God's Measuring Stick

One day, a very successful businessman was riding to work in his chauffeur driven limousine when he happened to notice a little boy sitting at a table by the side of the road. On the table sat a mangy, decrepit old dog. His fur was all matted and scruffy. Around the dog’s neck, the boy had hung a sign which said “Dog for Sale… 10¢”.

Day after day, the businessman passed the boy and the dog sitting there by the side of the road, until one day he decided to stop and give the boy some business advice. Folding his Wall Street Journal under his arm, the businessman stepped out of his limousine and went over to the curb where the little boy sat. “Young man,” he said, “I see you have a dog for sale. But it doesn’t seem that you’ve been successful in finding a buyer so far. Let me give you some good business advice. You need to think big. First, you have to take this dog and give him a bath. Then comb his coat till it is shiny and sleek. Tie a big red ribbon around his neck. Nobody wants to buy an old flea-bitten mongrel like you’re offering now. And change your sign. Raise the price. Think big. People won’t think this dog is worth anything if you’re only willing to sell him for 10¢.” At that the businessman climbed into his limousine and drove off.

The next day as he drove by, he noticed that the boy had followed his advice. There sat the dog, only now he looked beautiful. His coat was glossy and sleek, and he had a big red bow around his neck. But what really caught the businessman’s eye was the sign. In gigantic letters, it read “Champion Retriever for Sale: $10,000 !” The businessman chuckled to himself as he drove by, figuring that the poor boy would sit at that table forever with a dog that price.

Imagine his surprise though later that day as he returned home from work to find that the table was empty. The dog was gone. Spying the little boy, the man ordered his chauffeur to stop the car and he beckoned the boy over. “I see you’ve sold your dog.” he said. “Did my advice work?” The boy replied “Oh yes sir. Thank you so much for teaching me to think big. But I didn’t exactly sell the dog. I traded him to the little boy down the street for two five thousand dollar cats.”

In today’s performance oriented world, success is measured on the bottom line. Your worth as an individual is determined by how much money you make. What sort of house you live in. Where that house is. The car you drive. The clothes you wear. And perhaps most important of all, your credit rating.

People like Donald Trump, and Lee Iacocca have become the folk heroes of the 80’s. They epitomize success as measured on the bottom line.

But this performance standard is mighty unforgiving. This success mentality -the measuring of our worth as human beings on the basis of our accomplishments - is devastating because it causes our self-esteem to become conditional. If you’re a baseball pitcher, you’re only as good as your most recent year’s performance. That’s o.k. if you’ve had a year like Orel Hersheiser, but it’s not so good if you’re a Bob Ojeda struggling to overcome a hand injury. If you’re a movie actor, you’re only as good as your most recent film. If you’re a student, you are only as good as your grade point average. The question of the day is “What have you done lately?”

And so life becomes a race - a race to the bottom line, a race to succeed, to accomplish, to do well. It is a race that injects a lethal dose of pressure into our bloodstream. Some people handle the pressure by turning to artificial stimulants to get them started and artificial depressants to get them stopped. Relationships suffer. Marriage partners, weaned on this performance mentality, come into the relationship with performance clauses, written or unwritten. When their expectations are not met, when their partner doesn’t perform up to their standard, the marriage breaks down.

And for every winner in this race there are ten losers - people who are left in the dust with only the dreams of what might have been and painful questions about their own worth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about success lately. What makes a person a success, not in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of God? What standard of measurement does God use to determine how successful we are? To try to answer that question, I want to spend a few weeks with you looking at the life of the prophet Jeremiah.

He will be a very useful model for us, because Jeremiah’s life and ministry was largely a failure, as measured by today’s yardstick of success. You see, Jeremiah was a preacher whose people wouldn’t listen to his preaching. He was a prophet whose colleagues contradicted what he said. He was an author whose critics crucified his book. (The king when he read it, tore it up and burned it! Shades of Salman Rushdie!)

During Jeremiah’s career, his beloved country Judah was smashed to pieces and overrun by Babylon. And perhaps to cap it all, Jeremiah, a man of God and a true patriot, was accused of being a traitor. They threw him into a cistern - an underground pit designed to hold water. Then they took him, against his will, an old man in his 70’s to Egypt. Jewish tradition says that he met his end there by being stoned to death.

If you measured Jeremiah’s life on today’s performance scale, he was a failure. Nothing panned out. Things seemed to go from bad to worse. There was no revival under his preaching: in fact quite the opposite - people grew spiritually colder. It is no wonder that he became known as the weeping prophet. But on God’s scale, Jeremiah was a success. Why?

I believe the answer to be that Jeremiah, throughout his difficult life, never lost sight of who he was - an ordinary person in the hands of an extraordinary God.

Notice in Jer.1:4-5 that God takes complete responsibility for who Jeremiah was.

Jeremiah 1:4-5 The word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

God said “You are the person you are, Jeremiah, because I made you that way.” Jeremiah, although he had some difficulty at first, gradually came to understand that he was the person he was because God made him that way. I believe that the first key to Jeremiah’s success in the eyes of God was that he didn’t try to be anyone other than the person God made him to be. He accepted his unique identity as a gift from God.

How many people today are dissatisfied with who they are ! They are not happy with the way God made them. They say “Oh if only I were more beautiful, or if only I were more intelligent, or more athletic. If only I had been born into a better family.” And their lives are full of these “if only’s” which really are an indictment of their Maker. They are saying “God, when you made me, you didn’t know what you were doing. You made a mistake. And because you made a mistake with something so important as my very identity, because you stuck me with this person I see in the mirror, I can’t really trust you anything else in my life.”

Chuck Swindoll, a man of down to earth common sense and wisdom, has said that there are just three things that lead to a successful life in the sight of God. “Know yourself. Like yourself. Be yourself.”

Jeremiah was called to go through some terribly painful experiences. He knew the shame of rejection; he felt the acid animosity of his countrymen. I believe that the only thing that kept him going through these times when the world was screaming in his ear “Jeremiah, you’re a failure !” was his faith that God knew what he was doing. And that faith started with his acceptance of the fact that God had made him to be the person he was. You can’t trust God for anything else if you can’t trust him for that.

But God not only told Jeremiah that he had made him to be the person he was, He told him that he had made him that way for a reason. God said

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

That word “formed” in Hebrew refers to the way that a potter forms and shapes the clay on his wheel. The word is used in Gen.2 where we read that God formed man from the dust of the earth. It means that the one who is doing the forming has a purpose in mind. A potter knows what he is going to make before he starts to make it.

I remember Bill Cosby telling about his experiences in school shop class. Whatever he began to make always turned out as something else. He started to make a coffee table and it turned out to be an ashtray. Well God isn’t like that. He knows what he is going to make - he has a purpose in mind - and he sets about to make it.

God says to Jeremiah “Look, Jeremiah, I knew what I wanted you to be, so I made you that way.”

Jeremiah didn’t catch on right away. Look at what he says in v.6

Jeremiah 1:6 “Ah, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.”

Notice the pronouns in that verse? I… I… I… Jeremiah had a performance mentality. He said “It’s up to me to be a prophet, and I just can’t do it. I’m not one of these people who can get up and speak in front of others. I get terminal stage fright. I’m not up to it. I just can’t talk.”

But in verses 7-8, God says “Wait a minute. It doesn’t depend on you, it depends on me.” Look at the pronouns God uses…

Jeremiah 1:7-8 But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.

God answered Jeremiah’s three “I”s with three “I”s of his own. And God’s “I”s are a lot bigger than our “I”s. God said “I’m responsible for you, not you. Your life, your career, your success, your results, your performance is my responsibility. Just be true to your calling, do what I tell you to do, and I’ll take care of the rest. You obey and I will pay.”

And Jeremiah was a success according to God’s measuring stick because he obeyed. He was faithful to God’s calling. He did what God wanted him to do. And God took care of the results.

They weren’t results that made him appear successful in the eyes of his contemporaries. In fact, Jeremiah never lived to see the results of his ministry. But results there were. Fifty years after the prophet died an ignominious death, a man of God sitting in a palace in Babylon read the words of Jeremiah and was moved deeply in his soul. As he cried out to God over what he had read, God revealed to him a vision of His plan for the future and the coming of the Messiah. The man was Daniel, and his vision is recorded in Daniel ch.9. It happened because Jeremiah was faithful to his call.

580 years after Jeremiah died, one of the prophecies he wrote was fulfilled about the birth of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. It is recorded for us in Mt.2:17. It happened because Jeremiah was faithful to his call.

Thirty-three years after that, another prophecy of Jeremiah’s was fulfilled concerning the betrayal and death of Jesus Christ. It is recorded for us in Mt.27:9. It happened because Jeremiah was faithful to his call.

2,570 years after Jeremiah died, a group of people located almost 6,000 miles away from where he lived, on a continent unknown to him, met to talk about his life. The group studied the life of Jeremiah as an example of a man who brought glory to God by the way he lived. That little group is us here at Lynbrook Baptist Church. And it is happening today because Jeremiah was faithful to his call. And how many other churches are meeting today all around the world or have met in the past 2000 years of church history to learn about God from Jeremiah?

Nobody remembers the name Edward Kimball. He was an obscure man who taught Sunday School in a little church in Boston in the mid 1800’s. One day, a young man attended his class as a visitor. He came for a couple of weeks, and then Kimball visited him at his place of employment, which happened to be a shoe store. All that Kimball was able to say to the young man was, “I’m concerned for you.” After he left, the shoe clerk thought to himself “If he’s concerned for my soul, maybe I should be concerned too.” At that, he went to the basement of the shoe store and invited Jesus Christ to be his Savior. That young man was Dwight L. Moody, one of the greatest evangelists ever to live. Everyone remembers his name. Nobody remembers Kimball’s. Nobody except God. It all happened because Kimball was faithful to his call.

Your life can be a success in the sight of God, too. All he wants you to do is to be faithful to Him. Be faithful to Him at home, young mother, with your laundry and your dishes. Be faithful to Him at the office, secretary, with your hard to respect boss. Be faithful to him on the job-site, tradesman, with your co-workers who curse God. Be faithful to him in the school hallways, student, with your friends who laugh at your faith. Be faithful to Him and He’ll take care of the results.

True success is not wealth. It is not fame or popularity. It is not the admiration of your peers. It doesn’t even come in the form of results or accomplishments that are tangible and measurable. True success is the smile of God on a faithful life. Sometimes your faithfulness to God will make you a failure in the eyes of the world. It did Jeremiah. But he marched to a different drummer. His desire was to hear God say at the end of his life “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

May God help us to remember his example of faithfulness in a world that is obsessed with the bottom line.