“Dear Heavenly Father, while I am on this journey through life, I pray that I may always listen for your voice, whether it is for praise or discipline. Please, please may I always know your presence, especially if I am to journey through life’s valleys. When I am weak fill me with your strength, and help me to love like you love, even when it hurts. May nothing matter to me more than becoming the person you want me to be. Amen.”

– Dianne Parsons (1949 –  )

“Churches throughout the Western world find themselves increasingly marginalized from society as they endeavor to relate the good news to people whose assumptions and attitudes have been shaped by modernity and postmodernity. Our post-Christian, neopagan, pluralistic North American context presents crosscultural missionary challenges every bit as daunting as those we would face on any other continent.

Unfortunately most pastors and church leaders have had no missiological training. Consequently they resort to marketing strategies in place of missionary insights in their attempts to reach out to a population that is becoming increasingly distanced from the church.”

– Eddie Gibbs in Church Next: Quantum Changes in How We Do Ministry

“Lord God, fill us with your Holy Spirit, baptise us in your love and send us in your strength to minister Christ to those we meet. Give us great confidence in the message of the gospel, open doors of opportunity for us and enable us with courage and sensitivity to speak of Jesus. Heavenly Father, we long that the prayer of Jesus may be answered in our lives; ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ Send us afresh with his sense of commission and his heart of compassion. Use us, even today, to bring someone to you. Amen.”

– Victor Jack (1937-  )

“O Lord, who has warned us that you will require much of those to whom much is given; grant that we whose lot is cast in so godly a heritage may strive together the more abundantly by prayer, by almsgiving, by fasting, and by every other appointed means, to extend to others what we so richly enjoy; and as we have entered into the labors of other men, so to labor that in their turn other men may enter into ours, to the fulfillment of your holy will, and our own everlasting salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

– Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

“Grant us grace, our Father, to do our work this day as workmen who need not be ashamed. Give us the spirit of diligence and honest enquiry in our quest for the truth, the spirit of charity in all of our dealings with our fellows, and the spirit of gaiety, courage, and a quiet mind in facing all tasks and responsibilities.”

– Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

“Our heavenly Father, we commend to your mercy those for whom life does not spell freedom: prisoners of conscience, the homeless and the handicapped, the sick in body and mind, the elderly who are confined to their homes, those who are enslaved by their passions, and those who are addicted to drugs. Grant that, whatever their outward circumstances, they may find inward freedom, through him who proclaimed release to captives, Jesus Christ our Savior.”

– John Stott

Gracious and Holy Father,
give us wisdom to perceive You,
intelligence to understand You,
diligence to seek You,
patience to wait for You,
eyes to behold You,
hearts to meditate upon You,
and a life to proclaim You,
through the power of the Holy Spirit of Christ our Lord.

– Benedict of Nursia (480-547)