Pastor Dana's Call to Prayer!

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This is the Truth Network. Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Oh wow, do we have a show for you today on If Not For God. We have Pastor Dana Coverstone back with Mike. You know, this close to the election is a critical time, right Mike? It sure is, and this is actually the third time we've had Pastor Dana on. And this, I think, I believe right now, we talked about it a little bit before, Dana, and a couple of the things that you said are on your mind right now are, number one, prayer for this time right around the election.

And then you said there was also something else as well, is that right? Yeah, yeah, there's a couple things on my mind. We're getting ready to go into, we're 13 days from an election. You've got agencies and groups that are coming in and saying that, you know, we plan on basically rioting, burning stuff to the ground if certain people don't get their ways.

We already know that both sides have a number of attorneys on both sides, literally, ready to threaten with lawsuits anything that's done. I don't know about what you're thinking, but I'm probably trying to guesstimate and estimate how long it'll take before we know who the president is who won the election. Already 36 million people have voted early. And just here in Kentucky, I'm hearing from people that are working the polls for early voting, and you've got lines that are, you know, blocks and blocks long. So definitely people have got into the spirit of, they know the need to vote. And probably it's because on both sides, on both sides of both parties, people have understood what's at stake. And I say that literally, both sides understand what's at stake, and everybody's coming out to vote, which means we need to pray more at the church and the body of Christ, because there will be violence.

There's going to be all sorts of crazy things happening going on. And once again, we've seen video reports, interviews of people saying, you know, that's what they're going to do. Fox News put some stuff out yesterday about some threats. Someone sent me some news today, some counties in Florida, where people are getting threatening emails about, you know, you need to change your party to vote. You need to make sure you vote for the right person.

Threats, intimidation, all sorts of things you hear. You know, I know that the mainstream media says that the ballots and that the election is fair, not rigorous and all that, and yet every single day, the news that I read, you hear reports. Even in Kentucky, a television news program actually did an article where a USPS employee was dumping ballots in ditches. So we see that in every state, we see it on time, and yet the mainstream media said, oh, it's not happening, it's not happening. You see politicians saying it's not happening, and yet when you read, you know, the real world news around here, and that's not a plug for that news group, I'm just saying that when you read newspapers, articles, you look around, you realize there's a whole lot of things happening.

There are some counties that have more people registered to vote than actually live in the counties. So that brings us up to some very important things. We know the importance of the election based on just the freedoms, things that are happening, the things that are going on. So I want to encourage the church to be praying, especially the next weekends. I'm going to actually, on October 31st, I'm going to be in Topeka, Kansas, watchmenstrumpet.com, we're going to have another 12-hour prayer meeting, prayer and fasting for 12 hours, praying for the nation, and we did it purposely the weekend before the election. No, it's probably going to be a prime time to get people together, get people interested, and get people praying, because we know something, you know, something's about to happen, something big is coming, and going back to, you know, the first dream I had, it resonated with people because people said they felt something was coming, something big was coming. And the closer we get to the election, I'm seeing more and more people having dreams.

I'm being sent more and more dreams from people about the election, about who wins, who loses, about the consequences of it. So even in the subconscious level, there's a lot of people that are thinking about the election. I've never heard as much news about an election in my life. I'm 51, but absolute chaos in the news and the news media right now about this election, it's overwhelming. It's almost, you don't have to turn the news off every few minutes to kind of get your head together.

There's a lot going on with the church right now that we need to be ready for and praying about, because a lot of things that happen to us or with us as the body of Christ will be reflected in the election. You know, just this week, President Trump signed into action some legislation, some work, so literally, you know, keep people safe from human trafficking, get some consequences. Have you heard very much about that in the news at all? No.

No. Probably anything, which doesn't make any sense because trafficking is a huge deal in this country. And we're talking about young girls who are being abducted, kidnapped, and being exposed to things they never thought we'd ever dreamed of.

And there's a lot of fathers who have no idea where their daughters are because they're being trafficked. And yet, Congress hasn't done anything, hasn't passed any bills, hasn't worked on anything to save those young ladies and some boys in that situation too. So, you know, we see nothing but chaos because of the Barrett confirmation hearings. We saw the way that some of those senators... I mean, when's the last time a sitting, elected federal senator of a state asked for a Supreme Court candidate if she had ever sexually assaulted someone? Yeah, it was almost like a, you know, are you kidding me?

Yeah, yeah. As an American citizen, I was there thinking, if the people in that state don't rise up and speak out against this person and this senator, and where in the world do you even come off doing something like that? They talk about inappropriate at a Supreme Court candidate confirmation hearing. A female senator asks a female candidate a question like that. The fact that her family's been attacked.

They adopted two kids from Haiti. I think that's honorable. I think it's noble. But yet, people came out and made it a racist situation, although they were doing something great for these two kids. The hot mic with Feinstein and the questions about her faith. And our faith is under fire.

I don't think people understand the consequences of what could happen to those of us that are Christians, should there be a certain winner of the White House. And that's not me trying to be divisive. That's just simply me saying, you've got one party that pushes gun control, taking what they can, getting what they can. We talked earlier about you trying to get ammunition.

It's impossible to do. That happens during every election. But right now, it's both guns and ammo. There are states that are backed up on background checks that can't get the background checks done because their system is overwhelmed.

Because people are thinking, what does this look like? I know somebody who works in a business where they go into people's homes on a constant basis. And just a few, just a few in the last week, telling me that every house he's gone into recently, he has noticed stacks of canned goods, cases of bottled water stacks.

This is your normal, not like prepping stuff, but just extra supplies, extra this, extra that. And everybody wants to talk about, what do you think is going to happen in this election? What do you think is going to happen in the week of the election? What do you think is going to happen with trucks? What do you think is going to happen with our rights and liberties? What do you think is going to happen in the big cities? So this is something that everybody, and we've not been trained that we're just, if you're an American citizen and you live here, you're pretty much aware that there's a lot of stuff going on right now and a lot of potential for danger, for damage, for chaos.

So people really need to be waking up to what's happening and praying, praying for wisdom and direction. I've actually told my kids to make sure they keep their gas tanks full the week before, the week of, and the week after the election. I'm not anticipating, you know, running out of gas, that I got my two daughters are both in larger cities and I've got ways for them to get out the community. They're not going to be downtown places.

They've got friends they can stay with off campus and away from the downtown areas. I want them to be safe. Well, and one of the things that you were talking about when we were talking about prayer, we were looking at Second Chronicle seven and it's 13 and 14. And it says, if I shut up heaven, that there be no rain, Dana, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people, it says, if my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and I will heal their land. And one of the things that you had said, Dan, is you said, you're actually having a prayer.

Was it October 31st? Yes, yes, yeah. It's going to be at the peak of Kansas through WatchThisTrumpet.com and we're just going to pray the Lord continues to show mercy and grace on the country because we do, I do believe that prayer changes things. I also realize that sometimes prayer just gets us sustained. You know, the things I've been hearing and sensing in my, in the dreams is embrace yourself. Right. And more and more, the thing I think about those words is, because these dreams go through my mind constantly.

It's an everyday situation. And I find myself thinking about, you know, well, what does that mean? Am I braced enough? What else do I need to brace? And brace yourself, really getting ready for impact. I've seen that word brace in more headlines, news articles, and things like that in the last couple of weeks than I ever thought I would. But brace to me means get yourself ready for a hit. And you brace yourself so you don't get knocked down. It's like that football, use that football analogy. That guy on the front line who's guarding the quarterback with the ball, there's a 325-pound guy in front of him that's going to hit it. He knows he's got the, he's got the, he's got the gear on, he's got the helmet on, and he puts his foot back and he pushes against what's coming against him, because he knows if he goes down, that big guy gets by him and gets the quarterback, he's a sacks the quarterback and gets the ball. So what I believe that God's been doing is strengthening the Church during September, October, to get us ready for the things that are coming, because we can't just sit back and say, well, nothing's going to happen.

I think that's a non-point right now. We know something is going to happen, and our response to what happens is what's going to matter. We can't react, because typically when you react, you end up reacting wrong. We need to respond, and God's given us a warning and said, hey, we're going to pray, I want you to get your foot, you know, get your foot back, get yourself braced and get ready. There's a reason that people in hurricane prone areas board up their windows when hurricanes become, because they've learned from experience that when hurricanes come, they can break windows, the winds, the rain, the damage, the debris that gets flying around.

There's certain things you do. Some people say it's time to get out of town, let's get out and get on the road, get away. So right now we've had a weather report that said the storm's coming, get ready for it. That's been the warning, not just for me, but for many, many, many, many others, because of what they sense and feel in their spirit. And I continue to get emails on a daily basis from people saying that they just they feel that the election is going to be a hard time, but they have been praying with their family, they've been praying with their kids, they're making connections. I'm hearing about churches that are doing Zoom calls with other churches, see how they could help each other if there's a supply shortage. I'm hearing from churches who are working together on situations, if there's big, you know, riots or things like that in their areas, what can they do to bring safety to people? How can they use their churches to be a safe place for people to come if they're afraid to be in their neighborhoods? And I'm hearing about that from all sorts of pastors, all sorts of churches across denomination, alliance, and fellowships.

So what I see that is that's a response. We pray, God, show us what to do. People say, okay, if these things happen, here's what we can do. And so in my mind, the Lord's already answered prayer, getting us ready to help one another.

It's not about just having a voice. I mean, yes, the gospel is all-encompassing. It tells us we're supposed to help people, teach people, help people with supplies and things like that, but it also means that we teach people how to live, how to work, how to heed the warnings by warning them ourselves. And so when the church wakes up and begins to do those kind of things and says, okay, if this happens, we can do this. It can't be, all right, this happens, what are we going to do?

It needs to be thought out beforehand. And then my church, we started collecting some supplies, put those things back. We're making connections with where some of our older folks live, our seniors. Okay, if something happens and they need something, how do we make a connection there?

If communication goes down by some way, what do we have that we can make contact with and find out what people need? Because you've still got COVID going on. You've still got all sorts of other things happening in the school system. The COVID has made a whole, it's just made a mess of everything. And people are terrified or nervous even to be around anybody without this cough. And I recently went into a Walmart. When I walk in the door, I'll wear the mask and then I take it off. And I've got severe allergies.

If I wear a mask for more than 10-15 minutes, I'm coughing, gagging, hacking, sneezing like crazy. And I've got a lot of people looking at me already. And I took my mask off and I've had a lot of people say, man, I'm glad to see someone without a mask.

I'm glad to see this. And then I've even had managers, managers from large retail box stores say, if I had my way, nobody would wear a mask. People are just tired of this tyranny. But I also understand that it's a real condition. Some of the world missions records in the hospital for almost two months with COVID almost died.

And I know people who personally, who have almost died because they got COVID, understand it's a serious thing. But we need to respond to the things that are going on rather than react to them. And that's where the church can be the voice of reason, can be the most stable force imaginable if and when things fall apart in the week after next. That's what I'm hoping and praying that we can see happen. Yeah, I mean, and one of the things going back to going back to the election, Dana, I'm looking at justactions.org.

And according to this website, globally, an estimated 56 million abortions are occurring each year, 36 million in Asia, 8 million in Africa, six and a half million in Latin America, 4.4 million in Europe, and 1.2 million in North America. We have Amy Coney Barrett, who looks like is going to be confirmed. And so then the justices are going to be 6-3. But if Biden wins the election, he's talking about stacking the courts. And I think it was Stu Epperson who said that the last election, there were tens of millions of evangelical Christians who did not vote.

Why do you think it's important that we vote this year? Well, a lot of people look at the political side of it and say, well, I don't want to be involved. And they quote that letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist about the separation of church and state.

It's not an official government document, it's no one in the Constitution. And a lot of people are just, they have this mindset that, well, if I get involved with politics, is it any means that I've stepped over some line? If the church doesn't vote, if believers don't go out there and vote, I believe there will be some judgment on believers that don't vote.

I'll tell you why. We live in a representative government. We have the right to vote professionally. And yes, the people I vote for sometimes don't get elected. I took the time to go and vote because my vote represents my endorsement of a candidate. And my endorsement of a candidate means my endorsement of what their value system is, what their belief system is, and what they want to put into effect for the country and my country. And so if I choose not to vote, my vote of silence is a vote.

And I believe a lot of believers are probably going to be shocked when they stand before the Lord and he questions us about some of the things we did and did not do. Abortion is an issue that has become a major political division. And we see churches that are abortion supporters. We see movements that are abortion supporters. But right now, the church in America is probably the only agency, the only entity that actually supports the life of the unborn. We're it.

There's no other secular group, no other... We're the Church of Jesus Christ. We're the only one standing up for the life of the unborn, the life of the unborn child. And so if and when we don't vote... And I know a lot of people say, well, you shouldn't just have this one issue be the most important one. How can life not be the most important issue? And every... And I've seen it said that a hundred percent of the people who were pro-choice have already been born.

Exactly. And I'm a pastor. And in my almost 30 years of ministry, I have probably had over 200 women in my office who have had abortions, who still have nightmares, who still have emotional difficulty because of what happened, who have dreams about some royal girl calling, Mommy, Mommy, where are you?

And I'm not making this up. I've got people who will tell you, just they send them off to say those things. But I don't think the... You know, Planned Parenthood is not telling anybody the emotional damage that a lot of these women will be in and go through. And I'm sure there's some that handle it very, very well. There's a lot of Vietnam vets that handle the PTSD very, very well.

But they still deal with some of those situations and some of the things that they face and they deal with. And so we as a church, we've got a reason and a responsibility to share with the watching world our belief system. An election is an endorsement of a belief system. That's all it is and all reality. It is an endorsement of a belief system. It's an endorsement of values that those people that you put into political office live by and will endorse themselves, will stand up for, will support, will vote for, will lobby for.

And so that's what we've got to realize that we've come to a place in the church where we don't want to talk about certain things because it might get people upset. As a youth pastor back in Indiana, I ran for a city council position and I won two terms. I spent seven and a half years, elected twice for the 75% majority and worked in a small a class three city. And I got to see how infrastructure works.

I sat on a water board, a border works in safety. I hired and fired police officers and fire department people. I dealt with contracts.

I helped write grants for millions of dollars. I got to see how the city works, you know, from the inside out. And I had people that were upset with me because, you know, I'm a pastor, I shouldn't be running for public office. I was able to do my work as a pastor. I also got to see how the community works. I believe I made my community a better community because I got involved.

I prayed about decisions. I got involved in those things. And it wasn't just me running for public office.

I was there to support my hometown, help my hometown stay afloat financially, make a difference in the community, bring things in, businesses and things for our kids and stuff like that. But I had people in the church world who were like, you know, Christians should not be doing that. Well, if we don't expect Christians to run for office, then we deserve what we get. Yeah, and you had actually had a dream, Pastor Dana, where—and I don't know this, but as you're talking through this, it's starting to make more sense to me—where you had had a dream where you saw judges were actually throwing Christians into prison. Like, if they believed that Jesus was the only way to get to heaven, or if they believed a certain lifestyle was wrong, or even if you believe abortion is a sin, that they were actually throwing Christians into prison. And you can see, I think it was Stu who had told me the other day, he said that the Supreme Court, the way that they are right now, they had kind of left it, they had thrown it back to the states to where you say, hey, if you believe that a certain lifestyle is wrong, even if you say, hey, look, I know nobody's perfect and stuff like that, but this is a sin where it can actually be considered hate speech, and it's a crime.

Yeah, and we see that in Canada. In Virginia right now, several churches have filed a lawsuit against the governor because of some of the policies that have been passed that will impact the LGBT community and will actually force churches to hire based on lifestyle. And, you know, as a Christian, as a pastor, I'm not going—let me say it this way. That's the line I'm not going to cross. I'm going to defend the territory of the fact that we have free speech in this country.

The church, biblically speaking, cannot endorse those kind of lifestyles as vital and virtuous or right. I can't do that as a pastor. And I get plenty of hate mail every single week. I get emails and letters that you cannot believe, that I better change my opinion about gay marriage, that I better change my opinion about gender identity, I better change my opinion about this or else.

I've given a stack of letters and emails to law enforcement to look at just as the dreams came out. But as a pastor, I've always held my ground. I believe in marriages between a man and a woman, period.

I believe that when you're born, you're born male or female, period. And I'm going to stand on that. And I realize eventually it's going to cause probably some great pain for my life, for my family, for my church. But because we've been silent for too long, and too many Christians who just said, Well, let's just get along.

It's not about getting along. We've got to preach to God. So I did see in those dreams, I saw judges telling pastors, leaders, and Christians, stop saying that last vow is wrong, stop saying this, stop doing that, whatever. And I saw persecution come into the church. Recently Perry Stone released a video. Well, you just sent me one, I think.

Yeah, I sent you the Perry Stone video. About the persecution coming to the church, it's just going to rock the nation in that sense. And so we need to be ready for that. That if we really love the Lord, we're not going to be afraid of the things that are coming. And you know, even around the world right now, the persecution that the church is facing, it's never come here. It's never come here. And for some reason, the American church has felt that we've been exempt because we give the missions, we support missionaries, and we build, we dig wells in Africa and whatever else we want to do. But it's coming, and it's going to come fast and hard. It's going to come fast and furious to us. And we're about to see a greater, faster division of the sheep and the goats we've ever seen in the church in America, because it's going to cost us something to be Christians. You know, the church in China has been praying for decades that God would allow persecution to come to the American church, because we have gotten cold and lame and lackadaisical. And so they're actually praying to send persecution to the American church to wake them up.

That's right. And so we're already on the verge of seeing those things happening, you know, right now. And the Supreme Court justice situation could play well into that. Certain election wins could play into that.

Certain people in certain positions of power, leadership, and authority could play into that. We also know that there's a lot of indictments that haven't been handed down yet in government level. We know there's a email scandal and a computer hard drive scandal with Hunter Biden, which could, you know, if that goes full blast, that could mean within two weeks of an election, you've got a Democratic presidential candidate whose name has to be removed off of that lit, and think, 36 million people have already voted.

Right. What happens if that scandal is so bad they have to remove him from the ballot? Can you imagine the cast that would throw into the election?

I'm not suggesting that's going to happen. But if the things that are in these emails, as they say, are as explosive as they could be, oh my goodness, it could throw the election on its head, you know. So that's where we are. I mean, even though it's crazy times, I'm really, I'm very excited about the times in which I live.

I've never seen America in the place that it's at. I've never seen the church being confronted with so many things at once, and understanding persecution is coming, opposition is here. We got to be willing to pray. And I'm encouraged by the number of people that I'm hearing from that are praying on a daily basis for the country. I've been praying on my Facebook page for about a little over a month now, and you know, praying for the month of October. And every day I'm having thousands and thousands of people who just join me for prayer for, you know, five or seven minutes.

That's right. And I'm hearing from almost every state, people from every state have prayed with me, people from other nations, people from all around the world. And people are praying around the world for our country because they understand how important the elections are. And I'll tell you, especially the people that are praying around the nations are Christians around the nations who are praying, because they understand that in some of those nations, America has been very good with supplies, with finances, with support, and with safety. And so there's some great things that God's not just waiting on the church to do.

He's waiting on the church up around the world. And I'm glad to be a part of that. Pretty exciting. It is.

And closing us out, we got about 20 seconds. I wanted to look up. It was John 12 25. It says, anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. And Pastor Dana Coverstone, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And we love to have you on, man. And we're looking forward to seeing what's going to happen. I think you said there was going to be a separation of the sheep and the goats.

I believe so. So thanks, Daniel. And it's always a pleasure to be with you guys. Okay. You too. Thank you. If not forgot. If not forgot. This is the Truth Network.