Monthly Archives: May 2023

Chapter-a-Day

Do the Right Thing

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Do the Right Thing (CaD Jer 22) – Wayfarer

This is what the Lord says: Do what is just and right.
Jeremiah 22:3a (NIV)

Doing the right thing is not always the easiest thing. It sounds so simple, but it is not. Like yesterday’s post, it sometimes requires surrender. I spent some time meditating on my life journey and the times I’ve had to make a willful decision to do the right thing.

I lost friendships because I chose to intervene and try to get my friends the help they needed rather than let them destroy themselves further. I still grieve the loss of those friendships.

I gave up multiple jobs because I refused to be a part of the corrupt or unjust things going on in the workplace. I’ve never regretted it.

As I meditate on those decisive moments, it strikes me that my decision was fairly simple because the circumstances were fairly black and white to me.

What’s less simple are the times when being a follower of Jesus has meant I had to forgive those who wronged me and choose grace instead of anger, judgment, retaliation, and resentment. If I’m honest, the hardest have perhaps been the times when doing the right thing meant surrendering my very strong personal will and self-centric desires in order for a greater good to flourish.

In today’s chapter, God sends Jeremiah to confront the kings of Judah. He begins by laying out what God expects of the King:

Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

Jeremiah then goes on to pick apart those who have inhabited the throne for “building the palace with injustice” and for setting their “eyes and heart on dishonest gain.”

It’s fairly easy for me to gloss over Jeremiah’s prophetic smack-down of kings who lived 2500 years ago, but then in the quiet this morning I thought about a message I gave just a couple of weeks ago. In that message I talked about my “sin” being simply my personal, willful indulgence of my base and self-centric appetites and desires. I used two kings from the works of Shakespeare as examples. I even wore a crown as I did so.

My grandfather used to say, “I’m king of this castle! And, I have my wife’s permission to say so.” All jokes aside, I am very much ruler of my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I can choose to rule my life with self-indulgence, chasing after dishonest gain, and seeking only my own personal desires. Or, I can surrender my crown and my will in order to love God and love others with my heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I enter this day which will be filled with a myriad of choices and decisions. I endeavor, O Lord, to consistently do what you ask of me: do the right thing.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

Surrender

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Surrender (CaD Jer 21) – Wayfarer

Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague. But whoever goes out and surrenders to the Babylonians who are besieging you will live; they will escape with their lives.
Jeremiah 21:9 (NIV)

I have been listening to the audiobook Surrender, the autobiography of the rock band U2’s lead singer, Bono. If you’re interested, I’d recommend listening to the audiobook rather than reading it. Bono reads it himself complete with song snippets and sound effects. There’s something even more personal about listening to him tell me his stories.

Bono’s life journey has been pretty amazing, and not just because of being a rock star. He is also a follower of Jesus, and it’s obvious that his faith has compelled him to use his status to do big things and make the world a better place just like Paul used his Roman citizenship to appeal to Caesar so as to share his faith story in successive trials before increasingly more powerful political figures of his day. Bono’s journey has, likewise, brought him into conversations of the most powerful political figures on earth. He even got Pope John Paul II to try on his blue sunglasses.

As I listen, and I’m almost finished, my mind keeps going back to the title of his book, Surrender. It’s really the thread of the whole story. It would be easy to read his story as the simple charmed life of a rock star, but underneath the story line is his faith-fueled motivation rooted in a young teenager’s passionate surrender to Jesus. The passion appears to have never waned despite his critics, many of them self-proclaimed Christians wearing their bright and shiny Junior Holy Spirit badges.

I thought about this as I read this morning’s chapter and meditated on the prophet Jeremiah, who had an unwavering faith-fueled passion of his own. In yesterday’s chapter he said:

Whenever I speak, I cry out
    proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me
    insult and reproach all day long.
But if I say, “I will not mention his word
    or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
    a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
    indeed, I cannot.

In today’s chapter, King Zedekiah sends a messenger pleading for Jerry to seek God’s mercy and deliverance. What’s crazy about this is that King Z was personally responsible for the Babylonian army knocking at the gates of Jerusalem. It was King Z who broke his allegiance with Babylon and made an alliance with Babylon’s enemy: Egypt. King Z and his administration have done nothing but mock and try to violently silence Jerry’s prophetic messages. Now that the fecal matter is striking the electric, rotary oscillator with great velocity, King Z suddenly wants to make an alliance with Jerry. It seems Z will make an alliance with anyone who might benefit him in the moment.

I found Jeremiah’s response fascinating. At the very beginning of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people, He said, “I’m setting before you life and death. Choose life.” (Deut 30:19). In this moment of terror as the Babylonians threaten to destroy Jerusalem, God through Jerry tells them that the same choice is yet before them: life and death. If they want death, they can stay in the city and hold out against the Babylonian siege. If they want life, all they have to do is surrender.

In the quiet this morning, I’m reminded that this faith journey is one of perpetual surrender.

Then [Jesus] told them what they could expect for themselves: “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat—I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? Luke 9:23 (MSG)

Or, as Bono sings it:

It’s in the street gettin’ under my feet
It’s in the air, it’s everywhere I look for you
It’s in the things that I do and say
And if I wanna live I gotta die to myself someday
Surrender, Surrender.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

The Man of Constant Sorrow

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The Man of Constant Sorrow (CaD Jer 20) – Wayfarer

Why did I ever come out of the womb
    to see trouble and sorrow
    and to end my days in shame?
Jeremiah 20:18 (NIV)

(Note: This is a good soundtrack for today’s chapter. It was going through my head as I read and wrote today’s post. 😉)

There is painting of Jeremiah by Rembrandt that hangs in the master bedroom at the lake. Jeremiah sits in a cave outside the city of Jerusalem, which is burning in the background outside the cave. It is just as he had predicted for decades. Jeremiah, and old man at this point, is isolated and alone. His head rests in his hand, his elbow propped on a copy of God’s Word. His prophetic words have all come true. He alone stood and proclaimed the truth when no one wanted to hear it. He was cancelled by the culture of his day. They mocked him, tortured him, beat him, and imprisoned him yet he refused to be silenced. Rembrandt captures the prophet in his “Aha!” moment, but there is no joy for Jeremiah in being right. There is only sorrow for his people who are being slaughtered and sent into exile. Perhaps he hears their cries and screams in the distance. It is out of this melancholy that Jeremiah will pen his Lamentations.

Jeremiah is known to history as “the weeping prophet.” One of the distinctive aspects of his prophetic writings is his David-like willingness to sing the blues. Six times in the first twenty chapters, Jeremiah has interrupted his prophetic message to the masses to issue his personal lament and complaint to the Almighty. The lament in today’s chapter (verses 7-18) is his longest and arguably most bitter. He complains about the bitter consequences of what God has called him to do, like being beaten and placed the stocks at the beginning of the chapter. He expresses his desire to quit his prophetic proclamations and walk away, but his inability to do so. He depressively expresses his wish that he’d never been born.

Jeremiah’s unabashed melancholy and willingness to express his raw emotions resonates deeply with me. I was recently introduced to a diagram that describes six stages in the path of spiritual formation and maturity. Between the third and fourth stages there is a line, a “wall.” It was explained to me that most people “hit the wall” after the third stage and revert back to the first stage. They are unable or unwilling to progress to the fourth stage that is essential in progressing to spiritual maturity. That fourth stage is labeled the “Inner Journey.”

I’ve contemplated this long and hard since it was introduced to me. I have observed that it is quiet common for individuals to refuse any kind of “inner journey.” I find it ironic that the Fourth Step of the Twelve Steps parallels the fourth stage of the diagram I’ve just described: “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” The inner journey requires that I search my own motives, emotions, weaknesses, indulgences, reactions, and pain-points. I observed many for whom this inner-journey should be avoided at all cost. Yet, I find that Socrates had it right: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In the quiet this morning, I find in Jeremiah (and David before him) an unashamed willingness to freely express his deepest and darkest feelings of despair, rage, and disappointment. I find in Jeremiah’s lament the childlike sense of safety to throw an unbridled tantrum before an understanding and patient parent who sees the tantrum for the momentary meltdown it is in the context of broader and more mature knowledge. Along my life journey, I have personally discovered that it is ultimately a healthy thing when I vent and express my emotions, even the dark ones, in productive ways rather than stuff them inside and ignore them until they begin to corrode my soul and negatively affect my life from the inside out.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

The Essential Ingredient

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The Essential Ingredient (CaD Jer 19) – Wayfarer

“Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired.” 
Jeremiah 19:10-11 (NIV)

This past weekend, I took a couple of days to spend with my friend Matthew at the lake. We both have April birthdays, so it was a mutual birthday celebration.

One of the things I love about the lake is that the combination of quiet and separation from daily routines allow for a level of contemplation and conversation that normal daily schedules don’t afford. In those conversations this weekend, Matthew and I peeled back deeper layers of knowing and being known.

One of the things I love about my Enneagram Five friend, Matthew is his natural curiosity that leads to a depth of knowledge and understanding about how humans feel, think, and behave. This feeds his work as a therapist. Matthew unpacked for me some of the things being studied on the cutting edge of his field in the area of neurobiology, the study of the brain.

Matthew shared with me how the brain, like a computer, has both hardware and software. In our earliest years, our experiences and the feelings they stir in us lead to the hard-wiring which becomes our mental hardware. As we grow, the emotional center of our brain (how we feel) and the resulting hardware center of the brain (how we think) combine to determine how we see everything around us (what we believe). As he described this, it sounded awfully hopeless to me. If my brain becomes hard-wired in these patterns at an early age, is re-wiring it even possible?!

“Yes!” Matthew answered emphatically. “God made our bodies with the ability to heal, and that includes the brain. But there is one ingredient that is essential in facilitating the rewiring process: pain.”

In today’s chapter, the ancient prophet Jeremiah is told by God to take a clay jar from the local potter, gather some civic and priestly elders, and take them to the “Potsherd Gate” of Jerusalem which overlooked the Valley of Hinnom. The Potsherd Gate was so-called because the area right outside the city wall was a garbage dump for people’s broken and useless pottery. The Valley of Hinnom had long served as an area where citizens of Jerusalem met to worship pagan deities like Baal, which included the sacrifice of first-born children to the god Molech.

Having reached the gate and overlooking the Valley, Jeremiah smashed his clay jar and prophesied that God was going to lay waste to Jerusalem because of her unwillingness to turn away from the worship of their false gods and their detestable practices. This prophetic word picture had a layer of meaning for the elders he brought along with them. Rulers in that region, particularly Egypt, would write the names of their enemies on pottery and then smash them as a curse.

God was sending His people through a painful siege followed by a painful captivity in Babylon. God ultimately wanted to rewire His people’s thinking and beliefs, their minds and hearts, which had become hard-wired to hold fast to their duplicitous worship system while stubbornly rejecting God’s ways. As I read this in the quiet this morning, I heard Matthew’s words echoing in my own heart: “…there is one ingredient that is essential in facilitating the rewiring process: pain.”

Matthew and I spent some time talking through some of the most painful experiences in our respective life journeys. In doing so, we learned some intimate details about one another, things we’d never shared before. We were not only able to extend grace to one another, but we were able to appreciate and articulate how God used those deeply painful experiences to teach us important qualities like faith, endurance, patience, joy, and hope.

In the quiet this morning, as I get ready to head into another work week, I am reminded that God repeatedly reminds me throughout the Great Story that I am to rejoice, exult, and “consider it all joy” when life gets shattered like an earthenware jar. If I am willing to respond to those painful stretches of the journey with spiritual openness, God will use them rewire my heart and mind in ways that are otherwise impossible.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.