Good Morning!
For today’s prayer/worship help we are going to do a bit of meddling. As you know since we brought back Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting/Youth Group at 6:30pm the devotional part for the adults has focused on reading a chapter a week of the Book of Jeremiah. Each week I will read the whole chapter as Jeremiah would have delivered it to the people of God, and then we speak through how the passage challenges us to walk more closely with our Lord and Savior, especially in the time of judgment and declension that we see around us today. I want to renew my invitation for all to come and be with us for this time of revival and challenge in the midweek. Our children especially need this time of praise and spiritual rest. Recognizing our need for growth, and of the blessings of corporate prayer and fellowship is an important part of our life together as a church.
In this week’s upcoming passage, Chapter Four, the prophet repeats his call that the people circumcise their hearts and turn away from their sin and move back towards a life of righteousness. In the previous speech Jeremiah had warned them against what he called a “pretentious repentance”. They had heard his preaching, said to themselves, “Yeah, how we are living is probably not right”, and put on a show of acknowledging their sin only to go right back to the mud of idolatry and their ongoing harlotry with the false gods in the groves. Jeremiah is warning them that such phony appearances actually made God’s anger against them worse! At least Israel had the decency to properly apostatize. Judah however was trying to tell the LORD that their outward acknowledgment of wrong was enough. That was finished. It was now incumbent on the prophet to leave them alone. Likewise God’s lament had been taken into consideration and filed away in the complaint drawer. They understood themselves to be the judge of what was good for them, and if sin met their needs then it was God and Jeremiah who needed to get over it. In the people’s minds it was high time for Jeremiah and his boss to move along to other matters. They needed to quit picking on poor old Judah. Hadn’t Jehovah seen the evils of the Ammonites and the Moabites? It seemed to them that Jeremiah’s time would be better spent talking to those heathens over there rather than to keep harping on what may be wrong with them.
However, their Laodicean impulse turned out to be a serious miscalculation.
Even if they were done with God, He most certainly was not done with them.
If Jesus Christ speaks about anything more than once it is most definitely about the problems with a failure to properly repent. A number of His parables and teaching moments with the crowds and disciples center very much around ensuring that your repentance was not like that of the Pharisees, or the hypocrites. The Synod theme that our new moderator picked out is Luke 9:62, “But Jesus said to him, ‘No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’” In your Bible this passage more than likely has a title akin to “The Cost of Discipleship”. Part and parcel of the Christian ethos is leaving behind your sin, and actually forsaking it, abandoning whatever it is and then positively taking on the new way of life in Christ.
It means doing the necessary things to remove the evil from you and putting your hand on the plow and not pining after it as you walk along the way. It’s hard and the Scriptures nowhere represent the act of abandoning spiritual idolatries as an easy thing. When Zacchaeus admitted to his evil before the Lord Jesus it meant giving back fourfold of what he had robbed from others. It could not have been an inexpensive thing for him to do, but he did it because in his circumcised heart he understood something that the Rich Young Ruler did not. For Zacchaeus to lose everything for Christ was worth the blessing of receiving the fruits of repentance, namely Jesus Himself. When the Lord goes and dines in his home it is a picture of the great glory which comes to those who cleanse their ways. Christ cannot live where sin is ignored, or worse, celebrated. Transgressions against the law must be dealt with.
Achan’s thievery contributed greatly to the loss of Joshua’s army at Ai. The goods that he stole from Jericho shouted out to God like a telltale heart. There was no hiding it from the eyes of the LORD. While no one else in Israel may have seen it, and no one else other than Achan and his family were aware of it, God knew. And that was enough. Our failure to take seriously our sin, and take away those things which keep us from enjoying the full blessings of our Redeemer hurt not only ourselves, but others as well. There were a lot of righteous men and women in the days of Jeremiah who were going to have to suffer through the exile to Babylon because of the refusal of the majority of Judah to repent, to heed the merciful warnings of Jehovah.
It is worth considering this morning that if you are harboring a “secret sin”, something which you know God knows, but have, at least in your own mind, successfully hidden from others you need to take a moment and consider reality. Think about how this sin might be damaging your relationship not just with the Lord, but with your spouse, your friends, family, the church, or even work colleagues. Something I think about when the conflagrations of the LORD’s judgments come upon His people, and upon the world, is how often the animals suffer for faults that are not theirs. That’s again a matter to contemplate when we refuse to do the difficult work of abandoning those idols which are holding us back from the grace of experiencing the forgiveness found alone in the Lamb. Remember this truth! His blood is shed for sinners! See His Grace!
When John the Baptist says, “Flee from the wrath to come” do we think that message is for others, or for ourselves? How we respond to that question says a lot about how we understand the Gospel message. The aforementioned Rich Young Ruler went away sorrowful, but it was not a sorrow of repentance which leads to joy, it was the sorrow of thinking that the cost of discipleship was too much. (2 Cor. 7:1-12).
If he had the wisdom which he arrogantly thought he did he’d know what Zacchaeus knew. “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. “ — Proverbs 28:13
Forsaking all and following Christ leads to riches unsearchable. There is no sin that’s worth it. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Repent and mean it. The consequences of just saying your sorry and moving along are too great to bear. (Rev. 2:5)
Today’s brief further reading comes to us from Adriel Sanchez on True Repentance:
As always if you need anything or need to talk I am always here to serve in this way.
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church