He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments.
– Psalm 78:6
This is one of my favorite places in the Bible to go to pray for the next generation, to pray for my kids and children in the church, family that I’m a part of, and just the next generation in general.
We have a responsibility to pass the gospel on the good works of God, the good Word of God, on to the generation that comes behind us. So there’s a lot we could pray according to Psalm 78, just generally, but I want us to pray specifically in light of this phrase in Psalm 78:6, the children yet unborn.
Psalm 78:6 encourages us to pray on behalf of the unborn.
So there’s a picture here of a longing for children who are yet to be born, to know how good God is. And at least in my country, as well as many other countries in the world, there are many children yet unborn who are in their mother’s wombs, whose lives are day by day, by day being taken from them.
I’ve written before that abortion is without question. Modern Holocaust in our day as thousands and millions of children’s lives have been taken from their mother’s womb. And I just want to lead us to pray for the children yet unborn and to pray for our lives and our families and our churches, to work for the moms who are carrying those children and the dads who are involved in those pictures and to pray that these children would live and that these children would know how good God is and how much God loves them.
So we pray, oh God, we praise you as our creator. We praise you for knitting each of us together in our mother’s womb. We praise you that before we were ever born, you knew us and we praise you for making us fearfully and wonderfully in your image. And so we want to pray, oh God, right now for children who you are forming in their mother’s womb right now. God, we confess, at least in my country, that under the guise of protecting women, we have destroyed women, specifically the lives of hundreds of thousands of little girls whose bodies you were beautifully knitting together in their mother’s wounds.
Psalm 78:6 encourages us to pray for parents considering abortion.
We confess that under the guise of promoting freedom in my country, we’ve stolen freedom from millions of little boys and girls who have been defenseless against our machinations. Oh God, we have dressed up abortion in all kinds of language about our rights and our privacy and our plans for our lives.
And in the process, millions of children have lost their lives because of what we have done. God have mercy on us and God have mercy on moms and dads. Lord, we pray that in whatever country we’re in, that you would open the eyes of people to see the beauty and the wonder of what you were doing in pregnancy.
God, help us to love women in pregnancy, to care for them, to serve them, to honor them, and especially when they can’t see a way forward, help us to come alongside them and say, we will take care of them as moms. Or if they’re not ready to be moms, we will make a way to care for their children. God, help us as your church to lead the way in foster care and adoption so that every child where we live from the moment of conception knows that they’re fearfully and wonderfully made by you who love them more than they can imagine.
This verse reminds us to pray against the evil of abortion.
God, we pray for an end to laws that make abortion legal. We pray that you would help us to spread your love in such a way that abortion becomes unthinkable. God, we pray that you would help us to be the church you’ve called us to be in a world where children are in such danger in their mother’s wombs.
And God, we pray that you would help us to be the most humble, compassionate people in the world going far beyond even political activism or social media posts to lay down our lives for women and men and moms and dad and children and communities in need. God, we long for the next generation to know how good you are. We long for the children yet unborn to know how much you love them. So help us, we pray, to work on their behalf and on behalf of their moms and dads in such a way that those children and their moms and their dads, and we all who are made in your image flourish in relationship with you through Jesus, in whose name we pray, 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.
