Faith & Failure #54
Jeremiah, pt. 3
John Covell
This is the third look at Jeremiah, trying to focus not so much on the message he gave to his people, but what giving that message to his people meant to him and his relationship with God. Jeremiah had a very close relationship with the Creator of the universe. The One True God. The reason I bring this up is because we’re going to see how close and tight Jeremiah really was with God in how he communicated with him.
All of us—at one time or another and to one degree or another—are going to go through some Jeremiah-like experiences. Not being rejected and abused by every person you know for 40 years, but you’ll experience some kind of opposition by someone you care about at from time to time during different times in your life. If our relationships with God are going to be an anchor for our souls during those times, we need to spend some time eavesdropping on some conversations Jeremiah had with God.
We’re not going to have time to look at each of Jeremiah’s prayers, but I’ve picked some I think represent the full spectrum of emotional peaks and valleys he experienced and brought to God in prayer. Jeremiah prayed a lot. He prayed frustrated prayers, he prayed confessing prayers, and he prayed devoted prayers. First I want us to look at a few of Jeremiah’s…
Frustrated Prayers
This really isn’t a message on prayer, but we’re going to be talking about prayer quite a bit. So before we go any further, I want to tell you something that might disappoint you. Some of you may be expecting or even hoping that you’re going to leave here with a formula for prayer that will leave you feeling good about God and life all the time, even when everything around you is falling apart. If I could do that, I would, but I’m not.
Actually, my goal is that we would leave here today with a willingness and even a desire to get beyond the expectation of “answered prayers.” Now that sounds pretty dumb. “Why pray if you’re not expecting answers?” Good question. Why pray if you’re not expecting an answer? Because God is not like a guy I used to work with named Barry.
Years ago I worked at a company that had a warehouse and Barry managed the warehouse and about 25 people who worked there, so he was really busy all the time and he had no for people who just wanted to hang out. So we all learned that, if you walked into Barry’s office, you had better have a question he can answer or an answer he’s been waiting for. If not, don’t come in because he’s busy. In fact, he even had a sign on his desk that said, “If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here.”
Some of us think God’s got the same sign on his desk. If you don’t have a question he can answer, don’t bug him because he’s got lots of really big things to deal with like countries at wars and global hunger and making sure that Tim LaHaye keeps writing more “Left Behind” books.
But we often think God has neither the time nor the desire to listen to us gripe and whine and complain and ask questions for which there really are no answers—at least ones that would make us feel better. Jesus even said, “Your heavenly Father already knows what you need.”[1] Yet in that same conversation, he also taught his followers to pray and to pray often. But when we pray, we’re expecting answers, so much so that, unless God answers our prayers the way we want him to, we talk as if he hasn’t responded to us at all. When you hear the phrase, “God has answered my prayers,” what does that mean? That’s Christian-speak for “God did what I asked him to do” or “God gave me what I asked for.”
God wants to take us to a deep place in our spiritual journeys where prayer becomes expressions of deeply-felt emotions, dreams, hopes, goals, desires, fears, and frustrations so that we become more aware of our incessant need to be fully dependent on God. This short prayer in Jeremiah 15 contains several things we’re looking for when we pray during this Jeremiah-like times in life. Look at verse 15.
15Then I said, “Lord, You know I am suffering for Your sake. Punish my persecutors! Don’t let them kill me! Be merciful to me and give them what they deserve!
During his 40-year career as a prophet, Jeremiah was falsely accused and arrested, falsely imprisoned, dumped in a well, beaten and put into stocks, and rejected by all his friends and family. He’s fed up. He’s tired and now he wants revenge. He wants to see those who have hurt him suffer. It’s like movies where the main character gets revenge by killing his enemies? Why do we love these movies? Because we get to see on the screen what we’d like to do in real life, but can’t. So Jeremiah does the next best thing—“You get them God! You’re the one they’re sinning against anyway. Punish them, but be merciful to me. But now look at verse 16 where he stays focused on his own frustration:
16Your words are what sustain me. They bring me great joy and are my heart’s delight, for I bear Your name, O Lord God Almighty. 17I never joined the people in their merry feasts. I sat alone because Your hand was on me. I burst with indignation at their sins.”
What is he saying here? In verses 16-17 he’s saying, “God, I’ve worshipped you sincerely. You really have been first in my life and I’ve never compromised my faith.” Now look at verse 18,
18“Why then does my suffering continue? Why is my wound so incurable? Your help seems as uncertain as a seasonal brook. It is like a spring that has gone dry.”
And God said, “Oh. Would you like some cheese with that whine?” no, but that’s what he was thinking. At least that’s what he told me. Look now at Jeremiah 18:19-20 where Jeremiah continues venting his frustration and anger.
19Lord, help me! Listen to what they are planning to do to me! 20Should they repay evil for good? They have set a trap to kill me, though I pleaded for them and tried to protect them from Your anger.
Now go over to Jeremiah 20:7-8 where he starts throwing some blame God’s way.
7O Lord, You persuaded me, and I allowed myself to be persuaded. You are stronger than I am, and You overpowered me. Now I am mocked by everyone in the city. 8Whenever I speak, the words come out in a violent outburst. “Violence and destruction!” I shout. So these messages from the Lord have made me a household joke.
What’s Jeremiah saying? The same kinds of things we often think but are afraid to say to God because you know, he’s the Creator of the Universe. He’s bigger than Nsync! You can’t talk to God like that, can you? Jeremiah did. He’s saying, “What’s the deal God? I do everything you tell me to do and that’s it. I believe in you. I’m not giving up on you or my faith, but I don’t get this!” Sometimes we just want to tell God that it’s kind of hard to understand why things seem so upside down sometimes. But does that mean we throw up our hands and say, “Look God, you’re just too hard to figure out. Maybe this is all a waste of time after all!” No, because you don’t have to. If Jeremiah didn’t feel that way, you don’t need to.
So how does Jeremiah keep his head on straight when he’s feeling like this? Most people reserve their most honest revelations only for those to whom they are closest and many people have one or two things they’ve never confessed to anyone. Yet while we can successfully withhold certain things from people, we can withhold nothing from God. God knows every evil thought I’ve have ever had; every desire; every action; everything that’s ever hurt me; or confused me; or frustrated me; or made me angry at others; or made me angry at God; or made me feel like a failure; or just want to give up on everyone and everything.
God’s word over and over again blares out unconditional love and acceptance for people, including you. He will never reject you because of anything you have ever said, thought, or done. So there is freedom to be completely and brutally honest with God in prayer. Christ knows where you are, and what has happened to you, and how it makes you feel and he wants you to tell him about it. God affirms this in his word when he says that…
We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)
Sometimes, we get this idea that faith in Christ is supposed to be some kind of spiritual Teflon™ coating deflector shield so that things like what we’ve been seeing in Jeremiah’s life won’t hurt us because we’re so dialed into God. But God knows that some of us here feel frightened, anxious, and hopeless, and he wants enter into those things with you. God is not afraid to deal with the realities of our lives. We can be open and honest with him about the reality of our anger and pain.
Like Jeremiah, sometimes our anger results not from how we feel mistreated or forgotten by God himself. Sometimes you feel like God isn’t doing what we want him to and it ticks us off. But you know what? It’s okay to tell him about it. He knows everything doesn’t always add up for us. He knows that these things test our faith. He knows they tempt us to believe that God must not exist or be in control. But authentic worship in the journey of grace includes learning to believe in and trust a God who doesn’t always make sense to us. It’s hard. It’s hard for you. It’s hard for me. It was hard for Jeremiah. But that’s why talk so much about faith.
Our faith is like a muscle. If a muscle isn’t exercised, it atrophies and becomes weak and useless. If things always made sense, our faith wouldn’t grow because it would never be exercised and then it would whither and die, and what was intended to be a journey of grace just becomes a rut. You know what a rut is? It’s like a grave that never ends. The place where we best learn to exercise that muscle of faith is in honest and intimate conversations with God. Look at another frustrated prayer in Jeremiah 17:15-17.
15People scoff at me and say, “What is this ‘message from the Lord’ you keep talking about? Why don’t your predictions come true?” 16Lord, I have not abandoned my job as a shepherd for Your people. I have not urged You to send disaster. It is Your message I have given them, not my own. 17Lord, do not desert me now! You alone are my hope in the day of disaster.
Jeremiah isn’t seeing any signs that God is involved and in control are as invisible to Jeremiah as the Spirit of God and it’s bugging him. God is invisible and inaudible to our senses, but what he does in the lives of people screams at us everyday. I can’t bring God in for “show and tell,” but I’ve seen the reality of his existence, his love, his grace, his forgiveness, and his word in the lives of thousands of people—including people in this room today. That’s why he says,
6 …without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
God’s like the wind it’s invisible, but when he blows on you you’ll know it. I have a 10’ by 20’ free-standing canopy with a steel frame where I park the boat. It’s pretty heavy and four of the eight legs are bolted into concrete footings. Last night, the invisible wind picked it up and tossed it over the boat and into the yard like a toy. You can’t see the wind, but it can still be pretty powerful. You can’t see God, but he can still be pretty powerful as well.
When you’re unconcerned about getting answers, you can pray brutally honest prayers you’ll ever hear come out of your mouth, and like Jeremiah, that’s when you’ll connect with God on a deep level. Jeremiah prayed frustrated prayers. He also prayed some…
Confessing prayers
Does he think he’s completely innocent—really? No. He knows he’s in need of God’s forgiveness just like these people are. We also know that he doesn’t just feel anger, for the last two weeks, we looked at how he grieved and wept over these people and how he called them my people. We know that Jeremiah didn’t bring the abuse and mistreatment he experienced on himself. Sometimes horrible things happen in our lives that are not at all the result of any sin or bad decision on our part. But I want you to look at two of Jeremiah’s prayers. The first is in Jeremiah 10:23-24, where he says,
23I know, Lord, that a person’s life is not his own. No one is able to plan his own course. 24So correct me, Lord, but please be gentle. Do not correct me in anger, for I would die.
The first thing he asks for is correction. Jeremiah’s not the problem, in fact, God’s using him to proclaim the problem—and it isn’t him! Instead of giving into a martyr complex or becoming self-righteous, he’s acutely aware of his need for God. Look at what he prays for in Jeremiah 14:20-22.
20Lord, we confess our wickedness and that of our ancestors, too. We all have sinned against you. 21For the sake of Your own name, Lord, do not abandon us. Do not disgrace Yourself and the throne of Your glory. Do not break Your covenant with us. Please don’t forget us! 22Can any of the foreign gods send us rain? Does it fall from the sky by itself? No, it comes from you, the Lord our God! Only You can do such things. So we will wait for You to help us.
Want to learn a new word? Here it is: “Abasement.” It describes your willingness to take appropriate blame. Someone who has a healthy “abasement factor” recognizes and admits their role and responsibility in something that’s gone wrong. In the same way, someone who has a healthy “abasement factor” acknowledges their own vulnerability to the sins they see in others. Someone who is low on abasement looks for ways to escape responsibility and blame someone else, or to see themselves as better than people who struggle. They’re the ones who look at the sins and struggles of other people and think, “I would never do that” or they believe they’re just not as bad or as capable of offending God as some other people.
When things go wrong, who do you instinctively protect and who do you instinctively blame? If you instinctively look for ways to protect yourself from blame, your “abasement factor” is too low. If you instinctively blame yourself for everything, not matter what, your “abasement factor” is too high. Way back in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal said, “Truly it is evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.”[2]
In this prayer in chapter 14, Jeremiah is performing an interesting abasement balancing act that we can learn from. He’s an innocent victim, yet he still identifies himself as someone who is just as capable of sin as those who have hurt him. Why does he need to do this? It’s that issue I’ve been hammering on for three weeks now: that in order to fully experience God, you have to believe you need his love and grace and forgiveness as much as anyone ever has.
We saw it in both Isaiah and Jeremiah—that they had an acute sense of their own need for God. They acknowledged a perspective—sometimes almost in passing—that they needed God’s grace and forgiveness just as much as the worst person who didn’t think the needed it at all. Because they bit into this crucial principle, they could experience God’s forgiveness and grace at the deepest levels and could then give it away on the deepest levels to people who desperately needed at the deepest levels themselves.
Until we’re willing to believe that, we’ll never experience God’s love and forgiveness and grace and mercy as much as we could, and we’ll never be able to give it away on a deep level to other people because we’ve not experienced ourselves first. So when you see someone self-destructing because of their own sin and choices, what do you experience? Do you become indignant? Do you feel a little self-righteous? Do you think, “How could someone be so stupid?” Do you struggle to believe you could do the same thing?
Jeremiah’s reaction to the sin of his people was compassion and grief because they were “his people.” He was one of them. He was like them—not that he did what they did, but that he knew he could. In addition to his frustrated prayers, he added confessing prayers. He was honest about his anger and frustration with both God and God’s people. But he was also honest about the fact that he was just like them. Not in what he did, but in what he was. But there’s one more type of prayer you need to have alongside of the others, that is Jeremiah’s…
Devoted Prayers
Something that I always like to talk about when I do weddings is the wedding ring. Because wedding rings are usually a beautiful combination of precious metal and diamonds, but those rings don’t come out of the ground looking like they do when they go on the hand. Those materials come out of the ground in a very raw, rough, and undeveloped form. It is through many hours and processes of shaping and molding and purifying those metals and stones that makes them end up so beautiful. Marriage, life, and our relationships with God are like wedding rings. We begin raw and undeveloped. Then every day, we have challenges thrown our way.
God wants to make those challenges and temptations become the very processes through which he shapes and purifies our faith so every time one of those temptations and challenges gets thrown our way, we choose whether we will allow those things to shape and mold and purify us, or whether we will allow them to beat us down. God’s word says that Jeremiah-like experiences strengthen and deepen us—if we let them, but instead we allow them to become a club with which our faith is beaten to a pulp. Yet when God looks at you he sees the gold and diamonds into which he wants you to be shaped and molded and purified.
Look at an example of what kept Jeremiah moving forward when everything was flowing against him in Jeremiah 51:15-19.
15He made the earth by His power, and he preserves it by his wisdom. He has stretched out the heavens by His understanding. 16When He speaks, there is thunder in the heavens. He causes the clouds to rise over the earth. He sends the lightning with the rain and releases the wind from His storehouses. 17Compared to him, all people are foolish and have no knowledge at all! They make idols, but the idols will disgrace their makers, for they are frauds. They have no life or power in them. 18Idols are worthless; they are lies! The time is coming when they will all be destroyed. 19But the God of Israel is no idol! He is the Creator of everything that exists, including his people, his own special possession. The Lord Almighty is His name!
Jeremiah could keep going one more day because his prayers weren’t just expressions of frustration. His prayers weren’t just focused and dwelling on his own sin issues. His frustrated prayers and his confession prayers were held up by his devoted, dedicated, dependent prayers. God isn’t like a celebrity, but he is the One True God, the Creator of the universe and he’s concerned about you. Like is said earlier, I hope we can leave here today free from the need for answers.
Jeremiah didn’t get what he asked for. He was never really vindicated and his people never did turn from their rebellion toward God during his lifetime. What Jeremiah wanted and needed, and what he got, was a deeper, closer, more dependent relationship with God in which he felt the freedom to say exactly how he felt without fear. He experienced a security in his conversations with God in which he could get mad and accuse God of not doing his job and then turn around and praise God for being the Creator of the universe.
[1] Matthew 6:8
[2] Illustrations at Bible.org
