Be Not Afraid Of Their Faces: For I Am With Thee

Know anyone like this? Do you see this person in the mirror? Give it up! God is not buying it. Do not start that being too bad stuff either. Peter told Jesus to "depart from me for I am a sinful man." That worked for him, right? Peter ends up preaching on Pentecost and writing two epistles even after denying Christ. Nobody is good enough which is why we have a Gospel to preach in the first place.

In verse 7, God tells Jeremiah he shall go to all that God sends him to. Hmm, I do not see an option here. In the Great Commission, the concept is really as you are going rather than a command of go (Matt 28:18-20). It was just presumed that you would be going and while you are at it this is what you are to do. Again, that does not seem to leave any option but obedience.

Jeremiah did not need to even prepare a sermon. He needed no homiletic or expositional skills. God will tell him exactly what to say. Preachers need to pray for better ears. God may not always speak in three points and a poem format. He may also want more of the full counsel of God than their personal hobbyhorses or ministerial machismo. I am not saying that we should not study nor prepare. We just need to be careful that we do not just crank messages out like cogs on an assembly line and make the ministry a career and not a calling. The Children of God need His message, not the preacher’s. People who witness also need to be sure they are giving His Gospel and not theirs. His will bring life and ours death.

In verse eight, he touches on the number one reason people do not witness for Christ. What will people think of me? What will they say? What will they do? They may laugh at me or even hit me! We are afraid of their faces.

In our society, the Word of God is not popular. His message is not popular. If you yield to God’s call, you will be taking an unpopular message to a hostile crowd. I do not mean just the lost or the unchurched. If you take a real stand for Him there will be "brethren" that will oppose you. You will be accused of being intolerant, hateful, narrow minded, bigoted, unloving and yes, even unChristlike.

The joke to this is the people who accuse you are the ones truly guilty of all these things. Most have no clue as to what being Christlike is because they have no idea whom Christ really is and have fabricated a "Christ" in their own image. They are tolerant of everybody and everything, but you. They are narrow-minded because they claim there are no absolutes except that you are absolutely wrong. When is the last time some of these folks treated you in loving, Christlike way? They hate you and treat you and speak of you as any Klansman would of a black person, but they are not bigoted or narrow minded.

With all that you say, "See, we have a reason to fear their faces!" God says, "I am with thee to deliver thee." We are to remember Who is on our side. The worse they can do to us is kill us. It may come to that sometime in the future, but then if we really believe that we are just a passing through anyway this is not a real problem. In the light of eternity, when we actually enter it does not matter. We will all enter it sooner than we may like to think, but we will forget about it in a twinkling of an eye whether we are Raptured or not.