Devotional:

Jeremiah 1.9-10

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and the plant.”

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” His quote is remarkably indicative of what our contemporary experience is like with new projects constantly fading away into obscurity. For instance, while the world tunes in for the Olympic games in Rio, the former Olympic site in Athens, Greece is falling apart and is being used as a living area for Syrian refugees. Millions are spent on building the stadiums for the Olympics, and within a decade most of them start crumbling.

In our churches this same type of behavior is common. Whenever a new opportunity for ministry pops up it garners support from the majority of congregations. Money will come in, people will volunteer their time, and the project usually bears fruit. However, after a program loses its luster it (like Olympic sites) begins to fade away from focus and fails to bear the fruit that it once did.

Moreover, the same principle holds true for our own discipleship. Whenever we encounter a new spiritual discipline, or a new bible study, it captures our initial interest and we start to grow more in our faith. We might commit to praying every morning as soon as we wake up, and for the first few weeks it is incredibly life giving. But as time passes, and the new behavior feels more like an old routine, we stop giving it our full attention and effort.

We like building, but we don’t like maintenance.

When the Lord first called Jeremiah to be a prophet, he gave him a difficult task: “I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” Jeremiah’s mission would not be limited to starting new programs and building new buildings alone. Instead, he was tasked with the even harder work of maintaining the people by plucking up and pulling down practices and behaviors that were no longer bearing fruit. He had the unenviable responsibility of maintaining what the Lord had created by destroying and overthrowing whatever stood in the way of God’s will.

What kind of maintenance work are we avoiding? What do we need to pluck up and pull down in our churches for them to truly become the body of Christ for the world? What do we need to destroy and overthrow in our lives to become the disciples that God is calling us to be?