The United States of America is at a historic inflection point, transcending the political sphere. From where we stand in the present moment, you and I are in the hour of a great move of God and the hour of the power of great evil being unleashed against it. It is the role of the intercessor to stand in the gap and pray through God’s will for the discipling of the nations.
America is a center of the spiritual battle right now with global consequences for the nations and for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Rejoice with us in the opportunity given by the Holy Spirit to intercessors from all nations to uphold the United States and its leaders during its time of crisis!
A Call to Prayer for the USA
The Lord is calling intercessors to pray for the Holy Spirit to Anoint Key People in the Trump Administration to be the Means of National Healing and the Restoration of the United States of America to the Best of its Founding Principles.
After the prayer call on June 4, 2020, I felt that there was a shift in the heavenlies. Space has been made for national leaders, called by God for such a time as this, to step into an anointed role, not only to restore the foundations of liberty and equality before God upon which the nation of the United States was founded, but to pray the prophetic dream of Martin Luther King Jr. into fulfillment. We are invited to intercede for the constraining hand of the Holy Spirit against anarchy at high levels that would destroy that order, and for the emerging move of the Holy Spirit beyond merely restoring order, a move that is sure to bring deep healing to the racial and political divides in the nation.
I felt the Holy Spirit giving me a break and was very peaceful as I went to sleep. However, as I was drifting off, the Holy Spirit fell on me and I started to speak in tongues, and over and over again I heard the Lord saying to me, “Your assignment has changed. Now you are to pray for the team that I am raising up around President Trump who will be anointed to bring healing to the nation.”
There also came the word that we were to pray into the symbolic actions these individuals had already taken, actions taken certainly without full awareness of their spiritual significance. All night long, the image kept coming to me of President Trump standing in front of St. John’s Church holding up the Holy Bible. Other images kept coming as well.
Four Images to Pray Into
Consider the following four images as prophetic images the Lord would use to guide and direct intercessory prayer that will bring God’s reality in view over the current realities of division, chaos, and anarchy. These images work to stand against the current plans and schemes of the enemy. They also provide a prophetic picture of what the Lord is seeking to do in the nation through all of its leaders including President Donald Trump. No area of leadership is excluded from our intercessory prayer! Even Antifa itself is subject to the rule of our Sovereign God, manifested as though Antifa were Balaam of the Old Testament, who came to curse but was instead supernaturally compelled to bless. We likewise pray blessing on each of them as the Holy Spirit moves at the inflection point of every heart.
I do not have time to provide you with the full teaching of how a government leader’s words like those of King Cyrus in the Old Testament may be used by God to shape history according to His will (“Cyrus my servant…” I will write on this shortly). The critics are all demeaning each of these images as simply being politically self-serving “photo ops.” While they may be so at the level of things that are visible to the human eye, our role as intercessors is to pray into reality the prophetic intent that God wills through them, as I have attempted to name below.
The First and Second Images
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump standing before the Cross and Kneeling before the Image of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God and Prince of Peace at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine.
President Donald Trump and the First Lady kneeling at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington DC on June 2, 2020. To understand the meaning of such an action and how it is connected to the spiritual roots of the American Revolution please read this section from my book “Timeless Lessons for Prayer Warriors” 1This provides the context for understanding the full prophetic significance of each of the images depicting these symbolic actions.
This event took place in a Roman Catholic Shrine in the late morning of June 2, 2020, before Trump signed the new executive order on international religious freedom.
A number of intercessors over the past three years have been praying into images that the Holy Spirit has given them of Donald Trump kneeling in prayer as a sign of his humble submission to God and to God’s law. No judgement is being made as to President Trump’s sincerity of faith, but this image may well be a sign of the Holy Spirit’s continued work in Donald Trump’s life. It is also offered as a prophetic hope to be prayed into reality.
But moving beyond whatever personal faith Mr. and Mrs. Trump may have or be growing into, as President and First Lady, this is a powerful symbolic affirmation of the God-given foundation of the United States. Proclaiming “In God We Trust,” the new nation spoke into being a calling to a political order based on Biblical Judeo-Christian values in which elected leaders and our government would represent “one nation under God.” Though our progress has been and continues to be fraught with fits and starts, this nation’s calling is based in “self-evident” truth which opposes all other ideologies that would dethrone God in an attempt to make the state or any human being into god.
The basis of human rights coming from God is built into the country’s founding documents: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 2
This stance is a direct rebuke of the high-level demonic spirit of seduction known as the Jezebel, who tempted King Ahab to put himself above God and God’s Law, inviting Ahab to abdicate by an oxymoron, “Are you not king … let me handle it.” The deception behind this invitation of the Jezebel demonic spirit is no doubt still with us and now actively tempts all leaders of all stripes including President Trump. The declaration of self-evident truths given by God is also a rebuke against ideologies of the right and the left that raise a “clenched fist” against God, going back at least to the French Revolution. True healing can only come to our nation as together we affirm these greatest stones of the foundation of the United States.
Suggestions for Prayer
Let the Holy Spirit guide you as you pray, but here are some suggestions for prayer:
- Pray that President Donald Trump would be, and continue to be, willingly, consciously, and humbly submitted to God and to God’s law.
- Pray that a recognition and Biblical fear of the Lord – the knowledge of the Glory of God prophesied in Habakkuk – would be established as the center of American society.
- Pray that all ideologies seeking to dethrone God in the nation – left, right, or center – would be unable to gain any ground in the United States.
- Pray for national healing to begin to happen as the United States of America discerns and restores the best principles stated in its founding documents.
- Pray that God would continue to raise up truth-tellers – and truth lovers – among the media and those watching and listening in the United States and throughout the world.
The Third Image:
President Donald Trump, in front of St. John’s Church (which had been torched the night before in the riots), holding up a Bible.
The location of this image, St. John’s Church, is significant. Built in 1815 across from the White House, it has served as the Church of Presidents starting with James Madison. Every sitting president has attended the church at least once since its foundation. With the exception of Richard Nixon, every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has attended spiritual services on Inauguration Day at St. John’s. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960. 3
While this church was attacked by rioters, what has been underreported is that churches and synagogues in other cities across the United States have also been defaced, attacked and burned. 4
These are intentional attacks on the Biblical faith roots of the nation – Judaism and Christianity, which the demonic ideologies and movements of the radical right and left are being used by Satan to try to destroy.
The first thing for us to pray into is the image of a steadfast looking President Trump walking to the church that was attacked, standing in solidarity with those institutions of Biblical faith, Synagogues and Churches.
President Donald Trump is Holding up the Bible
If he were just standing in front of the church building, that would not have sent the complete message, especially as many denominations have departed from Biblical faith!
When I see the President of the United States holding up the Bible, I see this as an act of defiance of all those who seek to remove our Biblical faith foundations and the Law of God from the nation and society.
This is a direct counter and challenge to the socialist and Marxist symbols that have been seen from groups of the radical left or the racist, prejudicial symbols from groups of the radical right.
Instead, the President’s action, stated symbolically – whether or not intentionally – that he and his administration are under God and the Law of God, who is the ultimate source of our rights as well as of government authority From our Reformed Biblical Faith view, which is a foundation stone of the U.S. Constitution, governmental authority is limited by God’s Law and by checks and balances built into our three branches of government, the Federalist system and its electoral process.
Our calling is to pray for the protection of this system, which is under threat of replacement by those who invite tyranny in the wake of destruction.
The basis of healing of the nation is restoring the true foundations for liberty as well as unity, that we are all made in the image of God and therefore are all equal under the law.
Further, there is deeply embedded in the American Founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights—the concept that human rights come directly from God as a reflection of the high status and privileges each one of us enjoys as His image bearers, and NOT from government, which is intended to bless and protect us but is a mere instrumentality nonetheless.
The President of the United States holding up a Bible is affirming this basic truth of the founding of the country, in defiance of all other ideologies that would reject the Biblical truth that all human beings are created in the image of God and that our rights come from God. This is the basis of healing for the nation, the same great principles upon which Martin Luther King Jr. stood and boldly declared in his “I Have a Dream” speech. There is no other basis for true healing, liberty, or justice for all.
Suggestions for Prayer
Let the Holy Spirit guide you as you pray, but here are some suggestions for prayer:
- Pray that the Word of God would be lifted high within the land and would become central to the hearts and lives of Americans.
- Pray that President Trump, and all who read God’s Word, would continue to be refined and grow in the knowledge and love of God as they are conformed more to the image of Jesus Christ.
- Pray for the protection of the United States’ form of government, and pray that the Lord would break the deceptions and thwart the intentions of those who would seek to replace that government with forms of tyranny.
- Pray that all who curse would find themselves compelled instead to bless.
- Pray that violent attacks against churches and synagogues in the land would come to an end and for there to be reverential respect for houses of worship.
The Fourth Image
Trump was joined by Attorney General William Barr (L), White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (2nd to L) and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Embed from Getty ImagesWhat is significant about this image is who are standing with him: Attorney General William Barr, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
As I looked at this picture, I felt the Lord saying to me, “This is the team God has raised up around President Donald Trump so that, with them, they will be the means to restore our Biblical foundations of justice, liberty, and order, which in turn will bring a healing of the nation.”
From what I know about those who are standing with President Trump, they are each Christians of Biblical faith. To these, I would add two who are not pictured, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
Just recently I was complaining to another intercessor, “I so wish that our President was more articulate in expressing his faith.” For instance, in an interview on Fox a few days ago, when Sean Spicer asked the President if he had been led to pray, he did not really answer the question but launched into commenting on the action he had just taken on religious freedom, and perhaps he was wisely deferring to those legal realities on which our intentionally pluralistic society is based. On that, intercessors said, “Yes, he needs an Aaron like Moses did, one who will be his mouthpiece and can speak wisely for him.”
So, I started praying into that, for the Lord to raise up the Aarons who can speak for President Donald Trump into this crisis and through them can come the means for healing the nation.
Well, the Lord showed me this picture and said, “These are the Aarons!! Pray that they with the President will be anointed to speak, as Aaron spoke for Moses.”
Suggestions for Prayer
Let the Holy Spirit guide you as you pray, but here are some suggestions for prayer:
- Pray for those the Lord has raised to advise and influence President Trump in this work of restoration and national healing, including:
- Mike Pence
- Mike Pompeo
- Ben Carson
- William Barr
- Mark Meadows
- Kayleigh McEnany
- And others who are called but whose names we do not yet know
- Pray that the Lord would anoint them for the task to which he has called them
- Pray that, like Aaron, they would be able to articulate and communicate well.
- Pray that the Lord would bring national healing through His words, that God as with Samuel would “let none of them fall to the ground,” and for His works “laid out before the foundation of the World”.
It is urgent that we begin to pray into these images, asking God to use them as prophetic words to constrain the power of evil rampaging through the nation, to bring justice as well as healing.
- In his brilliant lectures on Calvinism given at Princeton Seminary in 1898, Kuyper contrasted the spiritual roots of the Dutch, English, and American Revolutions with those of the French Revolution. He exposes the different fruit (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kuyper/lecture.html) “The French Revolution is in principle distinct from all these national revolutions, [i.e., the three revolutions of the Reformed world: the Dutch, the English and the American] which were undertaken with praying lips and with trust in the help of God. The French Revolution ignores God. It opposes God. It refuses to recognize a deeper ground of political life than that which is found in nature, that is, in this instance, in man himself. Here the first article of the confession of the most absolute infidelity is—”ni Dieu ni maitre.” [no God no master] The sovereign God is dethroned and man with his free will is placed on the vacant seat. It is the will of man which determines all things. All power, all authority proceeds from man.” (Ibid, pp. 87-88)
“In the sphere of Calvinism, as also in your Declaration, the knee is bowed to God, while over against man the head is proudly lifted up. But here, from the standpoint of thesovereignty of the people, the fist is defiantly clenched against God, while man grovels before his fellow men, tinseling over this self-abasement by the ludicrous fiction that, thousands of years ago, men, of whom no one has any remembrance, concluded a political contract, or, as they called it, “Contrat Social.…”
“Now, do you ask for the result? Then, let History tell you how the rebellion of the Netherlands, the “Glorious Revolution” of England, and your own rebellion against the British Crown [The American Revolution] have brought liberty to honor; and answer for yourself the question: Has the French Revolution resulted in anything else but the shackling of liberty in the irons of State-omnipotence?”(Ibid, p. 88.) The historical validity of this profound observation by Kuyper, made in 1898 at the turn of the 19th century, is in the horrors, mass murder, and bondage visited on humanity when, with God dethroned, the state became omnipotent in fascism and communism in the 20th century.
You may ask: What does all this have to do with what is taking place in the battle rending the soul of America in the 21st century? Everything! This is the essential divide in our nation and in Western culture. In a culture, the “knee bowed to God” contains the seeds that may blossom into genuine equality and liberty for all human beings! But the “fist defiantly clenched against God” sows the wind that reaps the whirlwind of the absolute tyranny of a few men over all the others.
The spiritual aspect of the quest to put originalist justices on the Supreme Court is to uphold the foundational concept of rights given by God resulting in freedom and equality before the law for all.
In opposition to this goal are those whose “fists are defiantly clenched against God,” resulting not in freedom and equality as they stridently proclaim, but in tyranny and inequality. The clenched fist is the universally recognized leftist symbol of confrontation! The self-identification symbol of Black Lives Matter, Communism and gay rights movements is the raised fist. This symbol was in evidence among the protesters against the Kavanaugh confirmation.
Those with fists clenched in defiance of God are a cultic force of diverse ideologies which are the successors of the French Revolution and which spring
from its intellectual and spiritual roots. They go under many names—Marxism, dialectic materialism, Democratic Socialism, Radical Left, fascism, intersectionality, Radical Islam—all of which fit under the general category of “struggle ideologies.”
These ideologies have the common thread of dethroning the God revealed in the Bible and the manufacture or deliberate escalation of conflict between races, religions, and other groups within society as a means of kingdom building. They are at their heart apocalyptic, but the kingdom coming after their version of apocalypse is not God’s. (Based on conversations from Steve Aceto who wrote me the following: How do we name ideology motivating those opposed to confirming Kavanaugh which illuminates their pernicious methods? “Marxist” is far too narrow to do justice to an ideology that goes back to fundamental enlightenment thinkers Kant and Hegel and passes through the French Revolution before it ever gets to Marx, not to mention that it is an overloaded and potentially distracting term. Consider the key word “struggle” as the result of a deliberate provocation of social conflict to achieve social and economic change. This use of the word would be instantly recognizable to Marxist true believers, whose task is to pit forces of “progress” against the forces of “reaction” resulting in “struggle”) Ominously, these struggle ideologies have increasingly captivated the popular culture and especially the leadership of the Democratic Party of the United States. Their influence is reflected in the 2012 Democratic Party platform where, echoing the French Revolution motto of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” there was much talk of liberty, equality and justice, but all references to God were removed.(https://www.theblaze.com/news/2012/09/04/dems-remove-all-referencesto-god-from-2012-party-platform) Once God is removed and humanity alone is sovereign, there are no constraints of God’s law and judgement on our innate sinful tendencies. Despite humanities highest ideals, inexorably the door is opened to Satan who takes his seat behind the human collectives with no checks in place, leaving him free with his deceived human agents to seize absolute power by all means available to him. The result is atheistic, totalitarian regimes that create hells on earth. - https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Episcopal_Church,_Lafayette_Square
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https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cathedrals-in-6-states-damaged-by-violent-protests-91111
I believe the Lord has called us and equipped us for such a time as this… And it is for the body of Christ to rise in the authority that our master has bestowed unto us and claim what belongs to his children. Let’s intercede in faith…!
I have been hearing the word “thankful” lately. I believe that even during this time of need for increased prayer and intercession, that we also need to be thankful that we have a God that listens and responds when we cry out to him believing that he will hear and act in accordance to his will.
I have several copies of a PRMI bookmark that I think of and refer to often that on one side lists four guides to discernment which are not listed as a total expression of the basis for Christian discernment, but certainly THE FOUNDATION for such:
Is Jesus Christ glorified by the expression or action;
Is it truly Biblical;
Is it verified by others whose faith and life are respected;
Are the fruits consistent with Jesus Christ’s teaching.
To uphold a leader who has a well founded reputation of making his fortune by not paying those to whom he is indebted, using bankruptcy consistently to excuse financial obligations, brags about his acts of sexual assault, who has citizens, acting peacefully and legally, forcefully removed (with teargas and “flashbangs” no less) from a path he want to take for a display of himself holding a Bible in front of a church whose leadership was not included or even consulted, a leader who makes a travesty of the Ten Commandments (especially the ninth-daily and repeatedly), a leader whose only criterion for decision making is to glorify himself and/or increase his personal power/following and wealth.
I do pray for Donald Trump. As a sinner saved by Grace alone I plead with God the Father of us all that through our prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit that Donald Trump be reformed and become the leader that truly repents and lifts before us the virtues taught by Jesus that we LOVE one another and not divide by personal and group-based attacks.
I understand that many self-named evangelicals support such goals as eliminating abortion and supporting such a version of religious freedom—but at what cost. It seems to me that many of the so-called religious right have been in bed with Machiavelli—the end justifies ANY means making them not only acceptable but desirable!
Pray for our nation and its leaders!
May The Holy Spirit bring God’s Peace, Will, and Comfort to us all.
Ted
Thank you Ted. You expressed beautifully what I was thinking. I too want to support the President but have my apprehensions because of the actions you stated. I pray everyday that he will do or say something more that touting his actions that will show his sincerity toward God.
“Awake, you who sleep,
Arise from the dead,
And Christ will give
you light!” (Ephesians 5:14)
“ Arise, shine ; for your Light has come! And the glory of the LORD Is risen upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1-2)
“For behold , the darkness
Shall cover the earth, and
deep darkness the people
But the LORD will arise over you and His glory will be seen upon you” (60:2)
Today with God’s Gentile people everywhere
As with Israel
Hallelujah
sister pat wannamaker
Hello Brad and Martin, The space left open is for leaders to listen, to put God first not man or self. To ask for wisdom, too many times ears are closed and mistakes are made. President Trump needs a team badly, he makes too many blunders or is not listening, let wisdom surround him and his leaders and advisors. Pic 1, President Trump before the throne of God asking for guidance. Pic 2 Even King David made mistakes and asked God will you be with me? Pic 3 Burn my church but the word of God lives in this book. No words need to be spoken for people know the Bible is the word of God! Pic 4 Unity needed not only in the church but in the government. Prayer for all leading in government to complete the work necessary, even to the point of uniting the country and its colour issues, to make a rainbow of promise. This is needed throughout the world, along with peace and repentance which will lead to new laws to heal and not divide, to unify not cause division . Pray also for wisdom and unity in the UK with good decision making policies, for here too, so many wrong moves and decisions by leaders, unite the world in peace and love and with laws that will see fairness and consideration to all peoples everywhere!