Monday, March 01, 2010

I Prayed For You Today

Today begins a brand new month and with it comes a brand new prayer challenge for Grace Church as part of our Year of Prayer.

This month we are using “I Prayed For You Today” cards that we made available last Sunday at church. If you didn’t get yours, be sure to pick up a stack of 10 of them this Sunday.

We are asking everyone who is part of our ministry here at Grace to take 10 cards and sometime through the month of March to pick 10 people to pray for. We would like you to select 5 of these people from those who are within our ministry. The other 5 we would encourage you to make those who are not part of our ministry. While it is fine for some of these to be people who attend other churches, we would love to see the majority of those five selections be people who are not believers and/or do not attend church anywhere.

Then, after your have prayed for each person, take one of your “I Prayed For You Today” cards and write them a note letting them know that you prayed for them. Then either hand them the card or stick it into an envelope and mail it to them. Imagine how encouraging and effective it will be for people all throughout our ministry and throughout our communities to be receiving these cards throughout the month of March.

In fact, we have 10,000 cards made up with the hopes that 1,000 of the people who attend Grace will participate in this challenge. I can’t wait to see how God works as 10,000 of these cards are given out after 10,000 prayers have been offered up on behalf of these individuals.

So if you picked your “I Prayed For You Today” cards up last Sunday here at Church then begin to use them. If you didn’t get yours yet, then go ahead and begin to think through, even pray through, what 10 people you will pray for this month and then be sure to pick up your “I Prayed For You Today” cards this Sunday.

Looking ahead to our April Prayer Challenge, it will just be a one day event as we have a ministry-wide Day of Prayer and Fasting on Thursday, April 1st. What a great day to do this since it is April Fool’s Day and the Bible says that “the fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

On this day we are asking everyone in our church family who is medically able to fast for 24 hours and to use the time that you would normally eat to spend in extra prayer for God to use our Easter worship services in extraordinary ways to meet as many people as possible right where they are and help move them to where God wants them to be.

Though this is a 24-hour fast, it really only involves missing two meals. If you were to eat dinner at 6pm Wednesday night, you could then eat dinner again at 6pm Thursday night, only missing breakfast and lunch that day. I hope you will pray about participating in this special day. We will be getting more information out to you regarding how to fast and giving you special prayer requests for that day.

No comments: