INTRODUCTION
What is it that makes a life a
success? Some people think it is money, or power, or to be admired. But the
Bible takes a different view.
Here is God’s view, as recorded in
Jeremiah 9:23-24:
Thus says the Lord:
“Let not the wise man
glory in his wisdom,
let not the mighty
man glory in his might,
let not the rich man
glory in his riches;
but let him who
glories, glory in this,
that he understands
and knows me,
that I am the Lord;
I act with steadfast
love, justice, and righteousness in the earth;
for in these things I
delight, says the Lord.”
Wisdom is good if it leads us to God, but
when we begin to think we are wise, we are fools. The Bible says (Proverbs 3:7):
“Be not wise in your own eyes.”
A wise man said, “The more we know,
the more we wonder. It needs understanding to understand the extent of our
ignorance” (George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine,
p70).
Power may make a person great in his own
eyes, but God’s “strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Wealth is good if it is used to lay up
treasure in heaven, but Jesus said, “Beware of all kinds of greed; for one’s
life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15).
Someone asked at a rich man’s
funeral: “How much did he leave?” The answer, “Every cent!”
The great thing in life is to
understand and know the Lord—that he acts with steadfast love, justice, and
righteousness in the world. And if we understand and know the Lord, we will
also act with love, justice, and righteousness in the world.
Now I want to talk about the
prophet Jeremiah, the man who wrote the words I read to you. Jeremiah is my
favorite Old Testament character because he is the one we know best. No one
else in the Bible opens his heart opens his heart to us as Jeremiah does—except
the apostle Paul in the New Testament.
Jeremiah shows us his compassion,
his sorrow, his despair. He shows us the cost of obeying God.
Jeremiah was given a terrible
responsibility—a painful responsibility—a responsibility he hated. But Jeremiah
was faithful, and people who study the history of Israel tell us that it was
Jeremiah, more than anyone else, who saved the faith of Israel in her darkest
hour—a time when Israel had strayed so far from her God that she could have
become lost to history—like the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the
Hittites, the Moabites, and other ancient peoples that are only read of in
history books.
I. Jeremiah received his call from
God in 627 B.C.—about 400 years after the glory days of Israel under King David
and King Solomon, and almost 600 years before Christ.
A. It was a dark time in Israel’s
history. The northern tribes—the Kingdom of Israel—had been carried into captivity
by the Assyrians more than 100 years before and had mostly been absorbed into
other nations. Only the smaller, southern Kingdom of Judah was left to worship
the God of Israel.
The Babylonians were the great
empire now. And they were coming to destroy Judah, as the Assyrians had
destroyed Israel.
And God chose Jeremiah to be his
spokesman to the nation. It was the most difficult and thankless task
imaginable.
Jeremiah is one of the longest
books in the Bible—52 chapters. I can give you only a few highlights.
B. Have you ever had a job you
hated? Jeremiah hated his job. It was a job that made him an outcast among the
people he loved.
But Jeremiah was faithful in
speaking God’s words to the people, even though they despised him for it.
He could see disaster coming
because of the sinful ways of the people, and he warned them—but they refused
to listen. Jeremiah was faithful, but he never tasted the pleasure of success.
A good part of Jeremiah is taken up
with cries of pain as he sees the coming destruction of his people. He cried
out to his people—
My anguish, my
anguish! I writhe in pain!
Oh, the walls of my
heart!
My heart is beating
wildly;
I cannot keep silent;
for I hear the sound
of the trumpet,
the alarm of war.
Disaster follows hard
upon disaster,
the whole land is
laid waste…
(4:19-20).
II. Judah had sinned, and God had
determined that since they would not repent, he would send the Babylonians
against them to take them into captivity. This was to cure them of their
unfaithfulness.
A. Jeremiah proclaimed God’s
message, that the only way they could save their city was to surrender to the
Babylonians.
It sickened Jeremiah that they
would not listen. He cried out to God:
My grief is beyond
healing,
my heart is sick
within me…
I mourn, and dismay
has taken hold on me.
Is there no balm in
Gilead?
Is there no physician
there?...
O that my head were
waters,
and my eyes a
fountain of tears,
that I might weep day
and night
for the slain of the
daughter of my people!
(8:18, 21-9:1)
B. Jeremiah labored for God for 40
years—but hardly anyone believed his message.
Jeremiah was an affectionate man.
But because of the difficulty of his work, God forbade him to marry. He was
denied the comfort of a wife and the love of children (16:2).
God forbade him to go any funerals
or weddings (Jeremiah 16).
He was isolated from the social
life of the community.
His fellow countrymen called him a
traitor. They ridiculed him. The king put him in the stocks. Then he was put in
a cistern to sink in the mud and die.
It was one of his few friends, an Ethiopian
slave named Ebed Melech, who rescued him.
Jeremiah had a struggle with his
faith. Sometimes he thought God had become his enemy. He complained bitterly,
but he was still faithful to the God who called him.
If people had listened to Jeremiah
and changed their ways, the nation could have been saved from the disaster that
awaited it. But the Babylonians came and destroyed the nation’s beautiful
Temple.
They carried the wealthiest of the
people away to Babylon into captivity.
They would have an easier life than
the ones who stayed behind. The Babylonians offered to take Jeremiah along. But
he decided to stay with the poor suffering people in Judah.
Jeremiah continued to speak God’s
words to the people, and they continued to reject his message.
Finally, some of the leaders of the
people in Judah fled to Egypt, and—against his will—they took
Jeremiah with them.
There the story ends for us. We
don’t know how Jeremiah died.
But, without a doubt, he died
thinking he was a failure.
As far as Jeremiah could tell his
40 years of labor and suffering had been in vain.
III. But Jeremiah’s life hadn’t
been in vain. Jeremiah has a starring role in the salvation story of the Bible.
A. After Jeremiah had died, people
looked back on his words and found in them an explanation for their disaster—and
hope for the future.
Jeremiah prepared the way for
Jesus’s coming. His most memorable prophecy was this:
“Behold, the days are
coming, says the Lord,
when I will make a
new covenant
with the house of
Israel and the house of Judah…
This is the covenant which
I will make
with the house of
Israel after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my law
within them,
and I will write it
upon their hearts;
and I will be their
God,
and they will be my
people…
for I will forgive
their iniquity,
and I will remember their
sin no more.”
(31:31, 33-34).
B. So when the nation came back
from captivity in Babylon, they remembered Jeremiah’s words and they took hope.
They realized that God had not forsaken them—but rather that they had forsaken
God.
Many of them turned to God. We read
about it in the books of Nehemiah and Ezra.
They built a new Temple. They met together
to read the Scriptures. Prophets and taught them. Their books are in our Bible.
C. When our Lord Jesus was on
earth, Jeremiah was remembered as a hero. He was remembered so fondly that some
people thought Jesus was Jeremiah, come back from the dead. We read about that
in Matthew 16:14.
The prophet Isaiah wrote of Jesus
that God’s Suffering Servant would be a “man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief.” In Jesus’s time people realized that Isaiah was writing about Jesus.
They saw in Jesus that same tender heart that had been Jeremiah’s. They saw Jesus’s
tears—his sorrow for sinners. They remembered Jeremiah.
I have told you the story of
Jeremiah to point to the truth that God works through us, even when we don’t
know it.
APPLICATION
In Proverbs 10:7 we read, “The memory of the righteous is a
blessing.” When someone lives for God, his memory lives on.
One person whose memory blesses me
was a man named Dudley Sherwood.
It was when I was 19—after my
freshman year in college, at the University of Kansas, I began to walk with
Jesus.
I was eager to learn more about the
faith, so the August, after my freshman year, I went to a little Bible school
that met over a drug store in South Chicago. There were three instructors and
maybe 20 students.
One of the instructors was this
man, Mr. Sherwood.
He taught a course in Bible
doctrine. It seems to me now that it would be hard to make a course in Bible
doctrine exciting, but the way Mr. Sherwood taught it, it was exciting. I
remember him standing before the class with his Greek New Testament, reading
and translating the text as he went. I thought it would be so cool to be able
to read the New Testament in the original Greek.
Because there were so few students,
I had plenty of opportunities after class to ask Mr. Sherwood my questions. He
patiently answered them to the best of his ability. I hung on every word. I
still remember some of the things he told me—even the tone of his voice.
I decided I wanted to learn to read
the Greek New Testament and years later I took a couple of correspondence
courses so that I could also read the New Testament a little bit.
The years went by, but I never
forgot Mr. Sherwood. After maybe 20 years, I decided I should write Mr.
Sherwood and tell him how much his teaching had meant to me.
He wrote back. I don’t think he
remembered me. But one thing in his letter stuck in my mind. He wrote, “I
have always thought that that summer was spent to no great profit.” He
thought his summer had been wasted, but it had meant the world to me.
That taught me a lesson. Sometimes
we do more good than we know. The important thing is to do what we can and
leave the results to God. The important thing is faithfulness.
If you have been faithful to God,
God has used your life—maybe in ways that you can’t know, ways that will only
be revealed in eternity.
Maybe it is your example, kindnesses
you’ve forgotten, hospitality you offered, the money you’ve given to missions
or to those in need.
Maybe it’s the children and
grandchildren you read stories to, or the way you did your work.
You have been important in the
lives of people you have forgotten and even in the lives of people who have
forgotten you.
You have sown a seed in someone’s
life that sprouted years later—or has yet to sprout.
When I was a child someone gave me
a little plaque which I hung above my bed. On it was a picture of a country
lane with flowers along it and these lines:
“Only one life,
‘twill soon be past;
Only what’s done for
Christ will last.”
And whatever is done for Christ will last. It will last forever in the
lives you have blessed.
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