A Prayer for Governor Andrew Cuomo
Our Father and gracious God, we come before You in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. We must begin by confessing our complicity in the great backsliding our nation has embraced over the last half century—as Your people we Christians have been pro-life, but we have not been as diligent, as passionate, or as effective, as we ought to have been. Forgive us for this grievous shortcoming, we pray, and for the sake of Christ, we pray. We can see now what it must all necessarily come to.
Solomon was greatly beloved by you—his name Jedediah even means “beloved of God,” and he wrote significant portions of our holy Scriptures. To this day we study his words with reverence, as we should. And yet even he built a temple to Chemosh, and another to Moloch, both of them gods with a taste for human blood. As he repented near the end of his life, so would we turn from our lethargic opposition to the curse of abortion. We are Your people, and we know that we are beloved by You, and yet we confess that we have not acquitted ourselves in this matter as we ought to have done. Forgive us, we pray.
Our prayer today, and our earnest desire, is for the conversion and salvation of Governor Cuomo, as well as for all the legislators of New York who voted for, and who rejoiced in, the full-term abortion measure that was recently signed into law.
We confess and believe in the gospel of Your Son, which means that we know that the blood of the Lord Jesus can cleanse the vilest of sinners, and we are convinced that wickedness of this magnitude could be included in such forgiveness. We would rejoice if the governor were to repent and, like Manasseh, end his days on earth in a forgiven, humble and chastened frame of mind before You. We pray that the governor might become one of history’s great trophies of grace, and that we might be privileged to spend eternity together with him. We unreservedly pray for his repentance and salvation.
And yet, Father of lights, the way in which this law was passed, and the way in which it was celebrated afterward, demonstrates clearly for us—and to the whole world—that those who are promoting this awful practice know exactly what they are doing. We do know that there have been some unbelievers who have been confused by the lies they have been told about the child being just a “cluster of cells,” but this particular outbreak of high-handedness betrays their leaders’ open defiance—their hatred of You, and their clear hatred of any defenseless being who bears Your image. They know they are killing babies and, like Gosnell, they rejoice to do so.
Father, the insolence, disdain, and arrogance in what they are doing, and the way they are doing it, fills us with horror. We know that with regard to the issue of the bloodguilt itself, the other 49 states are also guilty of the same crime, and we could all be brought low for tolerating Roe as we have done. But what we see here is the stripping away of all pretense. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. They love what they do.
And to celebrate their iniquity, they lit up the spire of the rebuilt World Trade Tower, and they did this within living memory of the day when the first World Trade Towers came crashing down in a fiery ruin—as they are vying with the terrorist high-jackers over who might be more evil. In the memorial at the base of the World Trade Center, there is an inscription to 11 unborn children who died on that day. How long before Andrew Cuomo catches up with that number? How long before New York State catches up with the entire 3,000 who were murdered on that day?
And so, Father, if it is not Your good pleasure and will to take away the governor’s heart of stone, replacing it with a heart of flesh, and if it is not your will to destroy these your enemies by transforming them into Your friends, then our earnest prayer is that You would destroy them regardless. Father, we would echo the prayer of our Lord’s mother, asking You to cast down the mighty from their seats. They lust to bite and devour the innocent, and so we ask You to break their fangs in their mouths. They reach out eagerly to slay the defenseless, and so we ask You to shatter their evil arms. Let their house be made desolate, and may they experience the full weight of pure justice, genuine justice, a white hot justice, and not their pretended forms of a corrupt and disease-ridden social justice. May their entire secular project, their great and loathsome Babylon, become a haunt for owls and jackals.
If they are not numbered among your elect, if they are not to come to the day of judgment through the cross of Jesus Christ, then we pray that You would hasten the day when they come to the otherkind of judgment—the time when heaven and earth will flee away from them, the moment when they cry out feebly for the mountains to fall upon them to hide them from the heat of Your wrath, and the day on which not one of their bootless cries will be heard.
We are pleading with You to do this. We are asking You to rise up and scatter Your enemies. We are looking for a display of Your righteousness. And so we also pray fervently that You would judge and bring low any self-appointed “Ehud,” the kind of person who is thoroughly convinced of his own righteousness, and who would rob You of Your glory in judgment. We pray that You would deal with any man who believes that carnal sedition will fix anything. We are praying for a judgment that is manifestly the act of the only Almighty God, and we pray that it would be the sort of thing that would make the ears of all who hear of it tingle. If You turn us, Lord, then we will be turned. The arm of man cannot give the kind of repentance that is necessary.
“Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me!” (Psalm 139:19, ESV
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We offer this prayer up to You in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who conquered death after three days in the grave, and who now rules all the nations of men with a rod of iron. We pray in His strong name, and amen.
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