Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 6, 2015 | Route 66 - Jeremiah

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September 6, 2015 | Route 66 - Jeremiah · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, good morning.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Good to see you here.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Glad to have everybody here.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Hello to the folks over in the College Avenue building.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: Welcome.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: If this is your first time here with us at Topeka Bible Church, we want to tell you we are on a journey of Route 66, a journey through the Bible.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: There are 66 books in the Bible.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: And today you have caught us where we have landed, the beginning of the second third of the Bible.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: How fitting.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: Pastor Jim wanted me to help him by reading through the overview with you that you can find in your bulletin insert.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm just gonna read it for you to help set him up.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: The prophet Jeremiah and King Josiah were born at the end of the longest, blackest period in the history of Judah.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: The time was 648 BC.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: It was a time where human sacrifice and black black witchcraft were just two of the evils that filled Jerusalem from one end to the other with innocent blood.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah as an outspoken prophet, and King Josiah as a reforming king, these two brave men gave their country its best chance of renewal and its last hope of surviving as the kingdom of David.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: Now we know Jeremiah, the prophet, more personally than any other prophet in the Bible, because his book was an autobiography.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: When he was called by God, he was a young Jerry.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: He became for over 40 years the weeping prophet, who carried a heartbreaking warning of judgment from a heartbroken God to a cold-hearted people.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: In response to his messages, Jeremiah experienced persecution from his own countrymen.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: He experienced ridicule, beatings, and imprisonment.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah's broken heart caused him to write a broken book.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: And it was impossible to arrange in any sort of neat outline.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: But the messages within repeat over and over and over, and they emerge clearly.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: He says, Turn, repent, soften your hearts, yield to the molding hands of your potter.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: Sin always leads to judgment, but judgment will lead to revival.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: And in the end, God has no choice with his rebellious child.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: He calls for the Babylonians, and the book closes with the fall of Jerusalem.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Excuse me, uh young man.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: You're reading about my book.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: What's your name?
2:50
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Your name is Jeremiah.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm named Jeremiah.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm Jeremiah Hiltai.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Hi.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: You were you named after me?
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: I was.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: That's uh you can you can sit down now.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: But that I I may need to talk to you afterwards.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: I I've never known anyone.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: I'll be in the lobby.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Never known anyone to be named after.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: People in my day would be stunned to imagine that anyone ever would be named after me.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: No person anyway.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: A dog, perhaps, they would say.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah is a barking dog that makes everybody mad.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah is a buzzing mosquito around your ear.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah's a bullfrog that keeps croaking, and you wish it would shut up so you could go to sleep at night.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: That's what they would say.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: They would never name a person after me.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean, after all, I was uh I was a laughing stock to them.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: No one would say that they were a good friend of mine.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh, at times it seemed that even God who appointed me was was an enemy.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Especially on that day that uh that He let me get buried alive.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean it.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean people that I had known all my life got so sick and tired of me that they decided to shut me up permanently and they threw me into a pit.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: A cistern, actually.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: One of those reservoirs in the ground, a big hole in the ground that they dig so that when the streams stop running, there'll be water and and and and and and you'll have something to drink.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: It's awful stuff, water from uh a cistern, it's full of worms, and it's flat and stale, and tastes like dirt and limestone, but it's water and it keeps you alive.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, this cistern, big sister, I hear your archaeologists uh have found it there underneath the courtyard of the king's palace in Jerusalem.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, if so, then then you know it was big and it was deep, and it was it was mostly empty, and and and they took off the lid and they lowered me down 25 feet to the bottom, and then they put the lid back on, and it was so dark, I can tell you.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: A darkness darker than you could cut the darkness, it was so thick, and I sank up to my ankles in mud, and then I could feel the worms crawling over my feet, and I knew I knew I I would die there.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Thirst, hunger, hate, loneliness.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I cried out to God, or to be more accurate, I I I cried out against him.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: If the people up there in the light ever heard the way I talked to God, they wouldn't believe it.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: To them, I was a stone wall, I was a prickly cactus, I was uh I was a prophet of judgment, but they never saw the inside.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: God wouldn't let me show them the inside, and that was hard because on the inside I was not a prophet of judgment.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: On the inside, I was a weeping prophet.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a funny thing in my country.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh, today in Israel, uh, they have uh uh uh uh something called a sabra, a prickly pear cactus.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: It's thick skinned and it has sharp thorns and it's uh prickly on the outside but soft on the inside.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: They call people, anyone born in Israel today, they call a sabra.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: Prickly on the outside, soft on the inside.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: I I was the first original sobra.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: I was I was prickly on the outside because God made me that, told me I had to be that way, but the inside I was soft and I was tearful and I was heartbroken and I cared what people thought.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: And right now at the bottom of that pit in the dark, when I cried out against God, I was I was disillusioned and I was angry, and I told God exactly what I thought of him.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: And you'll never name another child after me, I know, but I told him, I said, You lied to me, God.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: You deceived me, you told me you'd have my back, you told me you'd be by my side, you told me you'd have my hand that you would protect me, but for the last 40 years, all you've done is made me your mouthpiece.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: You've let me speak your words, and then you let people spit on me and hit me and throw me in prison and flog me and now look at me.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Here in this pit, you've left me to be buried alive.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: What good are you to me, God?
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember the day I said when I decided I'd had enough of the hate and I decided I would keep my mouth closed?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: You gave me a message and I closed my lips and I didn't say it.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't let it out because I didn't want people mad at me.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And you know what you did, God?
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Remember you lit the words on fire, and my bones were on fire, and my heart was on fire, and lest I burn up inside, I had to open my mouth and speak.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: What kind of a friend are you, God?
8:52
SPEAKER_00: You treat your friends like this.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: No matter no wonder you have so many enemies.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm down in this pit, God.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: I feel like my whole career's been a failure.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: I I didn't always feel that way, of course.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, in the beginning, it was different.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Long ago.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: When I was 16.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a little town a few hills north of Jerusalem.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: It was uh a town of Anatoth.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: Everyone in our town was a Levite or a priest.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: We we didn't have our own territory, we didn't have a tribal territory given to us, and so God commanded all the tribes we had to give us.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Each tribe had to give us four towns, just give us four towns we could live in, and this was one of those towns.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: So everybody in that town was a priest, and and uh my father Hilkiah, he was a priest, my grandfather was a priest, his father was a priest, his father, all the way back hundreds of years to Moses and Aaron, priests.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: So my life was pretty much laid out for me from the day I was born.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: I was going to grow up and become a priest.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And priests are a quiet sort.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: They don't make noise, they don't uh shout on street corners, they don't offend people, they don't, they don't, they certainly don't get thrown in pits.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna grow up.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: In a few years, I would get married.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about that already, and I'd get a place to live right there in Anatos.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: In a few weeks a year, when it was my turn, I would go up to Jerusalem and I would do the priesting at the temple.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: I would dust and polish and accept sacrifices and help with the worship and uh and study Torah and answer questions.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Then I'd come back home and tend the sheep and do the gardening for another 11 months.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Strange, isn't it?
11:04
SPEAKER_00: How how sometimes you think your life is just a straight road in front of you?
11:11
SPEAKER_00: You your plans are set, you've got it all figured out, and then something happens, and everything turns sharply, and and nothing is ever the same again.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened to me at age 16.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened to me when I heard from God.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: And I don't I don't mean I've I I I imagined him speaking to me in my mind.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't mean I felt something that I think was God.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean I heard from God in person, out loud.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: It was late afternoon, and I was turning the sheep, just a few sheep we had, because priests are like you're small town preachers.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: We uh we're not rich, but uh at least we're respected, and so we just had a few sheep, and I was turning them toward home when all of a sudden, out just out of nowhere, a man, a person appeared right in front of me.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean, one moment, not there, the next moment there.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: And I can't tell you how I knew, maybe it was my knees beginning to buckle, or the fact I couldn't look at his face, but I knew in that moment that this was the person I had been praying to all my life.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: I knew this was the Lord God.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: And then his words to me amazed me, shocked me even more than his appearance.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: Because he said, Jeremiah, I chose you before I formed you in the womb.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: I set you apart to myself to be not a priest, but a prophet.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: I was looking down, I heard those words, and all of a sudden something that it just didn't compute.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you understand there's such a difference between priests and prophets.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: I was born to be a priest, I'm quiet, I don't like the public, and and and priests are quiet sort, but prophets they stand on street corners and they shout words from God and they sometimes offend people and sometimes excite people, but no one ever hears a prophet and doesn't have an opinion.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they either admire them or they hate them, and and and and prophets don't care what people think because they're bold and fearless, but that wasn't me.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: That wasn't me.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: I I I cared what people thought.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: I was soft inside, and I wasn't a public speaker, and and and all of a sudden I blurted that out.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: I said, I said, I I I I I can't do that.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm too too young for one thing, and and I'm not a public public speaker.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: I uh the words don't come out of me easily.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: And then he did he did something, he reached up his hand and he touched my mouth.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: He God touched my mouth and he said, I'm not asking you, Jeremiah, I'm telling you.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: And I'm putting my words in your mouth.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: And these words will be powerful words.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: The words I give you will destroy and they'll uproot and they'll just tear down and they'll break and and and and they'll build and they'll they'll plant.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: And if I I thought since then, if only for a moment I I would have kept my wits about me and done some arithmetic.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: I would have sought, I would have realized how unpopular I was about to be.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh because because uh tear down and uproot and destroy and and and and and overthrow those.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: That's four bad things.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: That's four negatives, right?
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh build and plan, that's only two positives.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Four against two.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: That's that's not the ratio there is bad.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: That's two-thirds of my message would be would make people mad, and only a third of my message would make people happy.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: That's not what people like to hear.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: But I was uh I was uh at that point, I wasn't I wasn't thinking.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: I I wasn't certainly wasn't doing arithmetic or fractions.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: I was just amazed and stunned, and you would have been too.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, at the very idea that God would say that he chose me before I was born.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, wouldn't you, if God told you you were going to be his mouthpiece, and then you said, Well, I don't know what to say, and then he said, Well, I'm putting my words in your mouth, wouldn't wouldn't you be excited?
16:08
SPEAKER_00: I was humbled, I was honored, I was so, so excited.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Wow, little did I know what awaited me.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: God told me to move uh three miles up the road to Jerusalem, and that's when I discovered just how dark, how evil my world really was.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: I'd been protected in my small town, and I did not realize.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm some of you feel I think the same way.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: There are places I'm told in the world you live in, where you can be killed simply for believing in God or His Messiah.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Some of you some of you feel even today as though you're sailing against the wind, that you're outnumbered, you're fighting a battle, that you're that you're losing and you feel that you're in the darkness, that powerful people have control, but but I'm here to tell you you cannot imagine in your darkest nightmares the evil in my world and in my country.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Because in even in my land, my land was called Judah.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: It was what was left of the land of Israel after a hundred years before the the northern ten tribes had been captured and taken away by Assyria.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: And I lived in this little uh land called Judah.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: And what what I didn't realize was how dark we had become and how God's patience had finally run out.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: For the religion in Judah, I didn't realize was no longer the religion of God in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: The religion, believe it or not, was a religion now of black magic and witchcraft and consulting the dead and human sacrifice.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I mean human sacrifice, people giving up their babies and their children and even forcing old people, adults, to be to be burned alive to false gods.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: And then the injustice that rich people, powerful people, if you offended them, that they would hire people who would come to your house in the middle of the night and kill you or take your property.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: I had I had no idea.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Like a sobra almost with a soft heart to say, My people have abandoned me, they've committed a double evil, they've abandoned me, left me the fountain of living water, and have hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: And then I said, God told me to say, listen, don't let the wise man glory in his wisdom.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: The rich men stop glorying in your riches.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Mighty people, powerful people, stop glory boasting in your power.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: Boast if you want to boast in this that you understand and you know me, that I am the Lord who exercises justice and loving kindness on the earth.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: For in these things I delight, says the Lord.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: One one good thing, the only good thing that we had going for us in Judah was that we had a good king.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Finally, I mean after 55 years of the worst king ever, Manasseh, and all the idolatry and the sacrifice, we finally had a young king.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: He was my age, exactly.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: My age, Josiah was his name, Joseph, and he became my friend.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: He he cared uh he he knew that this had to be stopped.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Things had to be turned around, the human sacrifice and the black magic had to stop.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: But but but like he said, I mean what where was the guidance?
20:03
SPEAKER_00: What what should replace it?
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Because then you say, well, read your Bible, but we didn't have a Bible.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: We never had in our country more than a few copies, anyway, of what you call the Bible, but they were all lost.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: They when people turned away from God, even the priests, they were gone.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And uh and so we had no guidance.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: And we prayed.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: King Josiah prayed, and a miracle happened.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: Josiah had told them to clean out the temple, and and guess what happened?
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Underneath something broke through a wall, and they found a copy of the Torah of the Ten Commandments and Deuteronomy and the Torah.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it was the greatest day, and they brought it into Josiah, and he had them read the whole thing to him, invited me in, and I listened to it, and I wrote in my my journal that night.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Thy words were found, and I did eat them, Josiah, and I like starving men swallowed them, and they became to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart, for I'm called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: And for a moment I thought good times were coming.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we had a good king, now we had the word of God.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Wow, what could go wrong?
21:34
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what could go wrong.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: Josiah could get himself killed.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't have time to tell you the awful story of the foolish thing he did, but when they brought his body back to Jerusalem, his young body slain, I spoke at the service and then I went out as they buried him, and I I sat on a hill and I wept, I wept, I wept.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Wept.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: I knew that I had lost my only defender.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And I felt utterly lonely.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: I know you say, well, you had God.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: God had your back.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: God was by your side.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: God promised he would be with you.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what I had.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: God was the problem.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: God kept putting in my mouth messages which made people hate me.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: God made me denounce the new king for his greed and denounced the priests for their idols.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: He made me denounce the prostitutes for selling their bodies and the letters for buying them.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: He made me denounce the people for black magic and sacrificing their babies.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: He made me denounce the rich for exploiting the poor and the poor for envying the rich.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: One day he even made me stand outside the temple.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, his only friends would go to the temple.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: But he made me stand outside the temple.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: When the people came out from the temple, I called them hypocrites.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: He made me call them hypocrites.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: He said, What's he said?
23:08
SPEAKER_00: If you think for a moment that all that religious mumbo jumbo with the sacrifices impresses me, you've got another thought coming.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: God, I said, what are you doing?
23:19
SPEAKER_00: And then he said, and if if you're so big on circumcising your foreskins and so forth, why don't you do something profitable with a knife and cut off the foreskin of your hearts?
23:34
SPEAKER_00: Is it any wonder that they hated me?
23:39
SPEAKER_00: God was all about the heart.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Religion was such a heart thing for him.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: The people were all about, even the good ones were all about religion, and God said, no, you don't understand the heart.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Your heart is deceitful and wicked more than anything.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: You can't even imagine, you can't conceive how dark the heart is.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: And God had run out of patience, frankly.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And God made me say, listen, I've run out of patience.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: It's time for your sin to be judged.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm calling for the lion of Babylon, and he's going to come and he's going to take you into captivity.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: And then God made me say, and you're supposed to give in.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Judgment follows sin.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to open the gates and let the Babylonian army in, and then they won't kill you, and they'll take you off to Babylon for 70 years, and that's my will.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: People said, give in?
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Treason.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, no, no, you don't understand.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: God says on the other side of that, He has plans for you, good plans, plans to give you a future, plans to give you a hope.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: But first you have to be judged.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: See, I said this.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: It's not an issue of loyalty to the country.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: It's an issue of loyalty to God.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: God says, I want you to seek me, and if you'll seek me and search for me, I'll let you find me if you just search for me with all of your heart.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Because for God, it's a heart thing, it's a relationship thing.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: God says, I've loved you with an everlasting love, and that's why I'm loyal.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to stick with you.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: That's when God gave me my favorite, the greatest message of all.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: It was the message of the new covenant of the heart.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: God told me to tell people, listen, I mean the the the Torah is good with the Ten Commandments and the laws and so forth, but you've turned it into a religion, into a rules and regulations thing, and so you know what?
25:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give you something new.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give you a new covenant, and it's a new covenant of the heart, and I'm going to put my law inside you in your heart and forgive you from your sins.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: It'll be a whole new thing.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: You would have thought hearing about the new covenant of the heart that people would have turned their hearts to God.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: But they didn't.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: And there were doubters who said, listen, this, this, this, this whole thing of renewal, this can't happen.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: God said, it can.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: I can do anything.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing that's too hard for me.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: And if you'll just call on me, I'll answer you and I'll show you great and mighty things which you can't even imagine.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: But but they didn't listen.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: One of the strangest things that God had me do is, I don't know, he decided that since people weren't listening, maybe they could see better than they could hear, so he turned me into an actor.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: Me, Jeremiah Hill Kaisen, an actor.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: But he told me to take visuals, object lessons, and to show and to act out his message that sin inevitably leads to judgment, but then on the other side of judgment, there can be good times and renewal.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: You mind if I share with you three of those object lessons?
27:24
SPEAKER_00: One, uh one, if you'll forgive me, it was first one was dirty underwear.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: God told me, believe it or not, he told me to go buy a pair of the most expensive underwear there was the priest's underwear, linen underwear of the high priest and so forth.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: He told me to put to buy those and to and to wear those and to not take them off.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: So I did that.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: And initially it it was really nice, but but then it it got bad.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: And um and then God told me, okay, that's enough.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: Now take them off, and I want you to go all the way east to the river Euphrates on the border of Babylon, and I want you to bury them under a rock.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: Really?
28:11
SPEAKER_00: So I did that.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: Took that long trip, buried them under a rock.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: Went back home.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: A few months later, right out of the blue, God says to me, Okay, Jeremiah, I want you to go back to the river Euphrates, I want you to lift up the rock, I want you to get the underwear.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: So I did.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh, oh, they were so bad.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: They were filthy.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: God said, I want you to walk through Jerusalem and hold the underwear.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: So I did.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: And people, people just, I mean, even people from my hometown said, Jeremiah, stop this.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: This has gone way too far.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: And and and then people gathered around and they said, What are you doing?
29:01
SPEAKER_00: And God told me to say this.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: He said, Listen, you are to me a kingdom of priests.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: You are to me priceless and precious.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: I've chosen you to be close to me.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: But you've turned evil, you've turned dirty, you've turned filthy, and so I'm going to send you to Babylon.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to put you in jail.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to put you under a rock there for a while.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: People just stared at me.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: I I don't, you know, sometimes I don't think people understand how much how much God loves them, how precious they are to God, how God wants his people to be close to him, as close as you can imagine and intimate.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think people understand either how even their petty sins are filthy in God's eyes and how how bad they are to him.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: And certainly the people that I was speaking to didn't catch on at all.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: So God gave me another object lesson.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: He told me I could drop the uh dirty underwear, but then he said, I want you to pick up a cattle yoke and I want you to wear it.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: So I did.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: I put a cattle yoke on my shoulders, and he said, I want you to walk through the streets of Jerusalem.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: So I did.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: And after I keep turning, and people go to the other side of the street, they were angry because I would had to keep dodging the yoke, and and and and uh and finally they gather around and said, Stop, stop, what what is this?
30:48
SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
30:49
SPEAKER_00: And and God told me to say, because you've sinned like dirty underwear, therefore I'm gonna bring the yoke of Babylon upon you.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: And I want you like cattle to submit to the yoke.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: I want you to give in.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: I want you to open the gates, I want you to let them in, I want you to go to captivity willingly, I want you to take the yoke.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: People were horrified.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Treason, they said, You're so unpatriotic, and I sympathized with them.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Which of you would want to be the most unpatriotic person in your country?
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Which of you would want to be accused of treason, of saying, just give in to the enemy?
31:34
SPEAKER_00: I loved my country.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: Don't fight for it.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that God had a point.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: If you start living like an animal, then you ought to accept the yoke of an animal, and you ought to realize that sin has its wages, and there's a penalty to be paid, and that sin inevitably leads to judgment.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: But I have to tell you, I was so happy when God gave me a new object lesson that was positive, two-thirds negative, one-third positive.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: He he told me to go down to a potter's house, you know, where they where they make clay pots.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: We were proud of our pots, we're proud of our potters.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: They did such a good job fashioning those things.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: By this time, I had a crowd around me, and I walked down to the potter's house and I watched, and the pot and the potter got a lump of clay, and just in the amazing way they do.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: He put he started turning the wheel, he put the clay onto the wheel, and he fashioned a pot, but something happened in the pot, and it was a break, and it sort of warped, and it was bent.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know what the potter did?
32:47
SPEAKER_00: He he shoved the whole thing down, he destroyed it, he he he made a whole new lump out of it, and he put it back on, and then he fashioned a beautiful pot.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: And God gave me the words I pointed and I said, That's it.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: God is the potter, and you are the clay, and we all are the work of his hands.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand God's not surprised that you're broken, that you're sinful, that you're sick, that you're warped?
33:12
SPEAKER_00: He's going to destroy you, but that doesn't mean God's given up on you.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: God's going to tear you down and he's going to destroy us so that he can remake us.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: And on the other side of judgment comes revival, comes renewal.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: What a message.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, they didn't listen.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: And everything that I had predicted happened.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: The Lion of Babylon came.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: People of Jerusalem fought.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: But it was useless.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: They broke down the walls, and because they had resisted rather than giving in, Babylonians slaughtered thousands of us, men and women and children, and they completely destroyed the city, knocked down all the walls, took people, forced the yoke down on their heads, you might say, and took them off to Babylon.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: You might think I was I was happy that it that it all came true, but I wasn't.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: I've sat on a hill outside Jerusalem.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: Babylonians let me live.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: I sat there and I wept.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: It was the darkest day of my entire life.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: And I wept.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: I wrote a poem about it.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: I wrote a book about it.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's God put it in the Bible called the Book of Lamentations.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Saddest, saddest book ever.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: Sin inevitably leads to judgment.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Judgment can lead to revival.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't around to see it, but seven years later that's what happened.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: My people were released and they came back home.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: But as for me, thinking back on my life, my career, it feels like a complete failure.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: People hated my message, especially the message of treason, the message to give in.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: No wonder they persecuted me.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: I can't count the number of times I was shoved, beaten, flogged, thrown in prison.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: And finally buried alive.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Can't move.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: Dying of thirst, hunger.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Crying out, God, you lied to me.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm done with you.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm done with it all.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: And of course, God wasn't done with me.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: He sent a black man, an Ethiopian, uh, who had influence in the court.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: Ebed Melech.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: He he sent him and he went into the palace of King Zedekiah, who hated me.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: But he had influence with the king, and he talked him into getting letting him pull me out of there.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And so Ebed Melech and some other men, they they lifted off the top, and the light shone through, and they had tied together all these rags and dropped them down.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: I could so weak I could hardly get them around my armpits, and then they lifted me up.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: I had said, God, please kill me.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: Just kill me, just kill me.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: I wish I had never been born.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be rescued.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: But I was.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: And I went back to serving God, but I was, I have to admit, I was I was worn out.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: Completely worn.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Still am just tired.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't uh even thinking back, I don't I don't understand why God chose me.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm not the right personality to be a prophet.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: I didn't often stand on higher ground.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: I never soared with the eagles, but still God chose me, Jeremiah Hilchias, and just an ordinary ugly lump of clay.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: Chose me to be his mouthpiece.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: To use me.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: Nor do I understand why he put that my book in the Bible or why he told me to come here today.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Maybe maybe it just to prove to someone here that God will use any ordinary lump of clay if they're willing.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: Maybe, or maybe you're you're a sobra, maybe you seem prickly on the outside, but on the inside, God wants you to know as long as you stay soft on the inside, that's okay.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: Maybe, or maybe it's just that you're somewhere on the sin and judgment and renewal thing that God wants you to understand that sin has to lead to judgment and hard times.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: But judgment and hard times can lead to renewal and good times.
39:20
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's just that you're worn out, like I am.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: Worn out with trying to do as good as you can and it never seeming to be good enough, or worn out with feeling all alone, or worn out from being at the bottom of a dark pit.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: And if and if that's if that's true, then I'm I'm glad I came.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
40:47
SPEAKER_02: To keep on breaching my change.
40:55
SPEAKER_02: Let my heart feel my soul feels crushed by the weight of Jesus.
41:06
SPEAKER_02: I know that you can give me all that inside to lift my eyes up.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: I've just wanted I know that you can give me all that I have.
42:28
SPEAKER_02: Let me see.