Prayer in the New Covenant | Hebrews 13:18-21
Brian Hedges | March 23, 2025
Let’s turn in our Bibles this morning to Hebrews 13.
There’s a story that Leonard Ravenhill, the twentieth-century revivalist and preacher, used to tell about a man who carried jewels in his pocket. He would carry a ruby, a sapphire, maybe an emerald. He’d carry these jewels around in his pocket, and every so often as he was going out on a walk, he would take a jewel out, he would hold it up in the sunlight, and he would just admire the light shining through the different facets of that jewel. He would turn it, he would look at the different aspects of it.
I’ve always thought of that as a wonderful illustration of what we do with the truth of Scripture when we hold up a passage of Scripture and we seek to see the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ shining through this prism of Scripture, giving us new insight into God’s great saving plan and his love for us.
That’s especially true of the passage I want us to study together this morning, Hebrews 13. We’re going to be reading Hebrews 13:18-21, with a special focus on verses 20-21.
Now, we are in the home stretch of this series. There’s just one more message after today, and I think next week will be number thirty-two in this series, stretched out over about eighteen months as we’ve been slowly working through this letter together. If you’ve been here through this series, you know that this letter is addressed to Jewish believers who are being tempted to forsake Christ. They are facing pressure for their faith. So the call of this letter is for them to endure, to hold fast the confession of the faith, firm to the end, to not lose their confidence, to endure and persevere, and to keep believing in Jesus, because Jesus Christ as the great mediator of the new covenant, the one who has come as the great and final High Priest and has offered the final, definitive sacrifice for sins, this Jesus is better—better than all that has come before. It’s in light of this great new covenant work in the person and work of Jesus Christ that the author exhorts his readers to continue in the faith.
We get to this last paragraph, and almost the very last verses of this letter, and the author turns to prayer, and he asks his readers to pray for him, and then he in turn prays for them in verses 20-21. It’s the great benediction of this letter. It’s really something like a prayer wish. In fact, these will be familiar words to you because we use these often as the benediction in our worship. It’s a wonderful passage of Scripture that as we hold up to the light of God’s glory and his grace today will, I believe, yield some fresh insights into the nature of prayer and of the Christian life.
Let’s read it, Hebrews 13:18-21. It says,
“Pray for us, for we are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things. I urge you the more earnestly to do this in order that I may be restored to you the sooner.
“Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
So this passage begins with a request for prayer in verses 18-19, and we get the sense here that there’s a personal relationship between this author and his readers. We don’t know who the author was. Many throughout church history have thought this was the apostle Paul, but he never names himself in this letter. Others have thought Apollos or Barnabas or even others. We don’t know exactly who it is, but we do know that this person had a deep love for these believers. He wanted to be reunited with them, and he urges them to pray for him. Then he in turn prays for them in verses 20-21, and his prayer is really a model for us. It is a prayer that, in many ways, summarizes the themes of this letter and applies them to the prayer lives of believers.
I want us to note four aspects of this prayer, drawn from verses 20-21, and we can summarize these with these four words that all start with G:
1. God
2. Gospel
3. Grace
4. Glory
1. God: The One Who Hears Our Prayer
Number one: God, the God of peace, the one who hears our prayer. Look at verse 20. It says, “Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant…”
No request yet; he’s just addressing God as the God of peace. Now, this is a title or a name or a description of God that we find several times in Scripture. In fact, it’s only used elsewhere by the apostle Paul in about four different places where Paul addresses God as the God of peace. So that’s perhaps one reason why some have thought Paul has written this letter.
But it’s a description of God as the God who seeks and pursues and achieves reconciliation with us as sinners. This is the God of peace, the God who is disposed and inclined in his heart towards us, and he seeks peaceful relationship with us.
It’s not a throwaway title. We have to understand who this God is and the many and varied descriptions of God and of God’s character. We know from Scripture that God is a holy God. We know that God is a just God, that he is a righteous God. He is a God who punishes sin. He is a God who the Psalms say is angry with the wicked every day. This is a God who created the world and all the creatures in this world; the human beings in this world rebelled against this God, justly deserving now his wrath, his anger, his judgment, his displeasure. This is God as he is portrayed often in Scriptures. It’s not all that the Scriptures say about God, but certainly the Scriptures portray God as this God of holiness and of justice.
So the big question, the pressing question of the Bible, is how can this God—the God who is good, holy, righteous, just, and who hates sin—how can this God have relationship with rebellious human beings? How can he have a relationship with us? The great answer of Scripture is through the reconciling work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Because this God wants relationship with us, he pursues it, and he initiates it himself.
Now, just as an illustration, sometimes when I’m doing marriage counseling and I’m talking with couples about dealing with conflict, conflict resolution, and so on, we’ll talk about the way conflict tends to happen, and usually there’s some degree of escalation. You know, it kind of begins with a minor disagreement, but pretty quickly couples are getting into, “Well, you always do this,” and, “You always say this,” and, you know, “Your mother does this and your dad does this.” Before you know it, you have the whole history of the relationship with this one little argument, and there’s been no attempt at reconciliation. So one of the things I’ll often counsel is that you have to deescalate, and you have to turn the volume down, and you have to do what we call a repair attempt, where you reach out in some way to try to bridge the gap between you and your spouse. Sometimes that can be even a nonverbal thing where, you know, a husband puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder and then reaffirms his love for her. When there is that kind of repair attempt, things deescalate and oftentimes there can be reconciliation.
In our relationship with God, God is the one who makes the repair attempt. God is the one who reaches out to us to reconcile us to himself. He’s always the one who takes the first step. He’s always the one who takes initiative, because of his great love for us, because he wants a relationship with his creatures. And that’s why he is called here the God of peace.
He is the God who seeks this peace, who desires this peace, and who offers this peace, and he does this through the work of his son, Jesus Christ. We read in Colossians 1 that “in him [that is, in Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” It’s through the cross that we have peace with God, but the cross was God’s idea. It was God’s initiative. God is the one who seeks reconciliation with us, and so he is the God of peace.
That peace, then, has both an objective and a subjective dimension. There is a sense in which we can be at peace with God because of what Christ has done for us, maybe before we even fully experience the subjective emotions of peace. Romans 5:1 says, “Having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is what we have. We are in a state of peace because of what Christ has done for us and because we are reconciled to God.
But there is also a subjective experience of that peace in our lives. When we come to God in prayer, when we lay our burdens down at his feet, when we experience that reconciliation and our hearts are drawn near to God in his grace and in his mercy and our hearts begin to be flooded with that experience of peace, knowing that I’m right with God, that I have a relationship with God, that I’m loved by God, that I’m embraced with God—this is the God who hears and answers prayer, and this is how the author begins this prayer wish, this benediction. “Now may the God of peace…” He’s reminding them of who this God is.
Brothers and sisters, we need to remember this in our relationship with God. There is no real prayer without this, without an understanding of who God is and that this God wants and desires a relationship with us. Sometimes, you will find in your Christian life that the times when you need to pray the most are maybe the times when you feel inclined to pray the least, and the reason is because you’ve lost sight of the character of this God, that this is a God who desires relationship with you.
In fact, if you’re conscious of sin, if your conscience is bothering you because of some departure, because of some sin, because of some rebellion, because of some indulgence of the flesh, because of some lack of faith, you’ve drifted away from God, you’re not in close fellowship with God, there’s something in your heart that doesn’t want to go because you have forgotten who he is. We need to be reminded he is the God of peace, he is the God who has initiated a relationship, who pursues reconciliation, and has gone to great cost in order to reconcile us to himself.
This God is like the father in the parable of the prodigal son. When that father sees his son on the horizon, he is there ready with open arms, ready to throw a party, throw the best robe on him, put the best ring on his finger. He’s not making the son grovel. Right? He’s not making the son prove his worth. He loves his son. He’s ready to receive his son. His whole heart is a heart that wants to be reconciled, and this is the God who we serve.
I love the words of that old hymn-writer William Gatsby in a hymn that’s called “Mercy Speaks by Jesus’ Blood.” There’s a line in that hymn that goes like this:
“Peace of conscience, peace with God,
We obtain through Jesus’ blood.
Jesus’ blood speaks solid rest;
We believe, and we are blessed.”
That’s what you and I can experience: peace of conscience and peace with God through the blood of Jesus Christ because this is the God of peace.
Listen, this peace is not really the absence of conflict. This peace is shalom. It is that flourishing well-being, fullness of life and joy that God intended for his creation and that God, through Christ and through the Spirit, is now bringing into our hearts and lives and someday will bring into the new creation itself. He is the God of peace. This is the God who hears our prayer.bWe have to start with this, understanding who this God is that we speak to.
2. Gospel: The New Covenant Basis for Prayer
But notice also the gospel in this passage, which gives us what we might call the new covenant basis for prayer. You see this also in verse 20. It says, “Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant…”
Now right there, in those three phrases, you have the theology of the gospel and the theology of the book of Hebrews compressed into just a few words. Notice here, right at the heart of it is the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus. There’s the resurrection. This is the resurrected Christ, the one who not only took our sins on the cross, but he rose in triumph over death on the third day, and he now ever lives in heaven to intercede for us, ascended to the Father, seated at the right hand of God. The resurrected, enthroned ascended Christ, who there at God’s right hand is our high priest, our advocate; he is the risen Christ, but he’s also the Christ who shed his blood for us on the cross as the great shepherd of the sheep and the one who shed his blood, what is here called the blood of the eternal covenant.
Just think about the imagery here that’s used for Jesus. He’s called the great shepherd of the sheep. It is one of, I think, the most endearing images of Christ that you find anywhere in Scripture. Can you think of an image that combines strength and humility and gentleness? You’ve got the strength and the might, the manly dimensions of this shepherd who’s able to fight off the wolves. He’s living out in the wild with his sheep, protecting and leading and guiding the sheep. This is a strong person, and yet he’s gentle with the sheep. He’s gentle with the lamb. There’s a humility to that shepherd role. Those two things together, combined, describe Jesus.
Just think of how the New Testament uses this language of Jesus. In fact, Jesus himself says, “I am the good shepherd, and I lay down my life for the sheep,” in John 10. He is the shepherd who knows us and who loves us and who calls us by name. But he’s the shepherd who has shed his blood for us, and the author here calls this the blood of the eternal covenant.
What is that eternal covenant? What does he have in mind here? I think this connects to the emphasis earlier in this letter on the new covenant. You’ll perhaps remember that Hebrews really talks about two covenants. There was a first covenant and a second covenant, an old covenant and a new covenant.
The first covenant was the covenant that God made with the children of Israel at the base of Mount Sinai, mediated by Moses, when God gave them the Ten Commandments, God gave them the law. So here is a holy God who has redeemed his people out of Egypt, and he gives them a covenant. He brings them into relationship with himself. Really, everything that you read in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy has to do with that first covenant.
But listen, this was a legal covenant. It was a covenant that demanded something of God’s people. He gave them his law, and it was only through this strict regimen of cleansing laws and through priests and all these sacrifices—it was only through that that they could have God dwelling among them in their midst. That was all part of this old covenant.
But Hebrews is telling us that Jesus Christ has now come as our great and final high priest and that he’s offered this once-and-for-all sacrifice that is fully fulfilled. Everything that happened in that old covenant, it’s brought to fulfillment. It’s brought to completion. And Jesus Christ, through his death on the cross, has inaugurated or begun a new covenant.
So we read in Hebrews 8:6, “As it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.” Better promises—promises that do more than just provide external regulations and cleansing and temporary sacrifices, promises that actually lead to the complete and full pardon of all of our sins and the renewal of our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Hebrews 9:15 says, “He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance.” That’s why it’s an eternal covenant. This is a covenant that replaces the old, and it leads us into this eternal and lasting relationship with God.
Now listen; this is the gospel in Hebrews, expressed in terms of the new covenant work of Jesus Christ, but this is not just theology. This isn’t just something to kind of tuck away in the notes in your Bible. This is the basis of your ongoing relationship with God.
You might think of it like this. This covenant is like a legal contract that gives us the right to come to God. It opens the door so that we can approach God. Hebrews 10 talks about it like this. Hebrews 10:19-22 says,
“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain that is through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith and our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”
You see what it’s saying? It’s saying that we’ve got confidence because we have the right to enter into God’s presence, to draw near to God, because of what Christ has done as our priest.
But it’s not just that legal right. The gospel is also what fuels our prayer life. So, just as your car has to be refueled every so often, you have to fill it up with gas—for that engine to run, you have to have fuel. It has to have something to burn. In the same way, your Christian life has to be fueled by something, and it’s fueled by the gospel. It’s fueled by this constant, continual remembrance of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, of seeing what he has done for us. That’s where the power for living the Christian life comes from. We get it through the gospel, Christ’s death and resurrection for our sins.
When that begins to take hold of our hearts, it produces a kind of confidence that will keep us coming back to the Lord again and again and again. It will keep us persevering in our faith, pressing on. It will give us the strength to put our sins to death. It will renew our faith and our trust in God because we keep coming back to God’s great love for us as expressed in the death and resurrection of Christ, believing that with all of our hearts. Trusting in that finished work is what gives us confidence.
Charles Wesley put it so well in his famous hymn “And Can It Be.” There’s a line that goes like this:
“No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus and all in him is mine.
Alive in him, my living head,
And clothed with righteousness divine.”
Now listen to this.
“Bold, I approach the eternal throne
And claim the crown through Christ my own.
Amazing love! how can it be
That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
You see, the gospel so gripped his heart that it produced boldness and confidence in his relationship with God.
I would venture to say, friends, that you and I will never have a vibrant prayer life until you’re gripped by the gospel in just that way, until you know that you have the legal right to a relationship with God because of what Jesus has done, and until you are regularly, daily fueled by that good news, by that gospel, so that you draw near to God again and again.
3. Grace: The Primary Focus of Prayer
What is it that we then come to God for? We haven’t even gotten into the petition of the prayer. We haven’t even looked at the request yet, but here it is in verse 21, and it’s what we can call grace. It is the primary focus of prayer. He prays that this “God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, will equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight.”
I think this is teaching us something about prayer, that prayer is not merely asking for things; it is about asking God for his grace to do his will.
Now, there is a dimension of prayer where we ask God to meet our daily needs. So almost every day I wake up and I pray the Lord's Prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” That’s good to pray. Jesus taught us to pray that way. You should pray that way, and it’s right for us to bring those needs to God in prayer.
But that doesn’t exhaust prayer. Prayer also, and especially when you read the New Testament letters, it’s about praying that God would do something in our hearts that would enable us to fulfill the calling that he’s put on our lives, would enable us to do his will, to live in obedience to him. Prayer is all about laying hold of that grace that God gives us through his Spirit.
Now the word “grace” is not used here in verse 21, but the word is used earlier in this letter in the context of prayer, in Hebrews 4:16, where the author says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need.”
That’s what we pray for. We pray for grace to help us in the time of need. And everything in your Christian life that God asks of you, that God requires of you, that God commands you to do, every act of obedience, every act of faith or of love or endurance, every pursuit of holiness, all worship, all praise—all of it is dependent on God doing something in us. It’s dependent on God’s grace.
Listen, this is part of what is promised in the new covenant. Do you remember what the great prophet Ezekiel said in Ezekiel 36? He said that “I will give you a new heart.” These are the words of God. “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you.” He causes us to walk in his statutes. He does something in us by putting his Spirit and his grace into our hearts.
I think this has real practical implications for how we pray. It means that when we find ourselves faced with temptation or we find ourselves faced with obstacles or we find ourselves faced with challenges to our Christian life and we know that God is calling us to do something, it means that we need to seek him for the grace to actually do what he has called us to do.
This is the only thing that sustains us in the Christian life. It’s God’s grace. You don’t sustain yourself. You don’t keep yourself a Christian. God keeps you, God sustains you.
There’s a great illustration of this from The Pilgrim’s Progress that I’ve used many times. I use this about once a year, and I checked. It was last March, okay? So it’s been a year, so I can use it again. For some of you maybe it’ll be new. It’s that wonderful scene where Christian comes to the Interpreter’s house, and the Interpreter guides him through these different rooms in the house, and he comes to this one room where he sees a fire in the fireplace that’s burning, but there’s a man who is throwing water on that fire. Yet, in spite of all the water that’s thrown on the fire, the fire continues to grow hotter and higher. It’s burning brighter and with more intensity and with more heat. And Christian is kind of mystified by this. What does this mean?
The Interpreter tells him, “This fire is the work of grace in the heart of the Christian.” And the man with the pail of water throwing water on the fire is the devil who’s trying to extinguish that grace in the heart.
“Well, why is it that the fire continues to grow hotter and higher?”
And the Interpreter takes him to the other side of this fireplace and shows him that there’s another man, and that man is throwing oil onto the fire continually. And he says, “This is the Holy Spirit, who with the oil of his grace maintains the work already begun in the heart.”
This is what Christ does. This is what the Spirit of God does in our hearts and lives. He’s continually giving us grace to fuel everything God requires of us in the Christian life and to sustain us.
Listen, when you think about what the Christian life involves in terms of the obedience, the virtue, and the graces that God requires of us, all of it is dependent on God’s work within us. He calls us to love. We’re to love one another. We are to abound in love for one another. Yes, but we love because he first loved us. He calls us to faith, to an enduring faith, a persevering faith, continually to believe in Jesus Christ; but faith is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8). He calls us to repentance. Does God repent for us? We’re called to repent. We have to do the turn. We turn from sin, yes. But repentance is the gift of God (2 Timothy 2:25).
That’s true with everything that God requires. Holiness—we are to pursue holiness, Hebrews 12:14. Yes, but holiness is the work of the Holy Spirit within us. He’s the one who gives us sanctification. In fact, that’s given to us in Christ. And renewal and perseverance and endurance and hope—all of these things are commanded, but they’re also supplied by God through his grace. He is the one who works in us to will and to work for his good pleasure, even as we are commanded to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2).
I resonate with these words of the old hymn-writer. Maybe you resonate with these words, too.
“O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, Lord; take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.”
Do you ever feel that? Do you ever feel that your heart is prone to wander far from the God you love? What’s going to keep you? What’s going to sustain you? What’s going to keep you loving and believing and hoping and enduring and pursuing holiness and repenting and turning to him again and again and again? It’s only this, that God equips you with everything good that you might do his will, working in you what is pleasing in his sight. It’s grace.
Listen, this is what prayer is for. Prayer, in Calvin’s words, is the chief exercise of faith. It is the hand by which we lay hold of the grace of God given to us in the gospel, mediated to us through Christ and through the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and lives, the grace that keeps us enduring in the faith.
4. Glory: The Ultimate Purpose of Prayer
So we’ve seen the God of peace, the one to whom we pray. The gospel is the new covenant basis upon which we pray. Grace is the primary focus of prayer. Then there’s one more, glory. And here we have the ultimate purpose of prayer.
Look at the end of verse 21. “...through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Prayer, worship, the whole Christian life: it is ultimately about glorifying God. You see this over and again in the benedictions, the prayers of the New Testament. They end with doxology. They end with some ascription of worth and of glory to God. “From him and through him and to him are all things; to him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36). Or this one, Ephesians 3:21: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church through Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever, amen.”
Over and over again there’s an ascription of praise and glory to God. And listen, those aren’t throwaway words. It’s not just the formula that you attach to the end of your prayer. This is, instead, the throbbing heartbeat of New Testament worship, because they had been so captured by the grace of God given to them through the work of Jesus Christ that there was something in their heart that just welled up in praise to God.
I was thinking this morning about the very first time I ever told Holly that I loved her. It was in 1995, so almost thirty years ago now. And, you know, we had been close for a while. We’d been very good friends, really best friends for several years, and there had just been this growing, deepening relationship. There was a real deep friendship and an affection and kind of a blossoming romance. But, you know, I didn’t premeditate. I didn’t just think one day, “I’m going to tell her today.” It just kind of burst out. Right? I wasn’t even planning it. It just kind of came out as we were talking one day, because it was there in my heart.
There’s something like that about worship. There’s something about that in prayer, that when we have tasted deeply the grace of God given to us in Christ, when we have really gotten this sense in our heart and our conscience that “I am reconciled to God because of what Christ has done for me; this God loves me; this God who is my Father; this God who took the initiative, who pursued me, who called me, who chased me down in my sin, who raised me out of spiritual death, gave me spiritual life. There’s something in me that has to say glory to God. How can I not praise him? How can I not love him? How can I not worship him?” It is the overflow of a heart that loves God.
So we’ve seen these four dimensions to prayer: the God to whom we pray, the gospel which is the basis on which we pray, the grace for which we pray, and the glory of God, the ultimate purpose of prayer.
As we reflect on these things this morning, I just want to end by saying let’s apply this great privilege of prayer, and also recognizing our deep dependence on God and his grace. Let’s apply this in two ways.
(1) Let’s apply it individually in our personal prayer lives. Recognize that you’re not praying to some impersonal force. You’re praying to the God of peace who reconciles himself to us through his Son, who desires relationship with you, who pursues relationship with you, the God on whom you are dependent for every ounce of grace for living the Christian life. And on the basis of the gospel, pursue in your personal life that kind of gospel-oriented, confident prayer.
(2) But brothers and sisters, let’s also apply it corporately together, in our prayers together, in our worship together, in the prayers that we pray for one another. Think about your small group. Think about maybe the list of people that you’re praying for regularly. Think about the times when you’re gathering in smaller groups of people together in the church. Let’s pray like this to this God, this God of peace, to this God who reconciles us to himself through Christ, and to this God who equips us with everything we need to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight. And in doing so, may we give glory to him forever and ever, amen. Let’s pray together.
Lord, we thank you this morning for the great privilege that is given to us in and through Christ, the privilege of access to you, that we can draw near to God, that we can come to the throne of grace, and that we can come with confidence, knowing that this is a blood-bought privilege, that we have a right to your presence, a right that is not based on anything that we’ve done. It’s not a right that’s found in ourselves. It is a right that is based on the work of Jesus Christ, who has inaugurated this covenant and has given us this right and this privilege and this access into your presence and now promises by grace to meet all of our needs.
Lord, I pray that this would take deep root in our hearts, that we would remember this and live by it and apply it this week in moments when our hearts seem to have grown cold, that we would remember how much you love us and that we would remember what Christ has done for us, and that we would with confidence come back to the throne of grace.
Lord, we pray that you would help us apply it together as a church in our prayer together, in our worship together, that we would worship with this heart full of affection and love for you, spiritual affections of love and of trust and of hope that are grounded in these deep truths of the gospel, and that in and through it all we’d give you glory and praise.
Lord, as we come to the table today, may the table be for us a visible and a tangible reminder of what Christ has done. Lord, as we continue to sing together, may we sing with hearts that are full as we think of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. Lord, we confess our great need for you today. So, Lord, draw near to us now and be glorified. We pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
