Jeremiah 29:8 – Ears, Aspirations, and a Disciplined Faith

8 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are in your midst deceive you, nor listen to your dreams which you cause to be dreamed. 9 For they prophesy falsely to you in My name; I have not sent them, says the Lord. Jeremiah 29:8, New King James Version

The ultimate preparation for tomorrow is storing God’s Word in our hearts today. We ARE storing in our hearts, Matthew Sink insists, but what?  “We don’t have a memorization problem.  We have a meditation problem.”

Sink's text wasn't Jeremiah 29:8, but the verse certainly reinforces his sense of urgency. Do not let, says the Lord, calling His people to a disciplined they weren't inclined to when they were in their homeland. Now, uprooted, disoriented, one might expect perspective to be further out of their reach. Yet, that to which God calls us, He enables. The same sense of dislocation which causes pulses to race in moods to plummet also causes people to re-examine what they once assumed.

Like a country at war or under terrorist attack might be more diligent about its border security than in calmer times, thinking twice about what we let into our considerations makes sense. God calls out YOUR prophets and YOUR diviners. This means there is already an inclination in place, not knowing to listen to the wrong message contrary to His Word but to receive it from certain voices that resonate most readily with the desires of our flesh. There are certain cadences we wave right through to the deepest recesses of our souls, contrary to God's insistence that we guard our hearts as the wellspring of life.

Maybe OUR prophets and diviners have been right before. It is possible God used spiritual leaders it is time for us to outgrow, to rely more directly on Him and/or to be on the alert for the people He might use to challenge us next. Or, OUR prophets and diviners might have been gaining credibility with us, largely unexamined, by telling us what we wanted to hear.

The false prophets whose stations are already preset on our mental radio might have been recasting the mercy of God as an endorsement for the indulgent status quo of our behaviors. Peter warns, after all, of men's readiness to infer that because God hasn't judged yet, he won't judge at all. Eventually, the false prophets will be wrong.

The voices we let into our consciousness because they demand the least repentance and discipline from us take up a sticky residence there, warns the maker of our souls in the next phase of Jeremiah 29:8. As we take in false comfort and don't examine it, don't hold it against the purposeful dissonance of confrontational figures like Jeremiah in our lives and against God's Word, what they say starts to shape our dreams. Their message, to use the wonderful and fearful phrase of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, dye our souls.

I believe it all too well. As a young man, I spent a jarring stent as an unsuccessful classroom teacher, bringing my pretenses of my intelligence up against the skepticism of kids who could see I cared less about them than the impression I made. My dreams are still there decades later, returning to that battle.

Less fraught but still proving the principle, I've dreamt about lost emails, about diets, and about suddenly finding myself in the middle of innocuous but meaningless TV shows. My desire went there to browse, and my dreams stayed.

As a person thinks, indeed, so we become over time. The companion of fools, says Proverbs in recognition of the contagion of folly, becomes a fool. We are more easily influenced then we would admit.  Andy Stanley counters in The Principle of the Path, "We don’t drift in good directions. We discipline and prioritize ourselves there.”

This is the call of Jeremiah 29:8. As Christians, we ought to find this summons infinitely more encouraging than the prophet's original audience. They were being tutored in the hope that God could bring good out of correction that would outlast the human lifespan. We know it already. The Resurrection calls to us, not as a taskmaster, but as a harbinger in hope. Through its passage and transformation, Christ is the Firstfruits we follow behind.

Meditating not only on His week of Passion but on the righteous life He lived out as detailed in Scripture, we have a compelling counter narrative to play in place of the wives of our culture and our consciousness. We can, by grace, fall in love with aspects of His character more deeply than we seem stuck in our own musings. We can hold those people we listen to accountable to the standards of the Word of God and dismiss messages that undermine it by appealing to what remains of our lower nature. Christ is worthy, brothers and sisters, to fix our thoughts upon.