at least 120 people that were baptized this year. We thank you for the discipleship classes and pastoral training that they do. We pray, Lord, that you would empower your people there to love their neighbors, to keep preaching and proclaiming your mercies and we pray that you would save a great number of souls.

Father, we pray that in this season of Advent, as we go towards Christmas, we would rejoice and proclaim the Gospel to our neighbors. We pray that we would not focus on ourselves but on our neighbors. We pray that we would not think about the many things we don’t have and would like to have, but about the fact that you gave us your very own son. We pray that we hope in you and that our joy would grow in this season.

In Jesus’ name

Amen