Religion without Revelation - Part 1 (Jeremiah 7-9)

Slide03.jpg

Lord, please keep "plowing under" us with this past Sunday's sermon, and the text of Jeremiah 7:1-15 this week.

Remove our resistance to Your work--to the way You use Your Word to plow under our false assumptions about what is important in life. Keep us from trusting in ourselves--thinking that we need to behave right to be right with You. At the same time, keep us from hearing Your Word but not doing Your Word.

Instead, please make Your Words our song. Make our hearts beat faster with wonder at the way You show us mercy. Remind us how You have rescued us through Jesus and help us recognize that we, right now, depend on Jesus. Lead us into the works You've prepared for us.

Finally, please give us more stories of how You are working both in us and through us. Give us a burden to join all of the universe in speaking Your greatness--the greatness of our Creator and our Redeemer.

As always, contact Matt or Rick if you have a God-at-Work story you'd like to share!

The Incremental Slide into Spiritual Adultery (Jeremiah 2-6)

To help us move from Sunday to Monday:

When someone breaks a promise, it hurts. When that promise is to stay faithful to you in a romantic relationship... well, words don't do it justice.

But when God's people spiritually cheat on Him, that doesn't stop God from speaking with the precision of a prosecutor and the grief-filled, angry longing of a spurned lover.

You can see these words for yourself in Jeremiah 2. Here's a sample: 

The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay,” says the Lord.
“For my people have done two evil things:
They have abandoned me—
the fountain of living water.
And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns
that can hold no water at all!

These words are a warning for us to watch out and wake up! Like the generations before us, we tend to remember God in the wilderness but forget God in prosperity. 

If you heard this Sunday's sermon, here's a recap of steps forward for this week--steps to "rekindle the romance."

STEPS FORWARD FOR THIS WEEK

1. Ask God to "give us this day my daily repentance." Summing up a call from John Owen: Don't let careless indifference to God and things you can't see lead you to fall out of love with your Creator!  
Summing up a call from Thomas Brooks: Even when you don't obey as you should, ask God to help you see that every command of His is sweet because Jesus has fulfilled every command on your behalf. Because of Jesus, you can fight sin without having it get between you and God!

2. Practice "remembering rituals"--rituals that help you remember God in the wilderness. 

Preach the Gospel to yourself daily--perhaps by using a tool like the Gospel Primer by Milton Vincent: 

Place yourself in front of the plow of God's Word on the lips of God's People by going to Sunday morning services and to small group even when it doesn't feel worth it. 

Spend 5-10 minutes each Sunday morning by preparing to be plowed under. Ask God to shine into the hidden recesses of our hearts each Sunday morning before you come. Consider reading that Sunday's preaching text as you pray.

 

Introducing Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1)

This Fall, we’ll be working our way through the book of Acts.  It’s all about the active witness of Jesus working through His people.  In a messy and electrifying time, the early believers were seeking to live as a family of refugees on this earth—proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom even in the face of suffering.

In order to prepare for our time in the New Testament book of Acts, we’ll be spending several weeks in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.

Why?  That’s the question we explored this past Sunday.

Here are some quotes from the sermon.

“If the book of Acts presents God’s people as an active witness, the book of Jeremiah presents God’s people as a lost witness.”

“We can’t move forward unless we realize where we, as the church in America, are on this spectrum as a witness?  Are we lost, or are we active?  The answer, I think, is that we are right between these two.  We are not an active witness.  We are a passive witness.  And we are moving toward being a lost witness.”

“My prayer is that we will not leave here hopeless, but that we will leave here hearing.”

Subscribe to our sermon podcast here.