Good Advice?

Scripture Verses that Caught my attention today: Jeremiah 42:3-4 Let the LORD your God show us where we should go and what we should do.” 4 The prophet Jeremiah said to them, “Very well: I am going to pray to the LORD your God as you request, and whatever the LORD answers you I will tell you; I will keep nothing back from you.”

Observation: the people said they wanted to know what the Lord wanted them to do. And Jeremiah promised to tell them what the Lord wanted. But if one reads on, the people did not listen to what the Lord, through Jeremiah, spoke.

Application: The world is full of people who ask for advice but then don’t take it. Granted, not all advice is good and all advice must be weighed and measured. We are responsible for ourselves, after all, at least in terms of our actions and decisions. Yet there is plenty of good advice out there that we flat-out ignore, perhaps because we have settled into our own way of doing things or our own mindset and are not willing to summon up the gumption necessary to, well, change.

I’m guilty of this myself in some areas and I’m willing to wager that you probably are too.

For whatever reason, the people of Jeremiah’s day had it in their head that they had to go to Egypt to be spared. Yet the word of the Lord indicated that just the opposite was the case. It’s easy to second-guess this situation from afar, but part of me sympathizes with them. Decisions are sometimes hard and the benefit of hindsight seldom comes when you really need it. Still, they asked for a word from the Lord and even received a word from the Lord but refused to believe it. I’d like to think I would have handled it differently, but who knows, maybe I’d have done the same thing.

Prayer: Lord, the saving grace is not that we always do the right thing but, rather, that you ARE the right thing. You are the one in whom trust can be placed. Help us to trust in you regardless of how wise or unwise our decisions and mindsets might be. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

(Readings today included: Jeremiah 42-44, Psalm 48, and Revelation 13)