Sunday night | 5 November 2023 | 6:30-7:30pm
If my God-defined people, respond by humbling themselves, praying, seeking my presence, and turning their backs on their wicked lives, I’ll be there ready for you: I’ll listen from heaven, forgive their sins, and restore their land to health. 2 Chronicles 7:14 The Message
What an awesome promise…
but you know what…
this promise from God was not and never has been given to or for the USA, Canada, or any other modern nation, not even for modern-day Israel.
This promise was given to the people of Old Testament Israel, with whom God had made covenant. God has never made another covenant of any kind with any nation.
But, God still makes covenant with people today… He makes covenant by promising those who accept and place their faith in Jesus and what He did on our behalf, that they will be with him forever and they will forever be his people.
- If “my God-defined people”
- today that is those who believe in and follow after Jesus
- “respond by humbling themselves, praying, seeking my presence, and turning their backs on their wicked lives, I’ll be there ready for you: I’ll listen from heaven, forgive their sins, and restore their land to health.”
- this verse is, first of all, directed toward those of us who follow after Christ and not some secularized nation with whom God has never made covenant;
- we need to remind ourselves that this verse is not about calling the nation to repentance.
The focus of this verse, as we pray, is not about others, unbelievers, Canada and the world. It’s a call for God’s people (that’s us) to be serious about naming and facing the abuse, immorality, political idolatry, and self-worship that exists within our own communities that we so often choose to ignore, rationalize, or justify.
As we start to take seriously the teachings in the Bible that call us to be far more concerned with the log in our own eye and with wrongdoings in our own churches and faith communities than we are with the speck of dust in others’ eyes or of wrongdoing outside the church, and if we stop using this verse as a political weapon to call out the wrongdoing of others (unbelievers, liberals, “woke”, or whatever label you want to use), ignoring the fact that God is actually speaking to us, not “them”, and to his family of believers and not a nation.
If we would respond to the God who loves us “by humbling themselves, praying, seeking my presence, and turning their backs on their wicked lives” then we will see the healing and renewal of the land and the people of the land that we long for.
