Tonight the church of State College gathered at Unity Church to pray. It was an emotional time for many of us. As we prayed for the victims of abuse and the healing of our community, I sensed the presence of the Lord. I’m not sure how many congregations were represented, but there were people from all over the community bonding together over the brokenness that’s been exposed in our town.
A couple of things stood out for me tonight. Pastor Harold Mckenzie started things off by reading from 2 Chronicles 7:14–a well-known passage about God hearing his people and forgiving sins and healing the land. But it starts with God saying, “If my people…” He addresses the covenant community of faith, not those outside the body. Forgiveness and restoration begins with the house of God, with the people called by His name. When we humble ourselves, pray and seek God’s face, and turn from evil ways, then God acts. Then God moves to restore. It starts with the people of God.
Pastor Dan talked a little about a sense of urgency. There’s a big difference between urgent and important. Urgent is like important on steroids. It’s important with a ticking clock. It is urgent that God’s people pray. Now is the time for us to take seriously the plight of our community. Important things get a sticky note on the bathroom mirror, a star beside them in our inbox. Urgent things demand our immediate action, call for sacrifice and re-ordered priorities. Now is the time for us to seek God for our city, to ask him to reveal our brokenness, to lay bare our hearts and plead for his mercy and grace, to pour out his Spirit to convict us of sin and heal, to set people free, to bring light into the dark places. What we are facing–the spiritual climate in our community–is urgent, and the people of God need to respond by changing our priorities, bringing ourselves into alignment with God’s redemptive plan for our city.
We don’t want to go back to what we’ve known as normal; that old normal is broken and fallen. We need a new normal. It’s not enough for this storm to pass. A few victories on a football field and the tv vans moving on to the next big story aren’t going to suffice. We’ve got to pray and seek God for a new normal for our community.
There are more people praying here than I’ve ever seen. You need to join us. Find a group that is prayerwalking the campus. Get together with some of your neighbors and spend an evening praying over your neighborhood. Chris Heinz has put together something called PrayPSU, a 30 day prayer series, with emails coming to you each day to help you pray for Happy Valley. I’m signing up tonight, and I hope that you will follow me in this.
It’s urgent–life-changing, priority-shifting, Kingdom of God urgent. Please pray. Stop doing some of the lesser-important things so that you can do the urgent and important…
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