Something incredible happened in the White House just a few days ago. On Good Friday, President Donald Trump held a service in the Oval Office. I call it a “service” because the things he said were pointing people back to God in this tumultuous time. Once he was done speaking, he turned it over to Bishop Harry R. Jackson, who is one of his advisers and a good friend of mine. Bishop Jackson took that time to pray a blessing over our president and over our nation.
It was refreshing to see such a spiritual moment in the Oval Office. You can click here to watch the event. In a podcast I did with Bishop Jackson recently, he tells me he was humbled to be up there with the president praying. He says Trump asked him at one point if he ever got nervous praying and speaking in front of people. Bishop Jackson replied yes, to which Trump responded, “But you don’t look nervous.”
Bishop Jackson explained that he wasn’t nervous about what people would think of him—he simply felt the weightiness of what his prayer could do to shift things in the spiritual realm.
“We as Christians believe that prayer changes things,” Bishop Jackson says. “We believe that, although God’s in control of everything, and He has given an opportunity for us to, in a sense, influence the future destiny of a nation, the destiny of our families. So I was humbled by that. And I took comfort in knowing that God would give this man in the greatest office in the land, and Vice President [Mike] Pence—He would give them both wisdom.”
Bishop Jackson believes prayer is especially vital right now with the coronavirus pandemic raging. A few weeks ago, he received a revelation that prayer was going to impact the nation’s destiny. He was reading in Numbers 16 about the time God sent a plague to the people of Israel because a group was rebelling against Moses and Aaron.
Moses knew the plague was because of the people’s rebellion, so he told Aaron to run and grab his censer—which Bishop Jackson says represents the prayers of the saints—and stand “between the dead and the living” (Num. 16:48a).
When Aaron obeyed, God stopped the plague and showed mercy to Israel.
“Many national prophetic figures got that same Scripture,” Bishop Jackson says. “Many of us have believed that God is going to mitigate the impact of the plague if the church prays. Ironically, from Friday at noon to Monday and Tuesday at noon, all of a sudden, we found the governor talking about the fact that everything had peaked in New York. And it seemed as though our Passover prayer—asking God to pass over, asking God to use our prayers to be like Aaron’s incense, forming a line between the living and the dead—it actually worked.”
Bishop Jackson reiterates that it wasn’t his prayer, or anyone’s prayer specifically, that changed the tide of the coronavirus deaths. But rather, it was God’s mercy in response to His people’s cries.
And more of God’s mercy is certainly on its way. Bishop Jackson believes God is even stirring up awakening in this season.
“I believe that we’re going to see evangelism at its best manifest in this season,” he says. “I’m excited about it. And awakening is at the door, following the shaking, so that our confidence might not be in the arm of the flesh, but in the Word of the living God.”
Make sure you listen to my full interview with Bishop Jackson, where he shares several other Scriptures he believes are prophetic for our times.
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