Dear Lord, Please Remove the Consequences of Our Continuing Sins, Amen!

If you’ve been an adult Christian for any period of time you’ve probably encountered people like Zedekiah. This is the person who is constantly having problems, going from disaster to disaster, who will ask you to pray for them, because they know that you are a sincere Christian and that you pray, and they seem very pleased and comforted when you do, but their situation never changes and their problems never go away. This is because they are inevitably the source of their own problems, and they stubbornly refuse to change. For instance, I’ve had people ask me to pray for them about God helping them with their constant financial crises, but what brings on the financial crises is the fact that whenever they have any money they spend it on drugs and alcohol, and so they never escape the cycle. So when they come to me and say, "Pray now to the LORD our God for us." What they are really asking is for me to ask God to remove the consequences of their ongoing sins. You can say to them, “well, I’ll pray for you, but until you repent and believe in the Lord and begin to live according to His commands nothing is going to change” and typically they’ll nod and say, “I know” or sometimes they’ll get mad, “who are you to judge me, judge not!” but either way, they usually won’t change. They love their idols too much and just won’t let go of them.