To Encourage You

Jeremiah 23:29 “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”

Have you ever shared the gospel with someone and it seemed to bounce off them like it had had no effect whatsoever? If you are a believer, the wonderful truth of the gospel at one time pierced your heart like a double-edged sword, convicted you of your sin, and provided the remedy – faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But for some reason or other, when you have shared this truth with someone else who had never believed, nothing happened. It fell on deaf ears.

It is to this very thing that the words above from the prophet Jeremiah speak. Here the Word of God is likened to a hammer that breaks rock to pieces. Obviously, this is a similitude speaking of the Word’s effect on a human heart. One of the ways that the Bible speaks of an unbelieving heart is that it is a hard heart. We read about it in the case of Pharaoh, who over and over again hardened his heart to the Lord’s command through Moses to free the nation of Israel whom he had enslaved.  He was repeatedlywarned of God’s judgment if he refused. In his case, these warnings were to no avail. So far as we know, he never believed, and the result was the loss of all the first-born children in Egypt, including his own. And then he lost his entire army as they pursued the Israelites at the Red Sea. However, thankfully, that’s not always the case. If you are a believer, that’s not what happened to you, for your hard heart was finally broken by the “hammer” of the Word of God.

If you have ever used a sledgehammer to break up a rock, you know that it may take repeated blows to make an impact. Although the blows leading up to the strike which finally breaks the rock seem to have had little effect, the fact is that, little by little, the rock was steadily being weakened before that final blow. That’s the way it often is with the Word of God. As we continue to share it, here a little and there a little, we can be sure, because God has proclaimed it, that “My word . . . that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). For you see, God’s Word is like a hammer that breaks up a hard heart, and like a plow that breaks up the fallow ground (Hosea 10:12), i.e., a barren heart that has to that point yielded no spiritual fruit.

God’s encouragement to the believer, then, is to keep on sharing His Word, keep on praying as you share, and let God be God as He uses His Word to, sooner or later, break a hardened heart. But we should also share God’s Word with other believers, for it has a wonderful effect in this case as well. As believers share God’s wonderful truth with each other, as we share what God has been teaching us, the Word is “like fire,” in Jeremiah’s words above. It has the same effect that Jesus’ words had on the disciples on the Emmaus Road soon after the resurrection. To these discouraged believers, who had not yet understood that Jesus was indeed alive again, Jesus spoke and revealed Himself. It was after He left that “they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32). And if you are a believer, you know exactly what this is like as God reveals Himself to you little by little each day as you spend time in His Word.

God’s wonderful Word: it’s like a hammer and like a fire, doing its wonderful work in our lives as we read it, and in both our lives and the lives of others as we share it. There is nothing else quite like it on the face of the earth.