Return to Glory?

This might offend you.

I was in my prayer room this morning. I had IHOP on. They were praying and interceding like they do. They went into a time of rapid-fire prayer for orphans and the raising up of spiritual fathers; it was great. Then this guy comes on and prays that the LORD would return this country to the ways of its fathers. You know Washington and Jefferson and Madison. He went into a spiel about ending abortion and all that jazz about how America is so terrible and we need to get brought back to our former ways. Which you know sounds great…unless you’ve actually studied anything about the history of the United States. Most of our Founding Fathers were not Christians; they were deists. In other words they believed God existed but that he was super distant and didn’t really do anything on the earth. Also most of our founding fathers, including Jefferson and Washington had slaves and killed Native Americans (check out Abe Lincoln). All of them agreed that all people were created equal but women couldn’t vote or own land.

So pretty much what this guy was praying was LORD end abortion and return us to the days when slavery was rampant, genocide of the Native Americans was a daily and celebrated occurrence, and women weren’t really seen as people. Now I’m all for ending abortion, but we (especially as a church) need to stop glorifying the old days of our country. We were NOT morally better people then than we are now. It just looked different. Instead we need to wake up and realize that God doesn’t want to go back. He wants to do something new. He wants to do something He hasn’t done before; he wants to bring a renaissance. It’s not going to look like it did before it’s going to be a “new birth.” “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).

Wake up Christians, I know you think America is God’s chosen country…it’s not. That’s Israel. However, if we repent and we go after the new thing that God is doing, if we allow God to change the way we think and bring us into a new way of doing things, a new way of doing “church,” a new way of doing government, a new way of doing business, a new way of doing media, a new way of taking care of the poor, a new way of doing community, then God will use us. He will use us in a BIG way. But it’s not going to come from going back to what we had before. It’s got to be something new.