That is very profound when you think about it. Sympathy for the world is out of place. Sympathy for the lost souls, yes. Anxiety to reach people with the gospel, prayer for people to be used of God towards them, but no strong deep links. It is amazing these days that you will get somebody who is a thoroughly worldly person, even people have been intensely antagonistic to God and to religion, and to the Christian faith in particular, and they have slandered it and attacked it. But then they have died and somebody says, ‘You should see this blog by a notable evangelical leader, and on his blog you read: ‘What a shame this man has died! What a lot he did! What a wonderful fellow he was!’ Well the Scripture says through God's words to Jeremiah, ‘Don't you go showing love and sympathy to my enemies, the people who passed straight across from life to death and to judgment. We should wake up and understand these things.
Don't go to any happy events with them either, any feasting, he is told. ‘Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink.’ Do you go to worldly parties? ‘Oh, but I knew this fellow at school, and we spoke and we were friends, and out of the blue I had an invitation to his wild party, so I went.’ You did? Young people, do you go to parties with worldlings? Certainly, take an opportunity to witness to a worldly associate, but you can't do that at a party. He's not going to say to everyone, ‘Stop the music. Let my friend get up here and give a sermon to us.’ All you are doing really is encouraging people in a godless lifestyle. You are doing a very cruel thing, and a wrong thing by God’s standard. But that is what the Lord says to Jeremiah: ‘Don't you go to their feastings either, their celebrations of life and godlessness, the idolaters’ feastings; don't go. It is nothing to do with you.
There is a principle there for us too in this. If you become a pastor, you are called to make some sacrifices. You will probably be poor. You probably won't be able to have many things that are quite reasonable to have as you toil away for the Lord. You are probably called to work a hundred-hour week at least. You are on duty all the time, if necessary. There are many things you should be prepared to do without. You can't say, ‘I am not going to live like that. I'm going to work set hours, have so many holidays a year; I am going to have just what everybody else has. Well, if you can find a church that will accept such terms, that church will not make any progress; you won’t get much done; people won't be blessed. But I am told by various people – this is not my own personal criticism or observation – that there are many pastors who take this wrong attitude.
Now the prophet in these exceptionally bad times could not even have a wife or children. If we are pastors or church officers, we are pledged to the Lord. We going to give that degree of time and concern and heart and feeling to the work. But so is every Christian to a marked degree. I remember many years ago, Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones saying in a fraternal that he had been, during the war, invited to a Christian meeting to address it in the home of a man – this man was in public life, a very prominent man, and probably very wealthy. He had a very splendid huge house somewhere down the river in the better parts out of London, and when Dr Lloyd Jones went to this place – and this was in wartime – the food and the provisions and the antiques everywhere, the lifestyle, was so wealthy and so rich, and he felt so down that even in wartime a person, who was supposed to be a Christian, wanted a preacher at this gathering, could flaunt all this. This was his lifestyle. This is what he was pleased with; this was what he was proud of. So Dr Lloyd Jones said to him after this meeting, ‘Your life is a total contradiction of your message.’ ‘Oh?’ said this dignified and prominent public man. He said, ‘Yes, you want people to believe that what matters to you is being converted and going to heaven, but you have got heaven on earth in this place. You have got wealth and splendour and expensive things everywhere. Your lifestyle says you don't believe in heaven. You have got to cram in as much affluence and earthly happiness as you can before you die. Your lifestyle is entirely that of an unbeliever.’
What about us? What are your aspirations? Is your lifestyle consistent with being a person whose hope is in heaven, and whose home is there, and who wants to get as many people to come with you as you possibly can? You are going to help and serve the people of God, and you are going to demonstrate to people all around you that you don't think much of this world at all, and this is not what absorbs your attention. Is your lifestyle in line with your message? Sadly, you sometimes hear that some Christians have got nothing else to talk about but what they are going to do with material things, and the colour schemes and the decorations. That is very sad. You think of Jeremiah and his calling was even to go without wife and children so that his lifestyle was consistent in his case with his message.