David French’s Five Best Ways to Pray For America
Good Faith
Good Faith
5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Praying for Change: A Path to National Reconciliation
Feeling stuck on how to pray for America? You’re not alone—but there is a path forward. In this timely episode, Good Faith “founding friend” and New York Times columnist David French lays out five virtue-based ways to pray for our nation with clarity, courage, and compassion. Drawing upon Scripture with a healthy dose of personal reflection, David extols the importance of praying for America as a daily act to seek God’s best for our country and each other—restoring unity and healing what’s broken.
Episode Companion: Prayer Guide
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Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
- 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (ESV)
- The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:5-13 (ESV)
- "The Ministry of Reconciliation" in 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 (ESV)
- Jesus Prays in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26:36-46 (ESV)
- Micah 6:8
- Ephesians 4:3
- Isaiah 42:3
- Psalm 34:18
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- The Ongoing Los Angeles Protests
- Australian journalist shot by rubber bullet during L.A. protests (video)
- Waymo taxis Ablaze in Los Angeles
- Georgetown scholar recalls ‘mockery of due process’ in immigration jail
- The Westminster Confession's Standards for the 9th Commandment
- South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- Les Miserables: The Bishop and the Redemption of Jean Valjean
- What Is Restorative Justice?
- More about the work of Brennan Manning
- Tim Keller’s Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
- Dennis F. Kinlaw’s Prayer: Bearing the World as Jesus Does
- E.M. Bounds on Prayer
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Praying the Psalms
- The work of Michael Card
- More about the work of Rich Mullins
- The Lost Dogs’ Pray Where You Are (song & lyrics)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of the Good Faith podcast was recorded before the recent acts of political violence in Minnesota. |
| 0:06.0 | While the conversation does not specifically address those events, |
| 0:10.0 | the themes we explore and the call to prayer remain as vital and urgent as ever. |
| 0:18.0 | You know, peace and justice and grace can go a long way towards removing hatred. |
| 0:22.5 | But what is it that can bind us together again in relationship? |
| 0:26.9 | That takes reconciliation. |
| 0:28.7 | And so that's what I'm praying for. |
| 0:31.4 | I know it's an ambitious prayer. Welcome to the Good Faith podcast, where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. |
| 0:55.0 | I'm D.T. Sloughman, the producer of these conversations, Curtis Chang, is off this week. |
| 1:00.8 | And today we're going to dive into one of the key ways followers of Jesus try to make sense of the world. |
| 1:06.1 | We pray for it. |
| 1:08.0 | As I was preparing for this episode, I had to be honest with myself and now with each of you. Prayer isn't always easy for it. As I was preparing for this episode, I had to be honest with myself and now with each of you, |
| 1:12.9 | prayer isn't always easy for me. A lot of the time, I don't even know how to pray or what to pray |
| 1:18.4 | for. So I reread the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6. I put the song, Pray Where You Are by the Lost |
| 1:24.3 | Dogs on repeat. And I grabbed a few books off of my office shelves to see how others have wrestled with prayer, |
| 1:31.0 | authors like Ian Bounds, Dennis Kenlaw, Brennan Manning, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. |
| 1:36.2 | But what really comforted me was opening my wife's dog-eared copy of Tim Keller's book, Prayer, experiencing awe and intimacy with God, and reading this from Tim. |
| 1:48.3 | I can think of nothing great that is all so easy. Prayer must be then one of the hardest things in the |
| 1:55.2 | world. To admit that prayer is very hard, however, can be encouraging. If you struggle greatly in this, you are not |
| 2:02.9 | alone. And he continues, the pursuit of God in prayer eventually bears fruit because God seeks for us |
| 2:10.7 | to worship him and because prayer is so infinitely rich and wondrous. That last part from Tim, |
| 2:17.4 | that's the hope, right? But today we're going to |
... |
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