This resolution of Daily United Prayer is based on An Humble Attempt, originally put forward by Jonathan Edwards in 1748. Its design is to encourage God's people in the duty of united extraordinary prayer; setting aside some time every day to pray for the revival of His church and the advancement of Christ's kingdom in our homes, in our churches, in our nation, and in the world.
I want to give an update on the BJU project that we're currently involved with. I've made mention of it before but I would covet your prayers when you think of it as it is something that is weighing very heavily on my mind. The best way to do this is simply to share with you what I sent out in a recent SA newsletter.
Hello everyone,
This world is becoming a very confusing place where good is called evil, and evil is called good (Isaiah 5:20). It is becoming an increasingly hostile place for those holding to Biblical values, not just in America, but indeed all over the world. The natural reaction is for us to become fearful and have a "hunker-down" mentality where we're basically in survival mode. This is where it is helpful to remember the heroism of men throughout church history to pour concrete down our spine.
"Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God."
These words were spoken by William Carey and they still hold true. I don't want to get to the end of my life only to be full of regret over my unwillingness to attempt great things for God simply because of fear or unbelief. The easy thing to do is stay in our little comfort-zone of what we know and not venture too far out beyond that. We don't want to be presumptuous after all, right? Wrong. That's unbelief speaking. That kind of reasoning sounds a lot like the servant that buried his one talent in the ground because he was afraid of losing it. He was soundly criticized by the Lord for confusing prudence with unbelief and fear. Perfect love casts out fear. Let's have our zealous love for God's name and God's kingdom cast out the fear of failure. Lord, give us courage.
Having said that, we are embarking on a bold new project with Bob Jones University where we will be constructing an almost 4000-sqft SERMONAUDIO CENTER directly on the school campus with the following objectives:
+ To mentor today's students into tomorrow's developers, technologists, and engineers.
+ To inspire young people to use their God-given gifts for the kingdom.
+ To build a mini-datacenter "vault" for the preservation and propagation of sermons.
It should be of great concern to every church that the level of hostility toward Christianity is escalating. The logical culmination of this hostility will be to silence the most offensive message of all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ along with the plain teachings of the Bible. As we witness case after case of 'cancel culture' becoming unhinged, churches will increasingly need to depend on a friendly platform that will safeguard their ability to proclaim the truth.
THE VAULT is the name we're giving to the mini-datacenter that we hope to build inside this new SERMONAUDIO CENTER on the campus of Bob Jones University which will enable us to move towards "infrastructure resilience" in the event of difficulties with cloud vendors. Like the 'Doomsday Vault' in Norway, we hope to preserve the good seed of the preached word for this generation and the next.
In the coming days and weeks, we will have more to say about this project. A very generous donor has offered to cover the construction costs associated with the space itself but we will still need to raise support for the servers and storage arrays needed to build THE VAULT. I believe it is important enough that we take this step of faith and, if God is in it, the support will be there for such an undertaking. There are almost 2 million sermons being broadcast around the world on SermonAudio with nearly 370 million total downloads to date. We need to do what we can to ensure this will continue into the future.
Will you please be praying with us about this?
DAILY UNITED PRAYER unitedprayer.net
Mon-Fri @ 12pm EDT // Sat @ 10am EDT
We invite you to join our dedicated and earnest group of praying participants of all ages from around the world that meet every day over Zoom to pray. At the start of each prayer call, a different individual will bring a brief Scriptural meditation. Here's the most recent: