Event: Call to Prayer 2021
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” Lamentations 3:24
Hope has been a powerful word over the past twelve months. So many in our country have hoped for many different things – health, herd immunity, PPE, a vaccine, Christmas, and now many are hoping for summer holidays. Hope is vital to any human, especially as we live in a world that is broken.
Life is a mixture of the good and the bad, and hope is needed because things are not as they should be as everything has been deeply affected by sin and the curse. We hope for the weekend or a holiday because work can often be a slog. Relationships are often broken, and we therefore hope and look for restoration or new and better relationships. The creation is broken, and we face health worries, so we therefore hope for better days and better vaccines. This is even true of our own lives as so many of our experiences never truly satisfy. Hope is vital to any human who wishes to live a fruitful and happy life in this world, but we need to put our hope in the right place … or the right person.
As Christians we are blessed beyond all measure because our hope is grounded in God who is not affected by this broken world. The Spirit has opened our eyes to see that though this world is wonderful, nothing and no-one on this earth can give us real, eternal, and lasting satisfaction. We are spiritual as well as beings, and we therefore need an eternal and spiritual answer to our problems that will give us hope to face life and its challenges. The Holy God – Father, Son and Spirit – is the only one who can do this, and we are privileged to place our hope in Him. This is a hope that will never allow us to be put to shame (Psalm 25).
Isn’t that what we have learned over this past year as God has slowly stripped us of so many of the trappings and trimmings of life? Our only hope in this life, and the next, is our great and glorious God – the Father who loved us in eternity and who gave His Son to die for us, the Son who humbled himself to death on the cross and who now reigns victorious, and the Spirit who is with us constantly guiding, disciplining, and loving us.
This is the basis of our call to prayer this year. There are so many needs in Wales both within and out-side the Church, but what we need more than anything is to be reminded of our God. Through the daily messages and prayer points we invite you to join with us to look at different aspects of God’s character. Our aim in doing this will be to encourage us and to realise that we need to depend fully on him as our only hope. As Lamentations three goes on to say ‘The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD’ (vs 25-26). What else could we possibly do?
Why a Call to prayer?
We recognise that as Christians, our prayer lives are a key part of our discipleship and our fellowship with God. We have no desire to divert Christians from those matters they are already praying for. Our desire is simply to encourage prayer for God’s blessing on our land and on all that we do as a Movement, to foster a greater sense of unity, and to help focus our eyes on God, who is our hope.
How to use the Call to Prayer?
Every day we will be concentrating on a different truth about God through some Bible readings, a short devotion, some questions for meditation and prayer points. The content will be posted online (on the website and via social media) and sent through emails. You may wish to use the guide every day for a week (along with many hundreds of Christians) or you may want to use it over several weeks. Feel free to use it as the Lord guides you, and please also share it with others in your church.
We pray that it will be an encouragement to you in your daily walk with God and hope that you will find it encouraging to concentrate on our great and glorious God.
More information here