Jeremiah 18:1-20:18
Oh dear. It seems Jeremiah’s mental state has dropped about as low as Barry White’s voice. I suspect it was the clay jar smashing incident that really tipped him over the edge. All that broken earthenware must have been quite a harrowing sight, especially when you know you’ve got to point at it, look at your friends and say “that’s you that is; that’s what God’s going to do to you”. But that is the reality of relationship with this Mighty Warrior. You can sometimes find yourselves in a head-lock and you wriggle and you beg and you wriggle some more but you haven’t got a hope of breaking his hold. When the Lord Almighty has got a lock on you, you just have to let him him crack on. Jeremiah moaned that everyone ridiculed him all day long and his friends were desperate for him to slip but the truth was that he was better off in that place. People hated him but God had his back. People wanted to harm him but God wanted his good. It was better for him to have the word of God burning in his heart than the fire of a false altar flickering at his hands. God has to be obeyed. But his directions - while tough - do lead us to life.
1 Thessalonians 1:1-2:16
They served God and waited for his Son from heaven. I think I’ve blogged a lot about serving - obeying God, serving one another, looking for ways to show care to the world. So I’m grateful for this nudge in the other direction - for a push towards waiting. I want to be both-and person, serving God with all I’ve God but also waiting for Jesus in as full a sense as I can. Waiting I think is about looking forward but it is also about more than that. I think waiting is where faith really kicks in - it admits that we do not decide our own fate, that we rely on another for our destiny. Waiting is an act of trust and waiting is an abandonment of control - it is in Jesus’ time that he will come, in his way, when he decides. I am just a grateful recipient of all that he will choose to bring to me. In that sense I think waiting is almost a form of worship - it is placing trust in Jesus that he will come and get me; that he won’t leave me hanging like a child forgotten after school. And in that sense I think waiting is probably a way of living - an attitude more than an activity. It is a slant towards reliance on another and grateful expectation of good thing I could never earn. I want to press into this. I want to wait for Jesus more, while I continue to try to serve.
Psalm 119:1-8
“Do not utterly forsake me”. Goodness, I would usually set the bar for my prayers slightly higher than that.
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