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Hello, my ‘Walking with Jesus‘ friends on this first Friday in 2025.
Daily the headlines are calling us to consider the accomplishments and character of global leaders as we evaluate the record of their performance in 2024, and we rush into a new year with these leaders. Will ’25 be different? Oh my, how our world desperately needs men and women of honorable, capable, effective leadership, and what is your assessment of leaders of nations around the world? Have you ever given thought to what God sees when He looks at country leaders and what God’s expectations of these leaders are?
King David made this profound statement to his son Solomon as Solomon was about to become king of Israel: “…my son Solomon, acknowledge the God of your father, and serve Him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive…” (1 Chronicles 28:9)
We’re beginning 2025 in the city of Jerusalem about 2600 years ago as God is making some powerful statements about what He was seeing. I believe God is speaking the very same thing to your city and mine today! Yesterday in Jeremiah 5:1,2 God challenged us to take a stroll along the streets, look into the businesses and schools, to see if there could be found “even one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth.” Today God continues His challenge to Jeremiah, this time focused on the leaders: “‘So I will go to the leaders and speak to them; surely, they know the way of the LORD, the requirements of their God.’ But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds.” (Jeremiah 5:5)
It means well educated and trained leaders rejected the moral and ethical standards of God and refused to be accountable to God or the people over whom they had authority! Now think about that for a moment and does that sound like many world leaders today whose names we hear often, including the leaders in your nation and mine?
Sadly, in many parts of our world today Billions of people have little voice in either the selection or accountability of their national leaders. I’m not talking about tiny, obscure countries in faraway places, I’m talking about major, world leading nations. In fact, can you name ANY nation whose leaders would qualify as living and leading according to the standard of: “surely they know the way of the LORD, the requirements of their God”?
God’s message to Jeremiah was not finished. In Jeremiah 5:7 God says: “Your children have forsaken ME and sworn by gods that are not gods…” Do you see God is here challenging parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, entertainment and media producers and all adults who have influence over children? Rather than protecting and raising children with discipline and love to know God and pursue God honoring lives, God declares here that the young generations have turned away from God while still in their childhood and youth, and have pursued things abhorrent to God, things that will enslave and destroy them!
Do you see that in our world today my friends? Do we see it is not children who harvest, produce, transport, market and sell the addictive and killing hard core drugs?! It is not children who have produced decades of enslaving pornography. It is not children kidnapping and enslaving in sex trafficking young boys and girls around the world!
God is here calling selfish, abusive, predatory adults around our world to stand up and face accountability for the deaths and enslavement of millions of kids around the world, because God sees them and God will call them to justice!
Now before we rush to judgment, pick up the stones and start throwing them or writing off entire nations with one swipe, we need to hear God’s next scathing statement about Israel, and we need to look in the mirror. Is God talking about us when He accused His people with these words: “The people of Israel and the people of Judah have been utterly unfaithful to Me’ declares the LORD…a horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: The prophets prophesy lies, the priests’ rule by their own authority, and My people love it this way! But what will you do in the end?” (Jer. 5:11,30,31)
Are we complicit in this worldwide appetite for darkness, this worldwide failure in the moral and ethical standards of political, business, educational and spiritual leaders? This worldwide implosion of the family into social dysfunction?
So, as we begin a new year, my ‘Walking with Jesus’ friends around the world, I urge us all to take a close look…beginning in the mirror, then our marriages and our families, our neighborhood and communities, our cities and nations.
Let’s ask God to help us see what He sees and let us NOT give up but rather let us RISE up and declare that in 2025 we, all of us, will make a difference by living every day at the highest ethical and moral standards of God and both invite and challenge those we influence to do the same.
IF we will do so, and do it faithfully, what can you imagine God might do in our world to bring renewal, revival and revitalization? And if we don’t then what might God do?
As we ponder that, here’s a song to help us discern God’s application of Jeremiah 5 to our lives and our world in 2025. What would “The Jesus Way” be like?
Today’s Scripture: Jeremiah 5:5,7,11,30,31.
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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