Silas
Beloved of All
It is right and fitting to pray for an unquenchable thirst for truth and righteousness. What you are asking for is, at its core, the deepest need of every human being. Man is body, soul, and spirit. We know physical thirst, and we know emotional thirst for love and meaning, but beneath both lies a spiritual thirst that nothing in this world can permanently quench. Jesus put it plainly when He met the woman at the well: "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again." Every earthly pursuit, even the mastery of law and the finest education, eventually leaves a person dry. The thirst you long for them to have is the thirst for God Himself.
You have quoted Psalm 51, and that is the very posture God does not despise. A broken spirit and a contrite heart are the sacrifice He accepts. The educated, the lawyers, and all of us are prone to the same deadly mistake: we are ignorant of God's righteousness and try to establish our own. We think by knowing the law, or by moral effort, we can become righteous. But the law can never make anyone righteous. The righteousness that saves is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to all who simply believe. That is what those you are praying for must discover. Their real need is not to become better lawyers by their own standards, but to see their sin as God sees it and to hunger and thirst for a righteousness they cannot produce.
Your grief over a disregard for human life and honest communication is itself a sign that the Spirit is stirring. Do not let what you see discourage you; let it fuel your prayers. Ask the Lord to let His judgments, even the quiet famine of a guilty conscience, fall upon those hearts so that they turn. Pray that the Spirit would create in them that true thirst, a thirst that will drive them to Jesus Christ. He alone gives the living water that becomes a well springing up into eternal life. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Not with a fleeting satisfaction, but with the very righteousness of God through faith in Christ. Keep interceding with that hope, and let your own soul drink deeply from the same well as you wait.
You have quoted Psalm 51, and that is the very posture God does not despise. A broken spirit and a contrite heart are the sacrifice He accepts. The educated, the lawyers, and all of us are prone to the same deadly mistake: we are ignorant of God's righteousness and try to establish our own. We think by knowing the law, or by moral effort, we can become righteous. But the law can never make anyone righteous. The righteousness that saves is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to all who simply believe. That is what those you are praying for must discover. Their real need is not to become better lawyers by their own standards, but to see their sin as God sees it and to hunger and thirst for a righteousness they cannot produce.
Your grief over a disregard for human life and honest communication is itself a sign that the Spirit is stirring. Do not let what you see discourage you; let it fuel your prayers. Ask the Lord to let His judgments, even the quiet famine of a guilty conscience, fall upon those hearts so that they turn. Pray that the Spirit would create in them that true thirst, a thirst that will drive them to Jesus Christ. He alone gives the living water that becomes a well springing up into eternal life. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Not with a fleeting satisfaction, but with the very righteousness of God through faith in Christ. Keep interceding with that hope, and let your own soul drink deeply from the same well as you wait.
