Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) President Ronnie Floyd told a national television audience he is hopeful for America because he sees Christians beginning to pray desperately for a mighty work of God.
“While so many are down on our country … I do my very best to try to constantly call out to God about our nation,” Floyd, senior pastor of Cross Church in northwest Arkansas, said on Trinity Broadcasting Network’s “Praise the Lord” Aug. 12. “We may give up on our country along the way, but God does not give up on anyone. God can step in anywhere, anytime with anyone and do anything He so chooses.”
That’s why Floyd is “not counting on politicians in Washington to control the ultimate destiny of our nation” but is advocating prayer as a catalyst for “the next great move of God.”
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The two-hour program on which Floyd was a guest focused on the movie “War Room,” which is due in theaters Aug. 28 and tells the story of a woman who learns how prayer can help save her struggling marriage. Other guests on the program included filmmakers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who co-wrote “War Room,” as well as the film’s lead actress, Priscilla Shirer, a Christian author and Bible teacher. Host Kirk Cameron interviewed guests about the role of prayer in a believer’s walk with God.
Floyd said some American Christians are “getting on their faces and crying out to the Lord.” As an example, he cited a two-hour prayer gathering at this year’s SBC annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, attended by an estimated 7,000 Southern Baptists.
“I think God walked in the room,” Floyd said of the SBC’s prayer gathering. Believers left the meeting with a sense that “God was with us. God gave us hope tonight. God gave us unity in the Spirit, racial unity in the gospel. God gave us things that only God can give us.”
Local churches, Floyd said, can experience a similar sense of God’s presence and become catalysts for a Great Awakening if they too will devote extended periods of time to corporate prayer.
“When is the last time God so fell on the church that we went away and we weren’t talking about a sermon or a song, we were taking about the power of God?” Floyd asked.
A great spiritual awakening in America likely will be preceded by fasting on the part of Christians, Floyd said. He defined fasting as “abstinence from food with a spiritual goal in mind.”
Fasting and prayer are not “a couple of hoops we jump through in order to get God’s pleasure,” Floyd said. “But fasting is a principle in scripture that we must not and cannot deny.”
The length of a fast is not as important as “you being in tune with the Lord, giving up what you so love to do and which is natural” to retreat to “a place of talking to God,” Floyd said. During a fast, “we’re opening up His Word, we’re listening to what He says to us, we’re activating our faith based off His Word.”
The program closed with a time of prayer in which Cameron, Floyd and other guests asked God for revival.
Floyd prayed for “an army of the next generation that will absolutely not give up until we see God shake this country again.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE – David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service.)