Sunday 23 October

Jeremiah 49:7-50:10

“The people of Israel and the people of Judah together will go in tears to seek the Lord their God.  They will ask the way to Zion and turn their faces towards it.  They will come and bind themselves to the Lord in an everlasting covenant that will not be forgotten.”  This is the way out of exile.  Repentance is the gateway to faith.  It has always been so.  It ever will be so.  If we are wanting to be close to God, if we are seeking intimacy with him then weeping and seeking are the key.  We deeply regret our lack of hunger for him and we mourn our fickleness and our flight.  But regret is not where we end.  After the regret comes a voice ushering us towards Zion and we turn to its call with our eyes.  But the turning is not the end.  After the turning comes the binding.  And after the binding comes the remembering.  Real repentance is short-hand for a range of emotions; it contains a host of activities.   At the moment real repentance feels a bit like my spare room - I go in there every now and then but I couldn’t claim to know its every part; it always feels slightly unfamiliar.  But I want that to change.  I don’t want to live in exile.  And I want to tell others how to escape from it too.  I repent of my lack of repentance.

2 Timothy 2:1-26

I personally love entrusting people with things.  There is very little I enjoy more than getting alongside someone and gradually passing more and more on to them, whether it be responsibility or inspiration or material.  So this passage is really helpful for me.  It celebrates this desire to entrust things to others.  I like that.  And the passage also provides a few little guidelines for how to do it well.  It calls us (or at least calls Timothy but I think we can probably read it as having broader application) to entrust teaching to people.  This is the stuff the writer of the proverbs has been banging on about for 26 chapters - we can make others wise, we can equip them with how to make good decisions in the fear of the Lord.  That is actually a huge potential.  And so we entrust people with the bible.  We unpack it for them and open it up to them.  As well as telling us what to entrust to people, this passage tells us who to entrust these things to - we entrust them to reliable men.  While God’s grace is sufficient and mercy triumphs over justice, time and time again in the new testament we see people reaping what they sow, we see those who have been faithful in small things being the one who get given big things.  So we entrust things to those in whom God is already at work.  We bless what he is doing and work where our Father is working.  If we do that, and are willing to entrust the truth of God into people then a dynamic movement will be unleashed.  A movement that could encircle the Mediterranean and overthrow the greatest kingdom in the world.

Proverbs 25:21-26:2

If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat.