MORNING WATCH NOTES:
Only the touch of God will/can save a nation from godless influences and ideologies. Let the sweet aroma of prayer for revival and spiritual awakening lay thickly before God as a dense fog covers a deep autumn morning.
Shall we believe in prayer for America as the blessed missionary to India, Amy Carmichael (CIRCA 1930s), did for her beloved India mission?
The persistent intercessor will not shrink to give a few solemn moments to consider these thoughtful words from Amy Carmichael on the power of prayer? May we be encouraged in our prayers for America by her words, taken from her own autobiographical writings, Gold Cord, 1932.*
“The true India (as America) is sensitive and very gentle. There is a wisdom in [India’s] ways, none the less wise because it is not the wisdom of the West. This [alien] spirit which traffics in children [inside Hindu temple walls] is callous and fierce as a ravening beast; and it’s wisdom descended not from above, but it is earthly, sensual, devilish. And this spirit, alien to the land, has settled upon it and made itself at home in it, and so become a part of it that nothing but the touch of God will ever get it out. We want that touch of God: ‘Touch the mountains and they shall smoke’ (Psm 144:5). That is why we write.”
(Just so, there is an alien spirit in America that has attached itself and made a home for itself in our land. It is a spirit of dissidence, strife, murder, sexual perversion and who knows what else. Only the touch of God on our land will root it out.)
Carmichael continues, “We write for those who believe in prayer – not in the emasculated modern sense, but in the old Hebrew sense, deep as the other is shallow. We believe there is some connection between knowing and caring and praying, and what happens afterward. Otherwise we should leave the darkness to cover the things that belong to the dark. We should be forever dumb about them, if it were not that we know an evil covered up is not an evil conquered. So we do the thing from which we shrink with strong recoil; we stand on the edge of the pit, and look down and tell what we have seen, urged by the longing within us that the Christians of England [our homeland, of America] should pray.
‘Only pray?’ does someone ask?
Prayer of this sort never stops with praying. ‘Whatsoever he saith onto you, do it’ (Jhn 2:5), is the prayer’s solemn afterward. The prayer we ask is no trifle. ‘Arise cry out in the night; in the beginning of the night watches pour out thine heart like water before the Lord; lift up thine hands toward him for the life of the young children [sold into temple trafficking].’
(So we continue crying out in the night, in our morning watches, for the heart and soul of America. May we continue to pour out our hearts like water before the Lord; lifting up Holy hands for the spiritual life of our beloved nation.)
Carmichael: “The story of [India’s rescued] children is the story of answered prayer. If any of us were tempted to doubt whether, after all, prayer is a genuine transaction and answers to prayer no figment of the imagination – but something as real as the tangible things about us – we have only to look at some of our children [saved from temple trafficking]. It would require more faith to believe that what we call “the Answer,” came by chance or by the action of some unintelligible combination of controlling influences, then to accept the statement and it’s simplicity – God heard; God answered.”
The story of America’s next great awakening will be written in the prayers of God’s people; in the incense that arises to the great prayer rooms of heaven. Let the sweet aroma of prayer for revival and spiritual awakening lay thickly before God as a dense fog covers a deep autumn morning.
* Sherwood E Wirt, Spiritual Witness, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossways Books, 1991), 25.
The Prayer Sentry 