Sunday Morning, July 28, 2019 AM Part 1

in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There is one mediator between God and man, the man,

Christ Jesus. And so Father, we come before you today in the name of your Son, by the power of your

Holy Spirit to worship you. We ask that you would give us a sustaining, invigorating, transforming meal from your word.

This is our most necessary food. I pray that you would bless our time in your word, that you would lead us in worship, that in repentance and faith, we would honor and glorify you by being the amen on earth of your will, which is in heaven.

We pray these things for Christ's sake. Amen. I invite you to open your

Bibles and turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 31. Jeremiah chapter 31.

When I saw this passage and the next, just chapter 31 by itself, I immediately bolted and preached a two week overview to give me time to try to get ready for understanding what's here.

The Lord has been gracious. It's important to understand what's going on in Jeremiah. The particular context is essential to understand the message.

In beginning of chapter 30, we are told that the word of the

Lord came to Jeremiah and told him to write a book. God comes to Jeremiah in the last year that Jerusalem remained standing.

Zedekiah is king in Jerusalem. He is one of Josiah's sons and he is the uncle of the real king of Israel, of Judah, who is now in captivity in Babylon.

But the king of Babylon put Zedekiah in charge and he's supposed to be a puppet king, but Zedekiah has bigger plans.

Zedekiah wants to rebel against Babylon and through forging a coalition of local nations, he hopes to break free of the oppression of Babylon.

So he's got big ideas and big plans. And although he and his servants regularly consult with Jeremiah and ask him what the

Lord says, they also continually, regularly, they don't follow what the

Lord says. Nonetheless, they keep Jeremiah around. Things are so bad in Jerusalem right now that food is running scarce.

And those who advocate for Jeremiah requested that he be moved to the king's palace in a special room where he's still under arrest, but at least he gets a little food and water every day.

And so things are really bad and Jeremiah spends time writing this book.

And this is going to be sent to the exiles who live in Babylon. In the chapter 30, he writes to them about their future.

He writes to them and he gives them instructions. He's done so already in a letter and now he gives perspective now in chapter 30 about what the future holds for Judah, what

God has promised the nation of Judah. They're in exile in Babylon and they are under specific marching orders.

They are to plant gardens and build houses. They are to get married, have children, give their children in marriage to others.

And they are to multiply and not decrease. And they are to pray for the welfare of Babylon because in the welfare of that city and that empire, they would know their welfare.

And the whole point of it is that they're coming home. They're not gonna be there forever. There's a time in which

God will restore them to their land. And Jeremiah expresses this and he lets them know that the punishment that they are experiencing in exile and the wrath of God, which is about to fall upon Jerusalem is all justified.

It is righteous, but God will not completely do away with them. And then we come to chapter 31 and God has more to say to the captives in Judah, but this time he's not going to talk to them about their particular future, but he's going to talk to them about Ephraim, about Israel, about those people who were wiped out in 722, 140 years prior and where are they and what is their future?

And we're going to see in verses one through 26 of Jeremiah 31, a story about repentance, a story about restoration.

And the title of the sermon is the point of low return. You've heard the point of no return and there are some who cross it much to our sorrow, but this is not about that point.

This is about the point of low return, which is a way of talking about repentance.

This morning I'm going to read for us from verses one through 14 of Jeremiah 31.

I invite you to stand as we receive the word of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Here's the word of the

Lord. At that time declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel and they shall be my people.

Thus says the Lord, the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness, Israel, when it went to find its rest.

The Lord appeared to him from afar saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness.

Again, I will build you and you will be rebuilt O virgin of Israel. Again, you will take up your tambourines and go forth to the dances of the merrymakers.

Again, you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria. The planters will plant and will enjoy them for there will be a day when watchmen on the hills of Ephraim call out, arise and let us go up to Zion to the

Lord our God. For that says the Lord, sing aloud with gladness for Jacob and shout among the chief of the nations, proclaim, give praise and say,

Oh Lord, save your people, the remnant of Israel. Behold, I am bringing them from the

North country and I will gather them from the remote parts of the earth. Among them, the blind and the lame, the woman with child and she who is in labor with child together, a great company, they will return here.

With weeping, they will come and by supplication, I will lead them. I will make them walk by streams of water on a straight path in which they will not stumble for I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Hear the word of the Lord, O nations and declare in the coastlands of far off and say, he who scattered

Israel will regather him and keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.

For the Lord has ransomed Jacob and redeemed him from the hand of him who was stronger than he.

They will come and shout for joy on the height of Zion and they will be radiant over the bounty of the

Lord, over the grain and the new wine and the oil, over the young of the flock and the herd and their life will be like a watered garden and they will never languish again.

Then the virgin will rejoice in the dance and the young men and the old together for I will turn their mourning into joy and will comfort them and give them joy for their sorrow.

I will fill the soul of the priests with abundance and my people will be satisfied with my goodness, declares the

Lord. This is the word of the Lord, you may be seated. When I was very young, my mother read to my brother and me every night and she would read from some series of books and she read through the

Laura Ingalls Wilder series to us. And I always felt a little camaraderie with the family because our family moved 13 times in 18 years.

And so I remember asking my mother one night about why Paul Ingalls was always moving the family to someplace else.

And I didn't know I was asking her an autobiographical question, but she paused and she said, well,

Paul was thinking that there was a better situation somewhere else than where they were in and he would try to take them there and sometimes it didn't turn out that way and so they would move and try again.

That's a very, I think people connect with that. I think that we've all had that situation. We've moved to try to find a better situation and sometimes it didn't turn out that way.

I was advised when I was in seminary about moving from church to church that the grass was always greener over the septic tank.

So to be very careful where you go. But that's common to all of our human experiences that sometimes we think, well, there's a better situation, let's move and try that.

We have this in our history. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of folks moved away from the plains states towards California, filled with dirt and wind.

These states had become a dust bowl. And now hundreds of thousands of people are moving away from California, flush with government waste.

It has become a different type of bowl. All sorts of people around the world are moving.

Latin American folks flee socialist governments for the United States. Families in Belgium flee child euthanasia laws for Germany.

North African Muslims flee Islamic -made poverty for France and England. And the problems which incite mass immigration and the problems that it causes leaves everybody unhappy.

But we all recognize the human impulse to flee a bad situation for another one. We all know that feeling.

We have that impulse. And I think that is fertile ground into which the gospel of Jesus Christ must be sown.

You know, moving jobs and moving houses, moving cities, moving states, and even countries may be God's will for some of us from time to time, but there's a different type of movement that we all need to prioritize.

For God commands all men everywhere to repent. And repentance is a fleeing from and a moving to.

It's a fleeing from our self -confidence, a fleeing from our excuses, a fleeing from whatever false gods and false messages we trust to Jesus Christ.

Indeed, God says through Isaiah, "'Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, "'for

I am God and there is no other.'" So there's a way to sum up what I think is happening here in Jeremiah 31, 1 through 26.

It is this, leave the wasteland of sin for Zion. Leave the wasteland of sin for Zion.

There's a lot of material here, and I've been praying and looking for a helpful way to lay out the riches of this text in light of the scriptures.

And I think the best that I can do is a story of five points, and it's this.

Sin is a wasteland. Grief is a compass.

Hope is a signpost. Grace is a parade, and Christ is in Zion.

That's gonna be our story. We're just gonna get to the first part of it this morning.

But this is the story, I think, of the 26 verses here that begin Jeremiah 31. Sin is a wasteland.

Grief is a compass. Hope is a signpost. Grace is a parade, and Christ is in Zion.

And we need to start by talking about the wasteland of sin. I don't know if there's a lot of agreement about that in our thinking today as a culture.

I don't know if we really believe that sin is a wasteland. I don't know if we really feel the devastation and separation that sin causes.

We may need to remember and reflect upon the fact that the primal deception was precisely here, that sin would not be a wasteland.

As Satan told Adam and Eve, you will not surely die.

That's the primal deception, that sin is not a wasteland. It's an alternative, it's an option.

But sin is a wasteland. When I say a wasteland, I wonder what image comes into your mind. No, it is not a rugged mountainside wilderness.

Sin is the northern slope of Mount St. Helens after the pyroclastic violence descended in a forest obliterating life -suffocating lahar.

From the air, the trees, the blasted trees, look like a crate of toothpicks in the mud.

Sin is that kind of wasteland. It's not a wide -open desert filled with various specimens of life and spartan beauty.

Sin is the center of the irradiated sands in the

Nevada nuclear test site. Sin is a wasteland.

Sin brings destruction. Sin causes destruction. Sin is destruction.

Creation, creation is destroyed because of sin. Souls are destroyed because of sin.

Relationships are destroyed because of sin. The foundations are destroyed because of sin.

Nations are destroyed because of sin. Sin is a wasteland.

And though we have many examples in the Bible of this, the nation of Israel is a good example of what happens when a culture, when a people embrace sin, its devastation and its separation.

The devastation is described by a image at the end of chapter 30.

Behold the tempest of the Lord. Wrath has gone forth, a sweeping tempest. It will burst upon the head of the wicked.

The storm of the Lord, the wrath of God comes roaring upon the head of the wicked whirling.

Sounds even better in the Hebrew. Mit grorer al rosh roshim yachul. That'll get your attention.

I don't want any part of that. And this happened in the nation of Israel, the

Northern kingdom of the 10 tribes that split from Judah. It came by Assyrian mercenaries who literally felled

Samaria alive in 722. It also came by the

Babylonian armies like waves against Jerusalem. It was about to come and destroy

Jerusalem in 586 BC. It was just about to fall, this whirlwind.

We think of Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon. We can think of Jerusalem in AD 70.

We think about God's wrath being described in the scriptures, the worst of God's wrath, the worst of God's wrath poured out upon earth, we must remember, is a severe mercy warning of the far greater catastrophe awaiting sinners in hell.

Whatever we learn from Sodom and Gomorrah, whatever we learn from Samaria and Jerusalem, whatever we learn from Tyre and Sidon is to teach us about everlasting judgment of God.

Sin has its impact on you personally. Sin will fill your head with delusions. Sin will fill your heart with poison.

Sin will fill your relationships with mistrust, idolatry, and bitterness. But all of that kind of devastation is but an

EF zero next to God's EF five. So we have a picture of a tornado and there's the proof of the trampling.

Now what I'm trying to do here in the story that sin is a wasteland, I think it's important that we recognize the condition that the exiles are in Babylon, what they're dealing with, the

Jews who are in exile in Babylon, what they're recognizing about their sin. What about those who are still in Jerusalem in the last year before it's destroyed?

And what about those tribes who were taken captive by the Assyrians and spread throughout the known world?

You know, in the text, as we read through Jeremiah 31, one through 26, I've gotta tell you, most of it's very hopeful.

There is a lot of promise and hope and good things to look at, but unless we understand the context of the wasteland of sin in which they live, we won't understand half the hope and half the blessings and promise that are there.

As we've been moving through Jeremiah and as we think about the historical context in which they lived, we have got to recognize the wasteland of sin that they were in.

And so I'm pointing out the proof in the text, but there's a lot of other passages that say it even more clearly.

There's a tornado that God talks about in terms of his wrath and judgment, but also a trampling has occurred in Samaria, in Ephraim, verses four and five.

He says, again, I will build you and you will be rebuilt. That's good news. Oh, virgin of Israel, again, you will take up your tambourines and go forth to the dances of the merrymakers.

Again, you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria. The planters will plant and will enjoy them. Why is

God having to rebuild, repopulate, and replant Samaria and Ephraim?

It's because of sin, because it was a wasteland. It had been trampled again and again by foreign armies.

It was the highway through that foreign armies took and battles were waged again and again, back and forth over the hills of Samaria, the hills of Ephraim, to when there is nothing left.

There was a trampling, a devastation because of sin. Not only a devastation, but a separation.

And I'm talking about, and I don't know how much you know about the history, but when I'm talking about Judah, that's a different nation than Israel.

And why is it that the nation of Judah was still barely hanging on to their capital city in Jerusalem, even though many of their group had been exiled to Babylon?

What happened to this other kingdom named Israel just north of them? Why wasn't anyone living in Samaria? Why weren't they living on the hills of Ephraim?

Why weren't they having marriage feasts, and marriage celebrations, and planting vineyards, and rejoicing in the goodness of the

Lord? What happened to them? For that, we have to go back to Solomon and the rebellion that he began.

Solomon, he's known as the wisest man who lived, but he was also the greatest fool because being a fool is not being ignorant, being a fool is knowing better and doing it anyway.

And boy, did he know better. And Solomon rebelled against God. He progressively gave himself over to sexual desire and idolatrous experimentation.

Very sad passage is 1 Kings 11, one through 13. By the end, he had married a thousand women and worshiped the demon idols of Ashtoreth, Milchom, Chemosh, and Molech, which means that Solomon enshrined cult prostitution and child sacrifice among the tribes of Israel.

That's what he did. And that plague would not cease until finally,

God either exiled or exterminated the group. God promised

Solomon because of his disobedience that he would tear away almost all the tribes away from his son, Rehoboam.

And God raised up an opponent to Solomon, a man named

Jeroboam. He became the first king of the 10 Northern tribes of Israel.

He was an Ephraimite and he picked Shechem, a city in Ephraim as his capital. And thus sometimes the

Northern kingdom is referred to as Ephraim. It's one of the reasons why the Northern kingdom is sometimes called

Ephraim because they were the chief tribe of those Northern tribes. Solomon had fashioned many problems of wisdom for his son, but Rehoboam turned out as foolish as his old man was lecherous.

When Rehoboam became king, rather than listening to the counsel of his elders, he listened to the counsel of his peers.

And rather than enlighten the heavy tax load that he had on the people, he only increased it.

And when that happened, the nation divided. Here's what the 10

Northern tribes said. First Kings chapter 12, verse 16. When all

Israel saw that the king would not listen to them, the people answered the king saying, what portion do we have in David?

We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, oh Israel, now look after your own house,

David. So Israel departed to their tents. See, God had raised up David as a man after his own heart, as a king, and he had made this covenant with David and said,

David, I will make sure that a descendant, one of your descendants will be upon the throne of Jerusalem.

You will have an everlasting eternal house, an eternal line of kings will come from you.

And God promised in more than one place that he would not allow the lamp of David to go out in Jerusalem.

And what did the Northern tribes do then? They say, what do we have to do with that?

What do we have to do with the promised line of kings? What do we have to do with the line of David through whom would come the

Messiah? And they say, David, you look to your own house, the house that God promised to you.

They turned their back on David and they abandoned the Southern kingdom. So they defected from David.

They turned their back on the blessings of God's covenant with David. They preferred darkness to the lamp that God promised to keep lit in Jerusalem.

There was this division. And now Jeroboam proceeded with obstruction. After the division, after the separation and the rebellion comes obstruction.

Jeroboam was concerned that the Northern 10 tribes would begin to be realigned with Judah in the

South as they traveled down to Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, and there go through the practices of different feasts and different sacrifices.

He thought, if the people that I rule over continually go back down to Jerusalem, they will begin to be more aligned with that Southern kingdom and then eventually they'll be reunited and then

I'll lose all my power. And so he became an obstructionist.

At the Northern city of Dan and the Southern city of Bethel, Bethel being on the border between the

Southern kingdom of Judah and the Northern kingdom of Israel, Jeroboam built two shrines. They've even excavated the shrine that was in Dan.

They found it. And there they built golden, he built two golden calves, one to the

North, one to the South. Golden calves, like the ones that Aaron, like the one that Aaron made when they just got up out of Egypt.

And you know what he said to the people of Israel? He said, behold your gods who have brought you up out of Egypt.

He said, it's too much for you to go down to Jerusalem. You just go to Dan or to Bethel and worship there these golden calf gods that have rescued you from the land of Egypt.

And he made priests out of the non -Levites and he set them up upon the high places and upon all the hills, upon the hills of Ephraim, upon the hills of Samaria went the high places and they worshiped the false gods until after five generations of intense wickedness,

Samaria was captured and all of Israel with her. You can read about that in the sad story, 2

Kings 17, one through 23, but these Israelites, it says they were resettled anywhere from 400 to 800 miles away from their homeland.

They were sent to cities on a river. They were actually sent, it says, to the cities of the

Medes. Holy Spirit clearly states why this judgment came because they had feared of the gods, the gods of the

Canaanites, the golden calves of Jeroboam and they became what they worshiped.

They became what they worshiped, stone hearted, stiff necked, promoting the cult prostitution and child sacrifice

Solomon had introduced 200 years before. Now, 2

Kings 17, 20 says this, the Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers until he had cast them out of his sight.

That's what sin does. It devastates and it separates. Sin is a wasteland and these people were deported as worthless, stiff necked, idolatrous, immoral, murderous leeches on the land.

And now we come to Jeremiah 31 verses four through 10. When, this is staggeringly good news.

When we read in Jeremiah 31 verses four through 10, we read that the spirit of Jeremiah is telling the

Jewish exiles in Babylon, oh, your Israelite brethren lost 140 years earlier will be brought back that the hills of Ephraim where all those high places were, the hills of Samaria from which

Jeroboam said, we're not going back down to Jerusalem, that these places are going to be rebuilt, repopulated, replanted, restored.

And from these very hills, they're gonna say, let's go to Zion and worship God. That is jaw dropping,

I've got to sit down, get some water for my face kind of news. You see, before we can comprehend the power of God's saving grace, we need to understand the devastation of sin.

Before we can understand the power of God's saving grace, we've got to understand the devastation of sin.

Repentance is a grace, it is a point of low return. It's a point of low return.

You know, nobody can come to God without coming back to God. God has made us in his image. God has made us in his image, he has given us life.

So nobody can come to God without coming back to God, and nobody comes back to God riding on their high horse.

No one. God resists the proud, gives grace to the humble.

It's a point of low return. When we come to God, we come emaciated in our addictions, bent over in our guilt, groaning in our sin -riddled souls.

Sin makes a wasteland of our lives. Is it not devastating to your thinking?

Is it not catastrophic to your affections? Is it not debilitating to your character?

Is it not sabotage to your speech? Is it not confounding to your senses and your abilities?

Consider what sin does to you, and consider the scourge that you have laid upon others with your sin, that you contribute to their thorn -infested, famine -afflicted, folly -directed wasteland too.

Will we not confess without excuse and qualification the heinous natures of our sins? Will we defend our wastelands as a project?

Will we call our sin a natural disaster? Will you, as many have done with cold heart and arrogant face, call your wasteland a wonderland?

Instead of calling it abominable immorality, you call it a sexual revolution? Instead of calling it the slaughter of infants, call it women's rights?

No man can take fire to his bosom and remain unscorched. Now, if you will not acknowledge what a wasteland sin makes of your soul or your body or your relationships in the world around you, if all of this that we've already said will not make you dread and hate sin, then please, please look at Jesus Christ.

Look at Jesus Christ. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Behold Jesus Christ, blood streaming down His face from the thorns beaten into His head.

Behold His shredded back, His hands and feet impaled by Roman stakes. What a wasteland our sin has made

Christ. He bears our sorrows. He carries our transgressions.

Do you believe it? He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

God has laid the iniquity of us all upon Him. Will you own up to it? Behold Christ devastated and don't look away.

Behold Christ separated. Hear Him cry the cry of the damned. My God, my

God, why have you forsaken me? In the supernatural darkness, under the black weight of God's holy wrath,

Christ is devastated and separated not by His sins but by ours.

Will you confess it? Will you find in Christ your substitute?

Or will you stone -hearted and stiff -necked say, what portion do

I have in Christ? I have no inheritance in the Son of David. It is of the highest importance that we see the greatest devastation and worst separation of our sin as expended in Christ.

The fullness of our guilt, the totality of our condemnation. We may spend a very long time analyzing and cataloging all of the destruction that sin causes.

And all of the related accountability and related guilt and shame that we ought to feel for the full impact of our sins.

But if all we do is analyze our societal structures, if all we do is analyze our family relationships, if all we do is catalog our personal histories and find there every instance that we can of what is broken, what is wrong, and what has failed, we will not come near to the heinous horrors of what sin is.

We will only see it when we look at Christ suffering for us on the cross.

And it is vitally important for your faith, yes, for the salvation of your soul, and also for the sanctification of your life, that you know, that you believe, that you can see from the word itself that all of the guilt that should righteously come down upon you and crush you for your sinfulness has instead come down upon Christ in your place and for your sake.

Romans chapter three, verses nine through 20, gives us a scalding account of the horrors of sin.

And then says this, verse 21, but now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by his grace through the redemption, which is in Christ Jesus, whom

God displayed publicly as a propitiation in his blood through faith.

This is staggeringly good news that we would see the full scorching, awful nature of our sins and what it does to ourselves and the world around us and to the

God who made us and yet come to this portion. And it says that God freely saves us through the redemption, which is in Christ Jesus.

And this redemption is a propitiation. It is a satisfying, sacrificial payment in which the offended justice of God is met with the righteousness of Christ as he bears our guilt and the wrath of God for our sins so that God would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus, that he would look upon you and I, and he would say of us who are in Christ by faith, and he would say, not guilty, and he would say, righteous, as fully acceptable to the presence of God and the welcome embrace of God as Jesus Christ himself is welcomed to the embrace of his heavenly father.

That is jaw dropping, I've got to sit down, get me some water from my face kind of news.

And if we don't have this glorious truth in front of us, we are going to miss out on a lot of joy and be led into some frustrating and even dangerous paths.

The story goes like this. Leave the wasteland of sin, our sin is a wasteland, grief is a compass, we'll talk about that next time, hope is a signpost, grace is a parade, and Christ is in Zion.

Where are we heading, where's our focus? Now listen, what

I have described to you from Romans three, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, the truth by, the reality by which we are saved,

Jesus in our place for our sake. This is an idea that is increasingly not just questioned, not even really just rejected, but actually mocked by those who would claim to be for the church as some kind of backwards, horrendous idea.

You know, but the Bible is pretty honest about it. This gospel is a stumbling block to the

Jews, and it is an offense to the Greeks. And so it is what it is, it is the good news, even if it doesn't sound modern enough, or post -modern enough.

But I want you to keep this truth before you. If you do not, there will be those who come and pray upon you, and they will tell you, you are a great sinner in ways that you don't even know.

And you as a Christian would say, well, you're probably right about that. I mean,

I do have a lot of things that I struggle with. And they'll say, you know, unless you are making up for all of the bad things that you're about that you didn't even know that you were, unless you are working vigorously to make up for all those deficiencies, you're not really living out the true

Christian faith. And you say, well, I wanna live out the Christian faith. I mean, I wanna do what

Jesus wants me to do. And they'll even use scripture, and they'll compel you in ways to say, look, look how deficient your faith is.

Look how deficient your walk with Christ is. And this is causing all sorts of problems in the world. And look how much sin you are doing and causing in all these places.

And you know, the only way to make any kind of impact is to begin to say these list of things and then to do these list of things.

And if you will say these things in this way and do these things in this way, then maybe perhaps

God would be a little bit more happy with you than he is now. You know what you say to that?

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Who is he who condemns? It is God who justifies. Who is he who will put us on trial?

It is Christ himself who has died for us. And at the God of the universe and his son who will judge the living and the dead will not condemn us.

And who are these jokers? And if they say, well, you've participated in sinful structures so that anything that you say is tainted by all the sin that you have participated in and you can't speak of these moral truths or these gospel truths, and you don't really have anything to say to others because of your connection to all these problems, then you can confess along with Isaiah, woe is me in the presence of God, I am undone.

I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. But do you know what the angel does?

How does Isaiah, even though he's a man of unclean lips, and even though he lives among a people of unclean lips and so he's very tainted, how is it that he goes forth and speaks the word of God with clarity and boldness so that the people would hear the truth of God?

What is done for Isaiah? The angel brings a coal from the altar and with it, he cleanses

Isaiah's mouth so that now his sins forgiven, his identity in the gracious, forgiving

God who provides the sacrifice for him, now

Isaiah may speak clearly. And brothers and sisters, this is what we must do, that we speak not as those who say,

I have no sin, but we speak as those who say, I have a savior,

I have Christ. And because he is the light of the world, because he is the truth, then we get to speak along with him.

Two final applications and then we're going to be dismissed. The first step of the path here in Jeremiah 31,

I think that the first thing that has to be recognized is the wasteland of sin. And why it is that Ephraim will leave exile and journey all the way back in wretched condition to a place that needs to be rebuilt and everything else, but it begins with the fact that there's a wasteland of sin and we have to understand what sin is and call it by the names the

Bible calls it if we're going to come to the point of low return.

As long as we dignify sin, as long as we make sin a clinical or a social malady, as long as we give sin some kind of special status, we're not going to come to the place of low return.

And we have to stop with the effeminate language about sin. Effeminate language is either silent on sin or it's soft on sin.

It's either silent on sin or it's soft on sin and we need to be done with it.

You know, Jeremiah, by the Spirit, speaks of sin's devastation and God's wrath in clear, direct, necessary terms.

He talks about a storm, the whirling tempest of God's wrath upon the wicked. And then he talks about those whom

God plans to restore and he's just saying, you know, these people are way off. You know, he doesn't speak in such a way as to protect them from any exposure to the past.

Well, you know, they couldn't help it. He speaks of the hills of Samaria and the hills of Ephraim which need to be rebuilt, the hills.

The hills which the prophets spoke against time and time again, where the high places were. Upon every hill, underneath every green tree,

Ezekiel says, Israel played the harlot. And so here is Jeremiah talking about the hills that are gonna have to be restored for Ephraim.

That's not tactful, bringing up those hills. That hits a nerve.

That's a micro -aggressing trigger feast. You know, those hills. But he talks about it anyway.

There's no lisping euphemisms here. There's no effeminate doctrine when talking about sin.

We need to call sin what it is and not something else. You know, stop calling immorality a relationship, right?

Stop calling wokeness, start calling it bitterness and unforgiveness.

We gotta call sin what it is. It's not being attracted to loving, monogamous, same -sex relationships.

That's not what it is. It's coveting the abomination of sodomy. It's not having a broader conversation about the gospel in non -Western contexts.

No, it's preaching another gospel, which is not a gospel and is anathema. And it's not sharing my latest prayer concern about this family's many challenges again.

That's gossip. You gotta stop calling sin a condition or a challenge or a brokenness or fallenness or a poor choice or an unfortunate misstep.

We should call it what the Bible calls it, iniquity, transgression, abomination, wickedness, and evil.

And why would we do that? Because every time we speak effeminately of sin, we speak lightly of the cross of Christ.

Jesus Christ did not die for our condition and our challenge and our poor choice and our misstep.

He died for our sin. And secondly, we need to make room for shame and grief.

Not because we're supposed to live with shame and grief forever and ever and ever. And anybody can yank that chain anytime they want something from us.

But we need to speak clearly about sin because of what comes next. As long as, until we recognize that sin is a wasteland, then we never come to the compass of grief.

We need to leave room for grief. As long as we try and tell people who need to come to Christ, as long as we tell them not to feel bad about their sin, or don't feel bad about the impact of your sin, as long as we soften our language about sin, we dehumanize them.

They were not made in the image of man. They were not made after the likeness of animals.

They were made in the image of God. And if the more that we remove responsibility off of people, and the more that we speak softly about sin, and we dehumanize them, and Satan loves it, if we make people comfortable about their sin, they will become callous towards salvation.

Here's what Jesus says, Matthew 5, 3. Blessed, it means happy, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Now what is that? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? Well, it means to be spiritually poor. In other words, it's coming before God and saying,

I've got nothing. Nothing to buy my way in, nothing that you could use,

I've got nothing. Happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

You know, once you recognize that you're in the wasteland of sin, and that you have nothing, you've come to the point of low return.

Let's pray. Lord, I pray that you would help us to look at sin the way you do, that we would not take it easy on our sins just because we're trying to do a favor for ourselves or for others.

We would recognize it for what it is. God, I'm in this,

I'm in this boat. Father, please give us the courage and the insight to view our sins the way you see them, so that we would turn to Christ and know the joy.

Father, today, please restore unto us the joy of your salvation.

Lord, I thank you for the time you've given us in your word. You'd be honored and glorified in our midst and our lives.