In This Cultural Moment, What Are You Praying For?

If you have made a habit of being at prayer meetings, you have probably been in the following situation before.  As requests are being offered, someone asks prayer for Aunt Tilly’s bunion.  If the leader has his wits about him, this can be steered into a profitable time of prayer for Aunt Tilly.  But sadly, many a saint has been led in prayer for untold numbers of hips, feet and various and sundry body parts.  

The problem with this is the same problem we have in praying for our country.  There are real and troubling situations all around.  There is pain in these things.  But pain is a very useful tool.  Now, do not think that I sympathize with the twisted villain and his tools for extracting information out of people.  That is sin through and through.  Instead, God is good, and he has good plans and purposes for using pain.  He can use it to open eyes to the folly of lawless living.  He can wake us up out of spiritual lethargy.  He can make us forsake all hope in the strength and wisdom of man, no matter how many degrees or specialties he has.   God has done all of these countless times in the lives of his people.  The book of Judges in particular is a chronicle of this happening over and over again.  

When we pray for Aunty Tilly, our great concern is not her bunion.  Yes, it is painful, but to try to pray it away may be praying away the very thing God is wanting to use in her life.  Paul tried this with his thorn in the flesh, and he found that God had purposes for it. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)  Prayer for healing should be way down on the list.  Actually it should be on a separate list entitled “Things we would like but don’t know if it would be truly best.”  The part of Tilly we pray for is her soul.  We pray for how she should think about this bunion.  We pray for how she applies God’s word concerning this bunion.  We pray for endurance and self-control.  We pray for her to give thanks in all things for this is God’s will for her in Christ Jesus.  And all of this is assuming she is born again, which if not, then that should be the true focus of prayer.  

Back to our country.  Are you praying for the parts of our troubled country or are you praying for its soul.  Obviously, a country does not have a soul, which means we are praying for a collective of souls.  This should already begin to clear away the fog of thinking.  Our greatest needs are not booming economies and safe streets and honest politicians and free speech.  Now notice something, I did say “greatest need.”  Some combination of those four elements are needed for peaceful living, and peaceful living is a huge boon for gospel-driven living as 1 Timothy 2:1-2 tell us.  But even when those things are not happening, the gospel can still go forth.   Our painful situations are pointing to the cancerous rebellion against God that is everywhere.  Therefore, we must be praying not for America to be great again, but for Christians to be faithful again.  Christians need to pray that each believer would be faithful in gospel witness, that churches would be faithful in equipping and shepherding, and for a conviction of sin to settle upon this country.  And if you are really feeling stirred up, you need to pray that God would super charge those three things so that revival begins to spread.  

Whether America stands or falls is in God’s hands.  What we should pray for is what we know God wants in this moment.  Our praying should be for God to purge out the watered-down, entertainment churches as Jesus warned in Revelation 2-3, and that his people would be built up by faithful churches who proclaim the faith once for all delivered.  God has blessed America and she squandered it with idolatries of every form.  Now America needs to bless God in repentance and faith.  That can happen when America hears the call to repentance and faith thundering from the pulpits and echoing in the mouths of his people.