WEEKLY PRAYER: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we pray with the minister and civil rights activist for peace and enemy love.

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God, we thank you for the inspiration of Jesus. Grant that we will love you with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, even our enemy neighbors. And we ask you, God, in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, to be with us in our going out and our coming in, in our rising up and in our lying down, in our moments of joy and in our moments of sorrow, until the day when there shall be no sunset and no dawn.

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WEEKLY PRAYER: Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Yesterday, Nov. 1, was All Saints Day, when we commemorate all the saints of the church, those that are known and those that are unknown. In our prayer for the week, Martin Luther King, Jr. gives thanks for the saints and foreparents that have preceded us in the faith.

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Oh God, our gracious, heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the creative insights in the universe. We thank Thee for the lives of great saints and prophets in the past, who have revealed to us that we can stand up amid the problems and difficulties and trials of life and not give in. We thank Thee for our foreparents, who’ve given us something in the midst of the darkness of exploitation and oppression to keep going. And grant that we will go on with the proper faith and the proper determination of will, so that we will be able to make a creative contribution to this world and in our lives. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen.

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WEEKLY PRAYER: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Today’s prayer is from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a pastoral prayer recorded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956:

We thank thee, O God, for the spiritual nature of man. We are in nature but we live above nature. Help us never to let anybody or any condition to pull us so low as to cause us to hate. Give us strength to love our enemies and to do good to those who despitefully use us and persecute us. We thank thee for thy church, founded upon thy Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon thee. Help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity. Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace. Help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God’s children, Black, White, Red, and Yellow will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.

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