Week of Prayer

Dear friends,

This coming week is a week of prayer. Our Sunday gatherings have been shaped around prayer. Our Growth Groups are being invited to set aside an extended time for prayer. And if you can find other opportunities to pray that would be valuable too. (Hard-copy resources for the Week of Prayer will be available at services on Sunday 6 August. Online resources are available at: ccsi.church/week-of-prayer)

We’re going to pray for Mission. We’re entering a season of heightened Mission. Starting next Friday all our youth are going to be on Mission together for Youth Big Fridays (11, 18 & 25 Aug). After that, for the following three Sundays, the whole church will be on Mission together for Share Life Sundays (3, 10 & 17 Sep). As a follow-up to Share Life Sundays, all our guests will be invited to look at Jesus more deeply in the Bible.

So let’s pray that people will come to know Jesus. 

But let’s also encourage one another to pray because prayer does not always come easily! Even the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to do it! They had seen Jesus praying, they knew that John the Baptist's disciples prayed and they wanted to pray too. So Jesus instructed them in a pattern of prayer that we now call the Lord's Prayer. I call it a pattern because there are two versions of this prayer in the Scriptures that are not dramatically different, but diverse enough for us to see that the issue here is not so much the prayer’s exact wording but its content and to whom we address our prayers. 

In that vein, Jesus instructs us to pray to “our Father”. Now if you have been around a bit in Christian circles, perhaps even been brought up as a Christian, praying to God as Father is normal and perhaps even pedestrian. But it is here we need to stop. For if we overlook the reality that God is our Father, we will overlook the grace that enables prayer. So we need to be reminded periodically that the privilege of speaking with God so intimately was not even given to the greatest of the Old Testament saints. The Jewish people would never have called God Father, for being too familiar was serious business as Jesus found out. In John 5:18 we read that the Jewish people try to kill Jesus for calling God his own Father.

But this is the privilege that is ours as Christians. On Jesus’ lips it seems appropriate, but on ours, we must realise that it is an amazing and unexpected blessing. That the incomparable, sovereign God, creator of the universe, sustainer of life and judge of all, can be approached by feeble creatures like us as Father – its an amazing privilege. But ‘Father’ expresses more than our privileged approach.  

We can approach God as Father because he approached us first. In Christ he has sought us out and through faith in Jesus, brought us to himself and made us into his children. He is our heavenly Father, and we are his sons through faith in Christ.

I pray that you regularly approach your Father in prayer. And I pray that you might find time to join with others in the coming week as we devote ourselves to a week of prayer for mission.

In Christ,

Nigel