The intercessory prayer movement of the last several years is at a crucial junction.

Heavy LiftingDriven by angst over our nation’s declining commitment to basic principles and the growing malaise of our increasingly dysfunctional churches, many Christians are crying out for God’s intervention. What I’ve rarely seen, however, is a matching embrace of effective, transformational repentance — which Biblically involves changing the way we act by changing the way we think.

While desperately seeking to touch the heart of God, few intercessors seem willing to do the hard work of understanding the mind of God. The challenges facing our nation, and the Church, require both. We need intercession, but we also need God’s understanding followed by corresponding action.

The Need for Biblical Precepts

Unless we understand the problems that have contributed to the challenges facing our churches and nation, and the Biblical principles needed to address them, our prayers and intercessions for God to heal them will be ineffective. The challenge is to turn to prayer and Biblical precepts so that we can offer the positive solutions, rather than mere angst, needed to move things in the right direction.

We need intercession, with understanding, to turn around our churches and the nation. But even so, health will not come quickly. After all, it has taken decades of bad policies, irresponsible conduct and predatory leadership to produce our present spiritual and national malaise, and it is unrealistic to expect that things can turn on a dime.

Prayer with Repentance

The numerous appeals circulating among Christians to pray for God to heal our land often cite 2 Chronicles 7:14, where God says:

“… if my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

I hear lots these days about fervently praying, with nightly intercessory meetings and the like, but not much about humbling ourselves (i.e., setting aside our own thoughts and desires based on what we think, in our fear and anxiety, that God should do). I also hear lots about steadfastly seeking God’s face, but very little about repenting (i.e., turning from our wicked ways by changing the way we think as we commit to God’s ways).

The challenges now facing our nation and the Church require that we accept the full approach – rather than some partial approach – set forth in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Some intercessors “get it”, but not many.

By humbling ourselves and turning from our wicked ways, I don’t think this scriptural admonition is only talking about our personal lives, as important as that is. Rather, it is calling us to turn from the hubris and wicked ways that we, as Christians, have allowed to creep over the last several decades into our churches and into our nation’s laws, practices, policies and actions.

Rather than focusing on God saving us by making everyone else repent, mature prayer seeks to bring us to a place of our own repentance – both individually and corporately.

Total Truth for All of Life

Turning to God does not mean seeking merely His subjective, touchy-feely presence (as good as that legitimately sometimes can be!). Instead, it means seeking the objective precepts and principles He has given us in Scripture for healthy churches and healthy nations, societies, economies and cultures – then pledging to God that we will do the hard work needed to implement them.

We often forget that true repentance always involves confession. After all, how can we turn to God’s specific ways unless we understand and acknowledge what we specifically did wrong? (I simply note in passing that Scripture does not tell us to ask God for generalized forgiveness, but rather to confess and seek forgiveness for specific sins committed both against us and by us.)

Repentance results from authentic, specific confession which results in God changing the way we think. It is NOT, however, crying out to God with great emotion in non-specific ways to simply sooth our own emotional angst and anxieties.

Lately, I have watched many strong prayer warriors and sincere intercessors deeply agonize and cry out to God over the challenges facing our churches and nation. They urge me to join them at their intercessory prayer meetings, but I have held back from their pleas. My spirit is troubled with their apparent perception that humility and true repentance are achieved solely through emotional catharsis.

Before everyone gets mad at me, let me state that emotional catharsis has its place. God wants to heal our emotions, and he wants us to relate to him with our whole being – including our emotions. Emotions are good!

But it’s not good, or healthy, to stay stuck in our internal emotional hurts or anxieties over external issues by seeking to drown them out through constant, repetitive, day-in-and-day-out intense intercession. Like any addiction, intense and life dominating intercession that becomes an unbalanced obsession is unhealthy because it avoids the changes that healing requires. It’s an escape, rather than one of the many ways God has ordained for us to meet him and to embrace his transforming truths for ourselves, our churches and our nation.

Intercession that ignores the propositional truths of what God expects regarding our own lives, his Church and our nation’s laws, practices, policies and actions lacks true repentance and violates 2 Chronicles 7:14. Such repentance, however, only comes from specific confession that is motivated by humility, which in turn must be based on understanding God’s precepts and then action.

Authentic Biblical repentance is changing the way we think so that the way we act also changes. It requires understanding God’s truth and precepts, letting him alter our way of thinking, and then acting accordingly. Anything less is counterfeit.

God or Baal?

What I have seen with some of these intercessory prayer meetings – filled with Godly men and women of great passion and whom I profoundly respect – often resembles what the prophets of Baal did as they cried out and pleaded for consuming fire from heaven. Those prophets wanted the fire and a manifestation of divine intervention, which they earnestly sought with great fervor and sincerity, but there was no repentance.

Crying out for God to save us, without repentance, is just like them crying out to an idol created with their own hands. Like them, our cries and pleas too often are rooted in our own needs, fears and self-directed solutions rather than learning about and doing things God’s way. Such idolatry invokes great emotion and passion, but little subsequent or substantive change – especially as it relates to our churches or the nation as a whole!

My heart grieves because we are missing, in this season of prayer and intercession, true and effective repentance. For example, I know of a church with great intercessors who plead with God for revival. But they are so consumed with wanting to feel the heart of God that they have totally ignored the mind of God — and so they turn a blind eye and refuse to address predatory, abusive leadership that’s destroying their church. They want the emotion and passion of revival, but not the truth or change of repentance. As a result, they will have neither.

Although I have no doubt that there is a willingness to repent among those who send the emails and otherwise call us to intercessory prayer, I believe that gross ignorance of God’s principles and precepts within the Christian community, as they apply to our churches, nations, societies, economies and cultures, is preventing true, effective repentance. If I’m right about this, then God’s healing will not follow.

Spiritual Masturbation?

When Israel, as a nation, had fallen away from God, they didn’t simply seek God’s face and say “we’re sorry, we’re so, so sincerely, truly, totally sorry – now please forgive us and bail us out of this mess.” Such a prayer is self-centered, because it is asking God to protect us from the consequences of our own sins without taking the time to learn His ways and then repenting from the specific areas where we have deviated from His principles and precepts. It also ignores the follow-up need to change our ways and adopt God’s ways (i.e., humility!), as set forth in Scripture for the blessing of whole nations.

But how can we do this unless we understand the principles and precepts of God that go beyond pietism and our personal walk with Him? And how can we understand, unless we are taught?

Instead of only crying out in prayer during times of national malaise, the leaders of Israel (sometimes it was the civil leaders, and sometimes the religious leaders) called the people to an assembly. There are several instances of this in the Old Testament. At that assembly, the religious leaders taught the people God’s precepts – usually by reading and explaining Scripture to them. As the people learned what was right and pleasing to the Lord regarding the nation, they responded by collectively renewing their national covenant with God and repenting of their specific contravening sins, then pledging before God to change their ways.

This is what we are lacking and what God is waiting to see within our churches and in the hearts and actions of His people. He is weary of our sincere but hollow, and emotional but insubstantial, pleas for intervention. Those pleas, like the prophets of Baal, are often rooted in our own needs, fears and desires and are divorced of true, meaningful and informed repentance. They amount to little more than spiritual masturbation.

Where Are Our Church Leaders?

In general, I have this fault with many of the leaders of our churches: They have not taught God’s people or modeled in their own lives His precepts as they relate to our churches, nation, society, economy and culture. So when people gather to pray for the future of our churches and nation, they do so with sincerity but in ignorance of how we have violated God’s principles.

How can we repent of wicked ways unless we know God’s ways? And how can we turn to God’s ways for our churches, nation, society, economy and culture unless our leaders teach them to us?

Repentance must first start with the household of God, and within His household, it must begin with our leaders. They must repent of the easy-believism of “me and Jesus” pietism, and their settled positions of complacency, and start searching Scriptural precepts for all spheres of human endeavor – including the principles He has established to bless our churches, nations, societies, economies and cultures.

For example, there are more passages in Scripture about money and economic principles then there are about prayer. But you’d never know it sitting in our church pews Sunday after Sunday (except for the self-serving emphasis on giving to the church and the Old Testament practice of tithing!).

When was the last time we taught God’s people about sound economic principles and policies, such as the dangers of false weights (i.e., inflating our currency), or the dangers of borrowing (i.e., deficit spending), or the dangers of the State violating the domain of individual self-government and personal responsibility (i.e., expecting the State to meet our personal economic needs); or the danger of using centralized state power to solve our problems (which God warns in I Samuel 8 will result in oppression as the state runs and controls all aspects of our lives)?

When was the last time we taught about the principles of local representative rule as found in the book of Judges? In fact, if we were to ask the average congregation to pick God’s preferred form of government in Scripture, most would wrongly answer “a king” (thus feeding into the temptation our nation is now falling into of ever increasing centralized state power to solve the problems that the state itself more often than not created!) rather than the representative constitutional republic that God ordained for Israel at Mount Sinai.

It’s Not Too Late

Despite the problems facing our nation, it’s not too late to apply II Chronicles 7:14.

To start, we need to repent of the sin of ignorance and the “me-centered” pietism that has gripped our churches. Pietism is a theology that focuses on “me and Jesus” and what Jesus can do for me, while ignoring all that God tells us in his Word about his created order and our proper, vital role in building strong churches, nations, societies, economies and cultures based on eternally-valid principles. Yes, we must build in our people the strong foundations of individual faith! But we must never forget that the Great Commission also demands that our individual faith transform the “nations” and whole cultures.

Are we willing to stand with Zechariah, who, being “clothed” with the Spirit of God called the nation to repentance (and was willing to pay a high price for doing so!) by proclaiming: “Thus says God, ‘Why do you break the commandments of the Lord, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has forsaken you.’” (II Chronicles 24:20). Note that they forsook God by forsaking His commandments – His principles and precepts.

We must not ignore the fact that God gives principles and precepts for personal transformation and blessing as well as principles and precepts for the transformation and blessing of churches and whole nations. Our faith must be relevant not only on a personal level, but also to our communities and nations.

Is Our Faith Too Small?

Only if we expand our faith and understanding to encompass all arenas of human activity can we have convocations and solemn intercessory assemblies that result in God healing our churches and our land, because our church leaders will have first taken the time to learn and then at those meetings actually teach us God’s ways – not simply for individuals, but for the Church, whole nations, societies, economies and cultures. Intercession and prayer without teaching and understanding just won’t do the job when it comes to the challenges now facing our churches and nation. We need both intercession and understanding, working hand in hand in the same meetings!

Rather than spending hours and hours crying out to God in vain repetition, how about setting aside some time for a mature, gifted teacher to explain one of the wicked ways (i.e., a problem) that has contributed to our churches or nation facing the brink of calamity, followed by an explanation of God’s alternative way (i.e., the answer)? Then have the congregational leaders and the people respond in that same meeting by humbling themselves, praying, seeking God’s face, repenting and pledging to submit to God’s way on that specific point. Once there is a sense of breakthrough on that issue, have the teacher move on to the next issue followed again by fervent prayer and repentance, and methodically work through issue after issue for however long, and however many meetings, it takes.

True Repentance

As we are taught God’s specific ways at those gatherings, we then are able to respond, just as with Israel of old, by seeking His face and crying out to God in specific repentance for how we (not others!) have violated his specific precepts. The problem we need to confront is that we, as God’s people, have forsaken His ways (in fact, we haven’t even cared enough to learn or teach others His ways), and thus have abdicated to others who took our churches and nation in the wrong direction.

We have forgotten that God is sovereign – for our blessing – over all spheres of human endeavor, and not just the personal, “spiritual” aspects of our individual faith!

Let’s not cry out so much for deliverance from others – we have caused this mess in our churches and nation, and God is looking for us to acknowledge the sin of ignorance regarding His ways. He then is looking to see if we are humble enough to commit to Him, not only subjectively in our personal lives, but also to the objective principles and precepts of His ways as they relate to the problems our churches and nation are facing.

Only as we once again are taught God’s ways can we repent of our wicked ways. Only as we understand His ways can we turn again to His ways and once more see God’s blessing and providence poured out in the life of our churches and nation.

God is calling forth His intercessors, but where are our church leaders – our elders, pastors and teachers – who will hear and heed God’s call to begin teaching His ways? God help us if the leaders of our churches fail to rise to this challenge by failing to search Scripture and then teach God’s precepts for all spheres of life!

It’s never too late to begin “humbling” ourselves by acknowledging that our ways are not His ways, to begin “praying” with understanding as we are taught His ways, to begin “seeking” His face rather than seeking our own agenda, and then begin to “turn” from our wicked ways as we once again start to understand what it means to be “one nation under God.”

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