The world which God created is a beautiful place, intended by God’s loving purposes to provide an abundant life for all the people, animals, and plants living on the earth. Today as we gather in worship, we do so thanking God for his plan of creation, and for our place as stewards of the created order. We also bow before God, imploring Him to inspire us to be more consistent and dedicated stewards of the earth. Therefore let us with renewed commitment to do better and to try harder as we worship the God of all creation.
Pastoral Prayer
We praise Thee, O God, our Redeemer, and Creator. We thank Thee for the glorious beauty of the earth, for its innumerable natural splendors, its extraordinary fruitfulness, and for all the ways in which, in common concert, people, plants, and animals live in relative harmony with one another through the years, centuries, and millennia. Thou art truly an amazing and inspiring Creator.
Yet as we thank Thee for all we observe in the created order, and for all that it has provided for us, we also acknowledge before Thee that we have not always lived up to our best as stewards of creation. We have misused many resources, used other resources improperly, and have given too little thought to the consequences of our actions. Forgive us for falsely supposing that every purported advancement we have made truly advances either us or the natural order. Grant to all of us, and especially to the politicians of all the nations of the world, a heightened awareness of how some of the decisions we have made are damaging the environment around us, and how technological and scientific progress may work against us, even when we imagine that we are making life better for everyone. Convince us that collectively we do not own the earth, that this is Thy world, and that we are to be good stewards of what it has to offer for all the animals, plants, and people who have been given life here.
We pray for all those people who feel they are nursing deep wounds over the results of the election, and who despair that our nation shall ever recover from what they believe to be a great electoral injustice. We pray also for those who were victors at the ballot box. Enable them to work diligently on behalf of all the people, and not just for those who agree with them or who support them. Uphold the sick, give deepened trust to the dying, help people of good will to learn how better to feed the starving, and make each of us, personally, instruments of Thine abiding peace. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Now we pray together as he taught us, saying, Our Father….