Call for the Wailing Women - Part 2

To us, as your chosen women, in this hour, for Jesus' sake we pray it. Amen. Thank you.

You may be seated. The fourfold message of the prophets. First, there is a cry to wake up.

To wake up, to move from complacency to concern. You women who are so complacent, he says, rise up and listen to me. You daughters who feel secure, hear what I have to say.

And I don't know about you, but as I read these passages, I hear a sense of intensity, of desperation, of urgency, as they say, consider now. Call for the wailing women to come quickly. I believe they're saying we need to wake up to our current condition.

To see that we are in trouble. That our land is in trouble. Our churches are in trouble.

Our culture is in trouble. Our homes are in trouble. The sound of wailing, Jeremiah says, is heard from Zion.

How ruined we are. We must leave our land because our houses are in ruins. And then in verse 21 of Jeremiah, death has climbed into our windows and has entered our fortresses.

It has cut off the children from the streets and the young men from the public squares. Jeremiah is saying death is everywhere you look. It's indoors.

It's outdoors. It's everywhere. In the past several weeks, we've seen the images of death everywhere.

From the rubble of Kosovo, to the aftermath of the killer tornadoes in Oklahoma City, to the carnage left inside the walls of Columbine High School. So Jeremiah says, wake up to what is going on around you. God is trying to get our attention.

We are in trouble. We are in trouble when two teenage boys walk into a public school and gun down 14 of their classmates and one of their teachers as they laugh their way through the halls. The massacre at Columbine High School has been a wake-up call to a lot of people who are saying, I didn't realize it was this bad.

We are in trouble when a 39-year-old man plows his car through a daycare center playground, killing two toddlers and injuring four others, saying as he is led away, I was going to execute those children because they were innocent. We're in trouble. But the trouble we're in is not just a matter of physical violence and death.

Our marriages are in trouble. They're dying. Our relationships are dying.

Our culture is suffering the deadly loss of purity, morality, decency, and integrity. Ladies, we're in trouble when terms like these become part of our everyday vocabulary, terms like divorce, incest, date rape, anorexia, homosexuality, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, Prozac, sexually transmitted diseases. Every young person knows those words today.

But the problem is that we have little or no comprehension of such concepts as chastity, modesty, discretion, virtue, responsibility, fidelity, integrity. And here's what grieves me perhaps the most. It's not just the secular culture around us that's in trouble.

Week after week, I'm hearing the desperate heart cries of women in our evangelical churches, our Bible-preaching churches. I received a letter recently from a woman who wrote this. After attending one of my conferences, she says, I have struggled with Internet addiction.

At one point, I was on my computer up to 15 hours a day. It was my way of escaping my empty, lonely marriage. This, by the way, is a woman who's a graduate of a Christian college.

She says, in the last couple of months, I've curbed my Internet usage. I realized I was neglecting our six children and decided to make some changes. However, I met a wonderful man through a chat room.

We've met face-to-face several times now, and I'm considering leaving my husband for this man. You say, oh, that's just an exception. That's so extreme.

It's bizarre. Surely these things aren't going on as a rule in our evangelical churches. That's what you think.

Each weekend conference where I speak to women and revive our hearts conferences, I ask the women on Friday night to fill out a prayer card and to tell us, how can we pray for you and how can we pray for your family? I want to read to you several comments that I received on those prayer cards in one recent conference. This was one conference. And here's what some of these women had to say, and there are many others I could add to these from that one conference, and it's everywhere.

Listen to these. My marriage is breaking up. It's been an unloving, unnurturing marriage for over 12 years.

My heart is broken and I'm spent. I have nothing left for him or this marriage. My 17-year-old ran away nine months ago and moved in with her boyfriend.

The hurt is so deep. My 26-year-old daughter has denied her faith in Christ and is involved in a gay relationship. My son is in rebellion.

My husband's in depression, and I'm barely hanging on. My heart is so hard. I don't care about anything anymore.

And then this one. My pastor and I are very close. Just yesterday he acknowledged in a counseling session that he was very attracted to me, but he would never act on his desire because he knew that would hurt.

Now I feel deeply attracted to him. Help me, Lord, to let go of this and give me wisdom in setting boundaries. I cut his hair and give him a massage once a month.

And in this one, pray that God would deliver my 17-year-old son from an addiction to pornography that he has had since early childhood. Another one. My husband and I are under satanic attack.

Anger and criticism are tearing us apart. In this one, pray that Satan will leave our family alone. My husband is in adultery with a close friend of our family.

And in this, I have not loved my husband for a long time, and I am miserable. I had an affair three years ago and ended it to stay with my husband for our two boys' sakes, and then she gives their ages. Six months ago, I began the affair with the same man and have fallen in love with him.

I know this is wrong. He's married also, but I can't imagine life without him. One conference and many more like that.

And I'm looking into the eyes of women that I just told your story. And so what does the prophet Jeremiah say? Wake up. Wake up to our current condition.

See that we are in trouble. But he says also, wake up to your future prospect, to the even greater judgment of God that is going to fall. In little more than a year, Isaiah says, you who feel secure will tremble.

The fortress will be abandoned. Noisy city will be deserted. Say, this is what the Lord declares.

The dead bodies of men will lie like refuse on the open field, like cut grain behind the reaper with no one to gather them. Isaiah and Jeremiah are saying, it's not going to stop. It's not going to get better.

It's going to get worse. And I think they would say the same to our generation. For years and years, decades, we have sown the wind.

And now we are reaping the whirlwind. But you know, our natural attitude isn't one to be really concerned about these things. As long as it's not our kids who are getting shot up.

As long as things are going relatively fine in our own lives, the stock market's up, we're secure. It's to those kind of people that Isaiah and Jeremiah are addressing their words. To people that say, I have my job, my house, my kids, my stuff, my church.

As long as it doesn't affect me or threaten my lifestyle, I can go on with life as usual. And so we're blind to what's going on. We've been deceived.

You know, the world has always scoffed at the threat of impending judgment. It did in Noah's day. And it does in our day.

The world just keeps on partying, oblivious to the danger that is at hand. What grieves me is not so much that the world is partying, but that the church is partying. That we are unaware of the impending danger and threat of God's judgment.

Somehow we do not see the...