A Prayer for our Nation

The church office has received numerous requests for a transcript of Dr. Goligher’s pastoral prayer on Sunday, November 11. He delivered the prayer extemporaneously but, in response to requests, we have called up the recording and transcribed it. We are making it available here as a courtesy. You may watch the service archive here, the prayer begins at 19:30 into the service.

(The following prayer was delivered extemporaneously on Sunday November 11th by Dr. Liam Goligher following the US election 2012. In preparing the prayer he was helped by two blog posts - by Dr. Al Mohler and Reformation21 - which helped him think of the issues at stake).

Our loving heavenly Father, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our God and Father by gracious adoption: we come to adore you, to worship you, to praise you. We thank you for your perspective that we reflected on earlier on this morning…

[Part of the Call to Worship: ‘…if the foundations are destroyed,
        what can the righteous do?”
    The LORD is in his holy temple;
        the LORD's throne is in heaven;
        his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man’ (Psalm 11:3-4 ESV)…]

…that you are in your holy temple, that you sit above the fray of human experience, that you are good to all that you have made, that you reign over all, that you guide history to its appointed destination, that you overrule and guide our lives individually by your providence, and that you rule the world for the benefit of your church and kingdom.

Your word encourages us to come boldly before you and to pour out our hearts. You encourage us to pray as much for ourselves as for others, and that’s what we want to do today. We’re conscious, our gracious God, that you have placed your people in the world as aliens and strangers here, that we inhabit these two kingdoms, the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of the world to come. Forgive us that there are too many times when our focus and our gaze and our horizons are bounded by the kingdom of this age and we forget that we are those on whom the ends of the ages have come, by the power of your Spirit.

We praise you for those moments in our lives, difficult though they are, that remind us that this world is not our home and that we are passing through, and that our address is the New Jerusalem; that we have our citizenship, our ultimate citizenship there, and towards that home we press as those who know the Lord.

But we also live here, and especially this morning we come as those who live in these United States of America, grateful to you for every good gift that is involved in living where we live; in having the kind of political system that we have enjoyed here for two hundred years; the prosperity that you have been pleased to grant to us; the security and safety of the realm that has been insured by our military; and by your goodness the religious liberty that has enabled us not only to continue to worship, but to expand, as it were, the worship of God across this continent and beyond. We praise you, Lord, for these liberties and we don't take them in any way without deep gratitude to you.

As we come to you this morning we have a sense as a congregation that the foundations in many ways of our lives have been shaken. Though many of us disagree perhaps on economic and foreign policy, we can agree nonetheless as Christians that we’ve had a realization over the last number of years, and especially this week (the Election of 2012), that the world has changed. That old certainties about America's place in the world have been assaulted; that the church in America which has so long been an engine for change and for charity and for generosity to the worldwide church and which has seen growth and blessing and multiplication of ministries, is now languishing in the Master’s service.

Some of us have been shaken to see how it is that there has been moral collapse, not just in society but also in the institutions of society. The Founding Fathers foresaw a nation shaped within the boundaries of a Judeo-Christian ethic and saw that moral law bringing order to the vagaries of human nature and the human heart. This moral freefall did not happen in the polling booth and did not happen by political decision and did not happen by legal institution. The moral freefall in our society happened in the living rooms, in classrooms and boardrooms of America. And we repent of it, we cry to you Lord, as your people who love you and love America that you would in your mercy bless this nation.

We pray, Lord, for those millions of children who are growing up without two parents because of the scourge of what is called sexual liberation. We pray for those who bear the scars of the killing of their children the day before they were due to go into labor. We pray for such mothers that you would comfort them and for a society that allows it, that you would challenge it. We pray for young girls, that they would be able to resist the indignity imposed upon them at schools which promise contraception for when they fail rather than encouraging them in the dignity of purity and self-control.

We pray for those Christian employers who are being urged to support abortion on demand by choosing health care options and providers that facilitate it; for campus groups that they might resist the pressure to adopt the tyrannical nondiscrimination codes of their institutions at the expense of Christian values and doctrines.

But above all, Lord, we pray for the church in America. Your people are the apple of your eye; they are your Zion, the city of God. And Zion is under attack by those who would curb her liberty. In a sense that doesn't surprise us or it ought not to. Jesus said this would happen, “in this world you will have trouble.”

We are commanded to pray that we might live quiet and peaceable lives for the sake of the gospel and we've enjoyed that blessing for many, many years. To this land the persecuted believers of Europe and Britain came seeking refuge and they found a home. People of other faiths have come and found the opportunity to practice their faith with liberty here. But there are people who are intolerant of religious liberty; secular forces that distort and misrepresent and parody the Christian gospel; religious forces that claim to be peaceable but are prepared to work with the forces of secular humanism to isolate and neuter and destroy the church of God.

We come, Lord, conscious of all of these movements, but without congratulating ourselves on our purity; we come to acknowledge that we have realized in these days that many of us don't know our unbelieving neighbors and co-workers; and that their view of us has been skewed by that unfamiliarity, aided and abetted by a fiercely anti-Christian media.

We pray today that you would give us the grace and the love of the Lord Jesus to love our neighbor, and love our enemy, and love our brothers and sisters; that you would give us the grace to befriend those who don't believe what we believe and that we might serve them in such a way that they see our good works and glorify your name on the day that you visit us.

Help us to understand that, at a time like this, we’re not in the business as a church of preaching politics but of proclaiming Jesus as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.  Father, we pray that you will be pleased to halt this slide towards greater and greater moral destruction in our land, but above all we pray that there would be such a movement of God that we would be so involved in all aspects of human life, in the arts, and in politics, and in industry, and in education, and in business, that Lord we would be influencing people and reaching out to people in such a way that they hear what we are saying without fearing us, that they would hear us as we proclaim Christ to them.

We pray for our brothers and sisters, we’re thinking of them especially today whose struggle is much more overt, (our missions conference focus was on the suffering church) they face forces that threaten not simply their comfort zone; that threatens their lives. We especially pray for those Christian people who find themselves, because of political decisions, now isolated in fiercely anti-Christian contexts. We think of the Christians of Iraq who have had to leave there; we think of the many Christians in Egypt and Libya who are finding the powers that be are no longer tolerant of them but are determined to limit them, and inhibit them, and perhaps even to remove them, because they’re hostile to the things of Christ. We think of the many thousands of believers in Syria who already fear what will happen if the revolutionaries are successful in their struggle with the government. We pray that you would give to your people grace to suffer well, to lay down their lives with joy knowing that you will raise them up and give them a crown of righteousness in the last day. And grant, we pray, to churches here and around the world that we would not falter or fail or be feeble in our stand for the gospel. Let us not, in our environment of secular humanism, let ourselves be persuaded by the devil that our gospel does not work or is not true.

And give us confidence Lord in the words of the Bible, that we will resist all attempts to change those words to make the message culturally relevant whether it's here or in Muslim countries. Give us confidence in the exclusivity of the Lord Jesus that we would proclaim him with boldness even though we have to lose our buildings, or we have to lose our charity status, or we have to lose the kind of image that we have in the world. Lord, we pray that you would give us courage to gently but firmly proclaim that Jesus is the only way of salvation to the world. And give us, we pray, confidence in the gospel, that the very word of the gospel is itself the dynamic power of God for the salvation of men and women through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.

O Lord, the prophet Isaiah pictures your Zion as a ship at sea, buffeted by the angry waters of unbelief and rebellion against you, leaving it storm-tossed with its rigging torn and its sailors exhausted. The church of God, your Zion as at sea in these days through our own foolishness; through our own disobedience; through our own neglect of the things of God; for putting our confidence in princes instead of in the Lord.

Lord, we’re at sea, but we praise you that you have given to us great promises. You have promised that in the seed of Abraham all the families of the earth will be blessed. You have promised us that your church, in the prophetic words of the Lord Jesus, will be a witness to him to the ends of the earth, till the end of the age. Grant us therefore as your church, faith to believe, hope to persevere, love to love our neighbors and our enemies that the Lord Jesus Christ would be known and loved and glorified by people from every tribe and language and place. To your glory, Father, in the name of Jesus who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, amen.