Thursday, September 10, 2020

Pray to value others more highly than yourself.


Life Support Prayer Calendar 


Excerpt from the Sep - Dec Call to prayer by Executive Director, Deborah Hollifield:

 

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Psalm 139:13-14

           More and more each day we are bombarded with “identity politics,” the system that labels people and forces them into artificial homogenous groups.  Once identified with a certain group, assumptions are without regard to individual truth, followed by rigid rules and protocols for dealing with members of the group.  Most often the labels affixed are pejorative adjectives-turned-nouns:  Bigot, Racist, White Supremacist, Leftist, Deplorable, Pro-birther.  Once the label is attached, the individual is typically subjected to unfair ad hominem attacks: slurs and criticism aimed at a person’s appearance, ethnicity or character, (based on emotions and not logic), instead of that person’s position or arguments on issues.  Such labeling invites wicked discrimination in many arenas of work and social order, and often escalates to physical harm, as we have seen in the streets of our nation’s cities in recent months.

 

(Click the button below to read the whole call to prayer. You may download and print the prayer Sep-Dec calendar using the button at the bottom of this email. For those who receive the print version it will be a few days late, but should arrive in your mailbox next week.)

Genesis 1:25-28,
Acts 14:15 (ESV)

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

 

 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

 

 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

“Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.

Sep 6-12, 2020

1. Confess the sin of labeling others (individuals and groups) in ways meant to demean and devalue.

2. Ask God to give his people eyes to see His image in others and understanding that we all belong to God and have no sufficiency or worth in ourselves. Pray to value others more highly than yourself.

3. Pray for God’s wisdom and presence in the online  PPL board meeting on September 10.

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