Praying for the upcoming elections (pt. 1)

The Presidential Prayer Team daily prayer page today mentions that it’s 100 days to the mid-term elections.  With division in our country running so high and questions still surrounding alleged attempts to interfere with the 2016 elections, we need God’s intervention both to protect our election process and to put in place leaders who will honor him.  How should we then pray?  This is the first of a series of posts with thoughts on how to pray for our upcoming elections.

Pray for the campaigns

If you’re like me, you quickly tire of the campaign commercials so prevalent right now.  Candidates telling half-truths, trying to make themselves look better than they really are and their opponents look worse than they really are.  Here are a couple of suggestions for prayer:

1. Pray for Christian candidates.  Ask God to give them integrity and truthfulness in their campaigning.  Pray for hearts willing to do and accept God’s will, regardless of whether that means getting elected or not.  Pray for God’s protection from temptation and deliverance from the evil one.  Ask God to guard their words, to lead them to speak the truth in love.
2. Pray for campaigns based on “light” rather than “heat” – that truthfulness in campaigning will prevail and that God will rein in the natural tendencies of candidates to focus on negative.  Ask God to lead candidates to honestly share their own views and priorities, so that voters will have good information to make informed choices.
3. Ask God to raise up prayer throughout the country for wise and faithful leaders.  Ask him to lead his church to pray not based on political agenda but rather earnestly seeking and desiring for his will to be accomplished through the elections.

I once participated in a small group whose focus was to pray for our country.  We met weekly to pray and we shared a passion to see God honored in our land.  But I was never fully comfortable with the way we prayed as a group.  While I agreed with the conservative bent of the group, it concerned me that we tended to pray as if our politics were “right”.  We tended to give God the answers rather than simply seeking his glory.

Such prayer can actually prove divisive in a group whose members have differing political, economic, and social outlooks.  So as we ask God to raise up concerted, intentional prayer for our nation and for the coming elections, let’s ask him to cleanse our hearts of our own agendas so that we can honestly pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done” as it relates to the campaign and election process.

Next up:  Pray for the candidates