A. Though they are sinful. Perhaps even more surprising about this unfailing love is the fact that God promises it to these people.

B. Though they are being punished. Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because he weeps for the discipline that will come in the form of the enemies who will chop Israel down. But with the punishment he sees God's continuing love and promise of future restoration with the repentance it stimulates. Here is a vital scriptural truth. The presence of divine discipline is never an indication of the absence of divine love. Even if our failure is the result of our sin, and even if we interpret our situation to be a revelation of God's punishment, we should never assume that God's love departs from His own.

One of my great sadnesses in the pastorate was to see the slow ruin of a young woman as she moved through her adolescence. 111 call her Joan. She was at one time one of the glories of our church. She was radiant, bright, fun to be around, in love with the Lord. And then, slowly at first, something seemed to change about her. A certain slyness crept into her eyes. A bright expressiveness colored with a dark evasiveness. Her warm, endearing smile seemed to solidify into a studied stoniness and hardness of expression. Eventually the evasiveness became lies. The slyness became rebellion. Broken curfews turned into Saturday night drunks. Stony silence turned into angry yelling. A close family seemed to go to war with itself with an endless round of arguments, tears and slammed doors.

After a four-year nightmare of drunkenness, drugs and increasingly prolonged absences, this prodigal daughter returned to her parents' home one night with the announcement that she was expecting a child and needed their help. The help she had spurned she now begged for. They took her in knowing that she probably planned to take advantage of them again. And, in many ways, she did. She considered her pregnancy a punishment of God -- a biologically imposed grounding. But the necessary change of lifestyle slowed her down just enough for those who loved her to remind her of the God she had once loved and who still loved her.

She had trouble accepting that. She considered the sins she committed too great, and the infant she carried too clear an indication of God's punishment, to spell anything but rejection. How good to be able to say to her as I say to you what the Bible says in Hebrews, "God only disciplines those He loves." He is forever seeking to protect from greater danger. He is always drawing His own back to Himself. The presence of punishment does not indicate the absence of love.

Eventually, by God's grace, she understood His care and received it. And when that young mother brought her child for baptism, I'm sure some saw the child as a symbol of shame, perhaps even a symbol of punishment. But not I, and not her family, and not she. As the waters of the sacrament trickled down that infant's little head, we saw in the streams of water the tinsel of divine love covering shame and sin and saying to all, God covers even the unfaithful with unfailing love.