The Electoral Strategy That Could Spark Revival
PLEASE JOIN US FOR TWO EVENTS
- Issachar Training: the men and women of Issachar in Charleston, SC, this Friday, June 12th; and
- The Response-SC: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis, on Saturday, June 13th, 10:00 a.m.to 4:00 p.m. (EDT)
It’s finally apparent that America’s most desperate need, above all else, is a spiritual resurrection of our national life and public custom. No one believes that politicians are going to save America, or that Wall Street is going to save America. If America is to be restored it will be by men and women of Issachar, who have, “understanding of the times, to know what America ought to do.”1 Virtue and liberty go together. The American Renewal Project is asking 100,000 Evangelical pastors to pray and discern if God is calling them to run for city council, county commissioner, school board, mayor or Congress in 2016. Men and women of Issachar, who know the Word and are capable of bringing our values to the public square, is the greatest need in America. Founding Father John Adams famously said that our Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people [and] wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams meant that a people devoid of religious and ethical rules of behavior are incapable of sustaining freedom. We receive continual misinformation about the nature of our freedoms. But such distortions cannot be in the interest of our society and its longevity. Some have misrepresented American Exceptionalism in non-religious terms, which is purely ridiculous. Alexis de Tocqueville was the first writer to describe America as “exceptional”:
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. …[T]hey brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. This sect contributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a republic, and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved.
Exceptional men and women with Biblical wisdom and moral absolutes founded America. A culture soared, saturated in “the understanding and knowledge of God” acquired from the Bible, His word. Early America pastors led and thrived in the civil government arena. The American Renewal Project’s call for 1,000 pastors to run for public office in 2016 has set off a firestorm of criticism from the Left. One thousand pastors running for city council, school board, county commissioner, mayor or Congress in 2016, averaging 500 volunteers per campaign, would produce a 500,000 grassroots, precinct-level spiritual eruption in the public square not seen in decades. It would change America for good. A.W. Tozer gives direction as we prepare for America’s spiritual resurrection:
If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting. Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.2
Please join us in your home, or webcast to the flock entrusted to you:
- The Response-SC: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis, Saturday, June 13th, 10:00 a.m.to 4:00 p.m. (EDT)
We need a Gideon or Rahab the Harlot to stand. David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project. ENDNOTES: 1. 1 Chronicles 12:32. 2. Tozer Devotional, “Prophetic Preaching.”
