For participants in the AWAKE AND PRAY initiative, you are invited to pray some or all of the following intercessions on a daily basis.
For our own sins
Leader: Mt. 10:33 “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven.”
Intercessor: Lord, we may not have denied you by what we have said, but have we denied you by what we have failed to say? Have we hidden in the shadows, when taking a stand in the light was needed? Have we given in to cowardice and failed to stand up for you and your Church? Have we compromised the Truth of the Gospel because of the pressure to be politically correct?
Lord, for the times we have not acknowledged you before others or denied you by our silence, we repent and we pray:
Leader: Rom. 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds”.
Intercessor: Lord we have allowed our thinking to be shaped by the values of this world. We have sought creature comforts and expended time and energy in pursuit of material wealth rather than seeking the treasures of the kingdom of God. In raising our children we have placed the highest value on the best education to acquire the best job to make the most money to have the most comfortable life rather than placing the highest value on knowing, loving, and serving God.
Lord, for the ways we have conformed to worldly thinking and failed to be conformed to the mind of Christ, we repent and we pray:
Leader: Rev. 3: 15-16 “I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
Intercessor: Lord, we have tried to live with one foot in the Kingdom of God and one foot in the kingdom of this world. Our commitment to you is half-hearted. We give you only a small portion of our time, our energy, and our attention. We pray when we need something, but ignore you at other times. We give our leftover time and resources to the Church and those in need.
Lord, for treating you and your people with indifference, we repent and we pray:
For sins of our church
Leader: 1 Pet. 2:9. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
Intercessor: Lord, for our failure as a Church to be set apart for holiness and to stand as a sign of contradiction; for priests, pastors, ministers, bishops and church leaders who have given into the sexual sins of this age and the harming of our children; for our failure as the laity to be witnesses in the workplace, the marketplace, our neighborhoods and our families; for compartmentalizing our faith to Sunday church attendance; and for our spiritual sloth as lay men and women,
We repent and pray:
Leader: 1 Cor. 1: 10. Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.
Intercessor: Lord, we have become a church crippled by quarreling, dissension, and factions. We declare our loyalty only to leaders who align with our narrow way of thinking and we publicly criticize our bishops and our pope. We argue and even divide ourselves over the way to celebrate the holy sacrifice of the mass. And we criticize the beliefs and practices of other Christian denominations and assemblies rather than joining with our separated brothers and sisters to work towards unity in the Body of Christ.
Lord, for the scandal of disunity and for tolerating and even promoting a spirit of division, we repent and pray:
Leader: 2 Tim. 4: 2. “…preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching.”
Intercessor: Lord, for our Church’s failure to preach The Word of God with power; for avoiding controversial teachings out of fear of alienating people; for diluting God’s Word to make it more acceptable; for not sharing the Good News of the Gospel because our culture says we are imposing our religion on others; for being more worried about filling the pews and filling the coffers than filling our congregations with the Holy Spirit,
We repent and we pray:
For sins of our nation
Leader: Phil. 2:10-11.” …at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Intercessor: Lord, in our society your name is so often used in vain to curse rather than to confess your Lordship. And our nation bends its knee to the idols of power, wealth, pleasure, and honor. Pressure groups make concerted efforts to purge you from our national consciousness, memory, and history. We remove representations of the Ten Commandments from our public squares, and eliminate public prayer in our schools. We even stopped tracking time according to the birth of Christ, simply calling it the Common Era.
Lord, for diminishing, ignoring, and even renouncing your Lordship over our nation, and for offenses against your holy name, we repent and we pray:
Leader: I Jn. 2: 3-4. “And by this we may be sure that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says ‘I know him but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”
Intercessor: Lord, our nation blatantly disregards your laws and commands. Before they are born, we destroy babies that are flawed, unwanted, or just inconvenient; we flaunt our sinful behavior in movies, music, and entertainment; we excuse our adulterous relationships in the name of self-fulfillment; and we ignore your commandment to honor Sunday as the Lord’s Day, meant for rest from our preoccupation with the things of this world to remember the eternal life to which you have called us.
Lord, for our corporate disobedience of your commandments, we repent and we pray:
Leader: Gen. 1:27. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Intercessor: Lord, our country has rejected your design for us as created in your image and likeness. We claim the right to choose our own gender and redefine marriage and family; we parade our sexual sins publicly, scandalizing our children; we tout our achievements in medicine, technology, and science with sinful pride as if we have the power to conquer the evils of this world without you; we worship the false idol of individualism where we decide what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is good and what is evil.
Lord, for returning to the Original Sin of our parents by acting as our own god, we repent and we pray:
