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Thursday, July 3 2008 |
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Connecting
the Pastors of Washington State
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Let the priests, who minister before the Lord, weep between the temple porch and the altar. Let them say, “Spare Your people, O Lord. Do not make Your inheritance an object of scorn, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ Then the Lord will be jealous for His land and take pity on His people.” –Joel 2:17-18
We find ourselves in a place in American history where we are out of time and now completely surrounded by an enemy that is more numerous and more sophisticated than we are, and we are quickly running out of options.
What are we to do? Some would say that things have gone too far in America to be reversed now. They believe that what we are facing right now is inevitable, since the Bible predicts increasing godlessness in the last days. That is inexcusable fatalism. It might be Islam, but it is not Biblical Christianity. Isaiah 59 is crystal clear on this subject. Any unrighteousness in a nation displeases God. His unequivocal will for America is righteousness (Proverbs 13:34), and His vehicle for righteousness in any nation, at any time, is His Church.
After cataloging the sins of Israel in Isaiah's day, God says, "He went looking for a man." (Isaiah 59:16) There are many churches and pastors in America today who have put their heads in the sand, in the vain hope that God will see the darkness in our land and that He will do something about it. Well, He sees our plight, but He is waiting for us to do something about it. Verse 16 describes that God was astonished, stunned, stupefied, and amazed that He found no one who was willing to intercede!
If Jesus said that He could do nothing, except what He saw His Father doing, how can we expect to make any difference in our society until we have prayed, until we have called on His Name, until we have spent long enough in His council chamber to know His heart and what He wants us to do? I am not talking about some little prayer offered here and there, like a light seasoning on our lives, but fervent, unrelenting, unwavering, faith-filled prayer - confident that we serve a God who hears and answers.
Christianity Today reported a few years ago that the average American pastor prays three minutes a day. Is it any wonder our nation is in the condition it is in? The real problem is not the militant homosexual agenda or activist judges, Hollywood, or political liberalism. The problem is us, the Church of Jesus Christ.
God looks down on our land, sees the injustice and sin, and wants to rain down in righteousness, but He will not until someone stands in the gap to intercede. He is as displeased with the condition of our nation as He is with the condition of His Church, and He is poised and ready to act. He is looking for men and women who will intercede. It is time for the pastors and churches of our nation to repent and put the altars of prayer back in our lives and in the house of the Lord. We are on the verge of a spiritual awakening in our nation, if we, the Church of Jesus, will repent of our sins and call on the Name of the Lord. This is our wake-up call!
We are to humble ourselves, repent of our own sin, and pray for a revival of the Church of Jesus that will heal our land (2Chronicles 7:14). The reason we pray for revival is that, as the last two thousand years of world history have taught us, the only mechanism for turning a nation away from the brink of destruction is a spiritual awakening.
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