And the Lord said to him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”
– Ezekiel 9:4
Did you get that picture? God just told Ezekiel to put a mark on the foreheads of people who are sighing and groaning over sins that are being committed in Jerusalem. There’s a differentiation here between some people. Most people actually, who are not sighing and groaning over the sins of the people. And then, there’s some who are so burdened by the sin that they see around that they are sighing and groaning over it.
I read this and I can’t help but to think in my own life and to ask us, if God were to send someone throughout your city or my city to do this, to go throughout the city and identify who’s sighing and groaning, burdened to the point of heartbroken weeping over sin that you see in your own life or sin that you see in the lives of people around you. I asked that question and I’m immediately convicted that that description of sighing and groaning over sin doesn’t describe my life as much as it ought to.
Ezekiel 9:4 Leads Us to Confess Our Sin
I’ll start this prayer just with confession. God, I confess that I’m too complacent with sin in my own life and sin in the world around me. I feel too desensitized to it, that it doesn’t shock me and it doesn’t lead me to sigh and groan as it ought. I pray, in my own life and to the extent anyone else is in the same boat with me. We pray that you would cause our hearts to break over sin in our lives. God, help us to hate sin in our lives, to not be casual with it. But to run from it, to flee from it, to pursue holiness with passion. When we sin to be broken over it, to seriously and soberly confess it, receive your grace and turn from it.
God, we pray that you would cause our hearts to grieve over idols around us. Idols of sex and success and money and wealth and fame and comfort and work and sports. And so many things that people are giving affections to over and above you. Again, even ways that we’re prone to do the same. God, turn our hearts away from idols. Cause us to weep over idols in the world around us and the immorality that flows from idolatry.
Praying for Unreached People in Morocco
God, please mark our heads as men and women, as students, as children, whoever’s listening to this. Mark us as people who sigh and groan over sin in us and around us. In ways that cause us to turn from it and to turn others from it, to lead others away from sin. God, we pray for Rif Berbers in Morocco, a couple million of them.
So few followers of Jesus. I think about being in Morocco at one point and meeting one believer in a sea. In a mountainside, full of people where so few of them had even heard the gospel. This one believer in the midst of them, God bless him. You know who I’m thinking of right now. God, please bless him for the spread of the gospel through him.
God, we pray, make us people who are groaning over men and women who’ve never heard the gospel. Who are sighing over that, who are praying and pleading for them and doing whatever you call us to do to reach them with the gospel. God make us Ezekiel 9:4 kind of people. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
