Back when I was in seminary doing chaplain work at The Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, I got to be the harbinger of bad news late one night. A young man 15 years of age was brought into the ER. He had been shot in the heart. Per protocol, the ER paged myself and the other chaplain intern to come down. We arrived to the harsh sound of the ER Chief Attending loudly barking about this and that. He was a gruff man in his late 50’s exhibiting little patience. We rounded the corner into the ER just as he began to bark for us, “Where’s my chaplain? I want that chaplain here right now!” “Present, Sir!” “I want you right now to go tell that family that things are not going well. Prepare them for the worst.” I was told that medical staff should do that as to be able to answer medical questions, but the barker was too intimidating to argue with. Off we went.
We met the young man’s grandfather and uncle in the ER family room. The grandfather was a retired Pentecostal minister. We told them that things were not going well and that the doctors were doing everything they could but it doesn’t look good. The old man looked shocked and immediately fell on his face on the couch praying in tongues. We sat with them and occasionally he would rise up and compose himself. They recounted the events of earlier in the evening. His grandson lived with them and had just left to go to a friend’s house. He would start crying and then back to the couch he went. That kept up a little over an hour until a resident, not the Attending who couldn’t be bothered, came to tell them the young man had died. We prayed with them and walked out of the family room into the main waiting room which was now full of the young man’s friends. In a voice, similar to the sound of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he said to them, “There will be no retaliation, No retaliation! The dying stops now!”
That was the closest I’ve come to having a “Jeremiah experience”. God called Jeremiah to be the harbinger of bad news to Jerusalem and the people of Judah. Jerusalem and the entire nation of Judah. They fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Jeremiah was one of the prophets God sent to tell his people that disaster was surely coming and why and the why was that they deserved it. The Babylonians were going to destroy them and their city completely and the only chance they had to escape with their lives was to surrender without a fight and go into captivity and in 70 years they would return to rebuild. God wanted Jeremiah to make it plain to this people that it was God, the God of their ancestors, who was doing this and it was because they had blatantly made themselves to be no longer his people.
Their crime? They were worshiping other gods to the extent that their leaders and leading citizens were practicing child sacrifice. They worshiped wealth to the extent of abusing and enslaving their poor. The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. The Israelites were just like all the other nations around them. There was nothing to distinguish them as God’s people other than the temple in Jerusalem. Even there, their sacrifices they offered were just a show of hypocrisy. God’s only recourse was to destroy them as a nation and kick them off the land he had promised their ancestors. In exile, he would prune away how they had perverted their faith. Then, he would once again teach them how to trust his steadfast love by promising to bring them back to rebuild and keeping that promise.
Well, the people didn’t respond to the bad news like my Pentecostal grandfather friend – with prayer and repentance. Instead of believing Jeremiah and returning to God, they accused him of treason, persecuted him, jailed him, and even threw him into a muddy cistern where they left him to die. Had it not been for one of the king's eunuchs being a man of faith and pulling him out, Jeremiah would have died in that cistern. But Jeremiah’s story gets bleaker. If you read his writings, you will realize that he suffered from what we would call clinical depression. I can’t imagine having to be the harbinger of such bad, hopeless news and being treated the way he was while being in the emotional muddy cistern of depression.
Jeremiah was a prophet of the heart. Paying attention to how he directed his heart is how he dealt with his depression. He made it quite clear to God’s people that letting your heart turn away from trusting in the LORD only fills one’s life with a desert-like barrenness and, in their actual case, the reality of having their actual land trampled and reduced to a wasteland by the armies of Babylon. This turning away of the heart to trust in something other than God and his steadfast love makes one unable even to see when relief comes. There’s nothing worse than for your life to go dry in its pursuits to attain what your heart thinks it needs to be happy only to have relief come and not be able to see it because you simply haven’t got a clue of what God is doing in your life. Jeremiah tells us that following the heart is like being a shrub in a desert. The heart is devious above all else. For decades they had been turning away. God had tried to call them back by a number of prophets, but they wouldn’t listen.
Jeremiah warns that there is a cost that comes with following the heart into pursuing what it thinks will make us happy as opposed to remaining faithful to God so that God can give us what truly gives joy – a relationship with God. The cost is that even though you have everything your heart desires, you still feel unfulfilled and you’ve no idea of where to turn for relief from that nagging discontent and so you medicate the malaise in your heart with more stuff or with substances or with looking for love in all the wrong places or just sitting in your little castle on your recliner throne of cynical bitterness like an angry little god condemning the stupidity of the idiots who surround you and pondering how you might get more stuff. If you can realize it, that’s what happens to the heart when we make trying to follow it our source of happiness rather than disciplining it to follow God which requires we abandon our hearts and its desires.
Jeremiah presents us with an alternative to following the heart. It is to trust in the LORD. He writes, "But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the Lord. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." To trust in the steadfast love of God who leads your life according to the hope of a promise means a life of growth, a wellspring of confidence and joy – the wellspring of God living in us. Jeremiah says the Lord is our trust. God’s very presence in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the root of faith. Without it we don’t know what or who we’re trusting.
Our hearts are deceptive and will be that way until they are firmly rooted in the heart of God. Faith recognizes that we all have needs and desires. That is the way God created us but those needs and desires will mislead us and leave us unfulfilled if we seek those desires for the sake of themselves. The way past the heart problem that we have is what I call abandoning the heart to follow God's promise to give us what we really need. In that following, God will recreate, renew, and even redirect our heart so that it wants and desires rightly. We all have need of and desire for companionship, meaningful work, material comfort, and so forth and God promises to provide these things. We’ve no need to doubt or to be afraid of lacking them. The problem is that if we pursue them apart from God’s leading, we fall back into relying on our own strength and in turn heading towards the arid wasteland that Jeremiah spoke about.
The first step of abandoning the heart is letting go and leaving things in God’s hand. Be warned, for to learn how to let go usually requires going through some difficult times. But as you come through those difficult times you realize God’s purpose in it, that he was recreating your heart to desire rightly. Along with letting go, begin to spend time with God. Sit with God reading the Scriptures daily. Pray and express your needs even to the extent of saying “God I’m mad as hell at you for not meeting my needs.” You need to get that out of your system and saying it is about the only healthy way of doing that. It will pass as God begins to reveal himself to you.
Along with letting go, focus on God’s presence and trying to see God's work in your life rather than on the pain or the void brought about by the need you're leaving behind. This is most important. Spend time with God wanting to know him. Ask God to give you himself. God uses the hurt-filled times in our lives to build a relationship with us. To create in us a sense of his presence with us. It is his presence in us that cures the heart problem.
As we draw closer to God, we will find that some needs and desires become more acute while others fade and go away. When God determines we are firmly rooted in the knowledge of how much he loves us, he will start prompting us to ask and even to ask for certain things even if it seems impossible. He will even make known to us what he’s doing for us. The closer God brings you to himself and the more you strive to get close to God, the more you find that the entirety of this creation is held together by God’s love for it and when you begin to see that you’ll know what Jesus meant when he said nothing is impossible with God. Let God give you a new heart. Don’t waste your life pursuing property in the desert. Go riverfront on the river of life. Everything else will come in God’s time, according to his promise. It really will. Amen.
