October 17, 2010 2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

Jeremiah 31:27-34
“Written on Our Hearts”
Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

I read once of a fifth grade boy named Ralph, a very energetic young man who gave his Sunday
School teachers fits. He ran in the halls, shoved kids out of his way, played rough. Time and time
again the teachers tried to settle him down, to reason with him, but with little success. Not much was
accomplished with Ralph until one day when he playfully, but forcefully, shoved his classmate Jack
while Jack was at the drinking fountain. Jack’s head struck the water spout, and he was cut just above
the eye. Immediately, Jack cried out, and there was a great deal of bloodshed (as you can imagine
with a wound near the eye.) Ralph was horrified by all this. He ran from the church building to his
home a few blocks away.

After Jack was helped and the staff could see that the cut didn’t even need stitches, they went in search
of Ralph. They met him coming in the door of the church with his mother. She made Ralph apologize
to Jack. Interestingly, from that moment on, the staff saw a new Ralph. He was truly sorry. He’d
been shocked by the result of his roughhousing. His words and his tears were real. He had to learn
the hard way that what we do can get us into trouble, and hurt others.1

On the broader level, this was a lesson that Israel had to learn as well. There are consequences to
disobeying God just as the prophets warned. When Cheri and I were in Israel, we had a Jewish guide
who lead our tour. One of the first sites we visited was the ruins of the ancient temple at Dan, a
temple built by King Jeroboam to worship gold images of a bull. Jeroboam, you’ll remember, was the
first king of the Northern kingdom, and by building the temple at Dan, he was attempting to keep the
people of the Northern kingdom, Israel, from traveling down to Jerusalem, which was in the Southern
Kingdom of Judah. The point our guide made, as we sat 10 feet from the altar where those golden
bulls were worshiped, was that idol worship was a major problem in both the Northern and Southern
kingdoms until the exile’s return from the Babylonian captivity. The worship of the Canaanite god,
Baal, and the worship of various other gods was a major problem until after the destruction of
Jerusalem. Despite the warnings of the prophets, idol worship continued as it did at Dan. But when
the Israelites returned from their Babylonian captivity, idol worship was no longer a problem. There
were other problems, but not idol worship. The Israelites had learned that lesson, just as Ralph
learned to control his aggressiveness.

Understand, though, that it took nearly the total annihilation of the country for the Jewish people to
learn this lesson. Jerusalem was destroyed, and by this we’re talking leveled. The temple built by
Solomon was no more. It was as if a tornado had gone through and flattened the city, and removed the
people, at least the ruling class people. The rulers were gone. The Temple was gone. The economic
stability of the country was gone. Only rubble was left of the city and her people.

It was as the forces of Babylon gathered to inflict this destruction on Jerusalem that Jeremiah
preached. For the most part, he didn’t preach that everything was going to be ok. He didn’t preach
that God was going to save the country as many other prophets were proclaiming. He preached that

11 Strandjord, Jeanette “Preaching on the Lessons,” The Clergy Journal, August 1999, Volume
LXXV, Number 9, pp. 35-36.
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Jerusalem and her people were going to get what they deserved. They were going to be punished.
God had had enough. That’s basically what the book of Jeremiah is filled with – a message of gloom
and destruction.

However, there are pockets of hope in the book, and our text this morning comes from one of these
pockets. “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the
house of Israel and the house of Judah.” Jeremiah became convinced that Israel would be restored to a
full and happy future on the very eve of Jerusalem’s fall in 587. The light of hope shone brightest in
Judah’s darkest hour!2

If we’d listened to Jeremiah preach gloom and doom for what must’ve seemed forever, I wonder if
we’d have fully accepted his words of hope without reservation. Probably not. Jeremiah had been
preaching that because of Judah’s sins, God was going to punish the kingdom. On the eve of
Jerusalem’s destruction, Jeremiah now proclaims, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Write in a
book all the words that I have spoken to you. For the days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I
will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, says the LORD, and I will bring them back to
the land that I gave to their ancestors and they shall take possession of it.” Do I believe that message?
Maybe I hope it’s true, but I’m not sure I believe it. At the very least I wonder, if Israel’s sins in the
past brought such fearful judgment upon the nation so that it came close to total annihilation, what
assurance can there be that after a future restoration has taken place the same fate will not befall Israel
again? If our sins brought this terrible judgment upon us when we were trying to do what was right,
what guarantee do we have that the same thing won’t happen again and again. After all, we’re just
people. We usually don’t get it right.

Perhaps it’s to answer this sort of question that Jeremiah gives us today’s theological response: “The
days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took
them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was
their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after
those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will
be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each
other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the
LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Jeremiah is saying that the well-being of Jerusalem won’t depend upon the faithfulness of her kings,
nor upon the sanctity or safety of the Temple. Nor will God’s law be “out there” somewhere where
it’s easy to forget, easy to ignore. Now the law will be written on our hearts – written deep inside us,
written where it will be a part of who we are.

Ah, but you don’t agree with my analysis. We’re still waiting for Jeremiah’s words to come naturally
to us. It doesn’t feel like God’s law is in our hearts. Perhaps. But let me suggest that the new
covenant of which Jeremiah speaks is written on our hearts, but that we don’t stop to listen to our
hearts very often. After all, the Psalmist also talks about holding God’s law, or God’s word in his
heart: “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee,” the Psalmist says. Maybe

22 Clements, R.E., Jeremiah, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching,
John Knox Press, Atlanta, GA, 1988, p. 176.
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there’s more of God’s law within us than we know but we don’t listen very well. We don’t listen to
others. We don’t even listen to our own hearts.

Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, When God Is Silent puts it this way. “There are fewer and fewer
oases of silence in our noisy world. Communication has higher value for us than contemplation.
Information is in greater demand than reflection. There was a time when only doctors wore pagers
and the only person who carried a telephone around with him was the president of the United States, in
case of nuclear attack. Now we are all that important. We can be found anywhere, at anytime, by
anyone who needs us. When a pager goes off in a room full of people, a banner unfurls above the
wearer’s head: I am necessary. I am involved in something so urgent it cannot wait.

“Sometimes it is our own need to communicate that is urgent. One talkative friend of mine had his
brand new car phone disconnected the day after his first bill arrived. He had no idea that the cure for
his loneliness on the road could cost him a thousand dollars a month. I read about someone else who
has lodged a complaint with the National Park Service about the use of cellular phones in the
wilderness. It seems that his long-awaited trek to a landmark peak was ruined for him when a fellow
traveler to the top whipped out his cordless and began describing the view to his children, who were
apparently reluctant to be torn away from the television show they were watching at home.

“The Park Service was sympathetic, since they have begun to receive more and more calls from hikers
with cellular phones. Very few are genuine emergencies. The majority are from people who have
gotten lost and want to be guided back to their cars by telephone, or who have developed painful
blisters on their feet and want someone to come pick them up.

It is more and more difficult for us to choose silence when communication is possible. To let the
telephone ring, to leave the e-mail unread, to unplug the fax machine – these amount to acts of social
sabotage. To choose silence for even an hour, we must risk the loss of connection with other people,
who may have a hard time understanding how anything could be more important to us than responding
to them. We must also handle our own sense of anxiety. What if that is a call from the fire
department? From the hospital? From someone who wants to invite me to dinner? For some of us,
silence provokes so much internal chatter that it cancels itself out.”3

For most of us, I suggest, our internal chatter and the external chatter that is always around us, keeps
us from hearing God’s word that is written on our hearts. Are we afraid of the silence? Are we afraid
of what we’ll hear if we turn off the TV and the radio and the stereo, if we put the book down and
quiet even our own inner voices? Are we afraid of what we’ll hear, or have we just never tried it?
How long has it been since we’ve just listened to our hearts, listened for the voice of God without first
telling God all our problems, all our needs, all our wants?

What would we hear if we listened to the word of God written on our hearts? First, we would hear
how not to sin against God. We would hear the same message that the prophets proclaimed – “what
does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your
God?” We are to bring justice to those on the fringe of society: the homeless, the hungry, the helpless.
That’s the message of God’s law we would hear.

33 Taylor, Barbara Brown, When God is Silent: The 1997 Lyman Beecher Lectures on
Preaching, Cowley Publications, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, pp. 43-45.
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But if we listened to our hearts, if we listened in the stillness for God’s voice, we would hear of God’s
love for us. The law, even God’s law, is filled with should’s and shouldn’ts. “Don’t do that, but do
this instead.” Even listening to God’s law can sometimes create too much noise within our hearts.
But if we’re truly silent, if we listen long enough, what we’ll hear from God is God’s love for us.
We’ll hear that God sent His son to not to condemn us, but to love us and forgive us and to wrap His
arms around us. If we listen to our hearts, if we listen to Jesus Christ, we’ll hear a message of love
and acceptance, a message of forgiveness and peace, a message of hope and joy that is louder than all
the noise that so often fills our ears, and more welcome than rain to the thirsty desert. If we listen.
May it be our prayer that we will listen to our hearts and to the voice of God. Amen.