I have heard many people say they are praying for the president. Usually this refers to a general prayer for his health and wisdom in leading the country. Those are good things to pray for. As Christians we are commanded to pray for our leaders. We are told to pray for them so that we “can live quiet and peaceful lives, godly and dignified in every way.” (1 Tim. 2:1-3) If our leaders are ruling well, there will be peace and prosperity in the land that goes beyond the physical well-being of a country to the spiritual health of its citizens as well. Unfortunately, most of our country’s leaders have rejected the guidance of Scripture and so it should be no surprise that our land is far from the peace and quiet that is possible to those who submit their lives to God. 

As Christians we need to pray for our leaders in the specific ways that Scripture encourages us to. We are not just praying for the physical health and general wisdom of the president, we are praying for him on a spiritual level as well because we know that is where prayer is most needed. In keeping with that theme I have put together a list of ways to pray for political leaders from a Biblical perspective. 

Repentance: This may come as a shock to some, but we need to pray for the president to repent of his sin. Father Robert Morey of Saint Anthony Catholic Church in Florence South Carolina would agree with me on this particular point because he is the one who withheld communion from the president last year. He said, “any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.”

Salvation: Repentance and conversion go hand in hand so we should also pray that the president would confess his sin and submit his life to Jesus Christ. This is appropriate to pray for all our leaders because we know that God does not want any to perish, “but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) 

Justice: Our country is confused about justice today because people are allowing it to be defined by humans instead of by God. We need to join King Solomon’s powerful refrain in Psalm 7, “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son! May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.” 

Expose Corruption: The 2020 election had more allegations of voter fraud than any other election in recent history. As Christians we need to pray against all forms of political corruption. Ephesians 5:11 says, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” We need to pray that the president will call for an end to election fraud and all other forms of political corruption. 

Expose Hypocrisy: The president used his inaugural address to call the nation to unity. He then went to the White House and signed a divisive executive order on sexual orientation. We need to pray that he would recognize the hypocrisy of these actions and make decisions that reflect his call for unity. The Bible gives a vivid description of hypocrisy as “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and uncleanness.” (Mt. 23:27) 

Family: We need to pray for him as he leads his wife and influences his grown children and grandchildren. Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” That is a high calling for Christians husbands and one that helps us know how to pray for all husbands. We also need to pray for the first lady because she is under an immense amount of pressure with the responsibilities that come with serving as a leader of the nation. 

Humans are naturally drawn to technology because it fights against our natural limitations. We are finite creatures who can only be in one place at one time primarily doing one thing. We  invent things to try to change that. Our desire to change things is not inherently wrong, but it can lead to a negative outcome if it goes against the way God designed us to live. 

This is important to consider in our modern world because it has become so marked by technology.  We need to make sure to ask the right questions. Does the benefit of adopting a given technology outweigh the disadvantages? As Christians, we will answer this question very differently than the world because we are living for eternity with God, while the world is not. 

A worldly definition of technology is “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.” A materialistic worldview struggles to say no to technological advancement because it believes there are no supernatural consequences for saying yes. Christians see the world very differently. We believe people are made in the image of God. We believe they are made up of body, mind, and soul. We should not consider technology with a pragmatic approach. We need to think about it biblically, with a supernatural worldview in place. 

In Matthew 16:26 Jesus Christ wrote, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” This is a helpful question to ask in relation to modern technology because it forces us think of the natural world in relation to the supernatural. Technology often tries to let humans break out of their limitations. Go faster, communicate with more people, have influence in more places at the same time. As Christians we need to remember we are just one soul. Our purpose is to glorify God and make disciples of God one soul at a time. This is difficult to keep in mind because the materialistic goals of technology often seep into our minds and into the church. We have to be careful. We have to ask questions about modern technology that can be difficult to ask. 

How is your smart phone impacting your soul? How does watching Netflix impact your relationship with God? How does your 8K resolution TV help you serve in the local church? How does using Amazon Prime impact your ability to share the gospel with people at the store? Jesus’ question in Matthew 16 is difficult to ask because it makes us think about our soul. It makes us think about eternity, which is something technology so often distracts us from. 

The soul will never find true contentment until it finds peace with God. He is the creator of every soul. He knows that humans do not need technology to find lasting peace. In fact his word says, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” (Isaiah 26:3). How can someone trust in God? They must recognize that they have sin in their life, which separates them from God. They must believe that God sent his son Jesus Christ to die on the cross and rise from the dead to pay for their sin. They must submit their life to the Lordship of Christ. Then they will have peace because they will know that after death comes eternal life with their Savior. 

One of the wonderful aspects of eternity is that there will be no need for modern technology. We won’t need to put sermons on Youtube because the bride of Christ will be with the groom. We won’t need to use Zoom to protect ourselves from a virus because there will be no sickness, no pain, and no tears. We won’t need to use FaceTime with loved ones because we will be in the presence of Love himself! Let’s keep eternity in mind so we will know how to find peace for our souls during these turbulent times. 

If I had to choose one silver lining to the Coronavirus cloud it would be this, God is using the crisis to raise up men in the local church. In the last three months we have seen an unusual surge of men who want to get their lives right with God. They have come to our church and they have found out they need to repent of their sin, trust in Christ as their Lord, and dive in to life in the local church. We have also seen men who were already in the church step up to lead and become more involved in the church family. This has been a great encouragement to us and I hope it will be an encouragement to those reading as well. God is on the move!

This desire for men to rise up during the crisis is not just limited to our church. I was able to see it first hand when I went to a meeting this week for the Central Valley extension of The Master’s Seminary. What a joy to see dozens of men come from all over the valley to learn about how to be trained to preach God’s word! For two glorious hours my mind was turned from political turmoil and pandemic fear-mongering to the spiritual reality that God is at work in the hearts of men.

The more I heard from the students and pastors the more excited I became. These men understand what the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “Preach the word, be ready in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2). They recognize the need for men to preach and to entrust God’s word to faithful men “who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Tim. 2:2) Paul did not include a qualifying statement that said, “Take a break during a pandemic.” No! The Great Commission’s command to make disciples should not be hindered by what is being reported in the news. If anything, Christians should be even more motivated to share the gospel because people are desperate to know where they can find peace during this time of crisis.

The men at the pastor’s meeting represented over a dozen churches. I was struck by the impact they could have if God used them to stir up the saints in their own church communities. So much of our society is entrapped in a spirit of fear. Imagine if these men beat back the fear by standing for the truth? We need men who will understand what Paul meant when he told Timothy, “Fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” The men in our churches are all gifted differently, but all of them need to be reminded that God wants them to stand up and lead. We are not to live in fear. We are not to think of this year as a time of spiritual retreat and isolation. This is a time to spread God’s word. This is a time to make disciples. This is a time to pray for revival, and I know this is a time to pray for our men because God brings true revival through the leadership of men.

E. M. Bounds understood the importance of men in the local church. He wrote, “What the Church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use, men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men, men of prayer.” I hope you will join me in praying for God to raise up men in our churches who will stand firm in the gospel.

Every Christmas I have to work extra hard to remind our kids of the reason for the season. The more gifts they receive the more I have to slow down and make sure they understand the reason our family celebrates the holiday. I have to remind them that we are celebrating for a very different reason than the one you see in the stores and on TV. The Christmas we celebrate is tied to Easter. We celebrate the birth of Christ because he went on to die on the cross and rise from the dead! 

This is why Christians celebrate differently than the world. Our celebration is not a stand alone event. It is tied to the life of Christ. It is connected to the work that he accomplished on the cross. Christmas has to be celebrated in light of the resurrection because if Jesus never rose from the dead we would have no reason to celebrate his birth. If he didn’t rise from the dead then the main goal of his life would have failed. We would not celebrate Christmas. Instead we would have never heard about him because there would not have been a message worth passing on to the next generation. 

I was thinking about this because our church just put on a Christmas musical called “The Mystery of the Manger.” It follows the story of an investigative journalist who is writing a story about what actually happened at Christmas. At the beginning, he is skeptical and considers it to be a bunch of fairy tales, but by the end he has become convinced by historical evidence and he joins the rest of the cast in celebrating his very first Christmas. 

It’s a fictional story, but I discovered that it is actually based on events that happened in a former atheist’s life. His name is Lee Strobel. He was working as the legal editor for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980’s. His wife became a Christian and he decided he would research the Bible’s claims so that he could prove that they were false. After two years of interviewing experts in the fields of archeology, history, and theology he realized he had to make a decision. He went into his room and began writing down all the evidence he had compiled. He kept writing and writing until he realized the evidence pointed towards the life of Christ, not as an easily dismissed fairy-tale, but an undeniable historical fact. He read John 1:12, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” He repented of his sin and gave his life to Christ. 

Lee Strobel’s main questions were not about the birth of Christ. He spent most of his time researching the death and resurrection. He discovered four lives of evidence that even skeptics agreed with. The first was the integrity of Christ’s execution. There would be no point to talk about his resurrection if there was doubt that he really died. The second was how early the evidence was recorded for the resurrection. Alexander the Great’s biographies are considered historically accurate, but they weren’t written until four hundred years after his death. The accounts of Jesus life and death were written within decades by people who were eye witnesses! Strobel was also impressed with the historical evidence for an empty tomb. Strobel studied law and he knew that one of the strongest arguments is found in something called “Enemy Attestation.” This corroborates the empty tomb because Jesus’ enemies implicitly admitted that the tomb was empty when they said, “The disciples stole the body.” They were not denying the empty tomb. They were actually admitting it was empty by giving a different story for why it happened. The last line of evidence that led Strobel to believe in the Bible as history is when he discovered how strong the eye witness accounts of the resurrection were. The bible records that there were 515 eye witnesses of Jesus after the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). 

Strobel took his findings to skeptics and asked them to explain how an ancient book could make such a claim if it were not true. One expert named Gary Ludemann wrote, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” Ludemann is confident to say they experienced the risen Jesus, but he maintains that they experienced them as hallucinations. So Strobel went to a psychologist who specialized in hallucinations and he asked what he thought. He said it is impossible for over five hundred people to have the same hallucination because  hallucinations are “individual events that happen in individual minds.” This psychologist stated “Five hundred people having the same hallucination is more of a miracle than the resurrection.” 

Lee Strobel had started his research as an atheist who wanted to disprove the biblical account. His conclusion, after two years of careful research, was that “it would take more faith to maintain atheism than to be a Christian. Jesus not only claimed to be the Son of God. He backed it up by rising from the dead.” The same could be said about backing up the claim that Christmas was a historical event. The virgin birth in Bethlehem can be backed up with the evidence of his death and resurrection. There is a mystery surrounding the manger, but praise God the evidence confirms the biblical account. We know what happened on that amazing night. May we take the time to celebrate it, not simply as a wonderful story, but as a supernatural historical event.