Realizing it is our own lives that need to be cleaned up
“Perhaps they will listen and each will turn from their evil ways.” (Jeremiah 26:3a)
There have been any number of comments likening Election Day to the end of the world. Politics aside, we are in a time when each year the Christian Church focuses on the end of the world, Jesus’s Second Coming and Judgment Day.
Take a moment to reread our Bible verse for this week. It is all too easy to read a verse such as that and quickly apply it to all sorts of other people. We see the “sliver” in another person’s eye without noticing the “plank” in our own.
Jeremiah lived during a time when people might have easily felt as if there were living at the end of the world. There were big-time struggles for world power (sound familiar?). People and rulers alike turned away from God and went their own way (again, sound familiar?).
Against this backdrop, Jeremiah was called to deliver a message from God — not a message of hope, but a message of judgment. This was in stark contrast to the message of the false prophets who were proclaiming peace and that everything would be OK (still sound familiar?).
Our Bible verse this week is a single verse in the midst of all of that. One last time God sent Jeremiah to his people, Israel, pleading with them to see their sins and repent of them, then God would not send on them the judgment they rightly deserved.
There has been much finger-pointing in this election season. Candidates and voters alike are ready 
and eager to point out the sins and shortcomings of anyone they can. Let’s step away from that for a moment and use this time the Christian Church uses each year to make sure we personally are ready and prepared for Judgment Day, knowing it could come at any moment.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, use our verse this week to look at your own life and ask yourself where you — yes, you alone — need to “listen and each will turn from their evil ways.” Each of us has temptations we fall to day in and day out. We have sins we have proudly committed and refused to repent of. We fail to love God and each other as we should each moment of every day.
Realizing there is enough in our own lives that needs to be cleaned up, may God lead us to repent of our sins, see the full and free forgiveness Jesus paid and won for us at the cross and then daily seek his grace to live a life that gives honor and glory to God!