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Encouragement for the journey from God’s Word. Today's Scripture: Jeremiah 4:19-6:14
Well, a good Monday morning to you. Hope you had a wonderful weekend and were able to gather together with God's people in the Lord's house yesterday, learned something from his Word, and were impacted.
You were impacted by it as well. The Lord uses the Lord's Day, our gathering together to worship and serve him, he uses that as a means of grace, as a means to grow us in our grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So I hope you had that opportunity and experience yesterday on the Lord's Day. Well, we begin a new week today, and this morning we're in the book of Jeremiah, chapters 4, 5, and 6, and I just want to focus on one verse in chapter 4, which is really a sad indictment on the people of God, but I wish I could say that it's an indictment that was limited to Jeremiah's day.
I think, unfortunately, it's also something that could be said of so many who profess to be God's people today, and so listen to what the writer says. He says, the Lord speaking through Jeremiah, he says, My people are foolish.
They have not known me. They are silly children. They have no understanding. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge. Now, this is a condition, this last part of the statement, wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge.
That's something that could be said of young children who haven't found their way yet and haven't been instructed in just some very basic rudimentary things of life, right? They know how to get into mischief.
For quite a while we had little ones running around our house and there's no end to the mischief that they can get into, and they do so innocently, if you will, they do so without understanding. I remember speaking of that kind of a situation many, many, many years ago, and some of you probably had this experience happen in your own household at some point or another, but when I was a child, my younger sister, who is five years younger than I am, I remember one day she took one of my mom's car keys, or took the car keys, and stuck it in an outlet.
The way we knew it was, I mean, I was right there, right nearby, but there was this bright flash, and she was obviously very startled, and that, of course, heard this popping sound, and my parents ran into the room, and it was in the dining room, and everybody looked, and she was okay, my sister was okay, just shocked her, obviously, but just getting into mischief, just inquisitive and curious, and just getting into stuff.
Well, this is true of little kids. They don't have understanding. They're wise to do evil, not necessarily in a little child, in a moral sense, but doing things that aren't good, things that aren't wise, they just don't know any better.
But what a tragedy it is when this is said of people who should know better. The Lord is speaking here of his own people, who have had his word, they've had the law, they've heard prophets, they've heard preachers, they know better, but yet they have ignored it.
They are wise to do evil. They can scheme, and they can calculate, and they can figure out how to get what they want, and to do what they want, but to do good, they don't have any understanding. Is this the case in our day?
Is it possible that in our current contemporary Christian world, that maybe a majority of those who profess to be Christians, they are very wise to do evil, but to do good, they have no knowledge, they have no understanding?
Why would that be? I suppose it could be because of a failure in the pulpit, and I think that could be the case in many, many places where pastors have given themselves to just giving nice little lectures, nice little talks, a 15, 20-minute little thing.
I heard one person comment lately that they visited a church, and at that church, if you had taken out one or two Bible verses that the pastor quoted, it would have sounded like something you heard on Oprah.
It could have been just as similar to what you would hear on an Oprah show. If that's the case in that pulpit all the time, then there's going to be a people who are weak in their faith, they have no real knowledge of how to please God.
God's given us his Word so that we might find out what he is like and what he likes, and that we may live accordingly so that we may have knowledge and we may be wise to do good. I hope that's your pursuit and your ambition, far be it from us that we would have this set of us.
Our Father and our God, I pray that you would truly feed us with your Word. I pray that you would grow us in grace and knowledge of Christ. I pray that we would be wise to do what is right and really be ignorant and foolish when it comes to doing that which is wrong.
Give us that grace to grow in that way, we pray. May it never be said of us, what you had to say of your people of old, that they were foolish. This we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right, well, I hope your week gets off to a good start today.
May you have a good Monday. God bless.