Saving a Choking Nation

Yesterday while in prayer, I saw an image of the United States. The image was of a person gasping for breath. They were choking to death because of lies they had been fed and willingly ingested. I was observing the first gasp in a process of suffocation that will eventually lead to the death of our nation if not interrupted.

While some in the Church think that the concerns of a nation’s health are not our assignment and therefore disengage from the public discourse, many of us believe just the opposite. We are called to be spiritual change agents initiating change in all spheres of cultural influence, initiating a process of reformation that brings goodness and integrity in whatever nation we live in.

The word nation/nations appear over 700 times in Scripture, depending on what translation one reads. It is fair to say the Lord is concerned about nations. The Great Commission Jesus gave us includes a reference to nations, “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). If individual disciples are made, a nation and its social environment will change over time, allowing life and liberty to be experienced by everyone.

As a nation enters a process of suffocating death, truth becomes the Heimlich Maneuver the Church applies to people who are in the process of dying and, in the aggregate, the shared national choking that will produce the death of a nation. A national choking is interrupted when we bring truth and exposure into what has become a censored public platform offering a deadly meal of unexamined and unexposed lies that will lodge in our collective national throat.

As our nation continues to struggle for its breath, the only hope for dislodging the lies is a fresh move of God’s Spirit. A move of God’s Spirit clears the airways of our thinking. It will be His breath released into each heart and institution of culture that will allow people to inhale the real life and hope of God only found in Jesus Christ, the One who is the Breath of Life.

In this coming outpouring of God’s Spirit, the Lord will use those who do not see choking people as enemies but as victims of dark spiritual forces who use the victims to accomplish their evil agenda of the death of all things. Just as a Heimlich Maneuver requires close contact with a victim to initiate the life-saving process, so it will be as God’s Spirit begins to move over our nation. Those we have been told to dismiss and distance ourselves from and who are choking to death will need us to rise from our table and lay down our disdain and distrust to apply the life-saving love and truth of God as an act of mercy. Those who choose to live this way will see the miracles of God take place that will save people from spiritual death. As a result of those individual acts of salvation, a corporate miracle will also take place that will save a nation.