Call to Worship

Children of God, prepare the way! The Word of God is coming!

We come to listen and receive God’s Word among us.

Children of God, the prophets call to us now and from generations past, urging us to prepare and refine our hearts for the coming of the Word of God. Are you listening?

We come to listen and prepare to receive God’s Word among us.

Children of God, this is the mark of our preparation: that passion for God’s Word would burn within us, cleansing us and renewing us to reflect God’s love throughout the world.

May God ignite our passion for God’s Word that has come among us as we listen, prepare, and receive all that God has for us today. Amen.

Written by Dr. Lisa Hancock, Discipleship Ministries, June 2024.

Opening Prayer

Compassionate God, greet us with your grace this day, for we need you. We cannot save ourselves. Though we may be frantic with activity, our efforts do not yield peace, peace as you can give. Today we would be quiet enough to hear your voice. Today we would be still enough to feel your touch. Help us to find that place where we can receive as well as give, wait as well as act, and listen as well as speak. Our whole world needs your peace. Let us come before you and learn your ways, laying down our weapons and feeding the hungry. Come to us now, through Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Written by Ruth C. Duck in Touch Holiness: Resources for Worship, Updated (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2012), 5.

For use in worship, using the following attribution:

Prayer of Confession

God of Grace,
you blow the breath of life into our lungs,
you have formed us in your image.

And yet we acknowledge that sometimes
we are not who you would have us be.

You challenge us to embrace the refining fire of your love,
to meet you on the threshing floor of life, to be washed as with fuller's soap.

But in our heart of hearts
we would rather keep those things
that would be removed in such an encounter.

Through your Grace, life-giving God, accept us as we are,
Unrefined, unwashed, the chaff mixed in with the grain.

And help us to move into a new way of being

...time of silence...

Listen! For this is Good News!
God's Grace is wider than our wildest imaginings.
God's Grace embraces us as we are and where we are
and draws us out to be the people we were created to be.
Thanks be to God! Amen.

Written by Rev. Gord Waldie on his blog, Worship Offerings. http://worshipofferings.blogspot.ca/. Re-posted on the re:Worship blog at https://re-worship.blogspot.com/2013/08/prayer-for-grace-malachi-3-1-4.html.

Benediction

Go, now, blessed with a passion that refines, molds, and shapes each of our hearts to reflect God’s glorious love that transforms despair into hope, violence into peace, and distress into flourishing. Amen.

Written by Dr. Lisa Hancock, Discipleship Ministries, June 2024.