Vespers - 8 April 2018


(Our Children): Father, who delights to call us your children and has blessed our families and church with many children – teeny ones, tween, teens and grown ones. We pray for them that in their particular stages of maturation and growth, you would preserve them from harm and harmful people. Further, we ask you to cultivate their attractions, their affections, their thoughts, and their discretions that they would not be swept up and away by treacheries or twisted allurements. We want them to be successful in their academic studies and vocations, yet we ultimately long for them to always walk in your ways, to know that they are yours and you are theirs, and to love you with all of their heart, soul, mind and strength. O Lord, hear our prayer.

(North American Church): 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 ensnared in the present stultifying social squall. O Lord, hear our prayer.

(Non-Christians and Others): 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)…If there is a way we can be part of their conversion or restoration, give us those opportunities, along with the wit and willingness to go there with them. If they won’t listen to us because of family relations or personal history, then, please, send them the right persons to lay out before their eyes and hearts the Gospel of your Son, Jesus Christ. O Lord, hear our prayer.

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