Apr 8, 2021 – Prayer Focus
Thursday, April 8, 2021 – The 24/7 National Strategic Prayer Call
“A CALL TO THE WALL…ONE NATION UNDER GOD”
1-712-770-4340 Code: 543555 # (Ongoing call…24 hours a day!)
We begin our hour by praising and giving thanks to God!
“Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise.
Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.”
Psalm 100:4
We sing:
Now Thank We all our God
Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom His earth rejoices;
Who, from our mothers’ arms, hath blessed us on our way with countless gifts of love and still is ours today.
Oh, may our bounteous God, through all our life be near us,
with ever-joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us,
and keep us in His love, and guide us when perplexed and free us from all ills, in this world and the next!
All praise and thanks to God, the Father now be given,
the Son and Him Who reigns with Him in highest heav’n,
The One Eternal God, Whom earth and heav’n adore, for thus it was…is now…and shall be ever more!
The One Eternal God, Whom earth and heav’n adore, for thus it was…is now…and shall be ever more!
~~~
The key assignment for the 24/7 National Strategic Prayer Call is to intercede hourly
for the safety and security of President Donald John Trump,
and to pray for that which pertains to our nation!
We pray for his protection, for our First Lady, Melania, and their marriage
and for all the members of their family.
We cover them all with the Blood of Jesus.
We ask that in every situation and decision, President Trump will be led by the Holy Spirit!
Pray.
The 24/7 NSPC continues to stand for righteousness and justice in our nation,
and together, we affirm Donald Trump as our duly elected President!
Pray.
We bless our Vice President Mike Pence, his wife Karen, and their family.
Pray.
We pray that the evil actions of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be exposed
and that they be removed from office!
Pray.
We pray for ourselves and our loved ones, and corporately put on the full armor of God!
Particular prayer needed immediately…for Deborah Cole, Repeka Nuusa, and Teddi Dial…
to be healed totally of cancer that is attacking them!
Pray.
Strategic Focus for Thursday
WELCOME THE KING OF GLORY INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ONE NATION UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!
The Coming of the Lord of Hosts – Part 4
“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”
Colosians 4:2
Today, a 24/7 team will be traveling to DC, entering the gates of our nation’s Capitol, and positioning themselves to pray on site, according to the Lord’s instructions! Those on the call will be undergirding them off site, interceding for their sisters and brothers to arrive safely at their destination, and rejoicing with them as they finally meet…and “greet and another with a holy kiss”! Romans 16:16 Pray.
For the past three days, we have been looking at our most beloved and successful Presidents, seeing how they walked in humility that allowed them to win the people’s trust and hearts! Today, our focus turns to Ronald Reagan, America’s 40th President, whom God took on a spiritual journey, making provision each step of the way. He granted Reagan success as an actor, then put him in the Governor’s mansion in California, and from there, elevated him to the Presidency of the United States. He not only survived an assassination attempt but changed the face of US politics and greatly impacted the rest of the world. Let’s learn about him together, and rejoice as we do!
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6
On July 21, 1922, “Dutch” (Ronald Reagan’s nickname), his brother, Neil, and twenty-three others were the first to be baptized in a new church. He was 11 years old, and as he arose from the water, he heard the minister command him, “Arise and walk in newness of faith.” Reagan said he felt “called”…and that in that moment he had “a personal experience when I invited Christ into my life.”
Two years later, on January 20, 1924, Illinois awoke to “the heaviest and most spectacular” snowstorm of the winter, with a temperature of 18 degrees below zero. Suffering through the freeze, in the northwest corner of the state, were Jack and Nelle Reagan and their two sons. A continent away on that January day in 1924, 53 year old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lay near death in an even colder Bolshevik Russia.
As Lenin clung to the few remaining hours of his life, 12 year old Ronald Reagan clung to his hymnal in a pew near the front of the First Christian Church, with his Spirit-filled mother, Nelle. An annotation she had made in her Bible, which read: “You can be too big for God to use, but you cannot be too small.” Pray.
Thus began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead President Ronald Reagan to a spot in front of a bust of Lenin at Moscow State University 64 years later, inspired with a religious drive very much like what he and his mother had felt that Sunday in 1924. He recognized that Lenin, too, had been moved by a kind of religious zeal, though very different from his own…and it was the clash of their two belief systems that would make possible their rendezvous on May 31, 1988.
It was Nelle Reagan who would instill in her innocent son a set of beliefs that helped convince him of the need to defeat the Soviet Union. She and the faith she imparted were the central forces in his life. Without them it is difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan becoming President, let alone mounting a crusade against “godless Soviet communism.” As Governor of California, he wrote in a letter to his childhood pastor, Ben Cleaver, in 1973:
“One thing I do know, all the hours in the old church in Dixon (which I didn’t appreciate at the time)
and all of Nelle’s faith have come together in a kind of inheritance without which I’d be lost and helpless.”
We pray:
- In gratitude for parents who love the Lord and take time to instill in their children (and grandchildren), a deep abiding faith that will carry them through the rest of their lives. Pray.
In Nelle Reagan’s house, Sundays were strictly about God, and she and the boys had a full church agenda. The schedule: “Sunday school Sunday mornings, church Sunday morning, Christian Endeavor Sunday evening, church after Christian Endeavor, and prayer meeting on Wednesdays.” Decades later, Reagan spoke of Nelle’s spiritual influence.
“I know now that she planted that faith very deeply in me. Just seeing my mother’s faith, under trying circumstances, over long periods of time, has enabled me to realize that when Jesus said, ‘wherever two or three are gathered in My name, there am I also,’ He meant He is with us in every situation and circumstance.”
Then-President Reagan told the nation in a Mother’s Day radio address in 1983 that it was from his mother he learned about “the God who will guide us through life.” “I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land.” – Ronald Reagan, June 1952. In a tribute she would have loved, he used a passage from Proverbs to describe her…”as Proverbs 31 woman”! He once said that he liked to think that “maybe she’s still giving me a hand now and then.”
We pray:
- Remembering Jesus’ care for his own mother, Mary just before he died, it’s touching to see how deep an impact Reagan’s mother Nellie made on him, and how he honored her above everyone else. Pray.
As President, Reagan frequently invoked the memory of America’s earliest settlers…of their religious pilgrimage and the faith that sustained them. “We’ve come a long way since those first settlers reached these shores, asking nothing more than the freedom to worship God. They asked that He would work His will in our daily lives, so America would be a land of fairness, morality, justice, and compassion.” This was in sharp contrast to the bleak and godless system of Soviet communism, Reagan recognized in his own country both a special quality… and a duty to check Bolshevik ambitions. Pray.
By the 1950s, Ronald Reagan was publicly speaking of America as a nation chosen by God. In any number of speeches through the years, Reagan said generally that God had “blessed our land.” He referred to “America the Beautiful” and concurred that God had indeed “shed His grace” on us. For Reagan, this was more than a politician’s simple rhetoric.
- From his earliest days in the Disciples Church, Reagan had believed that God had chosen America for a special purpose – that He had a “divine plan” for this select nation, a “Shining City Upon a Hill.”
- He believed that the American people were preordained to play a crucial role in history, beginning with the trials of the nation’s earliest settlers and continuing into his time in the Oval Office.
- His evoking of America as “A Shining City Upon a Hill” has become one of the phrases most memorably associated with his presidency.
Here is the image in his own words:
“Standing on the deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts coast, John Winthrop said: “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”
Reagan knew Winthrop’s lines by heart, and loved the passage from Matthew 5:14-16, which he internalized:
“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may praise your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. “
These words constitute a call to practical Christianity, the kind Ronald Reagan had responded to since his childhood. Pray.
In Winthrop’s vision, it was the destiny not only of each private citizen but of America as a whole to share God’s light, to serve as a beacon and a model for all other nations. It was Reagan who added the word “shining” to the image of the city. He may have recalled his mother’s message to her Sunday school students: “Jesus said that the Christian is like a light, set where it cannot be hid; come out to Sunday School next Lord’s day at ten o’clock. Let us all be shining lights.” To the adult Reagan, who would refer to the Soviet Union as “the heart of darkness,” it was an irresistible image. In June 1957, he said:
“This irreconcilable conflict [the Cold War] is between those who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom
and those who believe in the supremacy of the state.”
We pray:
- The Christians in this country will once again internalize the words In Matthew 5, so that our lives are lived out before men in a way that will cause them to praise our Father in heaven. Pray.
It may come as no surprise that a figure so committed to fighting totalitarianism abroad would eventually focus on the dangers of an overpowering federal government at home.
- In terms of domestic policy, Reagan began to criticize government for becoming involved in far more than it should be – and especially for tax policies that he believed had become “confiscatory.”
- Reagan believed that the more money the federal government took from its citizens, the more it also robbed individual freedom – especially for those (like him) whose income fell into the 91% federal tax rate. One of Reagan’s most enduring messages, born in this period, was that Americans needed to be freed from such policies.
- Moreover, he grew convinced that American business must be liberated from “encroaching government controls.”
- Taken together, Reagan believed, high taxes and obtrusive government regulation represented a “creeping socialism” that might slowly but surely cripple the nation.
We pray:
- For the forward-thinking of Ronald Reagan and the way that he applied both Godly principles and good old “common sense” in his approach to reducing the controlling power of the federal government. Pray.
- For President Trump, who held many of the Reagan economic positions and swiftly moved to remove obtrusive regulations and encourage the nation’s economy to run, not walk, once again. Pray.
Ronald Reagan’s path to the Presidency was marked by a series of extraordinary public speeches. In each, he made impassioned and meaningful references to his faith.
- From “A Time for Choosing” in 1964, through his Republican convention speeches, his four inaugural addresses, and his Farewell Address from the Oval Office, he carried on a tradition begun at his very first “presidential” speaking engagement, as president of his high-school senior class: he made sure that God was invited.
- His final two public statements were no exception. In his August 1992 address to the Republican convention—as many guessed at the time, it would be his farewell speech to the nation – Reagan made five references to God or Christ. He connected his “God-given optimism” to the Shining City. And he closed: “And finally, my fellow Americans, may every dawn be a great new beginning for America, and every evening bring us closer to that Shining City Upon a Hill.”
Reagan’s last public act was his November 5, 1994, letter informing the world that he has Alzheimer’s disease. In that brief letter to the American people, he mentioned God and faith four times. He wrote: “When the Lord calls me home, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. May God always bless you.”
We pray:
- In gratitude for having had a President like Ronald Reagan… a man whose heart was Yielded to God. He lived his life out in a manner that honored his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…and And was a model for all of us to emulate. Pray.
As an adult, Reagan often referred to the Bible as his favorite book…and as “the greatest message ever written. ” That its words were of divine origin and inspiration, he said he “never had any doubt.”
Let us read this passage of scripture and pray into it, with hearts of gratitude for having been given such a President!
Psalm 1
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night.
Pray.
He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season,
whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper.
Pray.
The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
Pray.
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.
Pray.
We pray:
- Lord, as we read about President Reagan and other Goldy Americans who have given leadership to our nation in critical times, our hearts are filled with gratitude. Thank you for inspiring us and encouraging us as we prepare our own hearts, to go forward (KADIMA!) in this battle for the soul of our nation. Pray.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!
Our 24/7 NSPC website is up and functioning! https://247nationalstrategicprayercall.com
We have a page on our website for people to post prayer requests.
Listen to the song ahead of time, then either sing or pray it!
~~~
HINENI, ADONAI! HERE I AM, LORD!
ENGAGING IN A WARFARE OF LOVE! THE BATTLE OF THE BRIDE!
KADIMA! ONWARD…FORWARD!
“LAYNA!” LIGHT AND TRUTH!
BE STRONG…COURAGEOUS…BRAVE!
UNASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST!
GOD’S CHAMPIONS FOR LIFE!
MARANATHA! COME, LORD JESUS!
BE READY! REVIVAL IS COMING!
ONE NATION UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!
ONE NEW MAN!
VICTORY!
STANDING IN THE GAP!
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