A Trip to Bud Walton Arena
It was about 6:30 p.m. on September 19th, when my friend Dan dropped me off just across the street from Bud Walton Arena. As I walked toward the arena, I recalled other times I had been to Bud Walton to cheer on the Razorbacks, but never an event like this.
Over the next hour, more than 10,000 students flowed into the arena for the Unite Arkansas organized by Unite Us, a movement of college students united to lift the name of Jesus. What begin on the campus of Auburn University in September of 2023 has grown into a movement reaching college students across the nation.
In addition to the worship and praise, students heard the gospel of Christ proclaimed, and hundreds responded to the call for repentance and put their faith in Jesus Christ. Witnessing the hunger of these college students for relationship with Christ filled my heart with joy and inspired renewed hope in this generation and the future of our Nation.
My ultimate hope is in Jesus, but my heart grieves over the growing division, decline, and despair in our culture and nation. A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting Dave Butts at an Arkansas Pastor’s Prayer Summit. In his excellent book, With One Cry: A Renewed Challenge to Pray for America, Dave wrote, “The great danger for us now is that we will lose hope. Many Christians are pretty much convinced that we’re living in the last days, and we can’t do anything about what is happening.”
He goes on to say, “With such a dire diagnosis, why, then, am I not hopeless? To the contrary, I have great hope for America because the depth of a fall never determines God’s ability to restore.” May God restore us, revive us, and awaken us!
Dave goes on to talk about the reality that Christians in America are now more like the away team than the home team. He devotes an entire chapter to “How to Pray for an Election,” but perhaps the chapter that inspired me most was “The Hope of Revival.”
The Church is the key to the future of America. The nation doesn’t believe that. We have been marginalized by culture. But not by God. As goes the Church, so goes the nation. Of course, that is true in a negative way as well as a positive, and much of the illness in the nation is the result of a weak and powerless Church.
“We fool ourselves to think that America can continue as the beacon of liberty and justice apart from the pursuit of the source of liberty and justice: God. But while it’s all too easy to lay the blame elsewhere for the problems our nation is facing, the truth is that it’s the Church that must step up. We have become too satisfied with the status quo—doing little beyond simply stating our concerns. But complacency does not become a people in pursuit of God. The Church in America is in need of another spiritual great awakening if our nation is to survive the onslaught against her very foundations. This is not hyperbole but reality. Our nation’s survival depends on the church’s awakening.” — Alex McFarland, quoted in Charisma blog, January 6, 2015 “Impact of Great Awakenings in the Past”
In Quiet Talks on Prayer, S.D. Gordon wrote, “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”
As we approach the 2024 elections in the U.S. and as citizens of both heaven and earth living in a constitutional republic, we are called to:
- Pray for those in authority (1 Tim. 2:1-2).
- Speak truth in love to those in authority within our spheres of influence (Eph 4:25, John 19:10-12, Acts 4:19).
- Love God and our neighbor by exercising the authority given to us by God by voting for leaders and laws that promote good and restrain evil (Rom. 13:1-7).
A Humble Prayer for Our Nation
As we unite in extraordinary prayer—prayer that is increasing, unceasing, and persevering—we offer this prayer for our nation, co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine and featured on the Breakpoint Podcast on September 30th.
Lord, these are dark and dangerous times for our country. Our politics is full of hate, and it’s spilling over in how we think of and treat each other. And like any nation, we have guilt for the evil that we have done and permitted.
We have the blood of over 65 million unborn children on our hands. How do you even begin to atone for this? No political party is willing to defend the unborn, and some of those who speak up for them have even been imprisoned.
We can only appeal to your mercy and pray for an end to the slaughter of innocents. We have dismantled your design for marriage and sexuality and given in to a spirit of confusion over simple biological facts. We are engaged in a destructive project to do the impossible and transition people from one sex to another, and more victims will pay the price for our folly.
We have deep injustices in our criminal justice system against the marginalized and politically disfavored, resulting in many false convictions and plea deals done by the innocent to end their ordeal. In this way we have corrupted justice in violation of your commands to judge with truth. We have made idols out of our possessions, out of sex, out of ourselves, out of politics, out of our nation, and out of the government, and we have viciously attacked anyone who questions our false gods.
We treat them as heretics to be despised and hated. We hate and malign our political opponents, forgetting that they too are made in your image and forgetting Jesus’ teaching that to hold another in contempt is the equivalent of murder, an attack on the image of God and thus on God himself. May we as your people resist the temptation to hate, to insult, to lash out.
May we love our enemies and pray for those who insult or persecute us. May we be peacemakers. May our allegiance be first and foremost to your Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
May we live by Jesus’ teachings and the values of the Kingdom as agents of reconciliation and shalom in a world that desperately needs them. May your priorities be our priorities over party, tribe, or faction. May we seek first your Kingdom and your righteousness, working for your justice in the world but especially for your rule over all areas of life.
May we be disciple-makers in accordance with your final command to us. May we live by the law of love—not the kind of sentimental love our culture promotes—but love that seeks the ultimate good of all persons, not their temporary satisfaction. May we love people enough to speak the truth with compassion and gentleness.
May we care more about their wellbeing here and in eternity than about what they think of us. Politically, the issues we are facing are many and complicated, and no party stands for your Kingdom in all areas. May we affirm and support what is good: the right to life, liberty of conscience, our fundamental freedoms, equal justice under law, government that carries out its responsibilities before you but stays out of things beyond its legitimate authority.
May we oppose what is evil: infanticide, abuse of all sorts, injustice, and dehumanizing rhetoric from all sides. And above all, may we put our hope in you, not in the election or defeat of candidates or parties. We pray against the demonic forces driving these and other evils in our society and the increasingly overt embrace of the occult among cultural elites.
Lord, you and you alone determine the rise and fall of nations. Only your Kingdom lasts forever. If this is the time when we will see the decline of our nation, keep us from despair, remembering that our citizenship is in Heaven from which we await our Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Your promises remain unchanged, and whatever happens, we know you are true. Our hope is in you, not in politicians, parties, laws, or constitutions. We commit our nation into your hands, and by your grace we will live in faith, hope, and love, whatever happens.
We ask all this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
