Messy Religion

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Have you seen the traffic? Have you dealt with the stores? Are you dealing with your schedule? Yes. How's your stress? Today, we're going to be, the Sunday before Christmas Eve, we're going to be looking at a really touchy subject. And that is religion. Messy religion. Specifically, the way it was going on in Israel at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. And, well, honestly, you can't step in it more than what Jeremiah did. You've heard the phrase, don't kill the messenger. Have you ever heard, don't shoot the messenger? Well, it seems like Jeremiah is probably the origin of that. I think so. Because, actually, even though, when you look it up on Wikipedia or somewhere else, they'll go back to Plutarch. And he wrote, the first messenger that came noticed to a man named Lucilus, of Lucilus coming, was so far from pleasing Tigranus that he had his head cut off. So, he had his head cut off for his pains and no man dared to bring further information without any intelligence at all. Tigranus sat while war was already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him. But Plutarch is like 400 years after Jeremiah. And, to start with, people might go even as far back as the playwright Sophocles, who wrote in Antigone, that no one loves the messenger who brings bad news. But that, too, is after, like a hundred or more years after Jeremiah. Jeremiah starts in 609 BC. It happened a hundred years before Sophocles and 400 before Plutarch. We know exactly the date. We know the who, what, when, where, and why of this touchy proclamation that Jesus had. And this was prior to, don't shoot the messenger. It's really, don't stone the prophet. Because that's what they were doing and that's what actually has happened before. And Jeremiah is in the middle of that. Yeah, Jeremiah's book is not in chronological order. It's just all over the place. But the two chapters, though, so many chapters apart, are talking about the same event. And it was a pivotal time in Judah. This was just 114 years. I mean, we can be very specific in Jeremiah with dates. 114 years prior to that, the northern tribes of Israel, the greater part of the nation, was taken off into exile. And I mean, by the Assyrians, they did it in such a nasty way. They not only chained them together, but they also put hooks into their noses and connected them by hooks to each other. So they had to follow all the way to Assyria to be slaves. They walked the whole way with hooks in their noses. It was a brutal, brutal takeover of the nation. And I have a feeling a lot of people in Judah were wondering now, why did it happen to them and not to us? They were bigger. They were greater. They were the powerhouse. So why were we safe from Assyria? And I can see some of the reasoning they might have come up with. They might have said, well, you know, they were really wicked up there. They worshipped idols. The truth is Judah did too. Well, they had all those bad kings in the north that were not part of David's line. True. We had the kings from David's line. Yeah, but only a few of them were good if you read through it. And then maybe they would say, well, you know, Assyria probably got tired after they went through northern Israel because they're from the north. They just stopped and turned around. But most people in Judea, in Judah, in Jerusalem would say the reason why we were safe is because we had the temple and God will not let it fall. And in fact, they could quote some of the scriptures. They could turn to like Psalm 46, verse five. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns. Or again, in Psalm 48, great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth. Mount Zion in the far north, the city of the great king. And everything Jeremiah is going to say in this sermon in front of the temple. Goes directly against their thoughts about what it means to be safe because we've got the temple of God. He steps in it or better yet, maybe you could say the bovine excrement hits the air circulating device because that's what happens. We're going to read now what he says in the most caustic sermon, the most hard hitting sermon you could probably imagine in a day and an age in a place. By the way, he does it in front of the temple, which happens to be right next to the king's palace. OK, speaking truth to power and boy, what truth and what power. So from Jeremiah's sermon, we're going to have these three points. We're going to look at the motive behind religion, the misuse of it and what true religion can be. So first of all, the motive behind it. So why? Why was there a temple in the first place? This is what we have to kind of run through the Old Testament and understand. Why do we need a temple? Well, here's k...