Tuesday morning, sorry so late: Did you remember to Pray for Pastor Steve Wilkins?

O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,
lest like a lion they tear my soul apart,
rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.

O Lord my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust. Selah

Arise, O Lord, in your anger;
lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you;
over it return on high.

The Lord judges the peoples;
judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous—
you who test the minds and hearts,
O righteous God!
My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day.

If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and readied his bow;
he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief
and gives birth to lies.
He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole that he has made.
His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends.

I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.

4 thoughts on “Tuesday morning, sorry so late: Did you remember to Pray for Pastor Steve Wilkins?

  1. al

    Mark, you may have seen that I responded to Jeff Hutchinson’s question on imprecatory Psalms by saying that I do not think we should pray them against Christians.

    Do you take David’s prayers for judgment to fall on Saul and Absalom as your basis for doing so today? I am trying to work through this.

    Thanks and God bless,

    al sends

    Reply
  2. mark Post author

    Al, I never “rewrite” the Psalms with personal applications and names of people I know. I don’t know if it would be wrong or right. I just don’t do it.

    I do think that many of the Psalms are written for people who are being persecuted and falsely accused by powers in the Church.

    I have not quoted from a Psalm in every case and will be using other kinds of passages in the future.

    Reply
  3. Christopher Witmer

    Imprecatory praying is also self-imprecatory. We are not asking God to put a voodoo curse on anyone, and we are not in the position of having the equivalent of a voodoo curse put on us if we are the ones who are in the wrong when we make such prayers.

    Also, I don’t think there is always a clear-cut demarcation between “imprecatory” prayer and “non-imprecatory” prayer in the Bible. We pray as is appropriate for the situation. You don’t have to call it imprecatory prayer if you don’t want to, but it certainly seems appropriate to me in this situation to borrow the sorts of language that David used in his confrontations with Saul and Absalom. As I have pointed out elsewhere, when David prayed those prayers, he was praying with regard to 1) people who were very clearly in the Covenant, and 2) people whose status as hell-bound reprobrates was by no means obvious.

    Reply

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