Sermon Transcript
Today’s reading is select verses from Jeremiah 17 and 31.
Thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds. O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you shall be put to shame. Those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.
Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed. Save me, and I shall be saved. For you are my praise. Behold, they say to me, where is the word of the Lord? Let it come.
I have not run away from being your shepherd, nor have I desired the day of sickness. You know what came out of my lips. It was before your face. Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck that they might not hear and receive instruction. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
When my brother and I were young— my brother’s 2 years older than me— but while we were growing up, we fought all the time. Physically fought, argued, bothered each other, intentionally got on each other’s nerves. It was something probably every day, or at least my mom felt like It was every day. Now when we physically fought I was at a severe disadvantage because my brother even though he’s only 2 years older he was always much larger than me. By the time he was in 8th grade he was a full-grown man, 6’2, over 200 pounds as an 8th grader and I was not.
I did not catch him in height until I was in high school and he was in college, but even then I was always super skinny, like just a beanpole. I didn’t cross the 200-pound mark until I think after college. So growing up, whenever it came to a physical confrontation, I was not going to win. In fact, I got pummeled quite a bit, you know, arm bent behind the back as far as it could go without breaking, wedgies, whole deal, all of it, all the time. I never won, actually.
I fought to a draw a couple of times, but I never won.
But in fairness to my brother, I don’t want to give you the impression that I was always the victim. I wasn’t, even though I would love to paint all of my fellow younger siblings as completely innocent in all matters. You know, we aren’t, or at least I wasn’t. I instigated as much as he did, fully aware of that it would probably result in me getting severely hurt, but I did it anyway. I instigated it anyway.
You know, I pushed for more than my fair share of the space on the couch. I made noises that would annoy him. I played with his toys without permission, or I’d stand right next to his toys, you know, and then— but without touching them, be like, I’m not touching them. I’m not touching them. I’m not touching them.
All the nonsense, right? So I had it coming, and he would do the same annoying things to me too. Of course, I wasn’t the only one to instigate we both would, and then we would fight, and then Mom would intervene. She’d hear us from the other room, and she’d come running in, and she’d lay down the law. Our typical punishment is she would have us stand in the corner, like with our noses right up against the wall, and then she would set a timer.
We had to stand there with our noses on the wall until our sentence was over and the timer rang. But standing in the corner was actually the least worst part of our punishment because after we stood in the corner, Mom would make us apologize to one another. You know, she would order both of us to say to the other one, I’m sorry. Sorry you made fun of him. Sorry for using the TV remote as a weapon to smash your face.
You know, whatever.
So my brother and I, both seething with anger, would say, sorry, with as much disdain for one another as we could possibly muster. I don’t know why we ever attempted to say sorry with so much attitude because we knew exactly what Mom would say next. After we said sorry, she would say, no.
Say sorry like you mean it, like you’re actually sorry. So we would try again, you know, with a little less disdain. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Which of course also wouldn’t be good enough, you know, so she’d make us try again and again until both of us showed some amount of remorse even though neither of us were actually sorry at all. You know, both of us were very glad for how we ruined the other one’s day and fully intended to do it again.
But we didn’t want to keep standing there, and we knew the only way out of our purgatory was to show some kind of remorse. So both of us became very good at acting like we were sorry. We put on some Academy Award-winning performances to convince Mom, you know, to release us from this endless cycle of sorry, not sorry. But then, okay, after we faked our sorries, our punishment still wasn’t over. The worst part was actually still ahead.
The final consequence Mom had in her arsenal was to make us hug each other and say, I love you.
And again, we had to act like we meant it. Which we didn’t. You know, the last thing we wanted to do was hug, but again, we were trapped. You know, if we didn’t do those things, we had to keep trying, so we faked that too. And I later asked Mom, you know, after we grew up, I asked, did you know that we were only pretending to be sorry?
And she said, of course, of course she knew. She knew we were faking it. She just let it go because she didn’t want to stand there all day either.
Mom was correctly parenting, giving us rules, giving us punishments, telling us the right thing to do, making us act the way we should act. All of that is good and necessary, but at the same time it’s insufficient because none of that ever changed our hearts toward one another. We might have momentarily had this external compliance, but we didn’t have any kind of internal change. We didn’t want to do what we ought to do, and no amount of laws, rules, punishments could ever make it so. They don’t have that kind of power.
We’re in the 4th week of our series in Jeremiah, and we’ve said that contained within the book of Jeremiah is really the story of the whole Bible. There’s creation, and there’s fall— fall meaning, like, what’s wrong with the world— but then also after fall, how God begins our redemption. And how one day we will no longer be works in progress because he will completely restore all things. All of that story of the whole Bible is in Jeremiah. So week 1, we talked about how God made everything good.
That’s creation. But then weeks 2 and 3, we talked about sin, how creation fell, how we broke it. Specifically week 2, we saw how our sin affects God, that it breaks his heart. He reacts to our sin much more like a jilted lover than as cold law enforcement. That was week 2.
Following that, last week we studied how sin affects us, that it is highly destructive personally, generationally, societally. Sin is what is wrong with the world and ourselves. So far in the series we looked at creation and fall and now we’re moving toward the first step in redemption, which brings us to the role of the law in God’s process of redemption. God’s rules, God’s punishments, it’s a big part of the Bible, it’s a big part of Jeremiah. Law is massively important in the sequence of how God puts the world back together, and yet just like my mom’s rules for my brother and me The laws and commands that we see in Scripture by themselves aren’t enough to make us into the kind of people that we need to be.
We need something else, we need something more powerful to change who we are on a deeper level than simple behavior modification. So, as we look at our passages from Jeremiah today, we will see the necessity of the law, the insufficiency of the law, and then the fulfillment of the law. The necessity, the insufficiency, and then the fulfillment. So first, the necessity of the law is it teaches us what is good and true versus what is wrong and false. And we, and we need that.
We need to be taught what is good and true from what is wrong and false. We need someone to give us boundaries, and we need those boundaries enforced. It’s just like with kids. It’s part of the healthy development of the human race. You know, there have, there have been like multiple studies on parenting in the last decade or so from reputable places like Journal of Child and Family Studies, psychological journals, and they show that kids whose parents give them rules and enforce them, those kids are better able to regulate themselves, they have less impulsivity, less behavior problems, they can cope with the world much better Compared to kids whose parents take like a laissez-faire approach, you know, parents who don’t want to give any rules, parents who don’t want to say no, only want to give, you know, endless affirmation.
Kids with rules, boundaries, punishments, they do better in life than kids who don’t have those. Even if, and this is the kind of surprising data from the studies, even if the rules come from a demanding parent who isn’t very warm, those kids still handle life better compared to kids with, you know, a warm parent who doesn’t give boundaries and enforce them. Now, of course, the best is to have boundaries plus support, enforcement of rules plus affirmation. That’s the best. But if you’re just comparing rules versus no rules, it’s always better to have rules.
Kids need to experience consequences in childhood. Because it gives them a framework to understand the real world. In the real world, as you know, there are consequences for actions. We can’t live however we want and get any result that we want. The world is cause and effect.
You know, for instance, how we treat people influences what kind of relationships we have. We can’t be bratty to everyone and expect to have a lot of friends. It’s just not how the world works. Same as working hard will always get us further than not working hard. Being lazy will result in less success, always.
Now that doesn’t mean like if we work hard we will always end up exactly where we want to end up, that’s not what it’s saying, but working hard will always get us further than if we’ve done nothing at all. Right, the world is cause and effect. Kids who learn that and experience that in childhood, they’re better able to deal with reality as opposed to kids who learn from mom and dad, oh, I can act however I want to act and I still get a cookie. Those kids are not prepared for how to deal with life because in the real world they can’t act however they want to act and still get a cookie. Those kids, when they encounter consequences for their actions, they don’t have a frame framework to even process what’s happening to them.
They can’t cope. It’s very disorienting for them. They can’t understand, like, why does that other kid not want to be my friend? Or why am I not having success? Because, you know, I’ve always received what I’ve wanted to receive before, even when I’m acting like a fool.
So why am I not receiving what I want right now? Right? They don’t understand. They don’t know what’s going on, and so they lash out. And they have behavior problems.
They need rules and they didn’t get them, so now they’re in trouble. And so similarly, one reason why God gives us rules is to help us understand our world, to know right from wrong, what to touch, what not to touch, what to expect for choosing one of those versus the other, just like a good parent would. In our verses from today, God explains Um, from 17, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes his flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. I think we have these on a slide too. He is like a shrub in the desert and shall not see any good outcome.
He shall dwell in parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. This is the person who doesn’t trust in the Lord. This is what happens if we don’t listen to how God says to live in his word. Okay, but conversely, what if we do follow God? Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green. It is— he’s not anxious in a drought, for it for he does not cease to bear fruit. That’s what happens if we do follow God and his word. In this— in the same vein, Jeremiah also explains, O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsaken you shall be put to shame. Those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.
He’s saying, if you go this way, this is what will happen. If you go that way, that is what will happen. It’s explaining to them what is good and true versus what is wrong and false, what to expect if you choose one versus the other. God tells them very clearly, these are the rules, these are the consequences. Now, as we know, just because they’ve been told the right path doesn’t mean they always choose wisely.
They don’t. Just like my brother and me, right? Just like you. More on that when we discuss the insufficiency of the law. But throughout Scripture, whenever God gives us rules, one reason he does so is to set us up to live well.
That’s starting with the first man and woman in the garden at the beginning of time. God says, don’t eat of that tree. Why? Because the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. You’ll lose the abundance you have here with me, so don’t go that way.
You can hear his concern for them. In other words, the rules weren’t arbitrary. He’s teaching them how to function in His creation. The rule was for their benefit, for their thriving. It’s good and true versus wrong and false.
It’s the same story when God gives the 10 Commandments. When God gives the 10 Commandments to the Israelites, remember it’s pretty immediately after they escape from Egyptian slavery. You know, the Israelites have been slaves in Egypt for 400 years and all they had ever known for generations was generation after generation was authoritarian rule. So for them at the time, I mean, right and wrong was just whatever Pharaoh said. They were not free to make their decisions for themselves.
They were slaves. But then God liberates them, and now they’re on their own. So they will need to know how to function in a society without this tyrant overlord. How can we live well now that we have the ability to choose how we live? They didn’t know.
They’d never done it before. They didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone who ever had autonomy to run a society. All they knew was obey Pharaoh or die. They didn’t know how the world worked other than that. So God gave them rules.
He told them how to have a society. He gave them the 10 Commandments but also many other rules, even how to set up court systems. If you read the Old Testament, there’s all these instructions for like how to run a judiciary, and you’re wondering like, why is that in here? Well, they needed to know it. God was setting them up for success, setting them up how to function as a free nation.
It’s just like with the first man and woman. He was showing them how to live well. He says that explicitly. This is Deuteronomy 4. After Moses gives the law, Moses says, therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments, meaning God’s, which I command you today, that it may go well with you and your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land the Lord your God is giving you for all time.
The law teaches us what is good and true from what is wrong, false, destructive. That’s the necessity of the law. Now second, the insufficiency of the law. Which we’ve already mentioned, is it can’t make us new or holy or give us the desire to follow. Again, just because we know right from wrong doesn’t mean we make the right choice.
You know, in the New Testament, Romans 7, Paul writes, I would not have known what coveting was unless the law said do not covet. Right, so there you go. Law teaches what’s good and true from what’s wrong and false. Don’t covet. But then Paul quickly adds, it’s the next verse, verse 8 of Romans 7, he says, the law being there against coveting kind of made him want to covet even more.
It didn’t stop him from doing it, that’s for sure. He was taught one thing, but he wanted to do the opposite. And we’ve experienced that. We know what we should do, but we don’t do what we should do. In other words, it’s our desires that are wrong, and law can’t get at that.
Law can’t change what we want. Laws may force us into compliance momentarily, but the second we think we can get away with it, the second we think no one is watching, we’ll be right back at it if it’s what we want to do. It’s like my brother and me, you know, Mom could punish us, she can force us to hug each other all day long, but it never changed what we wanted to do. We wanted to kill each other even though we knew we were supposed to love each other. We knew that, but we didn’t love each other.
That dislike for the other one was still there, and that is what would really drive our behavior. It would overrule the rule, which is what happened in Jeremiah’s day as well. From our verses, even after Jeremiah told them what they ought to do until he was blue in the face, afterwards he says from verse 23 of chapter 17, he says, yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but they stiffened their neck that they might not hear and receive instruction. Their hearts were not aligned with what was good and true. Their hearts were aligned with what was wrong and false.
And then Jeremiah explains why. He says again from chapter 17, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? In other words, the, the problem with the heart is not that it’s misinformed. The problem of the heart isn’t that it needs to be constrained more tightly.
The problem with the heart is that it is sick. And until that sickness is fixed, while rules are important, they’re not addressing the real problem. Our behavior is always gonna default back to what our hearts want most, even if we know that it’s bad for us. In a former life, I volunteered often with street ministry. If you’ve been around for a while, I’ve talked about this a number of times, but with the street ministry, we would go out and we’d give sack lunches people who were literally living on the street and we would pray with them.
And as you would expect, many of the people living on the street were struggling with addictions. Not all of them, but many of them struggling with an addiction. And wonderfully, the ministry I volunteered with, they had a recovery program. They would bring people in off the streets, help rehabilitate them. It was awesome.
In the years that I served with that ministry, I saw many success stories. But there was far more heartbreak than success, far more people who wouldn’t even attempt recovery than people who did. What I learned with this ministry, explained to me, was for the people who stayed on the street, while on one level they hated how they were living and they hated their addiction, I mean they truly did, but on a deeper level than that they didn’t feel like they could give it up. So when we invited them to come with us into a recovery program, they wouldn’t come. They’d stay on the street.
So this ministry’s approach was just to continue bringing lunches, continue bringing lunches, build the relationship, build the relationship, build the relationship, hoping and praying that one day sobriety would become, you know, bigger and brighter in their hearts than addiction and they would be willing to do the necessary work to get clean. You know, the ministry kept praying for that for everyone they met and they saw many people take that step, but until that switch flipped, until there was a heart change, no amount of rules, boundaries, coaching was ever going to make any amount of lasting progress. You know, this ministry understood we can’t change anyone’s hearts. None of us can. Not only can we not change, you know, what other people desire, we really can’t even have much success changing what we desire.
Now, most of us aren’t, you know, thank the Lord, facing as severe consequences as living on the street, but we can relate, can’t we, that our hearts don’t want what they ought to want. Our hearts are sick, as Jeremiah says, and no amount of rules or boundaries will fix that problem. That’s the insufficiency of the law. It can’t make us new, holy, or desire to do what we ought to do. So, if the law is necessary but not enough, if the law can, you know, show us that our heart is sick but then not cure it, if it can restrain us momentarily but not renew us, then the question Jeremiah leaves us with is how do we change our hearts?
How do we rewire our desires? As always, we’re not without hope. Because God, of course, understands our problem, our inability to do anything about it, and he promises to remedy it, which brings us to the fulfillment of the law is a new heart. So we get a new heart and it’s given to us. It’s not that we earn it.
Our new heart comes from a miraculous work of God that he does on our behalf. In our verses, God makes a promise. He calls it a covenant of what he will do. Notice all the verbs in Jeremiah 31 are what God will do for us. Starting in 31, verse 31, he says, I will make a new covenant.
This is his promise. I will make a new covenant. What is the new covenant? I will put— I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts.
I will forgive their iniquity. I will remember their sin no more. His promise, his covenant to us is not more laws of what we ought to do. He’s not going to yell at us louder to get us to change. His approach is not behavior modification.
It is heart transplantation. Which brings us to Jesus. This new covenant in Jeremiah 31 is fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus. Because on the night before his crucifixion, holding the cup, Jesus says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.
He’s speaking of his death, his substitution on our behalf, dying on the cross in our place. Jesus is saying while holding the cup, what Jeremiah promised, I am inaugurating now. The wait is over. He says, my blood is what will buy your forgiveness. My death is what will give you a new heart.
Now, how so? How does that work? Well, when we see Jesus standing in our place on the cross, when we understand that we are guilty under the law but Jesus absorbed our guilt, when we know we are like these shrubs that Jeremiah referred to that have dried out in the desert and should be cut down. Cursed is the word Jeremiah used for what these shrubs should be. But then we know that’s us, that’s what we should be.
But then we see Jesus cut down and cursed in our place so that we can be like the tree that’s planted next to living water. I mean, when, when we see Jesus sacrifice his neck Because we have stiffened ours. When we see him die in our place, it transforms us, it heals us. It’s, it’s kind of like, but to a much greater, much greater degree, you know when you’re watching a movie and one character who the course of the movie you’ve come to love, you really care about this character, but then he or she sacrifices himself for, for another character or for the world, you know, it moves you. You can feel your heart shift.
You know, when Anna turns to solid ice protecting Elsa, when Katniss says, I volunteer as tribute, you know, when Spock locks himself in the chamber and says, I have been and always shall be your friend. In Saving Private Ryan, when Captain Miller holds the bridge, right, when we see someone sacrifice themselves for someone else. We see that on the screen. It, it moves our hearts. And that’s even if it’s fictional.
It doesn’t even have to be true to move our hearts. So how much more so when it’s not fiction? When the sacrifice is in a historical event and it happened on our behalf. When we see Jesus endure the cross for us, absorb the consequences for our guilt, pay the price we owe for our sin, stand in our place so we can be free, when we see it really happened for us, it not only moves our hearts, it changes our hearts. We’re left speechless.
We want to embrace him. Jesus becomes the biggest, brightest star in our lives. And once we have him, once we get a taste of his goodness, he becomes what our hearts long for most, our deepest affection, our most foundational desire. And then as always, our desire drives our behavior. So if he’s our biggest desire, that will determine largely what we do.
We won’t want to stray from him. Or more precisely, because we will stray, when we stray, we will want to come back. We’ll have different wants after we see what he’s done for us. That’s our new heart. That’s how Jesus performs the transplant with the new covenant.
So if you feel the weight of the law today, if you understand that you failed God’s standard, Great, that means the law is doing its job, it’s teaching you right from wrong, but don’t stop there and don’t collapse under its weight in guilt. Let the law drive you to the one who fulfilled the law in your place by standing in your place for you out of love for you. The message of the law really is not try harder, The message of the law is see Christ in his work on your behalf because the more you see him the more your heart will be healed of its sickness. Let’s pray together. Father, thank you for being good in so many ways, for teaching us what is good and true from what is right and wrong but then for also your compassion for when we go wrong, Lord, that you don’t abandon or forsake us but you’re reaction is to save us.
And Jesus would be cursed in our place so we may thrive and have life. I pray, Lord, that we all see him for who he is and what he has done for us. And may he become even more so our deepest, biggest, brightest desire so that we would want to follow even when we stray. We pray those things in his name. Amen.
Uh, well, the image or practice that Jesus gave the early church, one of them, to depict his work on our behalf on the cross, is communion. And at Bridges, we traditionally take communion first Sunday of the month, which is today. In a moment, our ushers will be passing trays down the aisle, and so you’ll pick up A double cup contains both elements of communion. And if you would, as you pick those up, would you just hang on to them? I’ll come back up in just a minute and we’ll all take it together.
The reason we like doing it all together at Bridges is because in the early church, when they took communion together, it was a meal that they shared around a table. And just like when you’re having a meal with your family, you don’t want want people kind of all eating on their own and coming and going. You— it’s much better when everybody is sitting all together. So in honor of that early tradition, we try to take it all together. At Bridges, you know, we don’t believe that communion is what saves you.
We believe it shows what Jesus did to save us— his work on our behalf, his shed blood, his broken body, for us that we could be reconciled to God and have life in him. Um, our ushers will now come forward.
