Sons of Issachar: August 5th, 2026

Written By Justin Scaggs

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

This was a week of deals almost made and systems quietly giving way. The Strait of Hormuz reached its hundred and fifty-seventh day closed, with two ships passing on Tuesday where seventy-three would pass on an ordinary day, while mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman carried proposals and the President said an agreement might come as early as today. America has now spent roughly eighty percent of its THAAD interceptors and two-thirds of its Patriots defending against Iran, and the bill for that arrived in Kyiv, where Russia fired twenty-four ballistic missiles and Ukraine shot down none of them, killing seventeen. At a border fence in North Africa more than seventy people died as tens of thousands crossed into a Spanish enclave in two days. In Gaza the President announced an agreement to disarm Hamas entirely, and the strikes continued while the parties argued over who moves first. Gunmen went house to house in a Nigerian village and killed thirty-one Christians, eleven of them children. Arizona's supreme court ruled that churches, not judges, decide what a confession is. And across three continents the heat began breaking infrastructure, from Romanian reactors starved of river water to Japanese earthquake shelters where the dying has continued after the shaking stopped. None of this proves a date. All of it answers the proverb: do not boast about tomorrow.

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1. Hormuz, day one hundred fifty-seven

The strait has now been closed for more than five months. On Tuesday two commercial ships made the passage, on a waterway that carries about seventy-three on an ordinary day, and those two moved in convoy under naval escort. War-risk insurance runs eight times its prewar cost. There was a real reopening once, under the memorandum signed on June 17, and traffic came through at a fraction of the norm on June 19 before the arrangement collapsed. Tehran calls the strait closed; the American military declines to use the word and points out that ships are still transiting. Both statements are technically defensible, which tells you most of what you need to know about the state of the thing.

American and Qatari officials reported progress toward restoring the ceasefire and reopening the channel, with Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman carrying proposals between Washington and Tehran like teenagers passing notes in class, and the President said a deal could come as early as today. He also approved canceling a planned strike on Iran yet again, citing the chance of an agreement, with American forces still on alert. Oil fell about two percent on the optimism alone. Read the fine print, though: Iran denies negotiating with the United States directly, and what Tehran is actually discussing with Oman is a temporary escorted lane rather than a reopened strait. Meanwhile British maritime authorities reported that an unidentified projectile struck a cargo vessel near Oman. Announcements are not yet arrivals, and a corridor is not a peace.

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. That is not cynicism about diplomacy, it is the reason to pray for it rather than merely to predict it. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Pray for the negotiators in Doha and Muscat and Islamabad, for the crews sitting at anchor waiting on other men's decisions, and for the households in poor countries who have paid for five months of a closed sea in the price of food.

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

"You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you." Isaiah 26:3, ESV

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2. The interceptor ledger, and a night over Kyiv

Here is a chain worth following all the way through, because the two ends of it are usually reported as separate stories. Defending against Iran has consumed roughly eighty percent of America's THAAD interceptors, from a prewar stock the Center for Strategic and International Studies put near four hundred fifty, and something close to two-thirds of its Patriot interceptors, leaving fewer than a thousand. Rebuilding those inventories takes years, not months, because the production lines are narrow and the components are specialized. Patriots are also the only weapon Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile.

So follow it to the other end. Overnight into Wednesday, Russia fired twenty-four ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region, along with four Zircon or Oniks missiles and a hundred and fifteen drones. Ukrainian air defenses shot down ninety-eight of the drones. They shot down none of the ballistic missiles. Seventeen people were killed and forty-four wounded, eight of them near a railway station outside Brovary, and the strikes hit a brewery, a construction warehouse, and a mail sorting office, with an ammonia leak complicating the rescue. Russia said it struck military logistics, which is its own claim about its own targeting and not an established fact. Five days earlier another barrage killed nine. Across one week, President Zelensky counted a hundred and forty-four missiles and nearly two thousand drones against sixteen regions, and said plainly that the shortage of interceptors is what leaves the cities open.

None of this makes the prioritization of the defense of American forces by American systems wrong. It does mean the accounting is not finished when the last Iranian missile is intercepted. Magazines are finite, factories are slow, and a shortage in one theater of war becomes a funeral in another. The offensive side of the ledger is thinner still. Reuters reported this week that five months of war have consumed virtually all of the Army's stock of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, the surface-to-surface weapons fired from mobile launchers at ranges of a hundred and ninety and three hundred miles, at about a million dollars apiece, along with close to half the Tomahawk inventory. Four hundred Tomahawks went out in seventy-two hours during a single March operation, roughly a tenth of the entire American stock. Replacing one runs about four years from order to delivery, which sounds absurd until you learn why. It is not that the missile is slow to assemble. The supply chain is specialized and the production line has been running cold for years on low-volume orders, so what takes four years is the restart. The practical consequence is plain enough: targets that could have been struck from a safe distance will now need manned bombers over them. The White House disputes the assessment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is not given to alarm, put it carefully in April, that there is enough left to finish this war with Iran under any plausible scenario and the real risk is the next one, with rebuilding measured at one to four years. Japan has already been told its four hundred Tomahawks may arrive late because of this war.

And Iran is not spending its stock at random. Analysts tracking the campaign describe a deliberate tiering: the older, cheaper missiles go first in large saturating salvos, while the newer Fattah 2, which carries a hypersonic glide vehicle, is held back for higher-value targets. The Kheibar Shekan, inexpensive to build and now among the weapons most often fired at American bases, is flown on varied trajectories at varied speeds with maneuvering warheads and drones alongside it, precisely so that each incoming round forces the defenders to launch more than one interceptor. Notice the arithmetic that creates. A single THAAD interceptor costs more than fifteen million dollars. Iran can lose every missile in a salvo and still come out ahead on the exchange, because the magazine being emptied is ours.

And here the public numbers and the intelligence numbers do not match, which is itself the story. The President has said Iran's missiles are mostly decimated and that Tehran retains perhaps eighteen or nineteen percent of what it had. A Central Intelligence Agency assessment delivered to his own administration in mid May put it at about seventy percent of the pre-war missile stockpile and seventy-five percent of the mobile launchers, and found that Iran had reopened most of its underground storage sites, repaired damaged missiles, and begun assembling new ones. Israel, which is a party to the war and has an interest in the answer, has claimed it destroyed half.

That May assessment is the last authoritative public number, and three months is a long time in a war like this one. Some of what has happened since would push the figure up: Iran kept building, and its rate of fire stayed about ninety percent below where it started, which is what husbanding looks like rather than exhaustion. Some would push it down: the campaign that resumed on July 7 ran eleven consecutive nights and widened from the coast into western and central Iran. We do not know where the number sits today, and on the public record neither does anyone else. What we can say is that the last time American intelligence put a figure on it, that figure was seventy percent remaining, and the President's public number was off from his own agency's by roughly a factor of four. So the picture is not that we are running dry while Iran runs dry with us. It is that we are burning interceptors and cruise missiles that take years to replace, against an adversary his own intelligence service says is still holding most of its arsenal and building more. China can do that arithmetic as easily as we can.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. The psalm is not against air defense; it is against the belief that any magazine is deep enough to be our security. O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed. Pray for Kyiv's dead and their families, for crews working an ammonia leak in the dark, and for the nations deciding who gets the next interceptor off the line.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

"O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more." Psalm 10:17-18, ESV

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3. Seventy-two dead at a border fence in two days

On July 30 and 31 something happened at Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the North African coast, that has no recent parallel. Somewhere around sixty thousand people crossed from Morocco in roughly forty-eight hours, and Spain later told European ministers the figure may have reached seventy-two thousand. By August 2 at least seventy-two were confirmed dead on the Spanish side and eleven more on the Moroccan side, with later Spanish briefings putting the toll higher still. They drowned swimming around the breakwater, or were crushed against it. Within four days roughly sixty-nine thousand had gone back to Morocco, most of them voluntarily, because Ceuta's status means arrival there is not arrival in Spain or in Europe. Spain has since installed a floating barrier offshore.

How it happened is contested. Spain blames trafficking networks that spread word of a Supreme Court ruling barring the immediate return of migrants who arrive by sea without due process. Morocco says criminal groups drove it and denies that its own government intended any of it. Several European governments point to video of truckloads of young men apparently organized and ferried toward the border, which if true would make this a state using human beings as leverage, and Spain has leveled that exact charge at Morocco before, in 2021. What is documented this time is that Moroccan forces were working both directions: water cannon against crowds still pressing toward the fence, and, according to a Spanish government source, Moroccan authorities blocking their own nationals from moving along the beach. Photographs circulating of Moroccan soldiers stoning citizens trying to go home have not been corroborated by any news organization, and in an age when anyone can generate a photograph, one image from an anonymous account is not a trustworthy fact. What is not in dispute is Europe's response. Twenty-two member states called for coordinated action, Italy suspended passport-free travel with Spain, and Spain's prime minister called Europe's answer selfish.

Two duties sit here and they are not the same duty, so we should not blur them. A government may lawfully control its borders. Paul told the Athenians that God himself determined the times and the boundaries of the nations, so a border is not an offense against heaven, and Spain deciding who enters is not wickedness. The church's assignment is different and more specific: the person in the water is our neighbor whatever his paperwork says, and seventy-two people drowned or crushed against a seawall is not a policy debate to us before it is a tragedy. Both things are true at once, and a Christian who can only hold one of them is holding half.

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And the King will say, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Pray for the families of the more than eighty dead on both sides of that fence, for the rescuers who pulled bodies off a breakwater, for Ceuta's residents whose small city was overwhelmed, and for governments to make policy that is both lawful and humane, which is harder than either alone.

"When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me," Matthew 25:35, ESV

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4. A deal to disarm Hamas, and the strikes that followed

On July 30 the President announced that his Board of Peace had reached an agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and every other armed faction in Gaza. What counts as a weapon is not settled, and that gap is not small: nobody has said publicly whether personal rifles stay in the homes that hold them, or whether rocket-propelled grenades and mortars go into the same pile as the rockets. The terms as described are still serious: an eight-month phased handover of weapons to a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, after which Israel withdraws and an international stabilization force takes over alongside a new Palestinian police force. That is the framework whose first two hundred troops Israel's security cabinet approved last week, so this is a real thread and not an announcement out of nowhere.

Then came the sequencing, where these things usually die. Hamas says Israel must withdraw from parts of Gaza first. An Israeli official answered that there will be no withdrawal from the yellow line until Hamas is disarmed and the strip demilitarized. Reporting suggests the Prime Minister will not publicly oppose the deal, calculating instead that Hamas will break it, and that he will not order a withdrawal before October's elections in any case. Meanwhile the strikes did not pause for the announcement. Palestinian officials reported at least twenty-six killed over one weekend, and Gaza held a mass funeral for a hundred and twelve bodies finally recovered from a 2023 strike site.

The northern front moved the same way. On August 5 Israel ordered residents of Mansouri in southern Lebanon to move a kilometer north and then struck, saying Hezbollah had blatantly violated the ceasefire, which is Israel's characterization and not an independently established finding. Lebanon's health ministry said a strike on Tebnine killed one person and wounded twelve. All of this happened while Lebanese and Israeli negotiators sat in Rome discussing withdrawal and Hezbollah's disarmament. The pattern is consistent enough now to name: the table and the target list are running at the same time, and the people under the flight path are not at either.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. For my brothers and companions' sake I will say, Peace be within you. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Pray for the hostages and their families, for Gazan families burying the recovered dead of a strike three years old, for villagers in Mansouri and Tebnine given an hour to leave, and for negotiators in Rome to close what men in the field keep reopening.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you! Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!" Psalm 122:6-7, ESV

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

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5. In Nigeria they went house to house

On Sunday gunmen entered a village in Kaduna State and killed about thirty Christians, and reporting published August 4 put the week's toll across Nigeria's Middle Belt at thirty-one. Twenty-one of the dead belonged to a Catholic parish and nine to the Evangelical Church Winning All. Nine men, ten women, and eleven children. The youngest was three years old. The oldest was eighty-seven. A former local councillor described what happened in one sentence that does not need any help from us: they were going from house to house, shooting. Survivors say the army was asked to come and did not come in time, and that police arrived after it was over.

We reported last week that at least two thousand five hundred and fifty Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first hundred and eighty days of this year, roughly fourteen a day. This is what one of those days looks like from the inside, with the ages written down. We keep printing these because a number that large quickly stops being human and becomes an abstraction, and a three-year-old and an eighty-seven-year-old killed in the same house do not.

They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food, the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth. Asaph prayed that in the psalms and God did not rebuke him for it. Weep with those who weep. Pray for eleven families in Kaduna burying children this week, for the wounded and the hidden, for pastors who will hold funerals and then hold services, and for a Nigerian government that will do the one thing God assigned it and protect its people.

"They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food, the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth. They have poured out their blood like water all around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them." Psalm 79:2-3, ESV

"Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Romans 12:15, ESV

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6. Arizona rules that churches decide what a confession is

This one belongs to us more directly than most things we print, so we are going to state it plainly. On July 30 the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously that clergy may withhold what they learn about child abuse in a confession or confidential communication when they judge nondisclosure reasonable and necessary within their religion, and that the First Amendment generally bars courts and juries from second-guessing that judgment absent fraud or collusion for secular ends. In practice churches, not judges, now define what counts as a confession under Arizona's mandatory reporting law.

The facts underneath the ruling are ugly and should not be skipped. A man named Paul Adams told Mormon bishops that he was sexually abusing his daughter. He told a bishop, and told it again with the bishop's wife present, and told it again before a disciplinary council. Nobody called the authorities. The abuse continued. Three of his children sued in 2020, and this ruling affirms judgment for the church. The court was careful to add that religious institutions have no general immunity from secular law, and survivors' advocates were not comforted by the distinction.

There is a real principle on the other side, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: the confessional seal is ancient, priests have gone to prison rather than break it, and a state that can compel a pastor to testify about what was told to him in repentance has acquired something dangerous. But a legal right is not a moral permission, and this ruling settles what a church may be sued for, not what a church should do. Our own answer should be settled in advance and out loud: when a child is being harmed, we call the police. Whatever protection the courts extend to us, we do not want it for this.

Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. That is the Lord's sentence on this subject and He did not soften it. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Pray for the Adams children and every survivor whose church chose its process over their safety, for elders and pastors who will face this and must not hesitate, and that our churches would be the safest rooms a child can walk into.

"Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:5-6, ESV

"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known." Luke 12:2, ESV

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7. A hundred billion dollars back, and who can actually claim it

In February the Supreme Court ruled six to three that the emergency-powers statute never authorized tariffs, and we covered the sequel in July when the same duties came back through older laws Congress had actually written. This week the money started moving. Customs has now refunded roughly a hundred billion dollars of the about one hundred sixty-six billion collected under the invalidated program, close to sixty percent, processed through a system built in late April that had taken more than two hundred fifty thousand refund declarations by July 31.

The detail worth digging in on is who gets it. Only the importer of record can file a claim, which means the refund flows to the company whose name was on the customs paperwork, generally a large importer. The small business that paid the higher price down the chain has no mechanism to recover anything, and the customer who paid the higher shelf price is further out still. So the tax was collected broadly and is being returned narrowly. That is not a scandal and nobody appears to have schemed it; it is how the plumbing was built. It is still worth noticing, because a refund that reaches only the top of the chain leaves the burden exactly where it fell and calls it made right.

Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate, for the LORD will plead their cause. Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, to turn aside the needy from justice. Neither text is about tariff refund mechanics, and both are about who ends up bearing what. Give thanks for courts that made the government give money back, and pray for lawmakers to notice the small importer at the end of the chain who has no form to file.

"Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate, for the LORD will plead their cause and rob of life those who rob them." Proverbs 22:22-23, ESV

"Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey!" Isaiah 10:1-2, ESV

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8. The heat is breaking things

Follow the water and you can watch a heat wave turn into an electricity problem. On August 3 Romanian naval engineers detonated a hundred and eighty kilograms of explosives in the Danube to clear rock from a channel feeding the Cernavoda nuclear plant, so they could build a temporary dam and push cooling water toward the country's last operating reactor. Record-low river levels had already forced another Romanian reactor offline. In Hungary the Paks plant, which normally supplies close to half the country's electricity, ran below half capacity, and officials said voluntary conservation cut demand by seven hundred megawatts in a single day. Reactors need river water to shed heat. When the river drops, the lights get expensive and the air conditioning stops running.

The same pattern showed up as fire and as illness. European fire weather from January through July ran forty-three percent more severe than the twenty-year average, with about one million and seventy-five thousand acres burned across roughly fourteen hundred fires, triple the usual area; France has already set a full-year national record and three firefighters died in Greece. In Spokane, Washington, wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced close to a quarter of the city. South Korea recorded one hundred eight and a half degrees Fahrenheit at Yangsan on August 2, the highest in a hundred and twenty-two years of observation, with sixteen dead and more than two thousand treated since May, and Seoul issued its first severe heat warning under a new system while crews checked on sixty-three thousand vulnerable residents.

And in Kumamoto the dying continued after the shaking stopped. The July 28 earthquake has now killed thirty-eight with a hundred and fourteen injured, including seven in an explosion at a shopping mall and eight at a paper mill. A woman in her seventies was found dead of apparent heatstroke while sheltering in her car, likely the first death caused by the disaster rather than by the quake itself. Water mains are broken and the power for air conditioning is out, in the hottest part of a Japanese summer, with thousands still in shelters. Officials expect the toll to rise. That is worth saying carefully, and carefully cuts both ways. The creation is groaning, and Paul says so plainly in Romans, but that groaning has been the condition of the whole created order since the fall and it is not a dated signal. Scripture does give us one specific water sign, the drying up of the great river Euphrates to prepare the way for the kings from the east, and a shrinking Danube in a Romanian August is not that. Not yet, and possibly not ever in our lifetimes. What this is, is heat, and old bodies, and broken pipes, and it kills people quietly for weeks after the cameras leave.

Since we have said what this is not, it is worth setting the number beside the text so nobody has to take our word for it. The world now runs about two and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the late eighteen hundreds, while the entire natural swing of the previous two thousand years was closer to one degree. That is genuinely unusual and worth taking seriously. It is also nothing like the fourth bowl of Revelation, where an angel is given power to scorch men with fire and they curse God by name and refuse to repent. Scorching human skin takes radiant heat rather than warm air, and the rise required runs from about ten degrees at the very low end to something nearer ninety, not two and a half. The bowl is also poured out on people rather than on the planet, which is not how a climate behaves at all. A thing can be genuinely abnormal without being promoted to a sign.

One practical note, because this is something a congregation can actually use. The number that kills is not the one on the thermometer. It is the wet-bulb temperature, which combines heat and humidity and tells you whether sweat can still cool a body. Above about eighty on that scale, the elderly and the sick and people working outdoors are in real danger. At about eighty-eight a healthy adult is past the limit. At ninety-five a man sitting in the shade with all the water he wants will die in roughly six hours, because evaporation has stopped working altogether. And here is the part worth carrying: in humid air the wet-bulb number climbs nearly to the air temperature, so a muggy ninety-five degree afternoon is far deadlier than a dry hundred and ten. That is precisely why heat kills quietly in Kumamoto shelters and across the humid South rather than in the desert, and why the forecast that sounds mild is often the one to watch. If your weather station reports a wet-bulb reading and it crosses eighty, that is the afternoon to go knock on doors.

Joseph told Pharaoh to find a discerning man and store the grain in the years of plenty, and that counsel is in Scripture because foresight is a form of love. The LORD is your keeper; the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. Pray for evacuees in Kumamoto shelters, for outdoor workers and elderly neighbors in Korea and southern Europe, for firefighters in Greece and Spokane, and for engineers keeping reactors cool on a shrinking river. Then go check on somebody old who lives alone, and do it on the muggy days, not only the hot ones.

"Now therefore let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years. And let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine." Genesis 41:33-36, ESV

"The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night." Psalm 121:5-6, ESV

"The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory." Revelation 16:8-9, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Pray for the mediators in Doha, Muscat, and Islamabad, and for an agreement that actually opens the strait rather than announcing that it will. Pray for crews waiting at anchor on other men's decisions, and for families who have paid for five closed months in the price of bread.

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

Pray for the seventeen killed over Kyiv and the forty-four wounded, for the rescue crews who worked an ammonia leak in the dark, and for Ukrainian families under a sky their defenses cannot reach. Ask the Lord who hears the desire of the afflicted to end this war before the next shortage becomes another funeral.

"O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear" Psalm 10:17, ESV

Pray for the families of the more than eighty who died at Ceuta, for those who recovered bodies from the breakwater, and for the residents of a small city overwhelmed in two days. Pray for governments to guard their borders lawfully and treat every person at them as an image-bearer, and for a church that refuses to choose only one of those.

"You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:34, ESV

Pray that the disarmament framework survives its own sequencing, for the hostages still held, for Gazan families burying dead recovered after three years, and for villagers in southern Lebanon ordered from their homes at an hour's notice. Ask God to make peacemakers of the men in Rome.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

Pray for the families in Kaduna burying eleven children this week, for the wounded and those who fled into the bush, and for pastors holding funerals and then services. Ask the Lord to move the Nigerian state to protect its citizens, and keep us from letting a number this large go numb.

"Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Romans 12:15, ESV

Pray for the Adams children and for every survivor whose church protected its process instead of them. Pray for pastors and elders who will one day hear such a confession, that they will not hesitate, and that our congregation would be the safest room a child can walk into.

"but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:6, ESV

Give thanks for courts that can compel a government to return what it took unlawfully. Pray for small businesses that paid the cost down the chain and have no way to claim it back, and for lawmakers with the patience to fix plumbing that quietly favors the largest party in the room.

"Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate," Proverbs 22:22, ESV

Pray for evacuees still in Kumamoto shelters where the heat is now the danger, for elderly neighbors and outdoor workers in Korea and southern Europe, for firefighters in Greece and Spokane, and for engineers keeping reactors cool on a shrinking river. Then go check on somebody old who lives alone, and do it on the muggy days, not only the hot ones.

"The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand." Psalm 121:5, ESV

Maranatha,
Sims Corner Church

Justin Scaggs https://simscornerchurch.com
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Sons of Issachar: July 29th, 2026