one small step

There's a Matt Redman song we sometimes sing which goes like this -

Can a nation be changed?
Can a nation be saved?
Can a nation be turned back to You?

It's a good question: and there are days when it seems such a huge and impossible task that it's tempting to think there's no way it can ever be done. And in some ways that's true. It would require a radical miracle.

Matt Redman sussed that one out, of course. The chorus of his song says as much -

We’re on our knees, we’re on our knees again.
We’re on our knees, we’re on our knees again.

Prayer is where it always starts. Earnest, urgent, ceaseless, tear-stained prayer.

Let this nation be changed,
let this nation be saved,
let this nation be turned back to you.

I can't exactly imagine the likes of John Knox ever singing a Matt Redman song. But he certainly shared the sentiment.

Give me Scotland, or I die, he's reported as having cried.

Prayer is where it always starts. God alone can do a thing like this. And if we're not prepared to engage in this such travailing prayer, we'd better just drop the hope of a better and brighter day.

Only God can do it. Only God can change and save a nation. Only God can bring about that massive revolution of the heart which sees a people humbled and repentant and then turned around to God.

But prayer is just the starting point.

Prayer gets rid of passivity in our lives. When our prayers are offered in faith as well as in hope, and directed in faith to a God who is mighty to save, then the conviction is formed within our prayerful hearts that this is what God will do: and we start to direct our energies to this cause.

Can a nation be changed? Can a nation be saved? Can a nation be turned back to You?

If the answer we give is 'Yes!' then we ratchet the whole thing up a level or two and start asking a different set of questions - Will this nation be changed? Will this nation be saved? Will this nation be turned back to You?

And if the answer to that is still 'Yes!' - then we've come to the point where we're able to see that this is in fact what the Lord is intent on accomplishing in these days.

And if this is what He, the Lord, is doing, then we give ourselves with confidence to doing it too.

As Jesus himself once declared - The Son can only do what he sees his Father doing.

But when he sees the Father doing a thing, he gets on with doing it himself.

God lays on my heart a burden for this nation. It drives me to pray.

And it drives me on to roll up my sleeves and to get on with the business of changing a nation.

That doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't ever happen in one great, dramatic turn-around. It's a little-by-little-by-little transformation.

Each day - and through each day, each task and opportunity the day affords - each day provides its own small set of nation-changing moments. Moments where the hearts and minds of people may be bit-by-bit engaged, informed and slowly re-directed to the Lord.

The bulk of today has involved for myself a funeral. A service along at the local crematorium. Then back to the church for a service of thanksgiving, celebrating the life of the man who'd recently died.

Another tiny nation-changing moment. The chance to sow the Word of God in minds and hearts made all the more receptive to God's truth by sorrow, and, along with that, the sense of our mortality.

The text was a given. They'd asked for this reading from Scripture. 1 Corinthians 13. The 'famous' chapter, all about love: or 'charity' as the older Authorised Version has it.

It's easy to turn the whole thing into platitudes. Which is anything but what the chapter is really about.

I'm not really there to make them feel good. Though I hope and I pray that that happens.

I'm there to make them feel God.

To give them a sense of the presence of God, and the glory of God, and the knowledge impressed on their hearts that only the Lord is indeed ever able to meets us in all of our desperate need.

It wasn't the nation I spoke to today. Just a few, a very few, of its countless millions. But if even a few of those few had their minds and their hearts turned a few small degrees back to God, then a start has been made on the nation.

Another small step has been taken.