Seeking the revelation of God …
5/21/2009 8:58:28 AM
O God, great and merciful God of all time, God of all creation, all redemption, all hope; God of yesterday, today and tomorrow, we worship You. We honor and adore You. We are bold to ask that You would glorify Your name in all the earth! Stretch out Your hand, Lord God. Stretch out Your hand!
Reveal Yourself in ways that people cannot deny.
Reveal Yourself in radiance and grace.
Reveal Yourself in wonder and majesty.
Reveal Yourself as a light that shines in the darkness, the very presence of love in the midst of a world of despair.
Stretch out Your hand, Lord God. Stretch out Your hand.
At this very moment, set people’s hearts on fire.
At this very moment, fill sleeping minds with dreams, visions of Jesus Christ, that when they awake they will find themselves inexplicably seeking Him. Even as they sit on cold pews, in lifeless worship services, stretch out Your hand that they would acknowledge that their hearts were strangely warmed, and they find themselves seeking You with passion, energy, imagination and love.
At this moment, stretch out Your hand and heal – that doctors might find themselves bearing witness to miracles, that scientists might find themselves acknowledging that there is a Life Force they cannot explain, that those who mock believers would – for a moment – be silenced by the sight of desperately ill people made whole again.
Stretch our Your hand, Lord God! Stretch our Your hand.
We want to bear witness to the name of Jesus, but we admit that we’ve lost touch with the world You died to redeem. We admit that we have fenced ourselves off from the riffraff of the world and enthroned ourselves in castles behind gates. O God, we don’t really want to go as Your ambassadors into the culture of confusion and chaos that so needs to know Your Son.
And so, Lord God, stretch out Your hand into our hearts. Make us inwardly strong and by Your Spirit make us outwardly focused – that Your name might be glorified in all the earth and in our corner of it. Stretch out Your hand, O God! Stretch out Your hand.
In the name of Jesus, stretch out Your hand. Amen.
Prayers of the people: