Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, July 20, 2025
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: The homecoming promised us by God is to more than just a land. It is to an intimacy with God in which we truly know and are known.
Once a man came into my office looking to speak with a pastor. I had seen him a few times in worship, so he was not a stranger to me, but we had never had a one-on-one conversation. As our conversation began, I learned the reason for the visit: a major trauma in his family had caused a crisis of faith. What had made him realize that he should talk to a pastor was that he found himself crying when he prayed, and crying was something he just did not do. He was, in his words, a man’s man, and by all accounts he fit that stereotype. Why was he crying when he talked to God? “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it’s because God is the only one you feel like you can be honest with about what is going on. Maybe you feel like God is the only one who accepts you for how these events have made you feel.”
I would be surprised if the interaction I have just described was unknown in your ministry. The tension in the life of this man is both emblematic of our patriarchal society and an expression of a deep struggle within the human spirit. All of us crave intimacy—indeed, we were created for it!—and yet intimacy brings with it a vulnerability from which we are conditioned to recoil. We hide ourselves behind a mask to keep ourselves safe, even as the weight of that false appearance weighs us down and threatens to break us.
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts,” says the Lord. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” At first the promise of writing law within our hearts seems the opposite of what would draw us closer together. Recall, however, what many of us so often forget, which is the pastoral dimension of the law. It was not only given as a way to curtail evil and reveal our sinfulness; it was also given as a sign of God’s compassion and care for the people. As Moses says in Deuteronomy 4:7, “For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him?” The promise to write the law within us is the promise of a God who is so near as to take up residence in our ventricles of our heart. With this promise comes true knowledge of God, not in the form of wisdom but of knowing and being known.
The good news of God is not merely that we are known by God; it is that the God who knows us is the God who loves us all the more because of it. Too often true knowledge makes it harder to love, yet with God, greater knowing is purely for the purpose of loving more fully. God’s seeking is not that of a judge who comes to condemn but of a savior who brings mercy. No doubt the past few weeks of reading Jeremiah have given you plenty of occasions to blend challenging preaching with the promise of consolation. Here, let the word resound that all we have come to know about God in these past weeks is at heart the revelation of the depth of God’s love and the boundlessness of God’s mercy.
