Jeremiah 23:9-40: Man-made religion.(please click here for todays passage)

A primary way the false shepherding showed its head was in the kind of teaching being given by people who claimed to be prophets, but really were not. They were cooking up the wrong kind of ‘food’, containing bad ingredients, and the people were being poisoned. An extended section from The Message will take us to the heart of the problem:

“Don’t listen to the sermons of the prophets.
It’s all hot air. Lies, lies, and more lies.
They make it all up.
Not a word they speak comes from me.
They preach their ‘Everything Will Turn Out Fine’ sermon
to congregations with no taste for God,
Their ‘Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to You’ sermon
to people who are set in their own ways.

“Have any of these prophets bothered to meet with me, the true God?
bothered to take in what I have to say?
listened to and then lived out my Word?’’

True and effective preaching comes from a relationship with God in which we listen to Him and say what He tells us. We also seek to live His Word. We are not free to change what is written in God’s Book, or to invent our own material. The false prophets were popular because they were saying what people wanted to hear. But to pronounce that judgment would not come did not stop its arrival. It made people feel good for a short time, but it did not save them. By contrast, Jeremiah suffered for his preaching, but if the nation had heeded him they could have averted disaster.

“I never sent these prophets,
but they ran anyway.
I never spoke to them,
but they preached away.
If they’d have bothered to sit down and meet with me,
they’d have preached my Message to my people.
They’d have gotten them back on the right track,
gotten them out of their evil ruts…I’ve had it with the ‘prophets’ who get all their sermons secondhand from each other. Yes, I’ve had it with them. They make up stuff and then pretend it’s a real sermon.’’

It’s been said that the gospel message is ‘bad news’ before it is ‘good news’. Let’s make sure we don’t delete the bad news or edit it out altogether. People need to know how sick they are before they will be prepared to call the doctor.

You can shout loudly and confidently that the on-coming juggernaut will not run you over, but it will do.