"Pray to Your Praise" March 25, 2018 AM

Let's go to Lord in prayer. Father, I want to thank you for gathering us together this morning.

Thank you for the way in which you have prepared us for this time. You have been at work in the world around us.

You've been at work in our lives. You've brought us to this time and this place to hear your word. I ask,

Father, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, that you would bring a maximum impact in our lives, that we would hear this word from you.

We would see Christ, that we would be filled with your spirit. We would follow him farther, love him deeper, worship you more truly.

We ask for all the good that you are willing to do for us, that you may have all the glory through us because of your son.

We pray these things in his name, in the name of Jesus Christ, the one with whom you are well pleased. Amen.

I'll invite you to open your Bibles and look with me at Jeremiah chapter 17. Jeremiah 17, and we're going to be looking at verses 12 through 18 this morning.

The title of the sermon is, Pray to Your Praise. And as we read through the scripture in a moment,

I would have you pay attention to especially verse 14 and to think about what it is that Jeremiah is praying about and to whom he is praying.

And I think it's vital that we think about this carefully and evaluate our own prayer lives in light of the word of God.

Last week, we looked at the first 11 verses of Jeremiah 17 and talked about this phrase that we have on our money, in God we trust.

And in fact, we have this phrase in our passage, in the Lord, blessed is the man whose trust is in the

Lord, the Lord who is his trust. And that if we truly trust in the

Lord, it means that the Lord is our trust. And we see that this is something that is vitally important to Jeremiah.

This is in contrast to the people of Judah. The description of Judah is this, that when you get down to who they really are, when you look very carefully at the stone tablets of their heart, what is most deeply engraved in them with iron stylus and diamond point, it's this, it's idolatry.

And not only is idolatry graven deeply upon their hearts, but it's also graven on the horns of the altar, indicating to us that what is most deeply entrenched in our souls is what we most value and therefore what we worship.

And we begin to think about Jeremiah, what is deeply engraven in his heart? And I think it comes out in his prayer here in verses 12 through 18, the way in which he prays.

Jeremiah is not a perfect man and he's been through a lot, he's going to go through a lot more. He has his ups and he has his downs, but you can tell what is most deeply engraved on his heart by the way that he prays.

We'll look at more of that in a moment. Would you please stand with me and let's read this passage,

Jeremiah chapter 17 verses 12 through 18. And this is the word of the

Lord. A glorious throne on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary,

O Lord, the hope of Israel. All who forsake you will be put to shame, those who turn away on earth will be written down, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the

Lord. Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed.

Save me, and I will be saved, for you are my praise.

Look, they keep saying to me, where is the word of the Lord? Let it come now. But as for me,

I've not hurried away from being a shepherd after you, nor have I longed for the woeful day.

You yourself know that the utterance of my lips was in your presence. Do not be a terror to me.

You are my refuge in the day of disaster. Let those who persecute me be put to shame. As for me, let me not be put to shame.

Let them be dismayed, but let me not be dismayed. Bring on them a day of disaster, and crush them with a twofold destruction.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. When was the last time you bought something that was fairly expensive?

Did you read any reviews to see how many stars were on that product?

It's become quite common for us, hasn't it? I guess it was not so long ago that we were looking to buy a wood chipper off Craigslist, and looked at some reviews of the product and other websites, and they were pretty funny.

You probably have noticed this, that for the same product there will be a five -star review, and someone just raving about it, and then a one -star review, and someone raving about it, but in a bad way.

What makes the difference? I think it maybe has to do with the expectations of those and the competency of those who are engaging with the product.

For our particular chipper shredder, plenty of good reviews, but there was one lady I just had to laugh at.

She had had a bad day. They had just got their shredder, and they went, her and her husband went out to go shred some leaves and chop up some sticks, and her review said that every time they threw a bunch of leaves down, it clogged, and they had to turn it off, and unclog it, and then restart it, and then when they tried to put the limbs down, the auxiliary chipper shaft, that you had to hold it just right, and it jarred their arms terribly, and that the bag was terrible too.

You know, somebody call the ambulance, right? This is really a bad day. I just imagine though, she wrestled with this wood chipper for, you know, a couple of hours, and came in, you know, covered in dirt and leaves, and was just exhausted, and sat down and fired off this scathing review.

I felt sorry for her a little bit. I also read the other reviews that responded to that, and like, you know, if you don't put so many leaves down, wet leaves down in a big mound, just feed it a normal amount, it probably won't clog, and you're not supposed to hold the sticks, just let them go, and it just chops it up for you, and there's nothing wrong with the bag, and so it was, but what were the expectations?

What was the understanding of the product? And very often, that's the only difference between those who think something is amazing and something is awful, and I think that we often experience something of this in a more grand and much more serious level, when people talk about God.

You know, there's a lot of people out there with a five -star review about God, a lot of people out there with a one -star review who wish they could give a zero -star review, but it wasn't an option, and a lot of the times, when you talk to people who are very opposed to God, sometimes they talk about their poor view of God in terms of prayer.

Well, this happened, and that happened, and I prayed, and then nothing happened. I tried praying, but he didn't answer, and why would he do this, and why wouldn't he do that, and if he's really a good

God, then why would this happen? What we think about God comes through in our prayers, really and truly.

What we think about God comes through in our prayers. You can tell when somebody thinks

God is a vending machine, right? My prayer is my quarter, and I've selected

J6, new job, and what do we do with vending machines when they take our quarters and don't give us the product?

We tend to abuse them. You can tell what people think about God by the way that they pray to him, and I think we see what

Jeremiah thinks about God in the way that he prays to him, and I think we should pay attention to the way that he prays.

He prays to God not as a vending machine or not as somebody who should make everything easy in his life, but he prays to God who is his praise.

I think it's vital that we pay attention to how this prayer goes in verses 12 through 18, and verses 12 through the beginning of verse 13, we see

Jeremiah pray of God's worth. This is something we ought to be praying, pray of God's worth.

I want us to see how it is that Jeremiah constructs his prayer to God, the way that he constructs praise in his prayer to God.

He does this as one who is saved, one who knows God, one who has been redeemed by God, and we find this constant contrast in this passage between those who have their hope in God and those who are the shamed, the saved versus the shamed.

That is a contrast that proceeds from the previous passage between the blessed and the cursed.

Same idea, same kind of contrast, and in verses 12 through 18, it's the saved versus the shamed.

In the saved, I think we see build praise. They build praise to God.

Now notice he says, a glorious throne on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary,

O Lord, the hope of Israel. Now if you are carrying the King James, they'll italicize the is because it's not there, and the

English translators are trying to find a way to translate the Hebrew, and sometimes that can be a little bit of a challenge, but there is no is, and also verse 13 starts with this phrase, the hope of Israel, and then says,

Yahweh the Lord. So let me read it for you in a different way. This is also a way to translate the

Hebrew. A glorious throne on high from the beginning, the place of our sanctuary, the hope of Israel, Yahweh.

Do you hear the way in which Jeremiah constructs his praise? One praise statement, one title, one glorious name upon another, building up to the name of the

God, the one true God. He's building praise to God, and he's focused on a throne.

You see he's talking about a throne. It's a glorious throne. It's a throne on high, a throne from the beginning, a throne that is a place of sanctuary, a throne from where the hope of Israel, where he sits.

He's focusing on a throne. This is not Solomon's throne. Solomon's throne is still functional, still there.

It's lost a lot of its grandeur. The King of Judah is an idolater. He does not worship

God alone. He's not a faithful king. He's an evil king, and Jeremiah is not focused on the throne of Solomon on which this idolatrous king, this rebellious king sits.

He's not interested in that throne. He's thinking of another throne, one that is in the place of a sanctuary, and this throne is called the mercy seat.

It is the throne of God on earth that sits on the ark of the covenant, flanked by the cherubim, and Jeremiah knows who really is in charge.

And this earthly representation of God's throne on earth and the holy of holies in the temple on Mount Zion reminds him that God indeed is a

God who reigns from on high, that he is a throne that is glorious, that it is exalted.

It's a throne on high. An exalted throne has the idea that the higher the throne is, the farther you can see.

Ever been up a really tall building? Ever been up a skyscraper? Ever been on a mountain? How far can you see?

The idea of an exalted throne is that when the throne is so high, the higher it goes, the more you can see the greater dominion that king has.

The farther his influence goes because the farther he can see, and God's throne is the highest of all thrones because he is king, he is ruler of not just the earth, but the entire universe.

So his throne is the highest throne. It's an exalted throne. It's an eternal throne because it's a throne from the beginning.

The idea is that God has always been in charge. He has always been ruling from the very beginning.

He is king of kings and he is lord of lords. From all of eternity, he has had this authority.

He also calls this an exclusive kind of throne. Remember that the throne on earth, the representation of God's throne on earth was the mercy seat.

It was the place that the high priest would once a year on the day of atonement take blood from a sacrificial goat and take the blood from this goat upon whom representatively all the sins of the people had been laid and take this blood and go into the holy of holies once a year to cast this blood upon the mercy seat.

That God would have mercy on his people. It's an amazing thing to think about this, but the highest throne, the greatest throne, the eternal throne of God, when it was given an expression, a revelation on earth, it was described as a seat of mercy.

Mercy, praise be to God. It's a mercy seat. It's a mercy seat.

It's a place where we go to find help in time of need. Grace from God.

Not going to this throne to receive what we deserve, but to receive that which we don't deserve.

Mercy. And it's an exclusive throne because he and he alone is the hope of Israel.

Jeremiah is not interested in the throne upon which the idolatrous kings of Judah sit.

They look all over the place for other hopes, other nations, other gods.

Jeremiah is looking at the one throne, the throne of God and says, there's our hope, Israel. There's our one hope.

It's an exclusive throne. He's building praise. He's building praise.

Praise that ultimately points us to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is king of kings,

Lord of lords, who has been given a name which is above every name, and all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him.

And he indeed has an exalted throne and an everlasting throne and an exclusive throne.

He builds praise. You might wonder about the conditions in which

Jeremiah is constructing his praise in his prayer. He is not surrounded by a multitude of God -fearing,

Messiah -loving worshippers. He's very much alone. Very few people in Judah believe in the one true

God the way that they should. He is not being supported by a thousand worshippers on either side, all singing the same song, praying the same prayer.

Jeremiah is living in the end of the days of Judah, the last days of Judah.

Judgment has been declared. Judgment is coming. God told Jeremiah to stop praying for Judah to be delivered from the coming punishment.

It's the last days of Judah and very few people follow the Lord. Jeremiah feels very often like he's on his own and it's in that context that he constructs this kind of praise.

We live in the last days. Judgment draws closer every day.

We sense the the fewness of those who truly value Christ and worship God.

These are days in which we ought to build praise in our prayers, praise to Christ.

The saved build praise with the shamed forsake God. Notice what Jeremiah says, O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you will be put to shame.

All who forsake you will be put to shame. What does it mean to forsake God? Sounds awful, doesn't it?

How about this, the word can also mean leave behind, it can also mean leave behind.