Good Morning Friends,
Early on God diagnosed the problem and designed a solution so we might appreciate the invitation to join Jesus in the Big Story of Holy History. I think that is one reason the Bible devotes so much text to the prophets like Jeremiah. It is to help us to realize that out of every crisis is an opportunity to be relieved of our addiction of self-focus and instead take advantage of the grand structural opportunity of renewing our thinking to align with the image of Christ and the life worth living. That is why, in a way, we should welcome troubles, because they provide a look at what God is doing. Jeremiah in many ways was a failed prophet and yet one of the longest books in the Bible bears his name and if you add Lamentations to the list of those he wrote, a study of his work might well be relevant for our time. Indeed, reflecting on the toll of the pandemic we face today and the social unrest its message of lament is applicable. But we get ahead of the story. In the setting for today’s text Jeremiah had been put in the stocks by the chief priest, for having the audacity to prophecy bad things coming to Jerusalem! Even then, there was no stopping Jeremiah from telling it as he saw it. He kept speaking forth the words of God. Then the text lets us overhear the praying prophet wrestling with God from the fall out from his Christ like actions.
You see, both Jeremiah and Jesus faced the mocking, reproach and derision and defaming of the religious leaders. Friends, we are in a crisis and we can be an isolated point without context, or we can be connected to the profound awareness of suffering that makes us part of the infinite context of Christ. Pain has a face. So, in the larger story of Jesus’ command to love well and thinking well, it all raises a question. Revenge and just retribution are not the same. The Gospels are full of what God demands of us and they are Jesus’s way of showing us who he is and what he expects of us. They are not harsh demands originating from a selfish desire to control, but rather loving directions for our good and ultimate satisfaction. We have such great freedom but also the opportunity to trust and treasure Jesus in a cause worth living and dying for. So, Are We Balancing Life’s Desires And God’s Demands?
Scripture: For I hear many whispering: “Terror is all around! Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” All my close friends are watching for me to stumble. “Perhaps he can be enticed, and we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. O Lord of hosts, you test the righteous, you see the heart and the mind; let me see your retribution upon them, for to you I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.
Jeremiah 20:10-13 (NRSV)
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
Genesis 12:1-9 (NRSV)
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
Romans 5:12-15 (NRSV)
“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. “Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.
Matthew 10:26-33 (NRSV)
Message: I do not know what you want out of life. Maybe you want to be happy but that is so general a statement that it means very little until you pin it down to specifics. A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you have never considered before, is about what pain you want in your life. The issue is about what you are willing to struggle for that is most certainly a greater determinant of how our lives turn out. Think about it for a moment and consider today’s scripture and meditate on what you are willing to give up achieving financial independence and an amazing job and a great marriage and great body, successful children or perhaps something more important than even those desires. Friends, there is no reward without risk and delayed gratification. But we must be honest about what we want weighed against the cost of getting it. The choice is the pain of disappointment or the pain of discipline. Adam and Eve were ultimately disappointed having chosen to sin. The negative experience of Adam and Eve set the stage with the opening scene. Then in the acts of Abraham, Jeremiah and Paul, for example, we see how meaning is achieved in taking a journey of faith. But it was by no means easy and the wait was longer than most would endure. They were all moved to risk in ways that were both painful and yet brought joy to life because there was purpose in the actions that had been assigned by God. There was obedience. Jesus’ leadership should guide us here in discerning God’s will, for joy requires struggle for the right things. What determines success is not what we want to enjoy. What determines success is what pain we are willing to sustain to achieve the goal. So, friends, here is the message: Jesus’ obedience even unto death and the ultimate pain he experienced was so that we might have grace enough to survive the pain of life. The quality of our lives is not determined by the quality of our positive experiences alone but the quality of our love in the face of negative experiences. That is what God uses to impact history. Like Jeremiah, we can get bone weary and feel abandoned. Like the disciples we can get a bit bewildered. We can begin to doubt. In the pain of uncertainty Jeremiah and Jesus will weep and cry out in passion for God the Father for help. But they both overcome the small thinking of relative certainty. Perhaps we too in these situations might lose our assurance of God’s plan for us, but hopefully we will in these situations reassert our faith in the trust and treasure of Christ’s life that God’s motivation will prevail. Our petitions like that of Jeremiah needs to ultimately see things as God sees them. Thankfully we have the mind of Christ to help sooth our sin sick souls with the experience of what it means to have a higher emotional and spiritual IQ…what it means to balance our desires with God’s demands.
And So, today we have explored the fall of Adam and Eve, the faith response of Abraham and Paul’s summary of the resolution to the problem of sin in the gift of grace and demands offered by Christ Jesus summarized by Paul and demonstrated in the life of Jeremiah. The message connected is that if you want success you need to get good at dealing with negative experiences because that is when God gets involved at helping us get good at dealing with life. God knows that if we want the benefits of life achieved, we also must want the costs necessary to developing the gifts we have been given. Friends, to achieve continuous improvement, we need to discover that there is a positive side effect in handling the negative. The negative is sin and you can only avoid its negative experiences for so long before they get you into trouble. The only useful answer to satisfying our real need is Jesus. When resentment becomes the primary emotion that we are feeling toward God and others, we are in trouble. On a deep level, I think, Jesus understood that it was all part of the plan to deal with the pain of sin for our salvation. It was preached as good news but with demands first to the Jews and then to the world. Here we discover that rejection sometimes is part of the plan too. So, perhaps the Jews did not respond to the promise of salvation Jesus offers, but in so doing the blessing would get extended to others. So too, such is the drama that plays out in life. Rather than moaning to one another, grumbling about our plight, we should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and lay out our challenges before Him and believe differently. Jesus has seen it all and knows the way to live a life that glorifies the Father. We are to follow Jesus’ lead in connecting our uncertainty beyond our finite point of reality of self to the eternal context. Where Jeremiah got tired of being rejected, he still persevered. Jesus pushed through the experience realizing that there was something beyond the lies of the little deaths we experience. Friends, the kind of obedience that glorifies God is free and joyful, not constrained and cowering. Even when the cost is supreme, the joy is triumphant, because the cause of Jesus cannot fail.
Pray we realize that our struggles determine our successes.
Pray we not become cynical. Pray we realize that Jesus is Lord. Pray when things get tough, we persevere. Pray we realize that the mighty works of Jesus reveal God to the world in a way to save the world. Pray we appreciate the courage of Jesus in the face of opposition. Pray we are faithful to the call of Christ. Pray when we face dark nights of the soul, we realize that we are not alone. Pray we realize that Jesus prevailed even though he faced greater suffering than we ever will. Pray we address the challenges of life by asking God for help. Pray we express our concerns and fears and doubts. Pray we join the Lord and trust God’s will to be done. Pray we petition God to see things as God sees them. Pray we do not consider it a disgrace when we suffer as a Christian, but instead use it as an opportunity to glorify Jesus and believe in the strength of the Father though faith in the Holy Spirit. Pray Christ complete the work begun in us. Pray we realize that the Christian journey is not necessarily going to be victory after victory, joy after joy. Pray we realize that the challenges and difficulties that we struggle with can be used by God for a purpose if we persevere. Pray we realize that a life worth living for Christ Jesus is a life worth losing. Pray we choose our struggles wisely. Pray we realize that living in love with a purposeful obedience to God is the only way to be successful. Pray we are truly honest about what we love and are not fooled as Adam and Eve. Pray we think differently before we try harder. Pray our desires and God’s demands for us are in unity.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 