This day, if you ask me to tell you what roads it takes to get to my grandparents' house, I can't even tell you what road they live on. But I got there off of all these little markers and these waypoints that I knew from my memory, from my childhood, from my adolescence, from growing up. I went there a few years ago with a friend to pick up a desk that my uncle was bringing me to my grandfather. They said, oh, the roadmarks are still there.
The syrup factory is still open. I still was able to make this way through here. First drive. Today, we're talking about returning home.
We're looking at the Prophet Jeremiah in a few chapters he has in the middle of his book. It's called The Book of Comfort. It's words they're spoken to God as people as they are coming home. But we're also talking about this.
What does it mean for us to realize repentance in our life? Now, you obviously, now, Chad, you're talking about going home. This time, it's nice and nostalgic. You go to holiday, season message.
Now, you're talking about repentance. Okay, this is a bait and switch. But I want to ask you this question, and I think these two things go hand in hand. Why do normal people neglect to see the power of God working in their life?
Why do we struggle sometimes seeing God in our life and our everyday normal life? We ask questions about where is he or why am I not understanding this or why is this not happening? Or why do things just seem normal right now? And Jeremiah, so we're coming home and a story about repentance.
It gives us so much into that idea because we really don't understand repentance. We struggle thinking about repentance being a personal thing. And if anything, repentance is all personal. There's this chapter, though, and we're not going to read the whole thing.
We're going to read bits and pieces. But it's all about when God's people realize the power of repentance in their life and how repentance has the ability to take them home. So Jeremiah 31, we'll start in verse 1 through 3. This is what it says.
So that time declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. That says the Lord, the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. Israel, when it went home to find its rest. And the Lord appeared to him from afar saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love.
Therefore I have drawn you with love and kindness. First thing, survived the sword. Found grace in the light of it. The first part of the story is a story about what we have been through.
What the Israelites have been through in their lives and what we have been through in ours. So this group of people that Jeremiah is talking to have lived through the siege of Jerusalem, have lived through the Babylonian king coming in and taking over Jerusalem of pulling the walls down, of burning everything to the ground, destroying the temple. If you want to read really, really gnarly things, you can read lamentations. We're not going to talk about that stuff in church today because there's little ears in here.
But these people had been through the worst. They had been put to the sword. It was their sin that got them there. It was this exile that happened because of breaking a covenant for hundreds and hundreds of years.
But they survived the sword. These are the folks who got left behind. They weren't important enough to matter to be brought away with the Babylonians in TikTok last week. We talked about with Nehemiah, his thing was brought away, or the book of Daniel.
The fun stories of Daniel in the lines. They were important enough to be brought away. These were the folks who didn't matter enough to be brought away. They had survived the sword.
They made the decision that the best thing for us is to actually leave Jerusalem. There's nothing here for us anymore. We're going to go to Egypt because we've heard there's things in either food there. They kind of like backtrack the Exodus.
They went back to the place that enslaved them before. But they're in the wilderness. The wilderness is a funny place. This whole chapter is just stacked with pictures of biblical metaphors, of things that are repeated again and again and again.
We think about the wilderness. We think about the role of the wilderness in Scripture. It starts almost at the very beginning. We read about Abraham going off to the wilderness to find himself.
And they're finding God in a burning bush. How God brought the Israelites through a 40-year journey in the wilderness. The prophets Ezekiel analyzed and spent significant time out in the wilderness. John the Baptist went to the wilderness to proclaim repentance of sins.
Jesus himself went to the wilderness 40 days after his own baptism. The wilderness of the wilderness of the wilderness. In Scripture two things happen in the wilderness. You either lose yourself or you find yourself.
But the more we look at stories of the wilderness we realize, maybe what's happening in the wilderness is we lose ourselves so we can find ourselves. So though you survived the sword, you've now found grace in the wilderness. Sometimes the best things happen in the middle of nowhere. A couple weeks ago on the recommendation of a person who has told me to consist of me time and time again, he's told me about this place about 10 miles outside of Homer, Louisiana in the middle of nowhere.
It's called Moon's Grocery Store. At Moon's Grocery Store I bought the best inch and a half rib I've ever had in my entire life. In the middle of nowhere. You have to get lost to find this place.
The best stuff in the middle of nowhere there. You're in the wilderness. The gnarly things that have happened to you in life have now taken you out in the middle of nowhere. But you are finding grace inside of those places.
Another thing that says in Scripture here is that I've drawn the Bible to you. I've drawn you with loving kindness. This idea of loving kindness. This faithful love of God that he keeps with his people because of the covenants that he has made with him.
I've drawn you with my loving kindness. Also this idea of drawing only shows up a couple of times in Scripture. Every time you find it's different. It's really weird.
There's two uses of it that really tell us a lot about what's going on right here. This both happened to Joseph and then the dreamcoat. The technical dreamcoat. His brother's got mad at him.
He thought he was a goody two-shoes. They said we're going to kill him and tell Dad that and emulate him. We feel bad about that. Let's just throw him in his pit and then we'll sell him into slavery.
This language is used of drawing Joseph up out of this pit. In just a few chapters before this Jeremiah makes people mad with his prophecies about how the Babylonian king is actually going to destroy Jerusalem. That people throw him into the sewage pit in the courtyard of the temple guard. Now he is up to his armpits in the sewage.
We realize what that is right? And how he's been drawn up out of this cistern. God says I'm drawing you out with my faithful love. That we find our rest only when we allow God to take care of us in the midst of our own chaos, in the midst of our own wilderness, in the midst of the very holes that we have dug for ourselves and are full of nasty things.
That is the faithful love of God that draws us up out of theirs. So God is telling us I will pull you out of what is stopping you through my faithful love. Not because I feel like I have to. Not because I feel like this is expected of me.
Not because I feel like I have to do this because people won't say I'm God anymore. But because of my faithful love, the promises I have made to you that are based off of a relationship of love, I will pull you out of whatever is stopping you. What Jeremiah is saying to people here is the same thing he's saying to us now that God is current, God is gracious, and God's powerful presence can fix our temporary displacement and bring us back to him. The second thing that we find out is that the road home is oddly familiar.
31, 739 reads this, for that says the Lord sing aloud with gladness for Jacob and shout among the chief of the nations proclaim, give praise and say, O Lord save your people the remnant of Israel. Behold I bring them from the north country and I will gather them from the remote parts of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame, the woman with child and she who is in labor with child together, a great company, they will all return home. With weeping they will come and by supplication I will lead them, I will make them walk by streams of water on a straight path in which they will not stumble.
I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my first one. I told you all this whole chapter is just so many images we find across scripture. Talk about streams of water, we find that in Psalms 1, it's like the definition of human thriving. This is what flourishing actually is I will plant you by streams of water with trees that yield their fruit and season, whatever you do, you shall prosper.
He speaks, he also speaks about a straight path and one of my favorite ways to say that we find this all through scripture, but the prophet Isaiah is the one who really loves to riff off this imagery. I just want to read you a few passages from Isaiah where he talks about this straight path and what that means. From chapter 35 he says this, a highway will be there a roadway and it will be called the highway of holiness. In chapter 40 this is kind of a classic Christmas text where he says the voice is calling, clear the way for the Lord and the wilderness, make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.
Whatever you value be lifted up and every mountain he'll may low with the rugged ground become a plain and the rugged terrain a broad valley. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh will see it together for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. In chapter 49 he says this, saying to those who are bound, go forth to those who are in darkness show yourself along the roads they will feed and their pasture will be on all bear heights. They will not hunger or thirst nor will the scorching heat or sun strike them down.
For he who has compassion on them will lead them and will guide them to springs of water and I will make all their mountains a road and my highways will be raised up. Behold these will come from afar, they will come from the south and from the north and from the west and those from the land of cerium. John the Baptist talks about this exact same image when he's saying it, but prepare the way for the Lord to make straight paths. This is a message of repentance.
This is a thing there and I've talked about this passage for a long time. It's been one of my favorite passages and the foundry is very first worship service we ever had was actually in this room that we're in right now. It was months before we launched weekly worship and I talked about this passage on that day. If you know me, if you've been to church here, you've heard me talk about this.
I say that God's going to push down the mountains and raise for valleys and straighten our roads for us. This is my favorite passage of scripture. These last few weeks I started reading this and I realized, okay, he's talking about this highway of holiness, this path of repentance. What I've never thought about though is who's responsible for the terrain that he's queering for us.
Our first, our safe bit is to talk about these things that are stopping us in life and we want to talk about the things that we didn't cause ourselves, right? I'm going to cast blame on other people, where we cast blame on the environment or the place where we have landed or situations like that. I'm going to talk about this being the effect of other people and not ours, but this is a highway of repentance. We can't repent for what somebody else has done in our life, can we?
We can only repent on what we have done in our life. This chapter, it makes it impossible for us to not place our own life inside the story of restoration that we experience. We have to realize repentance. This highway, this road, this familiar pathway, this familiar way we go home, what if this path is familiar because it's simply us working backwards through our own sin?
And that's realizing that way that God is clearing for us is the way that he's restoring us, that not only is he forgiving us, but he is taking the things that we have created in our life that stop us and knows what he's flattening. What if the thing that fills up the valleys in your life is simply God dragging the mountains of sin you've also built and using that to level things out? No, to repent means to turn. That's all it is.
It's to turn, to turn backwards and go the other way. This highway is not us going to a new place, it's us going home, and we lost that home because that home was destroyed. But God's clearing a new path for us through our own sin for us to get back to him. And we choose to go and pass.
It's not an accident. We choose to go and pass. This metaphor that we find throughout scripture is one of purposeful action. The last thing I had to talk about earlier today is this is the road home is littered with our own junk.
When I went to my grandfather's house to pick up this desk a few years ago, I met my uncle and he had the desk. My grandfather's best friend's house, his best friend was a stick. I don't know what stick real name is. I've called him stick since I was four years old and I'm 38 and I still call him stick.
But I'm going to my grandparents' house in a way that I knew the last road mark because my grandfather was a little bit of a redneck hoarder. Or as you have to call it a country savings account. We found 27 Model A wooden battery boxes in one of his sheds when he died. I think that paid for a semester I published one of my nieces.
But my grandfather, about 15, 20 years ago, the house that my mom had been born in, that he started his fame with my grandmother. It was about a mile away from his house. He got kind of junkie and he had been abandoned for a few years. And he bought it back because he didn't want his old house to be an eyesore.
He never weeded the cudsy was covered the house completely now. But he put an old farm altar in the front yard just because he thought that would be a neat thing to do. And I was going to my grandparents. The last thing I was looking for is that farm altar tractor.
It was on the right, that farm altar in the greenhouse that you can't see anymore. The road homes littered with our old junk. But it marks the way home. Look in the very beginning of Jeremiah 31, 21 to 26.
This is what it says. Set up for your self road marks. Place for your self guideposts. Direct your mind to the highway.
The way by which you went, return a version of Israel. Return to these your cities. Verse 21. But think about that.
To set up markers for yourselves. To place for yourself guideposts. And direct your mind to the highway. To realize that there are things in your life that will remind you to stay there.
And when I think about this passage, I've been praying through this passage in the last few weeks. What I just realized is that a pathway to repentance means that we know that we are walking on a clear pathway. But we see what God has saved us from. That these markers are the places where we previously have made decisions that we know are not in line with him.
They now not only serve as markers, they also serve as boundaries for us. They keep us on that path. They realize this is where I get to when I'm on my own. And it's not navigable terrain whatsoever at all.
Think about what the beginning of that. I'm drawing you to myself through loving kindness. Another translation says, I have lengthened out my mercy to you. This passage also speaks of the patience of God in our eyes.
And I'm not very patient naturally. I know some of you might be, but I'm not. But I think about it. The patience that God has to have with me.
I'm not patient with myself. And the patience that God has with me. This isn't about going to a different place. This is going to a change place.
A place of genuine transformation, a transformation of our character. But also the transformation of the mode of our relationships, of how we relate to God, also of how we relate to other people. And repentance is about us turning around and going back. And him clearing the road through all of our own junk for us.
It's God saying, I'm ending your exile. I'm ending your listlessness. I'm ending your frustrations. It's almost as though that we are just to look at Jesus.
And then we see the places where in the past we failed to look at him. And we've instead turned away and diverted ourselves from him. He's clearing out a path home. He's looking at us and saying, I am more powerful than the effects of your sin.
Let's pray together today. Jesus, repentance is about a road that's well worn. A road that's well known. Not well known in a good way most of time.
God is about us rewising the stopping points in our life. It's about us rewising the failure points in our life. But God, this is a positive conversation. Because we think of that highway.
That road back to you. Back to a place of thriving. God, and if we honestly think about repentance, we realize that that path is cleared of our stuff. It's a description of all of sin falling in the north of the glory of God.
It's a description. You make a path back to that glory for us. Hebrews read that Jesus is the great high priest that's brought us back into those holiest of places. God help us to understand to rewise what happens when we struggle to see you.
Because we're still trying to walk on our own road. It's not easy to walk on. But we open ourselves up to you, in repentance. God, we turn.
God, we pray for a clear eyes to understand what these markers are. God, to continue this journey. We celebrate and realize the things that you have done for us. God, some of us, those are first steps for us.
And we thank you for just willing hearts to see into different things. God, we open ourselves up to you. Thank you for loving us and loving us so well.