While there are many practical things we can do to minimize our contact with the deadly virus running rampant through our country, we can ignore the deadlier spiritual virus of fear that is also running rampant. The latter has a greater potential for death because it kills the soul of a people.

Jan and I are increasingly aware of the power of intercessory prayer at this time in our nation’s history. One thing we have been doing of late is prayer drives. We drive through our community, praying as the Spirit leads. These prayers are multi-faceted. Some are warfare prayers pulling down the strongholds that hold our region in the grip of things that are not God’s best. We also pray in tongues knowing the Spirit is strategically releasing an interpretation of our prayers into individuals, groups, and institutions.

This weekend on one of our drives, I saw our car turn into a crop duster aircraft. I saw our prayers being sprayed out over our valley like an insecticide would be sprayed over a field by a crop duster to kill an insect infestation. The spray from our prayers was empowered by faith, not fear, and they were having a devastating effect on things not seen with the natural eye. 

The most significant virus now affecting our nation is fear. Our faith has only one vulnerability to an infestation of fear– our will. What we choose to believe and speak has a tremendous impact on the spiritual environment where we live. We cannot place our hope in the discovery of an immunization against the Coronavirus as wonderful as that would be.  By the time we are injected with a new immunization, the virus will have mutated, and fear will come once again. We cannot place our faith in a nervous and overreactive financial market. We should all try to walk in wisdom and do all we can to hold off the expansion of a deadly disease. While those practical measures are being embraced, as believers,  we must also be spraying words of hope and faith across our nation, putting to death the rising infestation of hopelessness and fear.