Additional National Prayer Needs
Pray for America’s Military
The U.S. conducted strikes on three drug-running boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean Sea early this week. The U.S. Southern Command stated, “Intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Eleven male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions.”
Pray for U.S. commanders and military personnel as they work to prevent the smuggling of illicit drugs into the nation by designated terror organizations.
Pray for America’s Foreign Relations
Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Iranian officials this week in Geneva, Switzerland, to continue discussions about Iran’s nuclear program. President Trump said, “I don’t think [the Iranians] want the consequences of not making a deal.” Tehran also partially closed the Strait of Hormuz to conduct live-fire naval drills this week. The closure is significant as 31 percent of the world’s global crude travels on tankers through that strait.
Envoy Witkoff reported “meaningful progress” after a tri-lateral meeting with representatives of Russia and Ukraine, which also took place in Switzerland. He stated, “Both parties agreed to update their respective leaders and continue working towards a deal.” Russian forces launched 126 drone strikes and a ballistic missile against five Ukrainian provinces this week, killing two people and injuring 25 others. In Ukraine’s drone attack against Cheboksary, Russia, a single person was reportedly injured.
Pray for U.S. diplomats to receive God’s discernment as they meet and seek to mediate peace agreements.
Pray for AMERICA’S HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently launched a comprehensive reassessment of butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), a chemical additive used to preserve food. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said, “This reassessment marks the end of the ‘trust us’ era in food safety. If BHA cannot meet today’s gold-standard science for its current uses, we will remove it from the food supply and continue cleaning up food chemicals—starting where children face the greatest exposure.”
Pray for Secretary Kennedy and Commissioner Makary, FDA officials and researchers as they review scientific data on the chemical additives that have been used in the country’s food supply.
Pray for Needs Across the States
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced the creation of an online portal for residents of the state to report U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities and a website that educates people on their “constitutional rights when interacting with federal agents.” She also signed an executive order that prohibits ICE from using state-owned property for immigration enforcement operations.
The West Virginia Senate recently passed legislation ensuring that illegal immigrants are transferred to the custody of federal immigration enforcement. The measure now goes to the state House for consideration. A co-sponsor of the bill said it protects families and upholds the rule of law.
Pray for state officials to be discerning as they establish policies surrounding federal immigration enforcement.
Pray for America’s Faith Community
“Enlightenment thought rejected Jesus’s resurrection, but not because of a new scientific awareness that dead people do not rise. Everybody has known from earliest times that dead people stay dead. The Enlightenment’s real reason for the rejection was that, if Jesus had risen from the dead, his resurrection would be the turning point of world history—a status the Enlightenment claimed for itself.
There cannot be two such turning points. Here lies the crucial epistemological battle [what separates belief from opinion]. The Enlightenment was in thrall to the split-level epistemology that, by insisting on hard facts and creaming off everything else into a subjective sphere, realized Francis Bacon’s maxim that ‘knowledge is power.‘ Knowledge of the Enlightenment sort—‘we know the way the world is and we’re going to impose it on you‘—became the instrument of the imperial projects of the modern West.
But that kind of knowledge does not do justice to the ultimate realities of the world; and it fails to grasp, or be grasped by, the Ultimate Reality itself, which is the resurrection of Jesus as the launch of new creation in the midst of the old. As Wittgenstein said, ‘It is love that believes the resurrection.‘ Many of our current ills, social, political, and cultural, have emerged from our ignoring this or trying to bypass it.“ – N.T. Wright, Anglican Bishop, Theologian, New Testament Scholar
