Friday, January 4, 2008

A call to prayer! Let's join with our big brother America!

Urgent - TheCall Ohio

From slavery to the civil rights movement, it was always the praying remnant that mobilized the future into being with intercession and activism. Today, the same God who ended these atrocities and injustices wants to use this generation to end abortion.

While reading a quote in a biography on William Wilberforce, the great parliamentary figure of the 1800s who almost single-handedly ended the slave trade in England, I was suddenly and forcibly apprehended by the presence of God. In that moment, I received an undeniable and irrevocable commission from the Lord: “Raise up a prayer movement to end abortion in America.” TheCall is a part of that prayer movement.

God is looking for intercessors. That’s not just a fancy word to replace “prayer.” It is a high calling—some say the supreme vocation. There is a small piece of real estate that exists in between God and His rebellious creation, and it’s called “the gap.” You are called to stand there. You were made to stand there. God said, “I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none.” (Ezekiel 22:30)

On January 12, TheCall is going to an historic piece of real estate that was the gap between God and slavery—Cincinnati, Ohio. A slave who made it across the Ohio River sent a message back to his family who lived in slavery in the South: “Tell them if they can only get to Cincinnati, they can get liberty.”

Cincinnati was where the Underground Railroad brought them to safety. Cincinnati was the place where a new breed of abolition preachers fanned through the nation shaking the ideologies of slavery. Cincinnati is where the slave trade of pornography was completely banned for 20 years just in recent history. Cincinnati is the place where the right-to-life movement began in America. And Cincinnati is where a profound adoption movement is being raised up to care for every unwanted child and every unborn child.

The true heir to the civil rights movement is not homosexual liberties, but freedom for the unborn and the pregnant mother, and the Underground Railroad for the great injustice of abortion is adoption.

We are releasing a sudden summons to everyone within a day’s drive, even to the whole nation, to TheCall Ohio on January 12: “If you can get to Cincinnati, the nation may find liberty. If you can get to Cincinnati, the pornography addict may find liberty. If you can get to Cincinnati, the unborn may find liberty.”

It’s Joel 2! When there is no hope for a nation, when there is no remedy, God still has a holy prescription: Blow the trumpet, gather the people, and call a fast. We must humble ourselves because we have offended heaven.

Isaiah 1 says that God hates our prayer gatherings, for our hands are filled with blood, and we don’t take care of the widow and the orphan. We have not demonstrated the compassionate heart of God to a desperate world. Let us gather and repent for the church of the nation in Cincinnati and become His hands of mercy to the poor and afflicted! We must ask God to raise up crisis pregnancy centers, pregnant mothers’ homes and a movement of adoption to explode across the nation.

Ohio will be ground zero once again for the elections in 2008. We will gather and cry out to God for mercy that we do not deserve. God, give us a humble man that will lead this nation in compassion and humility out of abortion and into the favor of heaven!

In Ohio, Finney’s bones lie buried, and written upon his tombstone are the words, “The Lord our God be with us as He was with our fathers. . . .” Can Finney’s bones live again? It is time to groan in prayer for the third great awakening in America!

On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we will gather and cry out that the voice of the African American will once again arise and lead this new movement of justice. We will pray the dream of King—that God will break racism and shatter poverty in inner cities. We will pray that a nation conceived in liberty will be able to see their children conceived in liberty, and we will cry out in the gap for mercy—that the effusion of innocent blood may end so that a nation may not have to face a day of reckoning for the shedding of the innocent blood of the unborn.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue . . . until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Oh, America, we are in a crisis! If 600,000 men died in the battlefields of the Civil War—both north and south, black and white—for the shed blood of the slaves, then what will it mean to America—black and white and north and south—if God brings a day of reckoning for the shed blood of 50 million babies? This is not a Democrat and Republican issue; this is a day of survival for a nation. Hear the trumpet alarm!

Let a cry for mercy arise in Ohio. Let us stand in this little piece of real estate and plead a better blood. Let us release a new abolition movement—a generation of new preachers, movie writers, and musicians—to assail this covenant with death. And may a new Underground Railroad spring up from the hearts of the church, crying, “Give us your babies!”

I believe TheCall Ohio could be a defining moment for America.

“I looked for a man to stand in the gap.”

www.LouEngle.com

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