THE SECRET OF A VITAL LIFE

[Jeremiah 17:5-8]

              Introduction to the Scriptures: Jeremiah, of course, is one of the major prophets in terms of major works. Not that he is more important than the minor prophets, but Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel are the major prophets that have shaped our understanding of who God is. We go to the 17^th chapter. God is talking to us and He raises up an image that we are going to be exploring today, it’s found elsewhere in the Scriptures as well but stated succinctly and powerfully here in these few verses. So listen to God’s word and let this image that God is presenting for us here, be formed in your mind.

Prayer for Illumination - Thank you, Father, for this powerful passage, this powerful image. We certainly want to be numbered among those whose roots go down to draw up that nourishment so that we might survive adversity, we might grow, we might even have an excess of life that overflows in fruit, the fruits of the Spirit, like love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness, all those things that you place before us and that you desire for us to savor and to share. Father, let us take seriously the significance of nourishing our spirits this day. And, indeed, may we not only take it seriously, may we experience it through the power of your living Spirit in this place. In Christ’s name, AMEN.

Message

              Make no mistake, I depend absolutely upon grace! I know that my messages are often a challenge, and I hope you understand it is because I feel like I need to be challenged all the time. Like all of us, I struggle to be the man I know God desires for me to be. I set high goals for myself and I consistently fall short. Just when I think I am making some progress, I fall flat on my face. Maybe you know that experience. If I make some small measure of progress with one sin, I find that I have neglected to take seriously a dozen others. Most of us carry a great weight of guilt as a result of our failures. And perhaps we even fear the wrath of God – expect His punishment.

          But if you have confessed your sin and accepted Christ’s offer of salvation and new life, those are no longer the issues. Your sin has passed to Christ on the cross. He’s dealt with it. Your guilt has been taken away by an act of absolution. That is what it means to be a Christian. God has declared you no longer guilty – that is what justification is all about, and His wrath against your sin has already been spent on the cross. Now there has been a sea-change in the issues you must deal with. Some of us are still dealing with past issues; we need to look ahead and deal with the issues that are current for us. The issues are no longer guilt and fear for the Christian. The issue is, having escaped the debilitating power of sin, how can you begin to learn to grow and to experience the absolute joy of life which God intended for you to know? He knows you’re a sinner. He’s offered you His forgiveness, but He wants you to know life. He wants you to know what it is all about.

          Remember last week we listened as Jesus explained the difference between earthly life or bios which runs down and dies, and the delightful, all-powerful, life which comes from God – zoe in the Greek – which never runs down, but keeps on building up for eternity – it just gets better and better! And he told us in John 6 that He himself was the bread of zoe. If we want that experience, we find it in Him. He was the source of this incredible life from God! There is a great verse in John 10:10 which says that Jesus came to give us this life. That is his whole purpose! He came to give us this zoe, and to give it to us perisson, which is a wonderful Greek word which means abundantly, or even superabundantly. It means above and beyond measure. I want to you have this life that is found only in God, and I came to make sure you get it.

          I’m here this morning to tell you the secret of how to begin to experience that abundant life! As with anything in life, it will be a process, with some failures and some successes. But if you are committed to it, just like being committed to anything else, improving your golf game, or learning a new skill, you should begin making progress and finding greater and greater delight in your achievement. We should not be satisfied with being sinners who’ve been forgiven. God wants to give you more.

          We’ve already learned, a few weeks ago, how God designed us to work. Made in God’s image, we are a trinity of sorts ourselves, consisting of body, mind, and spirit. As we learned, the spirit is the unique part of us made in the image of God, unlike any other being on earth, which talks to and communes with God. God intends for that spirit, which is in communion with Him, to instruct our minds, and then for our minds to control our bodies. It’s a profound concept once we begin to understand it, and it’s very practical . And for the next three Sundays, we are going to look at the very practical and achievable ways in which we may nourish and build up our spirits, our minds, and our bodies.

          Remember last week we said it is no wonder that we are so weak spiritually, and so susceptible to spiritual disease and temptation, because we have been neglecting to feed ourselves spiritually. It is just like feeding our bodies. If we fail to feed our bodies, our muscles grow weak, our growth is retarded, we become anemic and susceptible to physical diseases. And it is precisely the same with our spirits. If we are struggling, we should know the reasons. So how can we keep our spirits strong? There is no trick to it. You don’t have to be a super saint. Anyone can do it. And if we will, we cannot help but grow stronger.

          Our text this morning from Jeremiah 17 gives us a powerful image which you need to take away with you, and I trust it will be embedded in my spirit today. It says:

            Cursed [as opposed to blessed] is the one who trusts in man, who depends on the flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. [By the way, nothing grows in the salt land either.]

But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him [as opposed to himself]. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

          Now that is a powerful picture! And you can claim it today. Essentially it says, You cannot get this right on your own. If you are struggling it is because you are trying to do it on your own. If you turn away from the LORD and try to do this on your own strength, your own wisdom, you will inevitably fail. You will become like a little dried up bush in the wasteland.

          By contrast, if you will come to the LORD for the strength to do this, you cannot help but grow strong and vital. It will not matter what adversity comes your way, you will continue to grow and you will enjoy a fruitful and a productive life. Not that everything is going to go right for you, but even in the adversity you are going to continue to grow and find His peace.

          The southern part of the Holy Land, that some of you have seen with me, is called the Negev. It is mostly a dry, barren desert. I grew up on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota – so if you haven’t been to the Holy Land, but you’ve been to the Badlands, you know what this is all about. Once in a while, a small weed or bush will grow in a pocket which collects a little moisture from time to time, but then the hot winds come and it dries up, breaks off, and blows away. In South Dakota we call them tumbleweeds. But scattered throughout the Negev are some amazing trees. You see them growing in odd, unexpected places – acacia trees and tamarisk in particular, sometimes standing tall and green though surrounded entirely by wasteland. You and I live in a cultural wasteland, so we might want to look at this image and see how this happens. Someone has estimated that the average adult tree must consume as much as 200 gallons of water a day in order to stay healthy. Where is that going to come from in a desert? It looks impossible, but the explanation is very simple. There are small, or sometimes large, underground streams or aquifers beneath the surface even in the desert, and these trees have simply sunk their roots down into the water, and they are healthy and growing even in the midst of a desert.

          So here is the secret of a vital life. It could hardly be stated better than it is in the translation of Colossians 2:6-7 printed in your bulletins this morning. It says this to you and to me: Yes, you’ve been saved, that is the grace and forgiveness part, where we began –

And now just as you trusted Christ to save you, trust Him too for each day’s problems; live in vital union with Him. Let your roots grow down into Him and draw up nourishment from Him. See that you go on growing in the Lord, and become strong and vigorous in the truth. Let your lives overflow with joy and thanksgiving for all He has done.

A healthy, growing Christian is simply one who has learned how to thrust the taproot of his soul into the deep spiritual reservoir which is Jesus Christ and His Spirit. If you are growing your roots down into Jesus Christ, you cannot help but grow stronger and more vigorous. In fact, if you are consistent with it, there will be an overflow of joy and of thanksgiving in your life.

          Perhaps you know how a tree grows. All winter it sends out its roots. Things are adverse on the surface, and it sends out its roots, which spread through the soil to find more moisture and nutrients which it will need. Then in the summer sunshine, its branches grow to match the roots. So however much the roots have grown, just out of sight, the branches are going to grow out there in the world. If there is minimal nutrition, then the tree may barely cling to life, like the evergreens you sometimes see clinging to a crack in a rock in the mountains. If there is more nutrition, the tree will grow. And if there is an abundance of nutrition, whatever the tree does not need to stay alive or grow overflows as fruit. Fruit is simply excess life shared now in the world. That is a beautiful image of what it means to be a Christian!

          Returning to our text from Jeremiah 17, we are informed that no amount of self-effort is going to be adequate for us to survive, let alone grow or be productive. But the person who draws his life from the Living God will not only live himself, but will thrive and grow, even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances. In fact, he cannot fail to bear fruit. That is what it says; that is God’s word.

          All right, so how do we do this? How do we sink our roots down into Jesus Christ? How do we draw from that spiritual reservoir? It is profoundly logical. It makes perfect sense. What is God asking us to do? How do we put our roots down into Jesus Christ? There is another famous passage of scripture which draws on this same image, and it is very powerful and instructive. It is Psalm 1, and it begins, “Blessed is the man” – the same words which begin Jeremiah 17:7, “Blessed is the man” (and blessed means happy or delighted or fulfilled or even overjoyed) –

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. [He doesn’t do it that way.] But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.

          Wow! There it is again! It’s a powerful image, isn’t it? That is what God is saying to us. The vital, growing, productive person is simply the one who sinks his or her roots down into the reservoir of life which God provides, and he does so – here is where the practical instruction comes in – Psalm 1:2 says, simply by meditating on God’s Word day and night. Now last week we mentioned the seven essential steps in feeding our spirits, and they are worth reviewing. Meditation was just one of them, but I want to focus on meditation this morning, because I believe that meditation is the core of the other six steps as well.

          A synonym for meditate is ruminate. This is an appropriate word when we are talking about nourishing our souls because ruminate can also apply to eating. When a cow ruminates, she just keeps on chewing on her food over and over again until she has extracted every last bit of nourishment from it. And this, the Bible is informing us, is how we are to approach God’s Word. We don’t just skip through it; we don’t try to swallow it whole. We keep turning it over and over and over in our minds. We study it; we compare the words, try to understand the context, try to listen to the author. We ask God’s Spirit to reveal His truth in it. We ask other believers what they have learned from it. We consider how it ought to apply to our lives – we think of practical applications to our own particular circumstances. And then we set about trying to put it into practice. All that is a part of meditating on God’s Word. It will be important to have others who encourage us in this endeavor – other believers who also take God’s Word seriously.

          Last week we said the other steps to nurturing our spirits included worship, Bible study, prayer, fellowship, obedience, and communion. All these, you understand, need to be centered on this rumination, this meditation on the truths God has revealed in His Word. Psalm 1 simplifies the process for us. It just says, if you want your spirit to be strong, if you want your spirit to survive in the midst of adversity, in a spiritual wasteland if you will, then you simply must make it your first priority to meditate on His Word – and it goes on to say to do that “day and night.”

          Now what is this telling us? It’s not just a figure of speech. He means literally that we need to be meditating on His Word day and night. You don’t just do this on Sundays – or one or two Sundays a month (assuming you come to worship occasionally at least, and when you do you truly dive in and chew on and explore the implications of God’s Word). Meditation on God’s Word has to be a daily exercise. Most of us wouldn’t even consider going a day without food for our bodies, but we let days and sometimes even weeks go by without even a snack for our spirits, let alone the serious rumination on God’s Word, and then we wonder why we struggle. Isn’t it obvious?

          If you are not progressing in your spiritual life – if you are not growing stronger and finding success in your battle with sin and disappointment in your life – then I am fairly confident you are not taking time daily for a Quiet Time of devotions with the Lord where you look deeply into His Word, reflect on it, meditate on it, pray about it, and look for ways to apply it specifically to your life. If you are doing that, God’s Word says, you’d be growing and your life would be productive.

          Now some of us are going to have to make some major changes in our lives just to get to worship once a week. But that is a bare and meager beginning. That daily Quiet Time of personal devotions simply must be as much a part of our daily routine as are the meals we enjoy for our bodies. And believe me, this is not a chore. It feeds my soul when I do it consistently! I often struggle with all my other commitments, but frankly, if I am not spending that time feeding my spirit every day, I’m not being productive with my other commitments anyway. The truth is, we cannot grow, we cannot thrive as Christians without that daily reflection on God’s Word. We simply cannot. There are no exceptions. That is the way it works. Just like our bodies, you don’t have a rare body that doesn’t need food, and you don’t have a rare spirit that doesn’t need nourishment either.

          But even if we get our worship and our daily quiet time established, we still will not have gotten to the point the Psalmist was describing. You remember he said we should be meditating on God’s Word “day and night.” I like to start my day in God’s Word, but the suggestion here is that we will want to end the day there as well. That makes sense, because the subconscious mind, as you know, quite consistently continues to reflect on the last thing we see or consider before going to sleep. So what you read, or the movie you watch, or whatever it is you are thinking about or doing, your subconscious plays that again and again, and mixes it this way and that, and it becomes a part of your thinking. It seems quite obvious that even a brief time of reflection on God’s Word before we go to sleep would have a positive effect on our minds and our spirits. The one whose roots are going down deep into the spiritual reservoir is the one who meditates on His Word day and night.

          I don’t want to scare anyone off or overwhelm you with the need to spend most of your waking hours having devotions. We don’t have that luxury, and God doesn’t insist upon it for us. You don’t have to spend your whole life eating either, but you do want to be consistent with eating, and you do want to eat something healthy. It’s the same with meditating on God’s Word. It doesn’t have to take a great deal of time, but we should be consistent with it, and we should be sure we are chewing on something substantial, we are really taking the time to reflect and see what’s there and what God has for us.

          Of course, you can read just a few verses and chew on it all day. The idea is to learn to keep God’s Word in your consciousness and let it begin to shape you, for the reality which every psychologist knows is that we become what we think about most. Every good coach will talk to his or her players about visualizing themselves as accomplishing all the things that might be required on their particular team and with their particular discipline or sport. We become what we think about most. What does it mean to be on God’s team, to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?

          So there you have it – the simple key to a healthy, vital, and productive life. We simply must begin – that is the first step (I like to go to the beginning; I’m very linear in my thinking) – we must begin by feeding our spirits. Everything else depends upon that. Without that, all our efforts, no matter how noble or well-intended will simply fail, as Jeremiah 17, points out, as Psalm 1 points out, as that classic passage about the branch and the vine in John 15 points out. We will simply fail if we are depending upon our own strength. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is not optional for the Christian. This is not an upper division course. This is what it involves to follow Jesus Christ. You will wither and die without it. And if you feel like your spirit is withering, this is where you begin.

          In our passage about the bread of life from John 6 last week, Jesus concluded in verse 63, “The Spirit gives life [or zoe]; the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” That is why we are called upon to reflect on, to meditate on, to ruminate on the words He has give us, because they are spirit and they are life. The secret of a vital life should not be a secret at all. It should be the most obvious thing in the world. God’s Word, absorbed into our spirits, is the single nutrient which sustains and grows our spiritual life, and everything else depends upon it. There is no future in ignoring our spiritual diet and then whining or complaining to God about our lack of progress in our spiritual lives. There is an obvious reason for it, and we have to deal with the reason. “The Spirit gives life; the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life [zoe].” You know where the banquet table is. There is no excuse for starving.

Closing prayer - Father, as we conclude our worship today, we have looked into your Word, and you have fed us a bit here, and that will sustain us for a little while. But we have to come back to the table. We will have to come back to the table tomorrow – tomorrow morning, and tomorrow night. We do a lot of complaining about our lack of progress, but the reasons for it are probably very obvious. So we would confess to you that we have neglected the feeding of our spirits. Though we have asked you to feed us, we’ve been unwilling to come to the table. I pray that you would help us to begin here with this simple act, commit ourselves to worship, to daily worship, to daily meditation on the Word of God, that there would be that meal every day. It can grow to fill whatever time and energy you require of each of us, but may we be consistent in coming to you and to your word, sending our roots down into Jesus Christ, into the spiritual reservoir prepared for us; that we might begin at the beginning, as human beings made in your image, to become the people you created us to be. Thank you for the simplicity of this insight, this revelation from your Word. We offer ourselves in response through Jesus Christ and the power of your Spirit, AMEN.