Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

It must be a truly awful thing when a city falls. What happened to Baghdad when the Americans took it was nothing compared to what happened at the end of a siege in the ancient world. The armies of old fought hand to hand, and when they finally breached the wall of a city—often after years of fighting—there was no holding them back until the bloodlust had finally been satisfied.Surrendering men should not be killed—but there is a time to surrender, and when it has past, you might as well fight to the end. In a way, this was a message Jeremiah had tried to give to Israel for a very long time. His warning? If you surrender now you will live. If you defend the city you will die and the Chaldeans will burn it and you with fire. That’s a very straightforward message.There isn’t very much in the Book of Jeremiah about the actual fall of the city, but there is a book about the aftermath. It’s called Lamentations. It is a kind of poetry, a song of lamentation—perhaps it could

I have to wonder how a prophet ever rises to prominence. We look back on these men as giants, but in their own generation, they were just ordinary men with an extraordinary message. One of them was a sheep herder and part-time fruit picker. Most of them were very young when first called of God and commissioned–one of them, just a child. Think about it, some kid shows up claiming to have a message from God. Would you take him seriously? But by the time these men reach old age, they start posing a real threat to men in power. How do they get from obscurity to prominence?For one thing, they speak the truth. And even when we don’t like it, we have a way of recognizing that it is the truth. And God has his own ways of establishing a prophet and making his voice heard. Sometimes, it is his enemies that give him prominence and make his message significant. For if he was not telling the truth about them, they would leave him alone.But it is also important to realize that real prophets are political dynami

All of us have what some call a worldview. We are as unaware of this as a fish is unaware of water, but we all have a grid through which we view life’s problems and which we use to make decisions about those problems.For the most part, that worldview goes unexamined. We have always thought the way we have and unless something jars us off our platform, we always will.What are the foundational principles upon which we will base our end-of-life decisions, be it our own life or someone we love? As Christians, we like to think that the Bible is our foundation, our platform from which we view the world, and the framework for making the hard decisions of life. But we immediately, it seems, have a problem…

Real prophets are given prominence by God. We aren’t always told how he does it, but in the case of Elijah, he called publicly for three years of drought…and it happened. By the time the three years were up, everyone was looking for Elijah. He had disappeared and had nothing to say for all that time, and yet his message echoed back and forth across Israel. Sometimes, real prophets become prominent because they are hated and feared.One thing is for sure: when a real prophet comes on the scene and begins to speak the truth to power, he will have enemies at the highest levels of government. Even with no power of his own, the truth can be a terrible threat to those in power—and they will react.At one point in Jeremiah’s long career, he was under house arrest to keep him from going to the public square as he had been doing. He was making a lot of people very uncomfortable with his message. In chapter 36, we find Jeremiah sitting at home when God tells him of a different way to bring his wo

You wouldn’t want to say that God is stubborn. But would have to admit that he is awfully persistent, wouldn’t you? God’s persistence—in keeping his word, in following through—is actually a saving grace. I’ve told you before that so much prophecy is bad for the simplest of reasons: whenever we are doing the right thing—our duty—there’s no reason for God to send a prophet to pat us on the head. Whenever we don’t, that’s often the time God sends a prophet. Consequently, you read an awful lot of bad news. But all the prophets are salted with good stuff. And there’s an interesting reason why that good stuff is there.Thus says the Lord of hosts; Again in this place, which is desolate without man and without beast, and in all its cities, shall be a habitation of shepherds causing their flocks to lie down. In the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the lowland, and in the cities of the south, and in the land of Benjamin, and in the places

You have probably heard the expression the lost tribes of Israel, but you may not know what people are talking about. Late in their history, Israel was divided into two nations: the house of Israel and the house of Judah. After a little over 200 years, the ten northern tribes (which were called the house of Israel) were carried captive by the king of Assyria. After another 130 years, the House of Judah (which was centered on Jerusalem) went captive to Babylon. They returned to Jerusalem after 70 years in exile. But the tribes of the House of Israel were never heard from again—hence, the lost tribes of Israel.The prophets never forgot the House of Israel. God frequently made mention of them in prophecies about the last days. I think most commentators assume that all these prophecies are fulfilled in the Jews. But if that were true, I really would expect a little different wording of the prophecies. Here’s one, for example, in Jeremiah 31:Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will sow the hou

It would be wrong to say that the Old Testament prophets bring nothing but bad news; they give us hope. The problem is that the good news they bring is mostly way out into the future. In the short term, they prophesy little beyond suffering and pain. Why is that? Possibly the most obvious reason is that there is no need for God to send us a prophet to tell us that we are doing just fine.Imagine for a moment that there is a fundamental standard of right and wrong conduct that grows out of the nature of man and man’s social interactions. Natural law—it’s just the way things are. Imagine that standard is expressed in the last six of the ten commandments and all the other laws that can be derived from these. Now imagine that the first four commandments are the guarantors of the last six.In other words, the form of revealed worship of God keeps us mindful of our duties to God. And our duty to God guarantees our duty to our fellow man. So, when we neglect our duty to God, our social fabric will ev

Once upon a time, there was a man sitting quietly by a pool of water. He was a very sick man, and doubted that he had very long to live. While he stared into the water, something stirred the water. It was almost as though a hand had swished the water back and forth, but no one else was there. Wondering, the man reached out his own hand and swished the water back and forth. As he did so, he began to feel better. Standing, he noticed that his pain was gone and he felt stronger. As the day went forward, he realized that he simply was not sick any longer.His friends were totally surprised at his recovery, and in the natural course of events, they learned about the pool and the moving of the water. For some time after that, all kinds of sick people went down to the pool and washed in its water, but no one else was helped...until the same season the next year, when another very sick man was healed after a similar moving of the water. A lame man, touching the water just after the first man was not helped in the leas

I heard someone say once, I have had a lot of bad things in my life, most of which never happened. He was trying to say that a lot of the things we worry about never come to pass. It seems to be built into human nature to worry. We even manage to worry about the fact that we are worrying. But, in fact, some bad stuff does happen to us. There’s an interesting passage in one of Paul’s letters that says this:And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.Romans 8:28 KJVHe doesn’t say that all things which happen to us are good, but that they work together for good.In the prophecies of Jeremiah we have a picture of a nation in decline. Israel has become increasingly violent and oppressive. They have adopted the religious practices of the Canaanites around them which can only be called detestable. People were not safe in the streets. They couldn’t find justice in the courts. The leadership was corrupt from top to

I’m sure you realize that there are a lot of prophets scattered around the world—people who claim to speak for God, to foretell the future? Except for a few cult members, no one ever takes them very seriously. Once in a while, one of them will get himself killed, usually because of stupidity rather than his prophecies. Probably more of them kill themselves and their cult members than are killed by others. So you have to wonder what’s going on when one does get himself killed.Jeremiah had been preaching for over 23 years and was well known around Jerusalem before they first tried to kill him. And the circumstances surrounding all this are truly strange. Jeremiah is not a cult leader. He had a secretary, but that seems to be the sum total of his organization. He had no following that he controlled. All he did was foretell disaster unless the people changed their ways. Foremost among the areas where he called for change was the judicial system, which he said was oppressing the poor. He also con

How many enemies can you make in 23 years of speaking the truth to power? Jeremiah has now been telling it like it is for 23 years and through parts of the reigns of two kings, and as I read him I wonder why people paid any attention to him. His message has a monotonous quality. It is reminiscent of the advice someone gave to preachers about sermon organization:First, tell ’em what you are going to tell ’em.Then tell ’emThen tell ’em what you told ’em.Well, Jeremiah told them again and again and again. Jeremiah’s messages have a quality of sameness because no one responded, no one changed, no one turned their life around. I imagine sometimes he got tired of it. It’s a wonder they ever came back to listen to him a second time. Maybe they just liked to hear a good preacher, even if they didn’t intend on following his message. Perhaps the real wonder is that God has waited so long and sent so many prophets.On this occasion, after 23 years, Jeremiah decides to summa

One of the things we depend on is that God is not fickle. He isn’t one way today and another way tomorrow. He doesn’t have one standard today and another tomorrow. He doesn’t have one standard for leaders and a different standard for followers.Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.James 1:17 KJVSo we can ask. When a people go wrong—a whole community or even a nation of people—who does God blame?There was a man named Jeremiah, and God came to him repeatedly with messages for all the people about what they were doing wrong. And I would assume that, since God doesn’t change, what he told him would still be applicable to us today. He sent Jeremiah down to a public place to tell the people how God felt about their lifestyles and what would come down on their heads because of them. This went on for years, and Jeremiah recorded all this in his memoirs—you probab

Predicting what is going to happen next in the Middle East is a fool’s game…or maybe perhaps a prophet’s task. Not being a prophet, and trying not to be a fool, it still seems necessary to look at what is going on there in the light of the Bible. Christian people pay close attention to what happens in the Middle East, for good reason. The reason grows out of a prophecy Jesus handed down in response to a question by his disciples. Country boys that they were, they were exclaiming over the beauty of the temple, when Jesus shocked them into silence by saying:And Jesus said to them, Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.Matthew 24:2 NKJVThis happened a few decades later when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, burned the temple and killed Jews in their thousands. But there is this curious thing about that. This happened in AD 70, to be sure. But it also happened some 650 years before that, when the Babylon

I think a man’s life before God can deteriorate in stages. As he passes through those stages, his options narrow. Suppose there is a man who regularly abuses alcohol and drives his car after he’s done it. His friends have warned him; they have even hidden his car keys. One by one he has alienated his friends as he gets angry with them for trying to save his life. Then one day a prophet shows up at his house with a message from God. If you will repent of your drunkenness—if you will check yourself into treatment and get this under control—you can keep your job, your home, your family. If you don’t, you are going to lose everything. That would be a turning point in a man’s life. Two roads lie in front of him. One leads to a good life; the other…not so good.Now suppose the man doesn’t listen; he drives drunk and hurts himself badly. After emergency surgery he has lost a leg and and his job. The prophet comes back again. If you will repent of your drinking—if

One of the most persistent, nagging questions that dogs the Christian faith is called theodicy—the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil. If God is good and all-powerful, how is it possible that he would allow the existence of evil in his world?You can explain it to people again and again, but somehow the explanations just don’t stick. I think it is because they still cling to the God of their imagination instead of the God they find in the Bible. Oddly, the answer to the question of theodicy is stated in the simplest possible terms in the pledge of allegiance.I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.Those are two of the most awful words in our language: Liberty and Justice. They are the inseparable twins that define the foundations of man’s relationship with God. Men have liberty, and that means they have the liberty

I am sitting here reading a document that is 2,600 years old. It reads like the memoirs of man who had an ongoing dialogue with God. Chances are, you have a copy of this same document right there in your home—it is the Book of Jeremiah in your Bible.God first spoke to Jeremiah when he was just a boy, and he sent him down to the gate of the city to speak to the people who came there to conduct business. The Gate of the city was something like our county courthouse is today. You made your contracts there, transferred property, held trials, and carried out all the legal business of the community. And it was there that Jeremiah had to go and speak In the name of Yehovah. (By the way, I am not a Jehovah’s Witness. Jehovah is an English rendering of the name of God—Yahweh, in Hebrew, or something close to that.)It was a very rocky course for Jeremiah, and as he grew in influence, his enemies list grew proportionately. The prophecies were spoken to the men of that generation, but they were written

Sometimes I understand why people don’t like to read the Old Testament prophets. They have an internal image of God as a kind of Grandfather in the sky. It is very comforting to them. And then they read a prophet like Jeremiah, and they come up against a God who is rather unlike the God they imagine.But it occurs to me that believing in the God of your imagination could be risky business. The God of the Bible does not make impossible demands, but he does make demands. The God of the Bible is gentle, comforting, kind, protective—but he isn’t that way to everyone, all the time.Let me put it to you this way. God has created the best of all possible worlds. He has placed man in this world and given man the liberty to do what he chooses to do. The problem is that some men choose to do evil to other men, and that is the simple answer to a very difficult question about God’s world. Bad things happen to good people because bad men make bad choices. So where does God enter the picture?

It is a small national conceit that Freedom is an American idea. Nor does Freedom owe its origins to the Greeks, either. Freedom is a singular Christian idea. I can say Christian because the roots of Christianity reach far back into the lives of the patriarchs of the Bible. And the idea of freedom, that lies deep in the desires of every man, was the will of God for mankind.The Declaration of Independence, the founding document of these United States, acknowledged that the idea of Freedom originated with the Creator. We do hold these truths to be self evident: That all men were created equal and were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.What may dawn on us as we think our way through this is that freedom creates democracy. It is not the other way around. But can you have freedom without democracy? That's what I need to explain next...

As I read through Jeremiah, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m reading his memoirs. Yes, there are things that he has said, speeches he has spoken. Yes, there are the things that God has directed him to tell the people of Jerusalem. But he’s writing it up (after the fact, I think) for the generations that are to come.I can see the prophet Jeremiah, sitting, alone in his room, perhaps kneeling, and praying. Day after day, he has been going down to the gate of the city. (In our world today, it’s like going down to the courthouse steps.) There he has gone to speak to all the notables and officials who have come to do business—official and unofficial. Time after time, he has told these people what the Lord says…but no one can tell any difference. And as he considers praying for the people one more time, God speaks to him with a different idea.Then said the Lord to me, Pray not for this people for their good. When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer burnt offe