My Prayer For The New Year

As we are only steps away from the New Year, I wanted to take just a moment to share my prayer for you, for all of us really, for the coming year.  

It seems it is sometimes easier for us to love the ungodly than it is for us to love our own brothers and sisters in Christ.  And so, I pray that God will give us all a heart full of love, and grace, and great mercy for one another.  

I pray that our love for the lost will grow stronger with each passing day.  I pray that we will begin to see through the eyes of Christ, listen with our hearts, and speak with words tendered by love. 

I pray that husbands will begin to love their wives as Christ loves the church.  I pray that they will take the role of Priest in their home seriously.  I pray that the hearts of fathers will be turned toward their children and that they will teach their sons, by their own example, what it means to be “a man after God’s own heart”.

I pray that wives will begin to walk beside their husbands instead of in front of them, allowing their husbands to fulfill the role that God has given them as the head of the household.  I pray that mothers will become more nurturing and that their daughters will learn from them what it is to be a godly wife and mother.

I pray that children will learn to respect the authority God has placed over them in the home, in their schools, and in their community.  I pray that they will enjoy just being children while they can.  I pray that they will develop a hunger and a thirst for God that is insatiable. 

I pray that the church will become what God intended it to be.

I pray that leaders will bow their knee before God now so that our country might be saved.

One of my favorite scriptures is found in Isaiah 43:15-19, “I am the Lord, your Holy One, Israel’s Creator and King…Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past.  It is nothing compared to what I am going to do.  For I am about to do a brand-new thing.  See, I have already begun!  Do you not see it?  I will make a pathway through the wilderness.  I will create rivers for them in the dry wasteland.”

I know I have shared this with you before and I’m sure I will be sharing it again because I believe God wants to do “new things” in us every day.  This scripture has been on my heart all week, I guess because I have friends who have been wandering around in the wilderness for most of the year.  I want you to see that your Heavenly Father has already begun to make a pathway for you and to create rivers and springs of fresh water to quench your thirst.  Nothing God has done for you in the past can compare to what He is about to do.  Hold on to this promise.

May God bless you and your family in the coming New Year and may you grow closer to Him than ever before.

Amen.