Happy Sunday, dear friends! I recently read a devotional from our friends at One for Israel, taken from one of my favorite books of the Bible, that caused me to stop and say, “I’ve never quite thought about it like that!” I was blessed by a new depth of God Word as I pondered it. I hope you are too! Happy Lord’s Day!

"If you return, O Israel, says the LORD, to me you should return. If you remove your abominations from my presence and do not waver, and if you swear, 'As the LORD lives,' in truth, in justice, and in uprightness, then nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory" (Jer 4:1-2). 

Whenever we take Jeremiah's calls to Israel to repent out of the larger context of the Book of Jeremiah and use them as our calls to people to repent, our message becomes a man-centered, flesh-empowered, human effort to make our lives right with God. Like Israel then, people today, including believers, must replace idolatrous addictions to the things of this world ("abominations") with a white-hot, passionate love for God. But let us not forget that Jeremiah's call went completely unheeded, and pre-exilic Israel ended up suffering the terrible consequences of covenant disobedience. Likewise, today, when we tell a person to stop loving sin and to start loving God, it may go utterly unheeded.

Jeremiah's continuous calls for repentance, however, are transposed into God's promises of repentance because of the new covenant, which sits smack dab in the center of the book (Jeremiah 30-33). Its structural location highlights its theological significance: the heart of Jeremiah's message is the promise of a completely new, Spirit-empowered, Torah-filled heart!

No doubt, we must call the people of this world (and believers sometimes) to repent, but we must also point them to the power of God that will get them to this destination. We must assure them that all of us can and will start loving God with all our hearts just as soon as we realize that God FIRST loved us with all of his heart, namely, by giving us his Son! Otherwise, our message may be seen by some as discouraging.

Oh that we might come to know the power of God, and build our faith there!