“You’re Not the Boss of Me”
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Jeremiah 31:34 (NEB): No longer
need they teach one another to know the Lord; all of them, high and low alike,
shall know me, says the Lord, for I will forgive their wrongdoing and remember
their sin no more.
[Prayer]
Beginning with the fourteenth verse of the seventh chapter of Romans,
the Apostle Paul writes some anguish-filled lines about his ongoing struggle to
do what is right. He admits that he has
spent a long time in sin’s prison, that he has been sin’s slave. Sin is the boss of him.
An
irony of his struggle is that he has tried so hard to keep God’s law, only to
fail time and time again. There is a war
going on within his heart and soul between sin and the law, and sin keeps
winning. Finally in verse twenty-four he
shouts out in spiritual pain, “Wretched
man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” And then he answers his own question, and
as he does so the reader can sense the joy of his deliverance: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!”
Paul
knows that through the atoning act of the God made incarnate in Jesus Christ,
he has been set free from sin’s prison.
For Paul, just as it is for every Christian, the words of Jeremiah have
come blessedly true in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. “I will
forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
This
side of heaven we are going to lose
some battles with sin. From time to time
it may hold us in temporary bondage. But
because of what God has done in Jesus Christ, those who claim Jesus as Savior
will always be able to say to sin, “You’re
not the boss of me!”
Back to Paul: as part of being set free from sin’s prison he was also
set free from his bondage to the law. No
longer was the law some outside force that had been imposed on him. The law that had been fulfilled but not
abolished in Jesus Christ was no longer just another boss forcing Paul to
behave. That law had now been written on
his heart. It was part of him, an
internal source of motivation as he sought to be the man God had created and
called him to be.
Let’s back up a few centuries. When Jeremiah spoke the words of today’s text
he was addressing the children of
And
Jeremiah speaks to them words of hope. A
new day would come, a day of forgiveness and redemption. They would go home again. God was with them. He still loved them in spite of their
betrayal. He was willing to renew the covenant
they had broken.
This
renewed covenant would be different. It
wouldn’t just be a set of rules and regulations carved into stone and imposed
upon them from outside. The law wouldn’t
change. God’s expectations would remain
the same. But they would be written on
their hearts, inscribed on the deepest parts of their being. No longer would they have to be taught about
the Lord. They would know the Lord:
deeply and intimately.
In
time God took his people home. The sins
of the past were forgiven. The covenant
was renewed. But as the years rolled by
the law hardened into a set of rigid demands and prohibitions. The law given by God to set his people free
now held them prisoner. No matter how
much they tried to keep the law they still sinned and fell short of the glory
of God.
And
then came Jesus to fulfill the law, to recapture its original essence. Along the way he made it clear that no one
could perfectly keep the law. By our own
efforts we can never achieve a right relationship with God. But if we will trust Jesus to be our only
Lord and Savior, and if we will believe the Good News he lived and taught, then
we can be set free from the dark dominion of sin and death. To sin, death, and evil – to the very Devil
himself – and to any kind of externally imposed law we can say, “You’re not the boss of me!”
In a
few moments, as part of our Communion Service, we will hear again these words
Jesus spoke on the night of his betrayal: “This
cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The
new covenant between God and humanity was sealed when Jesus died on the
cross. Sins were atoned for. Salvation was made available to all.
In
that moment the words of God spoken through Jeremiah were truly fulfilled: “… I will make a new covenant… It will not
be like the covenant I made with [the children of
We‘re
not here today because we have to be. No
boss, divine or otherwise, makes us come.
We don’t have to worship God, or give him our tithes and offerings, or
feed on his Word. Nobody forces us to
come to the Lord’s Table. We are there
by invitation and not by directive. When
Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of
me; do this until I come again,” he wasn’t issuing some sort of
do-it-or-else command. He was making it
clear to his disciples, past and present, that his deepest, most heartfelt
desire was that they join him for dinner on a regular basis.
His
invitation was issued in love, and the only way that we can truly receive and
accept it is to do so in love. If we
choose to follow him, our following will be an act of thankful love. If we go up into the house of the Lord to
worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we do so in joy. We’re going to God’s house to be with God’s
people and to fellowship in the Spirit with our Lord Jesus Christ. We’re going because of our love for the One
who first loved us.
We
belong to Jesus. We are his
servants. We are in bondage to him. He is the boss of us. But ours is a glad bondage that comes from
the heart. We’re not forced to serve
Jesus. We’re not ordered to love
God. We’re not slaves cringing in
terror, who obey the Lord because we fear his wrath. We’re happy servants who obey his law because
we want to.
In
the class dealing with the Fourth Commandment that I’ll be teaching later this
morning I will be sharing not only the words of the Commandment itself, but
also these words Jesus spoke to the Pharisees: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the
Sabbath…” Sabbath is supposed to be
a blessing, not a curse. The Ten
Commandments aren’t some sort of awful burden imposed on us by some harsh
taskmaster. The Ten Commands are a gift
from God, that when obeyed make our lives so much better. God gave them to us because he loves us.
And
we obey them because we love him. As it
says in A Declaration of Faith, first about the children of Israel: “God bound his people to himself in
covenant. Freed slaves became the people
of God when they accepted the Lord’s covenant.
God charged them to respond to [his] rescuing love by obeying his commandments. Their life was to express the justice and
compassion of their holy God.”
And
then about us: “Since we, too, are God’s
covenant people, we know that we must be holy as the Lord is holy. We must keep God’s commandments, not in order
to earn or compel the Lord’s favor, but to reflect the character of God and to
be his grateful and loving people.”
Responding to
rescuing love. Being grateful and loving
people. Those do not sound like the
dictates of a power-mad tyrant. Nor do
they resemble the unreasonable demands of some mean and miserly boss. They are not like the unthinking,
all-consuming demands of the lesser gods of this world: addictions, chemical
dependencies, sexual compulsions, soul numbing and body destroying quests for
fame, wealth, and success. In short,
lust and greed.
Those
are harsh taskmasters whose aim is to eventually own us body and soul. They are cruel bosses after the example of
their boss, the Devil. They’ll chew us
up, spit us out, and enjoy the misery they inflict upon us. They’ll break our backs and destroy our
spirits. When thy have hold of us they
are the bosses of us, cruel bosses indeed.
But
if our God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and if our Lord is the
Jesus Christ who rescues us from sin, then we will be glad to do his will. God will be our God, and we will be his
people. Not because we have to, but
because we want to. Of us God will say, “… they shall all know me, from the least of
them to the greatest… I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sins no
more. Amen.