A Prayer for the Nation

A prayer for the nation.

2 Chronicles 7:14
¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (NIV)

How many times have we heard this passage that if the people of God would simply humble themselves and pray the Lord would come and heal their land? Yet, how many of us actually pray for our nation, for our leaders, for the social imaginary of the nation? We are more prone to complain about our country, politicians, and the direction we are heading. Why don’t we pray for our nation more?

Pride keeps us from prayer. And if we do pray without humility, arrogance contaminates the spiritual with the carnal so that our prayer is nothing more than a religious production to entertain ourselves or our congregations. We must humble ourselves first.

We are commanded by God to humble ourselves because our natural disposition is pride. We think we can handle it on our own. We think through our tweets, posts, rants, and political action, we can save the nation. We can’t save anything. We are part of the issue. When we spend more time in arguments and political efforts than seeking God in prayer, pride wins.

To humble ourselves is a decision, an action, something to be done each day. It is a mental exercise of reminding our own hearts and minds how small we are and how little power we actually have. But the command of God is to humble ourselves before the Lord. We remind ourselves of how little we can truly affect the world as we kneel before the God who created it and still has supreme power over it. Our thoughts move from our inability to do much to calling upon God who can do all things.

God’s response to our humility is to exalt us to a higher place. Christ was lifted to the highest place in Heaven because He humbled Himself. When we are diligent in humility, the Lord acts on our behalf. He knows our frustrations with the nation has turned us to Him and His reward is to lift us up. This can be spiritual, mental, emotional, and financial.

Our prayers give us peace. Our humility qualifies us to be used by God without danger of self-aggrandizement. He increases our peace, our influence, responsibility, and power for change. We must remember that we can’t rescue a nation from apostasy, but God can. Let’s humble ourselves and pray.

Prayer: Lord, help me to stop complaining about the country but rather, in humility, call upon You to help us. Amen.