Call to Me: What God Says When You Feel Too Far Gone

When God says, "Call to me and I will answer you," He does not attach a single condition. There is no clause about your background, your bank balance, your track record, or how far you feel you have drifted. The invitation in Jeremiah 33:3 was spoken to people in exile, people whose own sin had carried them off, and God still told them to call.

That matters if you have ever assumed you need to clean yourself up before God will take your call. Most of us carry a quiet suspicion that access to God is earned, that there is a threshold of behavior we have to cross before He listens. The story running through Jeremiah 31, Jeremiah 32, and Jeremiah 33 dismantles that suspicion, and it does it by showing us what kind of covenant God was planning all along.

What "Call to Me and I Will Answer You" Actually Means

God's invitation in Jeremiah reads, "Thus says the Lord who made the earth, the Lord who formed it and established it, the Lord is His name. Call to me, and I will answer you. I will tell you great and mighty things that you have not known" (Jeremiah 33:2-3).

Notice what is absent. It does not say call to Me if you were born in the right place. It does not say call to Me if you have money, or if you can do good things, or if you have not made mistakes, or if your background is not going to slow you down going forward. It does not say call to Me once you have your act together, once you look the part, once you are no longer struggling with addictions, once you are no longer stressed. It says, "Call to me," and that is the end of the conversation. When you call, He answers, and He answers with great and mighty things.

If you are in a dark place right now, that promise is addressed to you specifically. God's invitation was never written for people who had it together.

Why the Old Covenant Could Not Give You Life

God made us to be alive. He crafted and formed us for life itself, and He fashioned every day of our lives. Then sin came in, and when sin came in, it brought death. When we broke God's commands, when we broke His laws, when we stepped outside of the covenant, death was the penalty we had earned.

The Old Covenant, the Ten Commandments and the 603 laws laid out in Leviticus, gives us real clarity about what that arrangement looked like. It says, plainly, don't do this and don't do that. But it cannot give what it does not possess. It cannot give life. It can only direct you away from death.

That is a limitation worth sitting with, because a lot of people are still trying to build a relationship with God out of material that was never designed to produce one. Rules can steer you clear of the ditch. They cannot make you alive.

The New Covenant Brings Sanctification, Not More Rules

The New Covenant is different, and the first difference is that it gives life.

The second is that it leads to sanctification rather than to a longer list of restrictions. There are guidelines in the New Testament, which is where we come to understand the New Covenant, and those guidelines exist to sanctify us, not to fence us in. The Old Covenant gave limitations; the New Covenant gives sanctification. The Old Covenant said stay away from here. The New Covenant says be this. That is the glory of it. Jesus came for more than the Old Covenant could ever bring.

The New Covenant Goes Wherever You Go

The third difference concerns property. Read through the Old Covenant and you will find how much of it is tied to the land itself: limitations about property rights, whether that meant actual physical ground, or livestock, or belongings. Part of the Old Covenant was the connection to the Lord through the way He delivered a people into a particular place.

God is opening the door now to those of us who were never part of that covenant, to the outsider and the alien. The New Covenant is portable. It does not need a temple. It does not need a central city. The covenant lives inside each one of us.

The fourth difference follows from that. The New Covenant restores them and us to the care of the Great Shepherd, meaning Jesus Himself. Hebrews speaks of the Great Shepherd who came looking for us, and here is the good news: He is still looking for you. He still longs to take you in as His own.

The Difference Between Knowing About God and Riding With Him

The New Covenant also calls us into an experiential knowledge of God rather than a merely cognitive one.

At a meal not long ago with our staff, I was sitting at a table with some of my team, and one of them spoke up while the rest of us were talking about cars and muscle cars and hot rods. He asked me a question that was almost unconscionable: "What's a muscle car, Darin?" Pastor fail. I nearly fired him right there for not knowing. I said, "What do you mean, what's a muscle car?" And he said, "I don't know what a muscle car is. I've never seen one. If I did see one, I didn't know it."

I realized something right there. I could show him, and I did, with my phone. I could show him pictures of muscle cars. But maybe the thing to do instead was not to satisfy his cognition, the knowledge in his head, but to take him to a muscle car, put him in it, and let him smell it. Because that is the beauty of a muscle car.

There is a wide gap between knowing about muscle cars and riding in one. For a long time, the Old Covenant told us about God. Now God has opened the door for us to ride with God. Cognition is a wonderful thing, and it is not enough. God says, I want more, and I want you, so I am opening this new covenant, this new pathway that has never existed before but now does.

When Jeremiah wrote this down, the fulfillment was still 400 to 600 years away, well before the time of Christ. It was a long way off for the people who first heard it, and God said it was coming anyway. Trust Me.

That brings us to the last thing worth saying about this covenant: it invites you into the strength and empathy of a relationship. God is not asking you to keep rules. He is asking you to keep company. He wants you with Him.

When God's Instructions Make No Sense

Jeremiah 31 has God saying trust Me in this new covenant. Jeremiah 32 is a little different. In it, God gives Jeremiah some strange instructions. Go down and buy this piece of property just outside Jerusalem. Buy it. I will tell you why later.

It was only after Jeremiah had obeyed that the Lord made clear what was going to happen with it. That is often the shape of God's stranger instructions, and it raises the honest question: am I willing to trust Him even when I do not understand? Jeremiah was. So, we should be as well.

God's Word of Light Is in the Darkness

Then comes a grievous but temporary word. In Jeremiah 32:31, God says, "This city has aroused my anger and my wrath from the day it was built to this very day, so that I will remove it from my sight." That was a terrible word. Jerusalem would be razed, leveled, raked clean.

But read the rest of the chapter. In Jeremiah 32:37-44, God makes it clear that it is not always going to be like this. God's word of light is spoken into the darkness, not after it.

So, if you are in a dark moment, if you are in exile, if you feel completely alone, if you feel set on a shelf and forgotten about, hear this. God has not forgotten you. He knows exactly where you are, because He is standing right there with you. He longs for you to call on Him and invite Him into the circle with you.

The New Covenant was fashioned, formed, and birthed from the heart of God for you. His desire is to be your shepherd. But He is a gentleman, and He is not going to run you down to be your shepherd. He wants you to draw Him. He wants you to go looking for Him. He wants to be found by you.

Does God Have a Reason for the Dark Season?

It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by all of this and ask the obvious question. God, why can't we just skip this part? Why can't You do Your good work now without us having to go through that?

That question does not have a tidy answer. But I have learned more about trusting God in the darkness than I ever did in the light.

Which is precisely why Jeremiah 33 reads the way it does. If those verses are not marked in your Bible, feel free to correct that now. Call them God's passionate invitation, and remember who received them. They were written to exiles, people whose own choices had landed them there, and God spoke to them anyway.

Who Is Allowed to Call on God?

Anyone. That is the whole point of the sentence. "Call to me, and I will answer you" has no entrance requirement attached to it, no probationary period, no reference check. The people who first heard it were the least qualified group imaginable, and they were the ones invited.

So, the question is not whether you are eligible. The question is whether you will call. God's promise is that when you do, He will answer, and He will tell you great and mighty things you have not known.

Where to Go From Here

If you have been treating your relationship with God as a rule-keeping arrangement, the New Covenant offers you something the old one never could: life, sanctification, a shepherd who is actively looking for you, and a God who wants your company rather than your compliance.

Say something to Him today. Not a polished prayer, not a performance, just a call. He is already standing where you are, waiting to be found by you.