Life-verse Number One

I have three life verses from Jeremiah—three and counting, I expect.

As a prophet, Jeremiah is very apropos to our generation. His is a sixth-century BC book. Babylon is besieging Jerusalem. The once proud nation is now in its death throes. Sounds a lot like another country I know. And its people are enmeshed in sin and rebellion; they want relief, but are not particularly interested in repentance.

I’ll take my life verses in chronological order, as God used them in my life. First up is Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

In 1974 I was a freshman, a Geology major, at Colorado State University. I was mostly agnostic and completely lost. God was for me an abstraction at best and a distraction at worst: I wasn’t interested.

I was button-holed on the campus by a fellow named Chuck. He had a Bible in his hand; I tried to avoid him, but failed. Trapped, I grudgingly consented to hear what he had to say while making it obvious by my body language that I was not the slightest bit interested.

He began sharing the Gospel with me. As a teen I had enjoyed trying to talk other bible-banging teens out of their faith, but this guy parried every thrust with the Word of God. He patiently and gently answered my every question and my every objection right out of the text, and God began to work in my heart. I was not seeking God, but He was seeking me.

At some point Chuck quoted Jeremiah 17:9, and with that my resistance collapsed. I had been outed, I had been pegged, I had been exposed. All my self-righteousness went up in smoke at that moment and I knew that God saw right through my act. God knew my heart, and His knowledge was dead-on accurate.

All my objections became superfluous, because I knew that only a living God could pierce me with truth as I had been pierced. I trusted Christ that very day, and have been trusting Him ever since.

Jeremiah 17:9 is a pretty humiliating life verse—but I love it. It’s still true of me, but less true than it was thirty-seven years ago, and a year from now it will be even less true of me than it is today. The closer to Christ I grow, the more clearly I see my own corruption. And the more grateful I am that God the Son absorbed the righteous wrath of His Father; wrath that should have been poured on me. I will never be called to account for my sins before the judgment bar of God, because they’ve already been paid through the death of Christ, and God doesn’t do double jepoardy. Hallelujah!

I’m thankful for the Son of God who purchased my salvation, for a man named Chuck who gave me the facts of the Gospel straight, and for Jeremiah 17:9 which exposed my sins!