Tears of Exile
From the Series: Tears
Speaker: Heather Zempel
Date: March 14, 2010
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Transcript
(Mark)
Before we jump into our ‘Tears’ series, I have a very special announcement to make. Are you ready for it? Several months ago, the movie theaters at Union Station closed and we went through a time of grieving that loss and praying for the Lord’s directions, and the Lord gave us a Scripture to stand on, Exodus 14:14, Moses is between the Red Sea and the Egyptian army with no place to go and Lord said, “Do not panic, be still and you will see the deliverance of the Lord.” And we determined in our spirits that we will not panic, we will stand still and we will see what the Lord does. For months, we have been praying and surveying and negotiating and finally, we have found our fifth location. Here’s the deal, I kid you not, one week ago, we thought it was somewhere else, but here’s the thing, we’ve really been praying Revelation 3:8-9. It says: “What He opens, no one can shut and what He shuts, no one can open. See I have placed before you an open door.” We have believed that God would open and close doors, and you know what? If you want God to open doors, you have to be open to Him closing some doors as well. So here is the amazing thing, we thought a door might be opening up at Mazza Galleria but in the last week, that door closed. That really made our minds spin and it created a little disequilibrium. So again, this week, we found ourselves fasting and praying and asking the Lord where He was taking us. We knew that with Easter three weeks away that if we didn’t know this week, we didn’t see how we’re gonna do this. We have a problem folks, there are too many of you! Especially at our Ebenezers location, we need a couple hundred of you to be part of this next launch. So, long story short, we began negotiating with a theater this week and it is in an area where we had our strongest response on the survey. in fact, the strongest response we’ve ever had on any survey we’ve taken for any of our launches. At 4:59 on Friday afternoon, we signed a check and sealed the deal and our next location, we better get a drum roll going, all of our locations, can we get a drum roll, our next location will be in Columbia Heights on 14th Street across from the Target at the Gala Theater! Go ahead and celebrate that! Unbelievable! We have been praying for favor. In our history, when people ask me what I pray for more than anything else, the favor of God, because the favor of God is God doing something for you that you can’t do for yourself. So, we will launch our fifth location in the Gala Theater, when? Yes, three weeks! It’s crazy enough that we need to do this. So, let me give you the 411 real quickly. Let me say upfront, there will be an informational meeting on Tuesday night, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. at Ebenezers Coffeehouse, and we want to invite you to come, those that said they would be interested in being part of that launch team. What we are going to do right now, my favorite moments in the rhythm of our church life because this is the moment I get to say, “You need to pray,” and “You need to ask the Lord where He wants you.” Do you redouble your investment in the location where you are? We need some of you to do that. We need some of you to step in because God is going to call other people to be part of that launch team. Some of you are going to feel the Holy Spirit tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘I want you to be part of this.’ We are going to go after another part of this city and we are going to bring the good news of the gospel and the love of Jesus Christ to that part of the city. So, as the Holy Spirit begins to tap you, your first step would be to go to that informational meeting. So, when will we gather? We are going to do a Sunday night location. It is going to be a different time frame. Sunday night at 7:00 p.m. will be our weekly gatherings. On Easter, we couldn’t get it on Sunday night, which is bizarre, because we were wondering if we ought to do just Sunday morning because it’s Easter Sunday morning, so we will launch Easter Sunday morning with a morning service, Easter Sunday morning. Then the next week, we will go to a Sunday night gathering on a weekly basis, and we are so excited about it. So, let’s start praying and ask the Lord to help us. It will take a lot of hard work between now and then to pull this off, but I believe it is God’s timing and God’s favor, and I can’t wait to see what the Lord does. Let’s pray together.
Father, we come to You and we thank You for opening a door of opportunity for us. Lord we believe that your fingerprints are all over this and we thank You that we are your workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works prepared for us in advance. God we believe that You are preparing the way and we are walking through the door that You have opened and we are so excited to see what You are going to do. Lord I pray for every NCCer, that right now, we would begin to discern what it is that You are calling us to do. For many of us, it means staying right where we are, that’s how we are going to obediently respond to this, but we’re going to begin to pray and begin to invest and begin to believe for this fifth location. For others, it is going to be obeying that prompting of your Holy Spirit as we step out in faith and become part of something new that You are going to do in this city. Lord we rejoice, we celebrate, we thank You and we commit these next several weeks to You. Help us Lord, we need your help and we humbly ask for it and believe and pray for your favor and your blessing. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
(Heather)
God is still ticked about idolatry. That’s what I wrote in my Bible a couple days ago as I was reading through the Book of Jeremiah and realizing that over and over again, God still has a big problem with this issue of idolatry. My name is Heather Zempel. I’m the Discipleship Pastor here at National Community Church. I want to welcome you as we continue our ‘Tears’ series through the Book of Jeremiah. If you are new to NCC or you are not sure what’s going on, we have just started this Bible reading challenge called ‘From Garden to City’ where we are, from Lent to Lent, reading through the Books of the Bible together as a community and then talking about it at our weekend services. So if you have not jumped into that, now is a great time to do it, because we are getting past all the depressing books. So, at the Connection Center, there is a card that has daily readings. You can put it in your Bible and we invite you to jump into that at any time.
What we are doing today is continuing the ‘Tears’ series. During this season of Lent, we are talking about issues of reflection and remembrance and repentance and looking forward to the redemption of God. We started with Pastor Mark talking about Tears of Suffering in the Book of Job and last week, our campus pastor, do you guys appreciate your campus pastors? Yes! Our campus pastors talked about Tears of Disappointment from the Book of Jeremiah when Jeremiah the Prophet sees his people making bad decisions. Today we are going to continue through Jeremiah and talk about tears of exile.
Here’s the deal with Jeremiah, Jeremiah is a mess of a book. I mean, it is a tough book to tackle because it is a jumbled mess of history and biography and prophecy and poetry that follows no chronological order or any sort of intuitive organizational structure. Then you throw in all of these weird action sermons, like Jeremiah making pottery and then destroying pottery and then burying loincloths and wearing yokes and weird stuff. It’s 52 chapters covering about 40 years and we can’t really tell what’s going on when and where and how, but there is one undeniable message. God wants our hearts so desperately that He will go to ridiculous extremes to win them. He wants our hearts. He is after our hearts. Ultimately, that is what He is about. So what we see going on in the Book of Jeremiah is all this stuff that revolves around our hearts and God’s purpose for us.
For those of you who might have grown up in church and went to Sunday School, Jeremiah is one of those books that we didn’t talk about a whole lot in Sunday School. I think we did Chapter 1 about God formed us and knew us and had a purpose for us, and then we got out of the book. So here are a few things that you probably didn’t learn in Sunday School. First of all, did anybody ever get a gold star for memorizing Jeremiah 10:5? It’s the verse that says: Your idols are like scarecrows in cucumber fields, or some translations say melon patches. I would have been all about Scripture memory if we’d had that verse! Then there is the moment in Jeremiah 20 when Jeremiah is being released from prison by the priest and Jeremiah looks at him and says, ‘Ya know, God doesn’t call your name Pashhur, he calls your name terror on every side.’ This is crazy. Then there’s the other part in Jeremiah 50 when God is talking about the idols and the images in Babylon and the Hebrew word that we translate there into images is actually the phrase ‘dung pellets.’ I don’t remember talking about dung pellets in Sunday School! These are the things we didn’t learn in Sunday School, and really they have no bearing at all on what I’m going to say tonight but I thought they were fun.
So Jeremiah is preaching and the story goes like this, the ten northern tribes of Israel in 722 were conquered by the Assyrians and they were taken into exile, and because of the godly leadership of people like King Hezekiah and Isaiah, the southern tribes known as Judah were saved and preserved. So then what happens is good King Hezekiah is followed by this really nasty king by the name of Manasseh, the worst king in all of their history, and he erected idols and there was all this pagan nastiness going on. Then he was followed by a good king by the name of Josiah. Josiah brought revival and religious reform but it was too little too late. That’s when Jeremiah comes on the scene, towards the end of Josiah’s reign and rule. Then you’ve got some really nasty kings and it’s during their reign that Jeremiah is speaking his message. So his message is really summed up in Jeremiah 13, verses 15-17.
15 Listen and pay attention! Do not be proud, for the Lord has spoken. 16 Give glory to the Lord your God before it is too late. Acknowledge him before he brings darkness upon you, causing you to stumble and fall on the darkening mountains. For then, when you look for light, you will find only terrible darkness and gloom. 17 And if you still refuse to listen, I will weep alone because of your pride. My eyes will overflow with tears, because the Lord’s flock will be led away into exile.
Jeremiah talks about the coming exile that because their hearts have turned away from God and gone astray, they will physically be led away into captivity in Babylon. Not only is this message really difficult, he is an unpopular man with an unpopular message, and he stands alone in preaching this. There are other prophets who are saying things like God will save us and God will come to win on our behalf and God will bring victory for us, and Jeremiah is standing there saying, ‘No, actually we are going into exile.’ These other prophets were preaching exactly what the people wanted to hear. They were preaching a positive message that was comfort to the people hearing it. Often, I feel like we are the same way. We crave a gospel of comfort and we are tempted to preach a gospel of comfort, but what we find is that when we take a half-truth, it is no truth at all. And when we take half the gospel, what we are left with is no gospel and no comfort at all.
What I love about From Garden to City and reading through the Bible is that we are forced to look at some of this harder stuff of Scripture that we don’t like to look at. We are forced to read about God’s wrath and his anger and his judgment and his jealousy and we don’t know what to do with that. But it forces us to put our nose in it and figure out what it’s all about.
So Jeremiah stands as an unpopular man with an unpopular message in the midst of a positive message being preached, and Jeremiah says, ‘We are going into exile, and mot only that, once you are there, there is a certain way I want you to live. I want you to live as a blessing to your captors, I want you to find ways to be a blessing to the city that you find yourself exiled into.’ An unpopular man with an unpopular message with really unpopular advice about what to do in exile. Gone are the days of Moses and Joshua giving their rousing speeches about taking the promise land. Gone are the days of King David standing before giants and conquering them. Gone are the days of the judges ripping into the enemies of God. Gone are the days of Elijah standing before the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel and bringing fire down on the right sacrifice. This is no longer a victorious message, it is about exile. It is about going into a place away from God, it is about being exiled by the Babylonians.
But then the flip side is, you get to Jeremiah 31 and you have all these really positive things, like I will turn your mourning into joy and I have loved you with an everlasting love and I will replenish the weary soul. So reading Jeremiah is very confusing. I think this is our problem with Jeremiah, we don’t often come to it with an eternal perspective. When I read Jeremiah, I am more convinced and more convicted that God is not just a bigger version of me, that He is wholly other and He is completely righteous and He is unreasonably good. He is a God that wants and desires our hearts so much that He will go to measures and extremes that are unfathomable to our human minds to win them. He will confound our minds and disrupt our lives to win our hearts. He will scandalize our religious notions to make us people of pure faith. He will ruthlessly and relentlessly go after the things in our hearts that keep us from him. He is a God willing to send us into temporary exile to save us from eternal exile.
I know a little bit about exile. When I was a kid, I learned about exile when I was 5 years old and in kindergarten, and my teacher had a disciplinary device called the ‘don’t be’ chair, as in don’t be bad, don’t be a liar, don’t be a stealer of other children’s crayons, stuff like that. My problem is that in kindergarten, I had so much stuff I wanted to share with my friends, verbally. So when she got up to teach us something new about colors or shapes or words, that reminded me of something I needed to tell Janie Fisher. So right there in the middle of class, I told Janie whatever it was that I needed to tell her. Then I had to get up from my table of friends, and I was exiled to the ‘don’t be’ chair, for I don’t remember how long but it felt like I lived there in kindergarten. In fact, it got so bad that my mom had to start asking me every day after school, ‘Heather, did you have to sit in the ‘don’t be’ chair today?’ There was one day, I kid you not, I couldn’t remember because it hadn’t so often, I couldn’t remember if I’d been in it that day or not. So being the logical little kid I was, I thought it’s probably better to confess something that I didn’t do than not confess something that I did do, and statistically speaking, I probably did it, so I should just confess it. Then, let’s fast forward one year and we find our first grade Heather on the playground during snack time, we would get 15 minutes to go out at 10:00 to eat our snack and talk to our friends. So there was a food fight going on and I’d never participated in a food fight, never really seen any reason to be involved in a food fight, but there was a food fight going on. I had changed, I had learned my lesson in the ‘don’t be’ chair a year ago, until a piece of food hit me, so I got involved. I threw a piece of bread. A piece of bread, not an apple, I came into this battle with limited weaponry, I had a piece of bread that I threw, and the teacher saw me and I was exiled to the fence for the remainder of snack time. Here’s what I to this day don’t understand, I was the only one who got exiled to the fence! Somehow I was the only person she saw in a food fight throw a piece of food! Exiled! I was even trying to bring people over to the fence to get them to tell the teacher that so-and-so was also involved in the food fight. But you know how exile is, the kids don’t come talk to you when you’re standing at the fence. Exile. I felt singled out because I was the only one.
I wonder if that’s how Israel felt? Like, they got singled out for un-preferential treatment because they were the people of God and because they were expected to live to a higher standard and a higher level. One of the things I learned is that I was grateful for the ‘don’t be’ chair and the exile fence, because from that moment on, until I graduated from that school, I got A’s in conduct. I wasn’t a perfect child, we won’t talk about the throwing the rock at the teacher incident and we won’t talk about the use of the famous movie phrase, ‘frankly, my dear, I don’t give a ___.’ For the most part, I was a good kid, and I credit it to the ‘don’t be’ chair and the exile fence. That discipline, when executed rightly, comes from a place of grace and for the purpose of making us better people. Discipline executed rightly comes from a place of grace and is granted so that we become better people. That’s what this story is about. It’s almost like God giving Israel a time-out to teach them something.
So, today I’m not really interested in our comfort. We preach a lot of messages in churches today that are positive and full of information about how we can be comforted. What we are really about today is truth, and what God is after, and that is our hearts.
I’m going to take us through a couple different places in Jeremiah today to show what the problem was and what God’s solution was. So if you have your Bibles, turn to Jeremiah 16. Jeremiah 16 gives us the reason for the exile. Verse 10:
10 "When you tell these people all this and they ask you, 'Why has the LORD decreed such a great disaster against us? What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the LORD our God?' 11 Tell them this reply, 'It is because your ancestors were unfaithful to me, and followed other gods and served and worshiped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law. 12 But you have behaved more wickedly than your fathers. See how each of you is following the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying me. 13 So I will throw you out of this land into a land neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.'
14 "However, the days are coming," declares the LORD, "when men will no longer say, 'As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,' 15 but they will say, 'As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.' For I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers.
Hold on to those last couple of verses and we’ll get back to them. I want to focus on the first part of this passage. The people were sent into exile because of idolatry. I think it is helpful when we are reading Scripture to make notes and take notes about what we are learning and what stands out. For instance, the word ‘heart’ shows up 66 times in the Book of Jeremiah. So as we see that word recurring, it might give us some indication of what the book is about. Another thing I noticed was a lot of talk about idolatry. So underneath this passage on that particular day, I wrote in my Bible – idolatry = not cool. Then a couple pages later, I said God is still ticked about idolatry. Whether we are reading in Jeremiah 2 where He says my people have exchanged their glory for worthless idols, or Jeremiah 4, put your detestable idols out of my sight, or in Jeremiah 7, you’ve set up detestable idols, and Jeremiah 8, they provoke me to anger with their worthless foreign idols, Jeremiah 32, they have set up their abominable idols. They are exiled because of their idolatry. They are exiled because their hearts have already gone away from God and gone astray and wandered off. So God exiles them relationally and spiritually and geographically to give them their fill of idols. When I wrote in my Bible that God is still ticked about idolatry, I meant it in the sense of that time and what was going on in Jeremiah, but the reality is that God is still ticked about idolatry. It takes our hearts off of God and puts them on lesser obsessions.
We tend to think of idolatry as an ancient, pagan practice that doesn’t really apply to us to day. But really, idolatry is when we love anything else more than we love God. In my life, I have struggled with idols of success, idols of knowledge, idols of people and their opinions of me. An idol is anything from which we gain our worth or acceptance. It is anywhere that we focus our attention and affections. I think I’ve given you these questions before but these are helpful in identifying the idols in your life.
What demands my focus and affections? From what do I derive my meaning? What do I look to to tell me what I’m worth? Where do I find safety, refuge, comfort, pleasure, security or shelter? Who must I please? Whose opinion counts?
When I find myself daydreaming, am I daydreaming about my own glory or about the glory of God?
These are the things that help us identify idols in our lives. John Calvin said that the human heart is an idol factory, because we are created to worship, we will worship something or someone. If it is not God, then we are idol worshippers. Idolatry will also enslave us and exile us. Idolatry not only disrupts our relationship with God, it disrupts our relationships with other people, because if our idol is career or success and there are other people that seem to stand in the way of that, we cannot have a healthy relationship with that person. If our idol is pornography, then it is going to be a hard time to relate to the opposite sex in a way that is healthy and godly. If our idol is the opinions of other people, it will be hard to relate to them in ways that are right. So idolatry, not only exiles us from God, it exiles us from people that God has created us to be in community with.
What is your idol and how has it exiled you? God is ticked about idolatry and that’s what sends his people into exile. This is one half of the gospel message, that our hearts have been turned toward lesser obsessions and it exiles us from the God who created us. It exiles us from the community He created us to live in.
But Jeremiah doesn’t end there, he gives us the other side of the gospel equation, because there is not only idolatry and exile, there is redemption and restoration. If we turn a couple pages over to Jeremiah 23, we read Jeremiah’s response to the exile problem. Verse 5
5 "The time is coming," declares the LORD, "when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD Our Righteous Savior. 7 "So then, the days are coming," declares the LORD, "when people will no longer say, 'As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,' 8 but they will say, 'As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.' Then they will live in their own land."
This passage is really fun for a couple of reasons – one, when Jeremiah is saying that there is a righteous king coming whose name is The Lord Is Righteousness, he is actually getting a little jab in at Zedakiah because King Zedakiah’s name mean ‘righteous as the Lord,’ so he’s got this little jab going. And this image of a branch is also used by Isaiah to foretell the coming of Jesus. Everything in Scripture points to Jesus. Jeremiah is saying there is a King coming who will restore you from your exile to right relationship with me and to your land and to one another. This is what’s fascinating, that while we are in exile because of our idolatry, God exiles Himself from heaven to earth to redeem us and restore us from our exile. Philippians tells us that Jesus, who was God, did not demand to cling to his rights as God, but made Himself nothing and humbled Himself in the form of a slave, in human form, and He humbled Himself even further in human form by dying a criminal’s death. Jesus Christ exiled Himself from his right and his glory and his majesty and his privileges on the throne of heaven to redeem us and restore us from exile. That is powerful.
Here’s the other cool thing, these verse talk about when you take an oath, you are no longer going to be saying as the Lord lives who rescues them out of Egypt, but as the Lord lives who rescued them out of the hands of the people of the north country and other nations that took them into captivity. What’s interesting here is that the people of Israel rooted their spiritual identity in what God had done for them in Egypt. They celebrated the Passover, they celebrated the crossing of the Red Sea, they celebrated the time that God rescued them from slavery, and what God is saying is that your spiritual identity is no longer going to be rooted in what I did for you back then, it will be rooted in what I’m doing for you now and in the future.
For those of us who have grown up in church, in godly Christian families, this is for you. Our spiritual identity should not just be rooted in what God did for our parents or our grandparents or somebody back there. Our spiritual identity should be rooted in what God is doing in us, for us, through us now and in our future. If your great-grandfather was some great preacher, that’s good, you should be thankful for a godly heritage, but that is not the extent of your spiritual identity, because God wants to be known, not just for what He did in the past, but for what He is doing now and moving forward in the lives of his people. Along with that, I think it is really interesting that in Egypt they were coming out of slavery and exile because of oppression. It didn’t have anything to do with bad decisions they had made. In this instance, God is saying, ‘I’m not only going to break you out of bondage that you can’t control, I’m even going to rescue you from exile of your own making. I’m going to rescue you from the exile you find yourself in because of your own sin and idolatry.’ Jesus did this, this was his ministry. Think about then Jesus was on earth; everything we did was about restoring people to community, restoring people to right relationship with his Father and with other people. Think about lepers, He heals lepers then He sends them back to the priest. Why did He do that? Because the priest was the only person in the community that could pronounce a leper clean and thereby able to enter back into good society. He wanted to not only restore the leper physically but restore him relationally to the community around him. The woman at the well, she comes to the well at the time she did because nobody wanted to be around her. She was exiled from her community. She was exiled from relationship with the people in her community, and after one conversation with Jesus, she runs back and talks to everyone and everyone follows her. As Jesus is hanging on the cross, He is begging, pleading God, that He would forgive the people who murdered Him. As He is hanging on the cross, Jesus is restoring community between God and people. He looks at the guy beside him and says, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ He is hanging on the cross and He sees his mother and his best friend and He says, ‘Take care of one another.’ Jesus was about going to people and rescuing them from their exiled, isolated existences and restoring them to the community, with God and with one another that He had created them to experience.
Idolatry leads us into exile. When our hearts turn away, it exiles us from the relationships that matter the most, but God’s plan is for redemption and restoration. If we will just let Him woo our hearts away from lesser obsessions, we find ourselves redeemed and restored from exile.
When we talk about things like God’s wrath and his anger and his jealousy, we don’t know what to do with those. But the reality is that those are the things that sent Jesus to the cross. Those are those things, that in God’s world that discipline executed rightly is an expression of grace; it stems from grace and it ultimately is for our benefit. Idolatry will exile us. God’s plan is to redeem us and to restore us.
I don’t think Jesus died on the cross to give us a religious security blanket. It was about going after and destroying everything in our hearts that focus us in another direction.
We are all in very different places today. Some of us are living in the land of idolatry. Our hearts are focused on things that are not God’s. Some of us are living in the land of exile and maybe we are not even sure why. We don’t know if it’s our own making; we don’t know if it’s our own idolatry; we don’t know if it’s something else. One thing I would encourage you is that if you feel like God is far from you, one question you might want to ask is it because your heart is somewhere besides God. Then some of us are on a journey back from the land of exile to the land of restoration. We are all at different points on that journey. For many of us, we might not even be sure where we are and the craziness of following Christ is that we live in a reality of now and not yet. We live in the tension of knowing the reality of eternity but feeling the tension of the reality of today and that God is not a divine slot machine that we can just do something good tomorrow and then everything’s right, we are completely restored and redeemed and everything's great. Sometimes we are still feeling like we are living in exile and it’s a hard journey back. Sometimes we are in the land of idolatry and it’s really hard to smash those idols. I think it is important to stand on the promises that God has given us. There is one that is very important and probably very familiar to you. In Jeremiah 29, we like to put this one on t-shirts, verse 10
10 The truth is: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. 12 In those days when you pray, I will listen. 13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. 14 I will be found by you,” says the Lord. “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land.”
This is the kind of promise we need to stand on when we find ourselves in tears of exile. I want to reframe it though because I feel like we have grossly misunderstood and misused this passage. The first thing I want to make sure we see is that first verse, you will be Babylon for 70 years, those don’t show up on the bumper stickers and the t-shirts. God is saying, ‘You are going to be in Babylon for 70 years, you are going to face exile because of your idolatry. This isn’t going to be easy, it will be hard, but what I want you to know is that my plans and my intentions are good. I am after your heart and I will do anything to get to your heart.’ God’s plans for us ultimately are good, they are ultimately to restore us. See, we use this passage like it is our personal mantra against bad things. We use it almost sometimes like a magical chant, to ward off any attack of the enemy, ‘no, God knows the plans He has for me, good and not evil, to prosper me and not harm me.’ They are in exile in Babylon for 70 years! It’s bad! But God is saying, ‘My intention is good.’ This goes much deeper than something we slap on a hat to claim as a personal slogan. It is about God’s intent in the land of exile to restore and to redeem, to make new, to make right.
I want to give you some practical thoughts because this is tough stuff. Where do we go from here? I think it is important to remember that temporal discomfort is nothing compared to eternal separation from God. If God is dealing with us harshly or ways that we perceive to be harsh, we should probably be thankful, because that means He is after us, He is after our hearts and He will go to extreme measures to win them.
I think the first thing we have to do is identify our idols. What is it that we are worshipping? What demands our attention and our affection? What are our idols?
Number two, we’ve got to smash the idols. What’s interesting about this is that I don’t think we can smash idols by just focusing on them. We smash our idols when we bring them under the weight of God’s glory. There’s a great quote by Warren Weirsbe who said, “The remedy for idolatry is for us to get caught up in the majesty and grandeur of God, the true God, the living God, the everlasting King.” If we worship God and we get caught up in the splendor and the glory and the amazement of all He is, then we will realize how silly some of those lesser obsessions are.
Identify idols, smash idols by worshipping God, and thirdly, submit to the process. This was one of the hard parts of Jeremiah’s message because he said go into captivity and live there and live well, bless your captors, bless the city. Earlier this week, Pastor Mark said something that I felt like really summed up this whole idea. He said, ‘Quit trying to get out of bad stuff if that bad stuff is going to destroy idols in your life.’ I think sometimes I need to stop praying for deliverance and just start praising the Deliverer, because what I’m going through is destroying idols in my life, and there might be a season of exile, there might be a season of tears and discomfort, but temporary exile is nothing compared to eternal exile, and if my God is wanting to save me from that, I want to submit to whatever process He’s got for me.
Idolatry will enslave us, it will exile us. God’s plan is to redeem us and restore us and He sent his own Son into exile in order to do that. His plans are for good. His plans are to restore and redeem. He is after our hearts and will go to extreme measures to win them.
Father, tonight, I thank You for those parts of your personality that are hard sometimes for us to embrace and hard for us to get our minds around. The idea that a good God could be a God who is jealous and a God who exiles and a God who pronounces judgment. God I pray that You would help realign our hearts on that, that we would recognize that it is an expression of your grace that brings redemption and restoration. God I pray that You would identify for us the idols in our lives, the things that have taken our affections off of You, God that we would be able to repent of those lesser obsessions that we focus on and that our hearts would be turned completely back to You. God help us to see You in all of your glory and all of your majesty so that we can be unchained from what enslaves us and hurls us into exile so we can live fully and completely in community with You and the community with others that You created us to live in. God I pray that as we go into a time worship now, that You would break those chains, smash those idols; that we would see how great and glorious You are; that You would woo our hearts and captivate our imaginations and that we would love You like we’ve never loved You before. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
