Welcome to our service today. It is great to have you here and we would love to invite you to stay after the service and join us for tea and coffee.

In Luke 22 we read “He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed.”Having just been betrayed by a close friend and knowing that His accusers were coming to take Him to His death, Jesus got alone to pray. How He prayed that night gives us insight into how we should pray when we experience times of deep anguish and pain.

Firstly we must acknowledge that ultimately, God is in control of our situation. The first thing that Jesus did when He began to pray was to acknowledge that God was ultimately in control of His situation. Secondly we need to accept the fact that God may not answer our prayers in the way we think He will or should! God sees the bigger picture and we need to trust that He has our best interests at heart even if we can’t see it. We also need to humble ourselves to accept His answer. Prayer does change things but we need to remember that as well as that, prayer changes us. Fourthly we need to leave the result of our prayers up to God. Jesus left the result of His prayer up to His Father. He left Himself completely at the will of His Father. Lastly we need to keep on praying. In verse 43 we read that Jesus kept on praying. I know I give up on praying too early a lot of times! As I wrote earlier prayer changes us. The more time we spend in prayer the deeper our relationship with our Heavenly Father will be.

With love & blessings,

Sandra