Here, then, is the clue to our erratic life patterns, our inconstancy, our unfaithfulness, our stupid inability to distinguish between fashion and faith: we don’t rise up early and listen to God. We don’t daily find a time apart from the crowd, a time of silence and solitude, for preparing for the day’s journey. “A very original man,” says Garry Wills, “must shape his life, make a schedule that allows him to reflect, and study, and create.”
Jeremiah had a defined priority: persistently rising early, he listened to God, then spoke and acted what he heard. It was not because there were no other options open to him. It was not because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He had chosen what Jesus called “the one thing needful” — listening, attentively and believingly, to God.”
The mark of a certain kind of genius is the ability and energy to keep returning to the same task relentlessly, imaginatively, curiously, for a lifetime. Never give up and go on to something else; never get distracted and be diverted to something else. . . . The same thing over and over, and yet it is never the same thing, for each venture is resplendent with dazzling creativity. – Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (InterVarsity Press, 1983, 118-9).
Jeremiah
Living Mid-Story (Lent 2019)
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” – Jeremiah 1:5
Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah. . . .
We are known before we know. This realization has a practical result: no longer do we run here and there, panicked and anxious, searching for the answers to life. Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use our ego as the center from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically. . . .
If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.
My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.
Jeremiah’s life didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s salvation didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s truth didn’t start with Jeremiah. He entered the world in which the essential parts of his existence were already ancient history. So do we.  – Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (InterVarsity Press, 1983, 37-8).
God of an Orderly Universe (Scholar’s Compass)
Quotation
Jeremiah 33:25-26 (see below)
Reflection
Biologists study life processes – perhaps we should be astounded by a world in which we can study! [Read more…] about God of an Orderly Universe (Scholar’s Compass)
How are you voting?
Today is Election Day in the United States. How are you voting? I don’t mean for which candidate or party are you voting, but how are you voting? Enthusiastically? Reluctantly? Cynically?
During this election season, I have been reading (very slowly) through the book of Jeremiah — not because of an intentional connection to politics, but because our Faculty Ministry team has been took a close look at Jeremiah 29 over the summer, particularly God’s word to Judah as the Babylonians were about to take the nation into exile:
Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jeremiah 29:5-7)
In the book of Jeremiah, we see a mix of the spiritual and the secular. It’s impossible to draw strong distinctions between “religious” and “secular” categories. Jeremiah’s prophecies of judgment relate to the political and military forces at work in Judah and the region, and the above command from God deals largely with “secular” concerns: housing, food, children, family.
On one level, these words of God must have been very encouraging. It meant they weren’t going to die; they were going to have children; they would have some semblance of a normal life once the siege and exile was over. They would even be able to pray to the Lord, instead of being forced to adopt the religion of the Babylonians. [Read more…] about How are you voting?