Tag Archive for: prayer

Jesus’ powerful invitation

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Dear Christian Friend,

Happy New Year in Jesus!

It’s customary to use the turn of the year to celebrate the Lord’s blessings in the past calendar year and look to our Savior for his favor in the next year. Each January WELS does the same through WELS Connection, the “Your gifts, God’s blessings” annual report, and by sending a letter like this one with the opportunity to support Christ’s gospel ministry. You are welcome to do that, but I want to focus on something even more impactful: our Lord’s invitation to ask him to send workers into his harvest field.

Jesus—who came to seek and to save lost sinners—told his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field” (Matthew 9:37,38).

Let’s take our Lord at his word and boldly ask that his gracious will be done. We think of our called worker shortage—the many congregations with pastor, teacher, and principal vacancies and the many souls at home and abroad who need to hear about Christ’s love. Let us ask Jesus to help us encourage women and men—young and old—to consider serving as ministers of the gospel. Our ministerial education schools have aging campuses requiring costly capital projects. Let us ask our Savior to move us to support capital improvements. Our synod has just begun an effort to open 100 new home missions in ten years and we are expanding our world mission efforts. Let us ask our Lord to bless our gospel outreach. And let us pray that God blesses our work to equip members for Christian living—evangelism, discipleship, stewardship, etc.

While we are at it, let’s pray that every member of our church body is enabled by the Holy Spirit to eagerly worship each week, study the Bible daily, give generously, and boldly witness Christ to everyone they meet. May the Lord open the eyes of our nation’s citizens to his saving love in Christ. May he protect and support the small minorities of Christians in countries around the world so that more people know him through their testimony.

Does it seem like we’re asking too much? Know that Jesus is already answering our prayers and doing his incredible work through us. He’s built a theological education center in Vietnam and grown the Hmong Fellowship Church from 55,000 to 145,000 members. He has prospered the online ministry of Academia Cristo to reach millions of precious souls across every country in Latin America; a synod has now started on the continent, and they have a goal of starting 1,000 gospel groups by 2028. He has increased enrollment in our Lutheran schools with more non-member families looking to us to provide a quality, Christ-based education for their children.

As we work together in 2024 let us ask our faithful Lord to hear our prayers for the salvation of souls and to ask him to use us according to his gracious will to support those efforts. If you’d like to join us in thanking him for his amazing love by offering a gift to support WELS Mission and Ministry, which is all the work we will do together as a synod this year and beyond, you can do that by clicking the button below. Thank you.

Yours in Christ,
Kurt Lueneburg
WELS Director of Christian Giving

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Prayer: We praise you, our gracious God, that 2023 was another year filled with your wonderful blessings for our synod’s work of sharing Christ’s love with others. We thank you for the dedication of a theological education center for the Hmong Fellowship Church in Vietnam, for the successful launch of WELS Home Missions’ 100 Missions in 10 Years effort, and for declaring fellowship with the Obadiah Lutheran Synod in Uganda and affirming fellowship with Iglesia Cristo WELS Internacional. We ask your Holy Spirit to guide and prosper our work for you in this new year. Amen.

I’ll Pray For…

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One of the great uses I’ve found for technology is creating to-do lists. Shopping lists. Honey-do lists. Grocery lists. Project lists. And perhaps most important…prayer lists. We’ve all experienced the challenge of a good prayer life. It’s not for lack of things to pray for, but time, discipline, and remembering everything you want to carry to the Lord in prayer when you are ready to pray.

I’ve found a good routine of praying in the car on the way to work. I have a 30 minute drive in which I listen through the Daily Devotion from the WELS Mobile app as well as the Through My Bible series. Following that I have some quiet time in prayer. What really helped me during that time was being able to have my prayer list available. Trying to keep things digital, as I am want to do, I went in search of a good system to have that list with me in an easy to use and maintainable format. My requirements were:

  1. The list tool had to be easy to use. It’s important to have quick entry as prayer items occur. If it’s hard to get them into your system you will put it off, and perhaps forget before you get it onto a list.
  2. Whatever tool I use needs to be on multiple platforms and operating systems (Windows, Mac, phone, tablet, etc.). So whatever computing device I’m using or will use in the future I won’t have any trouble sticking with the same tool.
  3. The tool needs to support recurring items that can be checked and unchecked like any good list tool. This would allow me to cycle through items.
  4. The tool should be easy to use in the car by simply opening an app and have it appear without multiple taps which would be potentially unsafe.

What I decided on was a simple checklist within the Trello project management tool. I have a “card” called “Pray” and on it two simple checklists called Weekly and Special. My weekly list has a rotation of items like family, co-workers, spouse, kids, etc. The special list has those items that come up that may not be regular items but certainly things I want to take to the Lord, like a friend’s illness, relationship issues, special tasks or projects, etc. As I pray through the list a simple tap on a check box marks it as done once I reach my destination. Be careful to obey prevailing traffic laws regarding interacting with electronic devices. I’m hoping that voice activated check lists are in the near future as well.

Other lists you might consider would be OneNote, Evernote, and Google Keep. These are all cross platform and would work well for simple checklists. The point is to find a system that will put those things you want to pray for in front of you at the time you want to pray. I’ve found that just having the list available and in a system I use everyday anyway is a nice reminder to pray. We all need that!

So I just wanted to share my experiences with a system that seems to work well for me as I try to remove as many barriers as possible for a consistent prayer life. If we talk at some point in the future and I commit to praying for you or something that comes up in our conversation, know that I have a spot ready for it on my digital list.