On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman
from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49-cent
cup of coffee
from the drive-through window of a local McDonald's restaurant. Her grandson parked the car so that Liebeck
could add cream and sugar to her coffee. Liebeck placed the coffee cup between
her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the
process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap. Do you remember what happened after
that? She sued McDonald’s and a New Mexico
civil jury awarded her $2.86 million. It’s my understanding that she ultimately
received quite a bit less than that but because she ordered hot coffee and got
hot coffee but spilled it on herself, she sued.
In the summer of 2013, after George
Zimmerman's acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon
Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement began and quickly formed national
protests against mainly the police for what they saw as unjustified shootings
of black people. It started out as a
march and a rally here and there and wound up with riots, vandalism, general
chaos and even killings in some places because of the racism they saw. They were killing people because people were
getting killed.
Occupy Wall Street is the name given to a protest movement
that began on September 17, 2011, in
New York’s Wall Street financial
district. The mostly young, white
and liberal protestors were upset about social
and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the
perceived undue influence of corporations on government. It ultimately resulted in many of the
protestors being arrested and many, many instances of charges being filed
against them for riots, all kinds of sexual misconduct as well as destruction
of property and lots of sanitation issues.
I remember seeing one of the protestors being interviewed on TV and he
was asked what his demands were. He
couldn’t really answer but basically said, “Well…we’re just mad!”
“We’re just mad!” Do
you know anybody like that? Maybe it’s
you. I would dare say that most
Americans today would say those same words.
We’re mad and we’re not going to take it anymore! But what are we really mad about? Are we mad because our lives aren’t going the
way we think they should? Are we mad
because somebody isn’t giving us what we think we deserve? Is someone not being sensitive to our
precious needs? Our lives are a shambles
and it has to be somebody else’s fault because it surely isn’t mine! Right?
Now, some of us sitting here in church this morning might
think that maybe it is their sin that is being punished by God and that might
not be wrong at all. God does punish
sin. But God said through the prophet
Jeremiah that sometimes sin…is its own punishment. Let’s look at Jeremiah 2:19 to see what Jeremiah
was inspired by God to write 650 years before Jesus was born and I want you to
see one of the most relevant passages of scripture that has ever been written
to us today in these United States.
It’s like Jeremiah was watching our evening news and decided
to comment on it. This is the root cause
of almost all the social unrest in our country and around the world. Yes, we have racism, sexism, inequality,
partisanship in government and so many other problems and everybody on every
sides is thinking that if the other side would just listen that our problems
would be over.
Now, I’m not against having a good dialogue about these
things but at some point we all have to decide to take responsibility for our
actions and declare that change starts with me!
If this country is going to survive any more length of time, we have to
stop sinning. I know that sounds way too
simplistic but that is the root of our problems and our problems will destroy
us as individuals and as a country if we don’t.
We are continuing with our sermon series on what the
prophets of the Old Testament said and how we can profit from them so look
between the books of Isaiah and Lamentations at the book of Jeremiah. Poor Jeremiah! He preached, prayed and cried for 40 years
and nobody listened. No lives were ever
changed and people hated him for saying what he did but he kept on being
obedient. That is success in the eyes of
God and that’s all that matters.
Jeremiah was warning the nation of Judah of the Lord’s
coming wrath but he might as well have been talking to the United States and is
talking to us today through God’s Word.
Let’s read Jeremiah 2:19.
19Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will
rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when
you forsake the LORD your God and have no awe of me," declares the LORD,
the LORD Almighty.
I heard about a pig that ate his fill of acorns under an oak
tree and then started to root around the tree. A crow remarked, "You should
not do this. If you dig up the roots, the tree will wither and die."
"Let it die," said the pig. "Who cares as long as there are
acorns?"
Bits & Pieces, February, 1990, p. 24.
There are consequences to our choices, aren’t there? Those consequences are so easy to see…in
other people. Don’t you wish people
would just listen to us? Don’t you wish
everybody would just think like we do and do what we do and act like we
do? Wouldn’t life be sweet then? If everybody were just perfect like us?
I found this passage to be fascinating. I had never seen anything quite like it
before and I immediately saw the problems of this world and of this country so
clearly. It was obvious what everybody
else’s problems were. But then, what do
you think God showed me? That’s
right. He showed me this applied to
y’all as well.
No! He reminded me of
my own problems, past and present. He
showed me that sometimes God doesn’t have to do the punishing. Sometimes sin is its own punishment. Sometimes we get just what we want and it is
miserable.
The nation of Judah had split from the nation of Israel with
Israel to the north and Judah to the south and as the prophets like Amos and
Isaiah had prophesied, the nation of Israel had been conquered and the people
had been scattered. So, surely the
nation of Judah saw what had happened to their sister country and saw how the
prophecies had come true and surely they decided to repent and follow the one
true God, right? Nope.
In fact, just a few years later, Jeremiah himself was taken
away into captivity along with most of the others. Don’t you know it was all he could do to not
say, “I told you so” over and over? God
has not spoken to me like He spoke to Jeremiah and He has not foretold the fate
of the United States to me but I can’t help but see the incredible similarities
between Israel and Judah and our country.
Sexual sin was rampant in Judah in Jeremiah’s time.
The next verse after the one we just read says, “Under every spreading tree,
you lay down as a prostitute.” They had temples set up for worship that
included male and female prostitutes one could visit as part of the worship
ceremony and it wasn’t just accepted, it was commonplace. It was open to
anybody at any time and everybody knew about it and accepted it and evidently
almost everybody was doing it.
Today, we hear that and cringe. We can’t believe they
did such horrible things and we can’t imagine how they had slipped so far but I
can’t help but wonder what they would say about our society. I did some
research and you all know what that means. (I googled it.) Now, we
all know that the internet is a big deal, right. Most of us use it every
day. We check email, get the news, cruise Facebook, look at pictures of
the grandkids and watching videos of dogs climbing ladders. Have you seen
that?!
But did you know that almost 30 percent of all data
transferred across the internet is porn? Porn sites get more visitors
each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter Combined. I read that one
professor was trying to do some research on the subject and was going to use
men in their twenties who had never viewed porn…but he couldn’t find any.
It is estimated that every second of every day, there is an average 28,258
internet users watching pornography.
If I stopped right there, I can’t comprehend God continuing
to have patience with us and not wiping us out for one more minute. But
He is patient and He doesn’t have to wipe us out because the sins of lust and
perversion are going to wipe us out themselves. How many people lose
their jobs every day because of porn? How many people lose their
marriages every day because of it? How many Christians lose their witness
because of it?
The influence of non-marital sex doesn’t stop with the
internet. Sex is used to sell everything from hamburgers to spark
plugs. Every TV show; every sitcom, every soap opera, every movie seems
to be telling our kids and grandkids that everybody sleeps around. Nobody
even gets married anymore and if you do and it doesn’t work out, then just get
divorced so you can sleep around all you want. Everybody is doing it.
Well, maybe everybody is doing it and maybe that’s why our
nation is in the shape it’s in. You can’t keep ignoring God and keep on
sinning and keep on doing things He calls perverted and expect to have His
blessings. In Romans chapter one, God says through Paul, “Therefore God
gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the
degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth about
God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the
Creator. 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even
their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27In the
same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed
with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and
received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
He said God gave them over to their desires and they got
what they deserved. Do you want to stay away from sexually transmitted
diseases, unplanned pregnancies, and heartbreak? Don’t sleep
around. Want to have a satisfying and fulfilling marriage? Don’t
sleep around and use the internet for what it’s supposed to be used for –
watching dog videos!
Jeremiah said, “Your wickedness will punish you.” The
original Hebrew word means to correct, literally with blows or hitting.
It is a violent and painful thing to be punished like this and so many people
have this in their lives and wonder why God would be so cruel to them.
How could He do this to them? God didn’t have to do anything. Their
own disobedience did it to them.
He says, “Your backsliding will rebuke you.”
Backsliding is apostasy. It’s what Christians do when they make the
decision to not be obedient to God. It means to continue in sin.
Jeremiah is talking to God’s chosen people, the apple of His eye and His
beloved nation, or what was left of it. He is talking to us today.
As Christians, our backsliding, our continuing in sin is going to judge us and
show the world who we really are.
I don’t have time or inclination to talk about all of Jim
Bakker’s public sins; his sexual deviancy and rip-offs of his television
followers back in the ‘80’s. Some of you might remember him as the guy
who started the PTL Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network. His
backsliding is well-documented and still today the main reason televangelists
have such a bad name.
In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong, he admitted that the first
time he actually read the Bible all all the way through was while he was in
prison, and that it made him realize he had taken certain passages out of
context. He wrote: “The more I studied the Bible, however, I had to admit
that my message did not line up with the tenor of Scripture. My heart was
crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I was appalled that I could
have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that God had not struck me dead
as a false prophet!”
Maybe it was because God is so patient that He didn’t strike
him down but maybe God just let his own apostasy take him down; his own
backsliding rebuked him. How does a person get to that point?
Obviously, Jim Bakker didn’t just wake up one day and decide to go crazy with
women and money.
The next to last line in our verse today in Jeremiah says,
“when you forsake the Lord your God.” Forsake means to put distance
between. It’s what happens when we sin. We put a barrier between us
and God and then when we continue to sin, we keep putting a distance between us
and God. You do that step by step and sin by sin.
Jeremiah goes on to say this happens when we have no awe of
God or fear of God. In The Chronicles of Narnia, an allegory by C.S.
Lewis, the author has two girls, Susan and Lucy, getting ready to meet Aslan
the lion, who represents Christ. Two talking animals, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver,
prepare the children for the encounter. "Ooh," said Susan, "I
thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about
meeting a lion." "That you will, dearie." said Mrs. Beaver.
"And make no mistake, if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan
without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just
silly."
"Then isn't he safe?" said Lucy. "Safe?"
said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said
anything about safe? Of course, he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I
tell you!" Our Daily Bread, February 17, 1994.
In this life, people have way too much fear of the wrong
things and way too little fear of God. He is the Lion of Judah. He
is the King of kings and Lord of lords. He’s the Creator of the universe
and He is the same God today as He was in the Bible who did strike people dead
for their sins. He’s a good and loving God but He’s also a just God.
He can’t be all-loving without being just. We are to be in awe of
Him. We are to fear Him.
Because He loves us He wants us to live full and abundant
lives as it says in John 10:10 but so many of us are mad and bitter about our
lives and how things have turned out for us. We want to blame anybody and
everybody but ourselves but even that doesn’t bring us any peace. It’s
almost like that Jeremiah guy knew what he was talking about.
19Your wickedness will
punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how
evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the LORD your God and have no
awe of me," declares the LORD, the LORD Almighty.
So, what do we do? Our lives are bitter. We have
backslidden as individuals and as a country. Our own wickedness is
punishing us. How do we get out of this? First and foremost, know
that in and of yourself, you can’t get out of this. It’s too hard.
We’ve gone too far and there is no hope for us without repenting of our sins
and turning back to the One who loves us but we will talk more about that in a
second.
What you can do is make sure your life in being lived in
biblical truth. Make sure the log is out of your eye before you
start working on the speck in your neighbor’s eye. Then start with your family.
Men, you are to be the spiritual leader, not the wife. 1 Corinthians 11:3 says,
“But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of
a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” That’s God’s order
of things and it works the best.
Deuteronomy 6 says, “Impress these laws on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you
lie down and when you get up.” Mom and Dad, when it comes time to talk to
your children about how they should live, especially when it comes time for
that talk, you know what I mean, or to talk about the dangers of alcohol and
drugs or anything else that is important for them to know, don’t just have one
talk and check that box as done.
If we are going to save this country for our kids and
grandkids, it has to be done one at a time and that means pouring ourselves
into each other with ongoing conversations, not just that sex outside of
marriage is naughty and we don’t do it, but tell them why (appropriately as
they get older, of course). Tell them when it comes on TV why we don’t
watch that and then turn it off.
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The good news is
that even if it’s too late to keep them from seeing or hearing that, the same
God who did miracles in the Old Testament and in the New Testament still does
miracles today. He wants to have a relationship with you and He wants
to take that away from you because He doesn’t want you to live a bitter
life. He wants you to have peace and joy even in the difficult times of
your life.
Repent – turn
away from – those sins and ask God for forgiveness of those sins and the
Bible says He is faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all
unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9.) Then ask Him to be Lord of your life and
to save you and He will and that is the only way. It’s the only way to
Heaven and it’s the only way we can have true lasting peace and the only way
we cannot live evil and bitter lives. Do that today.
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