The Burning Inside Your Bones [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. The preacher thinks about it and he goes, how did I get into this in the first place? Why did I even sign up for this? How did I wind up being called into this? And suddenly the image comes to mind and he just blurts it out.

He says, I'll tell you what happened. I was seduced by God. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of Good News that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Brint, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, Remade, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program today, I sure want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. So, as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer.

Don't miss it. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org.

Or call 877-544-4860. We're going to give you more on all this later in the program. But right now let's dig in and get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Yes! That was real good.

That helped me right there. The Christian life is not so much about starting or stoking a fire as it is surrendering to a fire. We are in a new series called Remade because that's the image God gave to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 18 of a potter who is working at the wheel and discovers a major impediment, a marring, a deformity, something wrong in the vessel. And instead of throwing it away, he just lumps it together again, throws it back on the wheel and remakes it. And that's the nature of restoration in God's kingdom.

He never scraps what he's made. He remakes it. And I believe that he can do that and is doing that in our lives. And so we're in a series on Jeremiah and his prophecies of restoration. And today we come to a text that has a familiar phrase in it about the fire shut up in the bones. And when we study it together, you might be a little surprised in its context and discover here something deep about what a true walk with God looks like and how God sustains us and moves us even sometimes when we don't feel like doing it. Jeremiah chapter 20.

I'm reading from the new revised standard version because I like the way that it translates verse seven. Oh Lord, you have enticed me and I was enticed. You have overpowered me and you have prevailed. I've become a laughing stock all day long. Everyone mocks me for whenever I speak, I must cry out. I must shout violence and destruction because the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.

If I say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones and I'm weary with holding it in and I cannot. Are you familiar with the would you rather game? I always love to play this and it's good little discussion starters where it's like you're presented with a choice of one of two choices. Sometimes neither one is what you might like. Like would you rather always have to hop around on one foot or always have to walk around squatting? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Here's one on a kid's list of them for discussion. Would you rather turn into a purple bear or a heart-shaped pillow every time you felt happy? Would you rather wear a clown nose or a clown face paint for the rest of your life? You know, it's stuff like that. Would you rather eat only dog food or only cat food for the rest of your life?

You know, stuff like that. Well, our family and my grown kids, we were with a family and they had little kids there and the little kids wanted to start doing the would you rather and it's just, you know, when they make them up it's really cute and so they started asking my grown kids some would you rather questions. One was would you rather have roller skates for feet or have a thousand cats?

That's a random, random choice to make there. And then the little boy, he asked Bennett, he said, would you rather die or be beat up by a hundred men and then die? Bennett just said, I think I'll just take the straight out death, I guess.

I'll just take that, just take that. And then the little girl, I don't know why cats were on the mind. I think they've got a number of cats, but she said, would you rather have three million dollars or three million cats? And Bennett said, well, I believe I'd take the three million dollars. And the little girl, she might have been four.

She looked back and she said, interesting. Jeremiah in a sense is faced with a would you rather. Would you rather get revelations from God and be mocked or never hear God speak and be admired? Would you rather speak divinely inspired truth and be scorned for it? Or would you rather hide the truth, you know, and be applauded?

Maybe more starkly, would you rather have only God know that you're right and everyone else thinks you're wrong or have everyone think you're right and God knows you're wrong? Jeremiah is so honest. You know, if you were going to just write a holy book to be propaganda, you wouldn't come up with a Bible so honest in the way it depicts the people of God. Jeremiah, sometimes called the weeping prophet, is very honest with God. And God then is honest with us on what it was like in his soul to be this amazing prophet in a turbulent time. And what Jeremiah has to say here is that he has experienced an authentic struggle that he's been persecuted so much that he'd really rather just quit preaching altogether. But every time he tried to stop mentioning the name of the Lord, he couldn't help himself because the word was like a fire shut up in his bones. In other words, he says to us, I was more weary trying to not talk about God than I was weary when I talked about him and was persecuted.

Wow. I think it's a relevant word for us as we think about what is this fire shut up in our bones? What's that like? What is the Holy Spirit doing in us? And it's relevant also because, beloved, the culture has become secularized very quickly around us.

And I'm not used to it, you know. And so very basic things that are truths are now not believed by our culture. And when we talk about some of the most basic things of the gospel, most basic things about God the creator, most basic things about human sexuality, most basic things about what it is to love rather than hate.

When we talk about some of these things, it's weird to have a culture that would mock that. So Jeremiah is relevant for us. The context of this passage, we should go back and look at it. Verse one of chapter 20, because here's what has just happened.

The most recent of the persecution he's experienced. Now, Pashur the priest, the son of Immar, who was chief officer in the house of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the judgment that was coming against the disobedience of the people. And verse two, then Pashur beat Jeremiah the prophet and put him in the stocks that were in the upper Benjamin gate of the house of the Lord.

Jeremiah was physically beaten and then publicly humiliated, put into the stocks where you're out just people coming by and mocking you while your head and your hands are in the stocks there at the temple gates. And verse three, the next day when Pashur released Jeremiah from the stocks, you would think that if ever Jeremiah was going to tone it down, this might be the moment. But he said, the Lord does not call your name Pashur, but terror on every side. For thus says the Lord, behold, I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends. They shall fall by the sword of their enemies while you look on. And I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon. And he shall carry them captive to Babylon and shall strike them down with the sword. And this is, by the way, here we are all the way to chapter 20. This is the first mention of Babylon. All these judgment texts have been coming about this is what's going to happen.

But here it gets more specific. So Jeremiah is persecuted. He's beaten.

He is put into the stocks where people walk by all day and laugh at him. And he comes out. He's tempted to tone it all down so he doesn't have to keep suffering this persecution.

But instead he does the opposite. And the Lord speaks to him more specifically than ever before. It wasn't just the empire that wanted Jeremiah silent.

The religious establishment did. This priest did. And this is the nature of so much of Jeremiah's ministry.

Wow. As I'm thinking about Jeremiah, I imagine it's something like this, like a preacher who is a very good preacher and has prophetic power and is preaching, preaching in the man's bones. But I imagine nobody really wanted to sit through his sermons and nobody really appreciated them. He had a few supporters. He had a faithful administrator, but otherwise not much support. He could have done a lot of other things.

He could have prospered in the eyes of the world in many other ways. And maybe it takes a preacher to understand one. But I know how he felt. He just had to preach. There's just no other way to describe it. And hardly a week went by, though, that he didn't say, Why am I doing this and why can't I have a normal life?

That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Maybe you're like many Christians in America today. You're stunned by how fast a nation's culture has turned away from God. The values of our country have changed. Suddenly, most people don't go to church or have a biblical world view.

It can make you feel like an alien in your own culture. There's a lot to learn from Daniel when he was exiled to the pagan land of Babylon. Through our special offer this month, you can learn to live under the favor of God in an alien culture the way Daniel did. When you give before the end of the month, we'll send you Pastor Alan's audio series, Daniel, a favored foreigner.

You may feel like a stranger in this world, but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land, God's grace is upon you as well. Your donation will not only help you navigate through these troubling times, but it will also help someone else. Thanks for your partnership with Alan Wright Ministries. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. You know, I just feel like I'm just so blessed of all preachers I know. I'm just so blessed.

I'm blessed by you. I'm blessed by this ministry, by the grace to be here amongst people that love God and love the word like I do and are just so kind. And we just got about the best church in the world.

And, but it also, it's hard, you know. But I meet with pastor friends from around the nation every year. We're about 25 to 30 of the pastors of the largest churches in our denomination and we're friends and we get together and we talk every January. And we laugh and we cry and we share stories and we learn from each other and we play golf. And it's a good time.

Good three days together and we become good friends. This year, as we went around the table and honestly shared with one another after two years of pandemic. And 50 percent of them opened up and said that they had given consideration to quitting in the last two years. Two of them had begun to struggle with alcohol. One nearly had fallen into an affair. And we prayed for one another. Jeremiah is real. He is hearing straight from heaven. He is powerful in the word.

And they put him into the stocks and walking by and laughing at him. So I think of a preacher who can really preach and he just doesn't have a congregation that wants to hear him. And one day he is wondering, how did I wind up in this situation? And suddenly the image comes to his mind that he said, you know what I feel like? He said, I feel like the wife of a noble, wonderful husband who the whole society doesn't like for all the wrong reasons. He thinks like this. I feel like I'm married to that one.

And so what whenever his name is maligned, my name is maligned. But I'm just connected and there's no way around it. And the preacher thinks about it and goes, how did I how did I get into this in the first place? Why did I even sign up for this? How did I wind up being called into this? And suddenly the image comes to mind and he just blurts it out.

He says, I tell you what happened. I was seduced by God. It's a weird word to think of being there, but that's really what this word means enticed. It actually is the same word in Hebrew that is used to describe of the situation where man has allured a woman to his bedchamber and all that he must do and following up to marry her. It is the word that is used when they were getting Delilah to do what she did to Samson.

This word is used and it is importantly the word that God himself uses in Hosea 2 to speak about how he planned to bring Israel out of exile. He said, Therefore, I'm now going to allure her, lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. Jeremiah essentially is saying, the reason that I've become wed to God is that he made himself so attractive to me. The psalmist says we worship him in the beauty of his holiness. He fell in love with God. That's what happened.

That's what happens to us. And I just I like thinking of God this way. You know, he's this image in the Bible so often. He's like a wonderful groom who's courted his beloved. I love all in modern times the marriage proposals are so much better than what we used to do. And my son, Bennett, when he proposed to Amy, they went out to dinner at their restaurant where they had their first date. And then she knew it was happening because then they came out from dinner and there was a limo that was there. And their first date had been at a dance in this big room that was made into a ballroom on the top floor of one of the big academic buildings on the Baylor campus. And he had gone and worked with the administration to get permission for him to have the building opened up for him that night, just for them to be in that room. And he had a photographer there ready to take pictures. And it just was it just was romantic. And then and then all the all the family, we all knew it was going so we all flown into Texas and we were there for a party afterwards. I took my wife to Darryl's restaurant and we came back over to her parents house and I went down the basement proposed to her.

And that was better than what some of y'all did, man. Don't laugh at me. Some of these proposals today, they're unbelievable. I like here's a few images. They look like just ordinary umbrellas. And then all of a sudden she's looking up there and she can see it all spelled out. Will you marry me? That's cute. That's beautiful, isn't it? I like this couple. They like to go for runs and then they look back on the GPS track, you know, where they'd been running. But he had carefully lined this up so that when they checked back, their route spelled out, marry me, question mark. That's really cute.

I think maybe my favorite read about a couple. They got into a back scenes thing at SeaWorld where they could go swimming with the dolphins. I mean, that's in itself like you're swimming with dolphins. Come on.

And then all of a sudden, one of the trained dolphins pops up with a buoy. Will you marry me? Not quite as good as going to Darryl's in the basement, but in the old days, how's a man win the hand of a woman through courtship?

He might serenade her or compose poetry or write her a love note or send her a rose every day. And when you court someone like that, there's no room for pride in that groom. You are, in a sense, you're putting yourself all out there. And and it's not like capturing a prisoner. It is it is like attracting the one you love. And this is what God is. He never wanted to smother you. He never wanted to force you. He wants to intrigue, not simply suffocate. God doesn't want to consume his sweetheart. He wants to commune with her. He wants her.

Alan Wright. Today's good news message, the burning inside your bones from the series Remade. A Pastor Alan is back with us in the studio sharing his parting good news thought for the day in just a moment. Maybe you're like many Christians in America today. You're stunned by how fast a nation's culture has turned away from God. The values of our country have changed. Suddenly, most people don't go to church or have a biblical world view.

It can make you feel like an alien in your own culture. There's a lot to learn from Daniel when he was exiled to the pagan land of Babylon. Through our special offer this month, you can learn to live under the favor of God in an alien culture the way Daniel did. When you give before the end of the month, we'll send you Pastor Alan's audio series, Daniel, a favored foreigner.

You may feel like a stranger in this world, but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land, God's grace is upon you as well. Your donation will not only help you navigate through these troubling times, but it will also help someone else. Thanks for your partnership with Alan Wright Ministries. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks.

Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website, pastorallen.org. Beck, you're in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day. The conclusion of this teaching and our series remade, it's no one like our God.

With a message like this that we've heard, what can we take with us for the next couple of days from this? God has his way of doing a work in us where what he wants becomes what we want. And to me, that is so much of the aim of all spiritual growth. It is to say that when you have a fire shut up in your bones, like Jeremiah who says, well, I'd rather not even mention him, I'd like to stop all of this, but he can't.

And we'll learn more about people like Martin Luther who like Jeremiah would have loved to not become the great reformer. It's uncomfortable, but something happens inside where you can't help it. And I think this is what God wants to do in us. And for our listeners, he's doing this in you. And when you feel your affections change, when you feel your desires change, this is God at work within you. He doesn't want to simply give you laws and rules and ask you to follow his mandates. And he doesn't want to simply overpower you and overcome your will. He wants your will to come into alignment with his.

When you want to do what he wants to do, that's spiritual growth. The daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. This good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.