His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones: I am weary of holding it in: indeed, I cannot.

This past week I needed to run home and get something. I was in so much of a hurry that I didn’t take time to fasten my seatbelt. I went around the corner at Todeli and Greenbriar a little faster than the speed limit allows and yes I should have signaled, but I was in a hurry. And then I saw the police car. He had me. I just knew I was about to hear some things I didn’t want to hear.

Jeremiah was a prophet who was telling the people what they didn’t want to hear either, but they were things they needed to hear. Destruction was at hand personally, spiritually, and as a nation if they didn’t repent and turn back to God. The people didn’t like this message. They were chasing after false prophets who preached what their itching ears wanted to hear. Rather than listen to God they were seeking after friendships and alliances with the sinful world. They were trusting in themselves and not the God who time and time again delivered them and earnestly sought after their hearts.

This led me to ponder: how often do we listen to the teachers of this world instead of the Word of God? How often do we compromise the Word of God to get along with others- seek to make peace with a fallen world? After all what can a compromise or a little sin hurt? …Probably no more than making a patch of oatmeal raisin cookies and making up for some of the missing raisins with rabbit droppings. Just a few compromises the whole batch.

I can almost picture Jeremiah on a street corner, in the synagogue, across the dinner table speaking with anyone who would listen about the perilous times in which they live, his frustration rising as people roll their eyes, argue using worldly reason, seek to change the subject, and begin drifting away. St Paul writes to Timothy some 600 years later, For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their own desires they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears what to hear. They will turn aside from the truth and turn to myths. (2 Tim 4.3-4)

We live in a time when many are turning from God’s truth and gathering around them teachers who teach them what they want to hear: a salvation that comes, not from grace but from doing more good deeds than bad- “all the good I’ve done will merit me God’s favor and even heaven.” Or how often do I live my life professing grace but living works? Do the good works I do flow from a grateful heart or am I doing good hoping that I can get God in a position that He owes me one? And then there are those of us who are resurrecting idols- not so crass as of jade or brass but idols of sinful reason, intellect, and pride. Given enough time we can justify nearly anything we want despite what the Word of God says. How many of us have gone against the Word of God? We knew better but we did it anyway?

Jeremiah like all good preachers spoke against all this and it was recorded that: he was ridiculed all day long for it; he was insulted and mocked for it, and if you go to chapter 38 he was even thrown into a mud filled cistern and left to die for calling people to task for their sins. (Jer. 38) The Lord spoke to Jeremiah: Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather be afraid of the One who can destroy both body and soul in hell.

But what about us, if we are honest about it have we too failed to listen and live by the Word of God? How often are we are like those people who turn against and from Jeremiah? What are we to do? Jeremiah would say, repent- confess our sins to God and with His help turn from them. Stop calling the evil in our lives good. Stop believing that the promises, forgiveness and grace of God need to some how be supplemented by our works. Live the faith the fish on your car or cross around your neck proclaims. Allow God’s grace and forgiveness to take hold of you. Pray about it, meditate on it, treasure it more than you do anything, and I mean anything you have, and it will become you and you it.

A long time ago I had this burning desire, a passion, to be a school principal. When I was just learning to be a principal I tried to do everything I thought a principal did: I bought a gray suit, carried a briefcase and I learned to stop misbehaving students with just “a look”. A good friend of mine who was visiting commented that rather than being a principal I was just a man in a gray suit trying to be a principal. His comments stung but I kept at it. Years and years later this same friend came to me and said, remember when I told you, “you were just a man in gray suit trying to be a principal?” How could I forget? He then said, “Well now you’ve become the principal. We can’t tell where principal stops and you begin.” You are what you were called to be. You live 24/7; you are what a principal is. Ruth Ann would tell you I ate, slept and spoke it.

The prophet Jeremiah was, as many preachers are, reluctant to take up the task of speaking for God. It is recorded he, when called said, I do not know how to speak. I am only a child. (Jer 1.6) Where once he, like me, might have been just have been a man in a preacher’s robe, God was at work within him, transforming him. In the first chapter of Jeremiah we read, the Lord said, Do not be afraid, for I am with you…I have put My words in your mouth. (Jer 1.8,9)

Those Words and God’s commission created a passion within him to proclaim the Word of God. Our text records: If I say, “I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name,” His Word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones, I am weary from holding it in; indeed I cannot. By His power God made him “a proclaimer” of the Word of God, a man who sought after God’s heart- a man who was God’s man 24/7.

He spoke and lived it even though they would not listen. He spoke even though his message was politically incorrect and scoffed at. He sought to speak and live it even if they wouldn’t listen.

The passion of God’s forgiveness and grace would have burned within him. This, I believe, would have led him to speak just as passionately of a God who loves us so much that He didn’t abandon us in our sin. Jeremiah would have proclaimed that God was mounting our rescue, a rescue that would come to fulfillment in Jesus. Preachers who followed after Jeremiah like St Paul, Martin Luther, and even pastors today would have proclaimed the Son did everything that we would be saved - it is not by our efforts but God’s grace that we are saved. Turn from your words and reason and receive all the Son freely gives that you would be saved. Receive His forgiveness that comes to you in baptism, communion, absolution, and through His holy Word.

When Jeremiah spoke even such messages of grace and forgiveness he faced ridicule and hardship, yet knowing the Lord was with him like a mighty warrior he continued to boldly preach.

He preached like a man overcome by grace; a man transformed by it; a man overflowing with it. He preached like a man who knew something they didn’t- something the people around us don’t know-… all this is going to pass away. As good as your earthly life may be or even as hard as it may be, it is just temporary. But life with God in heaven will not pass away and it will be better than you could possibly imagine. Jeremiah knew, Seek first the kingdom of God not as an after thought but as the passion of your life and all things that really matter will be given unto you.(Matt 6.33)

Let us pray that the Holy Spirit would create in us a passion like Jeremiah’s. Create in us a passion for Christ that refashions our hearts and lives to such an extent that we could not help but share the Gospel with others. Refashion our hearts and lives to the point that one day when we die it would become our epitaph: God’s grace so changed this one that he couldn’t and wouldn’t stop telling others about it. It burned like a fire within him. Amen