This week's sermon title is "What God Can Do!" This is Palm Sunday! A day for singing Alleluias and praising God for sending the Lord Jesus who is the Son of David, the King of Israel. Of course, it’s also just five days out from the darkest of all the days of humanity, even darker than in the days of Noah’s flood. Good Friday will happen, but Good Friday is not the Final Word. Jeremiah, the prophet of dark forebodings of disaster for the nation of Israel, has a particular task assigned to him by God. He sees that it is done but cannot begin to imagine how it can be meaningful. He needed to learn what God can do.

This week's sermon title is "Roadways and Boundaries." Maps are wonderful. Without them folk can get hopelessly lost. One of the main prophetic insights given to Jeremiah was the value – indeed, necessity – of accurate maps. The maps referred to are not the ones we see on our GPS machines or that come up on Google maps. Instead, the maps Jeremiah references lay out the way folk should live. We need directions! The life that is directionless is frustrating and fruitless. Even worse are maps that give wrong information. Life can be wearying using the wrong maps. Jesus speaks to this issue in our gospel text.

God promised Jeremiah that He would be with him, that He would deliver him from his adversaries. There were many adversaries as it turned out! Today we look at one instance to get some idea of the deadly intentions leading figures had toward Jeremiah: they want to kill him! Jeremiah was not the only godly prophet ministering among the people of Jerusalem at that time. A fellow named Uriah had a similar prophetic ministry. Guess what? That man was killed by the king, personally! Why Uriah and not Jeremiah? Likewise, why James and not Peter in Acts 12?

People are very forgetful. In times of great abundance we tend to forget what it was like to count our pennies. When we are healthy and well, we don’t remember what it was like when we had that bad head cold. In a similar way, as a society grows more sophisticated, more learned, more affluent, there is a tendency to forget the truths by which our lives were formerly ordered. God makes such a charge against the Israelites. They have switched gods! Pilate’s judgment seat shows Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day doing the same thing. How about us–what have we forgotten?

We ought to consider more carefully the great legacy of literacy. Having a written language is a game changer. God took care to write things down. Some things He wrote in stone – hello, Ten Commandments! Moses smashed the first copy of the Commandments. In today’s text, God commands Jeremiah to write down all the prophecies he’s spoken. Guess what? When they’re read to the king, he burns them! Like the Ten Commandments, God has them written down, again. Luke and Pilate also write some things down. As it turns out, both write under God’s inspiration.

Some things never seem to change. A classic example is how prone we are to trust in our hearts, that is, to trust in the innate “good heartedness” of ourselves and others. The Lord spoke to and through Jeremiah about this issue, repeatedly. In today’s text we find as scathingly accurate an assessment of the human heart as will be found in any writing in any time. This does not make Jeremiah happy. What about Jesus? Doesn’t He have a better assessment of what to make of the human heart? We may need to reconsider the advice to “follow your heart and find happiness.”

If you’re going to carry a message for someone, it makes sense that you want to know if the person who is charging you to deliver the message is trustworthy. You want to be assured that you’re delivering an honest and accurate message. Jeremiah spent over forty years declaring a message to the Israelite people, a message they did not want to hear or believe. It makes perfect sense, then, that God would give Jeremiah assurance the message he was to deliver was truthful. Moses wanted such a confirmation, and Jesus gives His disciples (including us) similar assurances.

Today we launch into a character study of Jeremiah the prophet. He didn’t plan on being a prophet, nor did he think he was qualified to be a prophet. Yet, as it turned out, he served the Lord in exactly that role for over 40 years. What Jeremiah learned right off the bat is that God’s the One who does the calling! Likewise, the apostle Paul did not have any intentions of being an apostle of the Lord Jesus, but that didn’t stop Jesus from calling him to that office. Ditto for John, the youngest apostle who eventually became the oldest apostle. We need to hear God’s call too.

It is the end of January already. Statistically, that means that our New Year’s resolutions have already fallen to the wayside and we have begun to wonder in earnest what kind of year 2019 will be. Well, I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I am supremely confident that 2019 will be a good year. The basis of my confidence is not due to my financial security, physical health, or social standing. 2019 will be a good year, because we have a good King who reigns supreme over all things. We want to live and walk in the security of His kingship!

Slomon is inextricably linked in our minds to wisdom. Solomon is known as the epitome of wisdom. Early in his reign this designation was confirmed in the minds of all his subjects by the manner in which he proved which of two women who claimed to be a child’s mother really was the mother of the child. The Queen of Sheba had her breath taken away by Solomon’s wisdom and wealth. He was an extraordinary man. Being extraordinarily gifted can have its own set of challenges. Solomon experienced them. Solomon needed to exercise wisdom.