What Gear Are You In?
What Gear Are You In?
Jeremiah 7:23-24, "But this thing I did command them: Listen to and obey My voice, and I will be your God and you will be My people; and walk in the whole way that I command you, that it may be well with you. But they would not listen to and obey Me or bend their ear [to Me], but followed the counsels and the stubborn promptings of their own evil hearts and minds, and they turned their backs and went in reverse instead of forward."
What does God command His people to do? God has commanded each of us to obey His law. I know that we often fail in fulfilling every commandment that is in the Word of God but that is no excuse for what God is saying to us through the Prophet Jeremiah. God was speaking to Israel but, as always, those things that happened in the Old Testament days of Israel are an example and a type and shadow of where we are in our day.
God demands obedience and says in His Word that obedience is always better than sacrifice. Oh how we would love to sacrifice rather than obey God!
We would rather sacrifice a lamb than to offer our own life with all of its desires, needs, wants and dreams to God. We would rather suffer and sacrifice for our sin because that means that we can continue in our sin as long as we continue of offer sacrifices to cover that sin. If we were to obey the Word of God, sacrifices would not be necessary. Jesus died on the cross as our sacrifice and there remains no other sacrifice that we can make that is sufficient to forgive sins. His sacrifice demands obedience to His will and the moral law if we are to be called His chosen people.
God has promised us that He would walk with us, protect us, guide us, provide for us, but only if we are obedient servants! God is not obligated to protect us from our willful and habitual sinful heart. The heart of man is ever sinful, ever searching for the next mischief it can get into, and ever attempting to hide its faults from the eyes of our Father who sees it all.
The churches, as a whole, even those who of the “true Body of Christ” have gone backward! We have everyone gone our own way and Jesus had to take the iniquity of us all upon Him! Instead of us going toward the perfection that is in Christ, we presume upon the mercies and grace of God and continue on our merry way as we walk farther and farther from the place of perfection that Jesus has intended for each of us to reach.
Just like Israel of old, we don’t even think about the promises of God’s blessings until they are no longer there. We take Him for granted! We take His Word for granted! We take His church and his Spirit for granted! Where is the heart that will fall before God in repentance for our sin of omission in forgetting God days without number?
Not only do we forget God’s promises but also we are so quickly lulled into a false sense of security by the devil and we forget about the consequences of an unrepentant heart full of sin. We forget that God’s judgments are just as sure as His mercy and grace and that, one day, we shall face the judgment. If we forget God, it won’t be the Judgment Seat of Christ, it will be the Great White Throne Judgment and we will hear God say those awful words, “depart from me you worker of iniquity, I never knew you!”
Jeremiah 8:4-7, "Moreover, you [Jeremiah] shall say to them, Thus says the Lord: Shall men fall and not rise up again? Shall one turn away [from God] and not repent and return [to Him]? Why then is this people of Jerusalem turned away with a perpetual turning away [from Me]? They hold fast to gdeceit (idolatry); they refuse to repent and return [to God]. I have listened and heard, but they have not spoken aright; no man repents of his wickedness, saying, What have I done? Everyone turns to his [individual] course, as the horse rushes like a torrent into battle. [Even the migratory birds are punctual to their seasons.] Yes, the stork [excelling in the great height of her flight] in the heavens knows her appointed times [of migration], and the turtledove, the swallow, and the crane observe the time of their return. But My people do not know the law of the Lord [which the lower animals instinctively recognize in so far as it applies to them]."
When a baby falls as it is learning to walk, what happens? The baby will try to get up and go again, or we will run and pick it up to see if it is hurt! If a man trips and falls, he quickly gets up again and looks to see if anyone saw him fall! If we are suddenly stricken with circumstances beyond our control that cause us to lose our home, car, job or whatever we hold dear, what do most people do? They will try to fight and scrape their way back to the top! The natural thing for man to do when he falls is to get up.
Likewise, when we are on a journey, by car, boat or whatever, and we take a wrong turn or start down the wrong path, what do we do by nature? We turn around and try to find the right way! The natural thing for a man to do is turn around and go back where he made his mistake and then start out in the right direction again!
God’s warning to Israel and His view of our disobedience is that we are so hard-headed in our obstinate, sinful, self-deceiving, self-gratifying heart that we won’t even do what is natural and turn from our sin to find the right way to our eternal home!
Jeremiah 7:25-26 “Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent to you all My servants the prophets, sending them daily, early and late. Yet the people would not listen to and obey Me or bend their ears [to Me], but stiffened their necks and behaved worse than their fathers.”
We are traveling through life on a long road where there is no turning around unless God makes a way that we can “cross over” to the other side and start toward Him! We have not learned by the examples God has set before us, but still are traveling in reverse. The time has come to change gears, shift into forward and follow Christ.
That’s what true repentance is all about. A truly repentant heart will stop going in the wrong direction and turn back toward God; it will cease from sin and practice obedience, holiness and sanctification; and it will cry out to God when the way ahead seems lost!
Instead we try to justify our every sin! We attempt to twist the scripture! We attempt to appear self-righteous and holy when deep inside we know that our heart isn’t right with God!
The stork, turtledove and the swallow are birds of passage! They know, by their very nature and instinct, that their ultimate survival is based upon what they do in certain seasons of the year. The turtledove disappears during the winter to find a place of warmth and safety from the freezing cold. The stork flies to warmer climates until the passage of the harsh winter. The swallow flies south for the winter. Then the reappearance of these birds marks the coming of spring for all to see. Just think of the Swallows of Capistrano who return to the Old Spanish Mission at Capistrano every year!
Yes, even the animal know of the signs of the seasons and of the right way to find life for future generations of young animals, but Man doesn’t recognize the sin in his life, nor the punishment to come. We willingly ignore the signs, the seasons, the warnings, and the changes in our “climate” and the changes in the “air” around us and we go blindly into eternity without God! 9/11, Katrina, EF5 tornado’s, the enemies of old that continue to attack, drugs, abortions, death in our schools, skyrocketing divorce rates, all are the signs of a degenerate nation that has turned from the God of their father’s.
Jeremiah 8:14-15, "[Then say the people to each other] Why do we sit still? Assemble yourselves, and let us enter into the fortified cities and be silent or perish there! For the Lord our God has decreed our ruin and given us bitter and poisonous water to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace and completeness, but no good came, and for a time of healing, but behold, dismay, trouble, and terror!"
Why do we continue to fail the Lord? Why do we think that we can just do nothing? Why do we think that God’s blessings and promises will be ours when we obey not the voice of the Lord or His commandments?
Why do we sit in a barren land where there is no provision for our sin-sick soul? Why are we living in places where the Hand of God has already begun to lift from our lives? Why do we go day after day after day doing our own thing and not giving God our very best?
Jeremiah says, “Assemble yourselves, and let us enter into the defended cities”! Let’s go into the safety of our Lord’s unchanging hand. Let us lift up our hearts to the Lord and turn and go after Him so that we can have peace, safety, provision and blessing.
Let’s not murmur or complain of what God asks of us! Let’s not be angry with God because of the things we face and the troubles we have! Most of it is the result of our own disobedience! It’s not God’s fault that we commit sin!
But do not think that we can cry “crocodile tears” to God and then everything will be all right!
How many times must we go before God and cry out in repentance and then turn and do the same thing again? That’s not repentance – that’s just being sorry because God caught us and the Holy Ghost has convicted our heart! When we come to the altar before God to confess our sins, that is good but that’s not enough!
Confession is good, but too many people confess and then regress! Confession doesn’t do anything but remind God that we are guilty! The old saying is that “Confession is good for the soul” and perhaps there is a little truth to that, but I want you to know that “confession” isn’t what brings the blessing of God upon your life.
What brings the best that God has into your life? Confession is only the start! What must accompany that confession is repentance of the things that we are confessing in the first place. Repentance means to stop doing those things that we are obligated to confess! Repentance means change! It means turning into a different direction to follow Christ! Confession, without repentance and change, means nothing at all!
God told Jeremiah that Israel, “ looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble!"
We all hope to become prosperous in worldly possessions. Financial stability and the lack thereof is the greatest concern of most people I know in the natural realm. We all want to be spiritually sound and firmly rooted in the Bible and in the Lord Jesus Christ! We all want to be safe from attacks of our natural and spiritual enemies!
In fact, it’s those natural desires that Satan will use against us so easily! There are always those “false prophets” who will try to tell you that everything is well. There are those who preach and teach that peace and safety are an attainable goal for mankind. There are those who tell you that happiness can only be found in material wealth and prosperity! There are even those wolves in sheep’s clothing that will tell you that if you aren’t prosperous by the world’s standards, and that if you don’t believe that mankind can attain peace, then you have no faith in God’s ability to bring deliverance.
The Bible says in 1 Thessalonians 5:2-6, "For you yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the [return of the] Lord will come [as unexpectedly and suddenly] as a thief in the night. When people are saying, All is well and secure, and, There is peace and safety, then in a moment unforeseen destruction (ruin and death) will come upon them as suddenly as labor pains come upon a woman with child; and they shall by no means escape, for there will be no escape. But you are not in [given up to the power of] darkness, brethren, for that day to overtake you by surprise like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we do not belong either to the night or to darkness. Accordingly then, let us not sleep, as the rest do, but let us keep wide awake (alert, watchful, cautious, and on our guard) and let us be sober (calm, collected, and circumspect)."
It’s high time for the church to wake up and shake up! How long will we allow ourselves to slumber and sleep and be lulled into a false sense of security by Satan? How long will we continue to walk in sin without repenting and changing? How many times must we come and cry out to God around the altars of the church before we get to the place where we really mean business and let God change us? How long will we continue to put up our front in church and then live like eternity was a million years away?
God wants obedience out of His people; otherwise, they are not His people at all! God’s people will be peculiar or different from the world’s crowd. God’s people will be easy to recognize because they will stand out as different in a crowd. God’s people will live according to a higher calling, a higher standard and a higher plane than those of the world. God’s people must act different, talk different, eat and drink different, go to different places, do different things, and just be different. We must come out and stand out among the world so that Jesus can receive glory through us!
Which direction are you traveling right now? Are you traveling toward the perfection in Jesus by living a sanctified, holy, committed life to the service of Jesus? Are you striving to overcome and then trusting in the power of the Blood of the Lamb to deliver you from every little sin that so easily makes you stumble? Are you continually seeking to know Jesus in a greater fashion? Are your sins not only confessed; but also repented of? Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power and been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?
This is your chance! This is your time! Your time of passage has come and its time to see the difference in the “air” about you! It’s time to accept Jesus as your Savior and as your Lord and Master! It’s time to be obedient to the call of God in reality!
Which direction will you take? Will you continue to be in a state of continual and perpetual backsliding from the Lord or will you turn your heart toward Jesus and start climbing Heaven’s hill toward Him?
When you look for good times, for peace and for prosperity, what have you received instead? Is your life where you wanted and hoped it would be last year, last month, or 5 years ago? Is your spiritual health any better now than it was last week, or last year?
Has the work of your hands been blessed or cursed? Instead of prosperity, especially in the spiritual matters, have you experienced adversity as though God did not or could not hear your prayer?
Have you been on the perpetual downward, backward slide away from God? It’s time to recognize where we are and turn around to find the right path home once again! Jesus is coming soon! Don’t be going in the wrong direction or you will certainly end up at the wrong destination!
Repent, change and obey God from this moment forward and then you will be going in the right direction!