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Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Fourth Week of Lent
Jeremiah 11:20, John 7:46
Jeremiah prayed, “Let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause.” … Of Jesus, the guards said, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.”
We sing, “We want to be like you, Jesus.” Can you imagine singing, “We want to be like you, Jeremiah?”
No! Jeremiah was a bullfrog (just kidding). But none of us want to be covered over with the depression and bitterness Jeremiah showed in his prayers.
Jesus came to show us how to become one with God. He was filled with the Holy Spirit, and they emptied themselves into the Father, and they dance everlasting as one. Come and do this with me, Jesus says, and follow my steps, and join us on the dance floor forevermore.
But isn’t there something about Jeremiah’s position on his knobby angry knees that draws me in? Isn’t it nice to feel self-righteous, just for a moment here and there? “I never understood a word he said, but I helped him drink his whine.” He always had some very fine whine.
Reading into chapter 12, it’s clear that Jeremiah’s feeling about life mirrors God’s. In the next chapter God cries out his own despair. “I have abandoned my house, cast off my heritage; the beloved of my soul I have delivered into the hand of her foes … My heritage is a prey for hyenas, is surrounded by vultures; come, gather together, all you wild animals, come and eat!
“The whole land is desolate because no one takes it to heart … They have sown wheat and reaped thorns, they have tired themselves out for no purpose; they are shamed by their harvest: the burning anger of the Lord.”
If there’s anything that I love about God in the Bible, it’s the way he speaks his mind and pours out his feelings. We can do the same, and both Jeremiah in his way and Jesus in his do just that.
God turns back toward his people in chapter 29, with some of the most confident and comforting words in Scripture. “I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and future. Then you will call on me, and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
“I will be found by you.”
Lord, thank you for making me a thinking, feeling, imagining person in your world. But remind me that all those ways of being in your world do not mean that my ways are your ways. Your thoughts are higher than my thoughts. So I fall on my knees and worship, trust and obey, be still and know that You are God. No matter what. And gradually I become accustomed to the strangely luminous darkness I encounter in your presence, and love you more and more.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1464
