Jeremiah 24:7 – Grace blesses first.
6 For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land; I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. 7 Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:6-7, New King James Version
"Revivals," insists Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus on Psalm 85:7, "always involve a fresh 'seeing' of the Gospel of grace, grasping it theologically and knowing it experientially."
We can be rigidly formulaic but which comes first, generally insisting on which came first with us as the proper process of God's persuasion. For many if not most of us, the comfort of our experience was touched, chastened, restricted.
We became aware how vulnerable our sense of what is normal in Earthly experience was. Then the revival of fresh seeing, by the grace of God, allowed us to treasure Him theologically, forsaking the chase for secondary good unless it is granted in ancillary fashion as we pursue Him.
That's what makes Jeremiah 24:7 audacious almost to the point of scandal. Knowing how ready the human heart is to cleave to comfort instead of to Him as the Comforter, He says, this time I'll give it first. BY this, the people I am re-creating and saving will come to know Me.
He begins Jeremiah 24:7 with the word THEN just so our hearts and minds grasping for patterns understand the reversal here, the high wire act, His certainty of Himself as the ultimate Treasure in the hearts of those He will redeem.
He pledges to shepherd those He will redeem through the unsettling of heart and circumstance in the exile, then to bring them back. He will, catch this, bring them back to the very place His people's hearts grew fat and hard toward Him, settle them in the same sorts of comforts, THEN prove Himself more than all this. THEN, when they can make a full and knowing comparison, He will give them a heart to know Him as Lord, to submit their affections and all that He gives them.
Those who walk with the Lord over time have seen this play before, and rejoice in it. "The very nature of mercy, when shown," completes John Calvin in A Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God, "is to make us willing." Our experience of that mercy in ways we can touch, and taste, and feel, changes our will over time. "It isn't as much," separates Jon Hauser, "that we need to spend more time on the virtues. We need to spend more time steeping in the love of God."
And what a beautiful end product the Lord is working with His combined mastery of theological realization and tangible, earthly experience! Spurgeon looks forward with this confidence in his sermon, "Meditation on God," celebrating in advance,
"Temporal mercies will then have the charm of redemption to enhance them." He reevaluates, "They will be no longer to him as shadowy phantoms which dance for a transient hour in the sunbeam. Turning to the impact on the man, Spurgeon sees his spirits rise with the purpose of his goods, marking, "He will account them more precious because they are given to him, as it were, in some codicils of the divine testament, which hath promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come."
In anticipation of that day, brothers and sisters, when faith and sight will integrate, we enjoy this the earthly good because we know it's Author and Dispenser. We know the tenderness with which He plants not to arbitrarily pluck up, but, one day until that one great and fruitful transition into His Presence. We experience today's blessings as a down payment on those which are to come, the ones vulnerable to rust and thieves as inducements to remind us of the goodness of God, apparent even in this broken world.
As the fellow humans in our sphere may speak that language even more than we whose affections are being transformed by Heaven's work, we also give in the material currency in which God blesses. By this, we simultaneously give our selfishness away, attest that God will continue to give over and above our capacity to channel that blessing to others, and prize Him ultimately more than that which he can bestow upon us..
"Revivals," insists Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus on Psalm 85:7, "always involve a fresh 'seeing' of the Gospel of grace, grasping it theologically and knowing it experientially."
We can be rigidly formulaic but which comes first, generally insisting on which came first with us as the proper process of God's persuasion. For many if not most of us, the comfort of our experience was touched, chastened, restricted.
We became aware how vulnerable our sense of what is normal in Earthly experience was. Then the revival of fresh seeing, by the grace of God, allowed us to treasure Him theologically, forsaking the chase for secondary good unless it is granted in ancillary fashion as we pursue Him.
That's what makes Jeremiah 24:7 audacious almost to the point of scandal. Knowing how ready the human heart is to cleave to comfort instead of to Him as the Comforter, He says, this time I'll give it first. BY this, the people I am re-creating and saving will come to know Me.
He begins Jeremiah 24:7 with the word THEN just so our hearts and minds grasping for patterns understand the reversal here, the high wire act, His certainty of Himself as the ultimate Treasure in the hearts of those He will redeem.
He pledges to shepherd those He will redeem through the unsettling of heart and circumstance in the exile, then to bring them back. He will, catch this, bring them back to the very place His people's hearts grew fat and hard toward Him, settle them in the same sorts of comforts, THEN prove Himself more than all this. THEN, when they can make a full and knowing comparison, He will give them a heart to know Him as Lord, to submit their affections and all that He gives them.
Those who walk with the Lord over time have seen this play before, and rejoice in it. "The very nature of mercy, when shown," completes John Calvin in A Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God, "is to make us willing." Our experience of that mercy in ways we can touch, and taste, and feel, changes our will over time. "It isn't as much," separates Jon Hauser, "that we need to spend more time on the virtues. We need to spend more time steeping in the love of God."
And what a beautiful end product the Lord is working with His combined mastery of theological realization and tangible, earthly experience! Spurgeon looks forward with this confidence in his sermon, "Meditation on God," celebrating in advance,
"Temporal mercies will then have the charm of redemption to enhance them." He reevaluates, "They will be no longer to him as shadowy phantoms which dance for a transient hour in the sunbeam. Turning to the impact on the man, Spurgeon sees his spirits rise with the purpose of his goods, marking, "He will account them more precious because they are given to him, as it were, in some codicils of the divine testament, which hath promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come."
In anticipation of that day, brothers and sisters, when faith and sight will integrate, we enjoy this the earthly good because we know it's Author and Dispenser. We know the tenderness with which He plants not to arbitrarily pluck up, but, one day until that one great and fruitful transition into His Presence. We experience today's blessings as a down payment on those which are to come, the ones vulnerable to rust and thieves as inducements to remind us of the goodness of God, apparent even in this broken world.
As the fellow humans in our sphere may speak that language even more than we whose affections are being transformed by Heaven's work, we also give in the material currency in which God blesses. By this, we simultaneously give our selfishness away, attest that God will continue to give over and above our capacity to channel that blessing to others, and prize Him ultimately more than that which he can bestow upon us..
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