WEEK ONE - DAY TWO - SURRENDER AND POPULARITY

It was wonderful to run into a Bible study mate today and first thing she said to me was, "When I discovered Your Words I devoured them.  They are my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear Your name, LORD God of Heaven's Armies.  Jeremiah 15:16."  And she said that verse without missing a beat!  What a testimony to the JOY of studying God's Word together when we can greet each other in that manner!

But today is one of those days in reading God's Word that just doesn't seem quite so joyful.  We're talking about surrender, we're talking about popularity (or unpopularity, as the case seems to be for Jeremiah), and we're talking about painful warnings of dire discipline as written in Jeremiah 2.  Where do we find the joy in those kinds of subjects?   All we can do is to dig in and see...and to start by praying that the Holy Spirit will enlighten us to see the full scope of God's message to us for today.

First off - surrender!  How many of us really think that Jeremiah had big dreams of being a prophet of doom and gloom?  He was just as human as any of us and probably dreamed of a happy life with a family and friends.  But after his calling in Chapter 1 and his failed arguments with God, Jeremiah picks up in Chapter 2 by going and proclaiming all that God tells him to.  Surrender.  Surrender of dreams, surrender of goals, surrender of self.  God knew the man that he had selected - He always does - and Jeremiah committed himself to the life that God laid out for him.  One of my favorite verses is 2 Chronicles 16:9, "For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him."  God's eyes had spotted his man Jeremiah, and Jeremiah was fully committed.  Let's pray that God's eyes will rest on us when He is looking for those with committed hearts ready to carry out His purposes!  Full commitment equates to total surrender.  What are we holding on to?

Second - popularity.  It's something that we may not consciously think about as we grow older, as our study author pointed out, but it's a factor, still.  As much as we may deny it, we all want to be liked and we all want to be held in some degree of regard.  And there's nothing wrong with that, unless it becomes our overriding goal, forcing us to compromise our obedience to God in order to maintain a certain level of status or favor.  Jeremiah's instructions from God put him in a place of great unpopularity - it's hard to tell people that they are about to be overtaken and that their best chance of survival is to surrender to your mortal enemy and have them call you their BFF!  There could have been a sitcom (a not very funny sitcom) of the time, "Everybody Hates Jeremiah!"  But Jeremiah's commitment to God and his surrender of all else allowed him the freedom to do whatever God asked of him.  Think about that kind of freedom - that's the true meaning of living for an audience of One!  Hearing God's lone clap as we finish our dark and desperate soliloquy of warning to a sinful crowd. Living for that clap and hearing the accompanying words, "Well done, good and faithful servant", as earthly popularity falls to a very, very distant second place.  

And third - those words of Jeremiah 2!  Wow!  As I read them, I could not help but think how they are SO applicable to the world we love in today.  It's a fairly lengthy chapter, but I couldn't pause in my reading of it.  God talks through Jeremiah and reminds His people of the devotion of their youth - they had started out well, they had been in close relationship with God.  What had gone wrong?  "They followed worthless idols and become worthless themselves."  First thing gone wrong - they forgot all that God had done for them (bring them out of slavery and into their own land of promise) and abandoned Him for the worthless idols of the sinful nations around them.  Do we tend to forget all that God has done for us while we find ourselves preferring to live our lives of comfort and pleasure?  Putting things and the enjoyment of things over and above the One who has provided us with everything that we have?  All of a sudden we find ourselves saying those smug words, "I've done pretty well for myself, haven't I?" Oh, haven't we?  That's just when we are on the precipice of worthlessness!

In verse 8, God proclaims that everyone that should have been responsible for ensuring Israel's faithfulness had failed - the priests, those of the law, the nation's leaders, and even the prophets, had all failed in their personal faithfulness leading to the apostasy of the entire nation.  We cannot depend on any type of leadership to keep us faithful.  Don't look to religious organizations, don't look to the government and don't even look to those proclaiming God's Word to keep you faithful - they may, and often do, fail.  YOU stay faithful.  If the people of Israel had rejected the poor leadership they were receiving and if they had continued to worship God faithfully, there would have been a different story.  But when God says in verses 11 and 13, "My people", He is not just addressing the leadership.  They've all rejected Him.  They've all turned and gone their own way.  They've rejected the living water that God has offered them in favor of man-made cisterns that will soon dry up.

God's words are chilling when He says in verse 19, "Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the LORD your God and have no awe of Me."  As I said yesterday, we've lost the idea of giving authority of our lives over to God - it's exactly the same as when God says in verse 20 that Israel has stated, "I will not serve You!"  Bold-faced rebellion!  That's where we are, no awe of God and hearts that are turned against Him.  

He goes on to describe the depth of our rebellion - verse 25 could be paraphrased as saying, "It's no use!  I love what I love and I have to have what I love!"  Isn't that pretty much what our society has come to?  No boundaries, no limits, if we feel we need it, want it, desire it - then there's no fault in going after it.  Even if God has said it's a "foreign god" that will lead us to captivity.  No, we're smarter than to be bound by the provincial rules of an outdated "god"; but then our Egypts and our Assyrias prove to be disappointing allies and we find ourselves right where God told us we'd end up - captive.

All of Jeremiah 2 is a warning, a proclamation of God's judgment over His people, and one of the reasons for His judgment is due to their denial of their sinfulness, their refusal to see their guilt and God's anger with them (verse 35).  We are doing the same thing!  We are saying that we're "basically good people" while living lives of godlessness.  We are saying, "God wants me to be happy" while doing things that God has told us He is not at all happy about.  Bottom line:  God is not pleased when we are sinning.  Admit it!  Admit that sin is not where God wants us and that we need Him to rescue us.  That's when we are freed!  That's when the captor is defeated.  Isn't it interesting to think about what would have happened had Judah listened to Jeremiah's warnings and heeded them.  We could be reading an entirely different rest of the book!  And isn't it interesting to think about what would happen if every Christian in America would hear the same warnings and decide to surrender and allow God to have full authority over their lives.  If the rest of the nation could see that kind of change, who knows the impact over the future of our country.  It starts with us.  

Is that the joy of this chapter of God's Word?  The possibility of change?  The knowledge that you and I have a part to play in God's ongoing story?  Pretty incredible, isn't it?  Did Jeremiah know we'd be reading about him almost 2500 years later?  

God's eyes...ranging throughout the earth.