“What we were created at the depths of our souls to need is only the Presence of God. It is the answer as Jesus is the answer….Our questions and complaints will never find individual answers (even as Job’s questions were never fully answered). The only Answer is the dangerous, disturbing, comforting Presence, which is the true Answer to all our questions and hopes.” (“A Sacred Sorrow” by Michael Card, p. 129)

God of Mystery and Incarnation,

As your Church gathers today for worship services, I pray your Spirit will be poured out in each congregation. May we know in the depths of our being that you are there. May we know your dangerous, disturbing, and comforting Presence. May we know you, our true Answer to all our questions, complaints, struggles, and hopes. And may your people be open, including, loving, and kind to those still on the journey to you. May we interact with the God-seekers of this world with grace and mercy, allowing all of us to ask hard questions, but know that you are always our Answer. Help us to always speak your Wisdom and to shine your Glory. Strengthen us, Holy Spirit, so that Christ may dwell in all our hearts through faith. Root and establish us in love so that we can better understand your Love that surpasses human knowledge. Fill us to the measure of all the fullness of God, we ask in Jesus’s name. AMEN.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 4:16-19 NIV)

“We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.” (1 Corinthians 2:6-7 NIV)