• “They have gone after other gods to serve them. The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant that I made with their fathers” (Jer 11:10).
• You have to wonder how the life of faith could be so fragile that Israel’s bond to God is always being broken, but there it is, on nearly every page of the OT. It’s almost as though any impulse is capable of dislodging a healthy devotion to God. So when Paul says to the Galatians, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Gal 1:6), I think he’s using those words in a rhetorical sense. I doubt he’s actually “astonished.” Wearied maybe, but not astonished. He’s been around the block too many times.
• We all know this. It takes very little to get us off of God and on to something else. In a heartbeat our longings are rearranged, and what consumes us is the project at work, or upgrading the cars, or the Seahawks, or children, or a hobby, game, instrument, theologian, political candidate. It hardly matters. The enemy will use anything — or everything. The human heart is a remarkably feeble instrument to use in the service of God, and yet it is God’s chosen means of accomplishing much of what he does on earth.
• I have a favorite line from a movie we bought for the kids many years ago. A dying priest tells another man to trust in God and the man says, “I don’t believe in God.” The priest sweeps the comment away and says, “It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.” If we take that comment in a larger sense, that ultimately it is God’s hold on us, not our hold on him, that matters, then all is well. This is the force of Jeremiah 31, the chapter of hope in the New Covenant from the lips of an otherwise dispirited prophet: “Thus says the Lord: ‘The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built” (Jer 31:2-3).
• I don’t mean by this that, when apathetic or backslidden in faith, you should just sit on your hands and wait for God to snap you out of it. But I do mean that in the hour of your awakening you must believe in God and not in yourself. Read Isa 30:15. This means humility and prayer rather than self-confidence and quick action. Change will begin with sorrow and repentance for your wayward heart, not some fix of your own devising. After all, you’re the one who got you into this mess.
• And finally, know that your own fluctuations in faithfulness are going to come. Don’t let the enemy use this also against you, so that once you are down he gets to beat you further down. Just repent and rise. Again, read Isa 30:15. The redemption and restoration wrought by Christ mean you can get back up, lifting your drooping hands and strengthening your weak knees. God will build you, and you shall be built.