Sunday, June 3. Day 8 of 67 Days of Prayer
Today we are praying for the following districts:
- Tennessee State House District 22- Currently represented by Dan Howell
- Tennessee State House District 23 – Currently represented by John Forgety
- Tennessee State House District 24 – Currently represented by Kevin Brooks
- Tennessee State Senate District 8 – Currently represented by Frank S. Niceley
Our call to Prayer
Our call to prayer is excerpted from Jonathan Vowell’s article, Little Christs:
Politics demands results, but prayer’s true ‘results’ are not policy changes but sanctification. In If You Will Ask, Oswald Chambers—that 20th-century theologian and personalist philosopher—put it in his usual plain yet charged manner: “It’s not so true that ‘prayer changes things’ as that prayer changes us, and then we change things.” Why is that the order of things? Because: “Jesus Christ is not a social reformer. He came to alter us first, and if there is any social reform to be done on earth, we must do it.”
Prayer is not a shortcut or short circuit to getting things done. Rather, it is the opening of the furnace door so that the dross in us can be purged out. In that day-by-day, step-by-step sanctification and transformation of the self, we become the kind of people that God desires in all spheres of life, including the political realm.
Furthermore, part of that sanctification and transformation is learning what to actually pray for, and as Gethsemane demonstrated, it might not be exactly what we would will. But then again, perhaps that’s the problem: our wills are out of whack. As Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, Jesus looks so strange to us because he is sanity and we’re all different shades and degrees of insanity. He looks like an odd shape to us because he is the right shape and we are all the wrong shape. Out of shape, as it were, and akin to sanctification is the word reformation, literally to re-form something, taking what was bent or twistedout of shape and setting it right again, sometimes with many hot hammer blows on an immovable anvil of circumstances.
A Prayer for Day 8 of 67 Days of Prayer
Lord, Your name is known in Meigs, Polk, Bradley, McMinn, Monroe, Bradley, Claiborne, Grainger, Hancock, Hawkins, Jefferson, and Union Counties. . Thank You for the strong Christian heritage You have given to Your people in these areas.
Father, we ask that you raise up a spirit of prayer in this state. Lord, please call me first to prayer and please perform a work in me as I pray. Father, I ask that You would make our leaders praying leaders. Father, please call them to pray. May this state seek Your face.
Once more we ask: Father, would You cause a spirit of prayer to well up within the citizenry of Tennessee? Would You cause our state to once more seek Your face? Would you cause us to seek Your will as we vote – but not just in voting Lord, but in our daily lives? Would You move on our hearts and make our homes places of spiritual accountability?
Amen.
Please click here to download a printable guide of when to pray for each district. Please feel free to email this to other praying Christians, to insert this in your church bulletin, or to post it on your church bulletin board. Make sure you put a copy on your refrigerator or in another prominent place in your home. This guide may be freely reproduced as long as it is not modified.
