A prayer for the New Year
Loving God,
we gather today with all our hopes, dreams and worries as we step into a new year. A time where we can worship and praise and reset the context of our time and objectives.
May this be a year where time is important to us—a time where we focus on the plan that you have for us, a time when we enable your word to meet the street and isn’t something that is confined to the four walls of a building. Lord may this be a time like no other as we let your word inspire, change, and direct us.
We meet in this new year caught between the old and new, between what has been and what is still yet to be; in this crossover place may this be a time when we choose what to hold on to, what to let shape us, what experiences we need to keep and those we know we need to let go of.
In this year to come enable our places of worship to remain faithful places, holy places, where we can find those words, promises and truths that will be our partners in the new year. And may they be your words, divine words, loving words, words of guidance: the word among us in this place of meeting of time and people.
Creator, in the beginning before anything happened, in the beginning there was you. And there was the word. God and the Word together as makers. And another member of their family, the Spirit, was there at the beginning too.
And you were all making and creating. The moon and stars, thunder and lightning, seas and mountains, trees and buttercups, kangaroos, and ladybirds. You made them all.
But forgive us for messing up the plan that you started. Forgive us for our continuing to believe that our ways are best. One look around us today is evidence that we don’t know best. Very seldom even knowing right from wrong.
We confess our wrong doings, forgive us, heal us, change us, redirect us, sort out the old so that we can be new creations before you and before the world, as we humbly rejoice in the new life we have in Christ.
And we bring our prayers to you now in Jesus’s name, who taught us when we pray to say:
Our father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
(With grateful thanks to Spill the Beans)
Loving God,
we gather today with all our hopes, dreams and worries as we step into a new year. A time where we can worship and praise and reset the context of our time and objectives.
May this be a year where time is important to us—a time where we focus on the plan that you have for us, a time when we enable your word to meet the street and isn’t something that is confined to the four walls of a building. Lord may this be a time like no other as we let your word inspire, change, and direct us.
We meet in this new year caught between the old and new, between what has been and what is still yet to be; in this crossover place may this be a time when we choose what to hold on to, what to let shape us, what experiences we need to keep and those we know we need to let go of.
In this year to come enable our places of worship to remain faithful places, holy places, where we can find those words, promises and truths that will be our partners in the new year. And may they be your words, divine words, loving words, words of guidance: the word among us in this place of meeting of time and people.
Creator, in the beginning before anything happened, in the beginning there was you. And there was the word. God and the Word together as makers. And another member of their family, the Spirit, was there at the beginning too.
And you were all making and creating. The moon and stars, thunder and lightning, seas and mountains, trees and buttercups, kangaroos, and ladybirds. You made them all.
But forgive us for messing up the plan that you started. Forgive us for our continuing to believe that our ways are best. One look around us today is evidence that we don’t know best. Very seldom even knowing right from wrong.
We confess our wrong doings, forgive us, heal us, change us, redirect us, sort out the old so that we can be new creations before you and before the world, as we humbly rejoice in the new life we have in Christ.
And we bring our prayers to you now in Jesus’s name, who taught us when we pray to say:
Our father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
(With grateful thanks to Spill the Beans)