Don't Just Go Through the Motions

Living in New York City does funny things to people. Just this week, a friend of mine related how she had gone into the city. As she walked the busy streets, teeming with thousands of people, she was overwhelmed at how alone she felt. Occasionally, she would pass by a homeless person, sitting or lying in filth beside a building. She encountered a man who was obviously mentally disturbed. He was shouting obscenities at everyone who passed, imprisoned in his own private dungeon of confusion and rage.

But the sight that struck this woman most forcefully was this: she came upon a man who was lying injured and bleeding on the hood of a car. He may have either been hit by a passing vehicle, have fallen or jumped from a nearby building, or been mugged - all of which are entirely possible in New York City. He moaned pitifully at the passers by, who scurried on unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring.

And as my friend sat on the train returning home, she reflected with sadness and tears in her eyes that the city is a hard place, a dangerous place, a cruel place. To survive there, a person has to put on emotional armor - a coat of psychological chain mail - to keep from being overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the city.

So you build a wall around yourself - a wall to keep the pain out. You quickly learn not to look strangers in the eye. You become accustomed to passing within inches of scenes of human suffering and misery that would be shocking anywhere else. You learn to step over the bodies.

And to some extent, all of this is only natural. It is a defense mechanism, a strategy for urban survival. Nobody has the wherewithal to even begin to become involved in the lives of the people we meet in the city. So we erect a wall of aloofness around ourselves. We develop callouses on our emotions. We learn to hide our feelings. We become hard. And the real danger of the city is that we become used to living that way. And when we do, we begin to be that way with God.

The prophet Jeremiah was called by God to minister to people like that. People who had built a wall around themselves. People who were religious, to be sure, but who had come to the place where their worship was a sham. They were just going through the motions. Their worship was making utterly no difference in the way they lived. God couldn’t penetrate the armor of selfishness and callousness they had built up around themselves.

In Jeremiah chapters 7-10, we have the text of a sermon that Jeremiah preached to these people. Actually, it may be the texts of several sermons delivered over the space of several years. But we call it Jeremiah’s Temple Sermon, because he preached it while standing at the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem.

As the people went in and out of that great edifice, tending to their religious business, they encountered Jeremiah preaching doom and destruction upon the nation for the way they were practicing their religion. Now if you want to start a fight, there are two guaranteed ways of doing it: argue about politics, or argue about religion. Jeremiah did both !

Let me give you a little background. The year was 608 BC. The nation Judah was, by this time, a small insignificant state in the middle East. Her glory days had passed her by. Now she survived by playing political games with the three super powers of the day: Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. At the time of Jeremiah, Judah happened to be in bed with Egypt. She had really lost what little independence she had. The king of Judah who sat on the throne in Jerusalem - a wicked man named Jehoiakim - sat there because the Pharaoh of Egypt had put him there.

But the people of Judah didn’t see things that way. They felt that it was because of their diplomatic skill in negotiating with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, that they were still independent. And, what’s more, they thought they would always be safe, always be free, always be independent.

Why they thought this is where religion comes into the story. Three hundred and fifty years before this, King Solomon had built the Temple in Jerusalem. Now when that Temple was dedicated, God blessed it, and said that he would make His name dwell in that place forever. But over the years, the people of Judah came to believe that it was the Temple that was keeping them safe, not God. They came to view the Temple as a good luck charm. As long as they had the Temple in Jerusalem, they would be o.k. In 722 BC, the Assyrians invaded and conquered the northern ten tribes of Israel. The reason they didn’t capture Jerusalem, the people thought, was because of the Temple. In 701, the Assyrians were camped right outside Jerusalem, ready to take it. But God struck them down with a plague - a hundred and eighty five thousand of them died in one night. Jerusalem was saved. The people thought it was because of the Temple.

So by the time of Jeremiah, the people really believed in Temple theology. They believed that the Temple in Jerusalem made them invulnerable. Their religious beliefs and their political policy were founded on the presence of the Temple.

Along comes Jeremiah to burst this bubble of false hope. Let’s see what he said:

Jeremiah 7:3-7 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.

The people of Judah were living under a delusion. They were simply using God to sanction their own security. They were trusting in a building and the rituals that went on in that building to save them. And God rebuked them.

He said through Jeremiah: You are hypocrites. You come into the Temple with your sacrifices and your pious faces and your prayers, but look at how you are living on the outside.

Your worship is divorced from your walk.

Your religion has no effect on your righteousness.

You have come to depend on ceremony when what I am really interested in is your conduct.

You focus on externals, but I want to deal with your internals.

These people had fallen into a dangerous but common spiritual error. They had begun to think that they could live two lives. They could be pious on the Sabbath in the Temple, and live however they wanted the rest of the week.

They had begun to believe that what they were outside the Temple had nothing at all to do with what went on inside the Temple. And I want you to know that although these people lived 2500 years ago, this problem is still around today.

When I lived in Denver, I got to know a man who was a marriage counsellor. He told me one day that it was easier to work with non-Christian couples with marriage problems than it was to work with Christian couples with marriage problems. I was pretty surprised by his statement. He went on to explain that the Christian couples with marriage problems tended not to be willing to work as hard to solve their problems as did the non-Christian couples. The Christians tended to be lazy. They’d say “Well, if our marriage breaks up, at least I still have my relationship with God. I’m still saved. God will forgive me for being a poor marriage partner.” So they didn’t work hard at becoming a better marriage partner. They were using their relationship with God as something to hide behind to keep from having to change their lifestyle.

Look at what Jeremiah said to the people in

Jeremiah 7:9-11 ”’ Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you?

I’ve read where the hill country of Judah has lots of limestone caves. In the old days, bandits used these caves as hide-outs. They would sally forth to rob and mug travelers on the roads, and then they would retreat to their caves until the heat was off. Jeremiah said that this is how the people were treating God’s Temple. Like a hide-out where they would be safe.

It is still possible for a person to think that just because he goes to church on Sunday, and just because he goes through the ritual motions of having a relationship with God, he’s o.k. - he’s safe. That’s Temple theology. Let me tell you that God is only interested in what we do in here - in church on Sundays - if what we are out there - in the rest of our lives - is in accord with his will.

Jesus said in Matthew

Matthew 5:23-24 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”

In other words, what we are out there is more important to God than what we do in here.

Jeremiah told them something else about Temple theology: You can never use God as a good luck charm. That’s what they were doing. God and the Temple were like a fetish, a talisman, something to give them what they wanted - peace, safety, security. Their preachers were even teaching them to do this: look at what Jeremiah says about them in

Jeremiah 5:12 They have lied about the Lord; they said, “He will do nothing! No harm will come to us; we will never see sword or famine.

Jeremiah 6:14 They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.

Temple theology led to a health and wealth gospel. The preachers were telling the people “Look, we’ve got the Temple. So everything’s going to go great for us. We’re going to be wealthy and get everything we want. The fields are going to be fertile and all that we do will be successful. We will be at peace.”

Does this stuff sound familiar? It ought to, because there are people who are saying this today. Preachers who say that if you have the Lord, then you’ll get whatever you want. Just name it and claim it. God is like a big vending machine in the sky. Someone recently told me that some teachers are even teaching that whatever a Christian prays for becomes God’s will. What a horrible thought! God then becomes a projection of our wants and desires. I can’t imagine a God less worthy of our worship. These people haven’t read their Bibles.

Someone else passed on to me a letter that they had received in the mail from a preacher right here in New York. Let me quote some of it for you…

This preacher starts off the letter by saying that he has had a dream about the recipient, a dream in which this person feels so happy and young and healthy. “In this spiritual dream which I have for you, I am praying for you to come into a great sum of money, enough to pay all your bills, and buy all of the things you really needed, plus the things you would like — plus plenty of money left over.” He goes on to explain how for the dream to come true, the recipient will have to sleep with this letter under his pillow and then prove his faith in God by mailing $20 to the preacher as soon as he wakes up in the morning. He closes the letter with a testimony from one of his followers…

Dear Rev…

“I wanted a car and I got one. It’s just what I wanted, a Lincoln Continental. Pastor, it never fails, when I sincerely work with you and follow your teachings, I come out a winner. I’m a very happy man right now…”

Temple theology. Use God to get what you want. It’s contemptible. It’s demeaning. It is blasphemous. You’d better not ever try to use God to get what you want. God isn’t used by anyone. In the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis says of Aslan “Oh, he isn’t a tame lion.” And God is not a tame God. We don’t have him on a leash.

The most devastating thing about Temple theology though, is that we appear to be worshiping God when we are really worshiping someone else. Listen to Jeremiah…

Jeremiah 7:17-18 Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes of bread for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.

The Jews in Jeremiah’s day were worshiping a female goddess called the Queen of Heaven. She was known by the name Ishtar or Ashtoreth, and she came from the pagan religions of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. She was the goddess of fertility, the goddess of success. The pagans believed that the Queen of Heaven made their crops grow and their cattle breed. She was the one who gave them children. The goddess of health and wealth.

Notice how the Jews worshiped her? They baked little cakes in the form of a woman as an act of homage to her. They did it at home. The whole family was involved. The kids gathered the wood, the fathers lit the fire, and the mothers made the cakes. Although they went to the Temple of God on the Sabbath, they worshiped the Queen of Heaven - the goddess of success and fertility - the rest of the week at home. There is a lesson there for us.

If you want to find out what god a person really worships, don’t look at what he does at church, look at what he does when he’s at home. The people in Jeremiah’s day were leading double lives. How many church-going people today are leading double lives? They go through the motions on Sunday, but they worship at another altar on Monday. God’s name is never spoken in their living room or their kitchen or their bedroom. God is someone they talk about and talk to only on Sunday. They talk to their other gods the rest of the week. Temple theology.

Jeremiah brought the people of his day face to face with the double life they were leading. It’s no wonder that they tried to kill him for it.

The point for us today is that it is just as easy for us to lead this double life. We so easily build walls around ourselves to keep other people and their problems out. In fact, our lifestyle here in the NYC area lends itself to doing just that. But when we build walls around ourselves, we eventually shut God out. The window of our lives that should be open to heaven becomes cloudy, then opaque, and then dark. We draw the shades of our soul down. We can no longer be honest before God. And when we stop being honest with God, pretty soon we stop being honest with ourselves. We start using God. We start relying on things like Temple theology for our sense of security and well-being. We begin to just go through the motions.

Jeremiah was a man who was an utter failure in the eyes of his contemporaries. They had nothing but contempt and ridicule for him. But in God’s eyes, he was a success because he was the only man in Judah who was transparent before God.