Jeremiah 15:19 – Intimacy and Identity as God's
19 Therefore thus says the Lord:
“If you return,
Then I will bring you back;
You shall stand before Me;
If you take out the precious from the vile,
You shall be as My mouth.
Let them return to you,
But you must not return to them.
Spurgeon confesses of the Christian life in Morning and Evening, "My inward experience has often been a wilderness; but Thou hast owned me still as Thy beloved, and poured streams of love and grace into me to gladden me, and make me fruitful."
Just so, the Lord contends with the wildness, the waywardness, sometimes the whininess that even besets the faithful prophet in Jeremiah 15:19. In a similar pattern, He says His streams of grace and love will renew the profit where people have drained him. Most amazing for both Spurgeon and Jeremiah is their usefulness as instruments, as conduits, even after they have admitted their tendency to express their own will rather than God's.
The same battle is undertaken in us as His own, in the same battle He has pledged to win. In His plan, we will be as close to the overflow of His great heart as His own mouth is. As with Jeremiah, with Spurgeon, and with the exuberant biblical songwriter in Psalm 119, the very fact that we went astray will be incorporated by the Divine Composer into our lyrics.
He does not hide from us the fact that Jeremiah was resistant to being carried by His hands into exile, and thereby we can't reconcile ourselves that impulses of our flesh remain – but that He is greater.
We can hear the admonition Jeremiah heard, that present readiness to return to the habits of the flesh we have grown up around, and that developing discipline, by grace, to crave the things of God more. Out of the fullness of the heart, indeed, our mouth speaks. Which will overflow more, then, our discontented immediate reaction with some of the particulars of God's plan, or, on reflection, the unearned privilege we have of being His and proclaiming His message to our sphere?
The human community we choose can reinforce that. God's call on Jeremiah is not only an inward decision, but one to take out the precious from the vile. It is a separation with the remnant He has promised to protect from the familiar and the compromised to the unfamiliar chosen only by faith. Let us, then, step forward to associate with the called out ones who accept the exile of Earth for what it is, a God-chosen opportunity to demonstrate that He is more faithful, more fulfilling than the habits and community to which we have become accustomed.
“If you return,
Then I will bring you back;
You shall stand before Me;
If you take out the precious from the vile,
You shall be as My mouth.
Let them return to you,
But you must not return to them.
Spurgeon confesses of the Christian life in Morning and Evening, "My inward experience has often been a wilderness; but Thou hast owned me still as Thy beloved, and poured streams of love and grace into me to gladden me, and make me fruitful."
Just so, the Lord contends with the wildness, the waywardness, sometimes the whininess that even besets the faithful prophet in Jeremiah 15:19. In a similar pattern, He says His streams of grace and love will renew the profit where people have drained him. Most amazing for both Spurgeon and Jeremiah is their usefulness as instruments, as conduits, even after they have admitted their tendency to express their own will rather than God's.
The same battle is undertaken in us as His own, in the same battle He has pledged to win. In His plan, we will be as close to the overflow of His great heart as His own mouth is. As with Jeremiah, with Spurgeon, and with the exuberant biblical songwriter in Psalm 119, the very fact that we went astray will be incorporated by the Divine Composer into our lyrics.
He does not hide from us the fact that Jeremiah was resistant to being carried by His hands into exile, and thereby we can't reconcile ourselves that impulses of our flesh remain – but that He is greater.
We can hear the admonition Jeremiah heard, that present readiness to return to the habits of the flesh we have grown up around, and that developing discipline, by grace, to crave the things of God more. Out of the fullness of the heart, indeed, our mouth speaks. Which will overflow more, then, our discontented immediate reaction with some of the particulars of God's plan, or, on reflection, the unearned privilege we have of being His and proclaiming His message to our sphere?
The human community we choose can reinforce that. God's call on Jeremiah is not only an inward decision, but one to take out the precious from the vile. It is a separation with the remnant He has promised to protect from the familiar and the compromised to the unfamiliar chosen only by faith. Let us, then, step forward to associate with the called out ones who accept the exile of Earth for what it is, a God-chosen opportunity to demonstrate that He is more faithful, more fulfilling than the habits and community to which we have become accustomed.
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