Jeremiah 18-21
*Click here to read this passage:
Once again we’re seeing what a tough
calling Jeremiah had been given by God.
By spreading God’s message, He got beat and ridiculed. He received no recognition, no honor
for what he was doing. He
struggled. Yet, at the same time,
he knew of God’s faithfulness.
He said things like, “Cursed be the day I
was born!” But in the same breath
he said, “Give praise to the Lord!
He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.” He said, “Why did I ever come out of
the womb to see trouble and sorrow…?”
But he also said, “Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not
consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my
experiences attending the Global Leadership Summit because I just signed up to
attend again this year. It was my
first year attending in 2011 when Bill Hybels spoke about tough callings and
used Jeremiah chapters 19-20 as his text.
He spoke of how there were serious conditions in the world of Jeremiah’s
time, and how God called him, prepared him, and used him in a specific way. He challenged us to listen for God’s
calling on our lives and how He wants to use us for the serious conditions that
our world is in today.
In his session notes Hybels wrote, “I
wonder if people understand how precious callings really are. How much thought God goes through
before He taps a person on the shoulder and says, ‘Here’s an assignment. I’ve
crafted it for you. It might be a
difficult one but I want you to do it.
I’m going to grow you up through it and I want you to be faithful to it.’ I fear that people take these callings
far too lightly, and they bail far too quickly.”
At the end of that session each person
was given a broken piece of a clay pot (like the clay pot God had Jeremiah
break to send a message to His people) and we were asked to be silent before
God and to write down on that broken piece what we were hearing from the
Lord. At first I didn’t feel like
I had anything to write down – I wasn’t really hearing anything from the
Lord. But then as time was coming
to an end, I knew what I was supposed to write, and I knew what God was calling
me to. I had felt this certain
calling before but had ignored it, pushed it aside, questioned it, etc. The words on my broken piece of clay
pot were: No more excuses. I had a
feeling that God was probably speaking to my husband too, and later I found out
that written on his was: Stop Running.
There are still questions as to the exact
‘when’ and ‘how’ to the big picture of God’s calling for our family. And that can be scary. But that was the day when I said, okay,
I’m in – no matter what.
And Great is His faithfulness.
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