SELF IMPOSED LAMENTING

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“Gather up your belongings to leave the land, you who live under siege. For this is what the Lord says:”

“At this time I will hurl out those who live in this land; I will bring distress on them so that they may be captured.”

“Woe to me because of my injury! My wound is incurable! Yet I said to myself, ‘This is my sickness, and I must endure it.’ My tent is destroyed; all its ropes are snapped. My children are gone from me and are no more; no one is left now to pitch my tent or to set up my shelter.”

“The shepherds are senseless and do not inquire of the Lord; so they do not prosper and all their flock is scattered. Listen! The report is coming—a great commotion from the land of the north! It will make the towns of Judah desolate, a haunt of jackals.”

Jeremiah 10:17-22

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

I don’t know how many people I have listened to over the years who spent a lot of time lamenting over the hardships and difficulties they were going through. There certainly are a lot of people going through tough times.

But here’s the thing about a lot of the lamenting shared with me.

It’s self imposed.

Let me explain.

In many instances in life, we end up suffering through consequences of our own making. We make poor choices and the subsequent actions deliver us into troublesome problems, some easy to fix, some not so easy. And in some circumstances, our bad decisions get us into situations that will never be repaired. The damage can often be permanent.

So much of the trials we go through are self generated and yet we tend to deflect the blame from ourselves to other things. We don’t like to admit that we’re our own worst enemies most of the time.

As we look at today’s scripture passage, we find that self imposed lamenting is not a 21st century phenomenon for we find the Old Testament Israelites of Jeremiah’s day, sadly proclaiming their troublesome conditions, conditions they created through their blatant sinning against God. Look at these words again here:

“Gather up your belongings to leave the land, you who live under siege. For this is what the Lord says:”

“At this time I will hurl out those who live in this land; I will bring distress on them so that they may be captured.”

“Woe to me because of my injury! My wound is incurable! Yet I said to myself, ‘This is my sickness, and I must endure it.’ My tent is destroyed; all its ropes are snapped. My children are gone from me and are no more; no one is left now to pitch my tent or to set up my shelter.”

“The shepherds are senseless and do not inquire of the Lord; so they do not prosper and all their flock is scattered. Listen! The report is coming—a great commotion from the land of the north! It will make the towns of Judah desolate, a haunt of jackals.”  Jeremiah 10:17-22

The Israelites decided to disobey one of God’s most fundamental commands and worship false gods and idols, something that angered God and facilitated His judgment, a judgment that included casting them out of Judah and Jerusalem into a seventy year exile under the captivity of the Babylonians.

This is why God told His people to pack up and get ready to move out because they were not going to be staying in the blessed land He had provided them. The people of God chose to abandon Him and so He would show them just how bad life could be without Him.

The exile brought great distress on the Israelites as evident by their words of lamenting:

“Woe to me because of my injury! My wound is incurable! Yet I said to myself, ‘This is my sickness, and I must endure it.’ My tent is destroyed; all its ropes are snapped. My children are gone from me and are no more; no one is left now to pitch my tent or to set up my shelter.”

Yes, the people felt injured and wounded. They were sickened by their challenging circumstances and the isolation of being displaced from their homes and hauled away to be oppressed in a far away land. But note that there is no sense of accountability in their words. The people of God do not make mention that their sins were what had led to God’s punishment upon them. There is no lamenting their poor decisions that led to their circumstances. There is only lamenting about the circumstances themselves.

The big problem with this is that we never will learn from our errors unless we come before God and confess our wrongs and then commit to not doing them again. God understands we are fundamentally flawed and all afflicted with the sin disease. However, this does not give us license to just sin at will without paying the price for it. God expects that we will hold ourselves accountable for our transgressions so He doesn’t have to.

The message the Lord wants for us to receive today is that self imposed lamenting gets us nowhere but self imposed correction, turning from sin and realigning ourselves with the Lord’s righteousness through obedience to His will and way, will always place us back into the Lord’s favor and away from His judgment.

My prayer is that you will receive His message and apply it to your life.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.

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