Jeremiah 1, Prophets or Profits?

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Jeremiah 1 Prophets or Profits?

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All right, Jeremiah chapter 1, starting in verse 1, we'll be reading the entire chapter. Hear the word of the
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Lord. The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the
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Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah, in the 13th year of his reign.
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It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, and until the end of the 11th year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month.
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Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born and I consecrated you,
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I appointed you a prophet to the nations. Then I said, ah, Lord God, behold,
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I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth. But the Lord said to me, do not say I'm only a youth, for to all to whom
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I send you, you shall go. And whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the
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Lord. Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, behold,
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I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.
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And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Jeremiah, what do you see? And I said,
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I see an almond branch. Then the Lord said to me, you have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.
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And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, what do you see? And I said, I see a boiling pot facing away from the north.
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Then the Lord said to me, out of the north, disaster shall come, or shall be let loose upon all the inhabitants of the land.
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For behold, I am calling all the tribes of the kingdoms of the north, declares the Lord. And they shall come, and everyone shall set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem.
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Against all its walls, and against all around, and against all the cities of Judah. And I will declare my judgments against them for all their evil in forsaking me.
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They have made offerings to other gods and worship the works of their own hands. But you, dress yourself for work.
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Arise and say to them, everything that I command you, do not be dismayed by them, lest I dismay you before them.
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And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land.
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They shall fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.
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May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. A lot there, but anyway.
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And the winter of 2000, I got to work as the teaching assistant for Professor Robert W. Fogle at the
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University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. As some of you may know, being a teaching assistant, what they call a
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TA, is different than being the same title, the same one in a public school.
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TAs in a university are usually doctoral students, as I was, and who do all the things for a professor to run a particular course, except give the actual lectures.
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And in some cases, they may even be called upon to do that. Professor Fogle asked me to give a couple of lectures to the students, a class of about 50, with about half of them
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MBA students, his Master's of Business Administration, and half undergraduate economics students from the university.
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For some reason, he asked me to give the lecture on his area of specialty.
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Professor Fogle had won a Nobel Prize in 1993 in economics, largely for his research into the economics of slavery.
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Now, I was intimidated by having to give the lecture on the subject that he won the Nobel Prize for.
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But that's what he asked me to do. I guess he was tired of talking about it. I remember about halfway through my lecture to this room full of economics and business students, all there studying on how to make a profit,
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I remember some noticeably beginning to object to what I was presenting.
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There was some resistance. One female student, I can remember very clearly. It's kind of an amphitheater style, up in rows.
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She was sitting in the very back row, a little bit to my right, about where Jason is now. And she began shaking her head about halfway through the lecture, as if she were saying, no, no, no.
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The truth is not always happily received. Before Professor Fogle, it was widely believed, and I've seen it still stated in American history textbooks, that slavery, particularly
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American Southern plantation slavery, was not only harsh and cruel, but worse than that, for economists, it was economically unproductive.
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That it was bad business. And it drove on and encouraged backwardness and laziness, particularly the backwardness and laziness of the slave owners, of the plantation owners themselves.
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Men like, you think of the fiction, Gerald O 'Hara. Scarlett O 'Hara's very unbusinesslike father and gone with the wind.
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It assumed that kind of myth of what slavery must have been like, it assumed that slavery was simply not as profitable as free farm, just what people did because they just wanted to lord it over other people.
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That it wasn't very profitable, it wasn't good business at all. Professor Fogle proved all of that wrong.
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He did research, he took the actual accounting records, the income, the output, the expenses of slave plantations in the
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South, and compared them to free farms in the North at the same time, and found first that slave plantations were 35 % more efficient than Northern farms, despite the fact that generally, believe it or not, the soil is better up North, and part of the reason, there are fewer insects up there because the cold freezes them in the winter.
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Anyway, his critics immediately denounced his findings and insisted that that just could not be.
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Like the female student shaking her head, no, no, no. So he got more data, went back to the research, and made wider comparisons and concluded, you know,
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I was not right before. Plantations were not 35 % more efficient.
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They were 36 % more efficient. Not only that, many of them were run in very business -like ways, with the owners taking advantage of the very low labor costs to innovate a systemization of farming that was a precursor to mass production.
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It was very rational and efficient in the way it was organized most of the time. He found that the
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Southern economy, because of that, was growing at twice the rate of the Northern economy in the decade prior to the
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Civil War, which led him to conclude that if the Civil War had been delayed much longer, that had started much later in history, that the
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South could very likely have won. The reason many found that so objectionable, including many of my business students at the
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University of Chicago, was because of a basic assumption that they had, and that many
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Americans still have, that if something is profitable, if it makes a profit, it is good.
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And if something is good, it is profitable. Good business is moral, and morality is good business.
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So as I was speaking and trying to explain how slavery was efficient and profitable, that sounded like, to many of these business students, that slavery was good.
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And so they said, no, it can't be. I once spoke personally with Professor Fogel, and he told me how, when he started his research, he, too, had that assumption.
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That is what he expected to find as he started. He expected to find that slave plantations were inefficient and very sloppy business, but he found the opposite.
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And so for the basic assumption that, since he believed slavery was immoral, that he was evil, it had to be bad business.
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That if it was profitable, it would have survived. It's kind of like the theory of evolution.
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It's the same in the economic world. It's the survival of the fittest, right? The best business practices, the ones that are the most profitable, they multiply.
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They overcome all opposition. They spread and triumph. And so he assumed, before his research, that if slavery had been profitable, it would have spread and triumphed and still be around today, for that matter.
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When he discovered that slavery was very profitable, that it worked well, in fact, with modern business, he was faced with a crisis.
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Then, if that's the case, how did slavery end? Was it just the usual mechanisms of survival of the fittest, economics?
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So he said that that was his next focus of research. How did slavery end? What forces brought about the convictions among many people?
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What was it that began to convince more and more people that this institution, though profitable, was simply wrong, especially people in Britain and the
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United States? I can remember talking with him, just me and the professor alone in a classroom.
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And he told me himself, he called himself a secular
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Jew. And he said, here I was, a leading professor in some of America's elite universities.
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And I didn't know that it was evangelical Christians who ended slavery.
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Christians ended slavery because Christians were getting their values, getting their word from some source outside of the natural world, something above and beyond the world of practicality, of statistics, the workaday world.
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Christians heard from a God who reigned over all of that and whose word was more important than all of that, who, if he commanded people to do something, it didn't matter how impractical it might appear.
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It didn't matter how unprofitable his word might be, how much it might hurt the bottom line of business.
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What matters is what God said. And Christians knew that God had said to the prophets to let justice roll down like waters.
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And it didn't matter how much more efficient slavery was. It was plainly unjust.
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Christians knew the Lord Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself. And it didn't matter how much more money you could make with slaves.
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Our neighbors didn't want to be slaves. Christians knew that though God spoke through Jeremiah to let the slaves go free in his day, that God told the people, you better let your slaves go free or else,
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God said in Jeremiah chapter 34, verse 17, either you let the slaves go free or I will let you slave owners, quote, be free, free to be killed by sword or famine or disease.
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They had the prophetic word from outside themselves, from above the world of poles and bottom lines.
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And that word that made all of the statistics and the practicalities shrink to nothing, made them irrelevant.
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It was Bible believing Christians who didn't care how unpopular it was politically or unproductive it was economically, who demanded that slavery must end.
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What matters is what God said. What matters is what
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God said. But for you, what matters for you? Prophets or prophets?
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That's the choice this morning as we begin our look into the message of the prophet
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Jeremiah. What is your bottom line? What will further your income or what
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God has said? So here in Jeremiah chapter 1, we meet the prophet introduced to him at his call.
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His lofty call is called here to be a prophet, not only to Israel, but it says prophet to the nations.
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That would include us. To tell them all that God had said. Positive things like to build up, and even negative things like to tear down.
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To tell a hard -hearted people often the exact opposite of what they want to hear.
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And we see that here in this chapter in three parts. We see that Jeremiah is first appointed, that he is anointed, and that he is not disappointed.
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He is appointed, anointed, and not disappointed. First, he is appointed to be a prophet, even though a youth.
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In the 13th year of Josiah's reign, it doesn't say exactly how old Jeremiah is, but he was young.
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And he was young enough certainly to be daunted by the task of being called to be a prophet to the nations.
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Who am I that I can do such a thing? Likely, he was a teenager. He began his prophesying in what should have been a favorable time during the reign of the good
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King Josiah. But he had to continue that through a quick succession of compromising kings who wouldn't listen to him, who sometimes persecuted him.
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He continued through being put in stocks, plotted against, having a scroll cut and thrown in the fire, being thrown down a cistern, being arrested, kept in prison, being accused of being a traitor because he told them the hard words from God.
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His prophecy tore them down, and they didn't like that. He kept going through the destruction of Israel and even being dragged along against his will to Egypt.
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He kept going for decades, even when he appeared to have no audience, when he appeared to be changing no minds.
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No large crowds were coming to hear the prophet Jeremiah. They were not giving overflowing donations to his offerings so he could go live in a very comfortable house and drive a really nice chariot.
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He gave up getting married. He gave up living the quiet life of a priest. He was from a priestly family.
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He gave up just getting a salary and giving these people the religion they paid for.
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He gave up prophets to be a prophet. How does a man keep going when he's sunk halfway into the mud of a cistern and the only person who cares enough to save his life is a foreigner?
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How do you keep going when you've gone decades declaring a message and only one man cares enough to listen and to record it?
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His scribe, what we call a secretary, Baruch, he could keep going because he was appointed.
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We see what it means to be appointed there in verse 5. Notice there's three verbs there.
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What it means to be appointed. Known, consecrated, and simply as self -appointed. First, known. The Lord speaks to him, not only speaks to him, but very personally it says, the
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Lord came to me. It wasn't something impersonal and remote. The Lord came to me.
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And it says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. The word there for knew,
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Hebrews, is yada. It doesn't mean that the Lord saw into the future and could see that there would be this man.
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It's very much like what we just sang about. And he knows my name. Before time even began, he knew me.
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It was much more than just a mere intellectual knowledge, some information about who he was. It means a personal commitment to the one known.
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It means that before Jeremiah was born, the Lord intimately and personally committed himself to and experienced
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Jeremiah. So the appointment to be a prophet did come. Because Jeremiah went to prophet school and graduated on top of his class in prophecy, it came before he had done anything either good or bad.
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God knew him. And God appointed him. And second, God consecrated him.
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He's consecrated. In verse 5, the Lord says that before he was born, he consecrated him. It means to set him apart.
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The first one, we just looked at, he knew me, means that God committed himself to Jeremiah.
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This one, to set apart, to consecrate, means that the Lord committed
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Jeremiah to himself. He designated him for something special.
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Jeremiah wasn't a prophet because of who he was. He was who he was because he was a prophet. And third, appointed.
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I appointed you a prophet to the nations. It says the verb there means to be given a specific assignment to a particular task.
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Now, it's not a James Bond -like license to kill. You could just roam around and say and do anything you want to do.
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It is to a particular mission, here to be a prophet, a spokesman for God, to the nations, to say exactly what
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God has told him to say. All of it, and no less, and also no more. In verse 7,
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Jeremiah is told to speak all to all. I send you.
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Was it just to Israel? In verse 10, he's set up, it says, to speak to nations, plural, nations and kingdoms.
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God's word isn't just to Israel, not even the Old Testament. It's to us as well.
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Today, it's not just for the church or not even just for America. But our main point here, right now, is that Jeremiah is not self -appointed.
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He just didn't wake up one morning and figure the prophet career track looks good. I'll go that way. He was appointed by the
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Lord. And because of that, he cannot comfortably simply stay with the people who are just like him.
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I'll go among these people that I like. No, it's to all the nations. He can't change his calling when things get rough.
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I think I'll switch to be a dentist. It seems to be much more profitable. He didn't choose to be a prophet first.
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He was chosen to be a prophet. Prophets are appointed by God. They aren't elected by the people.
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So they don't take polls. They don't test their message in the market to see what attracts the most people.
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Because they know they are appointed by God, they keep going, even when people all around them are fighting against them.
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As God said would happen in that last verse. In Jeremiah chapter 15, verse 10, much later, he describes himself as a man with whom the whole land strives and contends.
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Now, that may sound a little bit like Elijah, doesn't it? That's his complaint. But it's really not a kind of bipolar,
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OK, now he's depressed and he needs somebody to encourage him. God did not respond to that. I'm a man whom the whole land strives and contends.
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He didn't say, oh, come on, Jeremiah, get off it. There's 7 ,000 faithful men in Judah who have not bowed the knee.
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God doesn't say any such thing. In fact, he said from the beginning in verse 18 that nearly everyone would be against him.
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You know, you're right, Jeremiah, the whole land is striving and contending against you. You are alone.
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Well, you got that Baruch guy, but that's about it. He had one supporter. He had no wife to go home to, no supportive family, no band of faithful followers, but he kept going because he was appointed by God.
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Jeremiah is appointed, and you, too, are appointed.
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Now, perhaps not individually to be a prophet. Each of us individually go out there and rail against the sins of society, and we wonder why people don't like us anymore.
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But the church together is called to be prophetic, to be a prophet to the world, a prophet speaks to people for God.
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And we together, corporately, are called to do that. Peter says in 1
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Peter chapter 2, verse 9, that the church is to proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
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In 2 Corinthians chapter 2, the apostle Paul says we don't peddle the word of God for profit.
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This is what people like to hear. We'll tell them what they like to hear. And oh, they like us, and they come, and they give money. Great. We don't do that.
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We declare it like prophets, sometimes rejected, like we might reject the smell of death by those who are perishing, rejected, just like they rejected
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Jeremiah. Whether you want to believe in modern day prophets or believe all that has ceased, that's really not nearly as important as understanding that the church gathered together is appointed to be prophetic to the world.
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It is. We are together to declare to the world the word of God. We are appointed.
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Second, Jeremiah is anointed. Why did he keep going when everyone was against him, when his career was unprofitable, when he could say, come on, this isn't very practical.
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This isn't working. Well, because he was anointed. This passage, this is one of those words people throw around a lot with almost no idea what it would mean.
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Well, this passage kind of describes it in verse 9, what being anointed means. Now today, many people seem to assume it means the ability of a speaker to entertain or soothe or rouse them with his rhetoric, to get them really fired up, maybe to get them to stand up and come forward at an invitation, maybe in some places to get them to fall down.
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Now, I'm not going to criticize any of that. I certainly hope for a positive response. And I'm not going to be jealous of those who seem to be able to get it.
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But here, that's not how Jeremiah's anointing is measured. Verse 9 says, the
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Lord put out his hand, and he touched my mouth. There was a touch of God, something beyond what simply can be explained by good rhetorical skills, effective communication abilities.
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There was the touch of God. I assume,
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I don't know German well enough to understand what his speech is, but I assume that Adolf Hitler was a rousing speechmaker.
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But he certainly wasn't anointed, was he? He didn't have the touch of God on his mouth to speak for God.
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Now, imagine if the same man, the very same man in early 20th century Germany and Austria, had decided instead of giving his life to politics and Nazism, he had decided to use his skills for giving sermons.
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He decided that a man with a gift for the gab, like himself, could make a good living in religion.
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Perhaps he could have. Perhaps he could have been a great success. He could have made a profit.
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But still, unless he was really converted by the message, he wouldn't be a prophet.
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He'd be just as dead, for he would not have the touch of God on his mouth.
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Now, here is something that many self -described reformed Christians in our day forget, that we need the touch of God on our preaching, on our teaching, on our music, on our prayers, our services, everything we do, our sharing, our witnessing.
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Unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain. Some reformed Christians seem to think the church is all about giving systematic theology lectures.
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We need more than that. The church cannot live just on words with no power, no touch of God.
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The words can be right, but if there is no touch of God in them, they will bring no life.
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We need that touch of the Spirit. You know what old -time Baptists used to call unction, what people today call anointing.
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Well, verse 9 continues, he touched his mouth, I put my words in your mouth.
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Jeremiah was appointed not just to share his opinions on politics, on let's be socially active and do this or that to stop the moral slide in our society today, or whatever.
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He is given the words of God. And those words, God's words, would be anointed.
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Jeremiah said in chapter 23 and verse 29, is not my word like fire, declares the
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Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. Now our words, our political opinions, our morality, our sweet inspirational stories to lift you up and make you feel better, do not have that kind of power.
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But the word of God does. The power to set hearts on fire and burn away all the thorns and weeds that smother the love for God.
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The power to break through hard -heartedness. That's what happens when God speaks his word.
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And here he puts that word in the mouth of Jeremiah. And the word there, for word, in Hebrew, means not only just a spoken or written communication, although that's certainly very important, but anything that communicates an event, an action.
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The Hebrew word for word here can mean word, or thing, or action.
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So in their view, with that idea of the word for word in their minds, in their view, what a person says and what he does are important.
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Both communicate the word. It's not good enough just to declare a word and then deny it in our actions.
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What we do communicates. It's not good enough to say you believe in loving your neighbor as yourself and then segregate the church.
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People cannot say with their mouths that they are one of God's people, called out and assembled from the world, what we call the church.
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They can't say that and then not assemble with other people of God's people. It makes no sense.
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We cannot simply say that we believe. We believe Jesus is Lord, from what we heard from Rodney in Sunday school this morning.
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And we think that that's good enough, even though we live our lives as if he is not Lord. That's not good enough.
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What we do communicates. And so is a word. That's why, of the ordinances that the
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Lord has given, the things he has ordered us to do, that Jesus has ordered us to do, for communicating grace, are not only preaching and teaching.
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Yes, that's important that he's ordered us to do that. But also this, the Lord's Supper, and taking it beforehand, hopefully preparing ourselves for it, recognizing that this is the way given to us by the
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Lord Jesus himself. It's what he said, do this in remembrance of me. In this, we say that we are participating, we are communing with the
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Lord and with each other. In baptism, we say in our actions that we have died with Christ and we have risen with him, now with a new life.
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The church is not just a preaching station. You know, he didn't just say, preach about remembering me. Preach about dying with me.
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He did say do that, and I'm not denigrating preaching at all. But the church is not just a preaching station where we have the abstract, narrow words we speak, but it doesn't matter what we say with our actions.
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Yes, preaching is vitally important. The words of Jeremiah were important. They came from the Lord. They were anointed, but he also preaches in his actions.
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He preached when he wouldn't marry. He was preaching of a sign of barrenness, of the barrenness that is coming upon Judah.
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He preached when he wore a yoke on his neck, like from an ox, and he put it on his own neck, telling the king to submit to Babylon.
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He preached when he tried to buy a piece of land, as Jerusalem was being besieged. Now, who invest in real estate when their country is being invaded?
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He preached that in his actions that there was a future and a hope. All of that was a communication that God had given him, and it was all anointed.
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Jeremiah was appointed, and Jeremiah was anointed. And third, Jeremiah was promised not to be disappointed.
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Now, Jeremiah, this may sound kind of funny, because Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. He may seem like a very moody kind of guy.
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I don't know. But certainly, at times, he felt very disappointed. At one point, he cursed the day of his birth, kind of like Job did, right?
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And he accused God of deceiving me. You have deceived me, and I was deceived. And God rebukes him for that.
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As he was hated, as he was put into stocks, when the popular false prophets all around him, they broke that yoke that he put on his neck, and they proclaimed that the
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Lord had set Judah free. Just what they wanted to hear, the people wanted to hear, when he was sinking into the mud in the bottom of that cistern.
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A cistern is a large underground water storage tank. They threw him in one. He was sunk into the mud at the bottom of it.
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When he was in prison, when he was accused of being a traitor, he felt some disappointment.
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Perhaps he thought he had been promised victory over all opposition. And in a way, he had in this passage.
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But perhaps he thought, what a lot of people today think, that victory would mean a quick, popular success, as the world defines success.
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You know, they'll come around to my way of thinking next week. Well, 10 years later, they're still against him, and he's wondering what's going on.
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Well, in the last verse, the Lord had told him, they will fight against you, but they will not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the
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Lord, to deliver you. He may have felt disappointed, but at the end, he was not disappointed, because God did not let him down.
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That's also what the Lord promises in verse 11 and 12. Jeremiah has a vision of an almond branch.
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He's an almond branch in his mind. In Hebrew, the word almond sounds like the word watching, with very similar sound.
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So the Lord connects that, the watching almond branch, and says,
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I am watching over my word to perform it. Now, Jeremiah would be a man who would faithfully declare the word of God, including the prediction here in verses 13 to 16.
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Notice what he's declaring, that Jerusalem would be destroyed. He even makes it clear that the danger would come from a particular direction, from the north, not from the south, where Egypt is.
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He said that the Lord is calling kingdoms from the north against Judah, that God is not on their side.
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Now, people in times of danger don't like hearing that, that God is against them, and actually for their enemies.
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But no one would believe him. For years, Jeremiah warns, but no one pays him attention. Here at the beginning, the
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Lord says he will certainly do what he says he is going to do. You can count on it,
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Jeremiah. I'm going to do it. Don't be discouraged by multitudes of people who refuse to listen or heed.
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Don't be disappointed, because I'm going to do it. I'm watching over my word. And just so today people can continue, and we may see people, we may know people, we may even be right now warning people about their sin.
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They're continuing in it, perhaps for years, for decades. And we warn them that there is judgment coming.
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If you don't repent, if you don't turn around, judgment is coming, but then nothing seems to happen, and we get a little disappointed.
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We warn them, not that we want to see them suffer. We want to see them repent and turn to the
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Lord, and we hope maybe just a taste of judgment will do that for them. We warn those, the one who is thinking of falling away from the
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Lord, perhaps marrying a non -believer, that all of that is going to end in a miserable marriage.
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You'll be yoked together with an unbeliever, but perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it seems to work. Perhaps the sin seems to pay off for a while.
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Maybe it makes a profit, becomes very profitable. And see, often our way of thinking is we try to warn people, you go this way of sin, you won't make a profit.
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But maybe for a long time they do make a profit. You know, one of the longest -lived and successful and profitable businessmen of our day, with a daughter so loyal to him, good family too, right?
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A daughter so loyal to him, she has taken up her father's business in his old age.
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Sounds like a perfect life, doesn't it? Blessed. Well, it's the pornographer Hugh Hefner. You could wonder, where is
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God's judgment? But don't be disappointed. The Lord is watching over his word to perform it.
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Jeremiah's response and our response is to continue to fulfill the mission we've been appointed for, to be filled with the
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Spirit so we'll be anointed, to not be disappointed so we'll keep on declaring all that the
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Lord has given us. In verse 17, Jeremiah is once again given three commands.
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Notice that. Dress, put your working clothes on. Get ready for work. Rise and say.
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He's been appointed, anointed, and promised he'll not be disappointed. So now he has to dress himself for work.
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Put your working clothes on because now it's time to get on the job. Arise, get going.
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And say to them, everything that I command you. This is another way of saying what Paul said he did in Acts chapter 20 to the
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Ephesian church. Preach the whole counsel of God. Hold back nothing that was profitable for you.
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Don't leave any part out. Because if you let yourself leave a part out, you are likely to leave the parts out that will make it hardest for you.
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A prophet cannot only say what he thinks is profitable, what will make him popular and successful.
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The problem with most false teachers today is not what they say, but what they don't say.
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We have preachers who think that they can get by just telling half truths. The half people will accept.
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The half that lets them keep their jobs. But a half truth masquerading as a whole truth is nothing but a complete untruth.
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If we believe we've been appointed, anointed, and will not be disappointed in God's promise to perform his word, then we've got to declare everything, he says, that the
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Lord has revealed. That means going head to head against the sins and the false doctrines that dominate.
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That means not only building up and planting, it also means, in verse 10, destroy, tearing down the unpopular parts.
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In their day, that was particularly their delusion that they had God boxed in. That they had
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God on a leash. They had him under contract. That he lived in that temple in Jerusalem. And since he lived in that building in Jerusalem, he could not, he would not, allow
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Jerusalem to be captured and destroyed. In Jeremiah chapter 7, verse 4, he tells the people, do not trust deceptive words and say, this is the temple of the
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Lord. The temple of the Lord. The temple of the Lord. They repeated it like a mantra, magic words that assured them that no matter what happened, no matter who came against them, they thought, no matter how long they kept their fellow
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Israelites as slaves, or they served other gods, no matter what sins they pursued, they pursued the golden God of profit.
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The Lord would keep them safe because of that temple. They had him under contract.
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They believed it, and they had lots of false prophets assuring them of that. Some very bold broke the yoke off of Jeremiah's neck and made a confident declaration the
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Lord would keep them safe. Only Jeremiah and a few others told them that those were deceptive words. And he was thrown into a cistern and kept in prison for his trouble.
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His book was burned by the king himself. But Jeremiah, being appointed, anointed, and not disappointed in God, meant he would tell them the things that would cost him dearly.
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Now, let me get specific about this. For our time, for this place, some of you may think you know this already, that you've heard it before, and maybe as long as you can remember.
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But the whole counsel of God, and you believe it, and you even like hearing it again.
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But have you really been in a church where that is practiced? Have you?
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You'll know if the sins of your area, now not the sins of San Francisco or of Hollywood, but this area right here where this church lives, where you live right here, if those sins were denounced, if the church's prophetic body was willing to stand up against attitudes and actions that were accepted all around it, they were willing to be different and say, this is sin.
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Jeremiah mainly denounced the sins of his own people, even right here in chapter 1. Accusing his own people of forsaking the
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Lord. A prophetic church that declares everything the Lord has said will mainly be denouncing the sins of the area around it.
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Well, so then what are the sins of this area? We can go up all around them and be so used to them, we don't see them anymore.
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We are either transformed by the word of God, or we are conformed to the culture around us.
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Or in some cases, a little of both. You know, a genuine Christian people who are transformed in their minds in many, many, many ways, and yet who have a few blind spots and are sadly able to keep those blind spots for years because the church they are in won't tell them everything that God has commanded.
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What are the sins of this area, of the South, where I'm from?
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Most of you are from. I'm from Alabama. Alabama is more South than the rest of the South. It's often hard to see the sins that we grew up with.
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Or even if we do see them, we don't feel how abominable they are.
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Maybe the older generation can sometimes see the sins of the younger generation, like perhaps a more open sexual laxity, and wonder why they don't see how bad it is.
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But sometimes the younger generation can see the sins of the older and wonder why they were able to live with them so comfortably for so long.
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For me, I benefited for living for some time outside the South in California and Singapore, even in Ethiopia and some up north.
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What are the sins of this area? I think there are two that prominently stand out, at least to me.
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One is hypocrisy, or just outright lying. That is so common.
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It's so common here that even many Christians think lying is a virtue, that it is a mature thing to do, to continue to lie.
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Let's just pretend that we don't see these unpleasant sins. Let's just all ignore them. This one we know as sin, we'll pretend they have it and we'll help them continue in their sin.
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Well, that's one. Another, of course, is racism. A couple of years ago, I heard about John Piper.
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As many of you know, a very prominent and very effective pastor and preacher in Minneapolis, in Minnesota.
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He had an exactly identical experience as myself. We both went to the same seminary.
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He about 15 years before me. And we both took systematic theology from the same professor,
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Professor Paul K. Jewett. Dr. Jewett had a collection of articles that he required reading for one of his class on the doctrine of humanity, which were all about various aspects of racism.
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And that was one big stepping stone to me opening my eyes. Piper says the same about himself.
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Also from the South. He's now in Minnesota, but he is from the South. He's from South Carolina. There was this sin that was all around us.
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And even if we didn't actively participate in it, in fact, even if we had no inclination toward it, we couldn't see it because we had grown so accustomed to it, the sin of racism.
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So for Piper, he will have at least one sermon every year around the time of the
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Martin Luther King holiday to preach on racism. For us, it will come up as we get to it in the
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Bible. Now, if your response to that, if your thoughts about that are, well, that's too often,
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I suggest that at least in this one area, you've been more influenced by our culture than by the
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Bible. You might think, well, I've been going to church for years, for my whole life.
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I've never heard it preached on until you came along. It must be your obsession. Get off it.
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Friends, think about it. There isn't any doubt that racism is a violation of what the Lord Jesus called the second greatest commandment.
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That makes it pretty prominent, doesn't it? That means that there isn't any doubt that it is one of those things that the Lord has commanded us to speak and stand against.
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And that also means that if you've been going to church most of your life and you've never heard a sermon on racism against it, denouncing it before, certainly not a word that was allowed to be followed up with action, then you were not in a prophetic church.
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You were not in a church where the preachers and teachers were telling you everything that the
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Lord commanded. They were not looking beyond their culture, beyond what the world around them taught, and bringing to bear a word out of heaven, not caring how radical it was, how upsetting to many it might be, how unprofitable it might appear.
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You weren't being given the whole counsel of God. Now, perhaps you are bringing the word of God, being given the word of God on many other doctrines, perhaps in some ways even more important doctrines.
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But in this one area where the world around us had sinned so grievously, they went along with the world, being either overtly racist churches, which is probably actually rare, or passively failing to get dressed, rise up, and speak.
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Of course, many will say, well, the preachers couldn't address that. They couldn't go head to head against that. Because if they did, they would be fired.
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That's true. But that's what they were called to do. There are some things more important than your bottom line.
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That's what it means to be prophetic, to speak what God has said, even when it's not profitable.
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And pastors and teachers who failed to do that failed to do what they were appointed to do, what they were anointed to do, to believe that they wouldn't be disappointed if they trusted
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God and stood firm, like Jeremiah is called here to, like a fortified city, an iron pillar, a bronze wall.
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They failed their people, and they failed God. And we are now living with the legacy of that widespread failure.
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Oh, they may never have actively been racist themselves. They may even have secretly wished they could have stood up and spoken out.
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But on this issue, like many others, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
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And if that's the environment you grew up in spiritually, part of the problem, because it refused to be actively part of the solution, you need to understand that was deficient.
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And now we need to be different. The church is appointed, anointed, and promised it will not be disappointed to get to work, to rise up, and speak all that God has commanded.
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This time, let's do it right. What we have in the gospel, a message that is, in fact, in reality, in its actual impact on lives of people, it is good news, what gospel means.
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But we know, and Paul tells us so in 2 Corinthians chapter 2, that those who are perishing will not accept it as good news.
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To them, it smells like death. It tells them that they're dead in their trespasses and sins.
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That they're sinners, that they have offended God by their sins, that they've committed infinite crimes against God's infinite holiness.
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And those crimes can only be paid for by an infinite price. And it's not just their actions that have sinned, but it's their very nature, their hearts are inclined toward evil all the time, that they are, in fact, again, dead.
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And the only way out of that is not anything that they can do. They can't just turn over a new leaf, get civilized, study harder, get good grades, be a good citizen, keep the law, be moral.
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The only way out of that is by the death of a man who could represent us, but he has no sin of his own to have to pay for, who is himself infinite, so he can pay an infinite price, who is, in fact,
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God. And all of that has the smell of death to the world.
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That we meet and we take the Lord's supper to remember the Lord's death until he comes has the aroma of death to those who are, in reality, already dead.
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They will be offended by it. They will be against us, the whole of them. They will fight against us, just like they did
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Jeremiah, for telling them about their current death and about the death of death in the death of Christ.
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They will reject it unless God does something in them. He promised to do for his people in Jeremiah chapter 31, verse 31, make a new covenant written on our hearts.
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He has to change our nature. He has to soften our hearts.
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So what used to smell like death will now be the pleasing aroma of life.
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That's the message we are appointed, anointed, and will not be disappointed to dress for work, rise up, and say to the nations.
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That's the message that the Lord can give you a new heart that we offer you right now.