Love The Lord Thy God                                                        3/24/46

 

Scripture:  Jeremiah 13: 1-17a

 

Text:  Jeremiah 13: 16a;  “Give glory to the Lord your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains.”

 

The prophets of the Old Testament should be read with an understanding of the times in which they lived.  For they spoke to their people, in their time, of the needs and sins and dangers of those people.

 

The prophet Jeremiah lived over 600 years before the time of Christ.  He came of a priestly family and was himself educated in that tradition.  But he became more than just one who administered the affairs of the temple.  He developed a keen sense of the evil forboding that hung over a people grown careless, and he felt called to prophesy, to speak out, about it.

 

He lived at a time when the Jews had their own country, their government and their own king.  He saw the reign of four Hebrew kings, the last one being overthrown and taken into captivity by the Babylonians.  For years he had seen the strengthening of a potential enemy and the frightful moral softening of his own-people-grown-careless.  And he lived to taste the bitter result of that moral carelessness with the rest of them.

 

After illustrating the point he wanted to make, with his description of a girdle, or sash, grown rotten while buried near the river, Jeremiah tried to get the people to see that their moral fiber was weakening in just such a fashion through being buried and unused.

 

At length he says:  “Give glory to the Lord your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains.”  This is the way his words were translated into the English of the King James version of the Holy Bible.  A more recent translation puts his exhortation this way:  “Do honor to the Eternal before the darkness falls, before your footsteps stumble on the twilight hills.”

 

Of course the thing that makes such a prophet as Jeremiah timeless, and his writings an authentic part of the Holy Scriptures is that his kind of speech is not alone to the people of his day and nation, but also applies in spirit to other days and all times - to our day, now in 1946.

 

There is a pressing immediacy in the writings of the prophets.  They are constantly haunted by the urgency of a right decision before it is too late.  Sometimes the listeners have heeded the prophets and turned in their way before time has run out.  Often, however, history records the tragedy that the prophetic voice has fallen on deaf ears while people went on in their self-concerned old ways until disaster at length overcame them.

 

The prophets all lived in times of strain and danger.  Often some impending doom hung over their people like a stormy sky.  But always they pointed the way to a fairer scene, provided that the people should repent and recognize that God is at the center of their scene.

 

Like most Orientals of that day, and this, Jeremiah used many a figure of speech to throw the light on what he wanted to teach.  He has just finished a telling point on what has happened to the spirit of a people that buried and neglected their spiritual responsibility like a linen girdle.  Then he uses another figure of speech.

 

See the traveler journeying on foot for a long way.  During the daytime he is sure-footed and confident.  But the day is not long enough for completion of his trip and he is still on the way when twilight, and then night, falls.  In the darkness the rocks and crevices which he might have avoided during the day are a menace.  He needs a guide, who is familiar with each step of the way, to warn him of each dangerous spot of the wilderness trail.  He stumbles and falls; picks himself up again and goes on; is tripped again; and again rises to go on, bruised, alone, discouraged and fearful.

 

Now life for his whole nation of people is like that, says the prophet.  And in speaking to the people of his nation, he speaks to ours and to us.  We are traveling a road with many a rough spot, and with some dangers that are new in the experience of mankind.  While it is day, we are confident, even cheerful.  But for every man, and every nation, there come shadows of calamity, and the darkness of adversity.  Then how shall we find our way in safety?  There is one Eternal Guide, known to us, and knowing us, by whose guiding presence we can move with confidence to our destination.  The journey is so much better, during the hours of darkness, if we have become well acquainted with the Guide before darkness falls.

 

“Do honor to the Eternal before the darkness falls, before your footsteps stumble on the twilight hills.”  Moses had recorded, generations earlier, the same thing as the first commandment of God to man: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart --- mind --- soul, and --- strength.”  And Jesus repeated it and emphasized it more than 600 years later.

 

There is nothing more important than this “first” of spiritual existence.  “Love the Lord thy God.”  Know him; become familiar with his presence; get into the way of living each act in that presence; become familiar with the dependability of the Eternal and His rightness.  It makes a great difference in the daytime; it changes the times of darkness tremendously.

 

The words of the prophet, Jeremiah, are an admonition to young people to develop a sense of reverence and honor for God during their early years, so that when the perplexities and frustrations of maturity and the shadows of age shall fall on their lives - as they surely do to all of us - they will have with them that abiding source of strength which God can provide.

 

To a company of English school boys, Kipling once said that “every man is just sixteen years old in a pinch.”  By that, he probably meant that in a moral emergency the attitudes and ideas which a youth has made habitual, before he is sixteen, will determine how he acts in a pinch. ...  Not always necessarily true, I should say, but nevertheless rather highly probable.  Not often, except in the movies, and in the fictions from which movies grow, are there sudden whole reversals of character.  In the main, the lines laid down early, hold on in later living.  If the traveler is not to stumble on the twilight hills, it is usually because he has learned, in the years before his majority, a consciousness of God’s demands on life and a knowledge of His presence.  If he hasn’t learned it in youth it takes a radical conversion of his life to wrench him loose and set him in a new direction.

 

The young people who attend our church services of worship are a constant source of inspiration to us all - and the more faithful their attendance and attention, the more confident I feel of their future years.  The recognition of their need for God, the reverence shown in worship, the fellowship they have with those farther along the road -- these will likely become a lasting part, and the better part, of each of them.  Our hope and concern for the welfare of future years rest with these boys and girls, these young men and young women.

 

The attendance at church of the young men who have been away at war is an inspiration.  Now and then someone plaintively poses the question, “Why do not more ex-servicemen return to the church, and with greater regularity?”  One answer is that some were, unhappily, never “regular” before they went away in the national service; and in that respect have changed little.  A minister of a neighboring church [in my state] suggests, on this score, that we recognize that the years between 20 and 30 are sometimes lean years in spiritual concern.  And this is no war phenomenon.  These are years of questionings and some doubts and the testing of experiences.  The set of the sails is being determined.  There is a new freedom from parental restraints, from some accustomed ways.  It is an exhilarating feeling that all of us have had in some measure, as we will admit if we are honest.

 

Then life settles to a steadier pace and we begin to search for the things that abide and give peace and security.  The things we learned in our earlier youth are remembered, re-valued.  We recognize the necessity of God in our lives, and for our children, and we turn to Him who is alone able to supply our deepest needs.

 

We may be glad for all those who do come to church, or who go to church in the other communities to which some have scattered.  Some of the experiences of total war are such that none who have gone through them need be expected to climb out of their foxholes glorifying and praising God.  The extremes of hardship and cruelty are not brought on by proclaiming the gospel of love and compassion.  They were brought on by the perversity of man!  And many a man will very well question whether or not that gospel has been well, and faithfully enough, proclaimed and practiced by all of us of the Christian household.  We who never went to a front line are fully as much on trial in the light of the Eternal, as are any of those who return, brutally frank and candidly honest about some of their disillusionments.

 

When we Christian people can prove, by our faith and conduct, by our commitments and our actions, that our Christianity accounts for a definite difference, we need have no worry about others being attracted to like faith and conduct.  This is not to offer any apology or excuse for failure of any person, of any age or condition, to attend church here, or somewhere, regularly.  It is an attempt to put a little light on a matter that concerns many.

 

In his parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus apparently assumed that many a son would be prodigal; that most people at some time would see a far country that, like the greener grass on the other side of a cow’s pasture fence, so often looks better than it is.  The far country is not the point of the story.  Jesus’ point is that the home and father were such that the prodigal son wanted to return.  Returning there, the Prodigal found forgiveness and love, understanding and emotional security.  [Luke 15: 11-32].

 

That is where we parents come in.  If we have provided, in our homes, a sanctuary for God, given our sons and daughters a fundamental knowledge of their dependence on Him, we may be sure that, no matter what roaming they may do, our children will, in almost every instance, turn to the living faith they knew in childhood and set about making it their own.  If they have known that faith as seen in the strengthening of our own lives, their own steps will not falter, nor will they stumble on the twilight hills of their own adult experience.

 

While Harold Green was organist [at our church in Wisconsin Rapids] he set to modern music the words of a prophet: “Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’  While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain.”  Our choir sang it as an anthem.  The same thought appears in today’s text: “Do honor to the Eternal before the darkness falls, before your footsteps stumble on the twilight hills.”

 

But this is no message confined to youth.  It is the gospel for all of us.  Jesus was talking to mature people when he urged that they build their lives on something as solid as rock, rather than on beach sand.  [Matthew 7: 24-27].  None of us has a right to expect to find the great Guide to be just standing there when some great need arises, unless we have kept constant our acquaintance with Him, and made ourselves his servant.  Our faith is no magic carpet to be used in a tight spot.  It is a constantly nurtured attitude of spirit, and inner confidence, to remain steadfast no matter what happens.  When Paul boasts for all time to hear: “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” his words come of a constantly nurtured assurance.  [Romans 8: 38-39].  He had lived in that faith for a long time!

 

Now and then someone falling into the darkness of some family tragedy, or personal catastrophe, cries out in the fashion of Job’s would-be advisors, “What have I done to deserve this?  Why did this have to happen to me?  Such questioning avails nothing, except to show that one has forgotten what Jesus himself said, that “the rain falls of the just and the unjust - the sun shines on both good and evil.”  Adversity comes sooner or later, in one fashion or another, to all - none are singled out by the Eternal.  God is no bully.  He doesn’t pick on people.

 

The question of the one who has faithfully sought the presence and constant help of God is not “Why did this happen to me?” but “How could I endure this, apart from Him who has promised, ‘I am the Lord thy God; I will not leave thee, neither will I forsake thee!’”

 

I sometimes marvel at the confident courage of some godly soul who gets through adversity, bereavement, some anguishing separation with a confident acceptance which I wonder if I should have in like manner during a similar trial.

 

The most abiding of all psalms is the one which sings, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want ..... yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”  [Psalm 23].

 

To be able to sing that song in confidence; to be able to follow the footsteps of our Master up that hardest road from Gethsemane to Golgotha; prepare through the years, by doing “honor to the Eternal before the darkness falls, before your footsteps stumble on the twilight hills.”  For if he showed a way, then we too can make of the tragedies, a triumph.  And pitfalls can become footstools before a great throne.

 

-------------

 

Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, March 24, 1945

            Eau Claire First, June 16, 1946

            Huron Methodist Church, July 14, 1946