IF MY PEOPLE...

“IF MY PEOPLE WHO ARE CALLED BY MY NAME will HUMBLE themselves, and PRAY and SEEK My face, and TURN from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). It should be clear from this Scripture how crucial the Church’s role is for the destiny of the nations. God promises that He will bring healing to the land, IF His people will fulfil their calling and play their role. It is an amazing thought that there is a possibility for our nations to experience the healing power of God, and how we need that power among the nations today! God has set up four requirements for His people to fulfil before He can come and heal the land. It is important for us to observe that there are four, not one! The first one is: humble yourselves! What would it profit if we prayed and prayed and prayed, and God did not listen to us? Unless we know how to humble ourselves before God we can forget about being heard in heaven. Remember the parable Jesus spoke about the Pharisee and the tax collector? The Lord did not listen to the Pharisee. All his boasting and self-righteous prayers were totally ignored by God, because his heart was full of pride. But the tax collector, who humbled himself before God, went home justified! If there is anything God despises it is pride! “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5). If therefore, we have pride in our hearts, we have turned God into our enemy and He will be resisting us all the way. Without learning to humble ourselves and to live in humility we shall never be able to lay hold of the grace of God! The second requirement is prayer. There has never been a national revival anywhere in the world at any time in history that was not generated through prayer, and I mean real prayer: massive, united and persevering prayer by a hungry and desperate Church! We need to ask God to do great things for our nation because He is a great God, worthy of great petitions and well able to give us exceedingly far above what we ask or even think! It is time for us to make concrete requests to God for our nation. Like the Scottish reformer, John Knox, who came before God in a time of great need for Scotland and prayed: ‘Lord, give me Scotland or I die!’ God honoured this faithful man of prayer and gave him Scotland through sending over the land what is known as the Presbyterian revival. In the third place we have to seek God’s face. This is more than just praying. It means that we actually come face to face with the Lord. God wants us to get away from praying our own thing, and come to the point where we can be fully available for the burdens of the Holy Spirit. Seeking God’s face is not so much taking our concerns to the Lord as it is learning to listen to what is upon His heart. It is the experience of many that we can be seeking God for a long time and wonder why we never find Him. The reason is that we seek Him according to our mindset and tradition instead of seeking Him according to His way! We must learn to lay down all of our own self and come before God with empty hands ready to hear His voice and do His will. That is what it means to seek God’s face, and that kind of consecration and availability is a requirement if we are going to see God heal our land. The fourth requirement speaks about repentance: Turn away from your wicked ways. God requires true repentance as a prerequisite for the healing of the land. It is my experience that believers do not fully understand what repentance is. We often confuse it with forgiveness, but asking forgiveness and receiving it, is not the same as repentance. Repentance requires more than that. It requires that we change our way radically and stop doing the same thing anymore. That is the real meaning of the word ‘repent’: to change your direction! To confess a sin, ask for forgiveness and receive it, is something we can do over and over again, but that does not mean that we have repented of it. Unless we change our direction completely and turn our backs on our wicked ways, we have not repented in the true, biblical sense of that word. And until we turn from our wicked ways we can not make a way for the Lord to come and heal our land! [Extracts from: The Powerhouse of God - Johannes Facius, Sovereign World 1995]