Jeremiah 25:5 – Repent and Dwell
4 And the Lord has sent to you all His servants the prophets, rising early and sending them, but you have not listened nor inclined your ear to hear. 5 They said, ‘Repent now everyone of his evil way and his evil doings, and dwell in the land that the Lord has given to you and your fathers forever and ever. Jeremiah 25:4-5, New King James Version
My friend Chuck has been investing his retirement in part in word roots. He was marveling yesterday at one of the meanings of the word translated salvation among the Psalms. He said it means to move from a more constricted place to a more free place, an open pasture.
That revolutionary idea takes deeper root as it is followed up in my immediate experience with the continual insistence of the prophetic message according to Jeremiah 25:5. The prophets have been saying, God repeats to Jeremiah, let go of evil ways and evil doings. This is a narrow place, a place of conviction, confrontation, and confession. It is hard to hear the word evil applied to oneself, and it is a human tendency to stop listening, to stop progressing in that place. The flesh recoils that repentance cost too much.
In such a place, we miss the other half of the prophetic message. The prophets' call down to Jeremiah, and surely through to Christ and His own, is to give up the lesser things, with the evil machinations that exalted them to ultimate things, and instead to ABIDE in the land. When we see what is on the other side of discipline, no cost is too great, no habit too ingrained to break.
Our identity is new in Christ. So are our ways. So are our doings. We, then, look to our Shepherd to learn, not just what to give up, but how to dwell in the fullness of His promises. Long skittish at least subconsciously because we were vaguely aware of the consequences our sin deserves, we learn from Him how to lie down in green pastures. We learn from Him how to see His goodness reflected in still waters instead of allowing our thoughts to cascade toward what danger and doom in the new situation might present.
Since God has been giving this message of both our depravity and His good forever and ever, an honest look back at history can help to retrain and renew our minds. Again and again, our fears and those of our forbearers have foretold doom, yet paralyzed us from repentant action. Again and again, our Shepherd has extracted us from many of the worst consequences we deserve toward that day when we would genuinely appreciate His goodness as superior to anything else we would chase.
In repentance, we take Him at His Word. He knows what is good better than we do at our sheep's-eye, instinct-driven level. We give up thinking dominated by how to forestall the worst consequences for little while, and we devote our thoughts to dwelling with Christ now and forever. May the most intense of our musings, then, be directed thus. As we have by gift the mind of Christ, may we be focused more on dwelling in unity with Him than on the earthly sops we fear giving up.
My friend Chuck has been investing his retirement in part in word roots. He was marveling yesterday at one of the meanings of the word translated salvation among the Psalms. He said it means to move from a more constricted place to a more free place, an open pasture.
That revolutionary idea takes deeper root as it is followed up in my immediate experience with the continual insistence of the prophetic message according to Jeremiah 25:5. The prophets have been saying, God repeats to Jeremiah, let go of evil ways and evil doings. This is a narrow place, a place of conviction, confrontation, and confession. It is hard to hear the word evil applied to oneself, and it is a human tendency to stop listening, to stop progressing in that place. The flesh recoils that repentance cost too much.
In such a place, we miss the other half of the prophetic message. The prophets' call down to Jeremiah, and surely through to Christ and His own, is to give up the lesser things, with the evil machinations that exalted them to ultimate things, and instead to ABIDE in the land. When we see what is on the other side of discipline, no cost is too great, no habit too ingrained to break.
Our identity is new in Christ. So are our ways. So are our doings. We, then, look to our Shepherd to learn, not just what to give up, but how to dwell in the fullness of His promises. Long skittish at least subconsciously because we were vaguely aware of the consequences our sin deserves, we learn from Him how to lie down in green pastures. We learn from Him how to see His goodness reflected in still waters instead of allowing our thoughts to cascade toward what danger and doom in the new situation might present.
Since God has been giving this message of both our depravity and His good forever and ever, an honest look back at history can help to retrain and renew our minds. Again and again, our fears and those of our forbearers have foretold doom, yet paralyzed us from repentant action. Again and again, our Shepherd has extracted us from many of the worst consequences we deserve toward that day when we would genuinely appreciate His goodness as superior to anything else we would chase.
In repentance, we take Him at His Word. He knows what is good better than we do at our sheep's-eye, instinct-driven level. We give up thinking dominated by how to forestall the worst consequences for little while, and we devote our thoughts to dwelling with Christ now and forever. May the most intense of our musings, then, be directed thus. As we have by gift the mind of Christ, may we be focused more on dwelling in unity with Him than on the earthly sops we fear giving up.
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