It is easy to look at a life that way and decide you are not ready to speak for God—too inexperienced, too uncertain, too likely to say it wrong. Jeremiah 1 opens with a prophet making exactly that case — and God’s answer to him.
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There we are. I’m a little undercooked today. There’s my remote. Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Then I said, “Ah, Lord God, behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the Lord said to me, “Do not say I am only a youth, for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” declares the Lord. Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth. Then the Lord said to me, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Here is the question. Where does our strength come from? And Jeremiah does what, well, what I would do, what I think most of us would do, if you were told, “Okay, you’re going to be a prophet to the nations.” And to his credit, he does understand that this is a hard thing, right? He doesn’t say, “Oh, well, yeah, you know, I’m pretty great stuff, you know, this is going to be good.” No, what does he say? “Lord, I’m young. I don’t know how to speak. No one’s going to listen to me. This is not for me.” And he’s right in his own strength. Jeremiah realizes he can’t do it on his own. Jeremiah doesn’t have the ability to convince anyone of anything about the Lord. If he’s going to go and tell a message to the nations — and note, this is a message to the nations, not just a nation, but the nations — if he’s going to do that, he needs to be persuasive. He needs to know how to talk to people of great power. And Jeremiah says, “I can’t do this. I don’t have this in me.” It’s so tempting for him. So tempting he actually doesn’t say, “I don’t have the experience.”
As you think about where you think God might be calling you to say something about him to somebody, to share something about his word with somebody, that you say, “But I don’t have the experience, Lord.” Not at least in that area. Maybe if you’re a newer Christian, you think, “Well, I just don’t have the experience, full stop.” But even if you’ve been a Christian for many years, it’s still tempting to say, “But Lord, I don’t know how to deal with this issue. I’m still inexperienced in this area.” And surely there is someone else who ought to do it. What does God say to Jeremiah? He says that he, the Lord, is Jeremiah’s strength. Jeremiah’s been looking at his own strength. God says, “No, I’m your strength.”
Now, I’m not about to imply that all of us are called to do Jeremiah’s exact duties. And for that matter, I’m not about to imply that anyone here is called to be a prophet. But we are all called to do something to point to the Lord. And our excuses often sound awfully like Jeremiah’s. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re called to simply be a quiet, faithful witness at work or you’re in a neighborhood association and you’re thinking, “Well, maybe I should ask or maybe I should pray for our community.” But I’m not experienced. I don’t know how to say those words. I don’t know how to do it. It’s tempting.
The way we sometimes in the church have tried to overcome this is to say that God doesn’t call the equipped; God equips the called. You’ve probably heard that saying over the years. And there’s a good point to it. But I think in itself it actually can kind of lead us down the opposite side of Jeremiah’s error here. Because what it sounds like is, “Well, okay, so I don’t have the experience. But God’s going to make me good at it. So I should feel confident in what I’m doing, because God’s called me.” The point here to Jeremiah isn’t, “Jeremiah, you just need to know that I’ve called you. So go do it because you’re going to be great at it.” It’s that, “No, you need to look more and more to me to do it. I’m going to prepare you. I’m going to strengthen you.”
The old saying is true to the extent that we understand it, not being a rejection of equipping, but rather a rejection of anything, whether it’s lack of equipping or equipping, that somehow becomes the thing that makes us able to do it. I remember when I was in college, there was a pre-ministry program that I was not a part of, but there were a bunch of guys in it. And they would like to throw this thing around and say, “You know, all you guys that think you’re maybe someday going to get ready for ministry, we’re going to go and actually do ministry.” Okay, that’s actually a good point. We shouldn’t wait to do ministry. But the point was, “We’re actually holier than you because we’re going to go because we know we don’t need equipping. We just call.” That’s an unfortunate view.
We all need equipping. It’s not always going to look the same, but we all need equipping. And the key thing is, it’s not because we’re so confident in ourselves, it’s because we’re so confident in our God that we can do it. That’s what God’s saying to Jeremiah. Certainly over Jeremiah’s life, God is going to provide opportunities for him to grow in experience in ministry. He is going to be a different man at the end of his life than at his calling. That’s what should happen if we’re Christians, right? We should be growing. Or if we’re followers of the Lord in the Old Testament, we should be growing. There should be a trajectory there.
So it’s not a rejection that, “Well, I already have everything I need.” It’s that I already have the one I need who’s going to enable me, sometimes going to be through very careful study in a particular setting. Sometimes it’s going to be an approach. You get thrown into an opportunity, and you just realize that God is sending you to do this. And so you just do it, even though you don’t have any idea what you’re doing and God’s going to use you in that. And for, if we have the blessing of enough years living as Christians, probably both are going to be true at some point.
There are going to be times where it feels like God says, “Okay, I’m going to have you pause here and you’re going to learn something.” And there are going to be times where you think, “Well, God, did you really need to throw me into this yet? I am not ready for this at all.” He says, “But I am.” And the key thing in both of those is we trust that God’s the one doing the leading. God is at the heart of both going into the situation where we feel woefully underprepared. And those times where he says, “Now I’m going to be ready for this.” And God is at the heart of both going into the situation where we feel woefully underprepared. And those times where he says, “Now I’m going to prepare you for this.”
In fact, if you think about Jeremiah’s call, look again at verse five: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nation.” What does that imply? Well, it implies that Jeremiah wasn’t just going along blissfully in his life, completely unequipped for the job. And that one point God looked down at Jeremiah and said, “Ah, there’s a guy that can do more. I’ll go ahead and call him.” It implies everything that Jeremiah has experienced up to this point was for a purpose. God has been equipping him throughout his life. And that’s true of you too. It doesn’t matter if you can count the years of your life on your hands, or even if you go through all your toes, you don’t have enough. It still comes down to God is the one. God is the one who prepares us. He has been preparing us.
Maybe you hit our live stream tonight and you’re not even quite sure why you’re here, and you’re saying, “Well, I’m not a Christian.” So what does that mean for me? Well, it means God’s been working in your life too. Listen to the Holy Spirit. He could very well be nudging you tonight to go from “I’m not a Christian” to “I am a Christian.” And then that doesn’t mean, “Okay, now I’m, I’m like the lowest rank Christian, I’m of no value,” but no, you are. If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are precious to him. It doesn’t, there aren’t multiple ranks of preciousness to God. He loves you.
And the key thing is wherever we are, whatever point we are, there’s something we can be doing that God’s called you to at this particular moment. He’s giving you a purpose to testify to his goodness, to the love that he has for you and for me. And it’s true right now when we’re tempted to say like Jeremiah, “Lord, let me list out the reasons why I shouldn’t do what I think I’ve just heard you call me to do.” And Jeremiah has an advantage here, right? Jeremiah, he actually hears the voice of the Lord. God is saying to him. We’re discerning where God’s leading us, trying to see how he opens doors and closes doors and reading his word and praying that the spirit would nudge us in different ways.
Jeremiah has an experience that is not what we normally experience. And I think that’s all the more telling about what we’re going to do as well. We’re going to come up with reasons why it just seems like, “I don’t know, God, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be doing this. Maybe, maybe someday.”
Speaking of burgers and burger joints, I was reminded as I read that story about Lionel, about a burger joint that used to be out at 364 and in Darden Prairie, if you got off there on the road there to get off into Darden Prairie. There’s a mobile station there. There’s Darden Presbyterian church, and then there’s a mobile station right next to it. And that mobile station had a little burger joint attached to it. And if you happen to go to that burger joint, you would remember it because it was truly delicious. It was called Daddy Ray’s burgers. And it was called Daddy Ray’s burgers because the owner, she had her dad’s special backyard barbecue recipe of how he always made burgers that all the neighbors wanted to come in and eat. And she’d taken that burger recipe and she turned it into a restaurant. And she had this little burger joint that would have made Lionel proud. It was a very good place to get a cheeseburger. It had good fries too. Everything was good there, but the burgers were delicious.
And for me, I’ve never really looked down on a restaurant attached to a gas station, but I know that is a barrier for some people like, “Okay, I’m going to go and eat at a restaurant attached to a gas station.” I don’t know. And so they had started out in this little shack, like one of those little portable food stands and then done well enough with that. They rented this actual place with a dining room and so on, but it was attached to the gas station and they found it was hard to convince people that they could actually get one of the best burgers you’d ever taste by going into a gas station.
At first, they weren’t overly busy, but they were open every day. Go there at any time. And since at the time I was working at church, not too far from there, it was also really convenient. If I needed to meet someone, I could say, “Hey, why don’t we stop and have a burger? It’s really good.” And they were inexpensive, which was nice too. Nice not to spend too much on that burger. And so you could go there, have a burger, have a nice conversation and, well, it wasn’t great for the restaurant. It wasn’t too busy. So it was nice to chat, perfect.
But then it started to be that you’d arrive there and it was closed because they weren’t very busy. And so they started to close one day a week and then two days a week. And then it was, they were open three days out of the seven days of the week because, well, “We’ll build up our business. And then once we build up our business, we’ll go back to being open all the time.” But you know what happened? Well, I quit meeting people there, not because it wasn’t delicious, but because I wasn’t ever sure if it was going to be open when I was counting on it. And after several times that didn’t work and we’d have to say, “Okay, now let’s see, where can we go? We’ll meet each other in 15 minutes somewhere else.” Okay. I guess I’m just not going to meet people at Daddy Ray’s burgers.
And then one day it just didn’t open again at all. I kept waiting for that time when they finally would be busy enough they could fully embrace the business. I’m no expert on restaurant tear efforts, and I don’t know exactly what they needed to do, but what I can tell you is if you spend all your time thinking someday it will be ready. And someday I can go ahead and have a dependable schedule that people can come to. What’s going to happen? People are going to quit coming. They’re not going to come and just hope that you’re open.
“Someday I’ll be equipped and I can open the doors and share God’s grace with people.” When people need to talk to someone, do they know that they can talk to us and that we’re ready? I’m not going to guess if we’re not saying anything. The heart of this message to Jeremiah that is true in every call that God gives. And if you are a believer in Jesus, you have a call is that we’re ready—not ready for everything. It doesn’t mean we know it all. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to learn more and see more. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to learn more. It doesn’t mean we have to experience more. It doesn’t mean we have to learn more. It doesn’t mean we have to experience more. It doesn’t mean we know it all. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to learn more and seek the equipping that God has for us. And we’ve been looking at that over the past few weeks, that equipping.
What it means is that you’re ready right now. There’s something God has for you right now. And don’t close the doors thinking someday I’ll be ready. That someday when that someday comes, the doors are just locked.
“Be able to do more once I’m better able to serve customers” doesn’t work out well. Do we see over and over again, as God calls his people to serve him, we see it with Moses. We see it with Daniel. We see it with Paul. It’s a repeated refrain over and over. What happens when an angel shows up, when an angel shows up to talk to Mary, what does he say? “Fear not.” You can see over and over again, fear not showing up over and over and over again in Scripture. Why not? Because everybody that encounters an angel and is told, “Okay, here’s what I need for you to do now,” was really prepared in every single way for everything that was going to come? No. It was because God is there. He’s the one that actually makes us ready.
And the lack of fear isn’t that it’s going to be easy; it’s that God’s going to be with us. If there was anyone who shouldn’t be told anything about just going confidently, it was Jeremiah. Because Jeremiah, you know, sometimes we were down in the pits. Jeremiah was actually down in the pit, right? He actually is thrown into a cistern. You’re not going to get much lower than that. And I don’t mean that just as a pun. I mean, can you imagine Jeremiah goes through things? He is not ready for here at this time that he says he is not ready, but that says, “I’m going to be with you, and you’re going to be ready when you need to be ready for each thing. Just listen to what I’m sending you to do.”
Okay. So we’re going to be ready for something. That’s kind of vague, isn’t it? Here’s what everyone in Israel needed to know, and they’d been missing over and over again. And here’s what we often miss too as the body of Christ today. We need to ask ourselves the question, “I’m ready. What does that mean? What are we ready for?”
Jeremiah 31:10, just jumping a few chapters over here. Hear the word of the Lord. “Oh, nations, declare it in the coastlands far away. Say he who scattered Israel will gather him and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.”
What are we ready for? We’re ready to declare that God is the God who restores. Israel’s tried over and over again to get things right themselves. They’ve tried time and time again to prosper on their own, right? “We don’t seem to prosper as much as the other nations. Maybe we should try an eclectic mix of worship. We’ll try some different gods,” right? Because, you know, if one God is good, two gods is better, right? And three gods. I mean, yeah, maybe different seasons, right? Maybe some gods are better at different times of the year, or you figure out which God isn’t busy. Like we change checkouts at the grocery store and see if it works better at a time. They tried.
What did it get them? It got them… What Jeremiah had the displeasure of overseeing their exile.
Strength couldn’t testify to what they were meant to testify to for two reasons. One, they were looking to their own strength, and two, they forgot what they were trying to testify about. I think that second one may cut deeper oftentimes for us in the first, because we can get so wrapped up in different parts of even what’s true and good that we forget to testify to the one who’s true and good.
It’s amazing to me today in our culture that loves being so antagonistic how often Christians will get wrapped up, and they’re arguing about stuff, and you’d never even know they had any hope and joy. Why? Why? Because they’re too busy arguing over a point of theology or a point of culture. And it’s not that theology doesn’t matter. You know, I don’t think that it doesn’t matter; that it doesn’t mean that culture doesn’t matter. But what matters most is Jesus. And if we lose sight of that, does it matter that Israel had strong defenses? Yes. Does it matter that they had crops to grow? Yes. They were going to die otherwise. What they forgot was what mattered most. What were they called for? Why did Israel exist?
Israel did not exist so they could have a really nice place to live. Israel existed so that the rest of the world would see the God who loved them. And they forgot that. But God is the God of restoration. And if you really think about Israel during its history, what is it? Is that partially raw, partially overcooked cheeseburger? Without the cheese on it, yeah. It’s just a hamburger. It needs the cheese. And you look at it and it’s just this ugly, malformed patty sitting there. And you think, “What could possibly be done that’s good with this? What can possibly be good that can be done with us?”
But God takes us and he says, “I’m going to use you.” And the fact that you’ve been on a winding path, the fact that you have at times strayed and I’m calling you back, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do that. In fact, what it’s going to mean is I’m going to show the world how I restore.
Now I’m faithful. Faithful for what reason? Jeremiah 31, just a little further along. Jump to verse 31. “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant, they broke. I was their husband,” declares the Lord. “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.”
This is the message that the prophet watching the people being exiled has for the people of Israel. The exile is a wake-up call, a cold, harsh reality. We have failed in our calling. What Satan wants to say is, “And now you have nothing you can testify to the Lord on. There is nothing to go with now. You’re done. Someone else who has already been burnt can do it.” What God says is, “I restore. I’m the God who restores.” And he says to the people of Israel, “I haven’t given up on you. Yes, consequences have come from the vast unfaithfulness of the people, but it’s not the end of the story. Restore.”
When we turn to God, whether it’s for the very first time or the countless time where we again have to say, “God, I can’t believe I messed up again,” every single time we come to God, he takes that burnt patty of our lives and he smothers it in delicious cheese and he makes it good. And he says, “See, I can restore.”
Think about the prodigal sons. We have two sons that really don’t know their father. We talked about that a few weeks ago in Sunday School Express. And you think about those two sons. You think about the one who thought he could take all the money and run off and be happy and succeed. And the other thought if he just slaved away hard enough for his father, everything would come to him. And what they both missed is what really gave them any hope at all was their father.
Love them. And the prodigal son far away, having wasted away his inheritance, when he comes back, he experiences that. And you know what happens? Because he experiences that, he testifies to his father’s love. People can see the story of his father, not just his story. And Israel, as it was restored and Israel then as it remained and ultimately was used that the Messiah would come into the world, that Jesus would come into the world and redeem us, was the prodigal who could say, “How does the God who restores? His grace is big enough to act on our inability.”
And that wasn’t to say that Israel should have just sat back and not done anything, right? That was what got them into the mess to begin with — that they wouldn’t stay focused on the mission. But the fact that they didn’t stay focused on the mission, they failed. The God restores from that point, that every point we have failures in our past. But God testifies to his grace in those failures. What he does is he’s a God who turns prodigals into priests. Remember Israel was a nation of priests, a holy nation.
And today he continues to do the same. He takes us from wherever, whatever far country we find ourselves in, and he restores us as those who represent him to the world. And then we prepare and then we go and we do. But we remember in each step of that that we’re going because he’s the one who gives us strength.
I saw some clips this week of an interview 60 Minutes did last Sunday with Air Force Colonel only known as Bravo. Anyone see that? Bravo, you know, even if you don’t know his name, he was one of the pilots that crashed in Iran over the summer or the spring. And he was asked about, you know, “How do you make, make sense of that? How do you, how do you deal with the fact you’ve done all this training? You, you’re an accomplished pilot. What do you do though when you crash?”
Here’s what he said. He said, “So I paused right then. And I prayed, ‘Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need your help.’” And there is the point where he remembered. And then his sharing with the world what really matters about how he was going to get out of it.
He goes on. He says, “I’m not saying faith is a replacement for training. Training helps us understand what we do, but faith is the backstop of all my actions.” I really like that phrase, “backstop of all his actions.”
God isn’t saying to Jeremiah, “Nothing that’s come up in your life so far matters. Nothing that you’ve learned matters. Nothing that you will learn matters. None of the experiences you’re going to experience are irrelevant. They’re not going to make you better suited to do my work.” He’s not saying that at all. What he’s saying is, “I’m your backstop. I’m there for you. And in fact, if you hold onto that, you’re actually doing my work as you hold onto that.”
As this serviceman testified, it’s not that all of his skills didn’t come in handy. It’s not that God didn’t even direct him in how to use them. But what he realized is he was in a hopeless situation and all the training in the world wasn’t going to make this something that was just going to be a clear success. And so he said, “I’m getting through this. I need your help.” That’s what God wants us to say.
Sometimes he’s going to say, “What you’re trying to do isn’t my will. I want you to do something else.” And we need to be willing to hear that. But what we need to do every time we’re coming to God is remember what we’re really praying is, “God, if I’m going to get through this, if I’m going to do what it is that I think you want me to do here, correct me if I have your will wrong. But if this is your will, the only way it’s going to happen is with your help.”
It’s our faith, our backstop. And everything we do, because just like Colonel Bravo, we are in enemy territory. We live in a world that often opposes everything that God proclaims and everything God calls us to. And we go out and we think, “I’m strong enough. I know how to do it.” And we probably, many of us as having conversation the other week about this with one of you, many of us have probably had that conversation, and many of us have probably had that experience where we go out and we’re going to tell people about how true the Bible is. And so we go out on our own and we have this knowledge and it goes very badly.
And I remember as a teenager, one particular incident where I thought I could get the upper hand and explain all this. And I was depending on how I could explain it all. And I couldn’t. Now, did I go and study more after that? And could I explain a lot of those things better now? But yes, but the key thing was I thought I could do it. I’d like to say I completely learned that, but there are a lot of times I’m still trusting in the fact that I can do it. It’s temptation.
Just preparing a message from God’s word thinking, “Well, how can I bring this passage to life for everyone and apply it in a way that’s going to speak to you?” It’s one of the striking things I’ve heard so many pastors say this. It really shows how God works in this. It’s usually the sermons they get done with. And I think that was a horrible, confused mess. This was, in my head, it was all perfect, but it just came out garbled.
And someone says, “That’s exactly what I needed to hear.” Now, the lesson from that is that I say, “I’m just not going to prepare anymore,” right? That’s not what you do with a backstop. What a backstop does for us, what God being our backstop does for us is to say, “Go and do what I’ve equipped you to do.” And if it’s preaching a sermon, then go do your best to go preach a sermon. If it’s just spending a moment in prayer with a coworker who’s hurting tomorrow, then go spend a moment in prayer with a coworker tomorrow. And if you know that opportunity is coming, think about how you can, a scripture that might be helpful or how to lead that prayer in a way that’s helpful. Think about those things. But when you go and it becomes a jumbled, tangled mess and you think, “This can’t do anything,” remember God is the one who’s actually doing the work.
If it’s all about my own confidence and my own preparation, it’s going to always be worse than a jumbled mess. It’s going to be dead. But if I am faithful to what God calls me to do, but I realize that God’s the one who actually brings it to life, then he’s going to do what he’s going to do with it. It’s faith, our backstop.
If we’re going to go fishing, if we’re really going to put that pole out and catch the fish, he has to be our backstop. He has to be the one because we can’t. We’re always going to end up catching the old tire in the lake instead. But over and over, God says, “I’ll take you even though you can’t do it, and I will use you.”
What Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 26: “Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to the worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”
God chose his grace in us. Our stories, as his grace has shown, become a testimony to his story. And our burnt edges and maybe whole burnt side, when covered with grace, are not just covering it and hiding the crunchy, overdone parts of the burger. God’s grace is a special cheese. It actually brings the burger back to life. It makes it delicious again. It makes it just right. That’s what God’s doing with us.
He’s called us to show his grace, even though we’re messed up people, even though we have messed-up stories. Because this is what Jeremiah needs to hear. This is what Israel needed to hear. This is what the disciples needed to hear. And this is what all of us need to hear.
Yes, we have those messed-up stories. Yes, we are not adequate for showing God’s story in any way whatsoever. But when we see God speaking through us, when we are those covered in the cheese of grace, people don’t see our messed-up story. They see his story through our story.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would you help us to be those who don’t show our story but show your story? So often we get tripped up on what we can say and what we can do because we think, “But what are people going to think of my story?” And would you help us instead to simply want people to hear who you are? That we would be agents of comfort to the hurting, that we’d be guides who point to those who are lost, realizing that we too would be lost except by your grace.
Would you use us in everyday moments, in the big and the grand, but also the ordinary? Would you use us when you’re guiding us into seasons of preparation, but would you also use us when we feel woefully unprepared? In every moment, Lord, would you transform us? Would you take your grace and cover our bare edges and refresh us, restore us, that through your grace, as people see us, they don’t see us; they see you and the amazing wonder of the God who restores.
We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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