August 10-16, 2025

Heart Preparation:
“I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him, because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, One who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters.”
J.I. Packer, Knowing God


Week’s Reading Plan:

• Sunday August 10 - Jeremiah 10-13
• Monday August 11 - Jeremiah 14-17
• Tuesday August 12 - Jeremiah 18-22
• Wednesday August 13 - Jeremiah 23-25
• Thursday August 14 - Jeremiah 26-29
• Friday August 15 - Jeremiah 30-31
• Saturday August 16 - Jeremiah 32-34

What to Expect:
Reading through the Bible we are getting, for the most part, the highlights. Granted, we are getting what God wants us to get. However, remember that Jeremiah ministered God’s word for roughly 40 years. There is a lot of life that he had to live in the midst of the messages and prophecies he preached from God. And he had to live it. As a single man. Rejected by almost everyone. Including his family. Every day. When God gave him a message he delivered it. And lived his life. How do you do that? Jeremiah knew the God who is God. He did not just know that God is God. He knew God. God was God with Jeremiah when he was preaching in the temple and being arrested and when he made a sandwich. God was and is, always, God.


What to Look For:
God uses some vivid ways to say to his people “this is who you are to me.” He likens his people to a loincloth that he wears. He says they are like clay in his hands to be shaped as he will. They are like a basket of figs. And as they are his people to do with as he will he tells them how to be his people when Babylon attacks them. When Babylon carries them off. When Babylon keeps them for 70 years. And when God restores and renews them. Through it all God is God and he is God for, and to, his people. 


Personal Insight:
Right now I am sitting on my back patio looking at trees and listening to a bunch of mockingbirds carry on. And God is God. Tonight I’ll go and eat a hot dog and the swim night. And God will be God. I don’t know exactly what will happen tomorrow. But God is and will be God. And God knows me. And I know God. In Columbus or Babylon, in my kitchen or in exile. God is God. God knows me and I know God. Because he made me and in Christ established the covenant he talks about in Jeremiah where he says he will put his law in my heart and I will know him. 


Prayer:
Good Father, help me to know you more. Not just about you. Make it my desire to know you. Hold me up in the truth that you know me, intimately, right now, in this moment, wherever that is and wherever I will be. You are and you will be God. My God. I love and worship you. Amen.

Today's devotion was prepared by Justin Coberley.