“Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them.”
Jeremiah 1:17 (NIV)
The biggest obstacle to proclaiming the gospel, or sharing our faith as we like to say in Ontario in 2018, is fear. Fear grips us, we wonder what will they think of us, we imagine that they will be angry and that our relationship will be broken, and so we say nothing - nothing to our neighbours, nothing to our classmates, nothing to our loved ones - we say nothing!
It is amazing how similar the content of Matthew 10 is to Jeremiah 1. In both cases men chosen by God are commanded to speak and told not to be afraid. The encouragement that is given in both Jeremiah 1:8 and Matthew 10:29-30 is that God’s presence will be with them, that He will care for them Himself. If we think to ourselves that the apostles’ message was good news as compared to the bad news being given by Jeremiah, and conclude that the reaction by the people to the good news of salvation would be better than the reaction to the bad news of destruction, we would be wrong – for Jeremiah lived, whereas the apostles died. They were killed by the ones they were trying to bring salvation to. Don’t for a moment think that God’s hand was too short nor His arm too weak to preserve the apostles’ lives as He preserved Jeremiah’s, it was not weakness that allowed the apostles to be killed, rather it was the good, pleasing and perfect will of God, that the apostles would die as they boldly proclaimed the gospel.
Back to us- we aren’t facing death, nor are we facing imprisonment - our problem is wondering what people think of us - when we should be more concerned about what God thinks of us!
Forgive us Lord, give us courage to share the good news of Jesus to those around us.
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