When God called, time after time, after time, Judah failed to respond.  As the prophet of God, Jeremiah was sent to relay to them the message God had for them << Jeremiah 7: 27 - 28 >>.  When you did not respond to your parents, you were in trouble, weren’t you?  When we were kids, out and about in the neighborhood, my Dad used to whistle for us to come home for dinner.  If we failed to respond, we were in deep trouble.  We were disciplined in some way, and sometimes seriously so.  It is a tragedy when you already know the message you are bringing will fall upon deaf ears and hard hearts, because people believed the lie that says it doesn’t matter if they respond.  When any person or any nation refuses to respond to God, judgment and wrath follow inevitably.

       Now, please turn to Jeremiah 9: 12 - 14 << v. >>.  Why has our land been ruined?  We are often asked why our nation seems to be decreasing, diminishing in influence, decreasing in economic and military power, and dwindling in spiritual power as well.  It’s not simply because we had a stock market crash and ran out of money.  One of the sad commonalities between the contemporary American church and temple worship in ancient Judah is, like them, we also have settled for half measures.  They did just enough to get by, but their hearts weren’t in their expressions of devotion.  Like ancient Judah, we also possess a wilful unwillingness to see any personal responsibility for the community where we live.  We figure the problems are just too big and we are too small to matter.

       We use church as means of making us feel good.  If we allowed the Word of God and the Spirit of God to convict us and to assign changes in our lives, then we would change and our communities would actually be better places to live.  Plus, and to me this is the most important argument against this way of thinking, God placed us here to make a difference and to minister to the lost and broken.  We have no business allowing cultural disintegration to paralyze us.

       I have no idea if America will see the kind of military threat Judah faced, one that would wipe out our ability to defend ourselves.  While that is a possibility, I do believe we are facing the disintegration of our society from within.  I do not need to present a laundry list of all our problems and moral failures.  I can refer simply to people I know and love.  I can describe the great pain I see in their lives today.  I look around at the relational breakdowns, foreclosures, unemployment, the inability to deal with the level of stress unique to our day experienced by millions.  Within the last few weeks, three Christian friends called to say between them, three of their adult children and at least one other family member are divorcing.  Another friend called to say his son stands accused of a very serious crime.  It is true, each person makes his own decisions, but as a culture, can’t you see – we in well over our heads!  We no longer possess the ability to come up for air.  If we took seriously the call of God to holiness, I do not believe we would be seeing so many divorces, such a high level of domestic violence and felony arrests in the body of Christ.

       Jeremiah posed the question as to why things are the way they are.  Why are we declining, for example.  Anyone who reads the Bible can answer the question.  Anyone who studies the scriptures, who takes the message to heart, is wise enough and taught sufficiently enough to speak with authority on the subject.  We are decreasing because we have turned away from God.  Our straying is not recent; it did not just begin a few years ago.  Our national sins are historically generational and they reach back well before we were born.  Our treatment of slaves, of native peoples, our use of Manifest Destiny to force our way across the continent, the ego-driven sense of American superiority on the national and international stage all fed into these attitudes.  Didn’t you read The Ugly American when you were in school?

       Our culture worships and focuses on the gods at whose altar our culture worships: workaholism, addictions of every kind, sex, greed, the desire for happiness, and the shameless promotion of self.  The results are an increasingly scattered and fragmented society, filled with broken relationships and on an unprecedented scale.  The violence we are seeing in our communities is only the beginning of our being pursued with the sword.  There will be war, and whether or not it is international in scope is irrelevant.  The truth is, we will experience it.

       You may reject my understanding of these chapters by saying here in America we do not worship Baal.  You’re right, I do not know of any gods currently being worshiped on Cape Cod by that exact name.  However, the word “Baal” is translated as “Lord,” so Baal can be any god, the definition of which is not Biblical.  In Israel and Judah, many people worshiped the God of the Bible and Baal interchangeably.  They believed they were just being religious, worshiping the Lord. 

       Idolatry does not have to mean drooling demon worshipers.  Idolatry is anyone or anything you believe, or you act as though, that thing, that idea, that person, is more important to you than an intimate relationship with the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.  That idea, person, or thing would be your Baal, your lord, and that is your idol.

       You know when something is mentioned more than once in Scripture, we will pay particular attention and consider it of greater importance.  In these early chapters in Jeremiah, I saw repeatedly this one particular thought which began to resonate in my mind as I read.  I saw it repeated three times in as many chapters.  In Jeremiah 6: 14, 8: 11, and 8: 22, Jeremiah speaks, “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.  ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”  I keep thinking, we take a cynical view of many things today, believing they are not as serious as we previously thought.  The American revolutionary Patrick Henry quoted that phrase in one of his speeches.  He was saying then what I am saying now: there really is no peace.  We are in a deadly serious moment as a culture.  We are much more concerned with insignificant things than we are in the holiness of God.  We have grown more cynical and world weary as a culture and as a church.  Increasingly, we see everything as relative and every action as falling into some grey area. 

       In Jeremiah 8: 22, the prophet asks, “Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”  The question stunned me.  Why is there no healing?  I realized he wasn’t speaking merely of healing from specific diseases as much as he was speaking of the lives of people are broken, wounded, and festering – and they are neither healed nor are they seeking to be healed.  Why are families continually falling apart with such destructive intensity?  Why are the stressors of life today so deeply and keenly felt?  Given the level of distress, why is there so little crying out to God?  Why is it so hard to get Christians to meet for prayer, to step away from their lives for an hour to seek the face of God?  The incurable wound is a non-healing wound.  Its root is the infection of a wicked heart habitually turning away from God.  Jeremiah 17: 9 speaks of the deceitfulness – and the incurability of – the human heart.  This unhealed wound manifests itself in violence, rebellion, and self-centeredness.  In Jeremiah 7: 26, the Lord calls those who will not listen or respond to God, who suffer from this condition, “stiff-necked.” 

       We can hardly expect people who have no moral compass to behave in the same way as those who share our values.  If we possess Biblical values, we don’t need to shout them – we need to live them.  We need to exemplify godliness.  Instead, there is precious little shame in us as we think about our behavior, no motivation for us to change our actions or our attitudes, or modify our conduct.  There is no need to repent and change – many of us believe those are extremist viewpoints and verge on hate speech.

       Those three women died in a hail of bullets in Dorchester last week are a graphic reminder of how violence is growing and shaping the way we respond.  Boston’s only answer to violence is to beg people not to act on their anger.  We have learned to hide in plain sight and to pretend this is not our problem. 

       Out national unemployment rate is over 8% and the economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing is the weakest of any of the ten recessions we’ve had since World War 2.  Our culture feels badly about it, but it hasn’t stopped killing 1.2 million babies in the womb each year with alarming aplomb.

       Some folks are greatly disturbed by such statistics and news items.  As churches, we allow ourselves instead to be caught up in internet petitions, boycotts, and the like.  Those are the weapons of this world.  They were not intended nor were they designed to take on the principalities and powers responsible for the corruption of our communities.

       The prophet cried out, “Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”  Maybe because we never saw the wound as all that serious.  Maybe because, like Neville Chamberlain, we are more interested in having peace in our time.  Maybe because we’d rather have fun than engage in the hard work of transforming our own lives with a view to transforming the communities around us.  We complain about how tired we are after a long day at work.  Granted, work is tiring and we ought to be tired.  But God says we cannot have it both ways.  We can’t know His blessing and also hope to take the easy way out.  A lot of us want God’s blessing but we’d rather pass on allowing ourselves to be confronted by the Holy Spirit about the way we are living our lives.

       Leonard Ravenhill, an American preacher and evangelist, once said, “I can give you one simple reason why we don't have revival in America.  Because we're content to live without it.  We're not seeking God - we're seeking miracles, we're seeking big crusades, we're seeking blessings.  In Numbers 11, Moses said to God, “You're asking me to carry a burden I can't handle.  Do something or kill me!”  Do you love America enough to say, "God, send revival or kill me?”  Do you think it's time we changed Patrick Henry's prayer from, “Give me liberty or give me death,” to “Give me revival or let me die?”

       Why is there no healing for the wound of my people?  Whenever I read Jeremiah, the Lord stirs my heart with the sense He is speaking to me.  He is speaking to me about my country, not I think the USA is a 21^st century equivalent to Judah.  He is saying to us He called; we haven’t responded.  As a person, and as a culture, as a society, we turned away in steadfast stubbornness.  Any person and any country can turn its back on God.  But equally, any person and any country can make that commitment to turn back to God.  My prayer is that the Holy Spirit will stir more of us to engage with Him so we may be of use in the hard work of seeing Jesus change our community.

       As we begin, notice that the difficulties mentioned in these verses are brought on by God.  Many of us think that there is no way God could ever be responsible for judgments such as these.  But God says, “When I shut up the heavens,” indicating that the drought, the locusts, and the plague are divinely ordered, and are not randomly or capriciously dropped out of the sky.

       All this begs the question: do disasters always find their origin in God?  Aren’t there simply natural disasters that have no spiritual meaning at all?  Is it always God?  That’s a hard question, but I would respond this way: if you are thinking about some horrendous situation happening in America or somewhere in the world, and the Holy Spirit begins to prompt you to realize this means God is not pleased with the rebellious heart of man, and there are awful consequences for the sins of this world – then God is speaking to you through this event.  If you receive nothing at all like this, perhaps you are simply not listening!

       You will recall Romans 8: 18 - 21, where Paul says all of creation is in bondage to decay and is subject to disasters as a sign of that decay.  There is decay throughout the created universe, because of the presence of sin, and as a consequence of the sin of humankind.  The storms that move through the atmosphere, the earthquakes that send shock waves to destroy cities, the cancers that rob people of their lives, all these are creation breaking down, “groaning as in the pains of childbirth.” 

       The wildfires that recently swept through Colorado, the tornadoes that devastated the south last year, the earthquake and  tsunami which destroyed so much of Japan, are all indicators of the falling-apart nature of this old world.  It is up to us, however, to rightly interpret these events, to recognize whether the voice of God is speaking in the midst of economic downturns, and in the midst of droughts and floods.  When plagues of sickness take thousands upon thousands of lives, when people you love find their faith in God crumbling, when our own children lose their faith for whatever reason, we want to be especially keen about hearing the heart of God and understanding what is happening.  In each and every meteorological, geological, or medical event, the voice of God is calling His people to repent. 

       God spoke to Haggai and through him told the people of God to give careful thought to their ways.  Think about how your lives are going wrong... how nothing you do prospers.  Think about that.  Think about the lack of God’s blessing on your life.  Is God speaking to you through this experience? 

       Consider what God might be saying to America when communities in Colorado burn to the ground, when something called a land hurricane strikes our Midwest, or when the economy of the greatest nation in the world lies dormant and unresponsive even to the persistent tickling of our government.

       Are all these events merely natural, everyday occurrences, that have no meaning or significance beyond the events themselves?  No, not at all; these events are indicative of much more than a tantrum thrown by random and inanimate forces.  They are the consequence of fallen creation and fallen man, and are the result of man’s insistent and long-standing rebellion against God.  As disasters occur, this passage helps us to understand that by them, God is wooing us back to himself.  There is a way out, there is a solution, and the solution is found in our relationship with God.  The solution is found when we take ourselves seriously as “if My people.”

       What characterizes, what is the common denominator for the kind of events God mentions here is devastation.  A drought means there is no water to sustain life.  Plants die; famine results.  Locust darken the sky as they swarm, and then eat every green leaf in sight, and famine results.  A plague is a disease that overtakes and kills large numbers of people, leaving nothing but weakness and destruction in its wake.  That is devastation, that is destruction and it is total and complete.  Devastation can be physical, as these examples attest.  Devastation can also cause widespread spiritual and emotional damage.  When we are devastated, it can create a sense of desperation in our hearts, a desperation defined as hunger for God unsatisfied by money or success, a thirst for His presence that is unquenched by any other substitute.  We know this is not always the case, as sometimes devastation causes cynicism and bitterness, but certainly the preferred response is hunger, thirst and desperation in the heart for God. 

       When devastation brings forth hunger for God in the hearts of people, and those people begin to express that desperation for God in their lives, you can know God is wooing His people back to Himself.  When a desire for the things of God begin to outweigh and outdistance our appetite for pleasure or for life-as-usual, that’s a sign this desperation is maturing.  That’s when you know God is wooing His people back to Himself.

       That is also when God’s people begin to humble themselves.  Here God is not advocating sackcloth and ashes, self-flagellation, or self-mutilation.  God is inviting us to see ourselves accurately, Biblically, soberly, as we ought to see ourselves.  There comes a time when Christians understand everything we are and every possession we think we own is nothing less than God’s gift and all of it belongs first to Him.  That is easy to say and it is easy to nod our heads in sage agreement, but it is another thing to allow God the kind of access to our lives and access to our bank accounts that shows we are not lying when we say, Jesus is my Lord and my King.  Friends, we are neither self-made nor self-taught.  God has made us.  God has blessed us, and now it very well may be that God is breaking us.

       Through the painful trials we endure, God is causing our hard shells to crack, weaken, soften, and yield to the gentle pressure of the Holy Spirit.  Do you know how to tell when Christians are beginning to soften and become responsive to God?  One indication is when Christians set aside time to pray together.  That is a really good sign of growing humility.  Slowly, we are seeing people from the churches on Cape Cod becoming more willing to step away from whatever they were doing, and be willing to yield enough to go to meet with other Christians, simply to humble ourselves and to join hearts in prayer.  Here in Pocasset, we are a long ways from being able to say we are experiencing success in that area, but it has begun in other churches.  Most of us have not yet begun to soften, or to yield to God, and our hard shells are still resilient and very strong.  But God says, when we Pocasset Baptists humble ourselves and seek His face that will be a sure sign God is working in the middle of our stuff and in the middle of our church.

       I speak with people every week who say they pray all the time.  What they are probably doing is one of two things.  They are either engaging in spiritual self-talk, or they are bringing their shopping lists to God, saying, “God, please do this, and that, and this, and that.”  Seeking the face of God is far different from what these folks are doing.  Seeking God’s face is not stopping at Heaven’s super market... it is not asking for things; it’s enjoying His presence.  It is pure worship.  People who simply seek God are rare these days because we all want stuff and want God to do stuff for us.  People who seek God’s face simply want God.

       God is not bound to answer the prayers of wicked people.  If there is a formula to have God answer your prayers, these verses probably comes as close to a formula as you will find anywhere in God’s Word.  Humble yourself.  Seek God’s face, and turn from any wickedness in your life.

       That last condition is where the rubber meets the road for you and me.  Many of us believe we can repent and all will be well, but our repentance doesn’t include a change in behavior!  Plus, we all have a whole bunch of grey areas in our lives, areas that may bother us but we enjoy engaging in the behavior, so we make excuses about our participation.  When a believer is serious and not fooling around, those grey areas will disappear from their lives. 

       This whole statement which God made to Solomon is a conditional promise in the form of if/then.  If you do this, then God will do that.  Many of the promises of God are unconditional in nature and do not depend one bit on our response or our behavior.  We are saved by grace and not by works, so the love of God is completely unconditional, as are many of God’s promises, but not this promise.  What God will do here depends completely on how we respond.  If we turn from the behaviors and attitudes of our hearts that are displeasing to God, God will listen to our prayers.  He will forgive our sin.  He will heal our land.

       That’s the word here which reaches into our hearts, that grabs us, and makes us take notice – the promise that God will hear, the promise that God will forgive, and the promise that God will heal.   It is not only our nation that needs healing, but our families need God’s touch as well.  We have relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters – strained, torn, and devastated by years of built-up resentments and bitterness.

       When we see people who are wracked by the powerful pull of addiction, when some friends are falling into the depths of  depression, when other friends are seeing what little faith and hope they once had draining away – we become more than alarmed.  We become desperate for God to come by here and do the kind of redeeming and healing work only God can do.

       So the question to you this morning is this: what are you willing to do, how much of your life are you willing to invest in approaching God on the basis of the promise described in these two verses?  Many of us have this committed these verses to memory, but are we ready to step up our game and do whatever is required to see God answer our prayers?  It is not kidding or exaggeration to say the fate of our nation lies in our hands.

       The people in Haggai’s day were so busy with their own lives and so taken up in their own agenda that God had to speak directly to them, and say there were good reasons why they were not prospering or experiencing God’s blessing.  They had put all their attention and all their money into their own lives and into their own homes, all the while the things of God were allowed to rot and fall apart.  Solomon was told that when he became aware of God’s absence, when he realized disasters were striking close to home, he could remedy the situation by turning away from sin and turning to God.  It was a simple solution, and yet, three thousand years later, we are still struggling to find ourselves taking advantage of God’s promise.

       Will you make a decision today to become part of the solution rather than griping, rather than complaining, rather than remaining part of the problem?  Will you humble yourself and find a way to pray together with others, to depend on God for real, and not just as something that sounds spiritual to say?  Will you seek God’s face, not for what you hope to get, but simply for the purpose of getting to know Him?  And will you allow the Holy Spirit to complete an inventory of your heart and life, and as a result, remove everything that is standing in the way of God from your life?