A Prayer for Christian Civic Witness
The following prayer was delivered as part of the May 8 installment of our 2024 Faith & Politics Prayer Call series. Additional prayers from the May 8 call will be added to our blog later this week.
God, you are our great and glorious king. And you have seen fit to place us in a country where we share the responsibilities that a king had in the Old Testament, and we share them with 300 million other people, all of different people-groups, different political tribes, different cultural tongues.
Thank you for trusting us enough to put us in a place where we have these unique privileges, unique opportunities, and unique responsibilities. We confess that we have not always taken the responsibilities seriously, and we have often taken the privileges and opportunities for granted.
We have seen our citizenship, our relationship to the public square, either as something extraneous that we don't want to be burdened withl, or as something selfish, something to be used for our own good, instead of for the sake of others.
We have neglected the call that you gave to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob; the call that you have handed down through the prophets and charged all of the apostles with through your son; the call to take the blessings that you have given us and use them for the sake of being a blessing to others. We have not appreciated the full weight and seriousness of the privileges and responsibilities you've given us, and we have not looked at how we can use them for the good of our neighbors.
Jesus didn't act that way when you sent him here. He did not give in to the temptation to use his power for his own sake, and he did not give in to the temptation to withdraw from it and live a comfortable, private life. He didn't resent the mission field you gave him. Instead he endured it, even when enduring it was an overwhelming and frustrating experience. Even when enduring it led him to sweat blood and go to the cross.
We ask you to help us grow in patience, grow in endurance, grow in generosity, and grow in courage in the face of the daunting challenges and responsibilities of being part of the public square.
Let the way your people approach the public square serve as a signpost to the people around us who share our country, but not our faith. Help the way that we engage with politics, with government, with partisanship, and with civic life to actually demonstrate the character of Christ to the people who might agree with us about politics, but don't agree with us about Jesus yet. Help us think, speak, and act differently because of who Jesus is, what he has done for us, and what he has promised us.
We pray these things in his name so that when his kingdom comes, more of the people around us can look at it and say that they already recognized it because of the way they saw Christians engaging with American civic life.
Amen.