When Shirley Dobson, the wife of James Dobson, asked me to be the Honorary Chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, I wondered at first if she was talking to the right person. I was so humbled, and of course I agreed.
Why? Because America needs prayer like never before.
In fact, I think the answers to our deepest needs as a nation are spiritual, not political.
We need divine intervention, and if we don’t receive it, we are in for some very dark days indeed. The United States needs another spiritual awakening or, as it is often called, a revival.
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What is a revival? Revival means to restore something to its original condition.
Perhaps we cannot say that America is a completely Christian country, as it would seem everyone in it would need to believe in Jesus Christ to make that qualification. However, there is no denying that this country has a Judeo-Christian foundation.
But we have gotten too far from that. In the words of President Abraham Lincoln, “We have forgotten God.” We see trouble in our culture today. We see the breakdown of the family, crippling addictions, and random acts of horrific violence.
We have done our best to remove God’s Word and His counsel from our courtrooms, classrooms, and culture. Despite the fact that we, as a nation, have largely forgotten God, the good news is: God has not forgotten us. He still can bless and redeem our country.
One of the reasons I know that is because He redeemed me.
I never knew my father. My mother was an alcoholic who married and divorced seven times. I smoked pot, dropped acid, and drank my problems away. But God got hold of me and my life was turned around.
And if there’s redemption for me and my situation, there is redemption for everyone and everything.
I think a lot of the problems in America started back in the 1960s, when I was a kid. That experimentation of the ‘60s has turned into an epidemic in the 21st century.
Sociologist Robert Nesbet wrote, “The ideologies which gained entry into the academy in the ‘60s claim that fundamental intellectual principles of Western culture were illegitimate and must be overthrown. And with that we destroyed terms like truth, good, and evil.”
People laugh at the Christian worldview today. Up is down. Right is wrong. Wrong is right. So in our schools, evolution is taught as fact even though it is disputed in the scientific community. And yet they will not even consider teaching the biblical truth of creationism.
We basically teach our children that they crawled out of the ooze. They are highly evolved animals. Thus there is no God, there is no afterlife, and there is no final judgment. And then we scratch our heads and wonder what is happening when a kid gets a gun and walks onto a campus and starts shooting people.
And the pundits and the experts opine away and everyone asks why. And my question is, “Well, why not?” If there is no right and wrong, if there is no good and evil, if there is no God, why would we expect people to live morally?
To quote Lincoln again, “We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our heart that all of these blessings that we see in our country were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”
That’s why the only hope is not merely a return to conservative values; it is a return to the biblical truth that we find only in the pages of Scripture.
If we want to see our nation turn back to righteousness, then we must pray. Please join me in doing that on May 2, the National Day of Prayer.
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