Jeremiah 28:12 – And yet, God Still Speaks.

12 Now the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after Hananiah the prophet had broken the yoke from the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying, Jeremiah 28:12, New King James Version

"In fashion," adjudicates The New Yorker, putting pith to the world's pronouncements, "constancy is death."

You only debut once, the publicist's conventional wisdom goes. Coaching contracts are severed because the team has tuned out, needs to be motivated by a different voice. Has every culture tuned out more definitively than Jeremiah's contemporaries did?

This has moved beyond indifference to something more confrontational than heckling. A rival prophet has not only taken the "stage" with Jeremiah but has literally taken and broken the yoke the Lord told him to wear before the people as a picture of their coming captivity.

Next!

For, surely God is not short of voices. Surely Jeremiah's accent from little Anathouh has worn thin in the cosmopolitan precincts in which he has been confronting. Jeremiah himself, often speaking the weariness of ministering before such a stubborn people, likely wouldn't object to a change.

And yet, as surely as Jeremiah 28:12 follows Jeremiah 28:11, God still speaks to and through this prophet. He may use novelty, speaking, connects the opening of Hebrews, in various times and in various ways, but He is not bound by man's thirst for it. He is not desperate.

Nothing in Him is unfaithful to those He uses, whatever be man's reaction to them. As surely as His mercies are new every morning, He continues to speak to and through His own. His sweet whisper is clearer than the echoes of the latest human rejection, makes a deeper heart impression than the latest crunch or crash of the stuff or the setting that once served God's purposes and has been abruptly dismissed as men demand scene changes,.

Are we, as Eli coached little Samuel, ready to hear? Do we declare with heart and mouth, even with hopes for the latest ministry results crushed, speak Lord, for Your servant hears? 'Tis not the words which command the voice of the Lord like some magician's incantation. Jeremiah does not bid the Lord speak again, at least as is recorded in holy Scripture.

We need speak, though, so that our own flesh might hear. We need to command ourselves in readiness, in resilient faith, so that our flesh might quiet its howling from the latest rejection. For, beloved, we are so practiced in that questionable art that we would be lingering over the particulars of verse 11 when God is ready to move on to verse 12.

What is, brothers and sisters, the breaking of "our" yoke public to the point of shadow, when death's hold itself was broken that the Holy Spirit might speak from inside us? What is, Christian, the collective scorn we might have encountered the last time we presented Gospel Truth compared to the scorn Christ took on the cross, and defeated resoundingly in the Resurrection? Our Captain is victorious, once, and for all His own

We turn the page from our hurts, for He is greater. We turn the calendar from yesterday, for He declares Himself I AM. The circumstances don't have to change. The messenger, the medium, they don't have to change.

New is in HIM rather than in these variables. Should He choose, He can repeat the same thing through the same person and accomplish entirely different results, just as surely as His people's first six trips around Jericho were to all appearances in vain, and the seventh won the battle.

'Tis not easy to listen again, but how easy compared to contending in the battles He fights completely for us? Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. In our stillness, we will be more aware of Christ's power within to pull down strongholds of vain imagination that would ever lament over previous rejections. He yet speaks, and speaks over their bones. By His sovereign invigoration, there may yet be an army where we associate only defeat.

Spurgeon puts methods in their place in his sermon "Love."  "There is no light in the planet but that which cometh from the sun; there is no light in the moon but that which is borrowed, and there is no true love in the heart but that which cometh from God. Love is the light, the life, and way of the universe."

Feel that love, then, from Him which no victories in ministry can convey. Get up, then, as He called Joshua after Ai, and experience the potency in His next Word.