Praying Because We Mean It: Your Will Be Done on Earth, As It Is in Heaven

Prayer of Intercession for Our World

Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed be your name.

God of Wisdom, quite often these days, we don’t know what to pray or how to begin to make sense of the way the world is.

If we used as our prayer list the news headlines, or our news feeds, or the rapid fire crises lighting up social media, it would take forever to pray for all that worries us, or moves us to compassion, or makes us angry.

Forgive us when we give up and when the messiness of our world so gets us down, that praying for the world is the last thing we think of.

Eternal God, yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory. In the radiating light of the risen Christ, help us to pray by standing on that rock solid confession, Your will be done.

Response: “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

God of the nations, all over the world millions of people are on the move. Those seeking asylum from persecution and danger to life, refugees fleeing war and disasters of flood, earthquake, and drought. In seeking to offer help and refuge wherever it is needed, Your will be done

Response: “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Creator God, where your world is being wasted by stripped forests, polluted waters, destroyed habitats of people and creatures, the silencing of birdsong and depletion of our oceans, help us to find the know-how and the political will to change things back towards flourishing, justice and hopefulness. Your will be done.  

 Response: “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Generous God of Love, the cost of living crisis means so many things – hunger and no food, cold and not enough heating, loneliness and few friends, anxiety about how to make ends meet, fear for our children’s future and our own as we grow older. Lord persuade our hearts away from the possessive pronoun mine, and towards the shared pronoun our. Your will be done. 

Response: “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

God of all hope, as we pray for the world, its wealth and all its peoples, teach us to live wisely and generously. By your grace enable us to behave and act with determined faithfulness to follow Jesus; by your Spirit give us words and passions to pray prayers of defiant trust; fire our imagination to think up new things and perform here in our place, gestures of decisive hopefulness. 

Response: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, for Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, forever, AMEN.