The Freedom Prayer

The following prayer appears in The Planner, a Christian novel by Alexandra Swann. The Planner is set a couple of years in the future when the United States is living under an oppressive government that has stripped American citizens of virtually all of their rights and reduced the populace to poverty and dependence on the government dole.

One evening Kris, the central character, finds herself sitting in on an illegal prayer meeting held in her parents’ tiny apartment, and when she hears Todd, the retired pastor who leads the group, pray this prayer, she begins to re-evaluate her own life.

In these trying times, I think that we would all do well to take this prayer to heart and incorporate these sentiments into our own prayers.

Todd’s Prayer

“Lord we come to You tonight to ask for Your forgiveness. The Bible promises that when we seek You, we will find You, if we search with all our hearts.

“Lord, we confess that we have not followed Your commands. We have not loved You with our whole hearts—we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not stood for the truth of Your Gospel. We have sat by and said nothing when Your name was blasphemed and mocked. We did not take a stand when we saw Your laws despised.

“We know that many times we ourselves have been among the worst offenders. We have lived sinful lives that are contrary to the word of God. Like Esau, we have traded away our birthright for a little convenience; we have despised this incredible gift of freedom that You provided for us and allowed all of the liberty that our country offered to be trampled down. We have forgotten the words of King David who said that it is better to fall into the hands of God than to be at the mercy of men, and so we now find ourselves living under the rule of a cruel and despotic government who has stolen everything from us and shows us no mercy.

“We know that everything that is happening to us is a result of our bad choices, both individually and as a nation. You gave us the gift of being born into a free nation—the greatest nation the world has ever seen. You gave us a form of government unlike any other that had ever been known by any other people, and we did not value it enough to defend it.

“For all of these things, Lord, we ask Your forgiveness.  We pray tonight that You will change our hearts so that each of us will begin to love what You love, to hate what You hate and to want what You want. We ask You to save our nation, for we know that the Bible teaches that salvation belongs to our God—no political party, no ideology, no government can save us.  If we don’t find salvation in You, we won’t find it at all. 

“Please turn Your face to us again, and give us back our freedom, and restore our country so that we can truly be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We ask all these things in the name of Your son, Jesus.  Amen.”

The Planner

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother.   Her newest novel, The Warrior, is available on Kindle and in paperback.  For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup