O God, who rested from Creation on the seventh day and commanded a perpetual remembrance of the Sabbath, You sent Your only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to be our righteousness and our atonement for sin, when He died on the Cross, then raising Him from the dead on the third day, thereby, forever sanctifying the first day of the week as the Sabbath of a new and better Covenant with mankind; So, enliven our hearts and minds this blessed Lord’s Day to keep the Sabbath commandment out of the overflow of joy and gratitude: in our worship, in our fellowship, in our acts of love and common grace, and in our resting; That, we may know Your favor, taste Your promised blessings, and reap Your sacred anointing for our nation, our state, our community, our family, and ourselves; Granting such life abundant through the Sabbath remembrance of the glorious resurrection of your Son our Lord, that the week to come may be hallowed, as well; Thus, our whole lives are calibrated by the one-in-seven rhythm of Sabbath worship and lived through the other six days in continuous consecration all of the days of our lives; This, O Lord is our Sabbath prayer through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
— M.A. Milton
Collect: [kol-ekt]: A brief prayer in the ancient Western liturgy used at the collection and before the reading of the Epistle. The most notable collects are surely the richly Biblical prayers of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer. The Collect as liturgical prayer has assumed broader use in the Reformed liturgy in recent practice. Indeed, the Collect may now refer, simply, to a brief written or “said” prayer appropriate to a season in the Church Year. The Collect for respective Sundays in a season of the Church Year is often employed in Presbyterian and Reformed churches as a “gathering prayer,” e.g., for congregational use as a silent prayer for preparation for worship.
I love collects. Whenever I write out a prayer, I start that way: Father, you who……
and then I tie a request to that attribute or promise about which I have reminded Him – kind of a legal grounds for my argument.
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Dear Maria: Thank you for your exceptional note! Yes, forming our prayers in this way does, indeed, help us to ground our appeals to heaven on the revealed character and promises of the Lord. Of course, there is always, “Lord Jesus, help!”
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