God told Jeremiah to run a test.
Bring the Rechabite family into a chamber of the temple. Set out pitchers of wine. Pour it. Offer it in the house of God, from the hand of a prophet.
Jeremiah 35:6 “We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, ‘You shall drink no wine, you nor your sons, forever.'”
Jonadab had been dead for roughly two hundred and fifty years. There was no enforcement. Nobody alive had heard him say it. The city was under siege and every normal rule had already collapsed.
They still said no.
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God turned to Judah and said, look at this. A family kept the word of a man who is dust. You have not kept Mine, and I have been speaking to you the whole time.
Here’s what I’m seeing. Standards die quietly, in a season when nobody would have noticed the miss. The siege is on, the pressure is real, the exception is defensible. So you take it once.
The Rechabites made it into Scripture because they were boring for two and a half centuries.
Whatever you decided about how you would operate, back when you were clear-eyed and unpressured, is getting tested right now by a season that feels like an exception. That season is the test.
What standard are you holding that nobody would catch you breaking?
Keep the word.
Kap Chatfield is a Christian content creator, filmmaker, pastor, speaker, and coach. He has directed two feature-length documentaries (Acts: The Time Is Now, 2021). He has amassed over 1 million subscribers on YouTube. He is the Online Pastor of Love Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He is married to Joy Chatfield and together they have four children.
