\u201c\u2026i<\/b>f My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.\u201d \u2014 2 Chronicles 7:14<\/p>\n
The above passage is not a paradigm for the restoration and healing of the United States that most professing Christians are following or even believing in. They are attempting to \u201cvote in office\u201d the \u201chealing\u201d of our nation. While some may seek forgiveness and as Jeremiah and Isaiah repent for the nation that refuses to repent, the catastrophic worldwide consequences of sin and rebellion will arrive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The time to pray for victory over Satan\u2019s minions that are taking over the world, including our nation, has long passed. Professing Christians should have prayed when the watchmen warned them repeatedly to pray. However, they ignored the many warnings of the watchmen just as they have by now recognized this message is not to their taste and have stopped reading it. Their response was to label the watchmen as negative individuals obsessed with doomsday. Their preference in messengers leaned heavily toward heretics, hirelings, and dry preachers in comatose churches.<\/p>\n They should have risen from the squalor of mediocrity and became the shining light and salt that Christ declared they should be. That did not occur. Instead, they populated a great apostasy. Now the time has passed for praying that God will spare our nation and Christianity from the consequences of sinking into a dark pit. Many, if not all, people on board prayed when the Titanic began to sink, but it did not stop it from heading toward the miry deep.<\/p>\n They look around today in amazement and fear at the events occurring in the secular world and distressed. The riots, pandemic, harsh mandates from antiConservative governors, economic shutdown, and denying the First Amendment Constitutional right of churches to assemble, and great concern about the coming Presidential Election, have motivated some of them to pray.<\/p>\n But pray for what, exactly? Do they pray that the last days will revert to the good old days of casual Christianity? Do they wish to return to a vibrant faith in God, to seeking and obeying His will, and to praying (a most neglected activity and one that is common to Believers that genuinely know Him). The truth is, Christianity apostatized on their watch, but they did not pray or prayed Contemplatively as pagans. Is that state of apathy and complacency what they wish to return to?<\/p>\n From what I am reading and concluding there is an alarming number of professing Christians that are completely trusting Donald Trump to deliver them from Satan\u2019s minions. Their posts on Social Media embarrassingly reveal a degree of adoration for the President that cannot avoid being labeled \u201cworship.\u201d In my opinion, it is not so much that they woke up one day and decided to worship Donal Trump. The probable cause of their near-fanatical worship is likely desperation-driven. They were forced to awaken to how much territory Satan has captured. They cannot help but see the burgeoning threat to their comfort zones. Lacking a vibrant prayer regimen and deep faith in God, they have taken the path of least resistance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What they have steadfastly refused to possess in a time of relative peace\u2014living faith in and worship of God\u2014they now unabashedly express toward a mere man. They are deliriously believing in a return to the days when they did not respect or cultivate faith in God or man. It was a time when their love for the world System was a throbbing passion. Their couch meetings obliterated the meager benefit of their church meetings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It is now obvious that the unrestrained World System and apostate Christianity is beyond any recovery that does not involve an unprecedented major catastrophe. However, even during a major catastrophe weak and compromised professing Christians will likely continue leaning on the arm of flesh for redemption. They will\u2014as they are doing now\u2014call him \u00a0\u201cGod\u2019s man,\u201d \u201cGod warrior,\u201d a \u201cKing Cyrus\u201d or \u201cNew Messiah\u201d sent to deliver them.<\/p>\n Once the battle is lost on spiritual ground, it cannot be won on the earthly ground. The last day’s period did not begin when the Democrats began investigating Donald Trump. It did not begin with the election of Barack Obama. It was not initiated by the scurrilous presidency of Bill Clinton. It did was not launched with the PTL and Jimmy Swaggart debacles. It was not inaugurated by the Beatles, the so-called Sexual Revolution, the Counterculture, or even the Roaring Twenties.<\/p>\n The great and final apostasy began when professing Christians ceased praying. Praying is such an important and essential duty. To understand more clearly, consider that when the battle is fierce, when we are burdened, stressed, wounded, and in sorrow beyond words, the Holy Spirit will pray for us.<\/p>\n \u201cLikewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.\u201d \u2014 Romans 8:26<\/p>\n \u201cWhich cannot be uttered\u201d indicates that we do not hear what the Holy Spirit is speaking when He prays for us. All we can do is to weep, or to feel like a failure, or as if God has abandoned or rejected us, or that we may never recover from our trial. If even the Holy Spirit prays, who are we to believe that we do not have to pray?<\/p>\n Faith comes by hearing and hearing by God\u2019s word. But faith is not a magical substance that one can conjure up by mantras or mere belief (or insistence) that God must perform miracles. Faith is cultivated and maintained by daily communion with God that begins with praying. Praying, whether it occurs when walking along, working, or prostrate on the floor, is communicating with God. Everything in our relationship with and knowledge about God, that is not undergirded and strengthened with praying, will weaken and even terminate. In the heat of a trial or the throes of temptation, it will dissipate as water in a potted plant blistering in the sun.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Likely the major reason that people cannot or refuse to listen to the watchmen is that they do not pray or they pray so inadequately that it has very little effect in invigorating their faith and spiritual senses. Christ quoted Isaiah when He declared how the Pharisees lost their hearing and sight.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the hearts of this people have grown dull.<\/p>\n Their ears are hard of hearing,<\/p>\n And their eyes they have closed,<\/p>\n Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,<\/p>\n Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,<\/p>\n So that I should heal them.\u201d \u2014 Matthew 13:15; Isaiah 44:18<\/p>\n The majority of professing Christians cannot \u201csee\u201d or \u201chear\u201d spiritually. They trust in what they can physically see, hear, or know much more than they trust in God. Thus, they could not \u201csee\u201d or \u201chear\u201d when the watchmen declared that the time for voting for a victory over Satan\u2019s evil minions had passed. In other words, when the compromise of professing Christians reached the degree that they apostatized, and the second wave is about to apostatize, and the younger generations assuming control of Christianity are floundering in trouble water, being dashed on the rocks of heresy and the satanic philosophy of Satan\u2019s generals, and there is no longer enough \u201csalt and light\u201d in Christianity to hold back the flood of evil. It is not time to rally and vote\u2014IT IS TIME TO REPENT! Attempting to vote our way out of this incredibly massive mess is farcical.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When Professing Christians lost their sight and hearing they lost the sense of God\u2019s presence. One\u2019s heart cannot become tender and sensitive to the Holy Spirit without intimacy with God. That intimacy only comes by praying. It is what one\u2019s flesh despises the most, will greatly oppose with every trick, and that demons also hate, and individuals with carnal minds will never do.<\/p>\n Asking God to provide peace, prosperity, and security, and otherwise bless a nation that is boiling over with wickedness and apostasy is as believing that He should have blessed Sodom and Gomorrah. Does anyone truly intimate with God believe that Lot could have prevented God\u2019s judgment from falling on Sodom if he had supported and managed to get a semi-godly individual elected as mayor? The Remnant today are as Lot and his family in Sodom. We will witness the world become so vile that we will be vexed in our spirits, and cry out to God for deliverance until Christ returns \u201cin flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.\u201d (1 Thessalonians 1:8)<\/p>\n What do professing Christians conclude when they\u2014as Israel on the banks of the Red Sea\u2014look on the horizon and see the approaching army of Satan\u2019s angry and violent minions? To be brutally honest, the Israelites in that situation were not qualified spiritually to be delivered. They were qualified by a Covenant that they refused to obey but God honored. So much more is required of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The people that are called by His name\u2014Christians\u2014 cannot truthfully claim to be unknowledgeable and unaware of their condition. They cannot honestly plead ignorance about their failure to love and obey God. We have more bibles in this nation than in any other. Everyone that is a genuine child of God has been reborn of the Holy Spirit, is indwelled by the Holy Spirit, and has no excuse for failing to maintain his or her relationship with God.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, but we are sinners saved by grace! We can never lose our salvation! We can coast to the finish line! We will not be here when the bad stuff happens! Any moment now, and the worse it gets, we do not need to pray, be a witness, stand up for truth, expose the darkness, be faithful, be light and salt\u2014we will escape!\u201d Really?<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be<\/i> not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and<\/i> which was preached to every creature which is under heaven;\u201d\u2014Colossians 1:23\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To sink into such a low and decrepit spiritual condition as many professing Christians are in today, one had to ignore numerous attempts by the Holy Spirit to bring them to repentance. One will never respond to the call to repentance if he or she has rejected the responsibility to pray. Not one person will hear the Seventh Trumpet that has thus shut his or her ears to the Holy Spirit. He or she is going to go \u201csailing through the air\u201d or ride up to heaven on \u201cthe good old Gospel ship\u201d when he or she has not been crucified with Christ, been reborn, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, put on the new and put off the old nature of a child of wrath, and lived in newness of life. For one to say all that is figurative and\/or unnecessary to be a genuine child of God is a satanic \u201cgospel\u201d and makes him or her anathema. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Does anyone understand that repentance is a prayer? Does anyone know that it is impossible to repent without praying? \u00a0We cannot repent to the wind or by muttering under our breath. Repentance that never reached God\u2019s ear was never spoken sincerely and the individual never acknowledged his or her condition that made it necessary to repent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Refusing to acknowledge the essentiality of praying is also failing to recognize the essentiality of repentance. It is the greatest failure of Christianity. When the great majority of professing Christians abandoned praying, that is when they refused to repent and began to apostatize, i.e., depart from the faith.<\/p>\n The consequences may not appear in one generation. Eventually, a generation arrives that confuses godliness with moral standards that have no inward, spiritual, source. That trick of Satan produces a generation that is completely void of spirituality. They may extoll moral values in church meetings, but failure to apply those values make sermons and moralizing empty, unbelievable, and repulsive. Then comes the generation that witnesses and despises the hypocrisy of the prior generation that preached one thing and lived another. The successive generation will go its own way. They may fashion a form of Christianity that is practically severed from Divine Order. They may make peace with the world system, adapt its culture, its music styles, accept and integrate its values, and Christianity will implode with the collapse of a framework established on essential biblical principles.<\/p>\n That is where we are at today. It is long past time to pray that it will not occur. It has occurred. The turmoil and encroaching evil in the secular realm has excited the swelling mouth of hell rising up to greet the fermenting mixture of religion and wickedness<\/p>\n Christ did not say, \u201cAnd if you pray,\u201d but He said, \u201cAnd when you pray.\u201d (Matthew 6:5-7) The Disciples appointed men to feed the widows and orphans. They declared, \u201cbut we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word.\u201d (Acts 6:4)<\/p>\n In Romans 12, Paul explained how we should become living sacrifices, which is our reasonable service to God. He included praying in the list of characteristics.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer;\u201d \u2014 Romans 12:12<\/p>\n There are always excuses not to pray. Those excuses range from not being able to stay awake during praying, not having the time to pray, not having anything to pray about (?), not knowing how to pray, et cetera. However, not a single one of those excuses prevented people on the Titanic from praying. It is not that people cannot pray, but that they refuse to pray. Praying is a direct challenge to the carnal mind and desires because it defies everything it embodies. It involves surrender to and faith in God. That compels one to defy his or her natural logic and trust God to respond and interact with him or her.<\/p>\n The difference between a mere professing Christian and a praying Christian is that the former may know about God, but the latter knows God. The former may know doctrine, the latter possess living truth. The former may do all the religious things necessary to be called a Christian, but the latter manifests the characteristics of a child of God. The former are casual Christians content with religion, with doctrine, with selective moral assent, with listening to powerless sermons, and with the rituals, dross, and trappings of Churchianity. The latter ones have a fire shut up in their bones and will never be content until he or she has heard God say, \u201cWell done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joys of the Lord.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c\u2026if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.\u201d \u2014 2 Chronicles 7:14 The above passage is not a paradigm for the restoration and healing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paIm2N-wE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2025,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions\/2025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.truthkeepers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}