I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart! Once again you have blessed me and my family during the Christmas season. Your kind cards and generous gifts mean so much and we sincerely appreciate all you do. I am so grateful to get to serve alongside you here at Pleasant Grove and look forward to what God has in store for us in the year ahead and in the years to come.

As a new year approaches, I wanted to share with you something I shared on a Wednesday night a couple of weeks ago. Earlier in December I was at an Executive Committee Meeting with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board and the pastor doing the devotion that morning shared this with us pastors and I thought it was a great reminder about how we can pray as we approach 2021. So here are four prayers, straight from the Word of God that would be a good guide for us to pray in this new year.

  1. Show Me Your Glory. Moses wanted God to go with him and the people as they made the journey God had for them. In Exodus 33 we see Moses pleading with God to go with them and then asking not to make them go if He was not going to go with them. Wanting assurance from God in 33:18 Moses said “Please, let me see your glory.” As we move forward into a new year, we need to beg God to show us His glory.
  2. Search Me. It is one thing to want to see God’s glory it is another thing all together to be willing to ask God to search our hearts and reveal anything within us that should not be there. In Psalm 139 David asks a powerful thing of God, he asks God to search his heart. “Search me, God, and know my heart, test me and know my concerns. See if there is any offensive way in me; lead me in the everlasting way.” If we want to be useful in God’s hands, we need Him to reveal anything in us that might be hindering us from fully serving Him.
  3. Send Me. Don’t ask God for His blessings if you are not willing to serve Him and go where He leads you to go. We need to have the heart Isaiah had. We need to have willing hearts so that even when we are confronted with our sin, we would respond by doing whatever God wants us to do. In Isaiah 6 we see Isaiah responding to the call of God. Isaiah was in the presence of God and realized what a sinner he was and one of the seraphim touched his lips with a glowing coal and cleansed him from his sin. Then in verse 8 we see this: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord asking: Who should I send? Who will go for us? I said: He I am send me.” Would you pray that to God every day this year?
  4. Save Me. There are going to be things that come up throughout the year that are going to overwhelm you and you will need Jesus to save you from the wind and waves of life. In Matthew 14 we find the account of Jesus walking on the water and Peter asking Jesus to command him to come out to Him on the water. Jesus does and Peter steps out of the boat and starts walking on the water until he loses focus and rather than looking to Jesus, he looks at the wind and waves. It is at that point that Peter says in Matthew 14:30 “Lord, save me!” The wind and waves of life are going to overwhelm us but we need to know that Jesus is already there and He will save us whenever we cry out to Him.

So, as 2021 approaches would you be willing to pray Show Me, Search Me, Send Me, and Save Me? It might just change the trajectory of 2021 for you if you do so!

In His Amazing Grace,
Dan