Taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10.5)

Outcomes
Presidential Politics
At The Daily Caller, D. B. Ganz explains what many consider to be the irrationality characterizing the current political season (“Two Secularists Who Don’t Know the Bible: America Chooses Reflections Of Itself,” May 16, 2016).

If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a hundred times: “Is this the best we can do?” Mr. Ganz explains that “the same electorate which chose [Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump] gives Mrs. Clinton lower favorability ratings than any major presidential candidate in history...except for Donald Trump.”

We disparage the choices before us, but we are the ones who made them the choices, and they are but reflections of who “we the people” are at heart. We disparage the state of our national soul when we disparage those we have nominated for the highest office in the land.

Now, if only we could see that this is indeed the case.

As America has increased the pace of its drift from the principles and values widespread at its Founding, a worldview defined by secularism, pragmatism, materialism, and narcissism has leached into the wellsprings nourishing our national outlook and aspirations. We demonstrate very little regard for the Law of God, which, Mr. Ganz reminds us, Winston Churchill extolled as providing a system of ethics which is “incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact all other fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together.” We have strayed from that ethical system which holds love for God and neighbor as its highest values, and thus have chosen candidates who are most like ourselves – pragmatic, materialistic, and narcissistic.

Mr. Ganz opines wistfully, “Hopefully, the American public will somehow be inspired to reconnect to their traditional values.” But, given the evidence of our decades-long drift away from those values, why should we expect such a turnabout? We may not like what we see of the reflection of our national soul, but we do not yet not like it so much that we are willing to repent of what we have become.

As Christians, we may deplore this situation and the Punch-and-Judy presidential circus unfolding around us, but we have no one to blame but ourselves. What Francis Schaeffer described as “the great evangelical disaster” of the last century – Bible-believing Christians failing to live and bear witness to the truth in every area of life – has simply advanced to the next stage of its social and cultural degeneration. The Christians who ignored Schaeffer in the 70s and 80s are the same Christians currently fawning over Donald Trump as the man of the hour to preserve their freedoms and secure their pocket books.

Forgetting that believers are, first of all, citizens and ambassadors of a Kingdom not of this world, many Christians can see no better hope for postponing our national flight to the dustbin of history than to elect Mr. Trump. So, given the state of contemporary Christianity, and the choice between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, many Christians have concluded, “Yes, this is the best we can do.”

I suppose they could turn to seeking the Lord in united, extraordinary, specific prayer for revival (Jonathan Edwards), but most Christians do not believe in such prayer, and prefer to seek revival, to the extent they do at all, only as a personal buffer against bad stuff happening to them.

Meanwhile, God continues to bring the battering ram of His judgment against the walls of the fortress of America and the Church, at the same time graciously and patiently searching for some who will stand in the gap and repair the breach by leading the people of God in repentance and prayer (Ezek. 22.30).

To date however, most believers fail to see the need. And we are too busy chasing our materialistic and personal ends to focus clearly on the coming Kingdom of God and our role as citizens and ambassadors in it. The choices before us in this political season are merely the reflection of our souls. If we don’t like what we see, the place to begin making a change is not in the quality of candidates we nominate, but the character of the soul by which we select them.

For reflection
1.  In a famous Pogo cartoon strip, the hero declared, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Is it possible this could be said about the state of the Church and of Christians in our day? Explain.

2.  What evidence would you cite to demonstrate that your church really believes in prayer as the only hope of arresting our nation’s drift into disarray and disillusion?

3.  Of course, Christians must fulfill their political responsibility and vote in upcoming elections. What criteria should guide us in determining which way to cast our votes?                                                         

Next steps: Meditate on Psalm 126 as a prayer, used in difficult times, “sown” to the Lord for revival. Begin praying this psalm daily, asking the Lord to bring revival to your soul, renewal to your church, and awakening to our world. Let praying this psalm be the beginning of your “sowing” toward a coming day when even the nations will say, “The Lord has done great things!”

There’s no telling what God might do if only men – Paul is specific about this – will take the work of prayer more seriously. To find out how you can do this, and how you can begin enlisting other men for more serious prayer, order a copy of If Men Will Pray from our online store (click here). If you would like to put together a group of people to begin praying regularly for revival, order a copy of Restore Us! (click here), which explains why we need such prayer, provides guidelines for getting started, and includes 12 psalms as guides in seeking the Lord for revival.

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