Worship through Prayer

Father, blessed be your name! We praise you for your great love and faithfulness!

In your great love and faithfulness, you chose people for yourself. And you did not choose good people, but wicked ones. You did not choose clean people but dirty ones. You did not choose loving people, but hateful, envious, selfish ones. You chose them to showcase your love and glory.

If we were to choose people to come into our presence, to bring close to us, to share our wealth and glory with them, to love and protect, we would not choose people like you chose. We would put them to test and take only the ones that pass. The people you chose are failures, in every sense of the word, and you chose them, for your glory, to turn them into sons and daughters.

If we were to choose people to save, we would do it at arms-length. We would definitely not save our enemies. To the ones weak enough not to be a threat or nice enough to be friendly, we would give some money, time and advice, we would become angry at the injustice they suffer and call for reformation or revolution, but we wouldn’t hug them, become homeless in their stead, take the sickness upon ourselves or die for their wrongs. But you gave your one and only son, Jesus Christ, for us.

And you promised them an inheritance and you gave them a pledge, the Holy Spirit. How amazing is your love and faithfulness!

Father, we confess we are wicked, hateful, envious, selfish and forgetful. This past week we forgot your promise of eternal life and the promise of your inheritance, and we worried about our studies and about our career prospects and families. In our desire to protect and promote ourselves, we crafted narratives about how we are better than other people. We sought our own interest and did not care about the people next to us. Our hearts prodded us to indulge in lust, pride and greed and we followed the impulses of our hearts.

Father, forgive us our sin! Transform us through the Holy Spirit.

We thank you, Father, for your mercy and forgiveness, which we have by faith in Christ. We thank you that you shepherd us onto the right path, even as we try to turn left and right. We thank you that you show us grace. We thank you for the daily bread and that our names are written in heaven. We thank you for the great shepherd, Jesus, who stands between you and us, who guides us into the promised land and who is preparing a place for us.

We pray Father for love for you and for faith to believe that you are a good and loving God. We pray that we would love your commandments and your Word. We pray that we would appreciate the boundaries you have put in our lives. We pray that we rejoice in your promises more than in the momentary comforts which you have so graciously provided.

Help us, Father, “set aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us” and help us “run the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus,[…] who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God”. (Heb. 12:1-2)

We pray Father for the ones struggling in our midst right now. Please grant relief to those in pain, peace to the restless, comfort to those who mourn and mercy to those who are fighting physical ailments. We pray you provide jobs and guidance for those looking for work.

Father, we pray for the Gospel, that it may spread in Northwest DC. We pray that you soften the hearts of the people around us and reveal your truth to them. Make us bold, strong and courageous in proclaiming the Gospel.

Father, we pray for the Gospel, that it may spread in NK and Bur. You love all people and you do not take pleasure in death, but in life. Please grant light and life to the peoples in these countries. Do not allow oppressive and idolatrous societies to hold back your Word. Protect our brothers and sisters in these countries and empower them!

In Christ’s name, Amen.

by Kathryn Feliciano

Worship through Prayer

Adoration 

God, you are an eternal God. A year has just flown by, and you were with each of us every second of the day. You knew our every thought. You related to us at every step. The enormity of your presence in the past year alone is impossible for us to comprehend. And 2017 was only one year out of an eternity for you.

We thank you that you were God Emmanuel, God with us, and we look forward to the day when we are not listening to the harps on the farther shore, but we are playing them, together, rejoicing in your name.

• We will rejoice at your nearness, at your majesty, at your beauty.
• Everything in this world eventually gets old to us in some way, but somehow you will never cease to amaze us. We marvel at your greatness to come.

Confession

God, while you have given us a path to not only enjoy you in heaven, but to enjoy you here, our hearts have sought lesser pleasures apart from you, rebelling against you.

We confess this week that we have

• Fought with our family, spouses, inlaws, parents, children and roommates
• We have not sought first to understand, but have instead sought to impose our way, even if subtly
• We confess that while we have received many gifts, we have not been generous with you
  • We have grumbled when we have given our taxes, instead of praying that our taxes would be used well to help the poor
  • We have only given out of our excesses instead of our margins.
  • We have looked condescendingly on the homeless or others who have not measured up
• You have provided us with our every need, and yet we have worried about 2018 and beyond.
  • We have worried about future school and career plans, our relationship status, and our children or childlessness
  • As we wrestle with these real struggles, we pray that we would not turn to anxiety, but instead come to you with our open hearts.
• Lord, help us confess the following sins to you now: anger, jealousy, prayerlessness, lust, and impatience.
• Lord, would you please show us the peace that comes with trusting you and your commands, and how your way is the best way for us right now, that we might run in your path?

Father, we thank you that you happily forgive us with certainty.

Thanksgiving

And because you don’t hold our sins against us, we happily come to you to give you thanks.

• We thank you for bringing us through another year.
  • We thank you for the sermon series in Philippians this year, and the series on the Five Solas, and how you used your Word every Sunday to change us one degree at a time.
  • We thank you for Joey and Nathan, and how they have committed the prime of their lives to preach the Word to us.
  • And we thank you for the churches many of us have visited over the holidays, as we traveled.
  • It’s amazing how rapidly your churches have spread over the last century, and we praise you that we are not alone this Sunday in preaching your word.
  • We pray for local churches that preach your Word nearby.
    • Montrose Baptist in Rockville
    • Franconia Baptist in Alexandria.
  • We thank you for members you have brought to Restoration.
    • We thank you for R and C.
    • H, C and R.
    • J and J

• We thank you for the Campus Outreach conference going on right now, and we pray that the words spoken at the conference would bear fruit, particularly in the lives of the four students from American University who attended.

Supplication

Lord, You have given us so many reasons to be thankful, but we know you are generous, so we bring even more requests to you.

• We pray for those in our church.
  • We pray for those morning the loss of family members or close friends this year. Would you be near to them in this season?
  • We pray for those mothers who are caring for sick children during these long winter days. We pray that the mothers in our church would understand that their work caring for their children is no less important than the President’s work in your eyes. And we pray that we as a church would esteem the work of raising up children.
  • We also pray for mothers juggling caring for children and work in the economy. Would you please sustain them in the difficult days?
• We pray for relationships in our congregation.
  • We pray that we all would grow in appreciating each other. We pray that we would value each other just as you value us.
  • We pray that we would be inconvenienced in some way this week to serve someone else in our church.
  • In all our relationships here, we pray that in humility we would value others above ourselves.

Lord, we also pray for our world.

• We pray for those struggling with depression, both here today and in our communities.
• We pray for those who are struggling with chronic physical pain.
• We pray for poor churches serving poor communities in our country. We ask for your blessings on churches meeting in McDowell County, West Virginia and in the Navajo Nation in the southwest. We often feel overwhelmed at Restoration with all of our problems, but we pray for churches in these communities where broken families may be the norm.
• You show your care for good governance in scripture, so we pray for Zimbabwe and Iran. We pray that their governance would grow increasingly just in the coming year.
• And we pray for the Ends of the Earth: over 300,000 Kondah Dorah people in India. We pray that you would use the few hundred Christians in this group to reach their neighbors.

Finally, we come back to this church. Would you please:

• Move through us this morning as you bless us with the preaching of your Word?

We ask this in Jesus' Name, Amen.

by Kathryn Feliciano