A New Year's Prayer - Hope

Heavenly Father, God of Hope,As 2017 lays before us like a vast unexplored expanse we turn to you to lead, guide, and direct us. We seek more than to merely survive the next 365 days, than to just make it through. We want to be people of overflowing hope, people empowered by the Holy Spirit with uncommon hope, extraordinary hope.Father, Christ taught us to pray to not be led into temptation and to be delivered from evil, and we do ask for both. Deliver us from the temptation to be spiritually uninvolved where you have placed us. Deliver us from the temptation to hope little, from just hoping for a little health and little good fortune for a few dear to our hearts and ourselves. Deliver us from the kind of hoping that requires little faith, little prayer, and little engagement. Instead lead us to people and into situations where there is little or even no hope. Lead us where there is confusion, sentimentality, and lots of wishful thinking, but no real hope. Throw us into circumstances, places, and lives where we have to depend on you, where what only you can do matters, where your kingdom and the kingdoms of this world clash. Put us where overflowing hope, real hope, eternal hope is needed. Put us where our hearts brake and weep because of the brokenness, sinfulness, and hopelessness we encounter there, where we are forced to be more than consumers of hope but to be sowers of hope, agents of hope, givers of hope, where we have to seek you to refill us again and again with the hope only found in you.How we thank you God that you have called us to a life with you the God of hope, the God whose compassions do not fail, whose mercies never come to an end. 2017 will not lack evil, but none of us will have to be overcome by it, you have more than enough strength to give us to overcome evil with good, you do know how work all things together for good for those who love you and are called by you. Lord we ask that the Apostle Paul’s prayer for our Roman brothers and sisters long ago may be realized in us, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” Romans 15:13 (NIV).Hear our Prayer. In Jesus’ name, Amen.