In this week’s message from Jeremiah 23, we see God’s word set against the dreams of false prophets. His word is like a hammer which shatters a rock and like a fire that burns in the believer’s heart. Through stories of lives changed by Scripture, we are called to treasure God’s Word and wield it faithfully.
Transcript
Well, today I was thinking we would look at the book of Jeremiah. If we turn to the book of Jeremiah, chapter 23. I want to read Jeremiah 23, verses 16 through 32.
The Context of Jeremiah 23
Jeremiah was a prophet immediately before and during the Babylonian captivity. He started his prophetic ministry at the end of King Josiah’s reign. King Josiah was the last good king of Judah.
The kingdom had split between Judah and Israel. The kingdom of Israel was no more. It had already been conquered. The kingdom of Judah still had some kings, and King Josiah was the last of the good kings.
There was a revival that happened in Judah when Josiah was king, but Josiah was killed in battle, and when the next king took the throne, the kingdom of Judah again did evil in the sight of God, and there was no good kings after Josiah.
The kingdom at that time after Josiah was filled with highly religious people. They were filled with prophets who claimed that they spoke from God but were in actuality speaking their own thoughts, their own desires, their own wills. They ignored God’s Word. They ignored God’s calls for repentance. They ignored the prophet Jeremiah who spoke the words of God.
So although they were a deeply religious people, they pursued their own sinful wants and desires. And so as we read this portion of Jeremiah 23 this morning, I want us to focus on the true Word of God, the preciousness of God’s Word, how the Word of God is unlike anything else that we read or know, and how the true Word of God is powerful, how it can effect change in the hearts and minds of people.
So as we read this, I want us to remember the context. God is speaking to the shepherds. If you look at the very beginning of chapter 23, it says,
Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of My pasture, declares the Lord.
So this whole chapter is to the people who are supposed to be the spiritual leaders of Judah, but who are leading the people astray. So that’s the context.
A New Testament Without Jeremiah
And so we’re probably already turned to the book of Jeremiah, but before we read it, I want you to realize how blessed you are that you can turn to this book of Jeremiah.
A few days ago I got back from Peru. I was there for 10 days. What we were doing there is we were interviewing in length pastors who were in various parts of the country, jungle pastors, some pastors in the city of Lima. We were interviewing them for about an hour each just to hear their stories, their testimonies, to see how God has worked in their lives.
And one of them, his name is Martin. He was very long-winded. His interview lasted 100 minutes, exactly. He told the story about his conversion, and as he told the story of his conversion, he talked about what his life was like before Christ. He talked about how he was angry all the time. He was abusive to his wife and to his daughter, even hitting his daughter in the face when she was just two years old, and it left a mark on her face that didn’t heal for years.
This was before he heard about the gospel, but God saved him out of that. It’s a hundred-minute testimony, so I can’t tell you how he was saved out of that, but God saved him. His life was transformed, but they were extremely poor. They were so poor that they could not afford a Bible.
Someone had given them a New Testament, and when he would go to church, he would sit in the pew, and he would open his New Testament, and the pastor would say, “Please turn to the book of Jeremiah.” And he would weep. He would sit in the pew, and he would weep because his New Testament did not have the book of Jeremiah. He would watch everyone else open their Bibles to Jeremiah and read God’s Word, but he could not because he had no Jeremiah.
He would pray. He would continually pray, “Lord, I want a Bible.” He would pray that prayer every week.
So as we read this passage, we can be extremely thankful that your Bible has this passage of Scripture in it to help us, to encourage us, and to teach us what the Lord would have for us.
So let’s read from verse 16. Jeremiah 23:16 says,
Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; they speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord. They keep saying to those who despise Me, ‘The Lord has said, “You will have peace”‘; and as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, they say, ‘Calamity will not come upon you.’
But who has stood in the council of the Lord, that he should see and hear His word? Who has given heed to His word and listened? Behold, the storm of the Lord has gone forth in wrath, even a whirling tempest; it will swirl down on the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until He has performed and carried out the purposes of His heart; in the last days you will clearly understand it.
I did not send these prophets, but they ran. I did not speak to them, but they prophesied. But if they had stood in My council, then they would have announced My words to My people, and would have turned them back from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds.
Am I a God who is near,” declares the Lord, “and not a God far off? Can a man hide himself in hiding places so I do not see him?” declares the Lord. “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the Lord.
“I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in My name, saying, ‘I had a dream, I had a dream!’ How long? Is there anything in the hearts of the prophets who prophesy falsehood, even these prophets of the deception of their own heart, who intend to make My people forget My name by their dreams which they relate to one another, just as their fathers forgot My name because of Baal?
The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has My word speak My word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain?” declares the Lord. “Is not My word like fire?” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer which shatters a rock?
Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,” declares the Lord, “who steal My words from each other. Behold, I am against the prophets,” declares the Lord, “who use their tongues and declare, ‘The Lord declares.’ Behold, I am against those who have prophesied false dreams,” declares the Lord, “and related them and led My people astray by their falsehoods and reckless boasting; yet I did not send them or command them, nor do they furnish this people the slightest benefit,” declares the Lord.
Let me pray for us as we look at this passage of Scripture.
Father, we ask you this morning, as we have just read your words, that they would be illuminated to us through the work of the Holy Spirit. We ask you, as we look at this, that you would teach us. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This is a lengthy passage that shows the context of where Jeremiah is teaching, of what Jeremiah is prophesying against. You have these prophets who are prophesying, but they’re prophesying and teaching something that is contrary to the Word of God.
What I want to do this morning is focus on verse 29. Verse 29 says,
“Is not My word like fire?” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer which shatters a rock?”
Like a Hammer Which Shatters a Rock
The Testimony of Luis
Another one of the pastors that I interviewed, his name is Luis. Luis is 68 years old. And like most people in Peru, he grew up a Roman Catholic. His parents were not believers, even though they were deeply religious. When he was six years old, his father abandoned him and his mother and went off.
He was raised as a very religious Catholic. He would go with his mother to Mass each week. He would bow down before the statues every Sunday. He would even carry one of the idols in the processions. He did all of that, he said, as a way of proving his faith.
And yet inside he was empty. Even though he attended the Catholic Church, he did not have any peace. He would leave church on Sundays and immediately go dancing and drinking, pursuing his own sin immediately after the service.
As he grew older, evangelists would try and tell him about the true gospel of Jesus Christ. They would preach to him again and again and again, but every time, Luis rejected their message.
He believed in his own Catholic convictions, and he believed in his own righteousness. He was good enough before God. He was deeply religious, after all. He was a good Catholic. He did everything that he was supposed to do.
He told me how he joined the Peruvian army and how a man preached the gospel to him there, and he rejected it. After the army, he started work for a mechanics company, and there he met his wife. They lived together unmarried at that time, but he did not love her. He told me that he pursued her just to have her, but he did not love her at all. They would fight all the time.
Eventually, he wanted to be rid of her. She became pregnant with her daughter, and the fights got worse after she was born. He wanted to be free of them. And one night, after two years of constant fighting, she couldn’t take it anymore and left with her daughter to live at her mother’s house.
And Luis was happy. He was finally free of them. He thought that he had won, but he wasn’t free.
About ten days later, he started to feel the absence of his daughter. He started to feel a deep sadness. He started to feel deep regret, and he started to remember some of the things that the evangelist had told him years before. One of them, years ago, had given him his own personal Bible and said, “Luis, I’m giving you this Bible, and I want you to read it.” But Luis never opened it. He put it on the top of his wardrobe and forgot about it, forgot it was there.
But in this deep regret that he started to feel, one night he was laying on his bed smoking his cigarettes that he had just bought. And he remembered the words of one of the evangelists who told him, “The day that you start reading that Bible,” the Bible that he gave him, “begin with the Gospel of John. It’s written for the whole world, and it has a message in it for you.” So he remembered that.
And so he remembered the Bible was up there, and so he gets it down, and he starts reading it. He turns to the Gospel of John because that’s what the evangelists had told him to do. He reads the first chapter, and it doesn’t make any sense, and so he puts it down. But he picks it back up, and he reads the second chapter, and then he reads the third chapter.
And then when he gets to verse 16 of the third chapter, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and he crushed it, and he tore up all the other ones that he had bought, and he starts to weep. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop crying, and he started to pray, and he prayed, “Jesus, if you love me, forgive me. Save my marriage.”
And he said that God did something incredible. He gave him repentance, and he gave him a love for his wife that he never had before. He threw out his cigarettes. He took all of the framed pictures of the Catholic saints that he had accumulated, that he prayed to in his house, and he smashed them.
And although he had attended the Catholic Church all of his life, he had no knowledge of the Bible whatsoever. He had no knowledge of the Scriptures, but what he had just read in the Gospel of John for the very first time, he believed. Luis’s heart was hard as a rock and wouldn’t accept the things of God all of his life until he read the Scriptures and his heart was opened.
A Heart of Stone
A man’s heart is a rock of stone. We read in Ezekiel 36:26, but the Word of God, as we read in this chapter, Jeremiah, is a hammer which shatters the rock. Ezekiel 36:26 says,
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and will give you a heart of flesh.
The natural man, the unbeliever’s natural state before God, is that of someone who is dead. His heart is not beating. It’s as cold as a rock.
That man is in a hopeless condition. He does not desire God. He does not seek after God. He is dead in his transgressions and his sins.
And so when we’re thinking about this passage, that the Word of God is like a hammer which shatters the rock, the first question is, how does God’s Word shatter a rocky heart of stone like Luis’s heart, who rejected the gospel over and over and over again?
Unlike Any Other Word
Well, first of all, the rock is shattered by God’s Word because God’s Word is completely unlike any other word uttered by man. Think about the prophets in Jeremiah’s time. They often began their prophecies with the phrase, “Thus saith the Lord.” But the Lord did not speak. The Lord did not give them those words to say. They proclaimed their own words without power.
But when God speaks, as he has spoken to us today in this passage of Scripture, when God speaks, it’s the same powerful word, just like the same word that he said in the very beginning when he said,
Let there be light, and there was light.
It effects change. Something happens. There’s no difference in the authority of God’s Word between the words that you read on this page and the words that God says audibly when he said, “Let there be light,” when he spoke creation into existence. Both are God’s words.
And so, first of all, God’s words are powerful. They have divine authority.
The Bible that we read does not derive its authority from a church council or from human traditions. Man did not decide that the Bible is authoritative. Man didn’t even decide which books of the Bible are authoritative. It’s self-evident. The Bible is self-evident in its authority.
Straw and Grain
God’s Word is recognizable, and that’s the point. That’s the point of the previous verse. If you look at verse 28, so before our verse 29, verse 28 says,
“The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has My word speak My word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain?” declares the Lord.
If you think about straw and grain, they’re very similar if you look at them from a distance. Jackie’s the expert on this. If you look at straw and grain from a distance, they look very similar.
But as you approach them, as you get closer, one is just a husk of dried grass. Maybe a cow can eat it. You can’t eat it and get any sustenance. But the grain, you can grind into bread. It provides food.
You don’t have to convene a council in order to determine which of these two things provides food for you. The straw will never provide food for you. It’s self-evident. So the Word of God is self-evident. It has all of the characteristics of divineness.
So you can compare the text that we just read to any other ancient writing, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, or even the Apocrypha. You get a Catholic Bible and you turn to the Apocrypha in the middle. Those things might give you some historical insights, but it does not have the same authority as the Word of God that we just read this morning.
You can read it. You can maybe get some historical commentary, but it doesn’t speak. It doesn’t feed in the same way that the Word of God feeds.
The Power of God
What you hold in your hands is the power of God. The gospel is the power of God. Romans 1:16 says,
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also for the Greek.
The Word of God is powerful, and it is a hammer that crushes the rocky hearts of the natural man. And then as believers, we’re to use God’s Word in proclaiming the gospel, to wield it as a hammer, because it is the power of God to break down hearts of stone.
Hammer Away
Charles Spurgeon wrote on this passage. I want to read his quote. It says, Spurgeon says, whenever a minister, and when he says minister here, he’s talking not just about a preacher, but anyone who administers the gospel, who teaches someone the gospel. It says,
When a minister has the gospel to use, this metaphor of the hammer should teach him how he ought to use it. With his whole might, let him strike with it mighty blows for his Lord. I should think that it does not require any great education to learn how to use a hammer. It seems that to use a hammer correctly, one has nothing to do but to strike with it. A stonebreaker, for instance, gets a good strong hammer and a heap of stones to strike at, and he has but to hit them as hard as he can, and to keep on hitting till all are broken.
Brethren, when you preach, take the gospel hammer and strike as hard as ever you can with it. You may say, “Oh, but I must try to improve the look of my hammer. I must have a mahogany handle.” Never mind about the mahogany handle. Use your hammer for striking, for hammers are not for ornament; they are meant to be used for real hard work. And when you come to use the gospel as it ought to be used, the result is wonderful. It is a rock-breaking thing.
You may say, “Oh, there is a very stubborn man there.” Strike at him with the gospel. “Oh, but he ridicules and scoffs at the truth.” Never mind if he does. Keep on smiting him with the gospel. “Oh, but in a certain district, I’ve wielded this hammer against the rock for years, and nothing has come of it.” Still go on wielding it, for this is a hammer that never failed yet. Only continue to use it. Everything is not accomplished with one stroke, nor perhaps with 20 strokes. The rock that does not yield the first time, nor the second time, nor the third time, nor the 20th time, will yield at last.
There is a process of disintegration taking place at every stroke. The great mass is inwardly moving, even when you cannot see that it is doing so. And there will come at last one blow of the hammer which will seem to do the deed, but all the previous strokes contributed to it and brought the rock into its right state for breaking it up at last. Hammer away then, brethren, hammer away with nothing but the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The heart that is struck may not yield even year after year, but it will yield at last.
So remember the evangelist in Luis’s life who constantly presented the gospel to him, but he rejected it every single time. Year after year, he heard the gospel. When he was in the army, he heard it and rejected it. When he had the Bible in his hand, he rejected it.
But when he read the Word of God, the word was like a hammer that hammered at his rocky heart. His heart, which was stone cold, collapsed, and he was changed. His heart was changed. When he read John 3:16, he read it not as a skeptic, not as one who was self-righteous, but he read it as a child of God whose stony heart had been changed.
The Testimony of Silvio
Another pastor that I interviewed in Peru, his name is Silvio. He told a story about how his father and grandfather, both strong believers, they would ride throughout the Peruvian countryside on horseback evangelizing. One couple that they evangelized was an older couple who had two older daughters, one of which stayed with them to take care of them. The older couple couldn’t read at all.
Silvio’s father and grandfather would visit this couple and preach the gospel to them. They told them about man’s state before God, that they needed to repent of their sins and trust in the Lord to be saved. And they did. They accepted that message of salvation.
And the daughter comes to them and confronts them and says, “Why have you come to deceive my parents? They can’t read. We are Catholics.” And they answered her and said,
Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the Scriptures.
“And these people have understood. They can’t read, but they have understood the message of salvation.”
And that daughter was stubborn in her Catholicism and opposed them ever since. They would oppose them from coming and administering. After years passed, that couple died. They died as believers, the older man first and then the woman. And Silvio, the pastor, preached the gospel at the old woman’s funeral.
And after the funeral, he went to speak to that daughter, and he tells her, “Whoever rejects the gospel of Jesus Christ will be separated from God. You need to repent and turn to the Lord. Pray to the Lord that he will soften your heart.”
And the daughter looked at him and said, “Pastor, I have the Bible, the Bible that my mother left here,” she said. Even though that couple couldn’t read, they had gotten a Bible for their grandchildren to read to them, and apparently the daughter had been reading it, and her heart had been softened by the hammer strokes of the Word of God.
She looks at Silvio and says, “Pastor,” she said, “the Bible truly is the truth. The Word of God breaks you.” And Silvio looked at her and said, “The Word of God is a hammer that breaks hard hearts. It breaks those hearts of stone.”
Silvio told me in that interview, he said, “Thanks be to the Lord, brother. She and her husband too were converted to the Lord.”
So the Word of God is like a hammer. It breaks down the heart of stone. It prepares the heart for God’s grace.
Like Fire
The second picture in this passage is the metaphor, or a simile, the picture of the Word of God as fire. The Word of God is like fire. The picture of fire in this passage is directly connected to this imagery of the hammer crushing a rock. What the Lord is doing here is he’s using a different picture to communicate a very similar thing, or the same kind of thing. Like how the hammer crushes, the fire consumes.
And so he just mentions straw and grain, and then he mentions fire. So in your mind, think about how a fire would overtake a barn full of straw. It would be instantly consumed. Nothing would be left, just char and ash.
These are two pictures, two symbols of power. They’re powerful things. The hammer is a symbol of power. The fire is a symbol of power. It’s a picture of the Word of God in order to contrast the soft words, the palliative words of the false prophets.
Power Over Softness
If you remember what the false prophets are saying, look at verse 17. They’re saying,
You will have peace. Calamity will not come upon you.
They’re preaching a message of peace when there really was no peace. Babylon was about to overtake them. They were all completely dead in their sins. They were not following the Lord. They were doing evil in the sight of the Lord, following after false gods, and they were preaching this message of peace.
Jeremiah was not preaching a message of peace. He was preaching the opposite, that they needed to repent and turn to the Lord, or else they would be swept away.
So the picture here is power over softness. God’s Word is like a fire. It’s something that is powerful, that consumes.
So in the middle of this false teaching, this falsehood, was the real message, the real gospel. And that real message makes these false teachers pale in comparison to reality. And it’s recognizable. The difference was recognizable. That’s why Jeremiah was persecuted.
Those Who Steal My Words
Verse 30, the Lord says,
I am against the prophets who steal My words from each other.
And so what were these prophets doing? What were these people doing? Well, they persecuted Jeremiah. They preached their soft message even harder. They attempted to steal away God’s words in order for their own words and their own thoughts and desires to be made to the forefront.
One of the other pastors I interviewed was a man named Nico Mendez. He talked about two brothers. They were the Garcia brothers, who years ago visited his area up in the mountains in order to bring the true gospel to a highly Catholic town. If the town is 100% Catholic, it’s highly Catholic.
They were mocked and abused when they got there. They were dragged to the big square in the center of the village, where they were abused. Urine and all kinds of filth were thrown on them. They took the brothers’ Bibles and soaked them in urine. Think about this passage:
I am against those who steal My words from each other, declares the Lord.
Now think about why they would do that. Why would they do that? Why would they take their Bibles and soak them in urine?
Well, they wouldn’t do that unless they recognized that the message that they were preaching was made powerful by the Word of God, by those Bibles. They recognized that that was the source of the power in their message, and they hated it. They hated it. They recognized the power of God’s Word, and they hated it.
They did what these old prophets tried to do, to steal away God’s words from anyone who would be willing to hear. But they were ineffective. Nico Mendez, the pastor I talked to, told me that that particular story had an ending, but Nico Mendez himself is the pastor of a thriving church in that same area.
So in an area that was 100% Catholic before, persecuted the people who came to bring the gospel to them, now has a church that teaches the truth of God’s Word. And it’s there because of the bravery and boldness of those two brothers and the tiny flame of the gospel that began in that town square.
So the Word of God is like a fire because it burns and consumes false self-righteousness. It’s powerful, like a fire is powerful. It accomplishes all that God desires.
The Bible Closed
So in comparison, the word of the false teacher and the false prophets is a teaching that, as the Bible says, tickles the ears. It’s a soft message, and usually the Word of God is absent.
I remember a Bible teacher named, well, he’s with the Lord now, John MacArthur. Someone asked him a question, showed him a clip of a video of a false teacher teaching something contrary to God’s Word. He’s standing in front of his church of thousands of people teaching this, and he wanted to see what would John MacArthur say about this, what would his response be. And his only response was, “I hear what he’s saying, but I don’t see a Bible in front of him. I don’t see him opening a Bible.”
And that’s very true. A lot of times when you have false teaching, they can speak very eloquently. They can amass great followings, but a lot of the time, most of the time, they’re doing it with the Bible closed, not with the Bible open. Because the Bible, the Word of God, is like a fire. It burns, it consumes false self-righteousness.
A Fire in the Believer’s Heart
And as a believer, it’s a fire in your life as well. When the Word of God is applied in the hearts of believers through the working of the Holy Spirit, it acts as a refiner’s fire, setting on fire the combustible material of sin and self, hidden pride, and it makes us more like Christ.
And this was the effect of the Word of God in Luke 24 on the road to Emmaus as the disciples were walking along. While they were talking and discussing to one another, Jesus himself approaches and begins traveling with them, but if you remember, their eyes couldn’t recognize who he was. And he said to them,
What are these words that you’re exchanging with one another as you were walking?
After they told him, Jesus says,
O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory? Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all of the Scriptures.
And so what is he doing? He’s explaining the Scriptures to them. He’s giving them the Word of God. And how did that take effect on them? After Jesus was revealed to them who he really was, the disciples said to one another, and this is Luke 24:32,
Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?
And that’s the power of the Word of God on the hearts of believers. It causes your hearts to burn within you. This is the result of the application of the Word of God on believers by the Holy Spirit.
If you’re a believer and you hear the Word of God, it should burn within you. It should convict you of sin. It should cause you to confess your sins. If you’re reading about Christ, about his nature, it should burn within your hearts, causing you to rejoice in thanksgiving and to give praise to God and to love him even more.
Jeremiah says this same thing a little bit differently, but in Jeremiah chapter 20, verses 8 through 9, he says,
For me the word of the Lord has resulted in reproach and derision all day long. But if I say, “I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name,” then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones.
Jeremiah’s message was not a popular message. It was in fact the opposite of what everybody wanted to hear. But if he thought about giving it up, about giving up his ministry, his prophetic ministry, his heart burned within him. God’s Word burned within him.
He must preach it. Because there’s no other word. There was no other word of salvation. And for us, there is no other name by which we must be saved.
So for the believer, the Word of God is like a fire. The believer can recognize the Word of God for what it really is. When you read the Scriptures, it should burn within your heart. When you hear a passage of Scripture preached, it should do the same. It should cause you to love the Lord even more.
The Hammer and the Fire Together
So when we think about these two metaphors together, the Word is like a fire, it’s like a hammer which shatters the rock, the rocky heart of an unbeliever. When you think about them together, the hammer hammers at the unbeliever’s rocky heart, breaking it down over and over and over again until there’s nothing left. It’s disintegrated.
The Lord takes that rubble. He takes that heart of stone. He puts in a beating heart of flesh within him. And he recognizes the Word of God for what it really is. And then throughout his life as a Christian, Scripture burns away the chaff, the hidden sins, the wrong desires. It burns into him a greater love for Christ, that he would be sanctified, that he’d be made fit for glory.
Jonathan Edwards wrote of this passage and said,
As the heart is subdued by the hammer of the word and prepares the heart for grace, so the subduing of the heart by the fire of the gospel prepares the heart for glory.
And that’s true. The Word of God, operative in the life of the believer, acts as a refiner’s fire. It burns away the chaff of hidden sin and pride and fans the flame of love for God in our hearts. It prepares us for that day when we shall dwell with God in heaven, where there will be no more sin to subdue, no more hardship, no more darkness, only the light of Christ.
Our Greatest Treasure
The Testimony of Gloria
One other person that I talked to in Peru, her name is Gloria. She’s 68 years old. Maybe she’s older, I can’t remember. She’s unmarried. She’s never been married.
She’s an evangelist, and like most others, she grew up Catholic. She would attend Mass every week, as well as the patron saint festivals, which were the local tradition.
She said, “I thought that was something good, that God forgave me through it, but I was so, so far from the truth the Bible speaks of. Since I had no Bible, I couldn’t understand anything. It was like that from childhood through my teens. I don’t think anyone in my village had a Bible, nobody.”
She said that she lived her life up until that point, until her late teens, completely deceived. She eventually started attending an evangelical service when she was at school, and during the preaching, the pastor preached on Ephesians 2:8 and 9,
For by grace you have been saved through faith.
And she was converted and was immediately hungry for the Word of God. She got a small Bible, which became extremely precious to her. She took it with her wherever she went. She loved to read it and mark things that amazed her in it until it was completely covered in colors.
So since she was an evangelist, I asked her how she goes about evangelizing someone. She says she usually asks them, “Do you have a Bible?” Sometimes they say yes, sometimes no, and sometimes yes, but they don’t read it.
She says, “Then I say to them, do you know that you’re missing out on something that is a treasure? Because if you have it and don’t read it, it’s as if you didn’t have it at all. So I encourage them to read it. I tell them that the Bible is the most valuable treasure that we have.”
And as an evangelist, she could have went through all of the different evangelistic methods, talking about the law and the gospel or the Romans Road or any of those things, but what she does is she typically directs them to the Word of God itself, because the Word of God is powerful. It’s like a hammer. It’s like fire.
In order for it to do its work in our hearts, we need to read it. We need to realize that it’s our greatest treasure. It’s like fire in our hearts. And as believers, if you’re sad or experiencing coldness to the things of God or you’re depressed, open the Scriptures, because these words are the power of God. They’re a fire that will warm you, remove doubt and despair.
Wield the Hammer
And then we need to wield it. We need to wield the hammer of God’s Word. As Spurgeon said in that quote before, it doesn’t take an expert to be able to wield a hammer. It just takes someone who’s willing to do it. We have to be willing to teach the gospel through the Word of God.
A Bible for Martin
At the beginning, I told the story about Martin, who would listen to his pastor each week. The pastor would ask everyone to turn to the book of Jeremiah, and he would sit in the pew and weep because his New Testament had no Jeremiah. He would pray that God would give him a Bible.
Well, soon after that prayer, the church hosted a singing contest, and third place was a Bible. And so he entered that contest. He made a few mistakes, but with the help of the blind organist, he placed third, and he was awarded the Bible, which he kept for many, many years, well used, until he gifted it. It was completely worn out at that point. He gifted it to someone like him who did not own one.
So as we think about this passage this morning, think about that God’s Word is powerful. If you’re holding a Bible in your hands, you’re blessed. Revelation 1:3 says,
Blessed is he who reads and those who hear.
Let me just read this verse just one more time before we pray.
“Is not My word like fire?” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer which shatters a rock?”
Let’s pray together.
Father, we do pray for your blessing on this passage that we read and thought about this morning. We ask that we would be more diligent in the reading of your Word, that we would realize that it is a precious treasure, that as we read it, that the Holy Spirit would apply it to our hearts, that our hearts would be broken down by the hammer of the gospel, that the Word of God would be like a fire that burns away the chaff of sin, that causes us to love Christ even more. We ask that this would be true of us, that we would read it, that we would study it.
We do thank you for this passage that we read this morning in your Word, this passage in Jeremiah. We thank you for the blessing that it is, that we can hold it in our hands and read your very words. We thank you again for it in Jesus’ name. Amen.