God,

You alone are worthy of praise. You alone are great, you alone are eternal, you alone are good. Your lovingkindness extends to the heavens and your faithfulness reaches the skies. People take refuge in your wings and you preserve them.

Lord, you are holy, set apart from your creation, not bound by time and futility. People make images of themselves and engrave them in marble or bronze or even mountains. But you o, Lord, are truly worthy to be looked at in all your goodness and remembered from generation to generation. Lord, people use your creation and your blueprints to create objects and ideas that they use to pride themselves. But you alone are worthy to be praised, because you create from nothing. Whenever somebody becomes big and important, they go out of reach. Kings surround themselves with armies and people to serve them. But you, Lord, who were out of reach, as the Holy God that you are, you walked among your people and you served them. Lord, you deserve to be praised because you love. You truly love. You seek the well-being of the other, not matter how much it hurts you.

We confess, Lord, we don’t praise you enough. Our problems are big and you are small. We are busy, we are overwhelmed or we are self-absorbed.

In our busyness, which you may have ordained for us, we forget to think of you, thinking you are further away and somehow less immediately relevant. Please forgive us this short-sightedness.

In the midst of difficult moments, maybe surrounded by un-cooperating or failing neighbors, unsolvable problems and lack of time and energy, we forget you are the source of life. We forget you give strength to the weary. Forgive us Lord.

Lord, many times we are simply self-absorbed. We fear missing out on this or that. Or we feel a need to justify ourselves. We work hard at making sure we are the type of person we or the world around us thinks we should be. Forgive us Lord for failing to look to you.

Lord, we are thankful for the repentance that you have given us and for the forgiveness you have provided in Jesus. We are thankful He bore our sins on the cross, and for providing us with the Holy Spirit. We can now enter into your presence, we, small, insignificant people.

Lord, we are thankful for S.M. We are thankful that both mom and baby are doing well. We pray that S would believe in you and be a light in this world.

Lord we pray for the Gospel to be proclaimed to the ends of the earth. We pray that people in Northern Iraq would hear and believe the Gospel. We pray for the Christians is Syria and Nigeria and North Korea to persevere in faith and proclaim your name and that many believers would be added to their numbers.

We pray Lord that we would proclaim the Gospel here in Washington DC. We pray our circumstances would turn out for the proclamation of your Word and not for sin. We pray that we would love one another as Jesus loved us and we would thus reveal your glory to the world around.

Lord, we pray we would praise you more in the midst of our daily lives. I pray that what we learn about you, we would delight in and live out of by praising you. I pray that our busy schedules, our challenges beyond power and all our circumstances would be opportunities to praise you. Lord, I pray we would walk by faith in your promises and your character which you proclaimed so loudly at the cross.

Help us today, be confronted with your perfect love and be challenged and transformed by it.

In Jesus’s Name, Amen.