Dear Father in the eternal heaven, may all creation admire and acknowledge your goodness, greatness, and grace this day. Your ways are above our methods. Your thoughts are above our wisdom. You are the truth and yet always remain a mystery to us. Your approach to things is different. You are both engineer and artist. You test us and desire that we believe in the midst of a complex world. Help us to past the tests that you have planned for us today. Help us gain from these tests the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength they were designed to develop in us. Keep us from wasting the potential good in each test. Thank you Messiah Jesus for dying for our sins, and coming back alive that we might be declared righteous before the eternal throne and gain from it grace and not condemnation. Thank you for opening the treasure rooms of heaven to us and making it possible for us to be adopted as your brothers and sisters. Your mercy is beyond measure and your sacrifice greater than our greatest expressions of it Lord thank you for your love. Amen

January 1 - Prayer to know how to pray

Dear heavenly Father, I am thankful that you are greater than my prayers. You know the concerns of my heart and respond to them even when I lack the words and the discipline to ask. Your love for me is infinite. Please teach me to pray as I ought to pray. Give to me a hunger and thirst for prayer that will allow me to know your presence, power, and peace. Deepen my understanding of prayer and my sense of need for prayer. Save me from the pride that would keep me from prayer. Lord, we desperately need your intervention. As individuals we need greater faith, hope, and love; as families we need greater peace and harmony; as churches we need more of your power and love; as communities we need greater wisdom in understanding the common good; as a nation we need insight into how to establish a just republic; as a world we need to hear, understand, and believe your gospel. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Amen