Today's readings are Psalm 137, Jeremiah 25:1-18, and Matthew 26:1-19.
A pastor friend was talking with me once. He was a little discouraged about his congregation. It seems he'd been serving there for a couple of years and he thought they were a little slow to accept his leadership and take up his ideas. I asked him how much contact he thought the average person in the congregation had with him. It wasn't that much. People usually came to church services about once a week and most of them had only a little contact with him at other times. I observed that his time spent with most members of the congregation was then comparable to being at a full-time job with them for about two weeks, but with the time spread out considerably.
We tend to be quick in assuming everything's going wrong, don't we? How many of us will stick it out like Jeremiah did for twenty-three years, pleading with people to repent and believe God, then allow God to finally announce that there will be an exile? Most of us would rather stick with it for twenty-three weeks and then tell the people they are condemned. We'd like to pull out the end of Psalm 137 but skip over the fact that our sins have condemned us and brought us into this state of captivity in the first place.
May the Lord grant us patience and perseverance, realizing that his longsuffering is much greater than ours.
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