Prayers for a Nation

From today's reading in A Book of Private Prayer for Morning and Evening by J.R. MacDuff:

Look in kindness on our native land, in all its interests, sacred and civil. As you have blessed her and made her a blessing in the past, may she continue to realize that she is the honored instrument in Your hand for the spread of truth and the triumph of righteousness.

MacDuff, while living in Victorian Britain, could rightly say that his nation was "the honored instrument in Your hand for the spread of truth and the triumph of righteousness".

Can we say this, today, about either Britain or the United States? I think not.

When did Great Britain cease to "realize that she is the honored instrument in (God's) hand", and begin the downward slide that has led to her being a secular state with an increasingly irrelevant state church? Could it be that the beginning of the end was the time when the men and women of the United Kingdom quit praying as MacDuff did? Have we, in America put more reliance in political structures and forgotten to trust in God?

Christians of both nations need to pray, pray, and pray some more. We need to pray:

Look in kindness on our native land, in all its interests, sacred and civil. As you have blessed her and made her a blessing in the past, may she once again be an honored instrument in Your hand for the spread of truth and the triumph of righteousness.