Jeremiah was one of God’s all-time greatest servants. He was a shy, sensitive village poet: a man, who loved nature, and would have longed quietly to settle down with a nice girl, and raise a family, just minding his own business.
That was not what God had in store of Jeremiah. He was to be a prophet with a most unpalatable message. He was called to smash the cultural idols of his contemporaries, and this he did with thoroughness, and with imaginative vision. His words were sledge hammers. Nevertheless, when he comes before God in prayer, he is not soothed or stroked, encouraged and molly-coddled. He pours out his bewildered soul to his God, and even accuses God of letting him down. Like a brook which bubbles out of the ground, promising cold, clear, fresh water, only to run into the sand and disappear. The only answer he gets from God is that God will give him the moral and spiritual strength to keep going. He will be made like a wall of brass, an iron pillar – but, thank God, Jeremiah never lost his soft centre.
Read how, in Chapter 15, he dares to talk to God so openly:
Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? Will you be to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails? Therefore this is what the Lord says: “If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me; if you utter worthy, not worthless, words, you will be my spokesman. Let this people turn to you, but you must not turn to them.” Jeremiah 15: 18-19
A Prayer: Deliver us, O Lord, from all self-pity and complaining in our service for you, and grant us this day the strength to stand for what is right and true, whatever the cost. Through him who bore the cross for love of us.
A Thought for Today: “The purity of silver and gold is tested by putting them in the fire; the human heart is tested by giving them a little fame.” Eugene H. Petersen’s paraphrase of Proverbs 27:21
Now read Luke 17: 1-10 and read v.10 five times.