Prayer + Reflection

As we enter into the next 21 Weeks of Prayer we gather in His name and ask the Lord to do abundantly more than we could imagine.

Read through the Lord’s Prayer three times. Take time to intentionally meditate on His Word today and ask Him for a fresh anointing.

Pause. What do you have on your heart today that you need to hand over to God? Receive the Lord’s grace as you set an intention for the next 21 days.

Family/Friends/Resident Moment

Work on memorizing the Lord’s Prayer together. Draw pictures or print images for each line, and give them to your family, friends or other residents. Say the prayer together several times each day this week. To make it a challenge, remove an image daily to see if your family can remember it.

Discussion

As we head into the year 2022, we have an opportunity for our hearts to be recalibrated around certain priorities and commitments. the beginning of the new year always seems like just a natural time to, reconsider the things that are most important, reflect obviously on the year that we just came out of, but as we head into this new year, we want to embrace an opportunity to do something, that is significant in its impact, both personally. And in terms of just, how the kingdom of God is being expressed and manifested in the world today, that we want to be people who engage in an intentional time of corporate prayer and by corporate, I mean, that we're praying together with other believers all over the world in a certain way, in a certain period of time. And as a Foursquare family, we have always used the first part of the new year to spend 21 days together, in a time of focused prayer that unites our hearts together in a singular priority of seeking Jesus together.

But it's also a time of coming into agreement together. And there's something powerful about that. When a group of believers agree together in prayer, we obviously want something transformational to happen in our own hearts. but there's something about the collective voices rising. The scripture tells us like incense before the throne of God, that the prayers of the saints have always mattered. Throughout history, the prayers of the saints rise before the very throne of God and they're collected in this imagery, the book of revelation tells us like prayers gathered in a basin like in a bowl. Those prayers are heard and those prayers are answered from heaven. And so it is a priority for us. It's a first concern that we pray before we move out, pray before we pray before we decide. And so in this next kind of year before us, that we believe is critical.

And, there's so much that Jesus has in store for us. We first want to posture ourselves in a very intensified season of prayer. So we have 21 days set aside where we're going to engage in a passage of scripture and a kind of a general way. That is what we call the Lord's prayer. And it was a template of prayer that Jesus gave his disciples in response to a question that they asked him in the question was this, Jesus, would you teach us to pray now, think about it out of all the things you could have asked Jesus, if you were one of his direct followers in that time, but they saw the priority of prayer in Jesus's life. And they saw the effect of prayer in his life. And the most important thing that they thought that they could ask Jesus directly was to teach us to pray.

And so we're going to come with that same heart of a disciple. Jesus teaches us to pray. And Jesus, in response to that question, gave him what we call the Lord's prayer. And it became a way of thinking about prayer, of approaching God in prayers, our father, the things that are to be included in prayer and the priorities that are resident within that. And we're going to unite our hearts together in believing, contending prayer to see something happen, transformationally and our own development and life in Jesus. And also to see his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.