Jeremiah: serving in youth

Jeremiah chapter 1. What I would like to do today is, through the call of Jeremiah in the first chapter of his great prophecy, find words that might encourage us who are young, and I might say right at the beginning that of those who may think that this therefore doesn't apply to them, you can think of it this way, you'll never be younger than you are today. So, you're in relative youth or you're in absolute youth, either way, what I have to say applies from now on for the rest of your lives. We're going to look at the call of Jeremiah, so let us read the whole first chapter together, and I'm reading out of the New King James Version, if you wonder, just to clean up some of the obsolete words.

The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month. Now that's quite a mouthful, but we're going to go over some of the history that Jeremiah is alluding to as he pegs his own call and ministry in real space time, real history, going back to the sixth century B.C. Now the prophet is called in verse four, and the words of the Lord came to me, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

Before you were born, I sanctified you, I ordained you a prophet to the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord God, behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth. But the Lord said to me, Do not say, I am a youth, for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak.

Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord. Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.

See, I have this day sent you over the nations and over the kingdoms to root up and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant. Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Jeremiah, what do you see? And I said, I see a branch of an almond tree. Then the Lord said to me, You have seen well, for I am ready to perform my word, or more literally, I am watching over my word.

And the word of the Lord came to me the second time, saying, What do you see? And I said, I see a boiling pot, and it is facing away from the north. Then the Lord said to me, Out of the north calamity shall break forth on all the inhabitants of the land, for behold, I am calling all the families of the kingdoms of the north, says the Lord. They shall come, and each one set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem against all its walls all around, and against all the cities of Judah.

I will utter my judgments against them concerning all their wickedness, because they have forsaken me, burned incense to other gods, and worshipped the works of their own hands. Therefore prepare yourself and arise, and speak to them all that I command you. Do not be dismayed before their faces.

The second time we get that very interesting expression, not to be afraid of their faces, lest I dismay you before them. For behold, I have made you this day a fortified city, and an iron pillar, a bronze wall, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.

What I'd like to do at the beginning, just for a few minutes, is to set the historical stage for the prophecy of Jeremiah. The prophecy of Isaiah straddles the other major prophets. He speaks of times before they speak of, and he speaks of times after they speak, all the way into the future millennial kingdom and the eternal state.

So he's the bookends, Isaiah part one and part two. But in the middle we have Jeremiah, who remains in Jerusalem at the time the children of Israel are carried away, captivity. Not all of them are carried away.

There's a small group left, and Jeremiah is one of them. And then we have, of those who went away to Babylon, one man who sits in the courts of the king, who is in a place of political importance. His name is Daniel.

And at the same time we have a man who is with the common people down by the river Kibar, and his name is Ezekiel. So these are contemporaries, Ezekiel and Daniel and Jeremiah. Now for the sake of the young, let's just talk about a little of the historical background of these major prophets.

This won't take very long. You remember King Solomon and all of his glory. And yet at the end of his reign, Solomon turned away from the Lord.

And therefore it's no surprise, I suppose, that his son Rehoboam was not a man after God's own heart like David. At the time, the kingdom was divided. Remember, we have the northern tribes, later called Ephraim after their largest tribe.

And we have Judah and Benjamin, and I might add, faithful people from all of the other tribes who had moved down to stay with the Lord and with Jerusalem. And that southern kingdom is now called Judah. The first ruler of the northern kingdom's name is Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

And he bears this epithet in the Bible, who made Israel to sin. And just as Aaron made the golden calf for the people at the base of the mountain, so Jeroboam made two golden calves, and one he set at Dan in the north and one at Bethel just over the border. And his purpose in making these golden calves was to lure people out of Judah into apostasy and into idolatry.

And the first golden calf is just over the border, so that all you had to do is take two steps and you were there. And then he wanted you to take some farther steps and move as far away from Jerusalem as you could, all the way up to the second calf, who was up in Dan. What followed, of course, for Israel was tragedy.

I'm talking now about the northern kingdom. And Ashurbanipal eventually came, and he – it wasn't Ashurbanipal, it was – well, yes, it was Ashurbanipal. I didn't read that part.

This is pulling it out of the archives. Anyway, the king of Assyria came and he took them away into captivity in 722. And that was the end of the northern tribes, except for the remnant who remained in Judah.

What followed, of course, in Judah was a series of kings, some good and some bad. And now we want to talk about where Jeremiah comes in the history. He was born in the year 640 BC.

Josiah is made king at the age of eight in 639. So Jeremiah is one year old when Josiah is made king. Now Josiah is the greatest of all the kings of Judah.

Josiah is greater than everyone, all the way back to his father David. And he made the people celebrate a Passover which was not seen since the days of Samuel the prophet. So Josiah takes what Hezekiah, his great-grandfather, had done and he brings it to a climax, into a glorious completion to some extent.

That is rooting out the idols, rooting out all of the abominations that his father Ammon and his grandfather Manasseh had brought into Judah in some of the darkest days. So Jeremiah is one, and here's Josiah made king at the age of eight. Now we go eight years later, we get to 631, and Josiah is now 16, and he begins to follow after the Lord.

This is a message about youth, all right? Josiah's days began, his work for the Lord commenced at the age of 16. But Jeremiah can one better him, because Jeremiah in 627, during that period of time when Josiah was reforming the nation, Jeremiah is called at the age of 14. Any 14-year-olds out there? Any 15 and 16-year-olds out there? Listen up.

This isn't a word for old people. This is a word for youth. He's 14 years old.

Now he carries on until 621, and in 621, Josiah is made aware that Hilkiah has found the book of the law. And so after 10 years of reform based on general information and some portions of the Old Testament, the full volume of the Torah was now known, and parts of it apparently had been obscured for many, many years. And so now Josiah takes this newfound scripture, and he, well, he gets great encouragement from it, doesn't he? And he really begins to rev up that reformation, and he produces a time of glory for the nation.

This is what Jeremiah was growing up with. The days were wonderful when he was young. You had a king on the throne who was after God's own heart, the greatest of the kings all the way back to David.

You had people who seemed to be reforming. You had all of this, the Balaam and the Ashtoreth, and all these other idols being destroyed utterly, and their priests were executed, and everything seemed to be going back to the glory days of the beginning of the nation. But this was a time of geopolitical ferment.

You see, Assyria was becoming weaker and weaker, and there were two powers jockeying for position, Egypt in the south and Babylon in the north. Now, Babylon's truly to the west, to the east rather, but they enter Israel from the north, so Israel always regards Babylon as north. And King Josiah, who had listened to the book of the law and who had listened to Huldah the prophetess and who had listened to Hilkiah, did not listen to the word of the Lord through Pharaoh Necho, and he got involved in something he should never have been involved with.

He was trying to keep the king of Egypt from strengthening the faltering kingdom of Assyria, and at the battle of Megiddo in 609, he's slain in a way that is disturbingly like the death of Ahab. And Israel's glory crashes to the ground. And all that Jeremiah grew up with comes falling down in a horrendous crash.

And now everything that made life worth living, it seems, was no longer the case, no longer true. After the battle of Carchemish in 605, when Babylon finally defeated Pharaoh Necho II, the brain drain began in Judah. Nebuchadnezzar came down and he made Jerusalem his vassal state, and he took away the cream of the crop.

He took Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He took those people away in 605. And for the next 15 years or so, really 20 years, there would be other deportations until finally Jerusalem is sacked and the Solomonic Temple is destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586, and the nation is taken away into captivity.

Now Jeremiah's living during this time, he's prophesying, he's seeing what's coming, and he's given this awful burden to tell the people of Israel or Judah originally that if they repent, this can be averted. And then later on in his ministry, this can't be prevented any longer. I'm no longer permitted even to pray for you.

Your best bet is to give yourselves up to Babylon because it is now past the point of no return. Now these wicked kings that are mentioned here just briefly are the sons and in one case the grandson of Josiah, and I'll just spend a second on this since they're mentioned. When Josiah dies, his son Jehoahaz is made king for exactly three months.

His name is also called Shalom. Then the king of Egypt, who's stronger at that point, this is 609, he comes up and takes him and makes him a vassal, and he sets Eliakim, his brother, as king, and Eliakim is also called Jehoiakim, K-I-M. He reigns for 11 years.

He's completely wicked. We're going to find out later that he sits in his summer palace with a penknife and takes that wonderful book of the law that had been refound by his father Josiah and cuts it apart piece by piece and throws it into the fire. That's the kind of man Eliakim was.

Then Eliakim dies and he is replaced by his son Jehoiakin, C-H-I-N, also called Jeconiah or just Coniah. Well he makes it exactly three months as well, but this time it's not Egypt who takes him away, it's Babylon who takes him away because they're stronger. They set up his uncle Zedekiah and Zedekiah is the last king and Zedekiah sees the temple of Jerusalem destroyed and his eyes are put out and he's taken away to Babylon and the rest is history.

So we've talked a little bit about the context of Jeremiah. Jeremiah realizes that the country that he has been called to prophesy to, the people he has been called to minister to, are doomed. There was no remedy.

The land had not received its sabbaths for 490 years and God was going to come in and swift judgment. Now that's kind of a heavy thing for a young person to have to say and talk about, to declare to people, and yet we're going to find out that God equips Jeremiah in a wonderful way. I want you to look down, it says in verse number five, Now when we talk about God setting people apart, we often use this big word sanctification.

Sanctification means to set someone apart for God, for his purposes, for his pleasure, and for his work. It's a very positive thing to be set apart for the Lord, it's a very privileged and honorable thing. Although, if you're set apart to the Lord, it implies, doesn't it, that you're set apart from everything else.

Because if God has dibs on you, then no one else does. And therefore, sanctification cannot be divorced, cannot be separated from the word separation, can it? Because to be God's means you don't belong to anyone else. You're bought at a price.

Christ redeemed us. We are owned by him and we have been claimed by him and therefore we ought to separate ourselves from the world and from sin unto him and be his devoted people. But before we ever set ourselves apart to him, he set us apart to himself.

And we find out this is even before birth, in the sovereignty of God. We call this sometimes the pre-conversion sanctification. Paul said the same thing in Galatians 1. God set me apart from my mother's womb.

His purpose was to reveal his son in me so that I might be able to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. So God sets people apart before they're born. That means for you and for me, God made me the way I am, all the way down to my genetic structure, the way he formed me so that I might be a vessel for him in my life in a unique way that none of you can fulfill.

Similarly, none of you can be replaced just as I can't be replaced. You say, I thought all God's workers are replaceable. Well, they're not replaceable.

God has a purpose for making you the way he did. And no other person, even if you sit here with an identical twin, no other person has the same constitution, the same genetics, the same gifts, and the same goal in life as you do. And we've been reminded about the importance of that pathway.

And the question is, are you going to find your pathway as Jeremiah was given his path here? Recognize that in God's sovereignty, he made you the way you are. You may not like the way you are. You may think, I wish I looked different.

I wish I lived somewhere else. I wish I was in a different family. I wish I was in a different assembly than I am.

And what we hear from Jeremiah is, don't stop, I mean, stop wishing those things. Because what you're saying is God made a mistake. You're saying God was wrong in where he put you or how he made you or what he gave you as a gift.

And every believer has a gift. Read 1 Peter 4. Every believer has a gift. So we're to find out what that is because it's God's endowment to us so that we might glorify him and serve other people.

Just to finish this off, we have, of course, at the time of conversion, what we call positional sanctification. That's when God has claimed us now as his children. Then through our lives, we are responsible to engage with God and to walk in step with the spirit and to use the encouragement of scripture in order that we might be progressively sanctified and set apart to him.

And finally, at the rapture or at the time we're called home, well, we reach the perfection, the perfect sanctification, sinless, holy, devoted to the Lord. At that point, we could write on our very foreheads, holiness unto the Lord because all of our sin will be gone and we'll be perfectly his. Now, if that is true of Jeremiah, it's true of you and it's true of me.

This also reminds us, of course, that life begins at conception. This is a sidebar issue. But we understand that the scriptures teach extremely clearly that life begins at conception, not at birth.

Because Jeremiah, in a very strongly worded argument against the modern curse of abortion, says that if I had died in my mother's womb, I would have had to be buried. We don't bury people who aren't people. This chapter as well tells us that God was working in the fetal Jeremiah to bring about the young boy that is now ordained to serve God at the age of 14.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about the youth, that is, youth. There's a passage in 1 Timothy chapter 4, which you could turn to, but I'm going to read it. It's 1 Timothy 4.12. He's talking now to another youth.

Let no one despise your youth, Timothy, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity, till I come give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given you by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the eldership. Meditate on these things.

Give yourself entirely to them, that your progress may be evident to all. Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing that you will both save yourself and those who hear you.

That's a very close parallel to what we're reading in Jeremiah chapter 1 to another youth, Timothy, in the New Testament. So, Josiah is 16. Jeremiah is 14.

Jeremiah is responding to a call of God at 14. Josiah is beginning to cleanse the temple and reform the nation at the age of 16. And I'm saying to myself, what did I do when I was 14? What was I doing when I was 16? Well, in this country, what I was doing was I was being a teenager.

And what I mean by that is more than you think what I mean by that, because you think being a teenager means you're somewhere between the age of 13 and 19. But, in fact, no. There's a category in our country.

It's called teenager. It means you're not an adult. You do not have adult responsibilities.

You can do what you wish, pretty much. It's a time of freedom. It's a time of carelessness.

It's a time, basically, just to squander. You don't have to be serious about life. You don't have to be serious about God.

You don't have to be serious about your career. All you can do is just float for those years because they are optional years. They're years that are basically expendable.

But, you know, that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that adulthood really begins, in terms of God's service, at the age of, what, 13? You become a son of the covenant? So I'm telling to you, 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds, stop using your teen years as an excuse. You say, I'm saved, but I haven't been baptized yet.

Well, why haven't you been baptized? It's a command of the Lord. Well, you say, because I'm a teenager. Well, I'm taking that away from you.

You're not allowed to use that category. So you got any other excuses? All right. That's not an excuse.

Jeremiah is called a 14. You say, I'm saved and I got baptized, but I haven't, I don't want to commit yet to the assembly. I need some time of freedom.

I'd like to float until maybe I'm 18, 19, 20, 21, and then I'll think about gathering with the Lord's people. And I'm saying to you, are you using your teen years as an excuse for that? You can't use that anymore. I've taken it away from you.

So what's your excuse? That's also a command of the Lord. You see, it's time for us to rise up as young people and take on the responsibilities of serving the Lord because that is where your joy and satisfaction lie. And if you think it's fun being a teenager by goofing around, just come into the work of the Lord and see what real joy is about.

And you will never regret, you'll never regret taking a step of obedience to the Lord and following him as Jeremiah follows him in his early teen years. Spurgeon was saved at the age of 15. You remember the story? He was, I believe, walking in a winter scene.

It was very snowy. He went into a free Methodist church to get out of the weather, basically, and he heard this man preaching to him, preaching in general, but then preaching specifically to this scruffy-looking man who came in with snow all over him. Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else.

And he just kept saying it over and over again because apparently he didn't know what else to say. But that riveted itself into Spurgeon's heart and he was saved. As soon as the ice cleared off the river, he was baptized in the spring in May, and by the age of 18, he was preaching to thousands of people.

At the age of 19, at least, he was down in London preaching to thousands of people. At the age of 22, he preached to 23,000 people without a microphone in the Crystal Palace. Now you say, why are you telling us all that? You think all of us are C.H. Spurgeons? No.

In fact, when we talk about these people, we talk about Mary, the mother of the Lord, and her knowledge of Scripture and her obedience at the age of 15, 16, 17. We talk about Jeremiah. We're talking about maybe exceptional people as far as you're concerned.

You're saying, well, I couldn't be that way. Well, I'm saying, why not? Do you think mediocrity is something that you must accept in life? Now, you may not have the gift and God may not open the door for you to preach to 23,000 people at once. But then going back to the way God formed you and what he made you for, you're perfectly suited for that.

And if you get involved with that, you can be as great in that sphere as Spurgeon was in his sphere. So let's remember that God wants us to serve him while we're young, young, young. When we're very young, we want to respond to the call of God as children virtually.

Now, Hudson Taylor, just to mention one other example, saved at the age of 17. He's off on his own in China after studying Chinese, Greek, and Hebrew for three years so that he could translate the Bible properly into Mandarin. He's off in China by himself at the age of 22.

You can do that, too. It's not maybe China for you. Whatever it is for you, you can do it.

This is a call to be something for God. There's a few things about youth I want to end up with. First of all, I want to talk about the love of youth.

Because youth, when it first encounters something wonderful in life, tends to fall in love with it, tends to be enthused about it. They have what is called the first love in the Bible. The Ephesians, as a group of Christians, they had a first love in Christ when they were saved.

But then, of course, we know in Revelation 3 they left their first love because they became too sophisticated, too mature. They thought they had grown up. They thought these simple gospel truths and simple devotion to the Savior were too basic.

And they wanted something more. They wanted to be more sophisticated. Well, sophistication is not worth anything.

What is worth something is recapturing the first ardor of youth in things that really matter, like God and his word. It's interesting. We didn't read it.

We don't have time to read it. But I will allude to it. If you start reading in Chapter 2 of Jeremiah, you have a two-page legal brief where God sets out his case against Israel.

And one of the things he says about Israel is, when you were a baby, and you can read about this in Hosea 11 as well regarding Ephraim, God says the same thing to them. When you were young, I took you by the hand out of Egypt. You were just a little baby.

And I taught you how to walk. And I put out my hands, just like fathers or mothers put out their hands. And you took those first few faltering steps, and you came to me.

And I didn't let you fall. And I taught you how to walk. And I led you in the wilderness.

And then you grew up. And you grew up into a beautiful young woman. And I gave my commitment to you, and I married you.

And now, despite all the love that I've shown to you from the time when you were a young child all the way up to our marriage, yet you have turned your back against me. You were an adulterer. You're an adulteress.

The whole second chapter and many, many references through Jeremiah and Ezekiel equate the sin of Israel to adultery. It's a very graphic and a very vivid, really, almost difficult to read in some of the passages, just how graphically this is presented as a metaphor of our abandonment of our first love. And what God wants us to do is come back to the one we were betrothed to, to come back to the one who made his promises to us and to fulfill our promises to him.

Youthful love, let us never leave it. How about youthful strength? The Apostle John divides Christians he's writing to into three groups, little children, young men, and fathers. Fathers are those who have lived many years in Christ.

They're mature. They understand some of the deep things of God, and they have a track record, a legacy behind them. Little children, of course, are little children.

They're just newly saved. They don't know much of the ways of God yet, but they have that first love that I talked about. And they're probably going out and telling other people about Christ because people do that when they're first saved.

And then other Christians tell them they shouldn't do that and that you should be afraid. And you say, okay, I'll be afraid. And they stop doing it.

But in between, we have young men. And he says three things about them. Young men, you are strong.

This is about the strength of youth. And the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one. And one of the things about youth is the strength of youth.

We admire the strength of young men and young women, too. And yet, that strength, spiritually, is going to depend on two things. Number one, having the word of God abide in you.

Number two, having learned early in life how to overcome the wicked one. Because Paul also says, flee youthful lusts, which are not entirely sexual. There can be other materialistic, consumerist-type lusts that people fall into.

But much of this has to do with the falling into sexual addiction. If you are going to be anything for God, you've got to get on top of that. You've got to master that problem.

It will never leave you. It will be with you as long as you're alive. So you're not going to defeat that foe and then walk away and never have to face him again.

But what you need to do early on in life is understand how that warfare is to be won. And the way it is won is actually laid down in scripture in a very simple way. Number one, prayer.

Number two, having the word of God dwell in you. Number three, being accountable to and meeting with other believers. If you give your life to those three things, then you will not, at least you will be equipped not to fall into that particular snare of the devil.

The other point I want to make is that the word of God, and Matthew has made this point well, needs to abide in us. We need to imbibe it. We need to have it part of us.

We need to be reading it. We need to be studying it. Jeremiah says, and this is chapter 15, he says, I found your words and I ate them.

And they were sweet and they were the joy and rejoicing of my heart. And some of you say, I found the words of God and I read them, but they weren't sweet. I thought they were boring.

And I had to force my way in some sort of legalistic, cringing 15 minutes to read this stuff. And at the end of the day, I didn't get anything out of it. And all I did was assuage my guilt because I was guilty for not reading that morning.

Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's back away from that and analyze that for a moment.

First of all, if you have never had any love for the word of God, if it means nothing to you, then you need to hear the preaching of the gospel. Because God puts in the heart of every believer an innate love for his word. But that love, like any other love, can suffer from neglect.

And the less you read the Bible, the less you'll want to read it. But the more you read it, the more you'll want to read it and it will become a holy addiction. And it needs to be something.

Some of us are trying to carry on a 10-chapter-a-day kind of challenge. I think Peter might be involved with this as well because Brother Tom Turnbull in Detroit brought this to our attention and a number of us have tried to do this. This takes about 40 minutes a day.

And it's a dedicated reading of 10 chapters of the word of God with no distractions. And if you don't think you have 40 minutes, you have 40 minutes. I have 40 minutes.

And I'm busier than you are, if you'll pardon me for saying so. Maybe one of you is as busy as I am, but nobody's busier because I'm in a crazy phase of my life right now, which I will not bore you with. I find 40 minutes.

You find it too. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's five less.

But some sort of dedicated plan to get the word of God into your heart. Not commentaries. They have their place.

Not only listening to it preached. That has its place. But that private imbibing of the word of God so that every time you scratch, Bible verses bleed out.

That every time you're tempted to sin, immediately a verse pops up in your mind and the Holy Spirit has a handle that he can use just to turn you and pull you out of danger. That's what you need to be doing. Do you know that the kings of Israel, according to Deuteronomy 17 verses 18 and 19, were each of them to take the book of the law and make a personal working copy.

So every king of Israel was to have a personal working copy of the Torah that he had made for himself longhand. Have you ever written out the Bible? Another good technique. Typing is okay, too.

I do that, too. But I have something about writing it down that makes it just come, you know, through the visual into the Myers loop and out through the hand and back up through and into the memory. And before you know it, you know it better than you knew it before.

Anything you can use like that to have a, you know, we're blessed to have these printed copies. We don't need to make our own copies. And yet the danger of this or cutting and pasting on the computer is you own a Bible, but the Bible doesn't own you.

And it lives here, but it doesn't live here. So enough about that. I have some other things I want to say.

The freedom of youth, the idealism of youth. I'm coming back as I close now to the idea that you can be something extraordinary for God if you just lay your life out before him like Jeremiah did. You know, the problem is our peers tend to drag us down.

Let's face it. Maybe you're in school. When I was in school, I just got so excited about all kinds of things.

I read about Lord Nelson on the deck of the victory, taking broadsides from the Spanish Armada, taking broadsides from the French Armada. And if it hadn't been for him, Britain would be speaking Spanish or more likely French today. That man single-handedly kept Napoleon out of Britain and preserved a number of other things for us that we are recipients of today.

Nothing against French folks here, but at that point in time, it was important for Britain to remain British. Okay, I'll put it that way. Well, that's wonderful.

And then you go into your chemistry class and they tell you that CH4 plus 2O2, they redraw an arrow, 2CO2 plus H2O, and you have a combustion equation. That's why water comes out of the tailpipe of a car. That's why when I breathe on a mirror, it gets all wet.

Because combustion produces water. And you run and tell your friends these things. And they say, shut up.

Why can't you be normal like us? Let me tell you, normal is very overrated. Okay? I know. Hey, how about those Green Bay Packers? How about those Hawkeyes? And so you say, all right, I guess I'll be normal.

And let's take it over to the spiritual realm now. You say, I was just reading in Matthew 9, and I noticed that there's only one place in the whole New Testament where the Lord Jesus ever follows anyone. He never follows anyone, but in one case.

He follows Jairus. And the reason he follows Jairus is because he knows there's a woman with an issue of blood who's longing to touch his garment. And he deliberately draws back so that she can reach him.

If he had been leading as he normally would, she would never have been able to do that. And that's a wonderful thing. And Phil Coulson brought that to my attention, by the way.

So I better give credit to that because that was a great insight when I read that. So you go tell your friends that. They look at you like you have two heads and just stepped out of a flying saucer.

They're not interested in those things. Well, I could tell you to pick new friends, but that's not always so easy. I would say though, this, you should pick people more spiritual than yourself to spend time with.

And yet at the same time, the opposite of that is you need to be an example to other people, that these are the things that are worth it in life. And you want to pursue them with all your strength when you're young. There's a lot of guarantees at the end of this chapter.

And they put that clock up there for me. Let me just go over a couple of them with you. Jeremiah 11, chapter one, verse 11 says, what do you see Jeremiah? He says, I see a branch of an almond tree.

And the Lord says, you have seen well, for I have, I am watching over my word. This rests on a Hebrew pun, shockade, almond tree, shockade, watching. The almond tree was thought to be the watcher of all the trees.

It was the first tree to bloom in January. And it guaranteed that other trees would bloom and that almonds would come and other fruit would come and that the whole dearth of winter would be reversed and there would be a time of blessing and all of the crops would follow because the almond tree was the one that was watching over all of the other crops. And God says, so I am watching over my word.

So when we go out with the word of God and we declare it to other people, we know that it will not return to God void, but will accomplish the thing that he sent it to. It will accomplish his purpose because he watches over his word. And our purpose is just to release it, just to let it go.

And God will watch over it. God says, I see, what do you see next? And this is verse number 13. I see a boiling pot.

What we have here is a cauldron or a pot and it's over a wood fire perhaps and it's full of boiling broth, but it's dangerously tipping toward the south and just a little gust of wind and it will finally tip over and send scalding liquid down on Jerusalem. That is the warning that Babylonian judgment is coming. And so we too are called to warn men and warn women about the judgment of God that is coming when we speak to them in love, in our preaching.

And again, we wonder how can we take on such a difficult task. Look at verse 19. They will fight against you, but they will not prevail against you for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.

It's a wonderful thing that we do not need to be afraid of the faces of people. You know, people look at us with a face of anger, a scowling face, but we need to remember that behind that there's a hurting heart. So don't be dismayed by the facade, by the presentation, by the aggression, by the indifference, by the mocking, by the ridicule.

Remember that beneath that is a heart that is aching for the very gospel that you have come to know. So don't be afraid. God can be with you.

God is with you. So as I wrap up, let's think about Jeremiah's call. Let's think of the great way his life began and all of a sudden his history just brought about a tremendous crash.

And now it looks like doom and gloom. And yet in the midst of this we read some of the greatest consolations in the Old Testament. We don't have time to talk about them.

Chapter 31. 30-33 is the book of consolation. God says that he is going to make a new covenant with his people.

No longer will every man need to ask another to know the Lord, because they'll all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. I'm going to write my laws on their heart and on their minds. And I will bring forth the one who is the righteous branch, the Lord, our righteousness, Jehovah subcanyon.

So there's a lot of positive things, but still a difficult time. But Jeremiah gave himself to the Lord. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in another place, but I'll mention it again.

Jonathan Edwards, a man of many lists, says he always had two things in mind when he began to preach the word to other people. Number one, every man should give his heart to Christ. Number two, whether or not anyone gave his heart to Christ, I will give him mine.

I want you to walk away from this meeting saying, Lord Jesus, I will give you my life. When I'm young, right now, I'm going to give you everything for the rest of my life. May the Lord bless that word.