O Lord, You granted your prophets strength to resist the temptations of the devil and courage to proclaim repentance. Give us pure hearts and minds to follow Your Son faithfully even into suffering and death; through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
He had finally walked away from that marriage. It was not healthy. Neither he nor his wife really knew how to do this marriage thing very well. They fought a lot. There had been infidelity. He had tried. She had tried. Now they had failed.
He sat in my office and explained in excruciating detail what had happened. But his explanation had a very specific goal. He wanted me to approve of it. He wanted me to tell him that he had done the right thing, or at least the only reasonable thing that he could have done. He wanted me to say that it was alright, and he should not pay too much attention to that niggling doubt which lurked in the back of his mind as he fell asleep at night.
But it was not alright. He should pay attention to the shriveled voice of his conscience which was trying to break through to him. His heart was broken. Everything was broken in this situation. It was not how God wanted this marriage to end. God envisioned them being parted only by death. God could have blessed even a poorly constructed marriage and made it wonderful. But His Spirit is gentle and can be thwarted. They each had loved themselves too much to let that Spirit have His way with them. It was time to repent of many things, to come to the Lord in a tearful admission of weakness and failure. Could this man do that, or could he only hear from me that which he had come to hear: an approval of his divorce which he hoped would make that voice go away?
We prayed in this prayer on Sunday for courage to proclaim repentance. Pray today for your pastor as he is called to proclaim repentance in this conflicted and strange world in which we live. Have you noticed how the only sin which most people can acknowledge is to have even a whiff of criticism for what our grandparents all agreed was a sin?