“Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, who do his just commands. Seek righteousness. Seek humility. Perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the anger of the Lord.”
– Zephaniah 2:3
This is one of those verses. It’s just so clear for how we should pray for our lives, for others’ lives, and specifically in light of what’s at stake. “Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, who do his just commands. Seek righteousness. Seek humility.” So we’re going to pray that in light of this reality. “Perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the anger of the Lord.”
Zephaniah 2:3 Calls Us to Seek the Lord
This picture of God’s coming holy, just anger, and wrath in a fallen world toward fallen, sinful men and women. We need to seek the Lord. Obviously, we know this drives us straight to Jesus, the only one who has fully kept God’s just commands, the only righteous one, the one who humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross, to pay the price for our sins.
So Zephaniah 2:3 drives us to Jesus, to trust in Jesus and His righteousness, His humility, His just payment for our sins, and then to live in Him. Not just to be saved by Him, but to live in Him, to live with His justice flowing through us, His righteousness flowing through us, his humility in us. God, we seek you right now based on your word in Zephaniah 2:3. We seek you, our Lord.
We need you. God, we want you. We desire you. Lord, we want to know you. We want to love you. God, we want to follow and obey you. We want to worship you. Lord, we want to fear you. God, we seek you. We humble ourselves before you. May we be the humble of the land. God, may that be us. Remove all pride from us, we pray. We seek humility. Lord, we want humility. We need humility.
Zephaniah 2:3 Provides Bilbical Guidelines of How We are to Seek the Lord
Less of us, none of us, more of you, all of you. May you become greater. May we become less. We want to die to ourselves today, just like you have told us to, Jesus, to deny ourselves daily, to take up our cross daily. We want to do your just commands. God, help us to do all your just commands. We praise you that your commands are just and good and right and perfect, and we say we trust them even when we or the world around us are tempted to think that your commands are not good, not best. God, we pray that you would help us to throw aside our foolishness, our thoughts, our ideas about what is good and to trust that your commands are good and just and right. Help us to do them today. We seek righteousness.
God, we want to do what you just told us to do in Matthew 6, seek first your kingdom and your righteousness and trust. You will add all things we need to us. We seek righteousness today. Help us to seek righteousness all day long in everything we do, trusting that we are hidden from your anger, not because of our effort, but because of Jesus, His life and His death and His resurrection, and our trust in Him. All glory to your name, Jesus, for hiding us from that just holy wrath and anger that we are due. God, we pray for the spread of that good news, the good news of Jesus, the righteous, humble, just, holy one who has paid the price on the cross for sinners.
Praying for the Phu Tai People
We pray for the spread of that Gospel to the Phu Thai people, for this Buddhist people group in Thailand and even some 57,000 of whom live in the United States. God, for wherever the Phu Thai people are, we pray for the spread of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus to them, that they might be hidden on the day of the anger of the Lord in Jesus. God, we want them. You love them. You desire their salvation. Please, God, we ask you, make your glory known among the Phu Thai people and help us to live toward that end. Use our lives, our churches to make the Gospel known among all the peoples of the world, including the Phu Thai, that they might seek the Lord and righteousness and humility in Jesus and be hidden on the day of the anger of the Lord. We pray all this according to your word in Zephaniah 2:3. 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.
