I was reading through Jeremiah again today, as I am studying that book right now. The entire first section of the book is dealing with Israel and Judah’s turning away from God towards false gods, stone and wood…they choose to worship the created over the creator. To put it lightly, God is furious with them, and He uses all kinds of analogies to describe Israel and Judah in their sin.

This verse stood out to me today: Jeremiah 5:21-23

Listen, you foolish and senseless people, with eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear. Have you no respect for me? Why don’t you tremble in my presence? I, the Lord, define the ocean’s sandy shoreline as an everlasting boundary that the waters cannot cross. The waves may toss and roar, but they can never pass the boundaries I set. But my people have stubborn and rebellious hearts. They have turned away and abandoned me.

If I look at my own life I have to wonder how many times I take my eyes off of God and put them on something else? God tells me I am foolish for doing so! He declares how Big and Powerful He is in this verse, “…I, the Lord, define the ocean’s sandy shoreline as an everlasting boundary that the waters cannot cross. The waves may toss and roar, but they can never pass the boundaries that I set.” God is saying, “look I control the oceans!” Maybe Christians should go take a field trip to the beach and see who can stop the waves and who can control how far they come ashore. We cannot do it, yet everyday Christians and the church take our eyes off of God and we put them on things that God created versus on Him, the One that created all things, or we put them on ourselves as if we can control our life and what takes place around us.

I wonder how many of us are like Israel and Judah? Does God look at us and say, “Oh people with eyes who cannot see and ears that cannot hear?” Maybe today you should take a minute to examine what you are looking at…is it everything except God? Or is your focus on the one that controls the oceans?

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I was reading through Jeremiah 3 today and came across verse 12…this verse stuck out to me because it shows just how merciful the God that we serve is. Once again Israel has given itself over to the worship of other gods, the true and living God compares Israel to an adultress wife (or a camel in heat in chapter 2), but God calls out to Israel with open arms…

“…O Israel, my faithless people,
come home to me again,
for I am merciful.
I will not be angry with you forever.”

The cool thing is, no matter how much we mess up, God is willing to take us back with open arms as well. He forgave us at His death, knowing that we would still screw up…a lot! Yet he still gave us the opportunity to be a part of his family and he still gives us mercy when we need it.

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I just started studying Jeremiah…here is section of scripture that stood out to me this morning:

Jeremiah 2:23-25
You say, ‘That’not true!
I haven’t worshiped the images of Baal!’
But how can you say that?
Go and look in any valley in the land!
Face the awful sins you have done.
You are like a restless female camel
desperately searching for a mate.
You are like a wild donkey,
sniffing the wind at mating time.
Who can restrain her lust?
Those who desire her don’t need to search,
for she goes running to them!
When will you stop running?
When will you stop panting after other gods?
But you say, ‘Save your breath.
I’m in love with these foreign gods,
and I can’t stop loving them now!’

Most of us would strongly deny that we worship anything but God, yet if we take an inventory of our life and we take a serious look at where we spend our time and what we spend it doing we would see that we allow other ‘idols’ to get the attention that our God should be receiving. Maybe that idol is money…not necessarily that you have a lot of it, but the opposite, you feel like you don’t have enough, so you spend your time worrying about how the bills are going to get paid, how you are going to get out of the deep debt you are in, or you spend all of your free time working extra jobs to make up that which you lack, all the while the very one who provides everything to us, goes without notice, He gets ignored, and we wonder why our lives are a total wreck. It could be loneliness; we seek out anything that will give us a temporary fix, something that will make us feel accepted and valued just for a little while…yet the God of all creation…the one who created us to love us and to care for us, and to make us a part of His family gets put to the side, yet we never fill that void because we ignore the only one that has the power to fill it.

I love how the verse describes Israel’s desire to seek after and worship other gods as an animal seeks to mate when it is in heat. Are we not the same way? Do we not seek after pleasures in our own lives, anything to fill the void of loneliness, anything to fill the time? The fact is we are just like Israel was in the time that Jeremiah went to send them God’s message…we love our pleasures, we love our stuff, we love and we worship everything besides our glorious God, we exchange it for worthless idols! We are nothing more than animals in heat seeking our next partner. What would happen if those who call themselves Christians would love God first? What would happen if we decided to love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our minds?

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