26 Aug The Shepherd’s Staff – July 2022

The elder team met multiple times over the past month. Our visits together always begin with a time of prayer; and our most recent visit included a time of intentional prayer for our congregation, community and the leadership of our church. This time of prayer is something that is very important to us as a team and very important to the charge of shepherding our congregation. As we learned in our recent sermon series, prayer is one of the ways that God intends us to solidify our relationship with Him. Prayer allows us to profess our faith, acknowledge God’s sovereignty and power, as well as to align ourselves with God’s will. It is important to recognize the significance of prayer in our lives.

Communication with God allows us to have a better relationship with Him. Our prayers give us an opportunity to share our life’s challenges with our Creator and it also provides us an opportunity to listen for His direction. Throughout Psalms, we see a myriad of prayers that include pleas for mercy, appeals for protection, songs of praise, confessions of sins, cries of anguish, declarations of God’s power, and much more. In studying Psalms, we also see how they can be very relatable to our present day challenges. Not unlike the scribes of yesteryear, we too have an opportunity to submit our requests to our Heavenly Father, who offers us a place at his footstool to lay down our burdens and also sing His praises.

As we all walk though this life of many ups and downs, our prayer is that you know that God is ready and willing to listen, and to guide. Not unlike reading Psalms and finding ways to relate our current situations, God has provided an advocate in Jesus Christ. Jesus professed to be “the way, the truth and the life,” (John 14:6) and that means that He is the everlasting One who connects us to our Heavenly Father.

The elders will continue to pray for our congregation, our community and our leaders; and we request that you do the same. We also would appreciate you sharing any and all of your prayer request with us. We are thankful for what God is doing in and around Mt Pleasant.

I wait quietly before God,

for my victory comes from him.

He alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress where I will never be shaken.

Psalm 62:1-2

• Bo Sink
• Joe Hayworth
• Eric Hilton
• Steve Cranford
• Kevin Logan
• Jay Payne
• Vince Brown
• Daniel Rich
• Jon Sloan