We Stand With and for Every Home
Over the past two weeks, FamilyLife has published and shared two articles intended to help families process recent tragic events. We also participated in #BlackOutTuesday on social media.
The heart behind both of these represents that we as an organization will keep learning and lamenting, while pursuing oneness, reconciliation, and unity in a gospel-centered way.
During this time, our nation aches through a deep struggle that makes us long for the Lord’s return and all things to be made new. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”
Silence as an organization does not communicate FamilyLife’s long-standing vision of “every home a godly home.” We’re all in a space of learning how to engage in a way that communicates trust, community, and Christ’s love to all families, all homes.
I urge all of us to be firmly committed to learning, listening, and growing in our understanding of how to engage one another in a way that honors everyone as God’s image bearers.
We all know that the home can be a place where we experience God with depth and intimacy. Long conversations around the kitchen table and times where we get on our knees as a family are often the means God uses for the soul-formation He wants to do in us. Let’s be unified in gathering our families during this time.
I invite you to persistently go before God’s throne to pray. Below are some prayer prompts from Scripture to get you started.
- Confess and lament.
- In humility—confess our own sin, the sins of our nation, and their effect on the Body of Christ.
- The sin of racism that continues in our systems and in the hearts of people.
- Our indifference, our lack of unity, and our lack of compassion within the Body of Christ.
- Lament—the evil, the injustice, the hurt, the fruit of the evil one who came to steal, destroy, and kill.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanses us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
“Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known” (Jeremiah 33:3).
- Pray for injustice to end.
- That all would experience that they are made in God’s image—from conception to death. All humans have infinite value and therefore all should experience this relationally and in our institutions and societal fabric.
- Pray for the economic, government, and justice systems—that they would express God’s heart for His created people.
- Pray for our leaders at every level of our country.
- For wisdom and compassion in their decisions.
- That they would lead in a manner reflecting value for human dignity and life.
- Pray for renewal and revival.
- For God’s Spirit to move powerfully, transformationally, broadly, throughout our country, in our churches, and among His people.
- Pray for His Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.
- Pray for fruit among us, His people, that expresses this movement of His Spirit.
- Pray for unity.
- Among the body of Christ.
- For solidarity of expression in love and righteousness.
- That we would lean in to one another as followers of Jesus to learn, understand, and empathize. That we would be the visible answer to Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-23.
Please know I am praying for you, your home, and the homes across our nation. I am also praying for FamilyLife to be a ministry that is willing to engage in complex things in order to be conformed to the image of Christ.
I know at times we will do it imperfectly. But we commit to play the part we can to strengthen families toward Jesus and the ways of Jesus. I welcome your prayers for us.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7 NIV).
Copyright © 2020 by FamilyLife. All rights reserved.
David has been the CEO of FamilyLife since December 2017. Prior to coming to FamilyLife, he and his wife Meg helped launch a ministry for CRU in New York City to 20 somethings.