The relationship of the Christian to the political process is one of those issues that arises time and again and cycle after cycle. It is one of those issues that often generates more heat than light and that brings about more division than unity. Yet I would like to think we can agree that there is one unique contribution that Christians alone can and must make to the process.
Christians can vote and perhaps should vote, but the same is true of everyone—there’s nothing unique to the Christian when it comes to the responsibility of citizenship in a democratic nation. Christians can lobby, but people of any faith or any conviction can lobby. Christians can march, demonstrate, and picket, but so can atheists, Muslims, and Hindus. None of these things is wrong—in fact, each of them has its place and can often be the good and right course of action. But none of them is unique.
Yet there is one key contribution that Christians alone can make to politics: prayer. While I’ll grant that people of any faith can pray and perhaps even do pray for the political process, only Christians can pray and be heard. Only Christians pray to the actual God who actually exists and who actually oversees and intervenes in the affairs of men. Only Christians have the privilege and even the right (through the reconciling work of Christ Jesus) to have an audience with the true and living God. Only Christians delight the heart of the Father when we speak to him. Only Christians can approach and plead with the God of whom it is rightly said, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).
A church may express its belief that its members ought to make their Christian convictions known in the way they vote. A pastor may recommend to his congregants that they consider weighing some policies more substantially than others as they evaluate the various parties or representatives. A church may help its people get registered to vote or instead choose to remain silent about such things. There are many matters that are neither demanded nor forbidden in the Bible and in these each church must follow its own convictions.
Voting, lobbying, and campaigning may make a difference to a nation, but we can be absolutely certain that prayer will make a difference to a nation.
But to be faithful to God, a church must pray. To honor Scripture, a church must pray. To express love to the country and its citizens, a church must pray. It must pray because it alone has the ear of the Almighty and it alone has been commanded to make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:1–2). If we are to honor the Emperor (1 Peter 2:17) surely we ought also to pray that God would grant an Emperor who acts honorably. Voting, lobbying, and campaigning may make a difference to a nation, but we can be absolutely certain that prayer will make a difference to a nation.
We pray because prayer is expected of us and commanded of us. We pray because our prayers are heard. We pray because our prayers are effective. We pray most simply and most sublimely because God invites us to pray. And this, Christian, is our one unique contribution.
