Living in The Moment? Part One

For those of you who did not get a chance to see the sermon on video, I will be putting up parts of the transcript here for the next several days:

Jeremiah 16: 1-14

Have you ever faced certain death? You were absolutely sure that you had reach the last moment in your life.

I have had those moments. One happened when I was s senior in high school. My classmates and I were working ion the senior float for the homecoming parade. I do not even know if we finished it. But this particular night I was driving.

For some reason we had driven to one person’s house and then had to go to a third person’s home. Being the gentleman I pretended to be at the time, I thought I would be cool and give a ride to one of our cheerleaders. Besides I was one of the football players. She had a boyfriend though and he was also a very good friend of mine….

We were driving down one of those Social Circle roads that had a few houses on it. It was getting dark, and I had a super turbo minus the turbo Volkswagen Jetta (with sunroof). I wanted to show off my driving so I was going to speed up as fast as I could before the road ended. So I did (or at least as fast as the Jetta would let me go).

And then it happened. Near death experience written all over it. The stop sign was covered by a bush and you could not see it until it was in your rear view mirror. Of course if you lived there you knew that stop sign was there. I was cool until we went flying through that stop sign across the road and landed perfectly in someone else’s long dirt driveway.

I was cool until she looked over at me - face flushed white (which doesn’t take much). Knuckles dug deep into the steering wheel. And she started laughing and laughing and laughing. For three days she laughed. In our senior yearbook she reminded me of that day. At our ten year reunion she reminded me of that day.

I think everyone should learn how to drive a stick shift. You learn to pray a lot more.

The situation for Israel was a little more serious. They faced the wrath of God. They had forgotten how to pray. In the face of danger and death, they laughed at God’s prophets and told them to get lost. For Jeremiah, they threatened to kill him, they threw him in a well, they tried to starve him to death. But God had a plan for the life of Jeremiah, and if you were to read the previous chapter (Jeremiah 15) you would see that God had promised Jeremiah to make him a wall of bronze against the attacks of these people.

These people, the Israelites, the church of the times, were sinful pleasure seekers and God’s love was not enough to quench their desires. They made new gods. Gods that did not breathe or eat or require anything of them, so they could justify their sin and feel less guilty. Their sin had slowly destroyed there ability to feel remorse. It stole from the the ability to find real love and crushed their ability to have compassion for others.

Their sin deserved punishment, and our sin deserves punishment. I sure am glad that God is in control.

Even though our sin deserves punishment, God chooses to provide hope.

Questions: How does God provide hope? What good is hope when our lives are falling apart? What good is hope when we can’t give up the actions and thoughts in our lives that displease God?

I will be putting up portions of the rest of the sermon each day with more questions. Enjoy the study. As for today, you get the introduction so read the passage from the Bible and let your thoughts soar.