lamentations 3

--Lamentations 3:1-18

Oooooof, what do you think? How do you respond to something like that?

Hear again to what he says about God….

--made him a prisoner

--refuses to listen

--chased him—tore him to pieces

--shot arrows, broke teeth on a rocks

Is that God? Is that our God?

How would you describe this person? A believer? Someone with strong faith? Or Someone who has confused notions at best of who God is?

Here’s the thing….these words are from the bible. They are written by one of the great men of the bible, the prophet Jeremiah. They are inspired by the same Holy Spirit that gave us John 3:16, and Psalm 23.

Jeremiah wrote these words at an incredibly devastating time in his life.

His homeland had just been invaded and destroyed by the Babylonian Army.

He was walking around what used to be the great city of Jerusalem but now just a pile of rubble.

He was stepping over bodies.

He was watching foreign soldiers desecrate his peoples most sacred places.

He was dirty, he was tired, he was alone, he was sacred. And as he was seeing and feeling all those things, he wrote the Book of Lamentations. Which is where you will find this passage.

It’s my favorite chapter of the bible.

Some folks think it shouldn’t be there. That it doesn’t sound like bible stuff. But this passage has taught me so much about who God is and how we are to approach him.

I love the raw emotion of this passage. You can’t just read it, you’ve got to feel it.

I am one who knows…

I AM ONE WHO KNOWS!!!!!

Jeremiah is hurting and he’s letting everyone know. He’s holding nothing back. This is how I feel right now!!!

Now what Jeremiah says, is wrong, isn’t it?

God doesn’t rub peoples faces in the ground. He doesn’t break peoples teeth on rocks. If Jeremiah wrote this stuff on a theology test he’d fail. This passage is full of bad theology and profound misunderstandings of who God is, but that’s not the point. That’s not the important thing in this passage.

For me, what’s important is God’s reaction to Jeremiah’s rant.

Does God reprimand Jeremiah?

Does he yell at or punish Jeremiah for saying all of those bad, untrue things.

Does he shut him up or sue him for slander? Hi,dad

What did God do?

I’ll tell you what He did. He took those words that Jeremiah said, and he put them in the bible. He chisled them into granite so that every generation, every culture, every person who walked this earth would have the opportunity to read them for themselves.

He memorialized them for eternity. That’s what he did.

Whether you like it or not, Lamentations 3:1-18 is in the bible. And this isn’t the only instance where something like this happens. Unflattering, unaccurate rants about God are all over the psalms. They’re all over the book of Job. You see stuff like this throughout the bible.

God not only allows people to give him the badmouth, but he seems to reward them for it. “I’m gonna take what you said and I’m gonna put it in a book about me and people who live thousands of years after you will read your words and know your story and trust you to be their spiritual father.

Whats the point? Why does God include this, these venomous rants in his bible?

The point of this is that it is OK to be honest to God about what is going on in your heart.

“God, this is how I feel right now. It might not be right. It might not be rosy. It might not be Christian, but it is where I am at. I am not in a good place.”

I think God would rather have that than some smiley faced, cheerleader throwing rose pedals and gold dust when inside they are broken up.

I think a lot of people think they need to chipper and positive because they think that that’s how good, spirit-filled Christians are. That anything less shows lack of faith.

In other words, I’m going to pretend I’m better…..

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a soldier. I found his story remarkable and asked him if I could share it with others. He told me if anything positive could come from it than fine.

He sat in my office, told me that his dad committed suicide when he was 8, his mother drank herself to death 3 years after that, and his brother, his only living relative was killed by a drunk driver when he was 16.

He ended his life story by telling me that right now, he hated God. He said he hated God, but felt guilty about hating God and wanted to know what to do. He said he hated God, but something inside was telling him that God was his last best hope.

So I did two things for this guy.

#1 is that I showed him this passage. We read Lamentations 3 together. I said, “man, I don’t know what you are going through, but Jeremiah seems like he does, and his reaction sounds a lot like yours. It’s ok that you feel that way. That’s where you are at right now. It’s ok that you have questions for God….concerns, even frustrations. Don’t ignore them. Don’t fake it. God can handle it. As a matter of fact, the bible says there is healing in it (Ecclesiastes 7:3).

Your life has been hard. It’s all right to be sad, to be mad, to feel the way you do.

So the first thing I did was show him this passage. To let him know that it was ok to be honest with God.

The second thing I did was show him the rest of this passage (Lamentations 3:19-27)

In the midst of his agony, surrounded by destruction, Jeremiah has a revelation, a close encounter of the divine kind

He’s going off about how bad God has treated him, than he turns on a dime and breaks into perhaps the most beautiful song about the faithfulness of God in the entire bible.

Hope returns when he remembers/when he calls this to mind

Looking at a wall up close….taking a step back

1. where you are is temporary

2. transformation is possible

Rest of the story: temporary—where you are at right not, not where you will be forever

That transformation is possible. Where you are now is just that—where you are now. It’s not where you have to stay. As a matter of fact, God doesn’t want you to stay there. He understands you’ve got anger, he understands you’ve got fear, confusion, hurt, but they were never meant to be life sentences.

Though he puts up with it for a time, God really doesn’t want you thinking that breaks teeth on rocks and rubs faces in the ground.

For Jeremiah the turnaround was a mind thing—his circumstances didn’t miraculously change between verses 20 and 21—nothing changed—except what Jeremiah was focusing on.

Our battlefield is in the mind. When Jeremiah took control of his thought life, its there he found victory---that is where transformation took place.

The devil is so good at convincing, at throwing lies in our ears and (_______) us that things will never get better, that now is all that there is, that no one cares, that we’re all alone, that we’ll die like this.

He’ll take our anger, our hurt and he’ll tell us to make a house and live in it.

But Jeremiah says no. That there’s more to life than that. I might not see it now—but God is in control/this/here/with me.

Standing close to a wall---limited vision/can’t see…this is all that there is

Take a step back—things change, see more…Jeremiah did this and that is where he saw God. That is where things began to change. That, in his own words, is where he rediscovered his hope.

Love v. 22

Faithfulness v. 23

Enough v. 24

This passage is the whole picture.

A God who accepts us where we are---how we are—as we are. We don’t have to lie—don’t have to pretend—GRACE

But at the same time it is a love that doesn’t leave us where it finds us. It desires to bring us to a better place.