It’s a miracle.

President Donald Trump has the secular media talking about prayer.

Following the Virginia Beach shooting, the President waked into McLean Bible Church and asked Pastor David Platt to pray with him.

Let me explain why this is not the moral dilemma some are making it out to be.

First, Trump is the president, and most, if not all, presidents have asked for prayer, for themselves, for the troops or for the country.

Lyndon Johnson, the very first time he ever spoke to the public as president, the night after the nightmare in Dallas, asked people to pray for him.

“He means it, he’s going to need it,” quipped one Kennedy aide, who was not a LBJ fan.

Johnson, like Trump, was no paragon of virtue, but he knew when he needed divine intervention.

Second, church is for sinners. This concept is maybe the hardest one for non-churchgoers to grasp. We don’t go to church to celebrate our piety, but to confess our sinfulness, weakness and need for God.

It’s not for saints, it’s for sinners.

I don’t know any saints, so I can’t ask them what they do on Sundays. But sinners like me duck into a church, kneel and ask for forgiveness and guidance.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump the man, or the president, he needs both.

And he was in the right place for them.

Third, Pastor Platt has fallen into a morass of trying to explain and/or apologize for the moment.

He shouldn’t.

Ministers go to prisons, and pray with death-row dwellers and lifers. Priests in the confessional hear every kind of wrongdoing.

I would argue that the pastor could have done nothing else, or less, than pray with and for the president and the nation. See 1 Timothy 2:1-2. It instructs prayer “for kings and all those in authority”.

Not to endorse them, but so that “we may live peaceful and quiet lives”.

It’s not political, unless you frame everything as political.

Which many in our media do.

To suggest it was wrong, or “hurtful”, flies in the face of Christ and Christianity. No one’s beyond redemption. No one’s above prayer.

Or below it.

 

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