How Are You Praying for Our Leaders?

Since our nation’s very first days, God’s greatest movements in our midst have been fashioned and sustained by prayer, from the signing of our earliest documents, to our triumphs over days of darkness, to the spiritual awakenings that have sustained our faith and resolve over the centuries. Throughout Scripture and throughout our history as a nation, persistent, prevailing, intentional, and never-ending prayer has always brought the presence of God.

How vast are the possibilities when we pray! Prayer is a wonderful power placed by the almighty God into the hands of His saints. When we humbly seek His face in prayer, He is moved to act on our behalf and accomplish His desires for us.

And when we seek God in prayer for our leaders, we impact the very direction our nation will take. This forty-day prayer journey is designed to help quicken your prayers, to encourage you to seek God’s will for our future and ask Him to continually intercede on behalf of our nation. Prayerfully seek His face every day, believe that your prayers are making a difference, and claim all victory that is and is to come! For there is tremendous power in prayer.

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From President Ronald Reagan

To preserve our blessed land we must look to God….

It is time to realize that we need God more than He needs us…. Let us, young and old, join together, as did the First Continental Congress, in the first step, in humble heartfelt prayer. Let us do so for the love of God and His great goodness, in search of His guidance and the grace of repentance, in seeking His blessings, His peace, and the resting of His kind and holy hands on ourselves, our nation, our friends in the defense of freedom, and all mankind, now and always.

The time has come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him for the healing of America…. Our country is in need of and ready for a spiritual renewal. Today, we utter no prayer more fervently than the ancient prayer for peace on Earth.

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace…. .” And God bless you all.

— From a Speech to the American People February 6, 1986

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O Lord,

Let us never forget to praise Your holy name. You are a wonderful God. You are slow to anger and patient, with an unconditional love that has no end. Let us bless You each day and lift up our thanks in praise for the wonderful things You have done for us. May we forever give honor to Your name, for without You we are nothing.

Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,

My lips shall praise You.

Thus I will bless You while I live;

I will lift up my hands in Your name.

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,

And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.

— Psalm 63:3-5

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O Lord,

Open my lips, And my mouth shall show forth Your praise. — Psalm 51:15

When we make praising the Lord a habit, our lives will change. Everything we do will be different as pleasing God becomes more important and knowing more about Him becomes a priority. When we choose to live as the hands and feet of Jesus, we daily declare the love of Christ — and that can bring light and hope to our country. The more we praise God with our lives as well as our mouths, the more He comes alive in us — and that can attract others to start following Him. So may we — as the psalmist modeled — open our lips in praise to almighty God!

Excerpted with permission from If My People by Jack Countryman, copyright Jack Countryman.

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Your Turn

As the church, how are we doing our part to pray for our leaders and out nation all together? Are you finding it harder to pray for our country? How are you lifting up our nation to God in unprecedented? Come share on our blog!