How quickly we forget!

If you are a Christ-follower let me ask you two questions:

When have you been at your happiest?

When have you been at your most miserable point?

Are you not at your happiest when you are walking with God in relationship? Is there anything more satisfying than enjoying community with God when you are sin-free and entirely focused on His goodness?

I have enjoyed a lot of great moments in my life. I have graduated from high school, college, and a graduate school. I have fallen in love, gotten married, and had children. I have bought some new stuff and had some cool experiences.

But nothing on the above list compares to the times where I have enjoyed intimate fellowship with God. There is something so sweet about those times that it soaks (soak it!) all the way down into your soul. It is a kind of happiness that is so deep rooted it makes all other forms of happiness seem very weak.

The best analogy I can give it is to compare to a family who spends all of their summer vacations going to Lake Michigan. The sand is okay. The water is a nice temperature. The weather is average. The family enjoys playing some putt-putt and eating at some decent seafood places. But then one year the family decides to go to an actual beach (let's say Myrtle Beach) and they are amazed by what they find. The sand is gorgeous, the water warm, and the weather perfect. There are a million things to do and a lot of great seafood places. They have the best vacation ever. It doesn't mean they won't ever be able to enjoy Lake Michigan again, but every time they are at Lake Michigan they will say to themselves, "This is nice but it's no Myrtle Beach."

And that is how it is with all of us who love Jesus. It is not that we can't find happiness in earthly things, but the happiness we get from earthly things pales in comparison to the happiness we find in our times of communion with Jesus.

David puts it this way in Psalm 34:8, "Taste and see that the Lord is good..."

For those of who have tasted and seen, we agree!

And when are we at our lowest point of misery if not when we are separated from God by our own sin and wickedness? I don't mean the moment of sin (because sin can be fun), but the moment when we come to our senses and the sin loses its flavor and our hearts ache for Jesus.

Have you ever been away from home for a long period of time? I spent a summer in Africa and a summer in DC away from anyone I knew. For the first week or so homesickness is not a problem because you are doing so much that is new and exciting, but eventually things settle and you start to miss home.

It is the same way with our sin for those of us who love Jesus. At first, the sin is new and exciting and it drowns out our longing for home, but eventually it fizzles and we are left with a void where our intimacy with God used to be.

David felt this void when he sinned by committing adultery with Bathsheeba and in his prayer of repentance, in Psalm 51:11-12, he prayed "Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation..."

What was David missing? He was missing that sweet and intimate connection with God.

So, at this point you might be wondering what all of this has to do with Jeremiah, but I have been building to this question:

If our greatest moments of happiness come from times of intimacy with Christ and our greatest moments of despair come from times where that intimacy is robbed by sin then why do we pursue sin? Why do we so quickly forget the source of our happiness and the source of our despair?

This is the message that God speaks to the people of Judah in Jeremiah 44:9-10 when he asks them if they have forgotten the sin of their fathers and the damaging effects that sin had their relationship with God.

Have you forgotten the evil of your fathers, the evil of the kings of Judah, the evil of their wives, your own evil, and the evil of your wives, which they committed in the land of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? They have not humbled themselves even to this day, nor have they feared, nor walked in my law and my statues that I set before you and before your fathers.

Let us not forget, quickly or otherwise, that the times of our happiness come from times of communion with God and the times of our misery from sin.