January 25

God Wants His Sons Back

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

––Psalm 51:10-12

This is not the first generation of God’s sons to wander and be called back to their truest identity. The prophetic words of Jeremiah travel hauntingly through time amid today’s generation.

For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem,

“Break up your fallow ground,

and do not sow among thorns.

Circumcise yourselves to the Lord

And remove the foreskins of your heart.”

––Jeremiah 4:3-4, NASB

Ouch. The unmistakable and convicting message from God to His sons? “Come out of culture, come back to covenant, and start being fruitful and productive for my purposes. Do whatever you have to do, inside or out, and do it now.”

In Jeremiah’s generation, most guys were farmers. They knew what God meant when He told them to stop wasting their energy sowing among thorns. He was telling them not to give the best days of their best years to a fruitless, godless culture. They also knew that in order to answer God’s call, they were going to have to pay a price. Breaking up, reworking, and re-fertilizing the abandoned or unplowed ground of their relationship with God was going to be painful—it would produce some spiritual sweat and require real work—but it would be worth it.

In “The Clampdown,” a song by seminal rock band The Clash, Mick Jones sings, “You don’t owe nothing, so boy get running. It’s the best years of your life they want to steal.” While Jones, Strummer, and the boys were speaking to a critically unemployed generation of UK’s young men in the late 70s, the same principle applies today: On what are you spending (or wasting?) your precious years?

For Jeremiah’s generation, radical action was needed to wake Israel’s men from their stupor. So then the spiritual thoracic saw came out: Their chests were going to be cracked open for a self-administered open-heart surgery.

Picture that for second. Gnarly, isn’t it?

Why surgery? Because God wanted to save their hearts; hearts that had been infected and diseased by the idols of the age, and refashion them around their identity in Him, setting them apart once again for God’s purposes. There is no chance these sons of Covenant could miss God’s point.

Now it’s your turn. This is a prophetic word for this generation’s sons of the King. The Word is real and full of His truth. It’s time to heed the call.

Father, crack me open if you need to. Perform surgery to jumpstart my heart so that it beats for You.