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This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Great. Thank you very much. Well, good evening, everybody. Keep your Bible open. If you've got one on your lap or on your phone, be helpful just to have it open in front of you.

And as you do, and as we start, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever got the dress code wrong? Have you ever turned up for something, wearing the wrong clothes, drawn attention to yourself in a bad way, embarrassing way? Maybe got the wrong date for non uniform day at school? Anybody?

No one's going to admit to that. There was a lovely. We'll just save the picture for a moment. Where there's a lovely French family in the primary school in London that our children went to. They got the date wrong for when you come in.

In fancy dress. Yeah. It was the next day and they were the only four children in the school in fancy dress for the whole day. There we go. Poor them.

Maybe you've turned up to an event, overdressed in a suit or tie or a beautiful dress and everyone else is casual or the other way around. I learnt a new term this week from the BBC website. I learnt what a swag gap is. Do you know what a swag gap is? When two people in a relationship don't see eye to eye in terms of clothing or style.

We could put that picture back up again. One partner's more into fashion, always makes an effort to present themselves well while the other one doesn't care how they look. That is Justin Bieber and his wife Hayley on the way to the launch of some new perfume. I think in a great business launch that she's doing. That's a swag gap.

The concept reminds me of Katie and me, but not that picture.

Okay, I think we better take that off the screen. It's unhelpful for lots of reasons. In Jeremiah 13, the Lord tells the prophet Jeremiah to draw attention to himself by wearing a new belt, some fancy clothes. But then, as we read, he's going to have to spoil them. Jeremiah, as Antonio said, is going to act out God's message to his people.

He is going to be a walking visual aid of the Lord's message to the people of Judah. We're going to look at that for a few minutes tonight. Why don't we pray as we start to do that?

Heavenly Father, thank you, thank you that you speak to us. Thank you for your word that we can read tonight. And we pray that we would hear it, really hear it, and take it to heart ourselves.

Help us to understand what it is to be your people, your treasured special People, for your honour and praise and renown, and strengthen us to live like that. We pray in the week ahead for your name's sake. Amen.

Okay, so our passage begins with a trip to the shops. In verse one, this is what the Lord said to me. Jeremiah says, go and buy a linen belt and put it round your waist, but do not let it touch water. So I bought a belt as the Lord directed me and put it round my waist.

If you're at school, you probably wear a school uniform. Maybe a polo shirt or blazer has the school badge on it. And in the Old Testament, if you were a prophet, you. You probably wore a uniform as well. Like Jeremiah, you wore a special outfit.

It was a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt round your waist. And if somebody saw somebody wearing a, I don't know if it's a jacket or a robe or whatever it was and a leather belt, they would know that that person was the Lord's prophet. So Elijah wore it in 2 Kings 1:8. That's what he dressed up as John the Baptist. Hundreds of years later in the New Testament, the last of the prophets, he wears the prophet costume as well.

Camel hair and a leather belt round his waist. So everybody would have seen Jeremiah wearing his old camel hair jacket. But instead of a leather belt around his waist, Jeremiah is wearing a beautiful new linen belt that he's just gone out to buy. And it had never been washed, so it never, never faded in the wash, it had never gone off, it was pristine. It would have been like seeing somebody.

You know, when you see someone, you're used to seeing them in jeans and a hoodie. And then you go to a wedding and they're wearing a suit. Wow. Didn't recognise them. Except you don't say that to them, but you're thinking it inside it would have.

It was like that for Jeremiah with his new belt. Let's put on the next picture. There we go. A belt that was decorative, worn close to the body. I don't think that kind of belt is particularly functional, but it's showing off, isn't it?

And that's the point of Jeremiah's belt. That's great. Thank you. Now, why does the Lord tell Jeremiah to go and wear a belt, brand new belt, and wear it for everybody to see? The answer is because he's acting out God's message.

And what is the message? We'll look down to near the end of the reading that Ash gave for us. Verse 11. Look down at verse 11. It's the Lord Speaking.

And he says, for as a belt is bound round the waist, so I bound all the people of Israel and all the people of Judah to me, declares the Lord to be my people, for my renown and praise and honour.

So the message is, just as Jeremiah was told to tie this beautiful belt round his waist, God's people were closely bound to him. It's like he wears them.

They're his people. More than 50 times in the book of Jeremiah, he calls Israel, calls Judah, the little nation that's left. He calls them my people. They are my people. Those people, they belong to me.

They don't belong to anybody else. They've left everybody else and they're mine.

It's like that bit in the marriage service when the bride and groom promise that for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, they will forsake all others and be faithful to one another as long as they both shall live. And then the minister kind of lifts up their hands, joins them together, lifts up their hands, says, those whom God has joined together, let nobody put asunder, let nobody separate. They're leaving and cleaving. They're leaving their old family relationships and they're cleaving together to form a new relationship. And that's what God's people were called to do.

They were called to leave all the nations around them, all the practises, all the gods, all the values of the societies around them, to leave all that behind and to cleave to God in a special new relationship and to be his people, if you like, bound around his waist so that he could show them off and they would draw attention to him. That's the point of the belt. They're not just this bride, they're like this beautiful belt wrapped round my waist, the Lord says, bound tightly to me for everybody to see. When all the nations around saw the way that God's people lived in the Old Testament, bound to him in love and trust and obedience, it was meant to make them stand out so that the Lord would look good.

We'll come back to that. We'll think about that a little bit more and what that means for us in a moment or two. But that's not the end of Jeremiah's drama. He's carrying on, acting it out. So look down at verse three, back to the beginning again, verse three.

Then the word of the Lord came to me a second time. Take the belt you bought and are wearing round your waist and go to Perath and hide it there in a crevice in the rocks. So I went and hid it at Perth, as the Lord told me. Now, where's Perth? Well, it's the Hebrew word for what we would call the river Euphrates in Iraq today, or where Babylon was in those days.

So the Lord tells Jeremiah, take that beautiful new belt that you're wearing around your waist and go all the way to Babylon, 350 miles away. And when you get there, stuff it in a rock and come back.

It's no surprise what happened, is it? Verse 6. Many days later the Lord said to me, go now to Perth and get the belt. I told you to hide there. So I went to Perth and dug up the belt and took it from the place where I had hidden it.

But now it was ruined and completely useless. Of course it was. It's got damp now, it's got wet and it's rotted. 700 mile round trip to the Euphrates. A perfectly nice new belt, now ruined, useless.

And people who saw the belt when he brought it back, they must have thought, well, that was a waste of a nice new belt. What's all that about? What was it about? Jeremiah tells them, verse 8. Then the word of the Lord came to me.

This is what the Lord says. In the same way I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. These wicked people who refuse to listen to my words, who follow the stubbornness of their hearts, who go after other gods to serve and worship them, will be like this belt, completely useless. For as a belt is bound round the waist, so I bound all the people of Israel, of Judah, and all the people of Israel and all the people of Judah to me, declares the Lord to be my people, for my renown and praise and honour. But they have not listened.

When something is really, really good or really beautiful, and then it gets spoiled it often, that thing, because it was so good in the first place, when it's spoiled, it often becomes really spoilt, really bad. Have you ever noticed that? Have you thought about that? Just think for a moment. I was trying to think of an example of this.

What smells worse? Some weeds that are growing out in your garden. You go out in the garden, give them a sniff. Or a beautiful bouquet of flowers that you've left in a vase in the kitchen for too long. It's the flowers.

They started off beautiful, but when they go off, they stink, don't they? Lilies. Lilies stink anyway, but when they've gone off, they really stink. That's disgusting. They smell even worse than the weeds because they were so beautiful to start with it was the same with God's people in the Old Testament.

They were supposed to be his treasured possession, for his renown, his praise, his honour. People were supposed to look at them and say, wow, isn't the Lord amazing? Like a belt round his waist. They would draw attention to him, but instead they've become proud. Proud.

And they were useless. They were no good for pointing people to the Lord anymore because they were proud. They were proud of their land, they were proud of their kings. Cav showed us last week. They were proud of the temple in Jerusalem.

Do you remember? They thought, oh, nothing can happen to us. We've got the temple, the temple of the Lord. They're proud of it like a sort of lucky charm. But pride comes before a fall.

And the Lord promises that all of them are going to suffer the same fate as Jeremiah's belt. They are going to be useless. They are going to be ruined. They are going to be sent far away to Babylon, 350 miles away. And when they come back, they will be good for nothing.

And that is really how the Old Testament ends. They are useless until Jesus comes. But before we go on, how did that happen? How did they become like that? How did they become proud?

And how can we avoid it? How can we not become like that? Well, look at verse 10. There are three steps in this verse, verse 10. They refused to listen to God's word.

They followed their own hearts and they went after other gods. I think those are three, three steps in a process that we can fall into if we're not careful. They refused to listen to God's word, so they did what they wanted to do and they made up gods to suit them.

Imagine if you introduced yourself to me after the service. Maybe you're here for the first time. And if you are, I would love to meet you after the. But imagine you introduced yourself to me after the service. You told me about yourself, where you're from, what you're into, the kind of things you like doing on a day off, all those sort of things.

And imagine you told me all that and I said, well, thanks for the introduction, but I like to think of you like this. I know you've told me that you're like that and you're from this place, but I like to think of you as being actually from that place. I like to think that you're that kind of person. It's absurd, isn't it? It's rude, but it's ridiculous.

Nobody would do that. And once God actually tells us what he's like, and the kind of things he's into, what pleases him and what displeases him then. And the Bible calls that revelation. He shows us, tells us, once he's done that, then my opinion or your opinion is irrelevant. He's actually introduced himself to us.

Doesn't matter what I think he's into or what I think he's like.

Now I guess we've all got questions when we read the Bible. I do. You read things in the Bible. Think I find that very hard. That's really hard.

And it's very different from what everybody around me is saying. I think when we have questions like that, it's important to be honest about them and not pretend. And I hope and I believe that this is a church where we can do that, we can ask those questions and it's a safe place to do that. But once God has spoken in the Bible, which He has, we're just not free to pick and choose which bits of the Bible we're going to believe and accept which bits of God's character we like and which bits we don't like. If you pick and choose which bits of God's word you accept, then you're ending up with a different God from the one who's introduced himself to us.

That's what the Israelites are doing in verse 11. They refuse to listen to God's Word. They follow their own hearts and as a result they make up the gods and choose the gods that suit them best.

Problem is, when you get into problems and difficulties in your life, and we all do sooner or later, if you've got a made up God which isn't the God of the Bible, you're on your own. It's lonely because he's not real.

Psalm 103 says, Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us and not we ourselves. Or the message Translation. If you know the message, it has a paraphrase. It says, he made us, we didn't make him.

I like that he made us. We didn't make Him. We can't make him in our own image. We can't choose what he's like. He's introduced Himself to us.

This is what I'm like, He says, and honestly, I think this is the issue that the Church of England is facing at the moment.

God has spoken very clearly. He's revealed Himself to us in His Word. And the question facing the Church of England is what are you going to do with that? Are we going to trust him even if we find it hard? Are we going to trust him?

Even if it's very different from the voices of the world around us, the culture we live in? Are we going to trust him? Because we know him, we can trust him? Are we going to. Or what about us as individuals?

What about you when you're reading the Bible? Or me when I'm reading my Bible? Maybe you're exploring the Christian faith or maybe you've been a Christian for years and the question is the same for us when we're reading the Bible and God says something which is so different and the values are so different from the values of the culture we live in every day and we don't agree with it straight away or we don't like it jars with us. Are we going to trust Jesus?

Are we going to say, look, I don't understand it, Lord, I find it hard, but because I know you, I'm going to trust you on this, I'm going to trust you even if I don't like it, because I know who you are and you're trustworthy and I trust that one day it will make sense to me. Until then, I'm taking it on trust. Or are we going to say, no, I know best. I know the question is, who or what has the final word on those kind of questions?

Who or what has the final word on those kind of questions? The things we think about, the values that we have, who we are, about our lives, about sin, sin and judgement. I don't like that. But God has said it's real about heaven or hell or money or sex or the environment or other religions or whatever, or whether I'm going to forgive that person what they did to me all those years ago. I know the Lord tells me I've got to forgive them, but I don't want to.

Jesus says, are you going to trust me on that?

Who has the final word? Is it the Jesus revealed in the Bible?

Or is it you or me or the God that we've made up? The kind of God we think? Well, I think that's what God's like. I just don't believe he's like that. I think he's like this.

He's like, no, I've revealed myself to you. This is who I'm like.

A few years ago, Christians would wear bracelets with WWJD on. Do you remember? What would Jesus do? And the idea was, you know, whatever situation you're in, you just look down, you remember, what would Jesus do? And you asked that question and some people sort of smiled a bit condescendingly on those things.

Thought it was a bit tweet, but I thought, well, at least, at least it is saying, yeah, Jesus has the final word. I want to know what Jesus would do. And what does Jesus have me do? He's got the final word.

Well, the Old Testament ends with God's church refusing his word, following their own hearts as a result. Worshipping gods that weren't the real God of the Bible at all. And like Jeremiah's belt, they were completely useless. They were supposed to be this piece of clothing worn by the Lord. And when the other nations looked at them, they were supposed to think, wow, isn't the Lord amazing?

Look at his people as they live out his life. Isn't he amazing?

And it is an amazing thing actually, when you think about is an amazing thing that when God's people stay close to Jesus, they do make the Lord look good.

When we stay close to Jesus and we are aware of our own sin and our failures to do this every day, but actually the Bible says if we are walking closely to Jesus, we are shining for Him. It does make him look good. Jesus said it in Matthew 5:16. It's one of our core convictions. On the board at the back.

Let your light so shine before others that, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. So they see your life, but they don't praise you, they praise your Father in heaven. They see what you do and it makes the Lord look good. That's the lesson of Jeremiah's belt. And when someone dresses up nicely, it makes them look good, doesn't it?

You see the nice clothes and you compliment the person. You don't say, this is a hint perhaps, gentleman. You don't say, what an amazing dress you happen to have put on today. Darling, you don't say that, you say, wow, you look amazing, don't you? It draws attention to the person.

And when we stay close to Jesus, the Bible says, like a belt close to him, people see us whether we realise it or not. And it does make the lord look good. 1 Peter 2:12 says the same thing. Live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us to make him attractive to the world. John Stott used to call it the problem of God's invisibility.

How can people see God? Well, they look at his church. They ought to be able to look at us, his church, part of his church, and see something of him. And see who he is. It ought to make them turn their heads.

People should be drawn to Jesus by the beauty of his people and their life together.

If we stay bound to Jesus, or as John 15 says, abiding in Jesus, plugged into Jesus, then we can't help but live in such a way that it points people to him. Jesus says, John 15, whoever remains in me and I in them will bear much fruit. And he goes on, and this is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. People see your fruit and it brings glory to God the Father.

So this week, as we start a new week, we are going to be bound to lots of different things. We are going to be plugged into lots of different things this week. Social media, our phones, podcasts, music, whatever different groups we belong to. And they will give us a certain amount of life. But it's life that is always draining away.

But if we stay bound to Jesus, close to him in our hearts and minds, praying to him during the day, reading His Word, meditating on it, if we stay plugged into him, if we let his Word be our final word, our final authority, even if we don't understand it, even if we struggle with it, like, I'll trust you, Lord, just because I know who you are and I know you're good. If we do that, not following our own hearts, not picking and choosing him, worshipping some idol God that we've made up, if we're bound to him, then he will share his life with us, the life of the Spirit. And people won't say, good for you. They'll say, wow, isn't the Lord amazing? Don't we want that?

Don't we want people to say that? Isn't the Lord amazing? We pray they come to know him too. Should we pray now, Father? It seems such an amazing thing to think about that somehow we could make you look good.

But your word tells us that, that we are like a precious garment, like it's a beautiful belt around your waist, close to you for your renown and praise and honour, Lord, we want to be that to you this week. We want to stay close to you and to the Lord Jesus. We want the life of your spirit, himself, flowing down from you, through your son, into our lives, day by day. Because we want to be useful to you wherever we are this week. And we here in this room are going to be going out to different places, at school, at college, at work, at home, facing different things.

Lord, we want to draw attention to you. We want to live for you. For your renown and praise and honour. And so, Lord, that all the glory goes to you. And people see how amazing you are.

We ask this, Lord, for your name's sake. Amen.