FBC Morning Light – August 10, 2022

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you. Here we are in the middle of the week already, and I hope your week is going well.

Now, yesterday, I've got to correct a terrible error that I made yesterday. I failed to acknowledge that it was our anniversary.

My wife and I married on August 9th of 1980, so we celebrated 42 years of marriage yesterday.

We have a unique way of celebrating our anniversaries. I suppose the reason

I failed to mention this yesterday is I record these devotionals ahead of time, and it's a few days before our anniversary, so it wasn't on my mind at the moment of recording it.

But anyway, our unique way of celebrating our anniversaries is that we go on a bike ride together, and we ride a mile for every year that we've been married.

As you can imagine, it's getting a little more difficult as the years go by. So we were supposed to yesterday have—actually, we did the ride on Monday, to do the ride on Monday, ride 42 miles on the

Fox River Trail over in the western suburbs of the Chicago area.

So anyway, I thank the Lord for the good wife that He's given to me and has been by my side through these last four -plus decades.

Well, today we're in Jeremiah chapter 36, and this chapter gives us a good way of evaluating how we respond to the

Word of God as it's proclaimed. So the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, told

Jeremiah to write down what God was going to reveal to him in a book, in a scroll.

So Jeremiah did so, and then the Lord said, okay, take the scroll and have it read before the people, and have

Baruch, your secretary, if you will, have him read it to the people. And so Baruch does that.

He goes to—he writes down everything that Jeremiah gave to him, and in verse 10 of chapter 36,

Baruch read from the book the words that Jeremiah had received from the

Lord, and there were a bunch of people in the house of the Lord at that particular time.

And there were some who heard this, and we read in verse 11 that when

Micaiah, the son of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, heard all the words of the Lord from the book, then he went down to the king's house, into the scribe's chamber, and all the princes were sitting there, names who the princes are, and Micaiah declared to them all the words that he'd heard.

So he heard these words, and he responded, he reacted to those words with being startled, because after all, the word that Jeremiah received from the

Lord, that he wrote down and Baruch proclaimed in the house of the Lord, was the word of judgment, that God's judgment was coming upon his erring people.

And so Micaiah goes to the king's house, he tells this to the princes, and he declared all the words that he'd heard when

Baruch read in the book of the hearing of the people, and then all the princes sent

Jehudi, one of their representatives, to Baruch and said, take your hand and your scroll, bring it here and read it to us.

And so Baruch comes and reads it in their hearing. And when they heard what the

Lord had said, they looked in fear from one to another and said to Baruch, we will surely tell the king all these words.

And so they did. They found out how Baruch got those words, he explained to them that the Lord gave the words to Jeremiah, Jeremiah spoke the words,

Baruch wrote them down, and then Baruch read them. And so then they take this scroll to the king and start reading it to the king.

And how do you think he responds to it? As he hears the words from the scroll, he takes the scroll and takes a knife in hand and he slices part of that scroll, throws it into the fire.

Here's the next section, slices it, throws it into the fire. He doesn't want anything to do with it. All right, so in that scene, that account, you see several different ways to respond to the

Word of God. And it challenges us, doesn't it? Doesn't it compel us to ask a series of questions?

How do you respond to the Word of the Lord when you hear it? You respond with indifference?

Or do you respond with a recognition that this is the

Word of God? Do you recognize the divine authority behind that preached

Word? Do I submit to the demands that that preached

Word places upon me? Or do I try to figure a way out, do I try to weasel my way out of that responsibility that I have?

Do I believe the claims that God makes for Himself in His revealed

Word as those claims are preached and shared with me? Does my life change at all because of God's Word?

Does it change at all? Or does it go in one ear and out the other? And most pointedly, do

I just flatly reject it? Do I just say, I don't want to hear that, I want to do what

I want to do. And figuratively speaking, take out the knife and slice out the page and throw it into the fire.

Well, I'm sure if you're listening to this today, that's not your attitude at all. But this passage does give us some challenge, doesn't it?

To be sure that we respond to the Word of God in the right way, in the appropriate way.

Recognize the divine authority that's behind that Word, that consumes that Word, and submit ourselves to it accordingly.

All right, let's pray and ask God to help us to do just that. Our Father and our God, we do pray today that we would be properly responsive to Your Word.

We would have a wholesome fear and recognition of the divine authority that is given the

Word and that expects obedience and submission to it. And may we do so.

In this we pray, in Jesus' name, Amen. All right, well, have a good rest of your