Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Old Testament, Lamentations 3:22-33

Lamentations 3:22-33

We’re so geared toward complaining aren’t we? I guess I will admit it first. But, yes I am bent in that direction. When things don’t go my way, well I am good at wallowing. You? In our Old Testament lesson, dear old Jeremiah is showing his broken heart to us. Lamentations is the expression of a truly broken heart. A man, called by and given to the service of God, has been preaching a long time to people whose hearts are the opposite of his own. Not broken. Hard. And good at complaining.

Their disobedience has cost them their homeland and God who promised and gave them their home has sent them away in judgment. But what do we learn from Jeremiah here? That it is actually a benefit to sit under God’s good discipline and learn from it. Pleasant? No. Something to ask God for? Probably not. But when it comes, and as the New Testament says, we receive God’s chastening or we’re not His, Jeremiah says, “It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth …. and be full of reproach” (Lam. 3:27, 30b). Wow! That’s “Opposite World.”

I wonder if there aren’t many Christians who have not read Lamentations. It is worthwhile. It opens us to not only the broken heart of Jeremiah, but of His Lord and ours. Broken when and while we refuse to listen. He disciplines us because He loves us. We need to learn to take it.