Psalm 139: 23-24 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Proverbs 16:18 Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
Colossians 4:2-6 Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
I have written about the importance of prayer several times, and here I sit this morning with coffee in hand and the computer screen in front of me and prayer is the word that comes to mind again today. Our pastor preached out of Colossians 4 yesterday, and we were reminded once again of the importance of fervent prayer. We have to start fervently prayer for this country of ours, or I fear that we are going to fall.
We’ve all heard that history repeats itself, and I’ve often found that to be true. However, if we learn from our past mistakes and glean truth from those mistakes, we can perhaps keep from doing the same wrong things over and over. The Bible presents us with many valuable lessons of past mistakes made by humans in history. Oh, if only we could learn from others. David was a remarkable man. He wasn’t perfect. He made his share of mistakes. We are often reminded of that incident with Bathsheba. No, he wasn’t perfect, but he loved the Lord with great passion, and he served him well. Yet, while he was king of Israel, he found himself in the middle of a very bad situation. His kingdom was in an uproar. It was a true mess. The slaves hated their masters, and the masters hated their slaves. Everyone was blaming the government for all of the problems and unrest, and in turn, the government was blaming the people. Every man thought that he individually was perfect. There was sinful pride at every corner. His country was in a terrible state. (Hmmm…that sounds vaguely familiar.)
King David recognized that his country was on a slippery slope, and that if this sinful pride continued to increase, the great nation of Israel was going to collapse spiritually. He recognized how terrible things had become, and he did the only thing that he could do. He turned to God. He fell to his knees and brought his concerns to the Almighty. He came before the Father in humility, and said, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” He knew that God knew his heart, and he humbly opened his heart completely to God. He asked God to search his heart and see if there was anything offensive in him. He gave God complete authority over his heart, his whole heart. he knew that he had to be right before God as he went into the prayer war room.
Look around, Peeps. History is repeating itself. We don’t have slaves anymore, thank goodness, but boy oh boy do we have people hating people. Evil is now considered good, and good is evil. If someone has skin that is a different color than our own, we should hate them according to society. I don’t support the Black Lives Matter movement because I don’t support violence. Violence results in more violence, and problems can not be solved with violence. I support that black lives matter, and I believe they matter just as much as white lives matter. I also believe that police officer lives matter. For you see, God created the white man, the black man, the red man, and the yellow man. He also put the desire in the heart of our men and women in blue to protect and serve. God doesn’t love one color or one heart more than any other, and the scripture tells us that we are to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” In fact, Jesus said that this is the second greatest commandment. As a country, we are failing miserably at following this one.
We’ve accepted killing of unborn babies all the way up to the time of delivery as okay. We’ve accepted same sex marriages, and now we are being told that pedophilia is an acceptable way of life. If the media feeds us some racially biased news feed, we don’t even ask for the facts. We merely “get mad and get even.” We don’t look for peaceful solutions. Oh, protests may begin peacefully, but more often than not, they turn violent. And it seems that as a country, we think that if things don’t go the way that we want them too, then we have the right to be violent, burn other people’s businesses down, beat people in the streets, scream profanities, and roar as loud as we can roar.
What happened to “One Nation Under God?” What happened to this country that was found on the principle of freedom of religion. What happened to us? We could spend an eternity answering those questions, but the number one answer has to be “we turned our backs on God.” We have taken God out of our schools. We have removed God out of our government. We have blocked God out of our minds. We closed the door and threw away the key. How do we win our country back? How do we turn away from all of this evil? The only answer I can come up with is fervent prayer.
We must ask God to search our hearts, and ask that he remove any unclean thing that is keeping us from a relationship with him. Then, we must unite together in fervent, earnest prayer and ask our heavenly Father to forgive our nation and plead with Him to turn us away from this evil and turn our hearts back to Him. We must be united…united in Christ. United we stand, but divided we fall. We are a divided nation. There is no doubt about it. There is so much civil unrest that we are likely headed into another civil war. Divided we will fall. We are falling so fast, but we haven’t hit the ground yet. We must unite together in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We need hit the ground on our knees and cry out for help. Let’s start praying and never stop. Prayer is the greatest weapon we have right now, and it’s time to pull out the big guns! Let’s pray fervently and earnestly and without ceasing!
Inspirations from the Funny Farm 