Call To Prayer — Doug Small

Let me say, I'm having a few technical issues, and we tested this last night and it seemed to be fine, but so I'm going to have to turn myself off here to stop the sound looping. Dan, let me just say to you that I am so grateful and so appreciative to you for doing this and your heart and your desire for the nation and the group of people that you've lined up for this weekend is a stellar group.

I got a note today from Kevin Jessup, and as you know, and I think you're talking about this this week, the return that's taking place in Washington on September 26th, which before COVID, they were hoping that they would have a million people for a day of prayer.

Then I got a call today from the Billy Graham people, and they are promoting, of course, the Franklin Graham March. It's going to start at the Lincoln Memorial, it'll be less than two miles, it has seven stops along the way.

It's not a preaching meeting, it's Franklin praying, and he's going to take a prayer walk through Washington, D .C., and he's inviting people in the nation to come along and walk with him and pray with him along the way.

One of these is the return, the other one is, I think it's called Washington March 2020, and you can easily find these on the web. But this effort, Dan, that you are involved in is no less stellar than these.

The Seven Elements of a Solemn Assembly

This call to prayer, this mobilization of intercessors to pray. Tonight, during my time, I want to see if I could lay out what I call the seven elements of a solemn assembly. And so we'll stop and pray along the way.

But I'm going to use a visual for that, and I'm going to quickly flip to that visual. And Dan, if it gets tiring, you can switch me back. But I want to explain a bit about the solemn assembly and why the solemn assembly is important, and the spiritual dynamics of a solemn assembly, and maybe a bit about where we are as a nation.

And so let me see if I can go to my trusty little PowerPoint, and let's see if you can see it here. Is that coming up? It doesn't look like it's coming up. So the best of worlds, sometimes the best of things don't work.

Let me see one more time if I can share this. And I'm so sorry, there it is. There it is. I'm pretty sure it will come up. It will come up this time. The great passage for prayer and spiritual renewal in the nation is 2 Chronicles 7, 714.

And almost all of us know it, and we're weary of it. I don't think we understand the power of the passage. And I'll come back to that in just a moment. There are five things in the Old Testament that defile the land, and they defile the land to such a degree that God packs up His glory and leaves.

And that's what we don't want to happen. This is called the abomination of a land. So God just says, look, I give up. The greatest judgment of all is the silence of God, the abandonment of God. When you read Romans chapter 1, and God gave them up, and God gave them over, and God gave them up, that's judicial language.

It is like a stop order by the court. It's like an injunction by the court. It's like a moral behavioral barricade. And God puts that barricade up, and the culture runs the barricade. And He puts that culture up, and they run the barricade.

We've already violated the law of holiness, the law of righteousness. And so He puts another barricade up. He gives us over the first line, and that's grace. And then we run that barricade, and then He gives us over.

That's grace again. And then finally, as Hosea said, for three and yet for four. Five things cause God to pack up His glory and leave a land. The shedding of innocent blood. And when we talk about it, just think about the abortions.

Think about the murder rates, 16 ,000 to 17 ,000 homicides every year. A great majority of them not even assault. Just, it's a random thing. Another shooting in the city last night, we say. And the second is the treatment of the dead.

The way we treat death itself, the way we fail to respect death, and therefore the way we fail to respect a life. Even the despised criminal was to be properly buried in the Old Testament. And thus you have this idea of the sacredness of the body.

And that extends in so many different directions. The third thing that defiled the land was the breakdown of the family through the proliferation of divorce, and with it, sexual infidelity. The fourth thing was sexual deviance, specifically homosexuality.

And with that, identity confusion that always leads to social disorder. And then the fifth thing was idolatry or idolatrous altars and worship sites. Paganism and its priests. It's manifest in our culture as pluralism.

The rejection of our exclusive covenant with God and our own distinctive Christian, Protestant Christian history. There are two perspectives that confuse us today. Number one, we've lost the concept of corporate sin.

The idea that nations sin, and there's a ledger for nation. The idea that families sin, and God traces sin through the generations. And it multiplies like something that's off course, an error that's off course.

The further it goes without correction, the more off course it is until finally there has to be an intervention of God. Cities sin, entities, corporations sin, churches sin, and God judges them. So pervasive is the concept of individualism, even in the church, that sin has become a completely privatized concept.

And so we don't understand, solemn assembly, that we come together not just for our own sins, but for the sins of the city, for the sins of the state, for the sins of the nation, for the things that have created an abomination in the land.

The second thing that I think confuses our perspective today is holiness as a Christian ideal. It is now so pervasively eroded by an aberrant view of grace, what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, grace without a connection to discipleship.

Sin is now tacitly accepted. It's not treated as a serious affront to God. We have allowed the love of God to eclipse the truth of God, to muzzle the truth of God, and we dare not do that, nor do we want to have truth eclipse the love of God.

And truth and love both point to the unique holiness of God, the claim that he has upon our life, the desire to make us holy, righteous, and to make us, by extension, whole. We don't differentiate between sins.

We don't fail to see that there are egregious sins. We don't fail to see that there are sins that are an abomination. And while it's true that one sin, no matter how deceptively innocent or innocuous it may appear, that sin is toxic and deadly.

All sins are not in the same category. All sins are not the same. There are sins that are more egregious, more strategically destructive. And like an aggressive cancer, radical action is necessary to save the whole.

And that's where we are as a nation. And that's why we need a solemn assembly. We need a national solemn assembly. We need solemn assemblies at the state level, county level. We need solemn assemblies in our cities.

Our churches need solemn assemblies. And our families need solemn assemblies as well. Israel had a number of specifically called solemn assemblies. There were eight to 12 of these solemn assemblies in the Old Testament.

They were called usually by a king. At least six of them were called by a king. They were called often by a prophet. And they were called occasionally by a priest. Moses functioned in the priestly and prophetic mold.

Ezra was a priest along with Nehemiah who functioned in a governor's role. They called a solemn assembly. Some people see Acts 2, Acts 1 and 2 as a solemn assembly. It's the response of the church to Rome's crucifixion of Jesus.

In other words, when the whole world, the superpower of the world, rejected Christ and put him on the cross, and Jesus appeared to them for 40 days, and then left the earth, disappearing in the cloud of glory.

He sent them to the upper room and for 10 days, seven to 10 days, they waited before God. They considered what had happened. They considered what their response should be, what their message should be.

And into that solemn assembly, the Holy Spirit rumbled and you know, that's the day we call Pentecost. The prophet, the priest, the king calls a solemn assembly. The three branches of our government are based on the judicial branch, the court, the judges on the office of the prophet.

Will they call a solemn assembly? What's the chance that the Supreme Court will kneel before Jesus Christ and repent? All nine justices and call the nation back to God. I'd say less than zero. And then the Congress is based on the priestly or representative office.

What's the chance that Nancy Pelosi will call the Congress to prayer, to kneel before God, to repent, to affirm Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and the historic root of our nation? There's little chance of that.

There may be a chance that this president will be at the September 26th event. There may be a chance. He has indicated a willingness to consider that. And he has been the most vocal president in my lifetime on godly issues, righteous issues.

And I know that that's a contradiction to his own life and to his own lifestyle. It isn't, however, to his history and connection to the Hebrides revival. There are times that God raises up Osiris, as all of us have heard him called, and as Netanyahu has called him.

And he may yet to have the impart with Christ that we want him to have in the Lincoln bedroom. But right now, he has become a righteous advocate and a voice. And he may well add his voice calling for a national solemn assembly in September.

The “If My People” Promise and the Need for National Repentance

But I've got better news for you even than that. There's a wild card in scripture. What happens when the prophetic office, the kingly office, the executive branch, the priestly office, the representative branch, none of them will move a nation back towards God?

This is the wild card of 2 Chronicles 7 .14. If my people, if my people who are called by my name, who identify openly with me, will do four things, then I will hear from heaven. I'll silence heaven and listen to them.

I will give them a hearing in my heavenly courtroom. And I will forgive their sin and I will heal their land. This glorious, wonderful wild card is a provision of grace in scripture. It is a bottom-up movement of people who began to cry out to God and ask God for intervention into the life of the nation.

Why would we want a solemn assembly? Here's why you have a solemn assembly. Because there is a sense that a city, that a nation is reaping what it has sown. That judgment is looming over the land. And we must fulfill our mission as intercessors and as an intercessory community to stand in the gap.

You hold a solemn assembly because of a sense that judgment is imminent or it is already present and that the crisis may deepen. And that even among God's people, there's compromise. And it is critical that we redirect our lives.

Why do you hold a solemn assembly? Because of fresh revelation from the word of God. That we've ignored some aspect of the word of God. That we've gotten out of balance. We've now rediscovered something and we must change.

And because of a sense that our change, that our prayer will make a difference far beyond us. So what is a solemn assembly? Well, it is the urgent call of all people to come together to repent. Something has gone wrong and change begins with us.

It is an urgent call to humble ourselves, to be broken before God. To remember that God resists the proud. It is an urgent call to seek God's face. Not merely his hand, but in openness and transparency before God to see ourselves and to see God more clearly and to be moved to our face before this God.

Why, why, why? What is the solemn assembly? It is a call to fast and pray and to demonstrate that our greatest hunger is spiritual. It's a call to turn from wicked ways and to change our very, very lifestyle.

What is a solemn assembly supposed to do? Well, it takes us back to the pattern of scripture, to the hearing of God's word. And in a solemn assembly, there's a lot of God's word that's read aloud to a group.

It is a call to remove all things, all practices from our lives that might be displeasing to God, frustrating to his purposes. Anything in our life, our home, our church, that we have control we want to put out is the purging of the leaven.

It's a call to worship God with all of our heart. It's a call for everyone to renew a solemn covenant with God that's been in some way broken. And this is the means by which we facilitate this group's desire, this family's desire, this church's desire, this prayer group's desire, this nation's desire to be a more effective instrument in the hand of God and to fulfill our institutional mission.

Precipitating Events and the Search for God’s Judgment

Now, I want you to pay special attention now, because this is the heart of what I want to say to you. There's seven critical elements here. Number one, a solemn assembly, particularly the Old Testament, was often triggered by some precipitating event, something they interpreted to be the judgment or intervention of God or the withdrawal of his grace or failure upon our life.

When you hear the moderns talk about climate control, they talk about a climate that's completely under our control. We control the planet Earth and all of its calamities. And we can make all these calamities go away by paying attention to the Earth.

And what you hear dancing behind it is Gaia worship, is Mother Earth. When you read the Revelation, it becomes clear that you see a climate completely out of control and yet fully under the control of God, because the climate aberration that you see in the book of Revelation are in fact judgments of God upon the people of the Earth for their failure to live in righteous ways.

The Bible says in Romans that the Earth itself is groaning and travailing. The spirit is groaning and travailing. We're the only ones that are not groaning and travailing. And we should join our voice, pray for God to intervene and to set us back on a right path.

So when a drought occurred or a fire or a storm or a crop failure, the people would search their hearts and say, is there any connection between what's happening in our environment, in our circumstances and our own righteousness, our own prayer?

When an uncommon calamity came, and we've seen a couple of those, Katrina and Andrew and earthquakes, they would do the same thing. When a financial crisis came, Haggai talked about earning money only to put it into a bag with holes.

Bank collapse, and we've seen bank collapse just a few years ago or near bank collapse. And it was a bank collapse that triggered the third great awakening. And when there's human cause tragedy like war, the threat of war, national security, 9 -1 -1 was one of those.

Or when there is a pandemic of some kind, think about it. Since the year 2000, we have had a natural cause calamity, 9 -1 -1. We've had a banking financial crisis, 2008. And now we have a global pandemic unlike we have ever seen before.

And yet, we are not considering the fact that these may be messages from God, that we are to repent and examine our heart and ask if we are living the kind of lives that are commensurate with biblical calls to righteousness and holiness.

So whatever this event is, it is an interruption to life as normal. And sometimes it was localized, sometimes it's national. What we're living in is international. But there is some encounter that proves overwhelming, and it is supposed to instinctively move our eyes towards heaven to begin to pray and cry out to God.

And this is the amazing thing, isn't it? That in 9 -1 -1, there was a little bit of prayer. In the banking crisis of 2008, there was a little bit of prayer. And in the pandemic, there's just been a little bit of prayer, but there's been no brokenness, no soul-searching, no national call, no get on our knees, no, oh, God, have mercy on us.

No brokenness before God. So Joel said, and you've already heard Pastor Visor reference this passage, blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify them, assemble the elders, gather the children, gather the nursing mothers, cancel the weddings.

Nothing was more important in Jewish culture than a wedding, but cancel the wedding. Let the priests and ministers weep. Let them mourn between the porch and the altar, and let them say, spare your people.

We are on the edge of even greater judgment. Don't give your heritage to reproach that the nation should rule over us, God. Saying, where is their God? More of you, more of the pastors that I know, more leaders that I've ever heard in my lifetime are saying, this could be the end.

If we continue like we are with the rioting and the polarization, this could be the end of the nation as we know it. And Joel says, you stop everything. Everything is stopped. Everything is canceled. And there's days of prayer and crying out to God until we hear from God.

Humility, Intercession, and Seeking God’s Face

And this is what we pray. This is what we rely on. If my people called by my name, if my people, which are called by my name, they willingly, openly, without shame, identify with me. If they will humble themselves, and the word here actually is repent.

And if they will pray, and the Hebrew word there is palau, it means to represent others. In this case, we would represent the nation. We would stand before God in behalf of the nation or a church or something else, and seek my face, not merely my hand, and turn from their wicked ways, demonstrating a desire for truth and righteousness.

Then I'll hear from heaven. I'll answer them. I'll forgive them, justify, reconcile, restore. And I will heal their land. I will heal their living places. And here's what I want you to do. If you're watching this and you can see the screen, I want you to join with me in a prayer.

And you may wanna pray everything that's on the screen, and you may wanna pray just the gold response or the brown response. Let me begin. Lord, to whatever extent I have failed, I have failed to openly identify with you, that I have withdrawn the bolder edge of my witness, that I have been silent for fear that my Christian faith might cost me a promotion or even popularity.

To whatever extent I failed to openly identify with you, I now repent. And then read this with me. To whatever degree I failed to acknowledge the redemptive, kingly dimension of the name of Jesus, for that I repent.

I say, Lord, I say, there is no other name. Pray this with me. May I say it publicly. May I wear your name as an adornment, as your bride partner. May I come to understand the power and privilege of your name.

There is no other name. So we pray, let kings and nations acknowledge the name of Jesus. Let sinners and saints cling to the name of Jesus. Pray it with me right now. Pray the gold with me. I will boldly, more consistently, more openly declare, I am a follower of Jesus.

I am one of his children. I am a disciple. I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So Lord, may we, your church, be bolder in our witness. Pray this with me. May we, your people, not be silent.

We pray in view of the war, the virtual, veritable war against the name of Jesus by America, by its course, that you would intervene. Pray it with me, that you would perform signs and wonders around the name for your glory to demonstrate that Jesus is not dead.

Jesus is alive. Christianity is not a mere philosophy. This is the faith of a living Lord. We pray that we would live as representatives of the name, not sidestepping the culture war in which the name is permitted only in a profane manner, but forbidden when it's used in a sacred way.

Lord, we pray, manifest yourself as alive in this nation. So I want you to see it again. If my people who are called by my name will pray and they will humble themselves. The Hebrew text says humble, but the Greek Septuagint says repent.

What if it's both? You see, humility is the disposition of the heart, but repentance is the action. So pray this with me. Pray this with me. Lord, first we bow our hearts. We recognize who we're standing before.

Maybe we should pray. We pray that we would recognize who we're standing before. And we want to be purposely reverent, intentionally bent before you. So pray it with me. We bow, we bend. We demonstrate our subordination and your supremacy.

We confess our sin and your holiness, our frailty and your transcendence. We repent, Lord. We weep that our culture, including the church culture, has lost appropriate reverence of you. Pray with me. We fear the deadly consequences of such disdain for you, especially in view of our national sins.

We know, we should know there are consequences to nations, to nations for sins. And we fear for the nation. We fear for our sons and daughters. We fear for the generations to come and we repent. We are so sorry that we have allowed the escalation of scandalous sins in our nation and even in our churches and in our families with so few tears and so little prophetic outcry.

We repent for our complicity. We repent for our silence and for our complicity by our silence for quietly going along, for feeling that our little voice, our little candle was no match for the darkness and hiding it.

We repent for renaming sin. We repent for allowing love, confused love that did not want to offend, to muzzle truth. We pray, give us tough love, a truer love, so profound and like you, so laser-like that it loves the sinner without affirming sin.

We repent for times when we ourselves have not lived truth for living in an era in which the church is so compromised that there is little difference between us and the world. And more sadly, that such differences are no longer expected.

We are a cheap grace culture, content with superficial conversion and deeply resistant to discipleship. We repent to whatever extent our soldiering spirit has grown flabby and our capacity to mobilize has been compromised.

We pray, Lord, forgive us, grace us with the ability and the power to change. We know that your grace not only empowers repentance, but it also transforms. It makes weak men strong. It removes intimidation.

It emboldens. That grace took a ragtag band of wimpy disciples and made them fearless at Pentecost. God, we pray, do it again. Do it again. Do it in our generation, Lord. Do it with us, God. Forgive us.

Make us credible witnesses. Make us proof, living examples of your sin-breaking, liberating power of grace, of dynamic grace. Let others see our hunger for holiness, our tender hearts, our openness about our own frailty, our deep dependence upon you.

And may they follow our godly examples. Cleanse us, God. Unshackle us from any debilitating habit. Free us from the weights that beset us. Break covenants that bind us in any way to evil. Light our fire again and let there come over us a pristine purity that ushers in a new spiritual springtime.

If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray. The word pray here is palau in Hebrew. It means to represent another. It means to stand before God in behalf of another. It is the idea of coming before God as in a courtroom.

It is the idea of intercession. And so having humbled ourself and having repented, we are now more capable of standing between God and others. So let's pray this. God, we stand as advocates. We stand as extensions of heaven.

We reach out to others as priestly intercessors in behalf of those who do not know you, for some who may not want to know you, for leaders, for cultural influencers, and as intercessors, we plead for our nation.

We pray for those who are the blind purveyors of darkness, who are themselves victims and they do not even know it. We take a position in your behalf, God, in behalf of righteousness, in behalf of godliness.

We take a position in behalf of the wounded, the children that have never held a Bible right here in America, never heard the story right here in America. We take a position through prayer at places where sin is openly celebrated, in behalf of homes where your name is not honored, towards churches where revival fires have gone out, in the homes of seniors lacking care, in the places where singles live who lack companionship, youth lacking fathers, lacked key kids whose moms, despite their best efforts, will run short of food this month.

We take a position in their behalf. We reach out in prayer to the homeless, to the addicted, to the abused, to the kid who today will take his initiation in a gang. We weep, we weep for this nation. We take a position in courtrooms where your name is on the wall, but your principles, the very foundation of our laws are not allowed in Congress, in the White House, in state houses, in governor's mansions.

God have mercy on us. We intercede. We ask you to come to America. Save us. Turn the nation around for your glory and for your honor. If my people will seek my face, pray this with me. God, we know it's so easy to seek your hand.

We do it all the time. It's so easy to plead for intervention. It's so easy for us to ask you to fix this or that, all the while ignoring, ignoring you. We seek your face. We genuinely ask for grace to seek a renewed relationship with you, not merely for your hand of intervention, not merely for your help, not just for your deliverance, not to make things better, but for a relationship with you, the relationship that we've ignored and the one that we often ignore every day because we're in too much of a hurry to stop and pray.

Put us, put in us, in this nation, a desire to again know you, to want intimate connection with you, one that's personal, one that's authentic, one that's not merely utilitarian. Help us, Lord, to want you, not for what you can do for us, but for who you are, for what you stand for, for what you want to make us and for what you want to enable us to stand for.

Transform us as we behold your face in prayer. Change us into your likeness. If my people, if my people will turn from there wicked ways, pray this with me. Lord, we've repented with our lips, now give us the grace to repent with our lives, with our hands, with our feet, with our deeds, with our habit.

Let our ways please you. Let others see the change in our attitudes and our action and take note. Let our lives demonstrate the deep work that you're doing in our hearts. Change us, God. Break our sinful chains.

Make us more saints than sinners. We renounce our own wicked ways. Help us demonstrate a love for you, a love for righteousness, a love for holiness. We pray that we would turn not only from our sin, but unto you.

In fact, help us to run to you, to openly love you, to loudly praise you, to boldly proclaim your name and declare our allegiance to you. It is not enough for us to be free from sin. We pray that we would also be free to follow, free to worship, free to witness, free to pray, free to pray fervently, fervently free.

And even now, wherever in our inner man we are not free, we pray, Lord, liberate us, change us. If my people do these things, then I will hear. Stop just for a moment and just freely, just say, God, we thank you that you hear us.

We thank you that you answer us when we pray. We thank you that we can depend upon your word. We thank you that you are faithful just to forgive us our sins. We thank you that the weakest among us, the frailest of the faithful can pray and you will answer.

We thank you that your mercy endures forever, that your faithfulness is like the never ending waves of the ocean. You are a good and dependable God. The same yesterday, today, and forever. You never change and you've changed our nation before and you can do it again.

And for that, we pray. If my people do these things, I'll hear and I'll forgive. And so Lord, we've prayed and we've asked you for forgiveness and we've prayed for grace to live an overcoming life. One that's evidentiary of great grace.

And so now based on your word, we received your promise forgiveness. We revel in it. We savor in the sweetness of forgiveness. Thank you, Lord, for forgiving us. And as we freely received, help us to freely give.

We pray for grace to forgive our trespassers, even those who offend you, oppose your kingdom and seek to harm us. Give us grace to love them with the love that you've loved us. May we return good for evil.

May we not come under the awful power of the evil one and his orbit absorbed in a dislike of them as much as they may dislike us and dislike you. We pray, set us free to orbit your grace and your love.

Forgive us, free us and keep us free for your glory, we pray. May we live as dead men who cannot be offended, who will not be baited, who do not react, who do not react to the darkness. If my people, I'll hear, I'll forgive, I'll heal their land.

Healing the Land and Recognizing Human Frailty

So Father, we pray, heal our land, heal our living places. Heal our homes, our churches, our cities, our nation. Heal our schools and our neighborhoods. Heal our work and play places. Sanctify us, sanctify our culture.

It is no accident that you shut virtually everything down. It is no accident that you've shut down sports arenas and you've shut down theaters. You've shut everything down and you've called us back to yourself.

It's no accident that you've done that. We pray, heal our land, heal our play places, heal our bodies so wracked with cancer and deadly maladies, many so sick with COVID -19. Heal us God, heal our souls.

New psychological illness that emerge with regularity. Heal us, heal our environment. No one seems to believe that godliness and ecology are connected, but we know according to scripture that there is a synergy, a spiritual connection between the land and the spiritual nature and condition of the people who live on that land.

Heal our land as you heal us and you bring us back to righteousness. Now, I wanna show you an astounding movement here. There is this precipitating event and that brings a culture to the discovery of their limitations.

I mean, you remember, you'll never forget the faces of the people running from the falling towers and suddenly invincibility, how could this happen in America is gone. The failure of banks, discovery of our limitations.

COVID -19, the discovery of our medical limitations. Some kind of event brings us to the point where we discover our human frailty and there's a shared desperation. And then there should be a discerning process.

And this is what I talked about earlier. Is this the hand of God? Is this the finger of God? Is this an indication? Have we sinned as a nation? Do we need to repent as a nation? And out of that comes deep contrition.

That's an attitude. And out of that comes new direction. We begin to behave in different ways, in biblical ways. Our language cleans up, our homes become more stable. We stopped being a throwaway culture.

We stopped destroying our young and euthanizing our old. Our habits change, our entertainment desires change. And then we come back to destiny. Our destiny as families, the destiny of a church. You see, it's not God's will for us to amble through Sunday after Sunday with three sing songs and offering in a sermon.

Every church has a destiny. It has a mission, it has a calling. But sin obscures that, lukewarmness obscures that. Every family has a destiny. There's a destiny upon your family. There's something that God is calling you to do.

And of course, a great part of that is the raising and launching of godly children who encourage one another onward in the mission that God has called them to, the various callings upon their life. There's destiny upon a nation as well.

A precipitating event, the discovery of our frailty, our limitation. You can't do this with an attaboy, we'll roll up our sleeves and we'll go at this and we'll overcome this. There has to be the inclusion of God, the invitation of God to join the national conversation.

And then the sense of desperation, the need of God. And then the discerning process that leads to repentance and a willingness to redirect our lives, reconsecrate our lives, reconsecrate the nation, the church, the city.

And then we touch destiny. Destiny is what God has called us to be. That's incarnational, that's transformational. Destiny is what God has called us to do. That's vocational, that's task. And at any point in this process, this can break down.

You can discover your limitations and fail to share desperation or discern what God might be saying or to repent. And then the whole process breaks down and you start all over with another precipitating event.

I think we've had three precipitating events since the year 2000. And we have still not found ourselves moving along this chart. We've really not even reached the point of shared desperation. We certainly haven't reached the point of a discerning process where churches come together or cities come together and they discern what is God saying to us.

September 26 will be one of those moments in which there is a discerning process. What are you saying to us, God? This weekend is one of those moments where we are attempting to discern together. What are you saying to us, God?

What is your message to us? So here's the discovery moment. God, we stand at a moment in which we realize we are no match for the present dilemma. We have been far too self-reliant and too little dependent upon you.

And we need you and not merely your hand. And we confess that without you, we are empty believers, woefully inadequate for the task in this present moment. We cannot do what you have called us to do alone.

We cannot be what you want us to be without renewing our relationship with you at the altar of sacrifice. And so help us to discover what you are saying to us. We are fighting against unseen forces that no mere human can subdue.

Our solutions have failed us. We don't have a solution. Our formulas won't work. Our programs are inadequate. Our cisterns are dry. We need resources. We need spiritual power, wisdom, and discernment.

We've tried too often to do divine work with human skill. We've tried to carry on a holy mission with soul hands. We failed. Not merely the nations around us have failed. It is you, God, we need. We need your grace upon our life.