Trusting In Lying Words

Over the past few weeks, I have found myself in an unusual place as far as my heart and the Word of God. I have watched on television as our government has tried to deal with crisis after crisis as our economy has somewhat tanked and I have wondered and thought, "Is this part of the judgment that we may be facing?" The easy answer is yes, but that is not an answer I want to latch on to. I would like to count it as merely life, or the righting of a lot of years of bad leadership. I don't think I can bring myself to believe this though. What I truly believe is that we are seeing judgment come to this country. I pray that I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

I have been studying the book of Jeremiah and while I hold no degrees or could give you a good reason to read what I am about to write, I trust that you will ask God to show you the truth.
Ever since the end of WWII, our nation has been on a slippery slope of self gratification.
Men came home from WWII and found themselves in the middle of a new prosperity. Homes were bought. Families were raised, and a new level or lifestyle developed and life was good.
Fast forward to today.
The generation birthed during the prosperity, the baby boomers (of which I am one) found themselves with more at their disposal than any other generation had before. Church became something you did. You attended because it was the thing to do. The Word of God was traded for a social gospel during the 1950's. Being a Christian was based more on how you treated your fellow man and the good you sought to do in your town and community rather than a confession of sin, repentance and acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life. The reality of what it meant to follow Jesus was pushed to the back and relegated as being old fashioned and out of touch with our modern world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We sought to replace the mandates of God with the new, flashy, and more relevant word. This new word displaced such antiquated notions as sin, the blood of Jesus and confession with new ideals such as Jesus loves you just as you are.We no longer spoke of sin but rather of problems we face. The truth of God was re written to be a self-help encyclopedia that would lead you to your destiny.

All during this time there were several so called "revivals" that appeared. They would flash on the scene and quickly die out. This is not to say that God was not at work or that fruit didn't come from these meetings. But all the while, the lifestyle of this country became our god. We worshipped at the catalogues and paid our tithes in plastic to the god of this age. We gave a head nod to the real God in order to keep our status as a so called Christian, but our hearts were consumed with the next best thing we could buy. Lifestyle became our God and we could not ever be content until we had purchased the next new thing that would make it even greater.

We comforted ourselves with the thought that "this great nation was founded on the principals and word of God." Somehow no matter how bad we may become, we could always rest on this fact. Our heritage has become our "get out of jail" card. Yet in Jeremiah's day, the people felt the same way. It was a time of religious reform and the Temple was alive with activity. In II Chronicles 35 we read where King Josiah held a passover that was bigger, better and more lavish than any that had ever been held before. If you looked at the surface, life appeared to be headed in the right direction. But you can't judge by looking at the surface. I Samuel 16, God tells Samuel, "You look at the outward appearance, I, the Lord God, judge the heart."

In Jeremiah 7, God has sent Jeremiah to the Temple to stand in the gate at the entrance and proclaim this prophecy to the people who were coming and going from the Temple.
V.3
Amend your ways and your doings: and I will cause you to dwell in this place. Do not trust in these lying words, saying, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these."
Jeremiah was saying that the people felt secure and that their lives were decent and faced no danger because they had the temple. They went daily to perform their religious duty and did so without fail, but their lives were filthy with sin and with the worship of Baal, the false deity of the day. The people had no problem with making these two behaviors match up. In other words, the people had separated God from their every day life. Serving God was no more than showing up at the temple and giving a sacrifice to the priests and participating in whatever feast was going on.

The one thing I struggle with in my own personal life is walking out daily what I know God desires me to do. When I say struggle I don't mean that it is a hard path to walk, but that there is much to distract me and draw my attention away. If living like this is considered to be fanatical, then so be it.....I am a fanatic.
What I know is this.
Unless the church wakes up and understands the time we are currently in, it will find itself completely shut out of society with no voice at all. It will carry no weight because its message is not relevant to our day.
We have sold the truth of God in order to get people into our sanctuaries. Once there, we had nothing to offer them except programs and agendas.
Is it too late for us? I don't think so. I have begun to pray and repent for my sin and my attitudes that I carry around. I am praying that God would have mercy on the church and that he would send a revival not a reformation. A move of God's Spirit that would shake us to our very core and awaken us from our slumber. I pray that God would call out our names and like Lazarus, we would awaken from death, shake off our grave clothes and step out into the light of day.
God help me!

mb