In this sermon, the speaker recounts the story of a young university graduate who passionately preached against social injustices in open-air meetings. Many people gathered to hear him speak out against injustice. However, tragedy struck when he and another person were shot and killed in broad daylight by unknown assailants. The speaker emphasizes the need for prayer and spiritual warfare in addressing the problems and battles faced by society. They highlight the importance of using the weapons of prayer and intercession to tear down strongholds and bring people to obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.

I want to ask that you open your Bibles and go with me to two scriptures which I'm going to read before I share anything. Isaiah chapter 66, and I'll read verse 8 and verse 9. Who has ever heard of such a thing? Who has ever seen such things? Can a country be born in a day, or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children. Do I bring to the moment of birth, and not give delivery? Says the Lord. Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery? Says your God. And if you go with me also to the second book of Chronicles, that's a very famous scripture with intercessors. Chronicles 7, verse 14. If my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and I'll forgive their sin, and I will heal their land. I've called my sharing tonight, the travail of a nation. God says, shall I bring a nation to the point of delivery, to the point of labor, to the point of travail, and deny them the power to deliver? Shall I cause a nation to go into the crossroads where it is in need of assistance for delivery, and yet deny them my hand of deliverance? But as soon as they begin to travail, I will come to that. Says, if my people, if, I mean the nation is made up of so many people, and the majority of the nations are not people of God. But God says, that doesn't worry me. If the people who are called my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I'll hear from heaven, and I'll forgive their sin, and the sins of the land, and I'll heal their land. Let's pray. God Almighty, we submit ourselves into your presence, Lord. And I just want to say, Lord, join us together, and give your grace to every one of us, men and women alike. And may your spirit minister to us, wisdom and understanding. Father of heaven and earth, please fill this place with your presence. And Lord, let your words, the words that you allow to come out of my lips, let them bring forth your purposes and oracles. That we may see clearly what you want to happen, and give life to these words, Lord. That they shall bring you glory, and bring your people to where you want them to go. Let your name be glorified, Father. In Jesus Christ we pray. Let me begin by giving you a brief history of my country. My country is called Uganda, and it used to be referred to as the pearl of Africa. A time came when it was referred to as the reproach of Africa. During the darkest hours of our history, especially the 70s and the 80s. But today, God has been doing a mighty work in the nation. That today, the name pearl of Africa is again being applied to the nation. And in addition, different leaders are coming, and they are using terms like the beacon of Africa, the hub of Africa, and other things like that. Not just to excite us, but those are the words they are using to describe the nation. That has seen pain, shame, and degradation. But out of God's mighty grace, God is healing the nation, and is raising it back into the place that he intended it to occupy. Recently, a number of leaders, including the President of America, and other leaders have been coming. They have been referring to the nation as a beacon of light in Africa, hub of the region, things like that. But when you look back in what Uganda as a nation has gone through, every time we share the history, our contemporary history. The suffering, the pain, the shame, the degradation, the hopelessness of the situations that we went through. And what God has done to heal our nation, and to bring it this far. When you finish, people turn around and say, well, with God, all things are possible. I mean, it's the greatest realization of God's infinite power. When you look at how far the nation went, and how everybody gave up on the nation, and the people of our nation became ashamed of being called Ugandans. I have many people, some of whom are my relatives, who denied their citizenship. Not because they were being persecuted in the nation, but they felt ashamed to be called Ugandans. Because of all that was happening in our country, there are things I just cannot go naming. Some of them are just too hideous even to name publicly. And sometimes we have shared what happened in our country, leaving out things we thought, no, we cannot say this publicly. It's out of, I mean, there's no way you can say some of these things. And yet, even the little that we chose to say, when other people are writing in magazines and quoting, they find that even that little you shared is a bit too much to put in print. We are a people who have known what it means to suffer. When we talk about suffering, we don't talk about a theoretical suffering. We know what it means to have pain, not as one person, but as a nation. We know what it means to have lived a hopeless life, where you look around and say, where is the hope going to come from? We know what it means to be downtrodden, degraded, living in total loss of your identity. We know what it means to live in fear, where men were ashamed to be men in their households, because they could no longer defend their womenfolk, neither their children. Where they stood trembling in fear of death, and sometimes their women had to hide them away, and their children had to stand, sometimes just to defend, and sometimes their children died trying to hide away their fathers being hunted by murderous soldiers and other authorities. But in all this, when you see the turning ground of God, you say, Lord, you are able. And if you could do one thing in one land, and you are no respecter of persons, then you can do it anywhere. Where people will dare to believe you, where people will dare to hang on the rope of your hope that comes from your word. If my people, anywhere, if my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my faith, and forsake their wicked ways, then I'll hear from heaven, and I'll forgive their sins and heal their land. When our nation was going through all this suffering, and all the things you heard about Idi Amin, people thought that they could save themselves in a human way. Many, many people who were able fled the country, they went into exile. But that was not the answer for the nation, and that can never be the answer for the nation. Others thought if they made friends with people in government, with Idi Amin and his henchmen, they would survive. But there are many people that were very close to government circles, who ended up beheaded or killed in torture and torment. Others thought if we encourage our people to obey and obey everything the government wants, everything Idi Amin wants, maybe we shall have peace. But even that was not the answer. The more we submitted, the more we were downtrodden. The more we tried to hide away, the more we were sought out. And the people of Uganda are generally a very submissive people. It takes much to make them rise up in opposition to anything. And I think the last straw was in 1975. In 1972 the Jews were cast out of the country, the Indians were expelled. In 1973 our country joined forces in fighting against Israel. We sent soldiers from Uganda to Egypt to fight Israel. In 1975 you know about the Entebbe raid, when the PLO hijacked a plane and brought it to Entebbe and was under the guard of Ugandan soldiers. And you know about the rescue. When things are going on like that and you go out as a Ugandan, having suffered so much, you go into a world which rejects you, identifies you with everything Amin is and has done. You are identified with all the abuses as if you were the one doing them rather than the one suffering them. And you can picture the situation of hopelessness that our people had. And in 1973 all the evangelical churches were banned. And then in 1975 all the remaining churches, except the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, all the remaining ones were banned. And even the two remaining ones were denied the privilege of praying any other time. They had to pray only on Sundays and at prescribed times. The nation was declared an Islamic state. We have less than 10% of our population Muslim, but the nation was declared Islamic. And there were Muslim prayers every day and all the time. And everything was done in the Islamic way. And I think that was the last straw. Many people who persisted in being Christians were being persecuted. And we have many people who turned to Islam to save their lives. But there were a few, a few people who were called by the name of the Lord that said, No, if there is God in heaven and he still lives, let's call upon his name. And they began to pray. It was illegal to pray in the churches. Many churches were left empty because they were banned. So pastors turned their houses into prayer houses. And they began to pray. And very soon the soldiers cracked down upon them, began to arrest them from their houses. So they couldn't pray anymore in houses. But so deep was the desperation they went into the jungles, into the forests. And they would go in the night, pray the whole night and come back in the morning and go to work. And this went on for some time. I think it went on for about a year. Then the government began cracking down on these people, calling them guerrillas fighting the government. And many people were arrested. I have got friends, pastors who were arrested, some of them killed. A close friend of mine is now an old man who was among the first to say, Let's go in the jungles and set up permanent prayer houses there. And he went in the jungle and he declared an area sealed and said, This is holy ground. It is going to be given to the Lord for the travail for our nation. And people would go there day and night. And he did not come back to his house until after two years. He lived in the forest. And there are many, many others like him who chose to go into the exile of the forest so as to have the freedom to pray and cry out in intercession for the country. This was not some small civilized prayer where you recite some wonderful words and you think everything out to say it very well. This was prayer of desperate people. The people that would not be denied. The people that went down on their knees and cried in loud groans, loud waves. People who would sometimes find themselves not by design, not by theology. There was no time for theology in the forest. They would pray like the spirit within them drove them in desperation. Sometimes they found themselves wriggling on the ground. Sometimes they found themselves crawling deep into bushes, not by design, but by the travail, the pain, the struggle in their hearts to lay down before God. Oh God, have you forgotten us? So deep was the travail that many people came back. We have a few that even were impaired physically, but men and women who have discovered a joy with the Lord that is beyond physical health. But two years after this kind of travail was going on, God provided a way. And there was a change in our nation. Idi Amin was got rid of. And suddenly, it was through the forces that came from Tanzania. Tanzania joined up with the exiles from Uganda, from other nations. They invaded the country. And what appeared impossible came to pass. Amin at that time was declared having one of the most formidable forces in Africa, most mechanized forces in Africa. And yet, his forces were vanquished, and he was expelled from the country. So once again, the country was back in peace. But you know what? Once this change came, and the peace came, prayer stopped. And for two, three years, we had this peace without prayer. But very soon we were back, and the problems began again. They didn't begin one night. They began slowly. Murders here, murders there, robberies here, highway robberies and assaults here, and just kept increasing and increasing. And then people were saying, Oh, where are we going? Where is the nation going? Oh, we don't want to go back in the old times. What are we going to do? But no one was praying. Everybody was talking about it, but none was praying about it. And this went on until then they broke out a civil war. So now there was a very brutal government, and then there was a civil war. And things were very, very bad. To the people outside the nation, they think Idi Amin was the worst news Uganda had. To those who are inside the country, this time in the 80s was even worse. It is in those times that whole villages, whole villages were massacred. Sometimes army vehicles would come and pour out petrol, petrol drums. They would put a petrol drum in a Land Rover and open it and drive around the village, and the petrol would be spilling in the village. And after they do this again and again, they would set the village on fire. And when people wake up in the night, find their village on fire, they try to run out to save their lives, and the soldiers would be shooting at random. Many, many people died, and their bodies were scorched in the fire. My wife, when she was still with her parents, experienced this kind of thing. They woke up in the night, and the whole village was on fire. And their father just shot him and said, Everybody wake up and run for your lives, don't wait for any other, run for your life. And he got out with a few children, ran one direction, the mother got out with the others, ran another direction. They never saw each other for two years. They were totally separated. And they lived in the forest for more than 18 months, running for their lives. One day being hunted from one direction, the other day being hunted from the other direction. Firstly, my wife tells me that she saw more than four babies, whose mothers had been shot dead. And the babies did not understand death, and they were hungry and were sucking the breasts of their dead mothers in the forest. Some people died from bullet wounds, some people died from hunger, some people from diseases, some people from snakes, and things like that. And she witnessed many people that she grew up with in her village, being shot dead, or dying from something or other. And they were not buried because there was no time for burial. They just had to keep running for their lives. It is in this time that we witnessed, in broad daylight, at roadblocks, road checks, where you find people being asked for identity cards, including the baby. If you found the soldiers are bloodthirsty, they would ask, where is the identity card of the baby? And of course babies don't hold identity cards. But sometimes they just wanted to kill. And they would get the baby, throw the baby in the air, and put a knife, and the baby would come back and plunge on the knife. And they would take that baby and give him back to the mother, and say go. And some babies of course never made it, died. And on a few occasions, there were pregnant women who were asked, what is inside your womb? They said, of course it's the baby. They said, how do we know it's the baby? They went to check. And they had their bowels opened. And everything, they said, was poured out. I'm saying this just to show you how demonic these forces were. And one thing we did not understand, we thought we were dealing with men, bad men. We thought we were dealing with flesh and blood. And it took us a long time to look back and say, oh no, it's not men who are fighting. It's the forces of evil and darkness that were operating through men. So many things were done. I have got friends, got two friends who are living in the war area, who witnessed their father dying in a very hideous way, with a hammer and a nail being hammered into his head, just to deter the children from supporting the fighting forces. And other things, women, children watching their mothers being raped, then killed in sadism and things like that. Lots and lots of things. I could go on and on and on. But, I myself escaped a number of times. There are times I was, I stood at the point of death. And I was not in the villages where the fighting was taking place. I was right in the city center. I was born in the city center. I grew up in the city center. And I started working in the city center. And there are many times I stood at gunpoint, sometimes with a knife on your throat. And you know that this man has got no respect at all for life. And there is no one who will question him if he kills him. No one is going to ask him a question. He just has got to say, well, whatever he says, you do. And you just call upon the name of the Lord. But, a time came in 1985, they began killing church men. And then suddenly people began to say, hey, this is how our means started. It started with killing normal people, then it got on to church men. Where are we going? How long is this going to go on? And people would say that. But there was no prayer going on. Until one day there was a young university graduate. He was very vehemently preaching against the social injustices. And he preached in open air meetings in the middle of the city for a week. And many people gathered to hear him. And he was speaking out against the injustice. Then on Friday, after he had preached around 2, at around 3, within the hour of 3, he was driving back to his home with another person in the car. And they were blocked by a Land Rover. Soldiers got out and told him, get out of the car. And he got out of the car, his hands up, and they shot him in broad daylight. In the middle of a town, since everybody was watching. They killed him, and they killed the second man, and they left the bodies there. And they took the car. And that night, it was a Friday, that night, Christians gathered in the church where this young man went. And they were just crying, just crying. The following day was Saturday, and it was the day of a monthly prayer meeting. 10,000 people would gather around just to have prayer. It was a monthly prayer meeting. And there would be a lot of healing, and deliverance, and the Holy Spirit moving. But this day was different. There was just crying, and wailing, and mourning. And no one could preach. Whoever tried to come up to preach would break down into tears. And I remember someone narrated and said, in the middle of the night, one old person, who was heartbroken, came walking forward, and faced the pastor and said, Pastor! Where is the God that you always preach? Where is the all-powerful God? Is the God of Elijah dead? Couldn't we pray for a change in this country? Are we going to die off like this? And when he said that, the whole church, who lifted their voices, just cried. And later, one of the pastors who was sitting on the pulpit, stood up, and said, How many people here believe God answers prayer? And everybody raised their hands, and said, We are going to pray from today. We want a change in this land. And we are not going to make a secret of it. We are willing to pray until the change comes. And it was like bushfire. The call went out across the whole country. And churches began to pray. Prayer was going on during the day. Prayer was going on during the night. Of course, not every church prayed. But the majority of the churches were praying. Women would come from their homes and pray in the churches all day. Men would come back from work and spend the night praying. And as the prayers continued, whole churches praying throughout the land. The prayers continued, and they were building in tempo. More and more people were coming. And Muslims and other people were beginning to come to the churches to give their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ without anybody going out to preach. They were just coming in. Being moved by the power of God. Then something began to happen in many churches. The presence of the Lord began to be manifest. You would walk into a building, a church like this auditorium, and you would see the presence of the Lord like a mist. Feeling the whole area like smoke moving. There was no fire, no candles, nothing burning. Just the prayers of the saints. You would find people lying down, kneeling down, bent over, on their faces. There was no style. No theologically approved or disapproved way. It was just, cry to the Lord in the way you think is proper. What you feel in your heart, let it come out. Sometimes you found people buried down, burying their faces on the ground. Sometimes you find them lifting their faces with tears flowing. And there are some churches where you entered, and as you came into the church, you felt like you were crossing a curtain. It hit you, but it was just the presence of the Lord. Just an invisible curtain you walked through. And the power of God was so intense. When people went into prayer, they were crying out in repentance for their sins, for their families, for the nation, the sins of the nation. They were crying out to God, have mercy upon us. If you heal our nation this time Lord, we promise you we shall serve you. We shall do anything you want. And they were crying out to the Lord. Some soldiers were sent to churches to arrest the pastors because they were praying for an open change right from government through everything. And when they would be taken away, others would take their places and say, let's continue praying. Prayer was not stopped. They tried to intimidate them, they couldn't stop it. And there are many soldiers and policemen who gave their lives to the Lord Jesus. They would come into the meetings with their guns, but they would be overwhelmed by the presence of the Lord. And they would walk through the aisles to the front and lay their guns on the altar and lift their hands in the air and say to the pastors, we want to see, we want to get this Jesus you have, this power that you have. We want also to be like you. And they would repent of having been sent to intimidate and torture and that kind of thing. Well, after a full year of this kind of travail, why do I give you the time? Because sometimes the churches pray and they think if it doesn't work in a week's time, in a month's time, in three months, it's no use, let's give it up. The first time the whole nation prayed, it took two years. The second time the whole nation prayed, it took a whole year before the change came. But God moved and the change came. And we as a nation delivered from these forces and the healing of the nation began. The restoration of the nation began. And for the last 12 years or so, we have been just going through the healing of the land and the land being restored to God's glory. But after the change came, again prayer stopped. And again, everybody went back into their comfort zones. Now, in the early 90s, around 1991, we began to see another killer in the country. Suddenly there was a very high rise of AIDS. And this is killing of men and women, not only the men, forsaking men and women, leaving many orphans. And this is the point at which God helps us to open our eyes and begin to understand the spiritual confrontation involved in nations. We did not understand until this point. Now, we were faced with things which you can find in almost all nations. We had orphans all over the country. We had street children increasing in our streets. And they were turning to crime. They were turning to drug addiction. They were turning to prostitution, armed robbery, and things like that. And suddenly we realized the nation was decaying, not from a bad ruler, but from something we could not control. We did not know how to deal with this. And eventually government appealed to the churches to help with the orphans and the situation of moral decay. I remember there was a time when pastors gathered from all over the country to spend time before God praying for AIDS to go. And it was in that conference that the Spirit of the Lord spoke to us and said, Up to now you do not understand the spiritual confrontation over your country. Up to now you are still fighting against flesh and blood. And your minds are about all that evil man Amin, all that evil man Obote, all those murderers. And you still feel the bitterness and say you don't understand. And in that situation you can't overcome. You can't win the war. And said you need to understand one thing. You can pray now against AIDS. You can pray and you can pray about the problem. It will go. Thank God today of all the nations of the world, World Health Organization has got a report. There is only one nation in which AIDS has been coming down over the last three, four years. Coming down and that's Uganda. It's the only nation in the whole world. But that's because of the intensive prayer. But the Lord said to us one thing. You can choose to pray about problems. Problems will go. But other problems will come. He says if you want to learn how to change a nation, stop praying merely about problems and start praying for my prophetic destiny for your nation. And we said Lord we don't understand. And I want to begin here to share with you some of the lessons that the Lord taught us about nations and the warfare that goes on for the control of the destiny of nations. I'm going to be very brief. We can't do it in the time we have to go into the detail of each topic. But I'll just mention each one as we go on and maybe God will just take it from there and go deeper and take us deeper using other speakers and other experiences we have. Praise the Lord. The Lord said to us that when you pray about problems you are missing, you are touching the branches and not the root. And we began to pray as pastors. Lord show us, teach us. Teach us how to pray for our nation. And the Lord began to give us a number of principles to understand. One was the suffering and all this pain you see in your country is just the manifestation of a spiritual battle that is going on for the destiny of young people. There is a spiritual battle that is between the powers of darkness and the powers of light. There's no time now for me to go into the history. If we went into the history you would see the history of Uganda right from the time when the first missionaries came into the land. If you read the history of the region of East Africa the core of power was in the Lake Victoria region which later on became the center of Uganda. And missionaries, I mean discoverers like John Speake and David Livingstone say at Mombasa they were told about rulers right in the center of what today is Uganda. Uganda was the center of spiritual ancestral worship. And if you talk about lay lines and concentration points Uganda was the center of powers of darkness in the whole region of East and Central Africa. The River Nile is one of the greatest landmarks in the world. And the Lord was showing us that the source of the Nile being in Uganda was a great lay point for concentration of forces of darkness. And the forces of darkness were claiming the whole of the River Nile as a lay line. One of the greatest lay lines you find in the world which have such a concentration of power. When you go in the Bible you find again and again the Nile being used by different rulers and worshippers to draw power. To give you an example Indira Gandhi I think grew up in this nation of South Africa later went back to India and became a great ruler. Yet when he was about to die he said when I die let not my ashes the ashes of my bones be buried in this country. Let them be taken at an appropriate time into Africa to the source of the Nile and let them be buried there and then scattered the remains are scattered all over the Nile from the source to Cairo. And I want to say to you beloved that sometimes we don't understand these things and yet the servants of the enemy forces understand them. Three years ago two years ago I think they brought the ashes of Indira Gandhi to Uganda and the Shamiran and other leaders came to Uganda they offered sacrifices at the source of the Nile and they buried some of the ashes there they built a monument there and then they scattered those ashes from Jinja the source of the Nile up to Cairo and they tried to bring in many leaders to be there to witness at the moment we were not fully understanding what was going on until the Lord revealed it to us and right now we are dealing with it and we are still dealing with the spiritual force a new kind of principality that was brought into the country. Well, the spiritual confrontation began when the missionaries came in with the gospel the people believed the gospel and the confrontation was so powerful between the powers of light and darkness that in 1886 the early believers of the gospel in Uganda we are all put to death by fire they are today known as the Uganda martyrs they all died for their faith they had the king of Buganda gave them an ultimatum to deny Jesus or to be killed and they chose to be killed and they were killed 36 young men all of them less than 30 years they died for the faith and a decade later the first revival took place in 1893 in the city another came on in 1910 then again in 1920 and then the greatest which was the explosion which came out of the East African revival in the 1930s which started in Uganda then went into Rwanda using a French missionary the fire exploded and then came back when the Christians in Rwanda and the Christians in Uganda united to wait upon the Lord for two weeks in this border town of Kabali and there was such an explosion of spiritual power it spread across the whole country of Uganda Sudan the southern Sudan Kenya Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Zaire even to Zambia and Malawi and I'm saying all this to show you there have been waves when the powers of light have taken precedence then have been vanquished and the power of darkness has risen vanquished and then the power of light and the Lord showed us that you need to look back in the history and understand the dynamics of the spiritual warfare over your nation these are powers of darkness and light containing for the land now you have an open heaven you've been praying but you are surrendering the ground back to the enemy so he said Lord teach us how to war and then the Lord said the reason why forces of darkness and light contained for nations is one because God has got a redemptive gift or calling a prophetic destiny for every nation that he has created on earth for every people group God has got a prophetic destiny a redemptive purpose which God has ordained before the foundations of the world that he will use this kind of people and will anoint them to be a blessing to the rest of the world in a particular peculiar way now the enemy comes in subtly and tries to do things to hinder the nation from fulfilling his God given calling and let me tell you something the Lord reveals to us when a nation fails to accomplish its national calling all the ministries and the ministers and the people of God in that nation fail somewhere they will never excel because the excellence of their calling is in the optimum operation of their nation moving out into the calling of God so the Lord showed us that we need to move from the concern of our own churches and begin to be concerned about the whole nation that is the only way we are going to excel in our individual calling and in the calling of our local congregations well it showed us that there are two ways that the enemy uses to fight whole nations this is I would say principle number two that the Lord was showing us that there are two ways the enemy uses one I don't know there could be others but these are the two that we have so far been able to see in the spirit by the Lord's grace one is the strategy of torment and oppression and Uganda is a very good example of that strategy where the enemy has brought suffering oppression torment that the people would accuse their God of being unloving unfaithful and uncaring and the people would be so occupied with preserving their individual lives they would not give themselves to serving the purposes of God and the people would be sold would be influenced by such hatred bitterness demand for revenge and all kinds of passions that they would give no room for the love of God excelling in their hearts and to reach out that God wanted them to reach out it's a strategy to destroy the very rivers of love and fellowship that God intended the nation to reach out with to other nations and there are many many nations which are being destroyed in this way if you look around the world there are many people groups suffering tormented oppressed that they rise up with bitterness hatred revenge and they develop all kinds of murder and things which are being done when you look in the different nations you can see whole nations or whole people groups who are living in a lifestyle and you wonder what kind of people are these what influences all the people who are in this group to be like this but it is this kind of strategy the enemy uses on an entire people group to make them fail in their God given identities second strategy the enemy uses is ease and slumber African countries are being attacked by the first strategy and many countries in the third world but there are many countries in the western world America and Europe who are under the attack of the second strategy now this is where many people in the west have lost effectiveness in spiritual affair because they see only one side of the coin of spiritual warfare they think spiritual warfare or oppression is just the experience of being tormented torn apart and suffering so they look at the material wealth that they have they look at the comfort they have and the ease and they consider that there is no demonic activity in their land but this is the strategy the enemy is using in some of those countries ease and slumber he takes people to sleep and while they are sleeping spiritually he robs them of their spiritual inheritance look at the nations of America Europe and the other western countries look at how much has been eroded when you go to Europe today you are amazed at the state of sleep I mean sleep and deadness spiritual death in those nations the spiritual bankruptcy the total coldness of heart even in the people who appear to love the Lord and these people because they are sleeping they allow the enemy to bring in his laws laws from the kingdom of darkness and you find people who yesterday believed in all God's ordinances today bringing in their own ordinances and calling them God's ordinances churches demanding even these things about gay rights and homosexuals being married in churches wanting to be ordained by I mean ordained to minister and all these cases will excuse me I don't know about your beliefs but I want to speak from what I understand and you have the freedom to disagree with me but when you find people who say they love the Lord they believe the word and they believe that God is the author of life and he is the author and the finisher of all that we have you wonder how a believer could turn around and say I have got a right to abortion I have got a right to kill the baby in me because it is my body it is my right fine it is your right but what about the responsibility you have to that person inside of you we talk about rights and forget about responsibilities and how did we get there because we slept and the enemy robbed us corrupted our minds and all these things going on and you find the moral decay coming and people accepting standards of darkness because they are sleeping in ease and slumber and the enemy is eroding their power and the enemy the people who really love God and have tested his anointing and power when they go out to the west with all the material wealth that is there you still prefer to go back and live in Africa where you can still experience the vibrance of the Holy Spirit or live in some other country Brazil the far east where the people can still press on and touch the spirit of the Lord or press on and experience some passion for God rather than live in a cold and dead spiritual atmosphere praise the Lord the Lord was showing us these two strategies will do one result will bring one result turn people away from God and take them far from God so when we are fighting in spiritual fear and prayer for whole nations we need to understand how to contend with this now we ask the Lord Lord we understand what you are saying but why has our nation suffered so much are we the ones sinners why why are we going through so much and this is the understanding we are able to get that there are two reasons one the greater the calling of God on a nation the greater the confrontation in the spiritual realm two in the middle of the confrontation men sometimes do things which give the devil more power over their nation than he would otherwise have when people are in the midst of confrontation and they decide to turn to witchcraft and other things like that they are literally giving authority to the enemy to do even more worse things to their country such that when we are bringing the healing of the nation we need to go back and say Lord forgive us forgive us for idolatry forgive us for the things we have done forgive us and I want to say to you beloved there are two things that we could do which would hand more power into the hands of the enemy to torment our nations and to take them even further into bondage than would otherwise be the case there are two things one is idolatry and I just want to pass over this very quickly idolatry can come through manifestation of witchcraft and occult satanism spiritism and all these things you find in the west they don't believe they have witchcraft but you find people who go into algebods tarot cards transcendental meditation and other things like that and we have just been to Europe I took I led a team of certain intercessors to Europe we were preaching and one church the pastor told us well we want to hear what God has told you in spiritual affair but you see what you have in Africa is not what we have you see in Africa you have spirits and you have witchcraft and you have ancestral worship we don't have that stuff here now what amazed us in that meeting we talked about the control of the human heart by forces of darkness and at the end of it just through praying and Lord come down and deliver your people from the influences that come from transcendental meditation algebods and things and the power of God began to move in the congregation and people were being delivered demons screaming not in black faces but in British faces they were being thrown down on the ground and the pastor came forward and was looking and couldn't understand what was going on and no one was touching anybody it was just prayer Lord touch us and deliver us from every influence of the enemy and the spirit of the Lord was moving delivering people from spiritual forces free mercenary and other things which people covenant themselves to and then they wonder later on why their lives cannot excel in God and these spirits were coming down sometimes even screaming like you hear in the Bible screaming words and say we have got a right over him he made an agreement to serve us but they were all cast out and the pastor came and said how did you do that? I said the thing is not any special power it's just believing in the word and say praise the Lord we want your kingdom only your rule over us if there is any influence in our lives which is not your power your kingdom please get get rid of it by your power the power of your Holy Spirit and the power of your word praise the Lord and he said please come back again we want to learn how to pray we want to learn how to deal with our lives and live a life that is given to God praise the Lord the second area that can open up ok I was still talking about the first idolatry can also be brought by greed greed when we exalt anything and this is a very wide area when we exalt anything above the creator we are creating an idol and when we service that idol we create altars altars could be visible could be invisible but as we service those altars we bring ourselves into bondage then there is deception when we open ourselves to deception we become vulnerable to spiritual bondage and deception what is deception anything that we believe is truth which is not truth then we become deceived when we hold up anything as truth which is not truth according to God then we are open to deception and we may be good of good heart good intentions and sincere in our seeking but when we hold anything as truth which is not truth we are opening a door to the spirit of deception to take us into bondage and after that they open the door to a host of other spirits which come in and do all kinds of things to us the second area which brings spiritual bondage over all nations and corporate peoples is unresolved injustice unresolved injustice always ends up in woundedness a wounded people are a weak people they can't their hearts can't contain the power and power they are like a bucket with holes they can't hold the water a wounded people are people with inferiority complex always bitterness hatred crying out for revenge and one kind of thing or another a wounded person will always wound someone else wounded people are people with power to wound others and when we have this we get unforgiveness hatred bitterness crying out to hurt someone else we end up being open to all kinds of spiritual forces which we wouldn't like to be holding us but they end up holding us well we continue praying and fasting and we are asking God in our different churches now with our intercessors Lord teach us how to deal with these issues and the Lord showed us when a nation opens itself up like this it allows the enemy to build a blanket of spiritual powers over the land when a covering of darkness comes upon the land it is what the Bible usually refers to as the principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness of this world and the host of spiritual wickedness in high places Ephesians says all of us were ruled by the spirit before we gave our lives to the Lord we were ruled by the prince of the power of the air the spirit who works now in all children of disobedience these are powers which form a kind of covering a network a wave a veil that separates the people from their God and keeps them in darkness 2nd Corinthians chapter 4 verse 3 and 4 says if our gospel be hidden it is hidden to those who are lost whom the God of this earth has blinded that they may not see the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and these are powers which come upon the land very quickly let me say when we have these powers ruling over the land and we as the church do not rise up to tear them down and pull them down because the bible says the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but they are powerful through God to the pulling down of strongholds casting down imaginations pulling down every pretension which exhausts itself against the knowledge of God and taking those captives to bring them to obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ when we don't use those weapons in prayer and intercession then we allow the enemy to control the land and its peoples and this is what happens when such powers are ruling over the land they influence the mindset of the people in other words they influence the attitudes of the people and you find whole people groups holding a particular attitude which many times is against the gospel and this is why the bible says our weapons pull down strongholds and imaginations or arguments and reasonings and pretensions against the knowledge of God taking those captives to obey God so you find people with excuses why they don't want to obey God they say I would do it but look at this and they have good reasons according to their human understanding but all these are arguments against the knowledge of God we have to pull those down through intercession these forces control systems and I don't have the time to go into details they control systems like government schools hospitals municipalities social sectors and they cause decisions to be taken which hinder the purposes of God and promote the purposes of the enemy and if the church sleeps on it comes under control it can't continue because it's not dealing with its situation these forces also hinder the manifestation of the glory of God they hinder prayer they make prayer very difficult and boring dry and empty and cold they hinder the manifestation of the power of God we believe in the power of God in the scriptures that we never come around to see it in our day to day life and this is all the working of a life that is being suppressed by powers of darkness now very quickly we began to seek the Lord and say show us how to deal with these forces and I want to share with you a personal experience I had which has been spread out across the whole of our country and has helped to bring about a mighty change one day when we were praying against these powers of darkness I got a picture in the spirit and I just saw that God was showing us a net which was leading us into creating a net across the whole country now I don't have the time to go into details but when I asked the Lord what do you mean he took us the scriptures to Genesis chapter 12 from 12 onwards and said when he said to Abraham I'm giving you the land he said to him in Genesis 13 walk through the length and the breadth of the land and what did Abraham do walking the length and the breadth of the land he went planting starting prayer altars he would set an altar and call upon the name of the Lord and the Lord said to us that is what I want you to do fill the land with prayer day and night let prayer go forth from all over the land the whole land as you do that you will be taking over the firmament of the land and piercing the blanket of darkness and you will be claiming the land for your God and we said Lord how do we do that we want to start prayer and he has shown us that we could start prayer altars like Abraham started and there are four different types of prayer altars I could share with you one is the family altar now I have been in the west and I have talked to people in America and Europe about family altars and they keep saying it's impossible we can't bring our families together now this is where we've got to believe to decide whether we are going to believe God and pay the cost or not that God wants us to bring our families together if not daily at least every week we should be able to bring our families together and pray together not just for our needs and problems but as a family stand in the gap for the nation and say Lord heal our nation Lord have mercy upon our nation the Lord made us to understand that we are supposed to teach our children to pray and every day tell your children every day take time and say have mercy upon this land forgive the sins of this land and heal our nation and he told us children make more impact in the kingdom of God when they pray than others they touch the heart of God in a special way so we began to teach our children how to pray and we began bringing them together and praying with them in family altars another altar is the church altar where the whole church gathers together this time not to hear a preacher but just to spend time one hour two hours or more just praying through the issues of the nation the Lord have mercy have mercy on this please please change this let this change and he led us to call all night prayers where churches would spend the whole night in praying and worshipping God and dealing with the issues of the nation and say stop pointing fingers at your government you have a higher government you are working with a higher government the spiritual government of God when you judge and accuse you are not an intercessor you are an accuser mediators do not accuse they stand on behalf of the others if you are going to be effective in intercession don't accuse but stand in the gap when you see anything take it upon yourself in prayer and intercession and hold it before God and work spiritual affairs intercession and prevail and cry to God Lord have mercy and change this and say if my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves and I will heal their nation I will forgive their sins I will heal their nation the other altar is the community altar now this is amazing we started prayer in the villages in the communities people from this family and that family coming together in the community to pray for the community to pray for the people in the community to pray for the crime in the community the crime wrestler community the things that were unlawful in the kingdom of God which were taking place in the community and we just joined together as three, four families from the same community taking the responsibility for their community and that is amazing what God can do when we decide to take responsibilities for our nations for our land and we are seeing people changing giving their lives to God witch doctors coming to the Lord Muslims calling us into their houses and you would go and pray in the houses of Muslims and just call upon the name of the Lord Jesus and at the end they say can we also pray in this name of Jesus and when you tell them you can pray in the name of Jesus yes but it would be more powerful if you would invite him to enter your life and they would say yes we want him to come in and we have seen Muslims coming to the Lord Jesus Christ not because we have preached so much and spent so much money but because of the prayer in the land and then the most powerful prayer is the personal altar it is so good to pray in the corporate but we also have to spare time for individual prayer that we need to go and do before the Lord individually and say Lord have mercy upon the land because every one of us has got a calling on his life but that calling is influenced by what is happening in the nation if the nation has got an open heaven there will be more anointing and power in your calling if there is not that release your own personal calling will not be released secondly every one of us have got a priestly place before God so as we stand there is a priestly authority every one of us wails before God and as we get closer to God we exercise more of that authority on behalf of the nation and so that when we have the time in personal prayer when we join in corporate prayer there is a release in the spirit now I want just to finish with this as we began to do that the whole nation was again brought to prayer not because of suffering but because of obedience to God's call we saw things changing the whole nation eventually came together and we spent 14 days just repenting the sins of the nation tribe to tribe denomination to denomination the army to the people the police to the people and everyone was involved including our president and it was in that conference we say to the president to hand over the nation to the Lord Jesus Christ to cancel all the covenants that had been made by former rulers to Islam to occult and other things and re-covenant the nation to the Lord Jesus Christ and allow Him to be the Lord over the land and we said will you do a prophetic action take the flag of the nation as a symbol of nationhood and hand it in the hands of the intercessors as a symbol before the whole nation that you are handing the nation back to the Lord Jesus Christ and he did all this in faith and we received it and the Lord said the authority is now in your hands and a year later He has given His life to the Lord Jesus Christ and we have seen changes come in every area every sector the healing of the land I want to say now that as we finish could we just maybe take a moment and stand and just answer to the Lord He said I sought for a man who would stand before me on behalf of the land I sought for a man who would stand in the gap on behalf of the land that I may not pour out my wrath on the land and I found none therefore I allowed my wrath to come if we don't stand God will allow so many things to come to our nation some of the things we think the devil is doing but God is saying if there was a man or woman standing before me on behalf of the land I wouldn't allow those things to come the devil is not so powerful as to overrule God's boundary if we stand on behalf of our land God will stand on our behalf and I want to say to you tonight you still have a lot of time you are spending here tomorrow will we answer to God and say here I am Lord I want to be the person standing in the gap I want to call my family to prayer I want to call my church to prayer I want to influence my community to pray I want to see my nation pray and it starts with one willing heart God will honor that no one will come to God and be denied just ask the Lord please receive my heart and let your Holy Spirit teach me how to go forth I want to say let everyone of us just begin to talk to the Lord just talk to the Lord in the way you feel you are able to and just open your heart and say Lord I don't want to see my land destroyed and torn apart and I realize I have a priestly role take me today make me a priest for my nation go ahead and talk to the Lord and I am going to pray with you Heavenly Father we come before you and we say we love you Lord Jesus we want to see your glory we want to see your kingdom in our land in our nation and throughout Africa and the nations of the world and Father we realize that the responsibility lies upon us the responsibility lies upon us as the people who are called by the name of the Lord forgive us where we have been slacked Lord forgive us where we have thought that maybe other people leaders in government or elsewhere will make our land better not realizing that the authority lies in our hands as kings and princes together with Jesus Christ and Father I want to pray tonight Lord as you've gathered your daughters and sons into this place leaders of your people throughout this country let your spirit oh God work deeply in our hearts my Father to draw us to yourself teach us how to pray like you want us to pray work prayer from deep within our hearts my Father and let your spirit oh God prevail within us the word says we do not even know how to pray as we should pray but the spirit helps us in our families Lord I pray that the spirit of God will help every man every woman every child who will say yes to you and will make time to be in your presence I pray for family alters to begin men and women to bring their families to you Lord their children to come before you and spend time interceding for the land interceding for the people groups of this nation not accusing my Father but interceding mediating Lord Father I pray oh God for all churches to come together and spend hours before you not just in one part of the nation but throughout this nation my Father all churches to cry out in intercession for this nation Lord and I pray for the communities my God the things which are happening in our communities are our responsibility please Lord raise up your people in the communities that they will begin to see that the evils in their communities they can change they can get rid of Lord Almighty come Holy Spirit let there be let there be travail in your people Lord take us higher and closer in your bosom Lord let there be travail let there be a birthing of a new nation in South Africa Lord and Lord I pray in Jesus name that Father you will teach us how to be mediators not accusers Lord teach our lives to mediate teach our lives to bless and not to curse teach our lives to create life and not death teach our lives to be bridge builders to build bridges and not Father gap builders and I want to thank you and I want to ask your blessing upon this time that your people are spending here let it be blessed by your mighty God let it be anointed my God send forth your people from this place with a new anointing with a new power with a new zeal in their lives to go forth and change this land thank you Father thank you Lord Jesus in Jesus name we have prayed