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).
