Prayer for Revival and Reformation - Pt 1

 

I really want 2026 to be a bright year for our congregation. And I feel very confident it will be. But I also want 2026 to be a clear change and turn for God’s church in North America. And that I am sort of confident it will be. But deeply confident it can be.

 

Toward that end, I want 2026 to be a year where we pray for the revival and reformation of God’s church in these United States of America, and we persuade other believers to do the same. The church in this land needs some serious reviving, repenting, and reforming. If you zoom out and take in the bigger ecclesiastical landscape, you will see whole denominations making very poor decisions, even immoral ones, from both sides of the isle as they say. In the words of Herman Melville in Moby Dick, “Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow” (Chapter 8). And if we tweak that sentence a bit, it gets to my point. The world is a ship on its passage, and the church is its prow. If that’s the case, the church in North America has increasingly become part of the disease and not the remedy.

 

And yet, as Richard John Neuhaus (founder and original senior editor of the journal First Things) is reported to have quipped once, “The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Remember, hope is still a Christian virtue, and despair is a mortal sin.” Thus, in Christian hope, hope of the goodness of God, and that his world rescuing project is unstoppable, and his promise that even the gates of hell will not prevail against his church, it is right and fitting for us to pray for God’s Church in this land.

 

Therefore, over the next several weeks I will be handing you biblical prayers for us to use together. Prayers aimed at revival and reformation of God’s church in our nation.

 

Thus, for the next 7 days, please join with me in praying for God’s church in the USA. Join me in praying for the theologically, morally and socially liberal churches as well as the right wing, often self-righteous and self-satisfied ones. I am using this prayer from Lamentations 5:21. A prayer that arose during a tough and severe season for God’s people (just spend a little time reading Lamentations!).

 

Therefore, I invite you to take time each day, wherever you are, to join me praying, daily, starting today.

 

“Restore us to yourself, O LORD,

that we may be restored!

Renew our days as of old.”

 

 Pastor Mike


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