A brief overview for Sunday School teachers and Bible study leaders, of Lifeway’s “Explore the Bible” lesson of Jeremiah 35:5-19, with the title “Worthy,” for Sunday, July 30th, 2023.

(A video version of this overview is available on YouTube at;

INTRO:  ??? Can you think of a time when one of your parents told you to do something difficult, and you did it? (Or maybe a time when you DIDN’T obey your parents, and it cost you?) 

(EX: when I was in high school, I was very busy, with school, 35 hours of work a week, speech and choir contests, etc. I was literally busy every night. Inevitably perhaps, my body began to break down and the doctor said I was on the verge of an ulcer. So my parents told me: You have to cut back, and stay at home one night per week. To me that was SO hard, to just sit and stat at home one night a week — but I did it!  (Cheryl & lost summer!)

OR as an alternative: later I’ll share with you several examples of obedience from history — you could share one of those for an introduction.

Then = Today we are going to look at another example of obedience that God shows us in Jeremiah 35, in the obedience of the Rechabites.

CONTEXT:

Jeremiah 35 is not in “chronological order;” we looked at God’s promise in Jeremiah 29 a couple of weeks ago, about how Judah had been taken into captivity into Babylon and God was telling them they were going to be there for a while; so put down roots and seek the welfare of that place where He had them.

But Jeremiah 35 goes BACK to BEFORE they had been taken into captivity, while the city of Jerusalem was still surrounded by the Babylonians, but they had not been captured yet.  This story involves “the Rechabites,” a family in Judah, and their obedience to their father — which is an example to all of us in obeying our Heavenly Father. 

OUTLINE: I would just use a very simple outline this week:

I. The Rechabites’ Example of Obedience

II. Our Application of Obedience!

I. The Rechabites’ Example of Obedience

In 35:1 the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying …

:2, “Go to the house of the Rechabites and speak to them, and bring them into the house of the LORD, into one of the chambers, and give them wine to drink.”

This is a very interesting story that unfolds, as we shall see.

For one, as teachers let’s pronounce this right: (I had to laugh, I listened to one pronuniciation on YouTube, and he said something like “RACK-habits”!  It is “REH-cub-ites.” In Hebrew it is “Rechabim,” the descendants of the man Rechab.  

So Jeremiah says in :4 he obeyed God, and “I brought then into the house of the LORD, into the chamber of the sons of Hanan ….” And he says in :5, “Then I set before the men of the house of the Rechabites pitchers full of wine and cups; and I said to them, ‘Drink wine.’”  There was nothing unusual about this up to this point. This was a common thing in their day.

But in :6 the story gets interesting: “But they said, ‘We will not drink wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, ‘You shall not drink wine, you or your sons, forever.” So Jonadab told his family: I don’t want any of you, ever, to drink wine.

THAT WAS NOT ALL: as we see in :7+, “You shall  not build a house, and you shall not sow seed and you shall not plant a vineyard or own one; but in tents you shall dwell all your days …”.

??? So what kind of life were they going to live???
(Obviously, they would be “nomads,” living in tents, never building a homes, never planting crops. They would be shepherds, nomads — and never drink wine either.

??? What would you think if you were Jonadab’s sons, and he asked you to do this??? Or if you were his grandson, or great-grandson, and you had this heritage???

(Your group’s response … you may or may not have wanted to do that; it may or may not have sounded good to you …

I don’t know, but if I were his great-grandson or something, I might have thought: well, that may have been good for them, but that was years ago, and I am not going to be bound by that today!)

After you’ve talked about that for a while, then: look at what THEY did in :8:  They said, “We have obeyed the voice of Rechab our father in all that he commanded us, not to drink wine all our days … (:9) nor to build ourselves houses to dwell in and we do not have vineyard or field or seed …”.

They said in :10, “We have only dwelt in tents, and have obeyed and have done according to all that Jonadab our father commanded us.” 

So they DID what Jonadab, their forefather told them to do — all this time to this day. (I’ve read that they carried this tradition something like 250 years!). 

??? If you want some more discussion here, you might ask:

How hard do you think it might have been, if you were one of the Rechabites, when Jeremiah set the wine in front of them, to say, “No, we can’t drink it.” I mean, Jeremiah had invited there, he was a man of God …. Would that have been hard???
Yet they did it! It was really a remarkable obedience to their ancestor that they exhibited here! 

(Now :11-12 give us the historical context: they said when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, they fled into the city for protection. So we know this was during the time of the siege of Jerusalem.) 

So we have this remarkable story of the Example of the Obedience of the Rechabites, for over 250 years, they had obeyed what their ancestor Jonadab asked them to do.  

II. Our Application of Obedience!

(NOTICE: that in THREE different ways in :12-13 it indicates this is GOD’s word, not mans:

— :12 “Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah …”

— :13 “Thus says the LORD of hosts …”

— :13b “… declares the LORD.” 

THREE times in two verses! He is making sure they know this is GOD’S word, not man’s. We need to remember that too! 

And what IS His message?  :13 = “Go and say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, ‘Will you not receive instruction by listening to MY words?’ declares the LORD.”

He says in :14, “The words of Jonadab the son of Rechab, which he commanded his sons not to drink wine, are observed. So they do not drink wine to this day, for they have obeyed their father’s command. But I have spoken to you again and again; yet you have not listened to Me.”

You see the point, right: God is saying, the Rechabites obeyed their father; why aren’t YOU obeying ME?

Which is a good point, right? In how many areas of life, is obedience expected, and we would not think of disobeying.

Here are some examples/illustrations; you can use one, some, or maybe all of them as you are led to, to emphasize the point:

— A soldier is expected to obey his orders:

“(General Douglas MacArthur) tackled every task with zest. This was even true of an order to survey the whole of mountainous Bataan, that jungly peninsula lying three miles from Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay. ‘What that’s a job for a young engineer officer and not for a brigadier general,’ said  George Cocheu, once his yearlong roommate at the Point and now a major on his staff. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ The brigadier replied, ‘Obey it, of course. It’s an order. What else can I do?’  And so, leaving the cool House on the Wall, he personally mapped forty square miles of the malaria-infested headland, covering, as he later wrote, ‘every foot of rugged terrain, over its trails, up and down its steep mountainous slopes, and through its bamboo thickets.’” (William Manchester, American Caesar, p. 132)

— A politician is expected to obey his Commander-in-Chief.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford asked George H.W. Bush to leave his post as Ambassador to China to become head of the CIA — a post that was considered by most to be a political “graveyard.”

“Barbara already knew what was going to unfold. For her husband the matter was decided with the phrase “The President asks.” Bush knew it, too. “The President had asked, and as long as what he’d asked me to do wasn’t illegal or immoral, and I felt I could handle the job, there was only one answer I could give. He would do his is duty. That did not mean, however, that he could keep gloomy thoughts at bay. His political career seemed over.”

(Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power, p. 191)

There are examples of this left and right: how many of us have jobs, that if you just disobey orders or directives, that you would stay there very long?

— employees are expected to obey directives

— politicians are expected to obey their Commander-in-Chief

— soldiers are expected to obey their officers

— children are expected to obey their parents.

The point of all these is: God expects us as His children, to obey Him. 

And yet, just like with Judah and Jerusalem, often we do NOT obey God. And what God is showing us in this passage today, is that this is a BIG DEAL to Him. It’s not like God is sitting up there in heaven, laughing about it, like, “Oh, isn’t Shawn the dearest thing; I told him to do that, but he’s not … that’s so cute …”. NO! It is offensive to Him that we don’t obey Him. It is a big deal to Him. If there is an area of disobedience to God in your life, don’t think it’s not a big deal to Him; it is!

In Luke 6:46 Jesus said, “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,” but do not do what I say?” He wants us to obey Him. 

Cheryl & I don’t watch a lot of tv, but for the past few weeks we have watched one of the old Donna Reed shows while we eat dinner. The other day the father, Dr. Stone had asked their son, Jeff, to mow the lawn, and the son kept putting it off for one reason and another. Finally his father confronted him again, and said, son, if you don’t mow that lawn, you & I are going to have to have a long talk! Jeff said to him, “Gee Dad, I told you I’d mow it; what more do you want?” Of course, what his dad wanted was for him to DO IT!

That sounds like a lot of Christians, doesn’t it? We say, “Gee Lord, we told you we’d do it, didn’t we?” But the question for us, just like it was for Jeff, is, ARE we doing it? Are we DOING what He told us to do. We’re calling Him, “Lord,” but are we doing what He says? What God wants from us is OBEDIENCE.

In Samuel 15, God had commanded Saul to kill all the livestock they captured from the Amalekites. But Saul kept the best of the sheep, and didn’t kill them. So when the prophet Samuel came to meet him after the battle, Saul greeted him cheerfully, “I have obeyed the command of the Lord!” Then Samuel said to him, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears?” Saul started making excuses and said, I just kept them to offer sacrifices to the Lord (quick thinking!).   Then Samuel responded with these famous words from I Samuel 15:22:

“Has the LORD as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? 

Behold, To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.” 

In other words, God doesn’t want our “religious sacrifices;” He wants our obedience. 

Keith Green, who was a prophetic singer back in the late 70’s and early 80s, had a great song based on that scripture: “To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice.” You might consider playing it, or even just reading the lyrics. (I’ll read some of it for the video; you can get the whole thing on my website):

To obey is better than sacrifice

I don’t need your money

I want your life

And I hear you say that I’m coming back soon

But you act like I’ll never return

Well you speak of grace and my love so sweet

How you thrive on milk, but reject My meat

And I can’t help weeping of how it will be

If you keep on ignoring My words

Well you pray to prosper and succeed

But your flesh is something I just can’t feed

To obey is better than sacrifice

I want more than Sunday and Wednesday nights

Cause if you can’t come to Me every day

Then don’t bother coming at all

To obey is better than sacrifice

I want hearts of fire

Not your prayers of ice

And I’m coming quickly

To give back to you

According to what you have done

According to what you have done

According to what you have done

That song says it very well. God takes our obedience to Him very seriously. It should cause us all to evaluate: Is there any area of your life, in which you know you are NOT doing something that God has told you to do?

Similarly, is there any area of your life, in which you ARE doing something God has told you NOT to do? It’s the same kind of thing; it’s an area of disobedience. And as we see in this passage, God takes that very seriously.

??? What do you think are some of the reasons that we don’t obey God, even when we know what He wants us to do???

(— Lack of respect for God – the Rechabites respected their father, and kept His command. We are not respecting God when we don’t obey Him.

— Other priorities that we are making more important God, and obeying Him. 

— Fear of consequences if we obey God. We’ll lose money, or popularity, or a job, etc.

For a DISCUSSION QUESTION here or at another point in the lesson you might use this quote, and see what your group thinks of it? 

“And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.” (Melville, Moby Dick, p. 37)

Talk about this for a while; that to obey God, we usually have to “disobey ourselves” as Melville says, which goes against our sinful nature. But it’s important that we obey Him. Over and over the Bible tells us that God is looking for obedience from us, more than anything else we can give Him.

Close with prayer, that God will help us to obey Him in whatever He is commanding us to do for Him today.  

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