Week 8: Our Covenant With Christ to Pray for Centennial Covenant

December 20-26

This week, let’s especially pray for God to work in people’s hearts and lives through countless expressions of the Christmas story in carols, readings, prayers and reflections. The story is almost too familiar. And yet when Christ himself is lifted up, he draws people to himself (John 12:32).  His Spirit can break into mere traditions and sentiment with the solid promises of the Father to ignite genuine faith and hope for his peace and love. Pray it happen this week!

Ask the Holy Spirit for prompters to intercede fervently for specific celebrations this week – for example: particular family-times, including your own; and particular congregations in your neighborhood. Pray for our own Christmas Eve Candlelighting services on Saturday. Pray for those preparing, including Pastor David and that evening’s Worship Team, Darlene preparing a children’s story, and myself preparing a meditation. I know of people who were first awakened to the reality of the Good News and even came to faith during a Christmas Eve service.

Something I’ve been pondering for myself and those I love, including our Centennial family, is this: that one birth of one child that one night in a place called Bethlehem was the birth of a new creation and so re-birth into hope and peace for anyone anywhere who will receive it. As we’ve considered from Romans 8 in these Prayer Guides the last couple weeks, all creation is “groaning” in the “pains of childbirth.” Creation is “pregnant” with God’s promise to work his good for his purpose of liberating us as his children. How are we – as a church family” – “pregnant” with God’s promises for the future? In such hope, let’s continue to cry out for God to deliver what he wants born in us.