Prayer
Praying for Japan after the Earthquake
Our hearts are saddened at the damage caused by the massive 9.0 earthquake that rocked Japan to its core on March 10. The visual images of destroyed villages, imperiled nuclear plants, mountains of debris left by the tsunami–and the stories of personal tragedy as well as heroism–have touched our souls deeply. The 24/7 news coverage has etched the devastation indelibly upon our minds.
I was in Salt Lake City when the earthquake struck–involved in board meetings with the National Association of Evangelicals. We immediately went to prayer, and followed things closely throughout the entire day.
One of my favorite verses when confronting natural calamities is Isaiah 26:9 – “My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you. When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness.”
This is a time for great learning in the Japanese nation. It is time for them to yearn for God during this time of “night.”
Here’s how we can pray and help them.
First of all, a personal reflection. I have been to Japan a number of times. My first visit was in the 1980s when I visited and taught in Osaka and Tokyo–a massive metropolitan area with millions of people. I was amazed how Japan had miraculously rebuilt its nation and economy after a crushing and humiliating defeat in World War II.
Yes, it was true that “Made in Japan” carried a stigma in the 60s and 70s. But by the 80s and 90s it stood for quality, innovation, hard work, self-reliance and the world’s third largest economy.
But below the successful surface was an unhappy nation that did not enjoy a robust relationship with the God who had blessed them.
For many centuries, Japan was a graveyard of Christian missions.
Here’s the quick history. In 1549, Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier was the first missionary to Japan. Under his ministry, many were converted and the church grew rapidly. But Japanese officials saw Christians as a threat, and severe persecution began. The opposition to Christianity grew. In cities like Unzen, Christians were boiled in volcanic lava. Others were crucified on wooden crosses in the town of Nagasaki. Japanese soldiers rounded up all known Christian in 1637, around thirty thousand of them, and killed each one.
Following this, the church went underground in hopes of protecting those who managed to survive. The church struggled for several years. However, by God’s grace the church survived. Faithful missionaries did not stop coming. They heard about the monstrous persecution and answered the call to minister to the few faithful believers who were left.
Japan now has only 1.7 million active Christians out of a total population of 126 million. Whereas neighboring South Korea is over 25% Christian, and Christian evangelism is exploding in nearby China, Japan remains, according to the Joshua Project, “the second largest unreached people group in the world.”
I hope that is about to change.
Let’s pray that God will use many means of compassion and restoration to bring scores of millions into his Kingdom in the coming years.
Maybe God can use an earthquake to bring a mighty revival to the nation of Japan.
According to one source, Japan is often overlooked as a country that is has little exposure to the gospel because it is a rich nation with a high standard of living. The high cost associated with living in Japan actually contribute to what keeps Japan as one of the most unreached countries in the 10/40 Window having a Christian population of less than one percent. Many missionaries from America to Asia fly right over Japan completely unaware of the lack of exposure to the gospel it has. Japan is one of the safest countries in the world to live but it is also one of the most spiritually dark. The following are just a few facts.
• There are about 7,800 protestant churches in Japan and the average church size is 35 people… that is one church for every 16,000 people.
• There are only about 270,000 people serving the Christian population of Japan. Thats one Christian for every 477 people.
• Nearly 80% of Japanese pastors are in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s with there not being many Japanese Christian men to replace them. In 15 years many Japanese churches will have few pastors.
• Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. More than 30,000 people have committed suicide each year for the past 13 years (about a 100 people a day or one every 15 minutes).
• Japan has 183,000 known cult groups registered with the government and is known by some as the cult capital of the world.
• Abortion is the most common form of birth control.
• Japan is the #1 provider of child pornography.
• Shinto & Buddhist world views prevail.
Due to Shinto & Buddhist world views Japan has over 8 million gods and almost every house has a little altar where food is offered, incense burnt, and prayers are offered to false gods. Japan quite possibly could have the highest concentration of demonic activity in the world in light of what the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10:20, “what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not God.”
Japan is a very hard place to do ministry and help is needed to plow the soil. Having the world’s 3rd largest economy, significant political influence, and a resourceful and diligent population, Japan has tremendous potential to reach countries American missionaries have no access to in the 10/40 Window… should the Lord work in Japan as he has in other nations such as South Korea.
The Lord wants to reach the younger generation of Japanese. A 2001 poll on Japanese teens revealed that 85% wondered why they exist but only 13% percent believe they exist for a reason. 11% wish they never existed and some tragically contribute to the 100 people per day who commit suicide in Japan.
Jesus tells us “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”
Let’s pray for a revival among youth to sweep across Japan.
American pollster George Gallop, Jr., has an interesting perspective. He recently said about Japan:
“The findings of the study show that the [Japanese] populace is somewhat insular, uncomfortable with diversity and “outsiders”, and possibly, in some small degree, “racist”. In terms of reaching out to help others, the focus is primarily on one’s own family group and not on persons outside these groupings. Broader altruistic motives are not so apparent.”
“Most Japanese, judging by their responses to scales on happiness, are neither “very happy”, nor “very unhappy”. Their responses tend to fall between these two extremes. In earlier Gallup International surveys, responses for many nations fell more heavily in extreme positions than is the case in Japan.”
“While at least moderately happy, many Japanese seem resigned to being caught up in ‘the system’ or ‘the cycle of life’. There is a degree of fatalism in their somber mood. Teen’s perspectives on life tend to a sense of nihilism to an alarming degree. A note of hopelessness is found in the responses to a number of questions. And there is little evidence of eternal hope, although a considerable number do believe in some form of life afterlife.”
“Like much of the rest of the world, the Japanese tend to take relativistic view on ethical matters. There is little belief in ‘absolutes’, and this is true across the all-generational groups. In the ‘hierarchy of crimes’ (things that are wrong), those related to economic and family matters far outweigh those related to sexual activity.'”
“Seven in ten among adults, and half of teens, say they do not know enough about Christianity to express a favorable or unfavorable opinion about this religion. Corresponding, seven in ten adults, and half of teens say they do not know enough about the teachings of Jesus in order to give an evaluation.”
“In summary, then, we see challenges or obstacles to presenting the Gospel in a number of ways: in the insular feelings and somber mood and feelings of hopelessness of the Japanese people; in the relatively little importance they give to religion compared to other aspects of life, yet at the same time their attraction to other religions (namely Shinto and Buddhism) and “new religions”, as well as their attraction to the paranormal.”
“In some respects there seems to be a solid, impenetrable wall that could prevent the spread of the Gospel in Japan. Are there any possible openings in this wall? In seeking to reach people for Christ, the Christian message of hope and reassurance in times of darkness would likely be paramount.”
Japan has now entered such a season of darkness and trial . After years of self-sufficiency and the despair and death that it brings, we need to light up the Japanese nation with compassion, care, rebuilding and hope.
RescueNet, a YWAM Relief team out of Australia, is sending a team to Japan this week. If you are interested in supporting this outreach effort, please contact Josh Harmsworth at (360) 774-1181.
And let’s pray for Japan’s first great spiritual awakening as a result of the devastating earthquake.
It is could light up all of Asia in the 21st century.
“My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you. When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness.”
Prayer–America’s Hope
This article is being sent out early because today is the 58th Annual National Day of Prayer.
I ask you to make special prayer today for a nation-changing revival in the United States. We are in a very precarious state as a nation. Morally, we are floundering by turning away from God’s commandments and principles. Economically, we have debauched our currency, enslaved ourselves to debt and fiscal irresponsibility, and are heading quickly toward the misery of fascism/socialism. Militarily, we are beginning to disarm ourselves in a violent, unpredictable world, while accepting and rewarding those who desire to kill us. We are abandoning our friends and encouraging our enemies. There really is:
1. No political solution that can save us
2. No human being or political party that can deliver us.
3. No hope for the future without God’s intervention in our national life.
The wisest and most important thing we can do today is to humble our hearts, and seek the face of the God of the Universe for national repentance, healing, reconciliation, rebirth, and spiritual and moral renewal.
All across the United States families will be praying, churches will be gathering, and thousands of special events will be used to turn our attention toward God. I will be in Washington DC with our son Ryan for a prayer service in the Cannon Building in the morning, and a city-wide prayer gathering in the afternoon and evening on the west steps of the US Capitol Building.
If you can’t be here, you can be somewhere lifting up this nation in prayer. Please visit the National Day of Prayer website to encourage your heart and find out how you can participate. As you pray, remember Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of a National Day of Fasting & Prayer whose words are as true today as when they were spoken some one hundred and forty-six years ago:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.”
“But we have forgotten God.”
“We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! “
“It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
The Call 2 Fall
Another important day of prayer is being planned just sixty days from now on Sunday, July 5, 2009. Thousands of churches will be inviting their people to get down on their knees the day after Independence Day to affirm our dependence on Almighty God. It’s called the “Call 2 Fall.”
I am working with a group of national spiritual leaders on this second vital prayer thrust. Here’s the vision:
“The headlines of any given day reveal the depth and breadth of the cultural and political challenges facing America. The threats to our nation and the threats in our nation are real.”
“While Americans are dying on foreign fields of battle to defend the ideals of freedom, pastors are jailed here at home for exercising their freedom of speech in defense of the unborn. While the courts continue on the march to redefine marriage, the state of the American family appears to grow weaker under the cultural and social pressures. And whether responding to this evidence or simply seizing an opportunity, commentators have gleefully pronounced the “Decline and Fall of Christian America.”
“From a human perspective the future does not look promising. It is becoming evident that there are no political solutions to what our nation is facing today. But that could mean we are at the point of our greatest hope. If we as Christians will take responsibility for the state of the Church and the nation, and then follow God’s prescription for real change – there is hope.”
“The Family Research Council is joining with other Christian ministries in issuing a nationwide “Call to Fall” on our knees before the Lord on July 5th, 2009, urging a day of humility and repentance for America. We are asking pastors and churches to engage in a singular act of corporate humility, taking at a minimum 3 to 5 minutes during the Sunday morning worship for the entire congregation to fall to their knees, calling upon God to forgive our sins and heal our land (Joel 2).”
“The ‘Call to Fall’ is nothing new for America. When the First Continental Congress called for a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer, throughout the Colonies on July 20th, 1775, James Warren wrote Samuel Adams saying,
‘Three millions of people on their knees at once, supplicating the aid of Heaven, is a striking circumstance, and a very singular one in America. May the blessings of Heaven follow in answer to our prayers…’
“That is what we are praying for – a unified effort that crosses all denominational, cultural, and ethnic barriers among God’s people that will hopefully result in God’s hand of judgment being stayed and in His blessings being renewed on our lives and on our land.”
Please visit www.Call2Fall.com to sign the Declaration and to answer the “Call to Fall.” Here is the Declaration:
I will answer God’s call to fall on my knees in humility and seek His face in repentance, so that He might forgive my sins and heal our land.
Thanks for praying today, and for joining us on our knees Sunday, July 5.May God hear us from heaven and revive America for his glory (2 Chronicles 7:14).
My Inaugural Prayer
Father in Heaven,
The happenings of this week move me to communicate to you in prayer, rather than the normal medium of commentary or analysis. A confluence of three events have greatly troubled and spoken to my heart, leading to the need to seek you in prayer. As friends around the world read these words, I ask you to draw them into a fellowship of concern and intercession to seek your face during these awesome days. In the end, Lord, we are longing for you and your coming reign. May your kingdom come.
Father, this week in America we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King who is now on your side of the heavenly divide. You raised him up as a leader to call America to live up to its founding creed–that all men are created to be equally loved and respected. At great cost, Dr. King championed the cause of peace and reconciliation and thunderously proclaimed the need for biblical justice. I have always appreciated his poignant words that men should be judged by the “content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” When he was unjustly killed and passed into eternity, he learned face-to face the truth of those words. I thank you today for Dr. King’s unswerving commitment to life, liberty, and justice for all. You are the perfect embodiment of his dreams and aspirations.
But, Lord, my heart is heavy with another date with destiny that we remember this week. Great tears fell from your eyes thirty-six years ago, on January 22, 1973, when our nation made the worst decision of its history to legalize the killing of innocent children. We call it “choice” or abortion. You call it murder of innocent people made in your image. Since that fateful decision almost four decades ago, we have rationalized the slaughter of over fifty million fellow Americans who have silently passed to your side of the divide. Thank you for receiving them into your heavenly arms. Forgive us for snuffing out the precious gift of their lives at the rate of nearly 4,000 a day or one every twenty-one seconds. And I know these numbers state only the American babies killed by abortion–they don’t take into account the eight hundred million that have died world-wide at the hands of their fathers, mothers, and abortionists. Father, this quiet holocaust is so great I can’t comprehend it. I weep over our hardness of heart, our shame, and our folly.
I’ve sometimes wondered what activities take place on the heavenly side of the earthly veil–but now I realize that much time must be spent receiving the lives we reject in this world and welcoming them into yours. I’m grateful they will be given final justice and honor at the time of your coronation.
Lord, I’m thankful that Dr. King was a champion of the unborn. He believed and stood for life in all of its stages. I’m sure he now understands that though slavery and segregation were evil, nothing rivals the cruelty of taking nearly eight hundred million human lives since 1973. Hitler killed eight million and we rightly condemned him. Stalin killed fifty million and was branded a tyrant. Mao killed one hundred million Chinese while becoming the cruelest dictator in history. We Americans mercilessly imported four million slaves to these shores during the early centuries of the Republic.
But Dr. King and others who’ve reached the eternal shore now understand that nothing rivals the evil of today when twenty-two million people cross into eternity each year at the hands of their murderers. Lord, we are awash in an ocean of blood. “We know not what we do” – or rather, we don’t care what we’re doing because we’re blinded by our sins. Help us to see the error of our ways, to stop the killing, to value human life, and walk in the light of Dr. King’s message which comes from your loving heart.
And, Father, that brings me to the third great confluence of this week–the inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. You know I’ve been praying for him almost every day since our nation made its choice. I want him to succeed–to lead our nation well as our new leader–“to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with his God” (Micah 6:8). But Lord–I am deeply troubled that both he and the American people are being set up for profound and grievous failure. I ask you to enter our human affairs, work in our hearts, and guide our nation into your truth.
Barack Obama came to us, Lord, with a message of change. But to be a righteous leader it is he who must change. He does not agree with you and Dr. King on the evil of abortion. He has promised as one of the first acts of his administration to ratify the Freedom of Choice Act which would destroy any gains we’ve made in the abortion holocaust of the past thirty years. I ask you to change his heart, open his eyes, take him beyond the soaring words and rhetoric to a heart-to-heart encounter with the God of life. You want him to positively affect history by stopping the injustice! Lord–speak to him when he sits in the Oval Office and ponders the responsibility of governing. Show him how he can use the God-given gifts he possesses to truly do a work of righteousness in our 21th century world.
Father–show him the importance of the nuclear family–that you are the one that designed marriage between a man and a woman, for their good, for the health of their children, and for the stability and perpetuity of the human race. Don’t allow him to destroy the institution of marriage through a refusal to listen to history, revelation, common sense and moral decency. Remind him that Dr. King would never support the cheapening and diluting of marriage. It is on issues like this where the “content of his character” will certainly be revealed. Father, I pray desperately for him that he will pass this crucial test.
Lord of heaven and earth–give him wisdom to confront the evil forces in this world with clarity and strength. Change his heart on the role that civil government must play in the reviving of our economic foundations. Lord–he wrongly believes that central planning is the answer, that greater burdens on the productive will bring blessing to the masses. Father, show him where his economic ideas are wrong and point him in the direction of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan who unleashed the creative potential of the people by slashing oppressive tax rates. They understood that free people and trust in God were the keys to earthly blessings, not bigger and restrictive government. Lord, enlarge Barack Obama’s view of you so that government power will dim in his eyes and proposals.
Father in Heaven–as I ponder these earthly concerns, my heart is finally drawn in great anticipation to the true coronation that will one day visit the universe. Your Son, Jesus Christ, the Lord of lords, King of kings, President of presidents, the Savior of the world, will one day return in humility and grace. In the twinkling of an eye he will appear in the sky, and all the earth shall mourn and his people rejoice! The True King has come–the content of his character is FAITHFUL AND TRUE (Revelation 19:11)–and those who have been made right with God through trusting in his death and resurrection, will rise to meet him in the air. Those who are evil will be judged. Those who are reconciled will be welcomed into his eternal family.
Lord -hear our prayers during this awesome and pivotal week. We are longing for you. Fix our eyes on the only true hope of the 21st century–the bless
ed hope of the coming of Jesus the Messiah.
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus (Revelation 22:20).