Disdain or Devotion (Jeremiah 36.1-32)

Introduction

Well, hands up those of you whose favourite book in the Bible is Jeremiah! I’ll be honest, it’s not mine and I confess I’ve only ever preached on this book once before. It’s a book people tend to avoid and I think there are four reasons for that.

Firstly, the content; it’s quite heavy. A large proportion of it is about judgement and doom and gloom and impending disaster. We prefer our Bible reading to be a bit more uplifting.

Secondly, the length; it’s really long. In fact, Jeremiah contains more words than any other book in the Bible. We usually prefer something a little more bite size.

Thirdly, the structure; it’s confusing. The chapters are not arranged in chronological order so it’s not easy to see how the events relate to each other.

And fourthly, the culture; it’s so alien to us. Situated 2,600 years before our time, in a world with very different customs and ideas to our own, we struggle to relate to it especially if we're unfamiliar with the historical context.

With all that, what can Jeremiah possibly have to say to us? Well, I think, if we’re prepared to work hard and get to grips with it, we will find that it is extremely relevant to our situation in the UK today.

In May 1940, about 350,000 British soldiers were backed into a corner by advancing German forces near Dunkerque in northern France. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it “a colossal military disaster.” He said that the whole root and core and brain of the British Army was stranded and seemed destined to perish.

On 23rd May, many political leaders of our country, led by King George VI and supported by newspaper editors, called for a national day of prayer to be held on the following Sunday, 26th May.

The history books record that just 24 hours after that call for prayer, to the surprise and dismay of his own generals, Hitler inexplicably ordered his armies to halt. Two days later, on 26th May, our nation cried out to God for deliverance. Churches were full all over the land as people came before the Lord.

At 7:00pm that Sunday evening, with Hitler’s armies still stationary, the order was issued to attempt an audacious evacuation of Dunkerque. A fleet of 800 fishing boats, private yachts and half-seaworthy dinghies were hastily sent across the Channel with orders to rescue as many men as possible before the Germans arrived.

Incredibly, Hitler’s tanks stayed where they were not only up to 26th May, but - inexplicably - on into early June as well. To this day, no one knows why. Churchill called it - listen to this quote - “a miracle of deliverance.”

Another national day of prayer was called on 8th September that year as the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies above our land. It is generally acknowledged now that had the Luftwaffe established air supremacy over these islands the Nazis would have launched an immediate invasion and swiftly defeated us.

The Luftwaffe outnumbered the RAF by a factor of 3:1. But once again, there was an incredible deliverance against the odds. Germany’s failure to achieve its objective of destroying Britain’s air defences was its first major defeat in the Second World War and a crucial turning point in it.

Then on D-Day, 6th June 1944 our king made a speech. Here's an extract from it.

"That we may be worthily matched with the new summons of destiny, I desire solemnly to call my people to prayer and dedication. We are not unmindful of our own shortcomings, past and present. We shall ask not that God may do our will, but that we may be enabled to do the will of God... I hope that throughout the present crisis of the liberation of Europe there may be offered up earnest, continuous and widespread prayer. We who remain in this land can most effectively enter into the suffering of subjugated Europe by prayer. Thereby we can prophesy the determination of our sailors, soldiers and airmen who go forth to set the captives free... At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young or too old, to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance world-wide, vigil of prayer ... If from every place of worship, from home and factory, from men and women of all ages and many races and occupations, our intercessions rise, then, please God, both now and in the future not remote, the predictions of an ancient song may be fulfilled: "The Lord will give strength unto his people, the Lord will give his people, the blessing of peace."" [Psalm 29.11.]

Two national days of prayer and a global call to prayer. Two remarkable victories that defied the odds and turned the tide and one overwhelmingly successful assault that sealed the outcome of the war.

That was 1940 and 1944. This is 2014. Will our nation ever come before the Lord, with one heart, on its knees again? Even in a crisis?

I’m sure our Queen would show the same fear of God her father had, but I don’t think I can imagine today’s politicians or newspaper editors uniting to call the nation to prayer. Can you?

There is a feeling that our nation is not just drifting from its spiritual moorings; it’s throwing away the anchor altogether.

Background to Jeremiah

In this sense, Jeremiah lived in similar times to ours. He lived in a nation that was increasingly impatient with expressions of faith, where the rich became super rich and the poor got left behind, where people saw worship as irrelevant to their lives. He spoke publicly about all this for about 40 years and, during that time, he watched his country slowly slide away from God.

At first, people just thought that Jeremiah was a bit eccentric. Then, as he kept saying uncomfortable and inconvenient things, they began to find him a nuisance. And finally, when he refused to stop speaking out, he was silenced and attacked for being offensive.

You can’t understand Jeremiah unless you know a bit about the times he lived in. So let’s very quickly sketch the background to all this.

Jeremiah was called to speak God’s word during the reign of Josiah. We looked at this last week. Josiah was a good king - one of the best. It was during his reign that people accidentally rediscovered the Bible during a bit of spring cleaning in the temple. They blew the dust off, opened it up and found to their alarm that the whole nation was doing the exact opposite of what God had said would lead to peace and blessing and prosperity.

They were doing what he said would lead to famine and drought and war and losing their land. They took the book to Josiah. He tore his clothes in repentance and brought in sweeping reforms, leading the nation back to God. And God blessed them.

But after Josiah died, things returned to the way they had been before.

At this time in its history, Judah was situated between two hostile superpowers; Egypt (to the south west) and Babylon (to the north east). And if you were a little country in the middle, like Judah, you had to choose whose side to be on.

Well, the next major king after Josiah was Jehoiakim (there was one called Jehoahaz between the two but he lasted only three months).

Jeremiah brought Jehoiakim a word from the Lord. “The Lord says don’t side with Egypt.” Jehoiakim decided to side with Egypt. Anything that God said in those days was routinely ignored by those in power. A few years’ later, in 604 BC, there was an almighty battle between north and south.

Babylon demolished Egypt and established itself as the one, dominant superpower in that region.

Jeremiah had been saying in the name of the Lord for decades that a great power would come from the north and flatten little Judah. They told him to stop being unpatriotic.

He said the nation had to get right with God again. Nobody listened. He became a laughing stock and the target of mockery.

He asked “Why are we cutting ourselves off from (what we would call) our Christian roots?” People told him to stop whinging and they banned him from the temple.

He survived several attempts on his life. A priest had him beaten and put in the stocks for a day. He was thrown in a cistern and left for dead.

Here’s the thing - people just wanted him to say something nice. They didn’t want to be told that there was a train coming as they played on the railway line. They wanted to be encouraged and be told that there wasn’t a train coming because that feels better.

Writing It Down

One thing we know about Jeremiah is that he spoke spontaneously under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

We know he spoke without notes as well because Jeremiah 36 is the story about how all his words first came to be written down about 600 BC. Here’s how the story unfolds.

In v1-7 Jeremiah meets a lawyer’s secretary called Baruch who seems honest and supportive so Jeremiah asks him if he would be his scribe. He says “Look, I need to write down everything I’ve been saying for the last 20 years or so. This is going to be one, last, desperate effort to warn people that this is going to end in tears if nothing changes. If they hear it all together, maybe they will listen.”

But how could Jeremiah possibly remember everything he had said over the previous two decades or so with no notes to refer to? We speak. Life moves on. We forget what we said. Can you remember verbatim anything you said last year? I can’t even remember what I said in my last sermon!

But experts on brain function have discovered that the human brain creates a permanent record of our conscious experience which is stored away in the brain, like files on a computer drive.

I located a computer document a couple of weeks ago that I thought had been lost. It was an e-mail attachment that I opened, edited and saved. But when I opened it again none of my changes had been kept. Has that ever happened to you? Maddening isn’t it? Well, there is a record of it somewhere deep in the computer’s cache that you can access to recover it if you know how.

Similarly, everything we say and hear and see is stored away somewhere in our subconscious. The problem we have is retrieving it – but it is there.

What happened with Jeremiah is that the Holy Spirit brought back to his conscious mind everything he had spoken in the name of the Lord.

Jesus said that this is one of the things the Holy Spirit does. “All this I have spoken while still with you” he said. “But… the Holy Spirit… will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14.25-26). This is why incidentally it’s worth reading the Bible even if you forget it.

So, taking a pen and ink, Baruch put down, word by word on a parchment what we now have as chapters 1-25 of Jeremiah.

With the help of a computer, I worked out yesterday that, in English, that’s 17,341 words. Speaking at average pace, that’s about 3 hours of relentless bad news. That’s not easy listening.

Now it had to be read in public. Jeremiah had been banned from the temple by this time. So in v9-10 he gets Baruch to wait till the next big feast day and read it aloud in the temple then.

So that’s what he does. In v11-19 one of the temple officials hears it, takes it seriously, and tells the local councillors what he’s just heard. They say “You’d better bring the man here and let him read to us.” So he does.

They hear it and look at one another in panic. Why? Because if Jeremiah is right, the king has got his foreign policy completely wrong. Egypt is the wrong horse to back. “We’ll have to tell the king,” they say.

So in v20-26 they get the king’s private secretary to read it a third time, this time to the king. Jehoiakim has no time for it. He has zero fear of God. He is unwilling to listen. He takes a penknife and, as the secretary reads down the parchment, Jehoiakim cuts off what’s just been read and throws it into the fire.

What a contrast between Jehoiakim and his father Josiah! When they read the word of God to Josiah he tore his clothes and called the nation back to God.

When they read it to Jehoiakim in a display of open contempt for God’s word, he nonchalantly burns it.

Responding to the Word

Is the UK in 2014 a Josiah nation or a Jehoiakim nation?

If the word of the Lord was read aloud in our Parliament, to our newspaper owners, to our financial shakers and movers, to our High Court judges, to our intellectuals today what would they do? I wonder if they would turn back to God as their predecessors did twice in 1940.

Or, these days, would Churchill’s “miracle of deliverance” be downgraded to “an inexplicable slice of luck”?

Have we forgotten what God did when, as a nation, we got down on our knees? Well, I’ll say more about all that next week.

What I want to highlight this morning is this: God’s word is indestructible.

All that work that Baruch did, writing it all down. It must have taken a couple of days. All destroyed. But you can’t get rid of God’s word!

Jesus said “Heaven and Earth will pass away but my words will never pass away.”

In v27-32, God says “Write the whole thing down again and add a bit more this time about Jehoiakim. Say to him that Babylon will certainly come now and bring this nation’s days to an end. Tell Jehoiakim that he will have no royal line to follow him. Tell him that he will not even have a dignified burial when he dies.”

History records that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon did indeed come with his armies the following year. It tells us that Jehoiakim died during the siege, his body was thrown over the city walls, and was never buried. It tells us that his son Jehoiachin took the crown but that he lasted just 3 months. It tells us that Jehoiakim never did have another descendant on the throne.

Oh, the folly of resisting God’s word. You might as well resist a hammer with an egg. In fact, Jeremiah likens God’s word to a hammer that shatters rock in chapter 23.

Bottom line? Jehoiakim gets a brief, inglorious mention in Wikipedia. Jeremiah’s entire prophecy is preserved forever in the world’s most translated, most distributed and bestselling book. It’s also the world’s most powerful book.

God’s Indestructible Word

You’ve probably heard about Brother Andrew’s miraculous distribution of Bibles in the days of the Soviet Union.

Well, I was told another story this week about a man, back in the days when the Bible was not widely available, who was traveling between villages with a barrow of Bibles and was met by a bandit on the way. The bandit stopped him and asked “What have got in the barrow under that cover?” He said “Books.” The bandit said “I don’t believe you, show me.”

So he did and sure enough, there were all these Bibles. The bandit was so annoyed that there was nothing more valuable he told the man to light a fire and burn the lot.

So the man said “OK, but would you let me read you a little bit before I do?” The bandit said “all right.”

So he picked up the first Bible and read the 23rd Psalm. The bandit said “That’s a good one, I’ll keep that book.” So he picked out another and read the beatitudes. “The bandit said “I like that, I’ll keep that one too.” And then he read 1 Corinthians 13 on love and the bandit said the same thing again. And so on until he had them all stacked up, not realising they were from the same book. So he said “I’ll have your barrow as well.” And off he went.

Years later that man was back in those parts and he found, to his surprise, that people were clamouring for his Bibles. He said “Oh, you’ve heard about this book have you?” They said “Yes.” “Where have you heard about?” They said “From the preacher in the village.” When he got to the village, there was the preacher, the former bandit, with his congregation.

Ending

I’m going to end with a word that appears twice in this chapter (in v3 and v7). It’s the little word “Perhaps.” As Jeremiah writes down all that God has said through him, he says “Perhaps.”

Perhaps if people hear this they will turn around from the path they’re on and I will forgive them.

Perhaps they will come before the Lord in prayer.

“Perhaps” is a word that tells me that there is always hope. I hold out the hope that our country will turn to the Lord again.

If I’m honest, I can’t see it happening humanly speaking but then who would have imagined that the rediscovery of the Bible in the temple would lead to a national revival under Josiah?

Perhaps if our generation could hear the word of the Lord, it wouldn’t get shredded and burned. Perhaps the Holy Spirit would turn hearts and change lives and heal our land?

It may seem unlikely. But who would have predicted our Army would survive intact after being cornered in Dunkerque? Who would have imagined our Air Force prevailing in the Battle of Britain when outgunned 3 to 1? But for the power of prayer and the gracious hand of God I believe our nation would have fallen into the hands of Adolf Hitler. Churchill believed that too. If Hitler had prevailed in 1940 he said "we should be reduced to the status of vassals and slaves forever." But the Lord ha mercy on us.

Perhaps if our country had to face some unknown peril again, (and I wouldn’t wish that), but if it did, perhaps we would come before him in repentance for our ingratitude as a nation and cry out to him once more.

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 23rd February 2014

Being Holy (1 Peter 1.3-25)

Introduction

I have with me here a jigsaw puzzle of 1000 pieces. I completed it a few years ago though I’m not a great jigsaw enthusiast. It’s of the history of this country from the Stone Age to the present day and I did the puzzle because I was useless at history at school and I thought this might be a good way to learn it.

I completed the puzzle as far as I could without looking at the image on the box. Well, I finished it and I now know a little bit more about British history than I did. 

If you often do puzzles, you’ll know what it feels like when you tip the pieces out of the box onto the table. Hundreds of assorted shapes with different colours – your heart sinks. If you haven’t studied the completed picture on the lid of the box, it’s impossible to imagine what the individual pieces will look like when they’re assembled but you might guess the basic theme just by looking at the jumbled pieces.

Bits and Pieces of Jesus

The pieces on the table are similar to the picture the Old Testament prophets had of Jesus when they spoke about the Messiah. The letter to the Hebrews says “God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”

Like a jigsaw, it was in bits and pieces at the start but as the picture slowly emerges when you join the pieces together, with Jesus we see perfectly clearly what God is like.

Our reading this morning speaks about this: “the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, [who] searched intently and with the greatest care, [tried] to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.” 

The prophets saw dozens of glimpses of Jesus. One said he would be conceived by a virgin. Another said that he would be born in Bethlehem. Another said he would be in David’s line. Another said he would speak in parables. Another said he would have his hands and feet pierced. Another said he be buried in a rich man’s tomb. Still another said he would rise again from death.

Peter Stoner, former Professor of Mathematics at Pasadena City College, did some sums and calculated that the probability of just 8 such predictions being fulfilled in one person is one chance in one hundred million billion (which is many times more than the total number of people who’ve ever lived). 

But only when all these prophecies come together do we see the full picture. And when we hold the box lid of Jesus’ life against it we see a perfect match.

Set Apart

When you step back and look at the completed picture, you see one like no one else.

He only had to say “Follow me” and fishermen dropped their nets at once.

People would travel for miles and press into crowded buildings to get anywhere near him.

Yet he would stop everything to give his undivided attention to one poor soul.

No one in all history has a personality anything like his. As John Stott said “It would be hopelessly incongruous to refer to him as ‘Jesus the Great,’ comparable to Alexander the Great, Charles the Great, or Napoleon the Great. Jesus is not ‘the Great,’ he is the Only. He has no peers, no rivals and no successors.”

Jesus stands head and shoulders above the rest. He is set apart from the crowd. And that is what the word “holy” means; different, set apart from the rest.

Some people don’t like the word “holy.” We sometimes associate it with weirdness. Religious oddballs are called “Holy Joes” People who look down their noses are called “holier than thou.”

But Jesus wasn’t sanctimonious. He was just unlike anyone who ever breathed before or since.

Today’s theme is “being holy” and this is what it means; to be like Jesus, to be set apart. When we live holy lives like Jesus people will see him in us. That’s why the letter to the Hebrews says “Without holiness no one will see the Lord.”

There’s a subtle temptation most Christians face from time to time – to want to fit in, to prove that we’re just like everyone else. But we’re not. Verse 15 of our passage says: “Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’”

The former slave trader turned preacher John Newton once said to the hymn writer William Cowper “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be. But, thank God, I am not what I used to be.”

How do you get on the path of holiness? You do what John Newton did. Firstly, he gave up running his life and turned to Christ in faith. He wrote about his conversion to Christ in the hymn “Amazing Grace” that we still sing today. Secondly, he repented of his former life - he stopped working in the slave trade and he did all he could to abolish it. He committed his life to becoming more like Jesus.

Our passage talks about some of the ways we live holy lives. These are the things that God expects of you and me. I’m just going to finish very quickly with four of them.

First, it talks in v13 about “minds that are alert and fully sober.” Think straight. Don’t get intoxicated with latest ideas and crazes. Our mass media relentlessly and subtly promotes godless standards and values. Holy people don’t get sucked into that. Holy people think differently.

Secondly, in v14 it talks about obedience. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” It’s saying don’t make the same mistakes you once did when you had no thought of God or relationship with Christ.

Thirdly, in v17 it says “live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” Fear God. That doesn’t mean you live constantly in dread of going to hell. Quite the reverse; Jesus delivers us from that. It means something else altogether. Think about how you’d feel if you upset someone you care for deeply. It is a healthy thing to fear hurting someone you love. That’s what it means to fear God. And if you really fear God, you’ll never fear anything else.

Fourthly, in v18-19 it says “Be grateful.” Having an attitude of gratitude moves your focus away from what you lack onto the abundance you already have. Psychological research shows that gratitude is good for you. And look what we have to be thankful for; “you were redeemed from your empty way of life.” Look at the price tag; “not with… silver or gold (money gets devalued with every economic crisis) … but with the precious blood of Christ.”

Conclusion

As I close, I want to do an experiment. This is something I came across this week. 

Close your eyes and imagine with me that you have a lemon in your hand. Feel how cold it is since you just took it out of the refrigerator. Feel the shape of it. Now take a knife and cut the lemon into quarters. Careful! Don’t cut yourself. Look at the juice run down over the sides on to your fingers. 

Now, put three of the quarters down and just hold one quarter of the lemon. Now, look at it. Lean down and smell it. Get a good, full sense of the lemon fresh scent of it. OK, now take a big bite out of this freshly cut, tart, yellow lemon. Imagine that lemon juice on your lips, your tongue and your gums. You just bit into this very bitter, juicy lemon.

Right, who feels like they have more saliva in their mouth than they did a minute a go? How can that be? It was only pretend! The reason is because you always react to what your mind thinks about.

So as we fill our minds and soul with the full and glorious picture of Jesus – the most attractive personality, the most compelling individual, the most inspirational figure in human history, let’s be grateful that we have had the privilege of meeting him and let’s commit ourselves afresh to be like him, living holy lives.

Sermon preached at Saint Mary's Long Newton, 9th February 2014

Raised with Christ (1 Corinthians 15.51-57)

In Memory of Doris Ward (3rd May 1915 - 16th December 2013)

The lead singer of the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, now aged 70, was interviewed on a TV chat show a few years ago and was talking about how he keeps going as a youthful rocker. Jagger described the prominent creases on his face as “laugh lines.” The interviewer just smiled and said, “Oh come on, nothing’s that funny”!

The truth is our bodies are getting older, tireder, greyer, wrinklier, achier and for some of us balder every day. Warning, this talk is intended to depress everyone!

Or maybe not, because even if we are all getting older on the outside, the Bible says that those who receive the grace of God are actually getting younger - on the inside. The Bible says “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Christians are a new creation; new men, new women. In Christ, you get younger every day. Isn’t that good news?

These days, most people have - at best - only a sketchy idea of what the Bible says about life after death. Ask someone on the street what they think about life after death and you’ll probably get one of three answers.

Some will say, a bit like the Corinthians our reading was addressed to, that our disembodied souls kind of float around for eternity. That comes from Greek philosophy. It’s Plato - and is not what the Bible teaches at all.

Secondly, some will say that we reappear in a different form at some future point on this earth. Reincarnation in other words. That’s Hindu or New-Age thinking and is not what the Bible teaches either.

Thirdly, others will say that there is absolutely nothing at all after death. Atheists believe that when you die, that’s it. For the committed sceptic it is silly to engrave the words “Rest in peace” on headstones. Dead people do not rest, they say. Bodies decompose and that’s all there is to say.

But the Christian vision of what happens to us after death is different to all these tree beliefs. And our reading is one of the places in the Bible where the Christian view is explained.

It says “The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”

Our fragile bodies eventually go downhill, die, then decay. Our personality, the real me, the real you, our thoughts, our beliefs stay very much alive. Doris is conscious at this very moment and but is without a body and she is enjoying God’s presence in heaven. One day, when the Lord returns, she will rise with a new, immortal body that will never grow old or tired. In the age to come, all the indignities of our present bodies will be history; the dishonour of our aged, wrinkly frames will be replaced, with something quite glorious.

We have a few illustrations from nature to teach us about these eternal realities. Let me share two of them with you.

The first is the seed and the plant. The genetic make-up of an acorn, its DNA, is identical to the oak tree it becomes. The tree is unrecognisable from the seed it grows from, which may be hundreds of times smaller, and completely different in shape. In the same way, the Bible says that we will be transformed beyond anything we could imagine, completely different. And yet, it’s totally the same thing. The acorn falls into the ground and dies only to become something more glorious. As our reading says, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

Jesus, after he was raised, was the same Jesus - but different. People knew it was him and yet, curiously, there was something about him, so that people hesitated to go near him and, in fact, didn’t always recognise him at first.

Which brings me to the second illustration from nature; the caterpillar and the butterfly. At just the right time in its life, the caterpillar goes grey and hangs upside down on a branch and weaves a cocoon. It looks like it is creating its own coffin. But inside, it is undergoing transformation. It uses the same atoms it had as a caterpillar, rearranges them, recycles them, in order to emerge, rise, if you like, as a majestic butterfly, no longer crawling but flying! Its environment is no longer limited to the earth. It can now travel in the heavens.

The same is true of us when we die. Our bodies will be recreated, using the same raw materials, but this time equipped to exist on a different level.

I look forward to meeting up with Doris again one day. We’ll both have new bodies with no aches and pains. We’ll be different but certainly recognisable.

If the resurrection is just a fairy story, Jesus’ bones are lying in a tomb somewhere in the Middle East, our faith is futile, Christianity is untrue and Doris Ward wasted a large part of her life believing a lie.

But no. Her work in the Lord’s service, her praying, her encouragement of fellow believers, her stand against evil, her love for others, her giving, the faith she shared, were not in vain.

While her soul rejoices in the glorious presence of God in heaven, he is preparing for her a body able to enjoy him forever in the eternity to come.

It’s common to become overly preoccupied with our health, particularly as we grow older. Doris certainly had no fear of death. In fact, she was ready to go and rather wished it could have been sooner.

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus opened heaven’s doors for all who repent of their sins and turn to him in faith. Because of Christ, we don’t need to fear death any longer. He has decisively nullified the sting of death.

When we know Christ, we know that one day we will be with Him forever and that makes all the difference.

Thank God for Jesus’ promise: “Because I live,” he said, “you also will live.” 

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8th February 2014