DAILY BYTEThis week we’ve reflected on the history-shaping nature of God, and the surprising but wonderfully good news that God comes to us in our ordinary, everyday lives and invites us to offer our lives to Him to be used in His great purposes for the world.
Kathleen Norris writes:
“It is in ordinary life that our stories unfold, tales of conceiving, bearing and giving birth, of trial and death and rising to new life out of the ashes of the old.... Christianity is inescapably down-to-earth and incarnational.... [For the] Christian faith asks us to place our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find our way to God.”
So hear the challenge of the gospel. The challenge to look around at your life right now. Your ordinary, everyday life which locates you in this particular moment in history. Look at your life. See it as it is. The struggle. The pain. The promise. The shame. The hopes and dreams for something new. The deep sense that your life is not just about you.
It is in this messy, mundane yet miraculous existence that God finds you and me. And invites us to be a part of what God is doing. To put these miraculous lives of ours to magnificent purpose. To allow ourselves to be used in the making and moulding of human history.
Let me suggest one direct way in which we can give ourselves to the history-shaping work of God in our midst. It is quite simply through our intercessory prayer.
Walter Wink makes an outrageous claim. He suggest that history belongs to the intercessors. Listen to the reasons he gives for this audacious claim. He writes:
“Intercession breathes a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of present reality.
“Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current forces.
“Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised.”
Maybe today you need to take stock of the prayers that you offer for others and the world. And if you don’t pray in this way, to ask yourself why. Do the prayers you pray, or fail to pray, reveal what you really believe about God’s presence in human history and God’s capacity to act? Will you dare to believe that through heartfelt, faithful intercession you can help to irrigate the community with hope, and that your life, located in this particular time and place in history, can have eternal significance?
PRAY AS YOU GO
Gracious God, hear us as we offer our prayers of intercession on behalf of others and our world. We pray for every part of the world that is gripped by the tyrannies of war, oppression, poverty, violence and corruption. We pray for the strengthening of responsible, faithful leaders who will serve with integrity, creativity and devotion. We pray boldly for justice and peace throughout all the world.
We pray for all who suffer in any way – the beareaved, the sick, the destitute, the lonely, the abused, the victims of discrimination, the unemployed, the depressed, the marginalized and those forgotten. By your grace may healing, hope and peace enter their lives.
We pray for ourselves, that we would surrender our ordinary everyday lives to you more and more, that you might use us as the ones through whom you can continue your history-shaping work in the world. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING
2 Chronicles 7:14
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
