July 10, 2022 - When Life Stops being Normal - Pastor Paul Vallee

Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah Series Illness, accidents, marriage breakups, war, and disease, to name a few, can totally alter the direction of life. It can change how you live and where you live. Life then stops being normal or what it was. How can we move forward in a time where life now is different, and we must adapt to this new reality? We are living in a day of Amazing Grace. God continually reaches out to us as people, willing that we would embrace all that He has provided for us. He desires to be in a relationship with us. It is incredible to think how awesome our God is. When we consider the great sacrifice He made for us, how can we remain impassive, negligent, and indifferent to Him? Yet, we see the outcome of the autonomous life, the self-directed life, being played out each and every day. The result of the self-directed life is confusion, anxiety, and anger as we find that we cannot control events, people, and circumstances to our advantage. It does not take long to discover that life is often messy, confusing, and at times tragic. Sometimes the mess we are in is a result of our own self-directed life. The wisdom literature would sum it up in a proverb. “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end, it leads to death.” - Proverbs 16:25 We have been journeying through the book of Jeremiah. What we see are God’s people going their own way. Over time they have been seduced by the values of the people living within their land and the surrounding people groups. Wickedness had become so entrenched in their culture that people could not discern right from wrong. Their knowledge of God was distorted. They really did not know God. Even though God had continued to speak words of direction, instruction, and warning over the centuries, they repeatedly ignored His words through his prophets. Why the confusion? Because there were false prophets giving reassurances that were causing them to have a false sense of security. However, the reality was that they were practicing idolatry. In their minds, they felt they were serving the Lord, but they had adopted a syncretistic (a blending) of other religious worship, thereby distorting God’s commandments. They were putting idols ahead of God. They were in violation of the greatest commandment, which was to have no other god before the Lord. Now the day of the Lord was at hand. God was about to judge the nation, yet they were mystified by Jeremiah’s warnings; why would God do such a thing?