“Yet I planted you a choice vine,A completely faithful seed. How then have you turned yourself before MeInto the degenerate shoots of a foreign vine? “Although you wash yourself with lye And use much soap, The stain of your iniquity is before Me,” declares the Lord GOD.” — Jeremiah 2:21-22 NASB
These verses should blow legalism out of the water, especially verse 22. You can wash yourself and wash yourself all you want to. You try and try with everything you have to rid yourself of these bad habits. You know they’re sinful deeds. You know God hates them. You know the Bible says these things are wrong in God’s eyes. I don’t know what sin you’re struggling with, that’s between you and God.
God has chosen you. If you are a Christian, you’ve been redeemed and forgiven, you have an eternal home in heaven when your physical human life comes to its end, than you can rest assured God has chosen you and He will never let you go.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,”— Ephesians 1:3-5 NASB
“What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened;”— Romans 11:7 NASB
Verse 21 of our passage states that God had a plan for you when He created you in your mother’s womb. His plan was already in motion before you were born or even conceived. He chose you and me to be faithful Christians. BUT we screw it up. Now, I’ll make this clear, we are not powerful enough to totally ruin God’s plan at any point in our lives. If we were that powerful, that would make us gods in our own right, and we are not.
There are preachers out there who believe we are gods, notice the little “g”. They’re wrong. I’ll point out one preacher and only one of his many fallacies and even heresies. Joel Osteen, from Houston, preaches on Zacharias in Luke 1, cautioning his congregation to be careful with their words. Sounds good so far? Pay attention. It gets bad real fast. Joel Osteen told his people that God shut the mouth of Zacharias out of fear that Zacharias’s negative words might ruin God’s plan for the world.
I’m sorry, no. That’s not what Luke 1 says. It’s clear that God, thru His angel, chose to shut Zacharias’s mouth as a form of discipline for not believing God and taking Him at His word. (Luke 1:19-20)
We do not now have, we never have had, and we never will have the power to ruin and derail God’s plans for our lives. God is the Almighty, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient, the All-powerful, the All-wise God. His plan is perfect and cannot be ruined by us. Yet God still hates it when we sin, when we indulge in sinful activities. He hates it even worse when we habitually go back to that thing we know is sin.
The second half of verse 21 is a strong and even accusing question, which God has the right to ask us. After all, as Christians, we are His. “Why? Why are you screwing up? Why do you keep feeding your time and energy into things you know I don’t approve of?”
I’ll say it again, “God still hates it when we sin, when we indulge in sinful activities. He hates it even worse when we habitually go back to that thing we know is sin.” How do I know that?
“Like a dog that returns to its vomitIs a fool who repeats his folly.” — Proverbs 26:11 NASB
When the Christian goes back to his old sinful habits, repeatedly goes back again and again and again, when his addiction to this sin gets the better of him on a regular basis, God views that the same way we view a dog going back to his puke.
We look at the dog like he’s an idiot. “You just chucked that up and spit it out. It’s disgusting, and you’re gonna go eat it again? There’s no nutrition in there for you!”
God, in a sense, says the same thing to us. “You just repented of that and got it out of your system, and you’re gonna go back and consume it again? There’s nothing good for you in there.”
You see the resemblance?
Now, I don’t claim to be perfect. Far from it. God is sanctifying me and convicting me as I write this. I’m in the same boat with you. And I pray that God makes me and you, reader, much more humble to God’s leading, and then much more steadfast in resisting the devil’s temptations.
“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:5-7 NASB
While verse 9 of 1 John 1 is very important and necessary in being sanctified and cleansed from sins, but that’s something we all know and understand. We get that. I don’t think I need to preach on that, at least not right here. We understand “Confess our sins and God will forgive them.” We get that. We know that. At least I hope you do.
But that’s just the beginning of the process. After you confess, you need to “Walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light…” — 1 John 1:7a NASB
OK. What does that look like? Look at verse 6. “…we have fellowship with Him…”. Walking and living in the Light of God is the same as having regular fellowship with God. To put it in layman’s terms, are you happy and excited to go to church on Sunday, or is it just tradition? Are you excited to read and study your Bible, or is it a chore and a drag? Is the reason for your smile as big as God’s love for you, or are you happy simply because the car in front of you paid for your Dunkin coffee? Maybe that didn’t happen, but you get the picture. Walk and live in the light and joy of the LORD. Fellowship with your God and Savior.
What happens when we walk in the Light of God? Look at the end of verse 7. “…the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Look back up at our passage in Jeremiah 2. God takes sin seriously. Do you understand that? Do you believe that? He says it is. “The stain of your iniquity is before Me,” declares the Lord GOD.”
God is telling you, *I hate this!” He’s telling me, “I hate this!” We need to see sin the way that God sees sin. We need to hate sin the same way that God hates sin.
There’s the hymn we all know and love, written in 1922 by Helen Howarth Lemmel. The chorus really hits this point home.
“Turn your eyes upon Jesus, / Look full in His wonderful face, / And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, / In the light of His glory and grace.”
0 Comments