Jeremiah 17:7-8 “But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. 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.”

There is more than one word for “blessed” in the Greek and the Hebrew. In many of the psalms, or Jesus’ beatitudes, the word “Blessed…” means something more like “happy.” We feel uplifted and elevated when we are enjoying God’s word and the good things that come from it.

Here we have a word  for “Blessed” that describes us as people who have received a great gift. That’s what happens when we trust in the Lord. We possess good things. Those things may not make us happy in the material sense, but they are still good to have. They’re still a gift.

Some people turn this around. They make it seem as though when we trust in God, we are the givers, and he is the receiver. And we may speak of giving God our trust, or giving him our hearts. But that is no great prize, is it? I once heard a talk show host and a political guest joking about the heart of a particularly hard-edged politician. If you received his heart as a transplant, would it be a good thing, because it had never been used, or would it be a bad choice, because it didn’t work?

Spiritually, our hearts don’t work right. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure,” is the very next thing Jeremiah observes in verse 9. Some great gift for God that is when we offer our love and trust.

So we are the blessed ones, the receivers of God’s gifts. And the prophet describes that blessing with a picture: “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.”

Note that the tree in the picture doesn’t have life easy all the time. The heat comes and makes it suffer. The drought comes and dries up much of the moisture on which it depends. Life is like that for those who trust in the Lord. About now we are at the peak of the annual flu season. Millions have gotten sick. We can expect that the percentage of Christians with the flu matches the general population. When prices rise, we have to pay what everyone else does. When tornadoes come, they plow through Christian homes the same as unbelievers’. We live in the same world as everyone else.

But God has planted us by a stream of water. Under the surface, our roots tap into the streams of his promises. We know the love of a Savior who went all the way to cross and death to make us his own. Disease may make us miserable. It may even take our life. It has no effect on the streams of love and forgiveness flowing to our hearts from Jesus’ cross.

Our earthly fortunes will almost certainly swing wildly between plenty and scarcity, if they don’t just hover between “can’t quite make ends meet” and “can’t get the bill collectors off my back.” But God’s grace is always free, and no one can come and repossess the kingdom that he has already given us.

As people who trust in the Lord, we are always cleansed, always safe, always rich, always free, always treasured, always prospering, always at peace with God, always filled with his presence, always destined for glory, and no one can ever take these gifts away.

Jeremiah 17:5“This is what the LORD says, ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord.”

The people of Israel in 600 B.C. thought that they were clever. They had survived as a nation for over 700 years. They watched the rise and fall of other nations around them. They weren’t the super power they had once been in the days of David and Solomon, but they were convinced that they could continue to get by on their wits. Their shrewd manipulation of the political powers around them would save them. All they needed was the right mix of diplomacy, military strength, and well-chosen allies, and they would be secure.

There is nothing wrong with shrewd politics, careful diplomacy, or a strong defense and allies. But you see the weakness they all have in common: they all depend on fallible human beings. You realize we have similar issues of misplaced trust in our time. Have you watched the Disney movie The Incredibles 2? Both the original and the sequel play on society’s longing for superheroes with super powers to come to the rescue. Yet people fear those powers, and they disgust when the same superheroes make a mess of things.

Outside of The Incredibles movies, we see the fascination with superheroes easily enough. Hollywood churns out movie after movie about Superman, Batman, Spider-man, Wonder Woman, and The Avengers, to name a few. For all their super powers, these characters sometimes make a mess.

Now here’s our problem: We actually put our trust in superheroes. Only, our real-life superheroes don’t have supernatural powers. They have political powers. Our nation is very divided about the kind of politicians and political systems they like. A little historical study can point out the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various political theories, if we are honest enough to do a sober study. But they all have this in common: they are human inventions created, promoted, and utilized by sinful, selfish human beings. They are bound to be riddled with moral holes and blind-spots. They are open to abuse and corruption by the people who use them.

This problem is only compounded as more and more individuals idolize these superheroes. They become the kind of person Jeremiah curses: “who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord.”

That last phrase is the real nub of the issue, “whose heart turns away from the Lord.” Jeremiah’s Israel still went through the motions of worshiping God. They observed the major holidays. They brought the required sacrifices. But their hearts weren’t in it. The people showed their true colors by their moral degeneracy. Materialism, sexual promiscuity and deviancy, hard-heartedness toward the poor, substance abuse, corruption in the courts–that is the lifestyle embraced by these people whose hearts had turned away from the Lord.

The Christian faith in our country looks eerily similar. Europeans, oddly, consider us a hyper-religious people because so many Americans still go to church. But that is changing fast. Across our country, seven out of ten Christian congregations are growing smaller, two out of ten are holding steady, and only one out of ten is growing. In most cases that one is taking in Christians from the others.

But the clearer evidence that our hearts are turning away from the Lord can be seen in the lives of the people who still go to church. Did the list of sins I cited from Jeremiah’s day sound uncomfortably familiar? A friend of our family recently gave me a book called Gods at War. It categorizes our modern idols under three “temples,” the “temple of pleasure,” the “temple of power,” and the “temple love.” Under pleasure he lists food, sex, and entertainment. Under power he describes success, money, and achievement. And under love he identifies romance, family, and “me.” All of these things become rivals to the God of the Bible for the love and trust of our hearts. They offer people, and the things people produce, as a substitute. This is defiance of the very first commandment, “You shall have no other gods.”

Jeremiah’s warning is not intended to hurt us, but to warn us. The Lord is seeking to turn us back to himself. He is waiting with grace for those who do.

Matthew 26:40-41 “Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ he asked Peter. ‘Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ ”

Was it so much to ask, to sacrifice just a little sleep for the love of the Savior who was about to suffer what no other person ever has, who was about to bring all history to its climax and save a fallen world? Jesus had been teaching them for three years. He had spoken to them for hours this very night about the things that were about to happen. Did they still have no sense of the importance of the night or of the sacrifice it would require of him? Did they have no sense of their friend and Master’s burden? Keep watch for Jesus? They needed to watch for themselves and their own weakness. Their loveless slide into tempting sleep only made Jesus’ heavy load heavier, his sorrow deeper, his prayer more difficult.

What is our great temptation regarding Jesus, his suffering, and his sacrifice? Is it not our own failure to appreciate the magnitude of what he did, our own neglect of the centerpiece of his saving love? We don’t fall asleep, at least not usually. It’s worse. Jesus’ suffering and death bore us. We get all excited about a bunch of grown men chasing a ball around a field or across a court. Our heart rate soars, we scream, we cheer. We will watch for hours and hours.

Our attention is riveted to the news when people are senselessly or tragically killed in the latest crime or catastrophe. The news anchors can give the same five-minutes worth of details hour after hour, and yet it’s hard to pull away from the TV. Perversions of God’s good gifts of sex and beauty are like magnets that would pull our eyes right out of their sockets if they weren’t attached.

But when the eternal God makes himself a mortal man, and he stands in our place, and he lets himself be abused by the very people he came to save, and he submits himself to outrageous indignity and injustice, and for me he lets himself be nailed to a cross, and for me the blood pours from his body, and for me he endures wages of my sin, and for me he breathes his last, we yawn. It’s an old story. It’s a familiar story. “Tell me something new, something upbeat with a little more action.” No, watch your Savior. Watch him all the way to the cross and death that saves you.

Then pray, like he does, for the Father’s will to be done. “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

“May your will be done.” Jesus prayer for his Father’s will makes it a true prayer, a prayer prayed in faith. This is not an attempt to push God off his throne. It’s not an attempt to change the changeless God. Jesus will not an attempt to dictate terms to the Almighty. He asks, and he submits. True prayer trusts God’s will, and accepts that God’s will is better than my own even though it may mean pain, discomfort, disappointment and apparent defeat.

Jesus so embraced his Father’s will earlier in his ministry when he accepted 40 days without food in the wilderness, and did nothing to change that until God’s angels came and attended him. Paul embraced the Father’s will in his parting words to the Ephesian elders, “I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me. However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me.”

There are worse things than suffering. God often does his best work through suffering. We might be so bold as to say, he usually does his best work through suffering. “We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope,” Paul wrote the Romans. Jesus’ suffering was the salvation of the world. The things we suffer often serve the salvation of our own souls. “May your will be done.”

Matthew 26:36-39 “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’ Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’”

When ever in his ministry do we hear Jesus ask his disciples for help, as though he is the one in need of strength and comfort? He sends them on an occasional errand to pay a tax, fetch a donkey, or prepare a meal. He called them to serve in his mission. But he was always the pillar of strength offering comfort and assurance to them. He was the one who stood calm, cool, and collected in the face of danger. They are afraid they are going to die in the storm at sea, but Jesus sleeps through most of it, until they wake him up. Then he calms the storm with a word and takes them to task for their little faith.

Now Jesus is so filled with sorrow over the grim task ahead of him, so troubled by what he is about to suffer, that he asks these three closest friends for help. It isn’t a great thing he asks of them. Could they stay up with him for a little while? Could they just watch while he prays, could they see if anyone is coming, so that he may pour himself into this prayer, and pray without distraction? In the face of his fear, in his battle with temptation, he is the one asking them for help.

To be sure, no one ever before or ever since, has carried a burden like his. We sometimes say that a man who is overwhelmed by his responsibilities is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. With Jesus, it was worse. He was carrying the weight of the world’s sins, the responsibility for them all, literally, on his shoulders, and it was going to crush the life out of him in just a few hours. Everything inside of him longed to escape.

He takes his desire to abandon his mission and escape the cross to the Father himself.  He offers no perfunctory prayer, politely prayed before supper or bedtime. His whole body is involved, not just his mouth. There he lies stretched out on the ground, his sweaty, tear-streaked face pressed against the Judean sand. The words pour out from the depths of his soul.

Who is this praying, pleading, so? Who is this asking, begging for some way, any way, to be delivered from the suffering he is about to face? This is Jesus, the Son of God, heaven’s Prince, the King of Kings! For all his divine power and heavenly glory, how utterly, truly human he had become. How inconceivably awful the agony he had to suffer must have been.

In the whole history of Jesus’ sufferings and death, without a doubt the most frightening words we hear him cry come from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There he suffers the fate of the damned and forsaken, an eternity of torment for the sum of all souls packed into few hours on a cross one sad Friday. But next to that, is there anything more frightening than this scene: the very Son of God, so overwhelmed with sorrow at his coming death, so troubled, that at this late moment he is seeking any possible way to avoid it all?

Yet Jesus doesn’t give in to his temptation. He takes it to his Father in prayer. And so he faithfully battles temptation while his closest disciples stand watch.

Romans 10:15 “And how can they preach unless they are sent?”

How can preachers preach if no one sends them? No true messenger of God is an independent contractor. He understands that he is sent. I didn’t just show up one day and start my own church, or apply to become its pastor. I was called. The Holy Spirit used the members of my congregation to bring me here. In this way I have been sent to them, and they are sending me to others in this city who need to know Jesus, or need to know him better.

When you join me in this work, you are sent. Through your home church, God invites you to participate in outreach activities such as door-to-door canvasses, or educational work such as teaching a Sunday school class, or promotional work manning the booth at the County Fair. God sends you to invite your friends and neighbors to come and see. Even when you are sharing the gospel with a friend or family member in the privacy of your own home, you are doing so sent by Jesus. No Christian merely acts on his own, because the message we speak is his, not ours, and the person to whom we introduce them is him.

This isn’t God trying to limit our freedom or cramp our style. This is empowerment. This is confidence that the Lord himself is backing us up. This is the privilege and honor of representing the great God and Savior of the Universe, not just doing our own little spiritual thing. I mean, I am not that much to get excited about. Neither are you. But the Lord Jesus Christ we represents always is.            

There is just one question left: What are we waiting for? Let’s go and tell someone the good news that saves us!

Romans 10:14B “And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

How can you hear about God without a preacher? In God’s plan to save people, preachers are a necessity, too.

Don’t think that is limited to people like Paul, who was writing these words, or people like me, who preach and teach for a living. “Preaching” isn’t limited to formal speeches delivered in front of groups of Christians on Sunday mornings.

Preaching is what happens when people deliver God’s good news. Preaching is going on when a college student defends or explains their faith to a roommate or friends in a college dorm room. Preachers are in action when the next-door neighbor gets cancer, or suffers a loss in the family, and the Christian next door not only drops off a meal, but gets up the courage to talk about Jesus and life that never ends.

Here’s the amazing thing: God has chosen to create a plan to save the world that needs people, people like you and me, to tell others about him. It’s true that we can hand out pamphlets, and distribute Bibles and mail flyers and postcards that have the gospel on them, too. But in almost 30 years of ministry, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who ever got to know God that way–because they read about him.

I know hundreds, personally, who got the gospel from a person. Generally speaking, our Lord wants us to meet him through a warm, living human being, not a cold piece of paper, though he will sometimes settle for the piece of paper if he has to.

Which would you prefer: if your pastor just wrote the sermons and let you read them? Isn’t it better to have him preach them from the heart? Maybe that is a dangerous question for me to ask.

When I was at conference several years ago, a number of people asked me to give their personal love and greetings to my wife. Of course, they are free to text or email her anytime they like, and some do. But there is something warmer, more intimate and personal, about getting a message through a live person.

When you call customer assistance, do you like the automated voice system, talking to the robot: “To make a purchase, press one; for help with installation, press two; for technical support, press three; to make a return, press four”? As often as not, you are just waiting to here, “to speak to a live operator, stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”

So God wants people to hear about him through a warm-blooded, moving and breathing preacher. And sometimes that’s not me. Sometimes, that is you.

Romans 10:14 “And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?”

How can someone believe in a God they never heard of? There is a saying I sometimes hear that wants to encourage people to have humility about their expertise, or practice a certain calm when the unexpected happens. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” It seems self-evident, doesn’t it? And if you don’t know it, you can’t take it into account. You can’t do anything about it. You certainly can’t put any faith in it.

It’s not as though things somehow work differently in God’s world. If the Lord had wanted, he could have put faith into everyone’s heart directly. He has the power to do it. There are certain things our bodies do automatically. I don’t have to think about breathing. No one ever gave me lessons. Most of the time I don’t even think about it. It’s always been something I do, obviously. Maybe believing in God could have worked like that.

There are certain things that work on us, whether we know about them or not. Sir Isaac Newton is sometimes credited with “discovering” gravity in 1687. That does not mean everyone was floating around like astronauts in space before then. Newton simply gave a natural phenomenon, a force of nature, a name. But it was holding everything to the floor long before any of us started thinking about it. When we were preschoolers, we didn’t need to be tethered to keep us from floating away. We hadn’t heard of gravity, but we it was working on us just the same. Maybe the Lord could have dispensed with faith, and dispensed with us knowing about him, and just let his salvation work on us anyway.

It doesn’t work like that. His whole idea is to restore us to himself as people who trust and love him. He craves our attention. He wants to share life with us, like friends or family do. That assumes we must know who he is.

He has chosen to make that happen through a message, a message that tells us what he hates, and that he will cut us off from him if we live that way; and a message that tells us he loves us like no one else ever has. He loves us all the way becoming one of us, and dying to save us, and moving heaven and earth and driving the whole course of history to seek us and find us and bring us the message that introduces us to him. The answer to the question: “You can’t believe in a God you never heard of.”

But you can believe in Jesus, because he is showing himself to you right now in his word.

Romans 10:13 “‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?”

That is a quote of the Old Testament prophet Joel. It states one clear truth, and implies another one. To call on the name of the Lord is to speak to this God, to pray to him, to worship him, as your own. The person who calls on the name of the Lord isn’t saying his meal time or bed time prayers merely out of family custom. She isn’t bowing her head in prayer or singing God’s praises at church as a matter of conformity. She is not faking it to fit in with the rest of the group and avoid unwanted attention. These people genuinely claim this God as their own, know him, have become his people, and bring him the concerns and appreciation of their hearts in word and song.

This is clear and explicit: Such people, every one of them, will be saved. This is also clear, if only implied: Everyone else will be lost. There is no consolation prize for following the wrong god. There is no participation trophy for claiming no god at all. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” is an important truth only if the opposite is equally as true. Paul’s words want to light a fire of urgency under us about our own condition–am I calling on the name of the Lord?–and our concern for billions of lost souls who face an unspeakable fate if something doesn’t change.

So a question naturally follows: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?” “How can unbelievers call on God?” The question is rhetorical and the answer is clear: “They can’t.”

Unbelievers can go to church and mouth the words everyone else is saying. Twice in my ministry I caught men who openly admitted they had no faith confessing the Apostle’s Creed with the rest of the congregation. They were not members, and I knew that the reason they sometimes came was to please family members. But since they were saying the words with us, “I believe in God the Father Almighty…I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord…” I asked them about it. Maybe something had changed. I think it struck both men for the first time that these words were more than some formula we say. They mean something. At the time I asked, they both stopped saying the creed with us when they attended.

I wasn’t trying to make them stop. I just wanted to know where they stood. Sadly, both were still lost. Today, one of them does call on the name of the Lord from the heart. Hearing God’s word so often changed him. He believes, and we can count him a brother in the faith.

The other, so far as I know, has never come to trust Jesus as his Savior. Whether or not one believes is no small matter. It makes a difference as big as heaven or hell.

2 Timothy 4:5 “But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”

A pastor’s ministry is not just about his preaching. It is also about his life. God expects calm, steady, self-control. “Keep your head.” When things aren’t going well for a congregation, it won’t do to have the pastor in a panic. He, of all people, needs to live by faith and trust that God has it under control. If others are opposing him, it won’t work to have him explode in anger. An old pastor once said, “It is of no use to an unrepentant one to be annoyed with him. What he needs is seeking love.” And if things are humming along the way they should, it is no reason for him to become full of himself. who wants a cocky pastor?

Paul is also realistic about the kind of life to expect. “Endure hardship.” That’s not to say that the ministry is all hardship. There are many pleasant things, many blessings that have come to me because of my ministry. But I think we all realize that if a man’s ministry is only about making life comfortable for himself and his family, only about doing what is popular, only about taking the easy road, something isn’t right. You can’t parent that way. You can hardly expect any other calling in life to work that way. People who manage others in the secular world often have to call out bad behavior, confront substandard work, even fire those who are insubordinate. If they don’t, things get worse for everyone. I am not saying that the pastor should “fire” members who are out of line. He needs to shepherd them. But of all people, the pastor needs to carry the cross that comes along with the work God has called him to do.

The real heart of the behavior God expects is in the phrase, “Do the work of an evangelist.” Don’t think of traveling revivalists here, like the evangelist Billy Graham, or a person who serves on a committee that visits people in your neighborhood. Paul is calling on Timothy to do his work in an evangelical way. The gospel, the good news about Jesus’ saving work, the love of God in his grace and forgiveness, the seeking of souls and the building of faith–this is the flavor of a ministry that is fulfilling the solemn duty God has given a man. All your pastors’ preaching, and teaching, and visiting, and confronting, and pleading, and counseling wants to lead you back to the gospel. The pastor is successful when you know that by faith in Jesus your sins are all pardoned, God is your Father, and heaven is your home.

Taken together, Paul calls on pastors to “discharge all the duties of your ministry.” In another context he asks the question, “Who is equal to such a task?” (2 Corinthians 2:16). Every man of God will fall short. Yet, with God’s blessing, your pastor’s ministry will serve as God’s tool to preserve your soul and others.