There is a kind of praying most of us rarely do, and it is the kind that has no chance of benefiting us at all.
We pray for our people. The daughter with the hard diagnosis, the son who stopped coming, the marriage that has gone quiet, the job interview Thursday. That praying is good and right, and God welcomes every word of it. But it all sits close to home. The answers, when they come, land in our own kitchen.
So I was caught by an invitation making the rounds this week. Cindy Jacobs and Generals International have launched something called Light the Nations — a call for believers to pray for 38 nations across the Greater Middle East, places where millions of people have never once heard the name of Jesus. You adopt a target nation. From September 22nd through October 4th, a prayer guide arrives each day with three or four of the 38 countries on it, and you pray. That's the whole thing. No travel. No platform. Just a believer with a list of countries and a little time.
Why bother, if you'll never see it?
That is the honest question, isn't it. You pray for a nation you cannot find quickly on a map, for people whose language you don't speak, and you will probably never learn what happened. No report comes back. No thank-you note.
But look at how Scripture teaches us to pray, and you find it was never meant to stay in our own driveway. “God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee” (Psalm 67:1-3).
Notice the hinge in that prayer. Bless us — yes, ask for that, God is not stingy. But then: that thy way may be known upon earth. The blessing is not the destination. It is the fuel. The psalmist asks for mercy on his own house so that the reputation of God travels past it. That is a bigger prayer than most of us are praying on a Tuesday morning, and the beautiful thing is that any of us can pray it starting today.
Intercession is not a long-distance phone call
Here is what I think trips people up. We imagine prayer as a signal that has to cross an ocean, and the distance feels like the problem. But prayer does not travel. It arrives. You are not shouting toward the Greater Middle East; you are speaking to a Father who is already there, already at work, already drawing people to Himself in places no missionary has reached.
And the Spirit who fills a believer in Ravenna is the same Spirit moving in a city you have never heard of. That is not poetry. That is the plain testimony of Acts — the Holy Spirit going ahead of the church, preparing hearts, giving dreams, showing up in homes before any preacher got near the door. When you pray for a nation, you are agreeing with something God is already doing, not begging Him to start.
I have watched people in our own church pray for someone far off — a grandchild across the country, a friend overseas — and then, weeks later, get a call they never expected. Not every time. But often enough that I have stopped treating those calls as coincidence.
Small, specific, and steady
If you want to take this up, don't overbuild it. Pick one nation. Write it on a card and stick it to the fridge where you make coffee. Pray a sentence, not a speech. Lord, let Your way be known there. Let them praise You. Do it for two weeks and see what the Spirit stirs in you — because praying for a place has a way of changing the one who prays long before it changes anything else.
And you don't have to do it alone. Our prayer gathering on Tuesday, September 29 at 11am falls right in the middle of that window, and there is room at that table for a nation or two. Then on October 4 we come to Mission Sunday — the very day this initiative closes. I did not plan that. I am not going to pretend it was anything but the Lord's good timing.
One last word, for the reader who has prayed hard and long and is still waiting. Praying for the nations is not a trade you make to get your own answer moved to the front of the line. God is not running that kind of ledger. It is simply what happens when a heart gets enlarged — you start wanting for strangers what you have been begging for yourself.
Which is, in the end, exactly what Jesus did. He prayed for people who had not yet been born, who would never meet Him in the flesh, whose names He knew anyway. “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word” (John 17:20). That is you. Somebody's prayer, long ago, had your name in it before you had a name.
Go return the favor.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.