LITURGY
WORD OF GOD
Once Jesus was in a certain place praying, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples”.
(Luke 11:1)
WORD FOR TODAY
Prayer is our lifeline with God. Not to pray means that we have a weak relationship, looking on from the sidelines rather than being at the heart of things. If we never visited, wrote to, phoned, emailed or texted our friends we would lose them…
WORDS FOR WORSHIP
As Jesus taught us in today’s gospel, so we pray:
Hallowed be thy name…
Let us pray for a deeper appreciation of the holiness of God and for the courage to make God known by our lives and our actions.
In your loving kindness, Lord: Hear and grant our prayer.
Thy kingdom come…
Let us pray for the Church that it may proclaim the values of God’s kingdom, particularly in those places where the rights of men and women are abused, where children are exploited in sweat shops, where farmers are denied a fair price for their crops and where people are trafficked for money.
In your loving….
Give us this day our daily bread…
Let us pray for our own needs and for those of our parish, for the sick and the dying, for the lonely and bereaved, for those seeking work and for those in any kind of trouble.
In your loving….
Forgive us our trespasses…
Let us pray for those who feel they have been unfairly treated or betrayed by others, for nations who live side by side in permanent tension, for those who are victims of crime and for those who deeply regret their past actions.
In your loving….
Father in heaven, your name is holy and your mercy never ending. Give us this day our daily bread, hear the prayers we make to you in faith and grant all we ask through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen.
FAITH IN FOCUS: JACKPOT PRAYER?
A woman who was on a diet came into work with a huge chocolate cream cake. When her friends asked if she had stopped dieting she told them that God wanted her to have the cake. “I saw it in the bakery and prayed to God to let there be a parking spot outside, if he wanted me to have the cake. And on the 10th time round, there was the parking place!”
Prayer is a strange thing. Some people feel the need to tell God a shopping list of things that they want, as if he didn’t already know what they need! And often we ourselves don’t realise what we really need and we pray for things that we think will make life better, but which everyone else knows will be our ruin. The same happens when an alcoholic prays for a bottle of whisky.
There are those who tend to think that prayer is like a religious fruit machine, a divine one-arm-bandit. You put your request in, pull the handle and eventually you hit the jackpot. Of course, this would be to treat God like some sort of robot that did not have our welfare at heart. It’s the sort of prayer that people make to win the lottery.
So it’s hardly surprising that people talk about unanswered prayer. The very thought that God would completely ignore us when we turn to him is ridiculous. But scripture tells us that sometimes we are asking for the wrong thing or with the wrong motives and that’s why we don’t receive what we want. Prayer is always answered; it’s just that sometimes the answer is “no”, or it comes in a way we didn’t expect.
When we look at the prayer that Jesus taught us, the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer, we notice that there is a lot of emphasis at the beginning on God’s will being done in all things, and the values of God’s kingdom permeating our thoughts and actions. Maybe if we remained open in our prayer, telling God of our needs and desires, but asking him to help us become conformed to his will, then we would start to change our approach to prayer, wanting to be part of God’s plan rather than getting him to change his plans to suit ours. Prayer would become a request to change us.
And maybe that’s why we have to wait until the second half of the Our Father before we get round to asking for things…
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