O Blessed Sinner

IBS Application for Jeremiah 23:23-24 “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.” There is something comforting and humbling about this truth. God is a God who is always close. He is immanent in our lives, meaning He is everywhere. There are some other places in Scripture where the idea is expressed that the heavens cannot contain Him. He is never not present; there is no place in the universe where He is not. As such, there is nothing we can do to escape from God. David, in Psalm 139, mentions this idea: “Where shall I go from Your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from Your presence?” God is everywhere. It logically follows that He is intimately aware of all that we are doing and what is happening to us. I know that in this case God was addressing the faithlessness of Israel’s prophets, who were prophesying falsely i

IBS Application for Jeremiah 15:16 “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts.” Honestly, I needed to do a study on something for my spiritual health. It’s been a hard week, and today has been no exception. I need to know who my God is, and that He loves me. This was a portion of a complaint that Jeremiah had made to God in the midst of the great persecution he faced at the hands of his own people and at the hands of the Babylonians who were attacking Israel at the time. In the midst of all of this madness, he recalls to the Lord his faith, and how he tries to take comfort in God’s calling, while also reminding the Lord that He called Jeremiah to a purpose in the first place. It’s hard for me to not be able to relate with Jeremiah on some level. Although I am not being threatened with death on a regular basis, I do know what it’s like to have the people you ca

IBS Application for Jeremiah 4:27 “For thus says the Lord, ‘The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end’.” This is perhaps the oddest choice for and IBS I’ve ever made. I haven’t had anything speak to me quite as much as this has within the past week, though. The Lord is just telling me about His goodness in a new way, one which I have seen before. Before I get into that however, some context. This is, as many of us already know, a piece of one of the prophecies of judgement that God had Jeremiah preach against Judah. This was all at a time when Judah had completely turned their backs on God and had started worshipping the gods of the pagans, engaging in all manners of filthy unrighteousness. In order to discipline His people, the Lord foretold of the destruction He would bring upon them using the Babylonians in an attempt to get them to feel the fear of the Lord again and turn back to Him. What is interesting about all of this is that God spea

IBS Application for Romans 15:13 “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” I wanted to do this study with a bit of a broader emphasis than my more recent studies have been. It’s been kind of hard to come up with a broader, more practical application than the more recent ones have been because they’ve been more akin to coming to understand what a Scripture is saying by coming to see it in a new light, then realizing that God is asking me to walk in those truths. So, I will attempt to make use of the discernment that the Lord has given me and come up with a more practical application for this verse. To start, this is from a section of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, towards the end of the letter. In this specific section he is trying to encourage these Romans to accept the comfort of the truths of the gospel. Having explained and espoused the essential doctrine that Paul desires fo