God Teach Us to Serve - A Prayer for Fathers

This prayer was written and read by Keith Richards for Father's Day 2026

God as a new Father, I didn’t know what being a father meant. Your scriptures are clear about what Father means; you sent your Son to serve and not to be served. You, Heavenly Father, value servantship in your children because you are a servant. God, the lesson of servantship has been impressed on my heart through fatherhood. I also see my failures as a servant. When I expect my children to serve me, or when I want to serve myself instead of my children. I believe I should be treated differently because of all that I have done for these children who take me for granted.

Lord God, thank you for teaching us to be servants when our Children are young. When our children wake us up at 5 am because they can’t get something they need to make it through the night. We are forced to serve. You are teaching us, strengthening our servant muscles so we do not walk away when we can choose not to serve. 

Father, we pray now for the fathers among us.

We ask that you strengthen those who are weary so they may continue to serve. The father who rose early and came home late this week, renew his strength to keep serving. The father learning to lead and to love at the same time, give him wisdom. For those who labor alongside their wives in the exhausting, sacred work of raising young children, may they find in you endurance that does not run dry.

We lift up especially those fathers walking through a child's difficult diagnosis carrying fears they don't yet have words for. Lord, be near to them, and give us the grace to serve these families, to carry what they cannot carry alone. Heal their children, we pray, and bring real joy into those relationships.

And we pray for the fathers whose children have walked away from you. Give them the heart of the Father in the parable, who saw his son while he was still far off, and ran. May they keep serving in love even when it is not returned staying present, patient, and faithful. Bring people into their children's lives who will speak truth, and make us those people whenever you allow it. As you served us while we were still wandering, teach us to serve our children while they wander still. Bring them home, Lord. Bring them home.

Father, we ask you now to meet those for whom the word "father" carries pain rather than comfort.

For those whose fathers abandoned, neglected, or wounded them we hold before you your promise: when my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will take me in. You are the Father who does not leave. You are the Father who does not wound. And by your Spirit the Spirit of adoption you invite even the most fatherless among us to cry out, Abba. Father. Heal what earthly fathers broke. Be, for each one carrying that grief today, the Father they never had because that is exactly who you are.

And stir in us, your church, the courage to serve in those dark places. We pray for those who might open their homes to a fatherless child, even for a season. We know the grief that comes when that season ends and we pray that grief would not overwhelm us, but shape us more into the likeness of our Father and his Son, who have served us this way time after time. Do not let the fear of loss keep us from entering in. You are the light that can change a life in days, in weeks, in months. So send us into the darkness, knowing that you go before us, and that no act of faithful service, however brief, is ever wasted in your hands.

We close with your promise that you will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and children to their fathers. Do that work, Lord. Do it in our homes. Do it in our church. Do it in us.

We ask all of this as your children, through your Son who came to serve, and by your Spirit.

Amen.