MK Gantt Ministries

Your house is beautiful. It is the envy of the neighborhood with its immaculately manicured landscaping and magnificent canopy trees framing the house like a Thomas Kinkade painting. With great attention to detail you have provided a stunning presentation of your home. You have purchased the highest quality siding money can buy. It has every accouterment available for your “Good Housekeeping” showpiece. 

New carpet and the most expensive hardwood flooring have been installed throughout the house. The walls have been professionally painted and papered so that every room is bright and appealing, each one complimenting the others. No discount warehouse furniture sits in this house. Every piece is coordinated and top-of-the-line. Your home boasts a state-of-the-art security system, and high speed internet reaches every room, including the pool house and toolshed. 

You have spared no expense to ensure you have a house that will be admired by all as they drive by and filled with oohs and aahs as dinner guests arrive. At Christmas, your family decorates with the utmost care. There are no gaudy or garish inflatable Clauses on the lawn, no plywood reindeer on the roof. No, your home is impeccably decorated with pristine care. 

This house, this home, is your pride and joy but . . . it is infected with termites. 

These tiny, destructive insects are relentlessly gnawing away at your home, devouring it from the inside out. This is a home invasion of the worst kind as these tiny monsters secretly bore into support beams, weakening the roof rafters and causing the floor to sag. These diminutive beasts work into the timbers that span the foundations. You try all the home remedies, spraying from aerosol cans and setting off “bug bombs” in the basement, but evidence of their destruction remains. If you don’t take drastic action, you will lose your home. It will fall down, no longer able to support itself. All that will remain of the “pride of the neighborhood” will be little more than an ugly pile of sawdust. Uninhabitable, it will be a blight on the neighborhood over which it once reigned. 

New siding won’t help. More paint will only cover up the ongoing destruction. New, more expensive furniture and new carpet will not support the weakened roof. Upgraded wiring and higher speed internet will do nothing to repel the relentless invasion of your precious home. 

Finally, you accept the inevitable . . . you call for the experts. Neighbors watch with curiosity through their windows as the trucks roar by. A massive crane plows into the yard, cutting huge ruts into your immaculately trimmed lawn and crushing your azalea bushes. Your shame mounts as neighbors drive slowly past your home, pointing at the huge truck in the driveway marked with large garish letters, “FUMIGATION SERVICES.”  An army of men trample through your home, their heavy boots leaving deep tracks in your luxurious carpet. They seal up the windows and doors with heavy caulking and run strips of tape over every seam and joint. Outside, men in a bucket suspended from the crane drop a series of heavy tarps over the roof, eventually encasing the entire house. They lay sandbags around the perimeter, ensuring that nothing can get in and nothing can get out. It is difficult to watch, but you understand it must be done. 

A hose is dragged from one of the trucks and inserted into a valve at the base of the tarp. The whine of a pump and the noticeable inflation of the tarp that covers your home tells you that the fumigation process has begun. The gas being pumped into your house is odorless, colorless, and deadly. The heavy gas flows into your beautiful house, across the carpet and up the walls and stairs. It fills the basement and climbs to the attic, filling every nook and corner of your home, penetrating deep into the wooden trusses and floor supports. It is on a search and destroy mission. It is relentless in its search for termites –– not to drive them out but to kill every ravenous insect that has invaded your precious home. 

When the job is done, the tarps are removed and the windows and doors are unsealed. The tide of destruction has ended, and the work of repairing the damage can begin. No superficial covering up has been carried out here; no minor redecorating would have sufficed. The suffocating gas has done its job; the enemy has been destroyed. Only now can the carpenters, painters, plumbers, and roofers move in to repair and restore so that the house will again be inhabitable. 

The United States of America does not need remodeling or new furniture. New siding and fresh landscaping will not address the issues that plague our nation, threatening its destruction. Our roof is falling in and our foundations are collapsing. An election just moves the furniture  around –– a new president, a few new senators and representatives, and perhaps new appointments to the Supreme Court. There may be new siding, but the same old rotten timbers are once again hidden from sight. 

America is in need of fumigation. We need to cover the whole matter with a huge tarp of intercession and fill it with the smoke of the prayers of the saints. Powerful, unrelenting prayer will search and destroy every last demonic “termite” that has infested our land. Politicians and parties are siding and furniture, carpet and paint. Changing them does not deal with the infestation that has bored deep into our foundations and is consuming us from the inside out. We are facing a demonic infestation at the very core of who we are as a people; an infestation that has eaten its way into our morals, our values, our very sensibilities.

Prayers have always been typified in the Scriptures as incense or the smoke of incense. Remember the plague that God sent upon the Hebrews because of their sin? The High Priest, Aaron, is seen running from the Tabernacle, carrying a censer in which he had placed incense and coals from the altar. As Aaron stood “between the living and the dead,” waving the censer, the plague stopped. (Numbers 16:48). 

There was nothing political or systemic in this act. There were no elections, debates, compromises, or negotiations. This was an act of a single man placing himself in the face of God and crying out for mercy for a nation. The people of Israel were going to die and rot in the desert, but for this desperate act of intercession. In the face of judgment, intercession was employed to save the nation. 

The psalmist writes: “May my prayer be set before you like incense.” (Psalm 141:2)

In preparation for use in the tabernacle, the elements of the incense that would be used on the altar were pounded with a pestle or hammer before they could be used. The process in the preparation of the incense adds to the imagery the idea of brokenness or contrition. American pride will not serve us in the ministry of intercession as we must come before God in humility and sorrow for our sins. As long as we continue to defend ourselves in spite of our sins, our prayers will go unheard in heaven. The incense that rises to God does so in acknowledgement of our guilt and is married to a plea for mercy.  

My good friend Peter Lundell has said, “Instead of asking God to bless me, I choose to be a person whom God is pleased to bless.”

When intercessors pray, the Bible tells us that the prayers ascend, like smoke, to the throne of God where Jesus sits at His right hand interceding for us. Jesus sits on the Throne of Grace, and those who seek Him do so in desperate need of His grace in their lives. There is no merit there, there is no excuse there, and there is no “earned it” there. As a nation, we are in desperate need for the grace of God to fall upon us. We deserve God’s wrath, we need God’s grace; but we are kept from that grace by our great national pride.

This is taken from my book CRY MERCY, Chapter 5: Fumigate