"We Implore Your Help and Governance" - 7 January 2018

We implore your help and governance, Good Lord, for your church throughout the world, for this congregation, and also for First Missionary Baptist, First Southern Baptist, Followers of Christ Baptist and Fortieth Street Baptist churches. May we flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. May we be planted in the house of the LORD; and flourish in the courts of our God. May we still bear fruit in old age; be ever full of sap and green, to declare that the LORD is upright; that you are our rock, and there is no unrighteousness in you (Psalm 92.12-15).

We plead with you especially and expressly for your church in North America. Preserve us from ourselves; preserve us from amputating ourselves from the essential, directive, life-supporting connection to your Word; preserve us from caving in to the present social and sexual storm that is brewing. Raise us up and guide us in affirming the beauty of your creation ordinance of one man and one woman married for life; the goodness of maleness and the splendor of femaleness. Breathe into us creative ways to communicate this so that our neighbors, friends, foes, society and even our courts will not be able to “withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which” we are “speaking” (Acts 6.10). And give us the astuteness to rightly, and God-honoringly, minister to those who are trapped in the present stultifying social squall.

For our own country, we beseech you: please make very clear to us the insanity that this numbing national nonsense is cooking up for us. May our love affair with the “sovereign self” –our promotion of the new morality with its one undisputable law that self-denial is somehow immoral – may it be exposed before our eyes before it’s too late, before the physical, emotional and human debris piles high into a reeking mass, and may there be some kind of authentic national repentance that might prevail!

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, including Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, and Ethiopia, who are divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule.

Shower your care and kindness on those ailing, sick, recovering and recouping…

Rescue those who are perishing in their sins, and those who have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs (1 Timothy 6.10)…

Be with our sons and daughters who have begun a new school semester that they may continue to be motivated in their studies, and see their hard work of writing papers, learning, reading, and lab work pay off by them mastering their studies.

Finally, we entreat you to help us in 2018. Especially, that this may be a wonderful year of reconciliation in our families and among our friends; and restoration of families and friends.

We ask all of this in Jesus’ name, for your glory and our good. Amen.