This year has brought us one of the most divisive elective cycles in recent memory. Many people that I speak to, regardless of political affiliation, are not excited about the choices they have for President. Both candidates have characteristics that could be defined as “unfit,” whether it is in temperament, decision making, morality, unpredictability, criminal behavior, experience, judgment, health, or political vision.  It is in this season that we need to pray for our country more than we do for our political parties. We are a nation off-course and the choice of our leader will make irrevocable changes to the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and moral direction we take as Americans.

Therefore, I would like to invite you to pray with me for our country. Over the next 7 days, I will be making a new post each day. Each post will include a link to a reading from the Psalms and a brief instruction on how to use this reading as a guide for prayer. Let us put aside our desire to see a specific person win the election and have the courage to pray boldly for God to stay his judgment and place in office the man or woman who will lead us to be the country that God desires (and designed) us to be. 

Will you please pray with me?

Read Psalm 37:27-40

Identify what God is saying about Himself in this passage. Boil it down into a one or two-word summary (e.g., God is ______ ) and confess that truth back to God, asking Him to reveal Himself in this way through your day and this election cycle.

v. 27-29 Ask God to give you, our nation, and our nominees a heart for good and not evil. May evil be repulsive to our souls and justice a delight. Ask that we will be a people filled with righteousness so that we may never lose our land but will inherit it and dwell upon it forever. Ask that we will not fall victim to government tyranny but that we will retain the precious freedoms with which God has provided us.

v. 30-31 Ask God to give us more than intuition in this election. Ask Him to give us wisdom and the ability to articulate it to others. May our tongue speak justice, so that truth abounds in the marketplace as well as on the ballot. Ask God to keep His law within our hearts so that we do not slip, either in our daily lives or in the electoral booth.

v. 32-34 Confess that “the wicked watches for the righteous and seek to put him to death” and that we are easy prey if God abandons us. Ask that God will express His power on behalf of the righteous and that He will not allow false accusations to condemn them. But may the righteous “wait for the LORD and keep His way” while the wicked are cut off.

v. 35-40 Rejoice that God does not permit a wicked, ruthless person to endure but instead, He upholds the blameless and the upright. Ask God to make us a people of peace and to give us a future while the those who seek to turn us away from Him and His ways are “altogether destroyed.” Praise Him that our salvation does not come from a Republican or a Democrat but from the LORD. Ask Him to help us in this election cycle and to deliver us; deliver us from the wicked and save us because we take refuge in God.

Thank Him for hearing and answering these prayers.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.