Without humility and repentance, prayer has no power. There will be no healing of a nation from division, there will be no healing of a nation from a plague, there will be no healing of a nation from economic collapse until God’s people seek His face as He has commanded. Someone has to stand in the gap for a nation. Someone has to fight and win the war against principalities and powers for the soul of America.
The key is repentance. That is the key to healing the racial divides, the key to healing the economy, the key to healing the plague. We’re not going to make America great with money or fame or status. Years ago, I prayed with Mother Teresa. Before we prayed, she said, “Please pray for me because I’m going to the poorest country on earth.” I said, “Are you going back to Calcutta?” “No,” she said, “I’m going to America. It suffers from the poverty of spirit.”
Years ago, God directed me to go to El Salvador. The country was in the grip of a bitter conflict. There were death squads roaming the nation, pulling people out of their homes and killing them. The country was divided. I met with the president and some of his top leaders while I was there to preach. I asked the president, “Do you want this to stop? Do you want your land healed? It can be, but it is going to take 2 Chronicles 7:14.”
I watched as he wrote that reference down. I listened as he issued a national call for a day of humility, fasting, repentance, and prayer. And I watched as God did heal the divide in their nation. He can do the same thing for us in America.
Isaiah the prophet declares in Isaiah 30:1-7: “Woe to the obstinate children, declares the Lord. To those who carry out their own plans that are not mine, who form an alliance, but not by my spirit, heaping sin upon sin, who go down to Egypt without consulting me, who look for help from Pharaoh’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for Refuge. But Pharaoh’s protection will be to you your shame…. The envoys carrying their riches on donkeys’ backs, their treasures on the humps of camels, to that unprofitable nation whose help is utterly useless. Therefore, I call her rahab.”
This word in Hebrew literally means “big mouth that does nothing.” God says, “I call her a big mouth, those who cut alliances with the world, looking for deliverance, that lean to the arm of flesh looking for deliverance. I call do nothing, big mouths.” There is no help in the world…help comes from God, or it does not come at all.
