“Why are we sitting here until we die?” (2 Kings 7:3 NKJV)

In light of the 9/11 terrorist attack upon our nation, an argument can be made that if we had sent more missionaries and given more money to missions we would not now be sending troops and paying more in taxes. To be honest, however, history is replete with such arguments due to Christian inaction down through the ages. The painful truth is, the day of opportunity has often come and gone while the church just sat there. 

In the text cited above, four lepers are sitting at the gate of Samaria, which happens to be surrounded by the Syrians. They are forbidden from entering the city because of their leprosy and they are afraid to venture out and surrender to the enemy. So, they sit there in their complacency waiting for the inevitable, namely, their death. 

Notice, it is a question that jolts these four lepers out of their complacency. They ask themselves, “Why are we sitting here until we die?” The only chance they had was to get up and go out to the enemy in surrender. If the enemy killed them, what had they lost; they were going to die anyway? So they got up and did the only thing they could. As a result, they not only saved themselves, but the starving people of Samaria as well.

The complacent church in America today needs to ask itself, “Why are we sitting here until we die?” Our country is imploding and God’s judgment is impending. Yet, the church is just sitting! It’s high time for us to get up and do something, not only for our own survival, but also for the sakes of the spiritually starving in our land.

What can we do? We can pray! Now, prayer is not the only thing that we can do. For instance, like the four lepers in our story, we too can declare to the perishing “the day of good news” (2 Kings 7:9). Still, nothing is more important than prayer. As A. J. Gordon said, “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”

Don’t just sit there, pray something!

Pray that the American church will be jolted out of its complacency and begin bombarding Heaven with its prayers, as well as preaching throughout this land the “day of good news.”