Beginning on August 11th until now, we've been working our way through all five chapters of Lamentations. It's an Old Testament book that Chuck Swindoll has dubbed Jeremiah's Journal of Woes, and for good reason. Jeremiah the writer was emotionally devastated by the violent destruction of Jerusalem. His book is filled with anguish, and today on Insight for Living, Jeremiah's dejected tone turns the corner, and you'll be encouraged to do the same.
Due to time constraints, we'll begin right where Chuck left off yesterday. He titled this final message in the series, Jeremiah's Mournful Swan Song. I want to draw four concluding principles from this, and then read you a true story.
That'll tie in with what I believe is one of the great hopes of our future. Two of these applications have to do with the prophet himself. Two of them have to do with the city that has made him so heartbroken with what he sees in the devastation. The first regarding Jeremiah, some are called to ministries that are demanding, painful, and unappreciated.
Stop and think. That was Jeremiah's calling. From his earliest years in ministry, the Lord said to him, you're going to uproot, you're going to tear down, you're going to stand against, you're going to be hated, you're going to be despised.
That launched him into a ministry that was exactly like that. You know, there are some ministers who face ministries like that, and it seems as though they are called from one to another, and it's tough from the beginning to the ending of their time with their congregation, or on their mission wherever they may be led to serve. In order to deal with that kind of ministry, you need a tough hide. And I'm going to add one more thing, you need a tough wife.
She's got to be right there with you, going through it along with you. Not every man or woman is made for a tough ministry. The Lord has to toughen us up if that's the kind of future he has for you, and he certainly did Jeremiah.
Now, that brings me to the second application. Those who were called to minister to hard-hearted people must guard against becoming like them. It would have been easy for Jeremiah to have become hard-hearted. Everybody he was ministering to was rejecting him and rejecting the truth, but you know, he never wavered. In fact, he remained devoted in his walk. What is it we remember about Jeremiah the most?
His tears. He never became like the people to whom he ministered. They were difficult, he was not.
They were hard, he was not. It's beautiful to see an individual be able to stay objective enough to minister to tough in tough places, and yet not pick up those qualities himself or herself. And Jeremiah is a good model.
Now here's the third application as it relates to the place. No matter how bad and sad the scene around us may be, God is always present and the same. I find delight in that. I find it marvelous that the Lord doesn't pick up my mood, that the Lord doesn't see the frame of mind I'm in and then take his cue from that. No, his mercies are new every morning. His plan is set. His character is holy. His purpose is pure.
His ways are right. And so all the way through, no matter how bad or how sad our situation may get, you can count on this. The Lord you worship and serve remains the same forever. And he is always present. He never leaves when the going gets tough. He stays right there with us through it all.
Never doubt the Lord's presence in the midst of these difficult times in which we live. He's all over it. He knows exactly what his plan is. He knows exactly what the future will be. We can trust him.
Here's the fourth that will lead me to the story I want to read you. No matter how bleak things may seem or how weak you may feel, prayer is always appropriate. In fact, I would use the word essential. This is a good time for me to pause and ask you about your prayer life. Have you paused at the end of most days in these last several months to pray specifically about the things that concern us, you personally as well as we a people?
It's always appropriate. And it's amazing what it does to our perspective. It's just remarkable how in the process of prayer we change. The situation around us may not, but the time spent in prayer bolsters us for what we're going through and helps us to stay strong when we would otherwise give in to our times. Now there's a big question that's left when you come to the end of a day or you come to the end of a study like Lamentations, and that is where is the hope? Is there a pocket of hope at work among us? Is there something we can point to and say that has the makings of hope?
And when you really cultivate that, it can begin to change this and these things. You know what I believe it is? The family. The family. Now you may be in a family, but you may not even be married. You're family. It may be you and your wife or husband and you may not have children around you.
It's you too. You're the family I'm talking to. You may be rearing smaller children. And by the way, hasn't it been interesting how God has brought you and the children close together? Interesting is a safe word to use in a pulpit, otherwise the people pick up stones to stone you. I read recently that a lady says she feels like she is a teacher in a class and she's got all her own kids.
She's ready for a new class, she said recently as a result of dealing with her own kids. Stop and think. The Lord's brought us together. He's closed us in. He's even given us words like sheltering in or quarantine. You making the most of that?
You cultivating that? Because you see, you really aren't going to do a whole lot to alter the life of your neighbor or your mayor or our governor. Your sphere of influence, hear me, is your family. Your attitude toward life and the situation that you're facing, that's a family matter. Your prayer disciplines, that's cultivated in a family. Your joy, even your music, that's a family thing. The neighborhood isn't going to sing together. You sing as a family.
Your whole viewpoint of life or the future or dealing with difficult people, that takes place among family members. I can hear some of you say, well, if you knew the truth regarding our family, you'd probably sing a different tune, Chuck. No, I wouldn't.
No, I wouldn't. I don't think that there is a model family. I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect family. I think every family is flawed because it's made up of flawed people.
But the family unit can be used in a beautiful way to cultivate the right way to view life. Now the story. I found this story in Charles Kuralt's book On the Road, which I'd recommend.
It's not a Christian book, but Charles Kuralt, years ago with CBS, went on the road and picked up snapshots for various documentaries he did of different scenes that he saw while he was on the road. This is one of the scenes. This happens to be the Chandler family.
Listen. He happened upon the Chandlers, a large black family in Prairie, Mississippi. He writes, along the road took nine children out of the cotton fields, out of poverty, out of Mississippi. But roads go both ways and this Thanksgiving weekend, they all returned. This is about Thanksgiving and coming home. Hold on, I'm going to get a Kleenex ready.
There. One after another, from every corner of America, the cars turned into the yard. With much cheering and much hugging, the nine children of Alex and Mary Chandler were coming home for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Gloria Chandler, there's my daddy, Gloria rushes over to hug him. Gloria Chandler Coleman, Master of Arts, University of Missouri, now a teacher in Kansas City, was home again.
All nine children had memories of a sharecropper's cabin and nothing to wear and nothing to eat. All nine are now college graduates. Cooking the meal in the kitchen of the new house the children built for their parents four years ago is Bessie Chandler Beasley, Bachelor of Arts, Tuskegee, Master of Arts, Central Michigan, dietitian at a veteran's hospital, married to a PhD and helping out in the kitchen. Princess Chandler Norman, Master of Arts, Indiana University, a schoolteacher in Gary, Indiana now.
You'll meet them all. But first, I thought you ought to meet their parents. Alex Chandler remembers the time when he had a horse and a cow and he tried to buy a mule and couldn't make the payments, so he lost the mule and the horse and the cow. And about that time, in Cleveland, the first son decided he wanted to go to college, Alex Chandler. We didn't have any money and we went to town. He wanted to catch the bus to go on up there and so we went up to town and borrowed two dollars and a half from her niece and we bought him a bus ticket. And when he got there to college, that's all he had. From that beginning, he became Dr. Cleveland Chandler.
He's now the chairman of the economics department at Howard University. How did they do it? Starting on one of the poorest forms in the poorest part of the poorest state in America.
Princess Chandler Norman. Well, we worked. All of us worked. Kuralt, you mean you picked cotton? Oh yeah, we picked cotton and we pulled corn and stripped millet.
We dug potatoes. But they all left. Luther left for the University of Omaha and went on to become the public service employment manager for Kansas City. He helped his brother, younger brother James, come to Omaha University too and go on to graduate work at Yale.
And in his turn, James helped Herman, who graduated from Morgan State and is now a technical manager in Dallas. And they helped themselves. Fortson, a Baptist minister in Pueblo, Colorado, wanted to go to Morehouse College, Portson Chandler. I chose Morehouse and it was difficult.
I had to pick cotton all summer long to get the first month's rent and tuition. So helping themselves and helping one another, they all went away. And now 50 years after life began for the Chandler family in one, a one-room shack in a cotton field. Now, just as they were sitting down in the new house, to the ham and turkey and sweet potatoes and cornbread and collard greens and two kinds of pie and three kinds of cakes, now Donald arrived.
Donald's the youngest who had driven with his family all the way down from Minneapolis and now the Chandler's were all together again. Alex Chandler said grace. Our Father in heaven, he prayed, we come at this moment giving thee thanks for thou has been so good and so kind to us. We want to thank you, O God, for this, for your love and for your son, Jesus. Thank you that you have provided for all of us through all these years. Mr. Chandler begins to weep, remembering all those years of sharecropping and going hungry and working for a white man for 50 cents a day and worrying about his children's future, remembering all that Alex Chandler almost didn't get through the blessing. Alex continuing grace, we ask all of this in the name of Jesus.
Amen. And neither did the others. All the family members are now wiping their tears away. Chandler family started with as near nothing as any family in the land of America ever did. And so their Thanksgiving weekend might have been more thankful than most. Chandler family starts to sing, I'll fly away.
Love it. I'll fly away is the name of the old hymn. It's Mr. Chandler's favorite. His nine children flew away and made places for themselves in this country. And this weekend they all came home again. There probably are no lessons in any of this, but I know that in the future, whenever I hear that the family is a dying institution, I'll tell them whenever I hear anything in America is impossible. I'll think of the Chandler's. Men and women, don't let anybody ever tell you that it's too late, or that we're finished, or that this country is done. We are not. There are too many great families like the Chandler's, and some of them are in this place. You're raising them right.
You're thinking straight. You know better than what you're being told in the media. You realize that God's plan is an overshadowing, all-consuming plan, spelled out in the scriptures, and nothing will ever nullify it. And the one place you have to make that clear and known and to drive it home is your family. If you're not saying it there, you're missing it, because that's where the children will learn it, and it's from there they'll take it with them. You better believe the nine Chandler family members all pray at their table, and all are grateful for what God has done, and they've all known hardship like you and I have never known it. But they don't look back cursing what was, but they now give thanks for the God who is, who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we could ask or think. These are dark, difficult days right now, but this isn't the end.
This isn't even the beginning of the end, but it is, as Churchill said on one occasion, maybe the end of the beginning. And as we start over in a whole new way, make sure your family's on target. Stir up the relationship within them. Spend time with one another. Build into the lives of each other. Pray with each other. Sing with each other.
Stand alongside each other. Be there for them when they graduate. Encourage them along the way. There's an old song that says, give of your sons to bear the message glorious. Give of your wealth to speed them on their way. Pour out your soul for them in prayer victorious, and all you spend, Jesus will repay. I have a family that prayed for me, and I am now the recipient of those prayers.
And I'm now enjoying the benefit of our family as the Lord gives us our days together. Do not let yourself be mesmerized by the majority voice around us. It isn't the majority.
It's the minority. God is at work. He knows what he's doing, just as he did in the days of the Lamentations. I'd like you to bow your heads, please. If you've never trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, there's no wonder why your life is so miserable and empty and longing for what will last and make a change.
Turn to him now. Someday you will fly away. Someday you will leave this earth, and your eternity will be determined with what you did with Christ during life. He who has the Son has the life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.
Trust him now. Dear Father, thank you for the privilege of going through hard times. Thank you that life isn't a bowl of cherries. Thank you that it isn't easy. Thank you that the challenge of it drives us to our knees and the difficulties that we face force us to trust and to pray and not be afraid. Give us the courage to face life head-on through your eyes and through your strength. May your word have more authority than any any periodical, any newspaper account, any media presentation, any news program, may your word speak truth to us and may we drill into it in a way that it finds root in our lives and ultimately fruit for your glory. For those who've never come to Christ, I pray that you lead them to faith in your Son before it is eternally too late. In the name of Christ, I pray.
And all God's people said, amen. You're listening to Insight for Living and the conclusion to Chuck Swindoll's eight-part study in the book of Lamentations called Jeremiah's Journal of Woes. To learn more about this ministry, we'd like to invite you to go online to our website.
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