Lord Jesus,
This is Your day – the primary day of the week when Your name is proclaimed, Your songs are sung, Your sacrifice is exalted, strength is gained so that Your mission is advanced, and Your salvation is offered to broken recipients. We wake on Sundays with stirred anticipation about what Holy Spirit might accomplish when Your gospel is proclaimed. Our brothers and sisters in the faith will gather alongside of us and we will join our prayers with theirs, asking, as You taught us, for the Father to usher in the Kingdom upon earth. We love Sundays because they have been consecrated to You.
Yet on this Sunday I awoke to news of stabbings and bombings in my homeland. The Muslims marauders have again lifted their blades and detonated their bombs. They are here in this land where You chose to shed Your grace. This is the land which was so directed toward you for so many decades. My fear, Lord Jesus, is that, because we have demanded that You exit the hills of our national landscape, because we have loved our darkness more than Your light, because we have extinguished innumerable lives in the womb, and exchanged the worship of the creature above the worship of the Creator… I am deeply concerned that You are granting this nation what she has demanded. We have told You that we wish to be left alone. You seem to be complying with our ignorant insistence. If so, You have surely acted justly and we have no platform for legitimate protest. We in America are as guilty as a people can be.
But there is a remnant. I have hope that You will honor the cries of the remnant.
We are Your chosen. We are Your beloved. We are the Redeemed. You have called us as followers of the Lamb and have promised that, in Him, we will overcome. You have made us to trust in Your Word, and there are scores within Your remnant who not only trust it, but tremble at it. Your people call upon You and ask You to awaken the Church in America. Cause us to jettison our stupid church trends which resemble Hollywood more than the New Jerusalem. Give us courage to grind into powder the dead traditions of yesteryear, which we carry around like some modern day Nehushtan (2 Kings 18:4) that You haven’t blessed in decades. Great King, call us to the furious fight! Raise up from Your few those who will write the vision and make it plain, so that those who read it may run with it. Let your sons and daughters prophesy as you promised in both the Old and the New Covenants. Pour out again Your Spirit upon all flesh so that the dreams and visions which You originate may come to pass. Our enemies have entered our shores with demonic cries of “Allahu Akbar!”, as they serve a god of death and destruction with bloody blades and blasting bombs. Father, we have torn the protective hedge with our sin, and they have breached the provision of Your safety which we long presumed would remain here. We have sinned, O Lord. We rejected Your authority and asked You to leave us alone. You obliged us and took Your protection and provision with You. Your remnant cries our, “Return to us! Remember Your promises to us. Regard our dependence and honor our prayers.” You were willing to do this when Abraham interceded for Lot – will you be willing to do it for my own nation as we also cry to You for mercy? Abraham asked you in that day, ““Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” We ask that same question. We dig down deep to find that fountain of mercy and grace which we know still flows for all who will get low enough to taste it. It is not our own worth that we lift up before You, it is Your everlasting mercy and grace that is our hope.
Remember Your remnant, O God. Hear our cries on this day of peace. Abide over Your children and mark us for divine protection. Expose our enemies within our borders. Bring their plans to nothing. May they fall in the pit which they dug for us. I want my heart and mind to belong solely to You today, King Jesus. I want to experience Your peace.
But I am distracted by war.
Remember Your remnant, and help us to endure with You always before our eyes.