A Prayer for Renewal
Pray that the Church Would Live up to Its Spiritual Status as Victors in Christ Over Sin
Jeremiah refers to the Lord’s people’s “crown” (Lamentations 5:16). The crown was their exclusive privileges in church and state, which they had beyond other people on the earth. God’s people are a royal people beyond all nations. All others are drudges to their own lusts, but God’s people are kings and conquerors, triumphing over principalities and powers, the world, and their own lusts and passions.
Use your spiritual privileges then, and be a crowned king over all that opposes you. Otherwise the royal crown will be taken off your head and you will be made an outcast. “The crown is fallen from our head” (verse 16). Of all men the most contemptible are you whom God would lift up and yet you are determined to make yourself base. Therefore, enjoy your kingship over sin, Satan, the world and your own lusts, in order that one day a crown of perfect gold may be set on your head.
Pray for a True Sense of Sin
The Lord’s people in Jeremiah’s time said, “Woe unto us, for we have sinned” (verse 16). Here they acknowledge that sin was the cause of all their misery and disgrace. Sin is the cause of all the trouble that comes on us. It defaces all our privileges and makes a people the tail and not the head (Deut. 28:44). If it was not for sin, God’s people would not need to lose their blessedness with anything.
The church cries, “Woe to us that we have sinned,” and not, “Woe unto us that we are miserable.” Sin is a greater evil than any misery, if only we were conscious of it, for we may blame ourselves and our sins for all our misery and for the feeling of our misery. Misery should turn all our grief against sin. If you tend to cry, “Woe is me because of my affliction,” learn to say instead, “Woe is me because of my sin.” Be more sorry for sin than for the judgment it has drawn down on you.
Pray for an Appropriate Dread of the Consequences of Our Personal and Collective Sin
“For this our heart is faint,” they say (verse 17). The reason for their grief and faintness of heart is both that God’s temple, which was the place of their comfort, is laid low and desolate and waste, and also that they were the ones who had moved God to cast it down. Now it has become a den for foxes and other wild animals. It shows that people’s sins not only draw wrath on themselves but also on the church and commonwealth of which they are members. So, in order not to bring a plague on church and state, put away sin.
Pray for a Sympathetic Attitude for the Troubled Church
Their grief is “because of Zion” (verse 18). We should be more grieved for the church drawn on by sin than for any other cause. The church’s grief should go nearer our heart than our own. If we lay God’s glory to heart, we will be more grieved for the evils that have come upon the church than anything that can happen to ourselves.
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Lies We Shouldn’t Have Told Our Children
If people are basically good, then why crime? Why do we need prisons? Some of our most fairytale cities have been trying to live without police to enforce the law. It’s not going so well. In fact, if people are basically good, why do we even need law? I think we can make a case that most people are basically nice — if they’ve been raised by decent, loving parents they pretty much seem nice, but nice isn’t the same as good. If we want our children to be wise and safe then we better tell them the truth about original sin — “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” — way short.
Well, Santa Claus for one — the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the Great Pumpkin, etc., but none of those are as damaging as others that we have consistently pounded into our kids’ thinking. Let’s look at some of them:
1) You can become anything you want to be. Theoretically that’s nice. We want our kids to dream, to reach for the stars. We fail, however, because we don’t finish the lesson. We don’t point out that there are some limits. Why should a person like myself (I have a singing range of about three notes and very little control over which of those notes I hit.) spend her life trying to be a singer? Shouldn’t reality appear here somewhere?
We don’t really want our kids to spend their lives banging their heads against impossibilities. That’s why this hairbrained idea of transsexualism has caught on. After all, if you can be whatever you want to be, there’s no reason a young man’s urge to strut in stilettos shouldn’t be entirely fulfilled. Right? One way to test an idea is to stretch it to its extremes and if it still holds up, it may be valid. Obviously, we can toss this one on the ash heap.
2) You should make the world a better place. What’s wrong with that? For one, it’s impossible. We can each make an effort to make our own little patch of society as pleasant and productive as possible, but change the world? That’s a tall order. It’s also way too vague to be useful. What is “better?” By whose standards? How do we define “the world?” How much of the world? For how long? At whose expense? What do we mean by “change?” And, most importantly, who will be in charge?How many human beings have successfully made this world better? Jesus Christ, definitely. The heroes listed in Hebrews 11? Yes, but most of them had no idea at the time that that was what they were doing. They tried to live and maintain a relationship with God, but mostly they got in trouble.
We can say that whoever invented the wheel did the world a service. Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line certainly made life easier and more fun. Does that count as an improvement? Steve Jobs and Bill Gates certainly changed the world, but is it better? They certainly changed things as fundamentally as Gutenberg did, but is it better? Can’t we just raise our kids to work honestly and productively, to marry and raise a family and pay their debts and be generally kind to others?
3) You are the product of blind, random mutations. You have no purpose or meaning. That’s a doozy — especially when we couple it with the last lie. We accept without thinking what a profound effect that has on kids.
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The Pitfalls of Faith Plus Works
When we stand before the Lord, there is only one to whom we will point for our acceptance before God: Jesus Christ. He fulfilled the law that we could not, paid our debt on the cross, and credits his righteousness to our account. Even when we experience significant sanctification in this life through the work of the Holy Spirit, we will never point to our righteousness as the basis for our salvation. Remember, even the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other ungodly men gave God credit for his righteousness and all his works, yet he walked away unjustified (Luke 18:9-14).
Those who teach that works must be added to faith as a condition for salvation can never tell you when you have done enough. This fact alone exposes why you will never find assurance of salvation in their systems. The problems with believing our right standing before God is a result of Christ’s work, plus our merit are innumerable, but the inability of its proponents to answer the question, “How much work is enough?” exposes its destructive effect on the hearts of those who adhere to it.
I refer to the effects of this doctrine as destructive because there are only two possible responses to imbibing this theology, and neither is edifying. The first is bondage to pride. Someone who is blind to their sinfulness will begin to rejoice in their goodness. After all, they are contributing some merit to their salvation. Jesus has not done it all, so there is room for boasting. The second response is bondage to constant anxiety. Anyone awake to their corruption will tend in this direction. They will strive and struggle but will never find themselves able to rest in Christ because, as long as they live, Christ’s work will never be sufficient, and their work will never be complete.
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Lessons from the Fall
The Lord will not allow the work that He begins in His people to be overthrown even by the most severe attacks of our enemy. And when His children fall, He is willing and able to restore them as they turn from their sin and trust Him for forgiveness.
The Gospels depict the arrest and trial of Jesus in a way that shows us not only the insensibility of His accusers, but also His own steadfast faithfulness to the will of God through suffering and humiliation. Our Lord’s example shows us how to continue entrusting ourselves to Him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23; 4:19).
Jesus, however, was not the only one who was on trial on this momentous occasion. The gospel writers highlight the events surrounding His abuse and trumped up charges, but they also record another trial that took place that night. This second trial was not center stage; rather, it took place in the shadow, not before the immediate presence of Caiphas the high priest, but in the outer courtyard of his residence.
This other trial does not give us any examples to follow, but it is filled with lessons about sin and grace. At the very time that Jesus was humbly enduring abuse and scorn by trusting His Father, Peter was failing miserably as his own faith was being tried.
The facts of Peter’s fall are well known to those who are familiar with the New Testament. All four Gospels tell the story in detailed ways.
Matthew reports that as Jesus was being taken to the high priest, “Peter was following him at a distance” (26:58). As He was being interrogated and abused inside, Peter “was sitting outside in the courtyard” (v. 69) when his own trial began to unfold.
It started with a comment directed to him by a servant girl: “You also were with Jesus the Galilean,” which he resolutely denied (vv. 69–70). As he headed for the door another servant girl made the same observation, and then some bystanders cast doubt over his denials when they commented that his accent gave him away.
Peter’s anger rises with his fear, and the third time he is confronted about knowing Jesus he punctuates his disavowal of “the man” with curses (v. 74). He failed miserably, just as Jesus had warned him that he would.
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