http://custardy.blogspot.com/2007/02/sermon-on-jeremiah-131-11.html

These verses from Jeremiah where part of my bible in a year reading plan this morning.  Decided I wanted to get a better understanding of them and did just that with Johns Blog.  With this link you can read the whole sermon but I have copied a section of John’s sermon below.

From John’s Blog – Sermon on Jeremiah 13:1-11

“You know what? The best part of 3000 years later, and I think that all too often God’s people still aren’t listening much.

God has bound us to himself, to be his people, for his renown and praise and honour.

God has bound us to himself. He has taken us, stupid, sinful, pitiful, lost, dead people who deserve his wrath, who aren’t any better than that ruined soiled loincloth, and he has bound us intimately to himself, to the perfectly wise and living God who does whatever he wants to do.

And yet we forget that. We start going off and thinking that we’re worth something independently of God or that we can somehow get to God by what we do or we look at other people who seem so sorted and we think that we’re somehow worthless. But God has taken us and God has attached us to him. It’s not to do with our effort. It’s not to do with how good we are or aren’t.

And you know what? God didn’t do it so that we could be our own, empowered people. He did it so that we would be his people. Not our own. His.”

Here’s the verses from Jeremiah.  I liked The Message version.

Jeremiah 13:1-11 (MSG)

People Who Do Only What They Want to Do

13 ^1-2 God told me, “Go and buy yourself some linen shorts. Put them on and keep them on. Don’t even take them off to wash them.” So I bought the shorts as God directed and put them on.

^3-5 Then God told me, “Take the shorts that you bought and go straight to Perath and hide them there in a crack in the rock.” So I did what God told me and hid them at Perath.

^6-7 Next, after quite a long time, God told me, “Go back to Perath and get the linen shorts I told you to hide there.” So I went back to Perath and dug them out of the place where I had hidden them. The shorts by then had rotted and were worthless.

^8-11 God explained, “This is the way I am going to ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem—a wicked bunch of people who won’t obey me, who do only what they want to do, who chase after all kinds of no-gods and worship them. They’re going to turn out as rotten as these old shorts. Just as shorts clothe and protect, so I kept the whole family of Israel under my care”—God’s Decree—“so that everyone could see they were my people, a people I could show off to the world and be proud of. But they refused to do a thing I said.