Baptist Press: U.S. distress from God, Evans says at prayer event

WASHINGTON (BP) — God is troubling this country to grab the attention of Americans, Tony Evans told participants Thursday (May 5) in a National Day of Prayer event in Washington, D.C.

Evans, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, was the keynote speaker at the Capitol Hill observance, which was one of tens of thousands of such events across the country. This year’s National Day of Prayer (NDP) was the 65th since the federal government first recognized the occasion.

Ronnie Floyd, Southern Baptist Convention president, attended the Washington, D.C., event and cited the importance of prayer in a message. “On this National Day of Prayer, we need to remember, there is no great movement of God that has ever occurred that has not first been preceded by the extraordinary prayer of God’s people,” he posted on Instagram.

The United States is experiencing societal distress not unlike that reported in 2 Chronicles 15:6, which says God “troubled them with every kind of distress,” said Evans, this year’s honorary NDP chairman.

“[W]hat you and I are seeing in America is what happens when a culture disregards God,” Evans told the audience. “We want God in the vicinity. We want him for invocations; we want him for benedictions, as long as He stays away from the meetings in between.”

When God is dismissed, Evans said, “that creates a vacuum for the viruses of evil to proliferate.”

“So what God has actually done is to allow America to become distressed,” he said. “Because He’s been pushed to the side, He’s allowed the vacuum of evil to proliferate so that He can get our undivided attention. And when He gets that undivided attention, we will cry out and scream out and declare Him at a level He wants to hear it at.

“It’s time now to declare through our prayer and its accompanying action our declaration of dependence.”

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