Let's return to biblical character we met earlier in this book. Jeremiah was a prophet used by God during some of the most difficult times in Israel's history the last days of the kingdom of Judah.
Read (Jeremiah1:1-4). "Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, " Jeremiah has pick up his pen and begun writing the Scripture. I don't think he had any idea that fifty-two of the chapters in the Bible would be entrusted to him. Jeremiah was fit to guide
' writing so that it became an inspired part of the canon of Scripture. So he records "The word of the Lord came to me saying..." (Jeremiah 1:5). God tells Jeremiah that He had set him apart as a prophet before he was even born. God knew him a before he was born. God consecrated him a prophet to the nations. God's predetermined plan is fixed. Before we were even conceived in our mothers' wombs, God's plans for us had been put into place. In his book Run with the Horses, Eugene Peterson has some marvelous insights regarding this ancient scene. In the chapter titled "Before," he points out several splendid observation: Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." This turns everything we ever thought about God around...
We enter a world we didn't create. We grow into life already provided for us... If we are going to live appropriate, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God...
Jeremiah's life didn't start with Jeremiah, Jeremiah's salvation didn't start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah truth didn't start Jeremiah. He entered the world in which essential parts of his existence were already ancient history. So do we. "I knew you."..
The second item of background information provided on Jeremiah is this: "Before you born, I consecrated you." Consecrated means "set apart for God's side." It means that the human is not cogwheel, that person is not the keyboard of a piano on which circumstances play hit-parade tunes. It means we are chosen out of the feckless stream of circumstantiality for something important that God is doing. What is God doing? He is saving He is rescuing; He is blessing; He is providing He is judging; He healing; He enlightening. And there is a spiritual war in process, an all-out moral battle. There is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. Thete is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. But 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. Tvere is no neutral ground in tve universe. Every square foot of space us contested. Jeremiah, before he was born, was enlisted on God's side in this war. God did a third thing to Jeremiah before Jeremiah did anything on his own: "I appointed you a prophet to the nation." The word "appointed" is, literally, "gave" I "gave" you as a prophet to the natiins, God gives. He's generous. He is lavishly generous. Before Jeremiah ever got it together he was given away. That is God's way. He did it with his own Son, Jesus. God so loved the world yhat He gave..."
Some things we have a choice in, some we don't. In this we don't. It's the kind of world into which we were born. God created it. God sustain it. Giving is the style of the universe. Giving is woven into the fabric of existence...
Jeremiah could have hung on to the dead-end street where he was born in Anathoth. He could have huddle in the security of his father's priesthood. He could have conformed to the dull habits of his culture. He didn't. He participted in the giving, throwing himself into his appointment.
That is what I want for you! Wherever God's will kead you, and whatever He may call you to do, whenever He requires you to live, whatever must be given up, and whatever must be taken on, Do IT!
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