{"id":215,"date":"2013-06-19T03:19:06","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T03:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/?p=215"},"modified":"2013-08-18T20:45:13","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T20:45:13","slug":"halfway-through-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"Halfway through the book"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0 spoke last night to a woman who is about halfway through my book, First of All, Pray<\/em>. She grabbed me by the arm and said, “I know why you wrote this book! You wrote it so we wouldn’t give up on praying for our country!” I honestly couldn’t have put it any better.<\/p>\n

She continued, “I’ve grown so tired of everything going on in government and politics,\u00a0that I just\u00a0backed off of\u00a0praying for the nation. But now I see that we can’t afford to quit–we’ve got to keep pressing in no matter what it looks like.”<\/p>\n

She also shared that she and her prayer partners have sensed the Holy Spirit saying to them, “As goes the Church, so goes the nation,” and she said that she is seeing the results in the nation of a complacent Church.<\/p>\n

She beautifully summed up my purpose for writing this book.\u00a0I know that there are many others far more adept and way more experienced in the things of prayer than I am\u00a0and who have articulated the art of prayer far better than I ever could. Yet,\u00a0at the same time\u00a0that I was witnessing\u00a0widespread, far-reaching\u00a0decline in my nation, my heart also burned with the desire to see the Church in the U.S. stirred from what seemed to be a\u00a0lull in her primitive, raw pursuit of the move and power and glory\u00a0of God.\u00a0And I knew that for God to have His way, truly, in this nation, He must first have His way in the Church.<\/p>\n

And so, God, may Your will be done–in the Church and in the United States of America and on the entire face of the earth–as it is in Heaven. May Your people in this nation not give up on the high calling and privilege\u00a0to stand in the gap and pray\u00a0for America!<\/p>\n

In Jesus’ name,<\/p>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0 spoke last night to a woman who is about halfway through my book, First of All, Pray. She grabbed me by the arm and said, “I know why you wrote this book! You wrote it so we wouldn’t give up on praying for our country!” I honestly couldn’t have put it any better. She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-june2013","category-prayerperspective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1736,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/1736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}