More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No one can assess my significance by looking at the work that I do. No one can determine my worth by deciding the salary they will pay me. No one can know what is going on in my mind by examining my school transcripts. No one can know me by measuring me or weighing me or analyzing me. Call my name.
in relationship—with God. It was the Jeremiah “to whom the word of the LORD came” who realized his authentic and eternal being.
electrical interchanges going on in each of us this very moment. There are intricate moral decisions and spiritual transactions taking place. What are we becoming? Less or more?
don’t yet see the results of what we are becoming, but we know the goal, to be like Christ, or, in Paul’s words, to arrive at being “fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ” (Eph 4:13). We do not deteriorate. We do not disintegrate. We become.
child is just a child. Each is a creature in whom God intends to do something glorious and great. No one is only a product of the genes contributed by parents. Who we are and will be is compounded with who God is and what he does. God’s love and providence and salvation are comprised in the reality of our existence along with our metabolism and blood type and fingerprints.
The now is only a thin slice of who I am; isolated from the rich deposits of before, it cannot be understood.
Instead of being told what Jeremiah’s parents were doing, we are told what his God was doing: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: A prophet to the nations—that’s what I had in mind for you” (Jer 1:5).
The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use
Jeremiah’s life didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s salvation didn’t start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s truth didn’t start with Jeremiah. He entered the world in which the essential parts of his existence were already ancient history. So do we.
God is more patient. He puts up with our interruptions; he backtracks and fills us in on the old stories; he repeats the vital information. But how much better it is if we take the time to get the drift of things, to find out where we fit.
What is God doing? He is saving; he is rescuing; he is blessing; he is providing; he is judging; he is healing; he is enlightening. There is a spiritual war in progress, an all-out moral battle. There is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. There is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. God is in continuous and energetic battle against all of it. God is for life and against death. God is for love and against hate. God is for hope and against despair. God is for heaven and against hell. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square foot of space is contested.
...more
That is God’s way. He did it with his own son, Jesus. He gave him away. He gave him to the nations. He did not keep him on display. He did not preserve him in a museum. He did not show him off as a trophy. “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life” (Jn 3:16).
Some things we have a choice in, some we don’t. In this we don’t. It is the kind of world into which we were born. God created it. God sustains it. Giving is the style of the universe. Giving is woven into the fabric of existence. If we try to live by getting instead of giving, we are going against the grain.
is like trying to go against the law of gravity—the consequence is bruises and broken bones. In fact, we do see a lot of distorted, misshapen, crippled lives among those who defy the reality that all life is
We don’t think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace.
But the most important things are what God did before I was conceived, before I was born. He knew me, therefore I am no accident; he chose me, therefore I cannot be a zero; he gave me, therefore I must not be a consumer.
We are so used to considering everything through the prism of our current feelings and our most recent acquisitions that it is a radical change to consider the vast before. But if we would live well, it is necessary. Otherwise we live feebly and gropingly, blind to the glory that we are known, chosen and given away by God.
prophet is obsessed with God, and a prophet is immersed in the now. God is as real to a prophet as his next-door neighbor, and his next-door neighbor is a vortex in which God’s purposes are being worked out.
“The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out” (Jer 17:9).
The great paradox of judgment is that evil becomes fuel in the furnace of salvation.
A people’s lives are only as good as their worship. The temple in Jerusalem was the architectural evidence of the importance of God in the life of the people. All the lines of life crisscrossed in the temple. Meaning was established there. Values were created
Josiah’s ears the reading was “a thunderclap of conscience.”4
called the “convulsive little ego.”
of acquiring the discipline to live with integrity, of realizing how God loves and of learning how to love God in return.
The reform was necessary, but it was not enough. For religion is not a matter of arrangements or places or words, but of life and love, of mercy and obedience, of persons in a passion of faith.
Their religious performance was impeccable; their everyday life was rotten.
is not enough to be in the right place; it is not enough to say the right words; it is never enough until we are walking with God twenty-four hours a day everywhere we go, with everything we say an expression of love and faith.
The artist shows us what happens before it happens. The artist has eyes to connect the visible and the invisible and the skill to show us complete what we in our inattentive distraction see only in bits and pieces. So I look at that portrait, then look into the mirror and compare.
great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole—not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out
...more
Pottery is artistically shaped, designed, painted, glazed, fired. It is one of the most functional items in life; it is also one of the most beautiful.
Each human being is an inseparable union of necessity and freedom.
The dust out of which we are made and the image of God into which we are made are one and the same.
“Storms are the triumph of his art.”3
yotzer,
Jeremiah preaches to the people what he has lived himself.
The life of faith is very physical. Being a Christian is very much a matter of the flesh—of space and time and things. It means being thrown on the potter’s wheel and shaped, our entire selves, into something useful and beautiful. And when we are not useful or beautiful we are reshaped. Painful, but worth it.
Heiddeger’s
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo . . . the result would not be to
...more
sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.2
One way is the way of enhancing what I want; the other way is a commitment of myself to become what God wants. Always and everywhere these contrasting expectations are in evidence. They are conspicuous in the experience of Jeremiah and collide in a noisy and dramatic confrontation one day in Jerusalem.
We must learn to live by the truth, not by our feelings, not by the world’s opinion, not by what the latest statistical survey tells us is the accepted morality, not by what the advertisers tell us is the most gratifying lifestyle. We are trained in the biblical faith to take lightly what
will have to expose the life of self-centeredness and proclaim the truth of God-centeredness.
said what he had said so many times, that a reform is useless if it does not change people’s lives. It is no good polishing up the brass in the temple if the quality of people’s lives is left unattended in their poverty. It is no good
didn’t like any of it, but he wasn’t afraid of it because the most important thing in his life was God—not comfort, not applause, not security, but the living God.
What a waste it would be to take these short, precious, eternity-charged years that we are given and squander them in cocktail chatter when we can be, like Jeremiah, vehemently human and passionate with God.
cellar reality of Jeremiah’s towering humanity is prayer.
God is not an idea to be studied.
Prayer is personal language raised to the highest degree. These seven confessional passages show Jeremiah in his unguarded and most personal times saying I and Thou.
But Jeremiah at prayer is scared, lonely, hurt and angry.
He is speaking to God what he is experiencing. It is clear that he neither accepted it nor liked it: “God, you got me into this, now get me out!” He continues by contrasting his own sense of urgency with God’s deliberate patience.
