Pray Without Ceasing for the Brokenhearted

A new Krazy Glue commercial says, “We believe that almost everything in this country is broken.” Most of us would agree that there is much in our nation that needs fixing—our schools, our infrastructure, our economy—the list is endless.  Yet, when compiling our lists of things we want fixed, we often forget about the broken hearts of millions of Americans that can only be healed by God’s perfect love.

It seems that every day another tragedy becomes headline news. We watch in horror as details of the school shooting at Newtown or the bombing at the Boston Marathon are made public, but almost as soon as the images disappear from our television screens, we tend to push them from our minds. It is difficult to think about the victims and their families whose lives have been forever changed by one moment of cruelty, and so we refuse to dwell on those tragedies.

Yet, God sees every broken heart and feels the pain of everyone who mourns. In prophesying about the Messiah, Isaiah says, “…the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the suffering and afflicted. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted, to announce liberty to captives and to open the eyes of the blind. He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of God’s favor to them has come…He will give beauty for ashes, joy instead of mourning, praise instead of heaviness.” (Isaiah 61:1-3)

What a promise! God says that He will turn around the lives of those who suffer and fill them with beauty, joy, and praise. When we pray, therefore, we need to remember to pray that those who mourn will receive these precious gifts from God’s hand. Jesus promised that He will never leave us or forsake us, (John 14:18) but when people suffer it is sometimes difficult to remember that promise.

Therefore, when we pray for those who have known a great loss, let’s pray specifically that they will feel the presence of God’s Spirit in their lives. Let’s pray that all that God has promised will come to fruition in their lives, and they will experience the peace that goes beyond their present circumstances and draws them into a healing relationship with Jesus Christ. He and He alone can mend broken hearts, so when we pray we must remember to take the brokenhearted to Him so that they can receive the fullness of those promises.

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. Her novel, The Warrior, about how one woman's prayers change the lives of those around her, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information visit her website at Frontier 2000 or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.

YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER

I believe in the power of prayer. I believe it enough to spend a significant amount of time each day praying for various people I have never met, various people I have met, family members, political situations, etc. I believe that our futures depend on our willingness to seek God with all our hearts and to come before Him daily with our petitions.

To make my life more efficient I have organized my prayers into categories and set aside a special time for each category. For instance, while I drive to work each morning I pray for my family members. It is about a twenty-five minute commute, and I make it alone with no radio or music to distract me. I pray aloud—I am sure that the people in the other cars think that I am talking to myself, but I pay them no attention. I am completely focused on praying for each child by name and each in-law by name. I then pray for each grandchild by name. With a family as large as mine, that takes some time.

Each day I also pray for our nation. I pray for men and women of God to be elected to office, and I pray that they will be strong and do exactly what God put them there to do. I pray for Jim DeMint, the Senator from South Carolina who recently resigned his office in order to take over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in April of this year. I pray that God will show him exactly what to do and how to do it. I pray that he will be bold and uncompromising.

In addition to praying for our nation’s political situation, I also pray for revival. At first I believed that it would be better to separate these two prayer categories so that I could pray for the political situation at one time of day and pray for revival at another. However, when attempting this I discovered that it is not possible to separate the two. As I have spent more and more time in prayer, I have become more and more convinced that without revival we can never improve our political situation.

As the result of hours of prayer for our nation, I have come to believe that none of the problems we face will ever be solved unless we become a nation of prayer warriors. A better economy, more jobs, lower gas prices, and safer schools are not going to exist unless we as a nation turn to Jesus Christ. And, the truth is, even if it were possible to bring about these changes without revival, we would simply be exchanging one godless system for another.

People frequently tell me that things are worse now than they have ever been in this country. They allege that we are more promiscuous, more drugged, more liberal and less patriotic than at any other time in history. I know that this is not true because I lived through the sixties. In fact, in August of 1969 when the three days of debauchery known as Woodstock occurred, I had just turned twenty-four. I was exactly the right age to buy into the notion that Woodstock was “three days of peace and music” but I didn’t. In spite of the endorsements of the most respected educators and medical professionals, I also didn’t buy into the propaganda that marijuana and LSD were “good” for you and would help you discover your inner self and find God. Likewise, I rejected the slogan of the day that proclaimed “God is Dead!” and I never thought for one minute that Jesus was actually a homosexual hippie who hung out with his posse and just wanted everyone to be free to live however they chose.

But something else happened in 1969 that changed this nation and the world. Revival broke out and burned across this country like a raging fire. Pictures of long-haired boys and girls wearing the unmistakable hippie fashions of the day, holding their hands above their heads and praising God began to pop up everywhere. These godless, misguided young people who had spent months—and sometimes years—taking drugs and having sex with whoever happened along suddenly began to find Jesus. Of course, not all of them stayed with their new-found faith, but many did. Those former hippies now make up a very large segment of Christians in America. They are now sixty something, but they still serve Jesus, and they know that the Gospel is true because they have experienced Grace and have known the presence of Jesus Christ in their lives.

If we had not had revival in the late sixties and early seventies, I do not believe that we would have survived as a nation. We were poised to fall when God sent His Holy Spirit to burn across this land and bring that generation of young people to His saving Grace. I have seen this with my own eyes, and I know that it is true.

If we are to survive the current attack on our liberty, we must turn from our sins and come to Him who alone can save us. We must have revival because you just can’t separate the two.

When you pray for your nation, remember to pray for revival. We cannot have just government unless we have godly men and women making the policies. Likewise, we will not elect godly men and women to public office unless we have a godly electorate. If you want to see this nation become that shining city on the hill, pray for it every day, and when you pray, remember to pray for revival.

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. Her novel, The Warrior, about how one woman's prayers change the lives of those around her, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information visit her website at Frontier 2000 or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.

Brother, Can You Spare a Minute?

The 1930s gave us a decade of the worst depression this country has ever experienced. Most of us are too young to remember The Great Depression, but all of us have heard stories about the joblessness, the homelessness, and the soup lines that defined that period of American history. Middle-class families were suddenly plunged into poverty and were destined to roam the country looking for work.

During the 1930s, the song Brother, Can you Spare a Dime? became an instant hit because it highlighted the plight of the middle-class American who begged on the streets in order to put a little food into his stomach. The newly created class of Hobos hopped off trains and knocked on people’s kitchen doors asking for whatever the housewife could spare. Even then a dime wasn’t much, but for those in need it just might make the difference between starvation and survival.

Eighty years later we find ourselves living in the twenty-first century version of the great depression. Americans are losing their jobs, their homes, and their futures at a rate that far exceeds anything we would have imagined only five years ago. In the 2012 remake, the soup lines are gone and families who have lost their homes and jobs are not begging on the streets; they are barely scraping by on a government issued check, but like their 1930s counterparts, they have little hope for the future.

However, the pleas for money have not disappeared. In the 2012 remake virtually all Americans who have access to a telephone, the Internet, or the U.S. mails are inundated daily with requests for money. We are told that if we can get ten dollars to some organization or another within the next 24 hours, they can stop a certain piece of legislation from being passed, or they can get a particular political candidate elected or defeated, as the case may be. The trick is that the money must be delivered in a specific minimum amount (of course, more is always better, but the minimum will do) and it must be delivered within a specific short period of time.

Today, I join the ranks of those who are asking Americans to give so that our country can be saved. However, I am not asking you to give money to turn this country around. My question is this: Brother, can you spare a minute? If you are willing to donate a minute to save our nation, here is how your minute will be used:

Your minute will be bundled with the minutes of tens of thousands of other Americans who have become a part of the If My People, 2012 call to action that is taking place right now and will continue through the election on November 6. However, please do not send your minute to me—do not even send your minute to Joel Rosenberg, who is one of the organizers of the event. Send your minute directly to God. Here is the way it works:

Many thousands of Americans are setting aside one minute every evening from now through the election to pray for our country as instructed in II Chronicles 7:14, If my people, which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and search for me, and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear them from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land.

The event calls for us to set aside one minute every evening so that we will all be praying at exactly the same time. Those on Eastern Standard Time pray at 9:00 P.M., those on Central Standard Time pray at 8:00 P.M., those on Mountain Standard Time pray at 7:00 P.M., and those on Pacific Standard Time pray at 6:00 P.M.  We are to ask God to forgive our sins both individually and as a country, to ask Him to heal our land, and to ask Him to send revival to our nation. We are also to pray for the upcoming election. This idea is so simple that everyone can take part. Even a child as young as three years old can put his little hands together and ask God to heal our land.

I hope that you and your family will join us in this effort. I believe that it is a great privilege to live in a nation where we can participate in events such as this one, and I am honored to be able to send my minute bundled together with those countless other minutes so that our land can be healed.

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. Her newest novel, The Chosen, is available on Kindle and  in paperback. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.

 

The Freedom Prayer

The following prayer appears in The Planner, a Christian novel by Alexandra Swann. The Planner is set a couple of years in the future when the United States is living under an oppressive government that has stripped American citizens of virtually all of their rights and reduced the populace to poverty and dependence on the government dole.

One evening Kris, the central character, finds herself sitting in on an illegal prayer meeting held in her parents’ tiny apartment, and when she hears Todd, the retired pastor who leads the group, pray this prayer, she begins to re-evaluate her own life.

In these trying times, I think that we would all do well to take this prayer to heart and incorporate these sentiments into our own prayers.

Todd’s Prayer

“Lord we come to You tonight to ask for Your forgiveness. The Bible promises that when we seek You, we will find You, if we search with all our hearts.

“Lord, we confess that we have not followed Your commands. We have not loved You with our whole hearts—we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not stood for the truth of Your Gospel. We have sat by and said nothing when Your name was blasphemed and mocked. We did not take a stand when we saw Your laws despised.

“We know that many times we ourselves have been among the worst offenders. We have lived sinful lives that are contrary to the word of God. Like Esau, we have traded away our birthright for a little convenience; we have despised this incredible gift of freedom that You provided for us and allowed all of the liberty that our country offered to be trampled down. We have forgotten the words of King David who said that it is better to fall into the hands of God than to be at the mercy of men, and so we now find ourselves living under the rule of a cruel and despotic government who has stolen everything from us and shows us no mercy.

“We know that everything that is happening to us is a result of our bad choices, both individually and as a nation. You gave us the gift of being born into a free nation—the greatest nation the world has ever seen. You gave us a form of government unlike any other that had ever been known by any other people, and we did not value it enough to defend it.

“For all of these things, Lord, we ask Your forgiveness.  We pray tonight that You will change our hearts so that each of us will begin to love what You love, to hate what You hate and to want what You want. We ask You to save our nation, for we know that the Bible teaches that salvation belongs to our God—no political party, no ideology, no government can save us.  If we don’t find salvation in You, we won’t find it at all. 

“Please turn Your face to us again, and give us back our freedom, and restore our country so that we can truly be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We ask all these things in the name of Your son, Jesus.  Amen.”

                          The Planner

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. Her newest novel, The Warrior, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

I’d Rather Eat a Squirrel

Recently a little boy told his mother that he would rather eat a squirrel than read a book! Last night I was surprised to discover that a lot of adults would rather eat a squirrel than pray in public.

Our pastor asked the congregation why the Sunday night prayer service is so poorly attended that he is able to hold it in his office rather than the sanctuary. A number of theories were put forth, but no one seemed to have a real answer to his question. Then a man said something that caused most of the congregation to nod in agreement, “Prayer is the most personal communication there is. It’s very hard to do something so intimate in front of a lot of other people.”

I knew immediately that this man had spoken for most of the people there. It isn’t really the television, or the sports, or the apathy that is keeping them away from the prayer services. They are staying away because they do not want to expose the most intimate aspects of their lives to people they hardly know.

After considering this matter, I think that the real problem is that most people do not know the difference between personal prayer and corporate prayer. Personal prayer is, absolutely, the most intimate form of communication. God knows everything about us. He knows everything that we have done and everything that we have thought. We, therefore, use our private prayer time to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness. We hold back nothing because there is nothing He does not already know. Because of the level of intimacy that we share with Him, nothing is either too insignificant, or too terrible to lay at His feet.

Corporate prayer is an entirely different matter. Normally, when people gather together to pray, they are praying about something specific. I have attended prayer meetings held prior to elections; I have attended prayer meetings for our city and our neighborhoods; I have attended prayer meetings for my church. The list is endless, but in every case these gatherings for public prayer had a focus. While it is never “wrong” to pray for something personal in this kind of meeting, that is not the purpose, and no one expects the meeting to turn into a sort of “true confessions” session.

On several occasions I have been asked ahead of time to pray at these kinds of meetings. In these cases it is my practice to spend time preparing by asking God what I am supposed to pray for during the meeting. I do not write out a prayer, but I do seek God to find out what he wants my particular focus to be. I once spent several hours during the week praying about a five-minute prayer that I was to offer on Sunday. When I was satisfied that I knew the direction my prayer was to take, I went to church with three specific points that I covered in my five minutes.

Prayer is spontaneous, but I believe that corporate prayer should have focus. If you are in a meeting and feel that God is directing you to pray for something that you had not thought of earlier, by all means do it, but don’t just show up and start talking out loud to God. As in most things, corporate prayer benefits from good preparation.

When I prepare, I ask God to show me what the people who will be in attendance need, and I ask him to give me a prayer that will help and bless them. Every group is different and corporate prayer gives us an opportunity to pray for the specific needs of those attending that particular meeting. Perhaps God wants the focus to be prayer for our marriages, or our children, or our nation. We do not know the specific concerns of the other people in attendance, but He does. This gives us an opportunity to pray for people without knowing the details of their lives. After all, God is the only one who needs to know all the details.

If you are a person who has a difficult time praying in public, I hope that you will rethink corporate prayer. It is very different from personal prayer because it is not about you. If you will make other people the focus and ask God to guide your prayer so that their needs will bemet, you will discover that praying in public is not so hard after all.

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Be Careful What you Pray For

In 2007 one of my daughters and her husband bought a big, beautiful home in El Paso’s upper valley.  With its one-half acre lot and aged brick driveway, the house was an impressive sight. Upon moving in, my daughter and son-in-law immediately updated every room with travertine floors, granite counter tops, and stainless appliances. Life looked sweet.

A few months later, however, they began to notice an inordinate number of bees around the doors and windows. My son-in-law investigated and discovered that a colony of bees had built a hive in an attic recess that was nearly inaccessible to humans. He determined that this was a job for a professional exterminator, and they immediately called one.

The exterminator treated the area, assured them that they bees were history, collected his one-hundred twenty dollars, and left. My daughter was greatly relieved to discover that the bees had, indeed, disappeared—for a while. Within a few weeks, however, the bees had returned in greater force than before. Again, the exterminator was called, the fee was paid and the problem appeared to be eradicated. But, no, within a few weeks the bees were back in even greater numbers.

My daughter, who has two young children and was very concerned about the situation, and began to pray that God would help them get rid of the bees. She was, of course, expecting that one morning she would wake up and the bees would have mysteriously disappeared.

Instead, she awoke one morning to the sound of gnawing in the attic above the ceiling in her bedroom. It did not sound like a small animal gnawing; it sounded like dozens of creatures gnawing. Horrified, Victoria leaped out of bed. The gnawing continued for days, and then she began to see tiny mice squeeze through places around the baseboards that were so small that no one would believe that anything could get through them. She set out traps and D-Con and still they came. She and her husband were just about at their wits end when the gnawing stopped and the mice disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

It seems that when bees build a hive, the honey attracts other bees. Because they had built it in a spot that could not be accessed by humans, either from the inside or the outside of the home, no amount of exterminating the bees was going to provide a permanent solution. As soon as the bees were dead, new bees arrived to take their places. Poison could be injected into the area where the hive had been built, but there was no way to remove the honey and wax that they had left behind. Actually, there was one way; a colony of mice could devour every last drop of the honey and wax that had been left behind, and they could lick every surface “clean” so that no trace of the sticky sweet substance remained.

I think this incident is a great reminder that God’s ways are not our ways. When we pray for help, we usually expect an easy, pain-free solution to our problem. Sometimes, however, when God begins to move, we are confronted with what seems to be an even worse problem. As we deal with life’s curve balls, we need to remember that God’s solutions are not always as pleasant as we would like for them to be, but His solutions are permanent. He has an answer to every problem that results in removing all the residue that would continue to plague us if it were not dealt with. 

Yes, hearing the gnawing and seeing the mice pop through places that they didn’t even know there were places, was horrifying, but the solution was permanent. My daughter and her family lived in that home for several more years before moving to Dallas, and they never again saw another bee or another mouse.

Although I knew that they had a bee problem, Victoria did not share the mouse problem with me until it had been resolved. The day that she related their harrowing experience, she began by saying, “Mom, be careful what you pray for.”

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