How can we reach communities, cities, countries? We are ordinary people. We are insignificant. Surely God would call people who have some fame, some achievements or accomplishment, whose names are known. That is how the world would achieve something significant. Somebody famous would be the chief or the chairman of some movements, the spokesperson, somebody who can command attention. But we are called to do a work for the Lord which is beyond our natural abilities. God gives spiritual gifts to his people. Yes, he may use our natural gifts to some extent, but he will magnify them greatly. ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us’ (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Humility is a necessary qualification for being a servant of the Lord, either as a minister, a Sunday School teacher. Every one of us: we are involved in a ministry, and the first qualification humility. How can I do it? Because humility is necessary for the blessing of the Spirit of God, and it is necessary to see the impossibility and the greatness of the task. I remember when I was younger, reading an evangelist saying, I am coming to London. I have been invited to London to take a great crusade, and I shall rejoice to do it because all the people of London are just dying and thirsting to hear this message. And I thought, Really? The people I witness to are not exactly dying and thirsting to hear this message. It is a hard task. Too much confidence; no realisation of the difficulty of the task. ‘If you had worked in my office,’ you say, ‘you would not feel such great confidence. It is a most difficult thing. There are some of the most difficult people, some of the most vindictive people.’ But when you feel your helplessness, then you are ready to depend on the Lord. Then you are prepared to look to him, and to pray to him, and to prove his power and his blessing. Somebody was saying that he had preached his first message, and he said, ‘It was a lot of fun.’ Fun? Much, much better if he had trembled. Much, much better if he was anxious about it. Much better if he had had some humility, and grasped the spiritual difficulty involved in it. Here we find this in Jeremiah, and it should be in all of us.
How old was Jeremiah at his calling? He describes himself as a child, but he may well be speaking of his perception of himself, rather than his literal age. The Hebrew term translated ‘child’ is very elastic one, and it is applied in the Bible to people who could be anything up to forty years of age. So, for all we know, Jeremiah uses the term in the sense of inexperienced, unprepared, not a person sophisticated enough or learned enough to have this calling and this task. On the other hand, since he ministered for forty years, he was obviously quite young. So let us say, he was at the most twenty to twenty-five, possibly a little younger. That is the favourite kind of age understood by the commentators: twenty to twenty-five, but not literally a child, we may suppose.