Daily Devotional
Come Out and Stand
The righteous are often pressed between two cities: the proud city of this age, rich, adorned, and drunken with blood, and the holy city of the Lord, purified through trial and awaiting His appearing. Mordecai would not bow to wicked exaltation, and for that refusal the innocent were marked for death. Yet the people of God have not been left without a weapon. Clement praises Esther because “a woman alone, afflicted with fastings, held back ten thousand armed hands, annulling by her faith the tyrant’s decree;” Fasting, prayer, and steadfast refusal are not weak things. They are the warfare of saints who fear God more than princes.
Song of Songs shows the Bride as a guarded garden, not open to every passerby, not made common by the market of Babylon. The Church must be lovely by purity, not by luxury; fruitful by holiness, not by abundance. For Babylon also is adorned, but only for burning. Her merchants weep when their pleasures perish, yet their grief is not repentance. What the soul has lusted after is taken away in an hour.
Therefore the command is plain: “...saying, Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues. Revelation 18:4 He who goes out and departs does not become a partaker of the guilt; but he will be wounded with the plagues who is found a companion in the crime.” The Lord will come, the earth will be shaken, and every false glory will fail. Better now to be enclosed as His garden than later to be found among the wares of a fallen city.
“a woman alone, afflicted with fastings, held back ten thousand armed hands, annulling by her faith the tyrant's decree;”
— Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata (Miscellanies)
“...saying, Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues. Revelation 18:4 He who goes out and departs does not become a partaker of the guilt; but he will be wounded with the plagues who is found a companion in the crime.”
— Cyprian, Treatises
For Reflection & Discussion
What act of compromise or flattery toward the world's power must you refuse this week, even if it costs you favor, profit, or ease?
What fast, prayer at set times, or almsgiving will you undertake in the next three days for the protection and repentance of God's people?
What Babylonish excess in your house—luxury, impurity, unjust gain, or neglect of the poor—will you remove and replace with a concrete work of holiness today?
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