Jeremiah 26:1-3
There is something uncomfortable about a man who keeps saying the same thing no matter how you respond to him. You can ignore him, argue with him, threaten him, and he just keeps saying it. Jeremiah was that kind of man. Not because he was stubborn, but because the word he carried wasn’t his own.
Continue reading “What Voice Are You Listening To?”
(Jeremiah 23:23-24, ESV)
Most of us have said it at one time or another. The day gets full, the demands pile up, and somewhere in the middle of it all we mutter, “I wish there were two of me.” It’s a familiar feeling. We’re bound by where we are. We can only be in one place at a time, and the older we get, the more we feel the weight of that. There’s simply never enough of us to go around.
God had something to say about that in Jeremiah 23. In the middle of a passage addressing false prophets who were living double lives, he asked a pair of questions no one could answer. “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD” (Jer. 23:23-24, ESV).
The implied answer is obvious. He fills heaven and earth. He is not confined to one place, not bound by geography or distance. While we struggle to be fully present even where we are, God is fully present everywhere, all at once. Psalm 139:8 puts it plainly — there is nowhere we can go that is outside his reach. Not the highest height, not the lowest depth.
We’re also limited by time in a way God simply is not. We feel it constantly. There aren’t enough hours. We lose track of days. Seasons come and go faster than we expect. But the God who spoke to Jeremiah exists outside of all that. He has no beginning and no end. He is the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8, ESV). What looks to us like history unfolding is, from his vantage point, already known, already held.
The fact that God has no boundaries is genuinely hard to take in. Everything in our experience has limits. Every person, every relationship, every resource runs out eventually. And then there is God, for whom none of that is true. It’s the kind of thing worth sitting with quietly rather than rushing past.
What strikes me about this passage is not just the theology of it. It’s what that theology means for the rest of life. We serve a God who can be with the grieving mother and the wandering prodigal at the same moment. He is not stretched thin. He is not having to choose. His presence with one person in no way reduces his presence with another.
And this God — unlimited, everywhere, outside of time — is the one who has moved toward us. He can do anything, including forgive us and bring us into his own family. That is not a small thing. The God who fills heaven and earth has made room for us.
We may spend our days wishing there were more of us to go around. But the One who is actually unlimited has given us his full attention. That ought to change how we walk through an ordinary day.
(Jeremiah 23:5–6)
There’s a particular kind of disappointment that comes from being misled by someone you trusted. Not betrayed by an enemy but misled by someone who was supposed to tell you the truth and didn’t.
Continue reading “When the Shepherds Fail”
Jeremiah 20:9 (ESV)
A man I know spoke up at work about something he saw that wasn’t right. Not loudly. Not publicly at first. Just to the right people, quietly. What followed was professional isolation. Conversations that stopped when he entered a room. Opportunities that somehow went to others. The message was clear: keep your mouth shut, and this stops.
Continue reading “The Fire in His Bones”
Jeremiah 17:9, ESV
Most of us have heard these words so many times we could finish the sentence before Jeremiah does. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9, ESV). It’s been preached so many times we almost don’t listen anymore. But here’s a fair question: do we actually understand what Jeremiah was saying?
Continue reading “The Heart You Can’t Trust”
Jeremiah 13:23
There is a question tucked inside the book of Jeremiah that is easy to read past. It sounds almost like a riddle. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). Jeremiah was speaking to a people who had drifted so far from God that their rebellion had become second nature. They weren’t just breaking rules; they had broken their covenant, the deep, binding promise they had made with the Lord Himself. And the honest answer to the question was no. You can’t change what you’ve become.
Continue reading “Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?”
Jeremiah 7:23, ESV
Most of us have spent a good portion of our lives looking for something. Not always sure what it is, exactly, but something that would make us feel like we had finally arrived. The next job, the bigger house, the right car — maybe then we would be content. Maybe then we could breathe.
Continue reading “The Secret Nobody Wants to Hear”
Jeremiah 5:28, ESV
We are pretty good at keeping up appearances. Most of us have learned how to look put-together even when things are falling apart inside. We smile at the right moments, say the right things, show up when we’re supposed to. And the world rewards that. A polished image opens doors that a messy, honest one sometimes doesn’t.
Continue reading “The Danger of Looking Good”
John 20:19–29
Every scar has a story. The one on my finger is from a knife I was told to leave alone. I didn’t listen. The one on my leg is from a bicycle crash I’d rather forget. And the one on my stomach is from a piece of metal that chipped off a steel chisel at exactly the wrong moment.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 10”
John 20:11–18
A man I read about was adopted at birth and grew up with no knowledge of his biological family. In his forties, a DNA service connected him with a half-sister he had never known. They exchanged careful, tentative messages for weeks. Then one afternoon she called him, and the moment he heard her voice, something unexpected happened. She said his name, and he wept.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 9”
1 Corinthians 15:12–24
A historian I read about spent two years trying to disprove the resurrection. He was not a believer, he was a skeptic, and he approached the accounts of Easter the way a detective approaches a crime scene: looking for inconsistencies, alternate explanations, reasons to dismiss. He catalogued the evidence on both sides. He interviewed scholars. He traced the manuscript traditions.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 8”
Psalm 2
A photojournalist who covered conflict zones for twenty years described what she called the hardest moment of her career. Not the violence she’d witnessed, but a single night in a city under siege when she genuinely believed darkness was going to win. The brutality seemed total, the cruelty organized, the hope of liberation absurd.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 7”
Exodus 2:23–25
For eighteen months, a woman I know wrote weekly letters to her estranged adult daughter who refused all contact. She never knew if the letters were read, returned, or thrown away. The silence was total. She kept writing anyway, because the love didn’t stop just because the replies did.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 6”
John 14:1–10
Maybe you’ve been there. You’re hiking a trail, the fog rolls in thick, and suddenly you can barely see five feet ahead. Your map is useless, all the landmarks you’d been following have disappeared. You’re standing at a fork in the trail, genuinely unsure which way leads back to the trailhead and which leads deeper into the backcountry.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 5”
John 13:6–20
A master woodworker once described the most discouraging phase of any project: the middle. “The beginning is exciting,” he said. “You have vision, you have energy. The end is satisfying, you can see the finished piece. But the middle? The middle just looks like a mess of sawdust and mistakes. That’s when most people quit.”
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 4”
Central Haywood Church of Christ 