Sunday, October 07, 2012

Prayer for Portugal: A 365 Day Global Prayer Journey - October 7

Today's prayer takes us to Portugal, a nation with an overwhelmingly predominant percentage of Christians, yet in desperate need of renewal as the current religious freedom is being dominated by cults and New Age philosophies. Please read pages 692-694, then pray along with this video. I've also included some reflections from a Portuguese believer on how to pray for his country.

On the social realm, Portugal is currently going through an economical crisis, due to misuse of money through overuse of credit by most of the families. Naturally, Christians are affected as well (directly or not) because unemployment has risen.

On the spiritual realm, among believers there is a midst of religiosity and passiveness towards the general situation of the country. Real born again believers are still a small minority, as the Catholic church represents a brutal majority according the charts. Anyway, the reality is that most of the Portuguese don´t go at all to any church, neither have personal relationship with Jesus. And the church is, in practice, quite subtle and closed into itself, as generations of believers are only used to keep the meetings going on, and seem not to be much motivated into change.

Nevertheless this situation can turn out to be a blessing, in the way that it may lead to repentance:
- Repentance of covetousness (by using unsustained credit).
- Repentance of religiosity, that believers could be revived again and non-believers would meet Lord Jesus as a personal Savior and Provider that He is.

Portuguese are friendly and happy people overall. I personally pray that they would find deeper and healing happiness in Jesus. 

http://youtu.be/_PsmpJzu8uw

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