PRAYER ROOMS

Tuesdays (online only today)

• 7:30am: online
• 9am: online  

Thursdays in June

• 7-8pm: 12 Bassett St

Sundays

• 8:30am: 15 Hayes St

PRAYER GUIDE

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Matthew 6:9

After instructing us to pray to God as our Father, Jesus tells us to pray for God’s name to be hallowed. This is not just a statement that God has a holy name, but it is a prayer for God’s name to be revered as holy. God’s name is his reputation, his character, it is the word that captures his essence. Jesus says our first concern in prayer is the reputation of God, and that God’s name would be hallowed. By whom? Who are we praying to revere God and His Name? Where are we praying that the Name of God would be hallowed? We are praying for his name to be known and revered everywhere and by all.

The minute we truly start praying for God’s name to be hallowed, we are reminded of all the places God’s name is not known or hallowed. We are reminded of all the people who do not know God or revere his Name. This is, therefore, a prayer that leads us directly into the heartbeat of a missional God. “The Son of Man came,” Jesus tells us in Luke 19:10, “to seek and save the lost.” 

Jesus stood before the crowds in Matthew 9:35-38 and was moved with compassion because he discerned that they were like sheep without a shepherd. The Greek splanghthnizomai refers to the bowels, the seat of emotions in the understanding of Jesus’ day. He was “gut punched” with compassion for those who were lost. Out of this compassion, Jesus turned to the disciples and commanded them to pray. “The harvest is plentiful,” he said, “but the workers are few.” Jesus was overwhelmed both with compassion and with the need for “workers” for the harvest. Those who would announce and demonstrate the gospel to those who did not know God. 

How do we feel as we look out on our cities? In Providence, for example, or New England, where there are literally millions who do not know Jesus, who do not know God’s love for them? Perhaps they’ve been to church a few times, or maybe many. But they have no real relationship with the God who made them. They are looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song lyrics go. Their lives lack the peace and meaning God designed them to experience. Are we moved with compassion? When we pray “hallowed be your name,” and truly allow that prayer to shape us, it leads us to ask God to break through in our hearts with his own burning love for lost people. 

For Prayer/Reflection:

• How does your care and concern for those who do not know Jesus compare with Jesus’ own concern? Confess apathy to the Lord. 
• Ask God to break into your heart with his burning love for lost people.
• Pray for God to send out workers into the harvest, so that his name and character and reputation would be known. 
• Who do you struggle to believe God could reach and rescue and save? Pray for them now.
• What people or groups of lost people do you struggle to believe God could seek and save? Ask God to reach them. Ask him to use you. Ask him for an opportunity this week to tell someone about Jesus.

PRAYER ROOMS

Tuesdays (online only today)

• 7:30am: online
• 9am: online  
  

Thursdays in June

• 7-8pm: 12 Bassett St
  

Sundays

• 8:30am: 15 Hayes St

PRAYER GUIDE

“Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name“

Matthew 6:9

After instructing us to pray to God as our Father, Jesus tells us to pray for God’s name to be hallowed. This is not just a statement that God has a holy name, but it is a prayer for God’s name to be revered as holy. God’s name is His reputation, His character, it is the word that captures his essence. Jesus says our first concern in prayer is the reputation of God, and that God’s name would be hallowed. By whom? Who are we praying to revere God and His Name? Where are we praying that the Name of God would be hallowed? We are praying for His name to be known and revered everywhere and by all.

This is the first concern of prayer. That God and his Name and his Character would be known and revered by all people everywhere. This is how God wants us to pray. This is what He wants us to care about first and foremost. 

But how do we come to prayer? What are our primary concerns and agendas as we approach God in prayer? If you are like me, most days, I come to prayer with other agendas on my heart. God help me with this concern of mine today. God please provide for this need. Or this person. And of course there is nothing wrong with these kinds of prayers. Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread later in the Lord’s prayer. But where do we start in prayer? We start by concerning ourselves with the Name and the Reputation and the Honor of God. 

When we pray the Lord’s prayer, one of the first things it does is to remind us that we are not at the center of the universe. God is. God’s glory and His honor is our reason for existing. “What is the chief end of man,” the Westminster catechism asks us? The answer is this: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Father, hallowed be your name.

Jesus, when he knew his time had come and he was about to suffer and die, prayed, “What do I pray? Father, save me from this hour?…No! Father, glorify your name.” And the voice thundered back from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” (John 12:28) 

For the next several weeks we are going to pray for God’s name to be known and loved and revered. And the first place we are going to pray for this is among the next generation. We live in a moment of profound secular decline in America. With each passing year, the number of people who consider themselves Christians decreases. By some estimates, the percentage of “nones”, those with no religious affiliation, is increasing at a rate of nearly 1 percent per year! By demographic standards, this is a cataclysmic change. And the groups who are increasingly most rapid in their disaffiliation from Christianity are the youngest generations. Gen Z is less Christian than the Millenials. And if the trends continue, Gen Alpha will be even less Christian than Gen Z.

One critical place we can pray for God’s name to be hallowed, then, is among the next generations. Let’s pray that way today:

For Prayer:

• Pray for revival to sweep through Gen Z and Gen Alpha. For God to hallow his Name by revealing Himself to the next generations.
• Pray for new expressions of Christianity that reach the felt needs and core concerns of these next generations.
• Pray for parents and families to raise resilient disciples among Gen Z and Alpha who are able to bear witness to the gospel among their generation.
• Pray for God to renew His fame and deeds in this current moment.
• Pray Psalm 145:4 – “one generation shall commend your works to another.”
• Pray for young people who do not know the Lord to come to know Him. 

• TUESDAY
  • 7:30am  online only
  • 9am  online & in-person | 12 Bassett St
    
    
• *THURSDAYS IN JUNE
  • 7-8pm | 12 Bassett St
    
    
• SUNDAY
  • 8:30am in-person (15 Hayes St)

Prayer Guide

“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

 He said to them, “When you pray, say:

“‘Father,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.
 Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins,
for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.
And lead us not into temptation.’”

Luke 11:1-4

Father. It is a loaded word for many of us. Loaded in good ways for some and in difficult ways for others. But it is the first word Jesus taught us to pray. Who we are praying to is more important than what we pray for, because prayer is at its most basic level is a living and vital connection with another person. And this person (because through the death and resurrection of Jesus we have been adopted into his family) wants us to call him “Father” or “Abba” (Daddy). 

The first step of prayer is to come to God as our Father. The one who brought us into the world, the one who cares for us, the one who loves us so much that He would sacrifice what is most precious to Him in order to be close to us. He loves us. And as hard as it is for some of us to believe, He likes us. 

So many of us have a deeply flawed image of God in our minds and hearts. Employer. Angry judge in the sky with arms crossed and gavel about to come down. But when Jesus taught us to pray, He taught us to pray to our “Father.” 

Many of us need God to heal our vision and image of Him. When we don’t pray to a father who loves us, we are actually not praying to the real God but to an idol made up in our own imagination. God’s heart breaks. He longs for intimacy with us more than we can understand, even when we have done things that hurt Him or break His heart. Any of us who are parents can grasp what this is like. 

If we, the church, need God to heal our relationship with Him, how much more so does a lost and hurting world which keeps looking for love and peace and meaning and value in all the wrong places. What we and they need is simple. We need to come into the arms of the Father, and to receive the blessing and love of the Father, which is available to all in Jesus.

For prayer/reflection:

• Who do you pray to? What is the God that you pray to like? Is this God your loving Father? If not, ask God to reveal his fatherly love to your heart.
  
• Pray for others who are alienated from God and are unaware of or have not received the love of the Father.
  
• Pray for a revelation of the Father’s heart to our hearts by the Spirit.
  
• Pray for the healing of mother and father wounds, in you, in others, in the church, in those who are not in the church.