Lord God of Israel,
You once stretched out Your hand against Egypt,
and no idol could stand before You.
You humbled their gods with frogs and gnats,
with locusts and flies,
with darkness that could be felt,
and with the death of the firstborn.
Every plague was a sermon,
every judgment a warning,
yet Pharaoh’s heart grew harder still.
So it is with us, Lord.
The American church has become Egypt.
We are proud in our strength,
secure in our riches,
and blind to our bondage.
We bow before the idols of politics and prosperity,
we crave entertainment more than holiness,
and we treat the blood of the Lamb as something cheap.
You sent frogs into the houses of Egypt,
even into Pharaoh’s palace,
to shame their false gods.
And so, Lord, You have filled our homes
with the stench of our own idols
screens glowing day and night,
our children discipled more by culture than by Christ,
our marriages rotting in secret sin.
You turned dust into gnats,
to prove no magician could imitate Your power.
But we, O Lord, have taken dust
and breathed our own false life into it.
We build churches on sand,
ministries on charisma,
movements on marketing,
and we call it revival.
We cannot see that it is nothing but dust.
You sent swarms of flies,
and the land was ruined by them.
So too, our churches swarm with gossip and slander.
We devour one another with our tongues,
and we call it “discernment.”
Our witness stinks before the watching world.
You sent locusts,
and every green thing was eaten up.
And now the American church has been stripped bare
our pulpits emptied of truth,
our altars emptied of prayer,
our children empty of the Word of God.
We are left barren,
because we would not bow.
You sent darkness over the land,
a darkness so heavy it could be felt.
And that same darkness is over us.
We stumble in confusion,
we fight against one another,
we no longer know right from wrong,
because we have traded the light of Your Word
for the flicker of our own opinions.
And then, Lord
You struck the firstborn.
From the palace to the prison,
death filled Egypt in one night.
And so too, we see the death of a generation.
Our young people are walking away,
starving for truth they never received.
We buried them under entertainment and shallow lessons,
and now the graveyards of the church are filled with their absence.
Yet still, like Pharaoh,
our hearts remain hard.
We will not listen to the shepherds You have sent.
We treat them like the prophets of old
mocked, rejected, slandered,
stoned with our words.
We would rather kill the messenger
than repent at the message.
But, O God, You made a difference in that night
between Egypt and Israel,
between those under the blood
and those who were not.
That line has not moved.
And we tremble to confess
so much of the American church
is not under the blood at all.
Have mercy on us, Lord.
Mark us again with the blood of the Lamb.
Spare us from the judgment we deserve.
Break our chains,
bring us out of Egypt,
strip us of pride,
and lead us by Your Spirit.
Let us not be found among Pharaoh’s army,
swept away in the sea of Your wrath.
Make us instead a redeemed people,
a pilgrim people,
a holy people,
ready to follow the cloud and the fire
into the wilderness of obedience.
For the night is coming
when You will pass through again,
and only those covered by the Lamb will stand.
In Jesus Christ, our greater Passover,
Amen.