Now for a little while grace has been shown from the Lord our God… to give us a peg in His holy place (Ezra 9:8).

It once fell to me to read Ezra’s wonderful prayer in a worship service at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia, Pa.). Afterwards, my apologetics professor, Cornelius Van Til, approached me, thanked me for reading the passage so expressively, and drew attention to the words, “a peg in His holy place.”

He quoted the Dutch version—“een nagel…in Zijn heilige plaats”—repeating the words “een nagel” (a nail), pointing out that this referred to just one of the many nails or pegs that held up the curtain around the tabernacle in Israel’s Sinai wanderings. With tears in his eyes he added that, while we do not deserve even one little nail in God’s house, this tiny thing is emblematic of God’s abounding love for us sinners who are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

What struck me was the warmth and simplicity of this eminent professor, one better known for his hard-hitting controversial writings. He understood that we are “scarcely saved” and are debtors to the unmerited grace of God in Christ (1 Pet. 4:18). When we know ourselves as God knows us, we have every reason to be full of gratitude for His abounding grace! It is free and it is undeserved.

Somebody, so it is said, once commended Clement Attlee to Winston Churchill. Attlee was deputy prime minister to Churchill during World War II and succeeded him as prime minister after the war. “Mr. Attlee is a humble man,” said this man, to which Churchill is alleged to have replied, “Mr. Attlee has a lot to be humble about.”

Whatever the case with Mr. Attlee (who, incidentally, did more to change Britain than any other 20th Century leader—Mr. Churchill and Mrs. Thatcher included), it is certain that God’s people in Ezra’s day had a great deal to be humble about. No sooner had the exiles returned from Babylon than it came to light that the people of Israel—and especially their leaders—had been intermarrying with the “peoples of the lands,” when they should have been marrying within God’s covenant people (9:1-2). This set Ezra to fasting, and to prayer at “the evening sacrifice” (9:5). As he prayed, more and more people joined him and “wept very bitterly” (10:1).

His prayer became a confession of national sin. Churches and nations today would do well to cry to God in the same way. Notice the five components of this powerful prayer: Ezra (for himself and for the whole people of God) successively states the problem, accepts the consequences, acknowledges God’s mercy, confronts particular sins, and renews submission to God. This suggests to us a most suitable template for our own prayers.

1. State the problem (v. 6). This is not confession of sin—that comes later—but it is confession that sin is the problem between God and Israel. Ezra defines Israel’s shame: “Our iniquities have risen higher than our heads.” The problem is not political or economic, but hamartio­logical, which is from the Greek hamartia—“missing the mark.” Sin is missing God’s mark, for “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

2. Accept the consequences (v. 7). It is too easy to explain away sins, personal and national, by taking the role of the victim and shifting the blame from our moral failures to other people and circumstances. They deserved the hard times that had come on them. The truth was that Israel had been “delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plunder.” It was high time that they faced God’s reality for the rest of their lives.

3. Acknowledge God’s mercy (vv. 8-9). Now “for a little while grace has been shown from the Lord” so that “a remnant” has been enabled to escape. The fact that they are in Jerusalem at all, and, notwithstanding their failings, can come before the Lord in a rebuilt temple, is proof positive that God has been good to them. The act of prayer itself is an evidence of mercy, for it holds the promise of future blessing. Israel had a new beginning, even if they were marring it by their sin.

4. Confront particular sins (vv. 10-14). Confession of sin in general is as worthless as it is popular. Indeed, it is popular because it costs nothing and requires no change. To say, “I sin daily in thought, word, and deed” is to parrot a mere truism. It evidences neither conviction of sin, nor evangelical repentance. The only sin that can be truly confessed is sin that is defined explicitly, understood as the personal problem it really is, and repented of in its specifics. Israel needed to face its actual sin—in this case marriage to the people of the land—repent and commit decisively to changing its ways.

5. Renew submission to God (v. 15). Ezra recognizes that sin always has penal consequences that leave their mark on the transgressor’s life, and the most sincere confession does not abolish these on this side of eternity. Accordingly, he casts himself on God’s mercy and is submissive from his heart to God’s will. He implicitly seeks God’s grace and commits to renewed obedience.

Even in the darkest of days, the Lord has given His people “a peg” in His temple—in Christ. However distressing our circumstances and our experiences of personal weakness and failing, Jesus is our temple, sacrifice, and priest—the One in whom we are called to “hold fast our confession” (John 2:19-21; 1 Cor. 5:7; Heb. 4:14-15). Along with Ezra, we who truly trust the Lord are charged to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering,” always with the promise that “He who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23).

Let me draw these threads together with a couple of contrasting examples from real life.

One Friday evening in college, I heard Rev. Murdoch Campbell, the author of a lovely little book of meditations on the Psalms, From Grace to Glory (Banner of Truth, 1970), speaking on sin to the Aberdeen University Evangelical Union (as it was then called). What stuck in my mind was the winsome humility of the man, especially when he answered a question as to his goals in ministry. He said simply that he hoped always to do his people some good from the pulpit and in the parish.

I fear this may be too humble for us. We would be looking for snappy vision slogans, impressive mission statements, erudite philosophies of ministry, detailed personal goals, practical programs, and positive prospectuses.

Mr. Campbell’s parish was Resolis, a sleepy farming area in the Black Isle—which is neither black nor an island, but a very green peninsula in the north of Scotland. In former days, that area had enjoyed tremendous times of revival. I was a 19-year-old aspiring zoologist with no thoughts about the ministry at that time, but Mr. Campbell planted in my mind an aversion to the routinely triumphalist emphases on methods and programs that we are told will make for successful ministry in our time. He set for me an example of ministerial humility that I should have labored more prayerfully to emulate in my own ministry.

A decade later, as a seminarian in the U.S., I heard the representative of a new Reformed denomination tell us that one of their goals was to plant a church in every county seat in this country by the year 2000. This allowed more than a quarter-century to meet the goal. Perhaps this seemed a modest enough proposition to him and his church. If so, the balloon was swiftly burst when one of the seminarians, today a well-respected senior URC pastor, asked what their denomination would do in the case of his home (county) town, which was a Dutch community with exactly two churches, both Reformed and gospel-preaching. Without a blink, the speaker grandly proclaimed, “We’ll send in a man and call out the faithful!” There was an audible gasp around the room.

It will not surprise you to learn that in 2014 the Lord has not so far permitted that proudly touted goal to be fulfilled. The tragedy of such attitudes is that they invite us to feel that we are already more effective servants of God than others, even before we have attempted—far less accomplished—anything solid on the ground.

The once-proud but now-humbled Apostle Peter reminds us from Proverbs 3:34 and Isaiah 57:15 that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (1 Pet. 5:5). The confirmation of these truths in his own backslidings from Christ lends wings to his exhortation to all the rest of us: “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time” (1 Pet. 5:5-6).

The practical equation is simply this: No humbling; no exaltation! This applies to every individual Christian and also to the Church collectively. Pride comes all too naturally; humility is a grace from God Himself. Even at our very best, we have a lot to be humble about.

What makes the difference is that in Christ we really do have a “peg in His holy place,” and we are both humbled and exalted as those He has bought with a price. Jesus humbled Himself under the mighty hand of His God and Father, “even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:8). And there is true glory—glory from and for God, glory in Jesus as exalted Prince and Savior, and glory for all who are His.

Gordon Keddie is a retired pastor of the Southside Indianapolis, Ind., RPC. He is the author of many books, including Christ’s Covenant and Your Life (Crown & Covenant).