Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting

January 31, 2025

Targeted Prayer: tips from a 93 year-old warrior saint

You're ready to see the citadels crumble around unbelieving loved ones, and the furnace fired up in the lukewarm. You're longing to see the supernatural override natural law "far as the curse is found." You hunger and thirst for righteousness and are no longer content to live in the deficit. This is the year the tide turns.
October 29, 2024

Five ways the church gets God’s judgments wrong

  Napoleon stands out as perhaps the ultimate example of a tyrant who, when brought to justice, has the opportunity to reflect on life and eternity. Napoleon in exile on St. Helena observed of Christ, “What a conqueror! A conqueror who…wins to Himself not only one nation, but the whole human race. What a marvel! He attaches to Himself the human soul with all its energies. And how? By a miracle which surpasses all others. He claims the love of men – that is to say, the most difficult thing in the world to obtain…..He claims it; He requires it absolutely and undividedly….Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Lous X!V strove in vain to secure this…He kindles the flame of a love which causes a man’s self love to die.”
September 25, 2024

Praying for God’s judgments?

Many Christians and secularists alike tend to think of God’s judgments as undesirable or even cruel. Some suppose that judgment is synonymous with hail, lightening, earthquakes, and floods. The scriptural pattern of God’s judgments often involved His people being invaded by foreigners who did not share their customs, took over their resources, and oppressed them. We cannot ignore that Peter told the church that “Judgment begins with the household of faith” (1 Peter 4:17).
June 26, 2024

Hell’s trifecta trap: Cynicism, Idealism, and Fatalism

Without fervent prayer, God's will is largely held back from what He purposes to do in the earth. As Chip Brogden stated, "“If God will do whatever He wishes, regardless of whether we pray or not, then we do not need to pray at all, and the Lord’s instructions on praying for the Kingdom and His will are superfluous. . .Apart from Him, we can do nothing. Apart from us, He will do nothing.”
March 28, 2024

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

“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?"
August 17, 2021

Afghan Christians Prepare for Martyrdom, missionary Robbie Dawkins, and “how would I want them to pray for me?”

” ‘Isa Padeshahe Padeshahan ast’!” (from Robbie Dawkins via Facebook, August 15th): “I was on the phone past midnight yesterday speaking with some young Afghan believers who I helped train […]
July 1, 2021

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land”: freedom as the nature and theme of God’s word

Don't let them neuter you. Many generations of men gave everything they had so you could walk about in civic freedom. Christ gave the splendor of Heaven and then laid down his life to a cruel death so you could partake of spiritual freedom and the liberty out of which came the civic. No more complacency. It's our time to give it all we have.
September 5, 2017

Three Things You Hear When You’re Burdened to Pray for the Nation

If you’re passionate about the direction of the nation, and if you hunger and thirst for righteousness in your land, perhaps at some point you’ve been chided for your zeal. […]