Welcome to the River Mountain Church Preaching Library. It is our prayer and indeed our hope that this message might inspire your life. So sit back, relax and enjoy the preaching of God's Word. Jeremiah is a very, very long book. Next to the book of Psalms, Jeremiah is the longest book. 52 chapters and I tried to read it. Matter of fact, I tried to listen to it. yesterday, as I was doing my yard work, and I realized that if I listened to the whole thing, I could have done everybody's yard work in Shepton. Because it was long. I finished my work, and I think I was only in chapter 13. This book is incredibly important, and I'm calling this message, How to Be a Prophetic People, or How to Withstand Adversity. So let's look at a little bit of Jeremiah, give you a brief overview of his life, He was called into the ministry when he was only 20. Very young. Most of us know that calling. It's right there in chapter 1. The Lord says, I knew you before you were in your mother's womb. I'm bringing you forth, and I'm going to give you a calling to be a prophet to the nations. But he's 20. He's from a spiritual family. He's the son of a priest. And he's living about 100 years after Isaiah. Now what's interesting about him is that he is coming on the scene when the nation is coming back to God. Israel kept going away from God, kept coming back to God, going away from God, coming back to God. They had just gone through a horrible apostasy. The king before, we're going to look at the king that is reigning here at the time of Jeremiah, but the king right before him, Manasseh, was a horrible, awful, terrible king. As a matter of fact, what he did is he burnt the scriptures. He took the scriptures, the word of God, burnt them. He took the temple of the Lord they were supposed to worship. He set up pagan gods in the temple. Horrible, awful king. Eventually he dies and they put a new king into place and his name It's just Josiah and Josiah here. He is Coming into power at eight years old. How'd you have to have a king like to have a king who's eight years old? That's when he takes power eight. It's almost Imagine CJ becoming our Queen. It would be kind of an interesting thing She's a beautiful girl, but it'll be very strange very odd to have her ruling over us. It would be very odd anyway, he becomes king and Israel is is kind of like one of those I mean, they try everything. They try Baal worship. They try worship of other gods. And finally, he says, well, why don't we go back to Yahweh? So the whole nation goes back to Yahweh. He decides, why don't we get rid of the pagan gods that are in the temple? And as he's cleaning out the temple, one of the priests discovers the scriptures. Apparently there was a copy of the scriptures that wasn't burnt into the story. Thank God for that so They bring it into the king start reading it to him He's probably a teenager at this time and he starts hearing the word of the Lord and he says man We have got a lot of work to do and they start this great revival in the land Bringing Israel back to their original faith, which obviously is serving Jehovah now. Here's the problem. I Jeremiah comes along, and Jeremiah is 20. By this time, since he took control when he was 8, the king is only 21. So you have a 20-year-old prophet and a 21-year-old king, and these guys are the spiritual heads. Jeremiah knows that although Israel is called of God and has come back to God, but it really is in name only. You know, sometimes we think that, boy, if America could just come back to God, I mean, if we could just get back and say, we are a Christian nation, then everything would be good. How many people know that is not the case? This is a classic point of that. The king wants the nation to come back. So they say, okay, we'll come back to God. We'll come back to Yahweh. We'll say that, you know, we're back to being the children of Abraham. But here's the problem. They have been in paganism for close to 100 years now, and as they come back into the true faith, they want to do it all. They want to have a little bit of this Jehovah thing, and they want to have a little bit of the pagan stuff. They want to have Baal worship, and they want to worship other gods. Maybe what this is akin to is when Catholicism began to spread into places like Haiti. Haiti was a place that was kind of entrenched in witchcraft. And so Catholicism comes along and so they say, well, we love Catholicism, we love Jesus, we love Christ, but let us bring our little witchcraft into this, and you get what's called voodoo. And I think it's like 80% or maybe 90% of Haiti practices this mixture of Christianity and witchcraft, and they call it voodoo. And you have that also in New Orleans, I think they practice it there as well. So Jeremiah comes along and he says, you know what, this is actually worse. than the way it used to be when there was paganism and maybe there was a small remnant of people that served the Lord. Now, you've got kind of this mixture. We're calling ourselves the people of God, but we've got inside of us all this paganism. I don't know, that can be worse. It's almost better to have something that is purely evil with a little remnant of purity and good than it is to have this mixture Remember in the book of Revelation, God says, I wish you were either hot or cold, but because you're lukewarm, I want to vomit you out of my mouth. He actually says, I wish you were either totally evil or totally good. I don't want the mixture. And what you have going on here in Israel at this point is mixture. It's a national revival. They've gone back to Jehovah, but they've got an issue here because they're still practicing paganism. So Jeremiah's call is to circumcise their hearts. That's his vocabulary. You were outwardly circumcised, but I want to see it inside. It's not good to have the mixture. God wants complete and total control. So for 41 years, he preaches this message of the circumcision of the heart, of inward conformity to the laws of God, to outward practice of worshipping Jehovah and worshipping alone. So what happens is, over 41 years, he has zero success. How would you like to have a ministry in which you had zero success? 41 years of telling people something they don't want to hear, nor are they going to change. That would be hard. It would be like us coming to Pennsylvania, starting a church, and after, I don't know how long we've been here, three years, we have one person here every Sunday. 10 years goes by, I got one person here. 20 years go by, we've still got one person. 30 years, people would be like, what are you doing? Either you're not called, because they don't understand why there isn't success. And what you have in Jeremiah is a man who is uncompromising and sees nothing, but he doesn't stop. He does eventually get three converts, and one of them, Baruch, is actually a scribe, and he writes down everything that Jeremiah says, and this becomes the book of Jeremiah. It also becomes the book of Lamentations. So what we want to talk about first here is, to be a prophetic person, you need to hear God for other people, and that's what Jeremiah does. As a matter of fact, one of the first people he hears God for, well, not the first, but this scribe is one of the few guys that's actually following Jeremiah, and one day he goes, you know what, this isn't worth it, I think I'm packing up and I might be leaving, and so Jeremiah says this to him, he says, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, for you, O Barash, Said you say woe is me for the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groanings I find no rest Thus shall you say to him. This is God speaking to Jeremiah. He says you shall say to him behold I Have I have built and I am breaking down. I have planted I am plucking up the whole land and then he says it's very interesting Do you seek great things for yourself? see most people seek great things for themselves and I guess this guy is educated, well-trained, obviously thought that his life would be better than just writing down whatever this prophet is saying to him. But then Jeremiah says, listen, I'm going to bring disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you your life. So if you stick with me, you'll be at least able to live. So don't worry about great things, just stay with me. Thus saith the word of the Lord to you. Maybe this is one of the first personal prophecies in which somebody gives a prophetic word here to an individual. There are many others, but this is one of the few clear examples of that. But the key to understanding the book of Jeremiah is this. The Lord says, Behold, I have built, and I am breaking down. I have planted, and now I am plucking up. And what God desires to do through Jeremiah is say, listen, if these people don't come wholly back to me, what we're going to do here is we're going to pluck the whole thing up. We're going to tear the whole thing down and we're starting over. So that's Jeremiah's message. So point number two is in order to be a prophetic people, you have to be able to stand against the tide. God told Jeremiah right from the very beginning, he says this, they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you. In other words, he tells Jeremiah, even right when he calls him, he says, listen, this is going to be a long haul, nobody's going to listen, they're going to fight, you're going to be discouraged, but don't worry, I will be with you. That's the only comfort he has. And here are the sins of the people. My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken the fountain of living water. They have hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. In other words, these people have obviously gone for satisfaction in life from these things that do not bring satisfaction, and they are broken. How many people know that anything outside of God is broken? Anything you try to find happiness in is broken. Everything that comes under the classification of idolatry is a broken vessel that cannot hold water that can never satisfy us. So the evil was you've left living water and you've gone after what is broken. And let me just say this about us. We have the same tendencies. What is the broken cistern in your life? What do you go after to find satisfaction? What is that? You can come up with something in your head. It is broken. Never leave God for what is broken, is the message. Jeremiah gets into specifics. One of the specifics is the fact that they are still attached to Baal. Here's what they're trying to do. Jeremiah says to them, you steal, you commit murder, you commit adultery, you swear falsely, you make offerings to Baal, and then, okay, then you come and stand before me in this house. You do all these abominations, all these evils, and then you come and you try to stand before me in the house of the Lord. Jeremiah saying that that's not going to fly. That's not going to work. You can't have a pantheon of gods and think you're still going to serve me Jeremiah 718 says the children gather wood their father's kindle fires the women make Curds of dough and they make cakes to the Queen of Heaven The Queen of Heaven it's very interesting this terminology is used because unfortunately the Catholics use this term for Mary They call Mary the Queen of Heaven And here these people understood Jehovah, but they also wanted this Queen of Heaven. As Jeremiah goes through his ministry, one of the things he says to the people is that either you can serve God or you can serve the imaginations of your heart. And eventually they chose to imagine things and serve their imagination. I think it's ironic, maybe not ironic. But how many people remember a movement in the, I think it was in the Methodist Church, but it was in a lot of churches, called Reimagining God. Reimagining God. And you know how they want to reimagine God? As Sophia. And they took something from the book of Proverbs, The word wisdom, which translates Sophia, and they say, why can't we reimagine God as if he was a woman called Sophia? And they had a big movement in the church saying we should worship God as Sophia, this woman of heaven. And that actually became kind of popular. I know churches actually kind of split. over this reimagining. But I think it's ironic that we in the church, we tend to gravitate sometimes toward a mixture of Christianity with other things. And we don't keep the purity. For instance, Israel was already very impure because they had chosen a king. Remember how God felt about the king being chosen? He says, you've rejected me. You have rejected me and you wanted to be like other nations, so you got yourself a king. In a sense, having a king was an act of idolatry. We as the church need to be very, very careful that we don't desire anything more than the leadership of God and what He wants to accomplish in our lives. Jeremiah spoke to the kings. He spoke to the people. He spoke to the priests. And he had hard things to say. And prophetic people have to say hard things. And as you read the book of Jeremiah, the hardest thing he had to say was this. Here's what's going to happen, folks, if we don't get this thing right. God has shown me that The king of Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar, is going to come down here, he's going to take all of us into captivity, and we're going to be destroyed as a nation. He's going to burn down Jerusalem, he's going to tear down the temple. That's what's going to happen. The people refuse to repent, refuse to repent, and Jeremiah comes to them one day and he says this. This is the vision that he had. He comes to the king and he says this to the king. He said, here's what needs to happen. God has decided that the king he wants in charge of everything is King Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonian king is the king that God has decided should be in charge. So here's what I suggest to you, King of Israel. Zedekiah was the king at this time. And he says to him, he says, listen, here's what's going to happen. This is what God is saying to you. If you will surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then your life shall be spared. This city shall not be burned with fire. You and your house shall live. Let me ask you this. What if I, as a prophet, stood before you and said, God has decided that Iraq should take control of America. And I have prayed about this and I believe that we should submit to them And they should become our headship. They should become our sovereign king. We should be under them. How many people in here would go for that idea? How many of you would say, no, no, man, we're going to rise up and fight this thing? And that's exactly what Israel said. There's no way no Babylonian king is going to come down here and take control of us. We're going to fight this thing. So what he was accused of was this. after they heard him over and over say this. He was accused of being what? What do you think he would be accused of? Saying that we should surrender and give up and go into Babylon without a fight. What do you think he was accused of? Yeah! Eventually, the generals came to him and said, listen, we've got to put this guy to death. Let this man be put to death, for he is weakening the hands of our soldiers who are left in the city and the hands of the people by speaking such words to them. For this man is not seeking the welfare of this people, but their harm. And so they want to put him to death, and so the king basically says, okay, he's in your hands, I can't do anything. I think the king could have done something, but he decided not to do anything. So they throw him into a well, and they were going to kill him. They were going to leave him there to die. See, we tend in America to be a little too patriotic. We're Americans! We're Americans! No, you're not. You're a citizen of heaven. I like God and country, though. God and country. Cling to my guns and my religion. By the way, I think that's totally ridiculous. Be careful about thinking that God is on America's side. God can be on the side of anybody he wants. And see, what these people said is, there ain't no way in ever that God's not going to be on Israel's side. Ain't no way. That ain't going to happen. We're the chosen people. We're the people of God. Be careful. I'm a little concerned that the church has become so political. Thinking that politics is going to change laws that are going to change societies. No, it's not. No, it's not. Jeremiah knew this. They claimed the name, put it over their banner, we're back to Jehovah, we're back to God. Hey, were their hearts back? I said, were their hearts back? And Jeremiah knew this. Unless the hearts go back, it doesn't matter. make all the laws, have all the godly kings, make all the rules, legislations, all of that, unless the heart goes back, it doesn't really matter. As a matter of fact, here's what's going to happen. If you get in charge and you start dictating, you're actually going to cause the opposite result. Have I made you all sufficiently angry? I'm hoping to, because I want to be like Jeremiah, and I'm trying to get into that Jeremiah mode here. I'm popular. As a matter of fact, this is a good thing for you to know about being a prophetic person. If you want to be, your life will become an illustration of what God is doing on the earth. God told Jeremiah not to marry and not to have any children, but to live a lonely life. But he said to do it because you're going to be an illustration of being alone, by yourself, without being able to reproduce. Why? Because Israel is going to be alone and not able to reproduce. That was his message. Do you think it happened? Yeah, it happened. The king, the people eventually said, there's no way, we're not going to do this. And here's what happened. The king of Babylon came in and he slaughtered the king's sons, slaughtered his sons right in front of him. Then he plucked out the eyes King Zedekiah plucked them out, then he bound them in chains, then they tore down the city. They tore down Jerusalem. They broke down the walls. This only happened twice. It happened when Titus did it in 70 AD, but it happened here again. And it didn't have to happen if the people of God could have broken out of the box of their thinking and said, wait a second, maybe God is on the side of the Babylonians. Maybe He is on Nebuchadnezzar's side. It's crazy for me to think that, but maybe that's possible. How many people know that God is the God of the whole world, not just the United States? What He kept threatening, what He kept threatening the people of God, is that I can rise up another king anytime I want, and He could take charge. And He might not be you. Might not be from your nation. That's scary for America to think that. Because I have a feeling if we don't get it right, if we don't get our hearts back to God as a nation, if God loves us and cares about us, He may actually do the similar thing here. Scary to think that. Possible. 41 years, zero success in His day. Here's what he said sometimes when he was alone by himself. He said, I cursed the day that I was born. The day that my mother bore me, let it not be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought good news to my father who said a son is born. Cursed that man! You ever feel like this? 41 years, no results. Cursed the day I was born. It's amazing that this guy said that. And He also gave us this bumper sticker right here. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for your welfare and not for your evil, to give you a future and a hope. The same man who said that said that. We would like to make the Christian life uncomplicated, simple. Bumper stickers. They're not. They're very complicated. 41 years, no success. Why did he do it? Why did he stay faithful to God? Why did he give an unpopular message that nobody wanted to hear? He gets thrown in prison, he gets beaten. Here's what he said. And he's probably tried it many times. He said, if I say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, if I say I'm going to be quiet and I'm going to shut up and I'm not going to say any more, here's what he said. There is in my heart, as it were, A burning fire shot up in my bones. And I'm weary, and I cannot hold it in. Jeremiah, like the Apostle Paul, said, I can't stop. I can't shut up. I can't not speak. Every time I try to hold it in, it's like a fire in me. It's shooting up in me, and I just have to say it. I have to speak it. What it takes to be a prophetic people is this kind of passion, this kind of burning, something inside of us that we are willing to stand against the tide, we are willing to say whatever God wants us to say, and we will not shut up. We'll keep on speaking it. What Jeremiah saw was that one day, one day this would all change. One day God would do something miraculous. He would come, He would forgive the people of their sins, He would send His Holy Spirit, and here's what He said, and this is the scripture that all of the New Testament writers point toward when they talk about the New Covenant. Jeremiah, in the midst of his sorrow and depression, said that there would come a day where God would put the laws, and He would write them on their heart. He would be their God, and they shall be His people. No longer shall they have to teach their neighbors and their brothers, saying, Know the Lord, for everyone will know Him from the least to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquities and remember them no more." That's our day. Every one of us should have a fire inside of us. Something burning. Something that says, I can't keep quiet. I have to speak out. I want us to pray now. And I think that something of the spirit of Jeremiah needs to be upon each and every believer. Many think that he was a type of Christ. The Bible says of Jesus he was a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief. It says of Jeremiah that he was the weeping prophet and he loved his people and he cried for them. As a matter of fact, as you're praying, remember this, Jeremiah only disobeyed God one time. And that one time was when God said, forget these people, I've forgotten them, don't pray for them anymore. And Jeremiah kept praying for them, even though God said not to. He loved his people. He loved his nation. He was the ultimate Patriot in the sense that he wasn't willing to give up on them and believe that there was something better for them So we as a people need to be able to stand against our culture. We need to be able to stand against the tide But I tell you I tell you this and I tell you this prophetically it is not going to be done politically It is not going to be done politically. It never has been never will be it must always be done by the church and It must always be done by the people of God. We must change this nation. We are the city on the hill. We are the salt of the earth. We are the candle that cannot be put under a bushel. And someday God will stand before His church and He will say, as He said to Jeremiah, Did you tell them? Did you tell them? Did you tell them? Let's be prophetic. Let's hear the message that God has and let's speak it. And let's never be discouraged because God is with us and will stand by us.