Healing America’s Soul: Introduction
The soul of America is sick with sin.
So is the American Church.
But God has made promises to heal a nation when His people in that nation sincerely repent for their sins and for the sins of their nation.
Because the roots of America’s sins began in the 1607 Jamestown Colony, the history of Jamestown can teach us much about how to repent for those sins.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Ezra and Nehemiah activated God’s promises to restore sin-sick Israel from God’s judgment.
In the last thirty years, these same promises have been activated multiple times all over the world with incredible results.
God is patiently waiting for the American Church to activate these promises now to heal America’s soul!
Our decadence as a nation and the sin and passivity of the American Church has brought God’s reproach on us. Sadly, much of America’s sin-sickness may be partly the result of lukewarm American churches who have not prayed nor acted in ways to prevent such widespread sin in our nation.
Sexual Sin
Sexual sins of all kinds have addicted many congregations and leaders. Sexual sin is ofetn the “elephant in the room” in American churches. Pornography is a bigger epidemic than COVID-19 among Christians, even among pastors.
Fornication by Bible-believing Christians may be at an all-time high. Few pulpits seem to address it. Worse yet, pedophilia has been rampant among one major denomination for at least fifty years all over the world, damaging tens of thousands of children—with the criminal complicity of denominational leaders. Beyond that, at least six major American denominations with over ten million members now consider the 3000- year- old biblical teachings on homosexuality to be totally incorrect.
Division, strife, anger, bitterness, gossip, hatred, unforgiveness, and racism by all colors combined with a massive vacuum of corporate prayer in churches has spawned the perfect demonic storm to weaken the American Church with devastating success. In 2020-2021 alone, COVID-19, racial anger, violent protests, empty Sunday services, political divisions, and economic losses have weakened the Church and nation even more.
The Loss of Truth and Freedom
Into this spiritual sickness of the American Church and America, a denial of reality and a totalitarian mindset have begun to take root in the soul of America. When a person chooses to deny their birth gender, that is their subjective preference. When a society decides that something as theologically and scientifically proven as the definition of gender is up for debate, the “nose of the camel is under the tent”. All truth, all reality is now at risk.
When that same society forbids and punishes any dissent against this denial of reality, all freedoms are also at risk. Free speech no longer is free—and the loss of other freedoms will surely follow. “Big Brother” is here to control Americans. “The wages of sin is death” God says in Romans 6:23. The loss of reality and freedom are part of America’s Kafkaesque wages of sin. America is staggering morally, emotionally, relationally, economically, spiritually and mentally due to sin. 2020 was only the latest version of our nation living without God’s full protection. The worst is yet to come—including for Christians who are increasingly becoming enemies of the culture due to our biblical beliefs.
But God has a powerful purpose in allowing our culture and leaders to act so foolishly: When Christians experience more of the painful wages of sin in our nation, that pain will awaken the sleeping giant of the American Church to prayer, repentance, and biblically-based action. That will prepare America for a Great Awakening—a massive revival that alone can save America from its downward spiral into greater sin and chaos.
God’s Loving Judgment on America
The simple truth is that God disciplines those He loves.
“For those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines and scourges every son whom He receives” (Heb. 12:6).
God always prefers not to punish sin. But as a loving Father, He has allowed our nation’s troubles to show us our desperate need for His help. He is like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. He gave his rebellious son enough time and resources to learn that he needed to return to his father in repentance. Read the Book of Judges in the Bible. The pattern is there. God often allows those He loves to experience the awful results of their sin so they will repent and return to Him.
God’s Solution
The only way back to “health” for the soul of America is through deep, heartfelt personal and corporate repentance by Christians— based on the powerful promises in II Chronicles 7: 1-14.
God’s Promises
If My people who are called by My name, humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (II Chronicles 7:14) The previous verse explains why God made those promises: When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people… (II Chronicles 7:13) Israel had sinned badly many times in the past. God often reproached Israel with physical penalties that led to sickness, famine or war. But now, God showed Solomon how to cancel such divine penalties for sin.
Identificational Repentance for Corporate Sin
We all probably know that God will bless us more whenever we confess our personal sins. But the Bible also teaches that God’s people can, and should, repent for the corporate sins of a group they belong to so the Lord will nullify His penalties for those corporate sins—whether they are current sins or sins from the past. This is called identificational repentance. It breaks the power of God’s penalties for the corporate sins of a nation. Identificational repentance for current and ancestral sin was practiced in the Old Testament and never changed in the New Testament.
Read Leviticus 26:39-42:
Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins, they will waste away.
But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their ancestors—their unfaithfulness and their hostility toward me, which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies… I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.
Well-known author and pastor Dutch Sheets writes, “There is no more important issue facing the Church than…identificational confession and intercession. No issue will have a greater impact on the coming harvest than this one.”1
Main Purpose of This Book
This book calls the American Church to recognize and repent for the current and past sins of the American Church and America according to II Chronicles 7:14. When that happens, America’s soul can begin to heal. There is no other solution.
God is again looking to His Church in America—His royal priesthood— to stand in the gap for the sins of our nation—a nation He greatly loves.
Will we?
Praying with you for America,
Pastor Bob Fox
November 25, 2021
Thanksgiving Day
1 Jim Goll, Father Forgive Us! Intercessory Focus on Yesterday’s Sins, (Destiny Image Publishers, 1999), xiv.