September 29-October 3
[M] Jeremiah 11-13; 2 Corinthians 12
[T] Jer 14-16; Psalm 76; 2 Cor 13
[W] Jer 17-20; James 1
[T] Jer 22, 23, 26; Psalm 77; James 2
[F] Jer 25, 35, 36, 45; Ps 133; James 3
Dwell Plan Day 196-200 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Jeremiah 11:14 | This is a hard verse to read. God tells Jeremiah not to pray for the people because judgment is already set. It jars us—how can the God who invites prayer ever forbid it? Yet this difficulty presses us to see both God’s holiness and His faithfulness to His covenant. Judah had broken their vows again and again, despising the God who loved them, and justice had to come. But here’s the wonder of the gospel: in Christ, God has fulfilled the covenant we broke. The judgment we deserve fell on Him at the cross, so that now the Father never says “don’t pray” to His people. Instead, He delights to hear us, because Jesus intercedes for us perfectly and eternally. Even in the hardest passages, God is showing us that His faithfulness is so great, He Himself would provide the way of covenant-keeping through His Son.
Jeremiah 12:1 | Righteous are you, O LORD | After a whole chapter of judgment in Jeremiah 11, our instinct is to recoil. The warnings feel harsh, the finality unnerving. Our modern ears are quick to ask: “Isn’t this too much?” But Jeremiah does something surprising. He doesn’t accuse God of being unfair, he confesses God’s righteousness. Even while struggling, Jeremiah anchors himself in the truth that God is just, even when His judgments are hard to accept. Where we are tempted to put God on trial, Jeremiah bows before His holiness.
That posture points us to the cross. The judgment Jeremiah spoke of finds its fullest expression when Jesus bears the wrath we deserve. God’s righteousness is not compromised there; it is displayed with terrible clarity. But at the same time, His love is revealed in its deepest depth: the Judge Himself takes the judgment on our behalf. What once felt like “too much” becomes the very place we see how far God was willing to go to save His people. Judgment and mercy meet in Christ, and only there can we confess with Jeremiah: “You are righteous, O LORD.”
2 Corinthians 12:7 | So what was Paul’s thorn? What is he talking about? He uses this metaphor because it’s actually a biblical one. From the very beginning, when God cursed the ground because of us, He promised us thorns. Plants that hurt you and wound you are intentional in this world. They aren’t a bug, they are a feature of God’s creation used in response to human sinfulness. The image is used a number of times to describe all the folks that were left over in the promised land after the Israelites were supposed to take it. They didn’t follow God’s instructions on His judgment, and instead enslaved the local peoples. This led them into idolatry. Those left over people became thorns to the people of God. We all get that image about people—some folks are pretty thorny! God describes His intentions: to use these thorns to chasten and discipline His people. Paul has those thoughts in his mind when he uses this to describe his own condition, and then never tells us explicitly what his thorny “condition” is. Lots of interpreters and theologians have debated what Paul’s metaphor meant to him. What was it specifically referring to? But that’s probably a fairly useless line of investigation. We’d just be guessing.
But using the biblical metaphor is a clue for us: Paul is intentionally staying vague about his specific thorn. Why? Two reasons seem important. First, it isn’t really about Paul and what his particular thorn was. Details about our suffering and our sins are not the point—it isn’t about us! Paul wisely keeps the focus off of himself, something he’s teaching us to do by example. And secondly, it’s God’s purposes that we need to know, trust, and understand. Paul is experiencing something he knows that God has always done with His people. God uses difficult circumstances and events and people in our lives as tools for our benefit. We can get frustrated and ask God to remove those circumstances, events, or people, and we often find He doesn’t take them away. In our frustration we don’t understand what He’s doing. Paul is letting us in on the love and intention that drives our God, so that all the weakness exposed only exposes more and more of His power.
Tuesday
Psalm 76:10 | What do you do with verses in the Bible like this? The poet seems absolutely and clearly convinced of one thing above all others: that whatever happens in this world happens because God allows it. Period. End of all discussion.
God does not create or choose any evil. He cannot. He has defined Himself for us as absolute good, and the Bible is very clear on this teaching. But this brings up some serious questions. When you double down on this idea of God, it begins to create a crisis. There’s a mental dissonance, a kind of “thinking static” that builds up in us. We see lots of evil in this world. Lots and lots of violence and horror. The nightly news has image after image of wars around the world. So how does this sync up the teaching of God’s goodness? What is God’s connection with all of this violence? There are two responses to this.
First, this isn’t abstract to God. This poet doesn’t have the info we do: we know how Jesus, the Son of God as fully man, personally suffered intense human violence. And this violence that He suffered is what saves us. He suffered for us, for what we deserved. And so these words were fulfilled in Him, and violence has brought glory to God. Second, God is judge of the world and His judgment is that each and every sin deserves death. Any offense, however small and seemingly insignificant, is a capital offense against God. And so all violence serves His justice in this world, revealing to all humankind that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And we can be absolutely and clearly convinced of this: God will get His justice out of our anger, despite the evil violence of man.
2 Corinthians 13:4 | The Christian faith holds together a strange and beautiful tension: weakness and power. On one hand, Paul says Jesus was “crucified in weakness.” The Creator of the universe—by whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together—allowed Himself to be bound, mocked, pierced, and killed. There is no greater display of vulnerability. Yet at the same time, this weakness was not failure but the chosen path of redemption. Through His cross, He disarmed the powers and authorities, exposing their impotence. What looked like weakness to the world was in fact the wisdom and strength of God.
This pattern becomes the shape of the Christian life. We too are “weak in Him,” and our frailty is not a liability but a channel for divine power. Just as Jesus, the all-powerful Creator, willingly embraced weakness at the cross, His people embrace dependence, humility, and suffering, not as defeat, but as the place where God’s strength is made perfect. The resurrection assures us that weakness never has the last word: the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us. This is the paradox of our faith: our weakness becomes the stage on which God’s power is displayed, and the cross of the Creator remains the ultimate proof.
Wednesday
Jeremiah 17:5–8 | Jeremiah paints a clear contrast between two ways to live: trusting in the flesh leads to dryness and death, while trusting in the Lord leads to life and fruitfulness. On the surface, the choice seems obvious, but the very next verse reminds us that “the heart is deceitful above all things.” Left to ourselves, we will always drift toward the curse rather than the blessing. Our problem is not just wrong choices but a broken heart that cannot love God rightly. This is why we need divine intervention—God must give us a new heart. In Christ, that is exactly what He has done, sealing us with His Spirit and rooting us in living water. Because of Jesus, we are no longer shrubs in the desert, but trees planted by streams of grace, bearing fruit that lasts.
Jeremiah 20:7 | This may be one of the most difficult verses in the Scripture. The translation is toned down, which is pretty ironic. The verb for “You are stronger than I and You have prevailed” is used to describe rape in Hebrew. That’s some of the harshest language towards God in our Bibles. It would be hard to overstate how desperate and hurt and confused Jeremiah is in this whole chapter. He even curses his own birthday. How much hatred of life and desolation of any joy can a believer in God experience? There’s no script for this kind of pain and horror in his heart. This is the sort of suffering where you keep saying to yourself: there’s no way I can survive this kind of pain. And then you do survive, and it’s all still there. More than any other person in scripture, Jeremiah seems to touch the raw sorrows and grief of Jesus, especially in Gethsemane. But that makes these sorts of verses so much more important for us. In the moment of horror, when death and pain seem so large that they will destroy us, we can know that our God meets us there and listens to our thrashing hearts. We know the One who is greater than the greatest terrors of our hearts. Praise Him.
James 1:27 | James reminds us that real faith is never abstract but always embodied in love and holiness. This ties directly to the message of the prophets, who condemned Israel for honoring God with their lips while their hearts were far from Him. They kept the sacrifices and festivals, but their lives were marked by injustice, oppression, and idolatry. God’s judgment fell on them because outward religion without inward devotion is a sham. James picks up this same theme, showing that genuine faith expresses itself in care for the vulnerable and a life distinct from the world’s corruption. The gospel frees us from dead religion by giving us new hearts that beat with God’s compassion. Jesus Himself fulfilled this perfectly, drawing near to the broken while remaining perfectly holy. Now, united to Him, we are called to reflect His love in action and His purity in conduct as the fruit of a living faith.
Thursday
Jeremiah 23:23-32 | Lying prophets stink. Be on the lookout—Peter, Paul, and all of these OT prophets agree: false prophets are a problem in this world. Lots of folks like to claim that they “speak for God” but it’s all to get control, money, and attention. The way to get all of that is to say the things people like to hear! Are these false prophets aware that they’re false? We don’t know. Self deception is pretty easy to do, so perhaps that’s part of it. But the caution never lets up. A part of the price we must pay for having the words and wisdom of our God is dependence on the Holy Spirit and vigilance with God’s words. Both the human heart and evil forces in the universe will corrupt the prophetic voice, so we must remember that a true prophet will call us to test them against God’s words.
James 2:18–19, 24 | But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! … You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. | The tension between James and Paul has long been noticed. Paul insists, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28), while James says, “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). Martin Luther himself struggled with this, even calling James “an epistle of straw” because it seemed to undercut the heart of the gospel he rediscovered. But in truth, James and Paul are not enemies, they are allies looking at the same truth from different vantage points. Paul is addressing how a sinner is brought into right standing with God: by faith alone, resting on the finished work of Christ. James is describing how that true faith shows itself on the other side of conversion: in a transformed life of obedience and love. Both affirm that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
This is why the Reformers helpfully summarized the tension with the famous saying: “We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.” Paul demolishes any idea that we can earn God’s favor by our deeds, insisting that “by works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight” (Romans 3:20). But James confronts the lazy distortion of Paul’s teaching that might say, “I have faith, so it doesn’t matter how I live.” Against this, James thunders that even demons “believe”; they know the truth but do not love or obey God. Real faith is always living and active, producing fruit in keeping with repentance. In that sense, James is not contradicting Paul; he is protecting Paul’s gospel from being twisted into cheap grace.
The cross of Christ holds these truths together. Jesus did the work we could not do, fulfilling the law and bearing the penalty of our sins, so that we are declared righteous by faith in Him alone. But the same Spirit who unites us to Christ also makes us new, giving us a faith that breathes, acts, and loves. Works are not the root of salvation, but they are the inevitable fruit. Paul himself echoes this when he says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Far from being at odds, James and Paul join hands to show us the whole gospel: faith that saves us and faith that transforms us, all by the grace of God in Christ.
Friday
Jeremiah 25:15 | The cup image is all over the Bible. Often it’s a cup of blessing, a cup so full it’s spilling and overflowing. But other times it isn’t blessing, it is punishment and judgment. One of the cough syrups my mother used was so awful that I remember pinching my nose when I had to drink it. I hated the taste so much. Afterwards I’d be spitting in the sink and drinking cup after cup of water to get rid of the nasty aftertaste. It’s one of those universal human experiences: having to drink something we don’t really want to. It happens to all of us. The prophets use this cup image to imagine having to endure something very very unpleasant, like the ferocious and eternal judgment of a holy God. Christ asks His Father if this cup can pass Him by in the garden at Gethsemane. He’s referring to this cup that Jeremiah is describing here. The cup then becomes an amazing picture of the cross, where Jesus is swallowing up death, sin, and judgment in His sacrifice of Himself. He drinks this cup all the way down and empties it. There’s none left for us to even taste. Our cup is the cup of salvation, offered to us in communion every week and received by faith at His table. The nations are still waiting at the bar for their cup, and the bartender is serving them up a tall glass just for them, and He’s going to make sure they drink it.
James 3:1 | This verse is tattooed on my (Jon's) right arm—it was actually my first tattoo. I put it there because I never want to forget the weight of what it means to stand before God’s people and open His Word. Preaching isn’t just about giving talks, or sharing ideas, or even motivating people. It’s about speaking on behalf of the living God, declaring His truth, and pointing people to Jesus. That’s terrifying when you think about it. James reminds me that I will be held to account for every word I say, and that humbles me deeply. It keeps me from ever thinking that this calling is about me or my own wisdom.
At the same time, this verse doesn’t crush me, it drives me back to grace. I know I’m weak, I know I stumble, I know I don’t have it all together. But the God who calls is also the God who equips, and His Word is powerful even when His messenger is not. That tattoo is a daily reminder to come to the pulpit with fear and trembling, but also with confidence in the gospel. My words won’t change hearts, but God’s Word will. And that’s why I keep preaching—because even though the calling is heavy, His grace is greater still.