Imprecatory means to invoke or call down evil or curses upon a person.
Now when I look for the definition in Google, of course I googled it, right?
I found in dictionary.com, it was really funny I found this though, it says,
repeatedly called, as like an example, it says,
repeatedly called for the death of President Obama via imprecatory prayer.
Gee, I wonder where they got that one?
I don't know if Pastor Anderson's face is like next to that in dictionary.com, but
I think he's the one that prayed it.
That's funny that that's the example, isn't it?
So he did pray for the death of Barack Obama and used some scripture to back that up.
So, but there is much imprecatory prayer in the Bible.
There's also imprecatory preaching, like hard preaching against things and
against people and against places and countries.
And it's found in the Psalms, the Old Testament, and the New Testament.
God doesn't change.
He's not gonna change from Genesis to Revelation.
God has imprecatory preaching and prayers.
I mean, what happens in Revelation?
You know, things are falling from the sky, talent size,
you know, hail is falling on top of people.
People are blaspheming God's name.
He's pouring out fire and
brimstone on people, that's in the New Testament, people.
It's not in the Old Testament.
So God has not changed.
So I'm just gonna read for you, second Peter, go ahead and
if you're in Psalm chapter five, just park there for a second.
I'm gonna read second Peter chapter one, verse 20.
This is an important verse.
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scriptures is of any private interpretation.
So this is not my private interpretation that I'm preaching to you today.
This is straight from the Bible.
It says, for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man,
but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
Every word written in this book was written by the Holy Ghost.
Men spoke it under the inspiration of God, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.
And it's all profitable for us for doctrine and reproof and all that stuff.
It's important that we understand that the Psalms are part of the Bible too.
Amen.
The Psalms are God's songbook.
And some of these songs are just like, just, I mean,
we haven't put a lot of these to words, but we're working on it.
I know that people are working on it.
But some of these were like, they'd sound funny to sing in the congregation.
I remember we sang Psalm 139 in our congregation.
I was preaching about some hate thing.
We hate somebody.
But anyway, it was an experiment on my part
because I wanted to see if people would sing out that song.
And it seemed like people were kind of hesitant and shaky about it.
Because people tell, here's the thing, the world wants to tell us what we should believe.
And sometimes we let the world browbeat us into what we believe.
And look, I'm not saying that we should hate everything all the time
and our Christian life should be about hate.
But there should be some of it.
And we, look, this church loves people.
They send soul owners out.
87 soul owners out last week.
Our church sends out soul owners because we love people.
It's not because we hate people and want to destroy people.
Jesus didn't come to destroy.
He came to save.
However, there are people that the Bible does say to hate.
There are these wicked people that try to creep into churches.
They creep in unawares.
And there's also people that stalk us and try to destroy the work of God.
And it's really weird.
I've never been, like before I kind of joined myself to churches like these,
I never had this kind of things happen in church.
I've never seen these kind of weirdos and these kind of freaks
trying and doing anything they can to stop the work of God.
Lying about men of God.
Just flat out lying lies and trying to destroy people's families.
Talking crap about people's families.
And like even politicians don't do that for the most part.
I mean, but these people are snakes.
They're wicked.
They're evil.
They're not savable.
They're trash.
Like Pastor Anderson would have said in his sermon a couple years ago.
But, so look, this is scripture and we have to understand that.
Psalm chapter 5, look at verse 1.
This is the first and considered the first imprecatory psalm, okay?
And that's why I picked it because it's kind of a pattern of how we should pray
if we're going to be in this type of a situation where we need to pray against somebody
that's trying to hurt us or hurt our lives or hurt our pastor or whatever it is.
And you know that this person's a bad person that can't be helped, right?
And we don't always know, but I'll get to that later.
Look at verse number 1 in Psalm chapter 5.
It says, give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my meditation.
Harken unto the voice of my cry, my king and my God, for unto thee will I pray.
So this is God, this is David, King David, praying.
And he's saying, hey, I'm going to pray to you, Lord, and here's what I'm going to pray.
My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord.
In the morning I will direct my prayer unto thee and look up.
So far so good.
It's all hearts and roses, right?
Hey, we should be praying to God.
And it says in the morning, doesn't it?
Don't wait until the evening to pray to God.
Pray to him in the morning.
For thou art not a God that hath pleasure and wickedness,
neither shall evil dwell with thee.
The foolish shall not stand in thy sight.
Thou hatest all workers of iniquity.
So that term, workers of iniquity, that's not just the run-of-a-mill sinner.
This is a person that hates God.
This is a person that hates the work of God,
and they'll do anything they can to try to destroy it.
Now, it's hard for us to understand how people could be like this,
how people could be against Christianity,
how people could pretend that they are Christians,
and then attack the work of God that's going on.
How they can say, hey, you're preaching a false gospel.
You're preaching that you don't have to repent of your sins.
Those people that fight against us like that, those people are workers of iniquity.
They're false prophets.