persistent prayer

July 22, 2024

Praying for your nation without double-mindedness

"It is for the king to ensure justice, and the saint to ensure charity," said G. K. Chesterton famously. In other words, the role of the government is to uphold civil law. The role of the church is to administer Christ's benevolence. Over the last century, government has usurped the role of the church and offered handouts - not because it has any inherent godliness, but because it seeks power over the one receiving its "benefits." In the last couple decades, governments around the world have taken this to a new extreme, abdicating their role to uphold lawfulness altogether and offering the money of hard-working citizens to criminal vagrants. This is heavily due to the spirit of lawlessness at work through globalists in the United Nations and WEF and their corrupt influence over national and even local authorities. Even God-fearing Christians are greatly confused about their own role and the government's in this matter, and as a result, cannot think about this in a single-minded manner. Thus they cannot pray effectively.
March 28, 2024
praying in tongues, praying in the Spirit, Holy Spirit prayer, travail

How praying in the Spirit changed a tense situation

Please pray!" came the quick whisper through the phone. "Pray in the Spirit, would you? And I'll be praying here." A friend of mine is staff for a political representative. I was just wrapping up morning devotions with my children when she called to tell me that the meet-and-greet the rep was hosting had been overwhelmed by constituents from the opposing party, and that they'd come loaded for bear.
February 19, 2024
foundations destroyed, what shall righteous do

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Few may argue the West's destructive course, but what does the final outworking of a disintegrated culture look like? Can even widespread revival pull a culture back from the precipice? As a Christian, I see the world simultaneously through two lenses. The one is observing the horrors of life in post-modern America, with its fearful velocity in recent years of lawlessness - infanticide, polygamy, pedophilia, trafficking, misogyny, suicide, crime, institutional corruption, and child mutilation; at the same time, I'm scrutinizing these trends against the backdrop of history, from ancient to present, and the fate of parallel civilizations. The other lens sees the influence of the praying church on history, from Peter's supernatural deliverance from Herod's imprisonment, all the way up to the fall of the Soviet Union and pivotal World War Two victories such as Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. The latter lens keeps me from despair. The former begs the question, "At what cost will we see Divine Liberation?"
February 10, 2024

The frightening truth about failing to pray

"Inattention to prayer actually gives place to the devil to advance his cause and evil." -Todd Smith, Unless We Pray An incident happened a couple years ago of which I only grasped its implications this week. It was July 2021. I had gone to a Wednesday night prayer meeting. There were only a few of us gathered, although our pastor was often reminding us as a congregation not to fall into "vacation mode" and lose spiritual focus, just because it was summer.