The Incurable, Untrustworthy, Desperate Heart of Man - October 19th, 2025

So if you guys can rise back on your feet, I will be reading Jeremiah chapter 17, and the sermon's going to be from the seven verses, but I'm just going to read the last three. Jeremiah chapter 17 9 through 11. It reads, The heart is more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick, who can know it. I, Yahweh, search the heart, I test the inmost being, even to give each man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds. As a partridge that hatches eggs, which is it has not laid, so is he who makes a fortune but unjustly. In the midst of his days, it will forsake him, and in the end he will be a wicked fool. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for just your holy word that is living and active, that is sharper than a two-edged sword that both cuts us to the heart to bring us to salvation, but continues to sanctify and purify and wash us.

So I pray that today, as you remind us of some timeless truths, as you cleanse and wash our hearts and motives, I pray that you would also empower us so that we would feed off your word and live victorious, passionate, zealous, and humble lives in a fallen and depraved world. And so would you magnify yourself, lift high the name of Christ before us through the proclamation of your word? And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Please take your seat. So about 11 years ago, I was counseling a young coworker lady and her boyfriend, who at the time was a seminary student. The lady's boyfriend was preparing to be a pastor, missionary or a missionary overseas, and then she asked me what kind of challenges that they should expect as a ministry family.

And I started sharing about the common ones, the common challenges, the standard ones. I mentioned that sometimes she would feel like she's sharing her husband with the church, and that there would be perhaps seasons where financially things might be tight, and perhaps they might not be able to comfortably root down and build a life like most of her peers. So I started with those, but then went into some more weighty and painful challenges that could really test them. And I told him that more than finance and time and busyness, I told him that God will make an example of your life. And no matter what the circumstance, no matter how he makes an example of your life, that you are called to present God as holy.

You are to make sure that when you are saying, thus saith the Lord, it's not just accurate in theology and doctrine only, but also in your life, and the responses to those sanctifying circumstances. I shared with them that these circumstances are usually excruciating and very painful. And even if you're faithful to present God as holy in both life and doctrine, the response of those who you're preaching to, of those who you're shepherding, still may be rejection, scorn, and even hatred. And you may see people walk away from you and also from the faith. So I shared with this young couple, not only because I saw these real life sermons lived out in the lives of pastors around me, but because I also saw this pattern in the scriptures.

And if you read especially through the Old Testament, you will see often God using the lives of his chosen servants, the prophets, as a living object lesson for his people and for all the world to see. So sermons and prophecies would not just be preached, but they would also be lived out in the prophet's life. I'm going to give you some fun Bible trivia, all right. Hosea was called to marry a woman he knew would be unfaithful to him. He was called to marry a harlot. Ezekiel was told to lay on the left side of his body for 390 days to symbolize that he was carrying the sins of the northern kingdom. Then after 390 days, he was to flip over and to delay on the right side for an additional 40 days to bear the sins of the South.

In Isaiah chapter 20, we read that Isaiah preached naked and barefoot for three years as a sign of the shame that was going to come upon Egypt and Cush. Obviously, stories like this don't show up in the Bible. I know you all know who Noah is. The New Testament refers to Noah as a preacher of righteousness. He undertook the task of building an ark for over a course of about a hundred years, but there's not much evidence that his message of judgment was heeded by anyone outside of his family members. So people probably just assumed he was crazy. You can include Job on this list. You can include the apostles.

And he had to go preach a gospel as a sign for all the world to see. So God will minister in his people. God will minister despite his people. And oftentimes, God will minister by and through his people. And in the New Testament, this call to be a living sermon was extended to all Christians, not just to apostles, pastors, and church leaders. So be excited. Because you are a part of his royal priesthood, you can assume that he will minister through you in a similar fashion. So our text today comes from Jeremiah's prophecy. Jeremiah had a ministry that none of us would ever want.

God made a visual of Jeremiah's life on numerous occasions, and this span several decades. And the passage that we read in the beginning comes shortly after the one of the living sermons. And I'm going to spend a moment talking about an event in Jeremiah 13 because it's important for the context of today's passage. In Jeremiah 13, the prophet is told to buy a belt. Okay, not like this, not in the like a belt that we have today. It would help for you to visualize a waistband made of linen cloth. Okay, or like a linen sash. The ESV calls it a loincloth. And you can think of it as like a decorative fancy belt or a sash. So it was more decorative than functional. It wasn't used to carry up the pants or togas.

And so this linen waistband was associated with the priest's garment. And that kind of a linen belt is a sign of dignity and nobility and holiness. So it symbolized a priest being set apart for his job. So God told Jeremiah to buy a linen sash, a belt, and so he did. And then he commanded Jeremiah to do a very, very strange thing.

Jeremiah 13, 6 to 7. Now it happened that after many days Yahweh said to me, Arise, go to the Euphrates, and take from there the belt which I commanded you to hide there. Then I went to the Euphrates and I dug, and I took the belt from the place where I had hidden it, and behold, the belt was ruined. It was totally worthless. So this rotten waistband symbolized God's people, the people of Jonah. They were supposed to be immaculate. They were supposed to be a people set apart. They were supposed to be a people dignified and holy. They were a people who were created by God and for God to love God and to serve God. They were to be a holy people, a royal priesthood, a people that God would specially use as his own possession, beautiful inside and out.

But like this rotten waistband, covered in muck and mire and river scum, they were now totally ruined and worthless. They were corrupt, they polluted everything that they touched, they soiled every good and perfect gift that had been handed down to them. And that was the illustration that Jeremiah was supposed to wear around for all of his ministry. So in almost all of his living illustrations, including the one from Jeremiah 13, God uses the lives of his people and his servants to communicate a consistent, almost timeless truth. Man was and is totally depraved and rotten to the core. Now to repeat this.

And you're gonna be hated.

Everything man touches becomes corrupted, polluted, and rotten. Man cannot save, man cannot redeem himself, man is deserving only of wrath. He is desperately in need of saving. And you're supposed to preach that.

Yahweh saw that the evil of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Good, pretty, that's a solid definition of mankind. Every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. So you and I sitting here today, we too have inherited this evil that plagued our ancestors. And you and I, as a people purchased and redeemed by the blood of Jesus, fortunately for us, we've been made new. Your salvation, though, had a cost, the blood of Christ, but after you've been saved, your regeneration comes with a job description attached to it. And so you and I are to preach about cursed man, two cursed man, in order to free cursed men from their curse.

Amen? I don't repeat this, you're like, ooh, that's fancy stuff. But just pay attention, okay? You and I are to preach about cursed men, two cursed men. Why? In order to free cursed men from their curse. So all mankind, every single person you and I know, is totally depraved and fall short of the glory of God. And there's nothing good in you or me outside of Jesus Christ. And so you and I, along with the rest of humanity, we've been created by God and for God to love God and to serve God, but we not only failed miserably at fulfilling our God-given purpose, we were all so corrupted and in our arrogant minds, we actually believed God to exist for us, to love us. God exists to serve us. And in our hearts, when we feel like our God isn't doing what we want him to do, we feel justified to reject him.

And we can find other created things that are not God's that will obey our wishes to make us happy. And that's the root of idolatry. So the late R. C. Sprohl, perhaps borrowing from the book of Jeremiah, he called that posture of humanity, cosmic treason. The scriptures say that the heavens are shocked. They're shocked at the arrogance of created man. They're appalled at the rebellion. So in the beginning of Jeremiah's prophecy, we see that this was the core problem of the rotten and worthless people of Judah, God's people, even God's people. Okay. So I'm gonna read you the Lord's own description of the problem I just described, found in Jeremiah 2, 12 to 13. It reads, be appalled, O heavens at this.

Be very afraid, and be very devastated, declares Yahweh. For my people have committed two evils. One, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to make for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. So this is a summary statement of all humanity's problems. Here's the context. And the problem is twofold. One, the people of Judah rejected their purpose by rejecting the God for whom they have been created. Make sense? We've been created by God and for God to love God and serve God, and sin is saying no to that. Okay. Number two, they determined in their wicked minds to find fulfillment, sustenance, and satisfaction elsewhere outside of God. So they had dug for themselves broken cisterns.

Imagine a big jug supposed to catch water, but it's cracked and broken. Okay? So broken cisterns that cannot hold water that leak all over the place, and in the end they're very useless. And they live lives of vanity. So Jeremiah 17, 5 to 11, our main text for today, we're gonna find mankind is categorized into two groups, all right? Those who are cursed, those who are blessed. Those who are cursed, those who are blessed. This passage doesn't tell us what to do to be cursed. It doesn't tell us what to do to become blessed. So you have to remember Jeremiah chapter 17, verses 5 through 11. Remember this, it's 100% descriptive. Okay, there's nothing commanded, there's nothing prescribed. There are zero suggestions in the seven verses that we're gonna read.

Okay? So this is a passage of scripture that is descriptive and not prescriptive. So it's telling you what something is, it's not telling you what to do. Alright? So this is gonna be the outline. The remainder of our time together, I'd like for us to explore the descriptions of the cursed people, the outcome that awaits them, and then we're gonna briefly explore what blessed people are like and quickly look at the outcome that awaits them. And then at the end, we're gonna see that the criterion that God is gonna be using is what is in their hearts. And after this, we're gonna try to figure out, okay, then with this 100% descriptive passage, what do we do? How do we apply it? So we're gonna kind of walk gingerly to try and find an appropriate application.

So first, let's look at what God says about the cursed man. Okay, remember, cursed, blessed. 100% description. Thus says Yahweh, cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from Yahweh. He will be like a juniper in the desert, will not see when prosperity comes, but will dwell in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt which is not inhabited. This is a poetic picture that Jeremiah is given. But what does cursed mean? The word in Hebrew is Arud. Repeat after me, Arud. Arud. Alright. Basically, it means to be banished from the presence of God. That's what cursed is. Okay, banished from the presence of God. Like witchcraft and sorcery, it's like done to you.

But the Hebrew word, it means to be banished from the favor of God. It means exile from the goodness of God. So it means all of God's goodness is taken away. So the object, that person, is now just exposed to full wrath. Okay.

That's what it means to be cursed. I looked on Amazon for a punching bag. Not because I want to punch it. I'm not trying to work out with an extra thing. Um I looked online just for reference. A decent one that weighs 100 pounds costs about 300. You can find cheaper ones that probably won't last as long. But whether you have the $30 one or the $300 one, what's the purpose of punching bags? To be punched, right? So the purpose is one and the same. To be punched. That's the sole purpose, to be punched again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Cursed. So specifically designed to be outside of the favor of God and to be hit with the unbridled wrath of God again and again, again, again, again, again.

So Deuteronomy 27 and 28, there are almost 66 consecutive verses detailing curse after curse after curse after curse on earth. Arur, arud, arur. So if they're disobedient, Israel and their descendants would be on the outside of the grace and the favor of God. These curses would not only be physical, but they would be geographical, sociopolitical, and also spiritual. Okay, so that's what it means to be cursed. What kind of people deserve to be cursed by God? If you were to ask just people in the world, they'll think of rapists, murderers, and for some of people who have more personal experience, like scam callers, identity thieves. There's a part of us that almost wants them to be cursed. Right?

When evil people in our society receive due punishment, people celebrate. And then people lament when people get away with crime. A couple of years ago, they're in Uvalde, Texas. You guys remember there was a shooting at a Texas or an elementary school? People were angry. Rightfully so. And if you look through the news article, there were comments that actually said, we lament the fact that the shooter died too quickly. Former student. People, religious and non-religious people, posted very angry things like, May he rot in hell. People who don't even believe in the existence of heaven and hell, they want desperately hell for hell to exist, so that people like this active shooter who will kill elementary kids or a serial rapist or a killer can go there, where they are incessantly and eternally judged and punished, condemned, where they are cursed, tormented by God nonstop.

So when we look at Jeremiah 17, 5 to 6, though, who is deserving of the unbridled wrath of God? It's reserved for those who trust in mankind, who make flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. So the baseline, the starting point of being a recipient of the wrath of God, the curse is what? Trusting in man. So in context, the people in Jeremiah's day were facing very real threats to their safety. They were in a time of war. Okay. So there were real threats to their way of life and to their children's future. Assyria had just wiped out the northern kingdom of Israel, and then Babylon, a wicked and more terrifying empire, wiped out Assyria. Okay, so this is like a couple hundred years after our Jonah series.

And now the people of Judah are terrified that Babylon was going to direct their attention towards them. So some people in Judah advised that they turn to Egypt for military assistance. Some entertained actually making a peace treaty with Babylon to see if they could curry some kind of favor and work out an agreement where they would just go voluntarily as slaves. We surrender, just use us as slaves. Bottom line, the people in this context needed to survive. They needed to ensure some kind of a future for their children. And they reasoned that compromises needed to be made. Some people believed that having the right king on the throne was the answer. They didn't like Zedekiah. And they trusted in man.

The funny thing is the very reason that Israel had a human king in the first place was they didn't believe having God was enough. Right. So they had always walked by side and not by faith. That's mankind. And I want to review for us how Saul, Israel's first king came into power. Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, No, no, there shall be a king over us, so that we can be like all the other nations, that our king may judge and go out before us and fight our battles. So what can we deduce and learn from what we see Jeremiah 17, 5 to 6? Cursed men trust in men. Cursed men trust in sin tainted flesh. Cursed men do not believe that God, the creator of the universe, is enough.

Cursed men put their hope in national and global leaders. Now, of course, scripture commands us to submit to God who ordained human institutions and to pray for the salvation of our leaders and intercede for them. But man is never instructed to ever hope in sin tainted men. Cursed men put their hope in religious institutions. Cursed men trust wholly in the advances of science. Cursed men pride themselves on being self-sufficient. Cursed men trust in degrees and status. Cursed men trust in their own efforts, their intellect, their skills, their abilities. Cursed men trust in their own determination and will.

That God is just all strict and all about rules. So remember, Jeremiah chapter 17 is a description, not a prescription. We are shown the evidence and the fruit, not the root. Okay? So I want to read Jeremiah 17, 5 to 6 again for you. Thus Jeremiah, thus says Yahweh, cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from Yahweh. He will be like a juniper in the desert. He will not see when prosperity comes, but will dwell in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt which is not inhabited. What is this cursed man's lot in life? His life is desolate, his life is meaningless, and for all eternity, his life will amount to nothing. He will be like a man living in a land of salt.

Okay, so let me explain that. There are a number of ancient texts from Mesopotamia that describe there's a part of southern Iraq, for over 200 years, the salt kept getting more and more, and no life was able to exist there. So that land was unable to be used for any agriculture, and for 200 years it was left abandoned, okay? Desolate. He will be like the juniper. And that's a different from the juniper plant that you and I may be familiar with. The NASB just calls it a dry bush. Dried branches. Okay. So dried bush, dried branches, functionally they are useless, right? Except for one thing. Wildfires. They are like the chaff that the wind blows away. These dried branches, these dried bushes are only good for burning.

Objects of wrath, cursed. So cursed men. Remember, we originated from cursed men, and we live surrounded by cursed men. Okay? So in verses five and six, we just see a description of the cursed man's choices and the cursed man's end, what he will be like. So I want to turn your attention now to the blessed man. Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh, whose trust is Yahweh. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends forth its root by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes. Its leaves will be green. It will not be anxious in a year of even drought, nor refrain from yielding fruit. Okay, now some of you guys might be written, nod your heads if you think Psalm 1. Ooh, how blessed is the man, right?

You think it's Psalm 1. So this blessed man, unlike the cursed man, trusts who? In God. He trusts in Yahweh. He not only chooses the Lord as his refuge, he actually sees the Lord only as his source of life. You guys see that in the text? The Lord is the very purpose of his existence. So he submits to the truth that he has been created by God and for God to love God and to serve God. And what does that man look like? When the fiery heat, the trials come, he does not wilt or cower or fear. He does not dry up when circumstances grow bleak.

Even in extended seasons of hardship, he is not anxious. Okay? And he is always bearing fruit in season and out of season. And he is rewarded because of this fruit. And where is this fruit coming from? He is rooted down by a stream, or he's literally attached to the fountain of living waters, as opposed to the other guy who's breaking making broken cisterns. He is attached, connected to the fountain of living water. And remember, this too is a description, it's not a prescription. So don't try to apply this because you cannot.

So how does God determine who is cursed and who is blessed? We know that God does not look at the same thing that man looks at, right? Verses 9 to 10 tell us a criterion by which God deems someone cursed and blessed. The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can know it? I, Yahweh, search the heart, I test it in most beings, even to give each man according to his ways, according to the fruits of his deeds. Now, how many guys have seen Jeremiah 17, 9 before? Nobody? Two people. Alright. It's quoted often in our culture, especially when you're talking about dating relationships. I always see this. I was a part of a large young adult group. Every time, don't trust your heart.

It's deceitful above all things. Who can trust? Who can who can cure it? That's not the point. Okay. Jeremiah 79 is giving an explanation why man is doomed. You guys, you guys tracking, right? These two verses tell us that the Lord searches the heart. He tests the inmost being. He is looking at your core volitions. The Hebrew word is actually kidneys. I, the Lord, search the kidneys. Alright, but contextually, for us it'd be really difficult to understand. Like, I don't understand what that means. So a lot of translations translate it as mind, but it's deeper than that. Okay? It's like DNA. So he's looking at the DNA of the man at his very core, at his inmost being.

He is looking at whether you are worshiping in spirit and in truth, where you're where you are a fruit bearing man from the core, he is looking at your heart. Jesus in Matthew chapter 15 talks about the heart. The Lord Jesus teaches his disciples through a parable, and you're gonna be familiar with this, that man is not defiled by unclean things or by eating with unwashed hands. You guys know that parable? The sin tainted, sindefiled heart brings forth every wickedness that you and I see. So Jesus is teaching that man is not a sinner because he sins. Man sins because he is a sinner, rotten to the core. And that's Jesus' uh uh teaching, Matthew chapter 15. The things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, those defile the man.

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual moralities, thefts, false witness, slanders, these are the things which defile the man. But eating with unwashed hands, the formalities, they don't defile the man. So man's problems are not in behavior, but in the heart. Amen. That's why modifying your behavior, making changes in your life, keeping your New Year's resolutions cannot save you. Not getting all the religious rituals right isn't what defiles a person. Murder, thefts, fornications, lies, those are all symptoms. The virus, the root problem is in the heart. So Jeremiah 17, 9 describes the heart how? As more deceitful than anything else.

It is desperately sick. It is beyond knowledge. So this is a very complicated Hebrew word. It doesn't mean just, oh, you can't understand it. No, it means who can fix it. And so NIV will say who can cure it, right? It is beyond help. And it's no surprise that in our wicked generation, the mantra that everyone's taught is follow your heart right into hell. You can't follow your heart. That's a stupid advice.

Nyquil cannot cure cancer. Amen. Is that easy to follow? Nyquil can't even cure a cold or a flu. Right? Nyquil only masks the symptom to give temporary relief and some comfort. Nyquil is a symptomatic medicine. It masks, does not heal. If you take the whole bottle of Nyquil, you may feel good in the moment because you basically gave yourself an alcoholic buzz. It did nothing for your disease. You guys understand that, right? But in the same way, no matter how good your religious activity, no matter how moral or upright your act, no matter how good you feel about checking off your Bible reading plan, how much money you've given to the poor, the disease runs too deep. We can deceive each other into making us think we're more highly or seeing us more highly than we actually should.

We can deceive everybody around us. But unfortunately for you and me, holy, holy, holy God looks at the heart, sees the sin that he cannot tolerate, and is absolutely justified in condemning and cursing us. Again and again and again and again. Arur. There is nothing hidden from his sight. We have all failed the test. All have sinned. The wages of sin is death. Arru, arur, arur, arur, arur. So Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, for decades, is preaching this. And he's hated. He would proclaim, there is no peace. There is no peace. Turn, repent. Don't turn to Pharaoh for help. Pharaoh can't help you. Don't you know your own history?

What God did in the Red Sea. Don't look to Nebuchadnezzar. Don't you realize God is using the Babylonians to discipline us, to warn us? Repent. Turn. Did he not say, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, turn from their wicked ways, and pray, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and it will heal their land. Turn. And he was a horrible, miserable failure of a prophet, because nobody followed. The last king of Judah, King Zedekiah, and all of his officials in Jeremiah 37, this is their response. The officials were angry at Jeremiah. And they struck him. They put him in jail in the house of Jonathan the scribe, because they had made that house into the prison.

For Jeremiah had come into the pit, the vaulted cell, and he stayed imprisoned for many days. If it were not for the grace of God, there's not a single one of us who would not respond in anger like King Zedekiah and his officials did.

The cursed. But the offensive truth is this, right? Not one single one of us, when our hearts have been thoroughly searched, would ever, ever qualify for blessed. There would be no person in the blessed category. So fortunately for us, we serve a very kind God, and it's his kindness that actually opens our eyes to see this, right? And lead us to repentance. So the comforting thing is that Jeremiah, while he's miserable, God shows him a dream.

And it actually says, and I woke up pleasant. So the weeping prophet had a nice dream, and he woke up, my sleep was pleasant to me, it says. Jeremiah and Ezekiel are given the same kind of a vision of hope for the future. God will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. His new covenant will not be like the first one, which he commanded the people to keep, which they wrote down on tablets of stone, Deuteronomy 4.13. This new covenant, God's gonna write on the heart. Remember, what's the problem? What's the problem of Jeremiah 17? The heart is a problem. He's gonna inscribe living word into the heart. In fact, he's gonna do the impossible and the unthinkable. He's going to take the DNA of a person, the heart of a person, and transplant it.

DNA transplants right now are not possible by science. But what God is gonna do, he's gonna DNA transplant a person so that the DNA does its work. And the greater shock is not just for Israel, but for even all the pagan Gentiles. Huh? Because that's how much space God has in his house. He's gonna take all the cursed people and give them a way to be blessed. God can do this. God will do this. Only God can and will do this. Right? So Ezekiel 36. I want you guys to pay attention to all the I wills in the passage. The heart is beyond cure, but God can cure the incurable heart. God will do this. So Ezekiel 36, 24 to 28, I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands, bring you into your own land.

Then I will sprinkle clean water in you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your uncleanness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit in you, I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, I will give you a heart of flesh, I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to do my judgments, not as a requirement, but as a response.

So you will be my people, and I will be your God. So the Lord who searches the heart, who tests the kidneys to give a man according to his ways, according to the truth of his deeds, will transplant the heart, the DNA of a person, so that that person actually will bear fruit that he is pleased by.

Why? In order that in Christ Jesus, the blessing given to Abraham, I will bless you, make you a great nation, and all the world will be blessed through you, might come to now the Gentiles, the Koreans, Chinese, those of African descent, everybody. Through what? Not by deeds, by belief. That was enough. So like I mentioned toward the beginning of the sermon, Jeremiah 17, 5 to 11 is descriptive. The entire passage is detailing the characteristics and the fate of the cursed people and then the blessed people. There's nothing commanded in Jeremiah 17. But I'm gonna draw a couple conclusions that we can make from this descriptive passage. First, we preach the curse. Preach the curse first to yourself and then to the world.

Remember that there is no other way to salvation except through the grace of God. There's no other way. You can't save you. You don't have to clean up your act before you come to God. Preach that all that's required to remove the curse is to repent and surrender and believe. And we keep surrendering, we keep repenting, we keep believing to remind ourselves that there is no other way. So we walk by faith. God did this. It's enough. And we don't walk by sight. And we live by faith, we don't live by sight. So what happens when we preach the curse to ourselves and to the world every day? We remember the partridge. That's a random thing to throw in there, Pastor Peter. Why do I need to remember a partridge?

Verse 11. As a partridge that hatches eggs, which is has not laid. So is he who makes a fortune, but unjustly.

And in the end, he will be a wicked fool. Now, let me explain what this is. The partridge here, he takes credit for being the parent of these non-partridge random birds. You guys see this? Okay. Those aren't his eggs or her eggs. Or him. I don't know what partridges do. But a partridge is sitting on someone else's eggs. This partrid had no real role in the creation of or of the hatching of the eggs. But it seems that the partridge is deceived into thinking that it deserves some credit. It sees life and successful growth, and he attributes that growth to herself. So the partridge represents a wicked fool who has prospered. A wicked fool is deceived by his evil, deceptive and incurable heart.

In this life, we see oftentimes the wicked prosper, right? Evil men may become rich, live without any real care or hardship in the world. They don't really see any real need for God. Many evil men don't believe in God. The purpose of their lives is to enjoy their lives. The fool, as he is called in Jeremiah 17, 11, takes credit for his own success, and that leads him farther away. It leads him to arrogance. But in the midst of priding himself for all of his accomplishments, he will suddenly die. Like the rich man in Luke 12. You fool. What are you going to do with all the stuff you stored up for yourself? The fool says in his heart, Psalm 14, there is no God. There is no curse. And then he dies and he realizes too late that for all eternity that he's wrong.

So believe it or not, there is no other name than Jesus Christ by which we can be saved. We need to preach the helplessness of man to the people of the world, even if they hate you. Preach the curse.

Let me repeat this. One of the best gifts that God can give you is humiliation. Why is that? Because humiliation breaks your pride and it breaks your worldliness. Amen. Humiliation breaks your pride and your worldliness. His desire is to rid our lives and our hearts of all the broken cisterns that cannot hold water that leak all over the place, because that's not where God's blessings lie. Sometimes we think, even as church people, that a good career, a happy family, a well-paded bank account, respect from peers, that's evidence of God's favor. No. That happens sometimes just by natural law and chain of events that if you're diligent, it does well, right?

You know plenty of church people who have good jobs, who have a lot of money, and yet have become just nominal church attenders who've totally drifted from the faith. You know worldly people that still attend church. The world is full of partridges, and there are partridges who have crept into the church. Always remember there's only one cure. It's the gospel of Jesus Christ. So do not be a partridge. Amen. Secondly, preach the cure. First, preach the curse. Second, preach the cure. The truths of the curse and then the cure, together you have the gospel. We have to preach the not so secret secret to becoming a blessed man. But if you preach to the partridges, they're going to hate you. The saints of God are blessed people living among a cursed people.

Does that make sense? The saints of God are a blessed people living surrounded by cursed people. But why does God leave the blessed people amongst the cursed people so that by his grace, by his kindness, some of these may be won over and become blessed as well. And while we live among a cursed people, we walk around as living sermons. They're not, because they're not reading the Bible. They're not listening to sermons, they're watching the Christians' lives. And in the lives of these Christians, they hopefully get an accurate picture of what a blessed man looks like. What he sounds like, how he responds in adversity, how he responds with love when he's persecuted. It will happen, 2 Timothy 3.

For everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be what? Persecuted. So the only application that we can draw from this, Jeremiah 17, 5 to 11, is preach the curse, preach the cure, and get ready for the stones. You guys, you guys follow this. Get ready for the fire. Get ready for the arrows. Preach the cure, preach the curse. Actually, the other way around. Preach the curse, preach the cure. And hopefully, in due time it bears fruit. And so I'm going to close with Psalm 1, which reads like our Jeremiah passage. How blessed. How blessed. How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of Yahweh.

And in his law, he meditates day and night. You can't meditate on something that you don't know. You can't meditate on something you haven't memorized. You can't meditate on something that you're not thinking about. That's why I push memorization of the scriptures, not because that's a goal, but that's a means to meditation. In his law, he meditates day and night. And this blessed man will be like a tree, firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its seasons, and its leaf does not wither. And in whatever he does, he prospers. Spiritually, sometimes physically, sometimes materially. So my hope is that you and I prosper. May we truly prosper. And may you and I live like blessed living and breathing, walking sermons who are getting thrown, stones thrown at.

And prosper, because we know that in due time we will bear fruit and prosper to the glory of God. Amen. Let's pray. Father, help us to walk by faith, not by sight. Satan wants to show us a lot of things. This cursed world tries to distract a lot of things, distract us by pointing to a lot of things that are visible only to the human eye. But I pray that you would cause us to walk by faith, to process this life through faith and to know your word, to believe your word, to know that you exist, to live appropriately in response to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So empower and enable us, because in and of ourselves, Father, that's not possible. So help us to walk by the Spirit so that we will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

And as we walk by the Spirit, as we are abiding in Christ, would you bear much fruit for your glory and your name's sake? In Jesus' name we pray.