PRAYER - Based on the words of Ephesians 3. 14-20
A prayer, based on Ephesians 3, to be used in worship on Christmas Eve.
O most gracious Lord God, before Whom the saints and angels bow and sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy,’ we adore You and praise You that, before the foundation of the world, You had engraved our names upon Your hands and numbered the very hairs of our heads, that You had numbered our days and predestined to make Yourself known to us. As we come before Your throne this night in praise and worship, we marvel that You allow us in to Your presence, as sinful and stained as we are. We know that we can only worship You because we are clothed in the all-sufficient blood of Jesus who has washed us clean through His sacrifice on the Cross, and won for us eternal life.
As Your apostle Paul prayed, so too we pray that You might strengthen our hearts through Your Holy Spirit, that in so doing we may become more aware of the breadth, length, height and depth of Your love for us, and that Christ may dwell within our hearts. For we know that, the moment we first believed, He came to dwell with us, and since then has remained with us through the good times and the bad, yet we also acknowledge to our shame and sorrow that our hearts are not clean and pure within – we are not temples of the Holy Spirit, and that our souls are blackened with the soot of sinfulness. All too often we turn aside from Your ways and Your Word, choosing to go our own ways or forge our own paths. As we do this, we abandon Your law of love and seek to squeeze Christ out from His throne within us.
Yet Your Word tells us that His love surpasses knowledge, and that when He dwells within, we can be willed with the all-surpassing fulness that comes only from You. It is for this that we pray tonight, Father. We know that we cannot achieve this through our own actions – it is not our intellect, nor our goodness, that can make a fitting space for Christ to indwell us, nor is it the same intellect or goodness that have made us worthy to stand in Your presence and serve You – rather it is the goodness of Jesus Christ who became incarnate to become our kinsman redeemer and to win for us the eternal life that You foreordained before the beginning of time.
Lord, in this Christmas season, as the world and the Church gathers to mark Christ’s birth and all that means, we pray that His same indwelling may make us aware of the wonder, the majesty, the glory of His incarnation – “our God, incarnate to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”1 For, without You, this knowledge surpasses our understanding, but with You all things can be made clear. Lord, move within us and make the Good News of Christmas a reality to us and our lives. Keep us from trivialising His incarnation, or for adding to it from the realms of imagination; keep us from doubt, or intellectual snobbishness that stops us believing in the Holy Child of Bethlehem.
Oh holy God, we know You give power to the faint and, to those who have no might, increase their strength: strengthen us, we pray, by Your Holy Spirit. May He enable us to recognise, overcome and subdue our sinful thoughts, temptations, and passions, and bring forth in our loves the spiritual fruits which are acceptable to Your holy will.
And as we worship, Father, we pray that You might hear our prayers for this world in which You have been pleased to place us. As Scripture instructs, we pray for kings and all in authority, praying especially this night for our King, our First Minister, our Prime Minister, and all those You have been pleased to set over us. May we, and they, remember that all power and authority is drawn from You, and that it is to You that they and we will ultimately give account. We pray too for our spiritual leaders, praying for our ministers, Kenny and Iain, as they take time off, for their families and all who support them. We pray for our Elders, our Deacons, and those who You have charged with the leadership of Your Church. We thank You for the people You have sent to speak Your Word down through the years, and pray for all those who labour in the Gospel this night.
We pray for the particular needs that are affecting our fellow worshippers tonight – for those issues which are widely known, and those known only in the secret places of the heart. We seek Your grace and wisdom in knowing how to act and how to pray.
Since Your Word assures us that You are our merciful Father in heaven, who loves and cares for His children, and that in Christ You will deny us no good thing that we ask in His Name and Spirit, we ascribe to You, O Father, with Your Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, all honour, glory, might and praise, this night and world without end. Amen