Jeremiah rebuking the king. -  I try to collect myself after vain hours in a denomination.   I shouldn´t have gone, for I was soon tied up with motions, words, performances, jokes, but no spiritual  fellowship.

Why did I go?  Well, I reasoned, Why don´t we meet with old friends?  I  felt sad.  Divorced people were in leading roles, the air was full of worldliness, jokes, humanism, sociability, empty talks combined with a façade of the popular manger romance, but with no anointed message to draw the line of demarcation between the saved and unsaved.  A voice raised to that end would be considered ill-timed.

I had my lesson.  Like Jeremiah I faced backslidden contemporaries, parroting with  pride, “This is the temple of the Lord,, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord”   declaring, “We are delivered  (or “set free”)!”  or as our Danish rendering puts it, “We are saved!”  (Jer. 7:4-10).

I´m licking my wounds.  Behind me is a Christian denomination that once in our history had an awakening ministry.  In fact, one of its fine evangelists became my spiritual father when I was only 14 years old.

In our backslidden national Evangelical Lutheran Church they have at each service a closing prayer ritual saying, “I thank you, God, that I  may now go out as a free and delivered man”, but, to repeat Jeremiah, these are lying words.  And lying words my countrymen want.  “But what will you do when the end comes?”  (Jer. 5:31)

Am I depressed?  Certainly not!  The gospel is at stake, and the love of Christ still compels me and makes me rejoice. For “Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart”  (Jer. 15:16).  No matter what.

Dec. 30, 2013 - jn