HCC Weekly - March 23rd, 2026

Remaining Faithful to God in the Valleys

Pastor David

I just finished going through the book of Jeremiah in my personal scripture reading and saw how he wasn’t very liked by the people around him. Who would like a guy who is going around prophesying a negative thing all the time about your home city? There were times where he offered some hope, but when you read the book… there’s a lot of “beware what’s about to happen”.

Because people didn’t like hearing what Jeremiah had to say, they didn’t like Jeremiah himself; even though he was just the messenger. He was thrown in prison for prophesying and once he was even thrown into the bottom of a well that was full of mud (Jeremiah 38).

In Jeremiah 15 he even complains about the hardship he is facing. And I can almost hear what he’s thinking. Here he is being obedient to God but his life is being made harder because of it. He says in verse 10 (NLT):

“What sorrow is mine, my mother.

Oh, that I had died at birth!

I am hated everywhere I go.

I am neither a lender who threatens to foreclose

nor a borrower who refuses to pay—

yet they all curse me.”

You can hear Jeremiah’s tiredness of not being liked come out in this passage. But when you go to the very next verse God responds with:

“...I will take care of you, Jeremiah…” (Jeremiah 15:11 NLT).

And God did. After Babylon came and conquered Jerusalem and established a governor over the region Jeremiah was given a choice of where he wanted to go - stay home or go with the rest of the exiles and be taken care of. He may have been the only descendant of Abraham that was given a choice, all the other ones were either killed, taken to Babylon or left behind, but not by their choice!

Jeremiah 40:4 (NLT)- But I am going to take off your chains and let you go. If you want to come with me to Babylon, you are welcome. I will see that you are well cared for. But if you don’t want to come, you may stay here. The whole land is before you—go wherever you like.

The point: being obedient to God will rub the world the wrong way. You will have times where being obedient to God will cause you hardship in the world, but the life of Jeremiah shows us that God will take care of you when you are being faithful to him. So, keep being obedient to God when the world comes at you and be patient as you wait for God’s hand to move!