"Spare Your People, O LORD"

[I sent this out to my congregation today in my weekly letter - 28 August 2024]

Yesterday morning, as the sun was starting to rise, I was reading Joel. It’s only three chapters long, but the scene is fairly dismal. Plagues, pestilence, locusts, and other “covenant curses” God had promised in Leviticus 26 if his people were persistently unfaithful to him. That’s the sad part about Joel. All of these calamities are – in a sense – self-inflicted because God’s people have walked away from the Lord. And yet the Lord is beckoning his people to turn around: “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster” (Joel 2:13).

To rouse the people’s return, the Lord then calls on the priests, the ministers of God, to spend some concerted time in remorse and repentant prayer. This repentant prayer is what caught my attention yesterday. It’s Joel 2:17:

Between the vestibule and the altar

let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep

and say, “Spare your people, O LORD,

and make not your heritage a reproach,

a byword among the nations.

Why should they say among the peoples,

‘Where is their God?’”

For all of the griping and alarm-sounding ringing in our land about the “Great De-Churching” of America – the growing number of people who have left the church in North America and the Western world – and other “bad things” happening, there are very few calls to repentant prayer. But this biblical repentant prayer would actually be a good place for us to start. It begins with grief over the present condition: “Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep and say…” In many ways this is a difficult time, and it calls to us to run to the Lord and lay our concerns before him, even acknowledging our role in the dreary circumstances around us.

The prayer then has two parts, one regarding God’s people, and one concerning God’s honor.

First, “Spare your people, O LORD, and make not your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations.” The prayer asks God to change our direction by (1) not allowing us to be a reproach, to not be a disappointment and disgrace. And (2) to not allow us to become a byword, to not become noteworthy in what is dishonorable. This fits well with that prayer Christians in China used to pray, and I have been praying for years: “Revive your church, O Lord, beginning with me.” But this is clearly a repentant prayer – ‘We are a reproach and a byword. Save us from our own dishonorable patterns and directions.’ When we recognize that we are connected with all of God’s church in North America, we can begin to fathom how this is a suitable prayer that we can throw ourselves into.

Second, it concerns God’s honor, “Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’” In other words, ‘Please, don’t leave your church in disarray and decline. For your own honor, for your own reputation and fame, revive your church, reform your church, reclaim your church so that the peoples sit up and take notice and recognize that you are in our midst!’

Yesterday, as the sun was just barely breaking over the horizon, this became my prayer. Would you, as fellow priests (remember, the priesthood of believers) join me in praying Joel 2:17 the rest of this week?



Pastor Mike