church

INI
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 28, 2011
Ascension Lutheran Church, Tacoma WA
Paul Naumann, Pastor

GOD’S WORD:
The Absolute Cure for the Discouraged Believer
Jeremiah 15:19-21

To God, alone wise, be glory through Jesus Christ forever. Amen. Our text
today comes from the OT Prophet Jeremiah, chapter 15, beginning with the
15th verse, as follows:

Therefore thus says the LORD: "If you return, Then I will bring you back; You
shall stand before Me; If you take out the precious from the vile, You shall be
as My mouth. Let them return to you, But you must not return to them. 20 And
I will make you to this people a fortified bronze wall; And they will fight against
you, But they shall not prevail against you; For I am with you to save you And
deliver you," says the LORD. 21 "I will deliver you from the hand of the
wicked, And I will redeem you from the grip of the terrible." This is the Word
of God.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, Who said, Blessed are those who are persecuted
for righteousness’ sake, Dear Fellow Redeemed,

Medical research has made great strides in recent decades, and I think most of
us have a healthy respect for it. So we tend to lose sight of a pretty basic fact:
that even with all of today’s medical advances, absolute cures are still very rare.
There’s still no absolute cure, e.g., for any kind of cancer, no cure for migraine
headaches, no cure for influenza or even the common cold. In fact, it’s hard to
find an example of an absolute cure. Polio comes to mind – it’s been all but
wiped out in this country - but even that was the result of a preventative
vaccine. There’s still no cure for the disease itself.

That’s why it’s so unusual to run across something that genuinely is an absolute
cure. And that’s what we have in our text for today. As we meet the prophet
Jeremiah, he is severely infected with the disease of discouragement. It’s taken
hold of him and is threatening to destroy him. He feels he’s all alone and that
everyone is against him. He’s even gotten to the point where he’s questioning
the reliability and goodness of God. Have you ever felt that way? (Don’t raise
your hand!) If so, you’ll be glad to know that the Lord has an absolute cure for
Christian discouragement. So if you’ve ever done your very best to be a faithful
Christian, and gotten nothing but hassle and pushback and mockery for your
trouble – or worse, if your biggest discouragement is your own sin, and your
failure to be a faithful Christian – then today’s text is for you. Our theme this
morning:

GOD’S WORD:
The Absolute Cure for the Discouraged Believer

I. It gives you absolute authority.
II. It gives you absolute invulnerability.
III. It gives you absolute redemption.

It took me a while, after reading through this text, to realize that the whole
passage is really about the Word of God. Those of us who have been Lutherans
for a long time take this for granted – that the Bible is the center of our faith
and life. It was for Jeremiah, too. He says, Your words were found, and I ate
them, And Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart. He loved
God’s Word! He ate it up! He presented it faithfully to the people of Judah to
whom he’d been sent. So what went wrong?

Well, it turns out that God’s Word was not what the people of Judah wanted to
hear. God told them, through Jeremiah, to repent of their wicked idolatry and
their godless ways. So they kind of shot the messenger. They persecuted
Jeremiah. They mocked and ridiculed him to the point where he felt isolated
and all alone, like he was the only one left who clung to God’s Word. It was
painful, and Jeremiah couldn’t understand it. He said, I did not sit in the
assembly of the mockers, Nor did I rejoice; I sat alone because of Your hand,
For You have filled me with indignation. 18 Why is my pain perpetual And my
wound incurable, Which refuses to be healed? He got to the point where he
even dared to accuse God of abandoning him: Will You surely be to me like an
unreliable stream, As waters that fail? “Lord, are you really going to be like one
of those desert riverbeds that’s full of water one day and bone dry the next?”
Jeremiah was one discouraged believer!

Have you been a discourage believer at times? You may not have been beaten
and thrown into prison for being faithful to God’s Word, as Jeremiah was. But I
sometimes wonder whether we’re heading toward overt persecution of
Christians once again. And you’ve certainly felt the more subtle forms of
persecution, haven’t you? The sneering condescension of people who look
down on you because of your faith. “You believe that God made the world in
six days? What a fairy tale!” “You really believe the Christ was born of a virgin,
that He walked on water and raised the dead? How naļve!” If you stick to what
God says in His Word, you can easily start to feel isolated and discouraged, just
like Jeremiah (we in the CLC have certainly learned that in the 50 years of our
history, if we’ve learned nothing else!).

But for every discouragement in your life, God’s Word is your absolute cure.
Especially if the thing that’s been discouraging you is the way in which people
react to your Christian witness. For – did you ever realize? - God’s Word gives
you absolute authority. God tells you the same thing He told Jeremiah, If you
take out the precious from the vile, you shall be as My mouth. Imagine: for a
human being to speak as the mouthpiece of God Himself – what absolute
authority such a person would have! But that’s exactly the authority you possess
when you speak the truths of God’s Word to people. They may not believe it –
they may reject it completely. They may treat you with scorn and contempt. Do
you know how much that changes God’s truth? Not one bit. When you’re
speaking God’s Word, whether it’s to a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker or a
relative, you’re speaking with absolute authority. "He who hears you hears Me,”
Jesus said, “he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him
who sent Me." -- Luke 10:16.

Notice in our text, though, that God tacks a couple of conditions on Jeremiah:
Therefore thus says the LORD: "If you return, Then I will bring you back; You
shall stand before Me.” The word for “return” means the same thing as
“repent.” Jeremiah had a lot to repent of, and so do we. He had taken his eye
off the ball and focused, not on his work for the Lord, but on his own suffering
and discouragement. Worst of all he was questioning God’s faithfulness. For
that he had to repent. Just like we have to repent for all those times when we’ve
complained, and questioned God, and given in to discouragement.

Jeremiah also had to maintain the integrity of God’s Word: If you take out the
precious from the vile, You shall be as My mouth. Let them return to you, But
you must not return to them. It’s not surprising that Jeremiah felt isolated and
alone. One scholar estimated that there may have been as many as 200
prophets active in Jerusalem at the time of Jeremiah. 199 of whom were telling
the people exactly what they wanted to hear, that everything was fine, that they
could go on their merry way and that they had nothing to repent of. Of course,
all that was vile dross, the worthless base metal that floats to the top when
you’re refining precious metal. But God had given Jeremiah the precious gold –
the absolute authority of His holy Word. He needed to maintain the integrity of
that Word, and so do we. That’s why we in the CLC are so absolutely focused
on God’s Word – because when we speak God’s Word, with nothing added to it
and nothing taken away, we speak as God’s mouthpiece. Then we speak with
absolute authority!

God’s Word is the absolute cure for a discouraged believer, secondly, because
it gives you absolute invulnerability. God told Jeremiah, I will make you to this
people a fortified bronze wall; And they will fight against you, But they shall
not prevail against you. Survival in the ancient near east was all about
fortifications. Whether your city was around long enough to prosper and
succeed often depended on how high and how strong was the wall that
surrounded it. Many city walls were of hardened mud brick. Some were of
stone. But God said, “Jeremiah, I will make you a wall of solid bronze. They
can fight against you, but they will never defeat you, and that’s a promise.”
What a cure for discouragement! For the Lord to tell you that, no matter what
happens in your life – no matter what persecution, no matter what hardships or
trials – you will never be defeated! But that is exactly what God’s Word does
tell you in the eighth chapter of Romans, where Paul asks, What then shall we
say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?...For I am
persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers,
nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other
created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord. -- Romans 8:31-39.

Finally, there’s the most important reason why God’s Word is the absolute cure
for discouraged believers – because it gives you absolute redemption. For I am
with you to save you And deliver you," says the LORD. 21 "I will deliver you
from the hand of the wicked, And I will redeem you from the grip of the
terrible." All those things that frighten you most in life. All persecution and pain
and suffering. Everything that makes you downhearted and discouraged –
particularly your sin, and that feeling of inadequacy and unworthiness that sin
brings. “Don’t be discouraged,” God says, “I’ve got the cure for that. I will
deliver you, and I will redeem you.”

And here’s something interesting – the word for “deliver” in this passage? It’s
the same Hebrew root that forms the basis of a familiar name in Scripture. It’s a
name that all of you know. The name Jesus means “deliverer”.

When Jeremiah was all done with his whining and complaining, he still had
faith that God would deliver him. Faith that he would be delivered from his
present trials, yes, but more than that. He had faith in God’s promise that a
Deliverer – Jesus- would one day come to redeem the world. We know that
from the whole rest of this book, but especially from passages like this in
chapter 31, "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a
new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah-…I will
forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more." -- Jeremiah
31:31,34. And this in chapter 33, In those days Judah will be saved, And
Jerusalem will dwell safely. And this is the name by which it will be called:
THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.' -- Jeremiah 33:16.

Yes, Jeremiah believed. He believed in the absolute redemption that cures
every discouragement. He believed in the Savior told about in God’s Word. In a
Savior who not only would bring us righteousness, not only would bestow on us
righteousness, but who would literally BE OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. Paul
says, God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become
the righteousness of God in Him. -- 2 Corinthians 5:21. God sent His innocent
Son Jesus up that last, lonely hill to Calvary. In those terrible six hours on the
cross the Father loaded His Son with the sins of the world – yours and mine
included. He made Jesus to be sin, so that you and I might be righteous before
God. So that the blood Jesus shed on that cross might cover every one of your
sins and shortcomings, your flaws and failures. So that every discouragement in
your life might vanish like the morning mist. So that the bright hope of heaven
– before so remote and unreachable because of your sin – might in Christ
become not just a possibility, but a certainty! Paul tells my story and yours
when he says “You were [once] without Christ, being aliens from the
commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having
no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who
once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. -- Ephesians
2:12-13. Is it any wonder that we treasure God’s Word, and cherish it so dearly?
For it is a Word that bestows on us absolute redemption!

F. B. Meyer was one of the most influential British evangelists of the early
1900s. He often worked in the impoverished inner cities in places like
Liverpool and London. It must have been quite a daunting task at times, but
Meyer wasn’t discouraged. He once said, “I used to think that God’s gifts were
on shelves placed one above the other; and that the taller we grew in Christian
character, the easier we could reach them. I now find that God’s gifts are on
shelves placed one beneath the other. It is not a question of growing taller but
of stooping lower; that we have to go down, always down, to get His best gifts.”
So if you find yourself bowed by adversity at times, don’t be discouraged! To
you belongs the very best gift on God’s shelf – the gift of His Word! It is the
ABSOLUTE CURE FOR THE DISCOURAGED BELIEVER – it gives you
absolute authority, it gives you absolute invulnerability and, in Christ, it gives
you absolute redemption. And one day we will all meet together in that place
where there will be no discouragements ever again, for “…God will wipe away
every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.
There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." -- Rev
21:4. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus, AMEN.