I need your prayers. I need someone to go to the Father on my behalf. I need you to ask Him to please give me stamina and patience and wisdom. I need direction and vision. I need to keep my spiritual fire burning brightly. Would you guys do that for me? Would you be willing to stop reading this for just a minute and pray on my behalf? Did you do that?

Would you do the same for my students? Will you stop reading and start praying? Ron Dunn was a Southern Baptist minister who wrote a great little book called “Don’t just stand there, Pray something”. Would you do that? Don’t just read this column and walk away encouraged or strengthened or informed, walk away with the knowledge that you can play an active role in the life of our college ministry. Don’t just sit there, pray something.

Let me preach for just a minute. “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” I want you to get up and live out your faith today like never before. I want you to rise up out of bed with a sense of purpose. There is a reason that you are not going to look at pornography today. There is a reason that you aren’t going to read the gossip columns today. You are not going to participate in the gossip mongering that goes on at your work place or the back-biting that might occur among your friends or on facebook or myspace (or myface or whatever). You desperately need to stay away from temptation today of every kind. Run from sexual immorality. Hate what is evil and cling to what is right and true. Why? I’ll tell you.

College ministers and college students and ministers and missionaries and your husbands and wives and sons and daughters are fighting for their spiritual lives and the souls of their friends and coworkers all over this planet and if someone doesn’t start living right and praying hard this battle is going to be lost. Oh yeah, I know that we win in the end but I want us to win in the beginning and the middle as well.

We need the saints of God to be the saints of God. If you are a believer and a follower of Jesus Christ then live like it. Step up and be who you are supposed to be. There is a war going on out here and some of us are neck deep in it and we need the rest of you to get up off your good intentions and get in this fight with us. Quit acting and living like America is heaven. This is not the promised land and we are not the chosen people. We are strangers in a strange land and if you don’t believe it then read the headlines. Wake up and smell the coffee folks. It’s time to go to work.

The most effective tool we have in this war is prayer and if our prayer lives are hindered by sin then our supply line is damaged and we are in trouble. Please step up. We need you. Rob Leonard needs your prayers. James Taylor needs your prayers. Jack Cross needs your prayers. Nathan Harper needs your prayers. Jason Beck needs your prayers. You get the idea. If you’ve been wondering what you could do to help well now you know. Live it out and pray it out and God will work it out. I love you guys. I need your prayers.