O ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves to flee out of the midst of Jerusalem, and blow the trumpet in Tekoa, and set up a sign of fire in Bethhaccerem: for evil appeareth out of the north, and great destruction.

2 I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman.

3 The shepherds with their flocks shall come unto her; they shall pitch their tents against her round about; they shall feed every one in his place.

4 Prepare ye war against her; arise, and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out.

5 Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her palaces.

6 For thus hath the Lord of hosts said, Hew ye down trees, and cast a mount against Jerusalem: this is the city to be visited; she is wholly oppression in the midst of her.

7 As a fountain casteth out her waters, so she casteth out her wickedness: violence and spoil is heard in her; before me continually is grief and wounds.

8 Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee; lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.

9 Thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall throughly glean the remnant of Israel as a vine: turn back thine hand as a grapegatherer into the baskets.

10 To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear? behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the Lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it.

11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.

12 And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, saith the Lord.

13 For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.

14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

15 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

16 Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.

17 Also I set watchmen over you, saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet. But they said, We will not hearken.

18 Therefore hear, ye nations, and know, O congregation, what is among them.

19 Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.
Jeremiah 6.1-19

There in v16, in the midst of the Lord of Heaven pronouncing the terrible punishment which the people had wrought for themselves, God yet gives the warning what to do to be saved.  On the eve of utter destruction, God is pronouncing salvation to all those who would hearken unto Him.

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.

Jeremiah 6.16

Our nations today are much worse than any of the old nations which faced the wrath of God before.  We need to stand in the way and ask for the old paths.  The old paths are true and right and reliable and consistent and certain and straight from God for us to follow.  The Holy Bible is that in written words upon pages etched across eternity.

I have taught many sports over the years, and it's noticeable how there are some sports which require a more ready attention to focus on details and goals and moving situations.  Kickball is a game most able-bodied people can play without thinking much about it.  You kick a ball and hope to run around a square before getting pegged or tagged out.  I love kickball, don't get me wrong, but there are sports which require a heightened level of awareness from what's required in a dusty baseball diamond, such as rock climbing, riflery, sailing, and snowboarding and skiing.  I am glad to be able to say that I have been able to get paid to teach others and share my love of these sports with many people over the years that I've had so far, and when the season is right, I'll teach sailing again, and when it's right again, I'll teach snowboarding.

Sometimes I've been in positions where someone wants to pay me to get certified in some sport that they're paying me to teach, and they've either brought expert trainers in, or sent me to go get trained by experts at another facility, and it's remarkable how many nuances there are in any given sport at a high level which most people who are not involved in that sport will never recognize or consider worth thinking about, but which, when in the stride of a given discipline, you notice and learn some nuanced aspect of the thing which you are focused upon learning, it becomes a great and remarkable joy to be able to manage it and adapt it and use it over and over again once you realize that you're perhaps balancing a snowboard on a curved rail and realizing the principles of flexion and extension you first learned when you were learning how to turn in S-turns down the hill.

In sailing, there is a concept of "tacking" which is baffling to people who have never sailed before, but it is a first-day concept which is really important to understand when learning how to sail a boat, and most people who sail boats don't even really consider it an obstacle or a difficult or tricky thing to do, after they realize what it is and how to use it.  It's possible to sail a boat and not fully understand tacking, but be able to figure it out to a certain degree just by physical practice, but when you have been shown vocabulary and given a good area to practice these skills in, with a good instructor and a safe environment you can learn to sail in a day and spend the rest of your life becoming a masterful sailor.

Whether out on the winter slopes on a snowboard or under the summer sun in a sailboat, there is a phrase among instructors who coach each other which goes like,

"New Skills, Old Terrain,

New Terrain, Old Skills"

The concept is that when we are instructing a student in a new sport, our job as teachers or instructors is to provide the very best environment which is good for our students at their current level, and to also judge with our expert opinion what is the very best terrain, or area, for them to learn in for a given skillset.  A good instructor is thinking about these things, and considers what terrain to take their students on for the skills which they are asking them to learn them on that day.

If it is a class of brand new, first time students to snowboarding, they're not going to be going up a chairlift to try and come down a black diamond hill before lunch that day, because that terrain wouldn't be good for them, because they're just learning how to go and stop and turn without falling down or running into anybody.  In snowsports, the terrain is entirely as important as anything else when considering the safety and ability of a class of students.

If a class has been doing well all day, and they've made it off the bunny hill and they've been out on the green hills all day, and then right at the last part of the day the instructor decides to take them out on a blue square, which is intermediate difficulty, then the new skill they are learning *is* the new terrain, and that class should not be expected to be able to perform any new skills during the first time they are going through the heightened difficulty of the new terrain, because just by being on the steeper, bumpier, faster terrain, the students are already learning new skills simply by learning how to balance and continue snowboarding, and adding any new expectations or teaching instructions on top of that should remain relevant only to what's immediately important, and for each student who is going down a blue square or a black diamond for their first time, the most important thing is that they make it down to the bottom safely so that they can do it again, while learning how to remain at a controlled speed and following the rules of the hill.

Once a class makes it to a certain level, then they could begin to learn maneuvers which require more speed, such as jumps or carves, and as it is, a snowboard is designed to perform at higher speeds, so for the student who has learned solid foundations at slower speeds, when they get to the higher speeds, those foundations hold fast and they can build on top of them.

For me, when I was first learning how to ski, I learned from a skiing instructor, who taught me the basics of a "pizza slice" and steering with the insides of the skis, which were like training wheel principles that I had to leave, to get to the better principles later on, but when I looked back, I could see how those training principles were put in place for my benefit, before I knew what was good for me in that sport.

By the time I was ready to get into snowboarding, I was a proficient skiier, but when I first went snowboarding, and for several years, I never took any snowboarding lessons, and my skills were.... lacking, to say the least.  I began building very bad habits that would work for me at my current level of skill to accomplish a certain task, like, straight-lining it off a jump and then figuring out what to do next to land, or figuring out that I could go anywhere I wanted on my toe-side edge, and I even applauded myself because I was riding both goofy and regular, but I knew I lacked any comfort level on my heelside, after a couple of nasty spills I wished had never happened.

It wasn't until on a whim one year I got a job at a major ski mountain as a ski instructor, and during our training, I found some friends who were snowboarding instructors, and I told them, "Teach me to snowboard, and teach me how to teach snowboarding," and they thought this was rad and they spent every day with me out on the mountain, so that by the end of our two week new-employee training, I had spent all of my off-time learning how to snowboard, and I was now able to teach both skiing and snowboarding, and I was actually able to snowboard down black diamonds proficiently, which I had never really tried much in skis yet at a bigger mountain.

For me to get better at snowboarding, I had to realize that I had a need to get better, and in this situation my needs were many: a) I wanted to be able to snowboard and be excellent, b) I wanted to snowboard in a superpipe, c) I could make more money if I learned how to snowboard and how to teach snowboarding, and d) from my very first time snowboarding, there was a certain realization that snowboarding provided more freedom of movement than skis, but I never had the opportunity to really explore how to get proficient snowboarding, and now I was in a place where that could happen.

Also for me to get better, I had to acknowledge that someone else knew it better than me, and I had to ask for help, which signified that I was ready to learn, and by the blessings you don't know how many days I've snowboarded, but it's almost unbelievable when I try to add it up, and to think that I've gotten paid for almost all of them, and it's something I'll do for as long as we have snow to snowboard upon.

Also for me to get better, I had to want to get better.  It is possible as human beings for us to see a need that we have, realize we have that need, see that we have the people and the resources available to help us get better, and yet we don't want it enough to do anything about it.  Such is the case of people who become very comfortable with life the way it is.  It can sometimes become difficult to see the importance of prioritizing work over leisure, and we become lazy.  This is an error.  The word sin means error.  The word sin was and is used in archery competitions and training.  Back in the day, when kings or princes or warlords were training in archery, it was some guy's job to stand out by the targets and yell back to the archers what their score was, and to collect all the arrows.  If the archer missed the target, the spotter would yell out "sin!"  Some old ways are not exactly old ways that we want to go back to, and when the Word is telling us to ask for the old paths, it's not talking about going back to the way things were, but it's talking about realizing the old wisdom and its eternal value even for today.

When I asked these other instructors to teach me how to snowboard and how to teach snowboarding, I had to acknowledge that they had a better way of doing it, and as I learned what they were teaching me, I learned that a lot of what they were teaching me was taught to them by others, handed down in a way that made sense for anybody who was learning how to be a snowsports instructor, and there were even discussions regarding various established principles which have been established by certification bodies who manage documents which spell out what knowledge and skills and proficiencies are required to be able to test to become certified.  Somewhat ironically, perhaps, in regard of the rest of what I'm saying here, out of all the sports I've taught, I've loved snowboarding the most (sailing is a close second), yet it's the one I've resisted getting certified all these years, because I've never seen a need to be certified in it.  I'm not a stickler for certifications, but what I'm pointing out mainly is that there were established ways of doing things, and when I was able to see that I needed to learn these ways to advance in the way I wanted to go, I was able to do so, by the providence of God.  It is fully evident in my life that the Holy Spirit has led me through each day of my journey, and I am grateful that He has made it so.

Similarly, there are "old ways" in the Bible which we are beckoned by God to return to.  Jesus Christ made it clear, and agreed with the Old Testament prophets that said that God does not require sacrifices or that we follow the laws to gain His favor, but that we have a humble spirit, and believe in Jesus Christ as our Saviour.

15 O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

18 Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.

19 Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.
Psalm 51.15-19

Jesus Christ fulfilled the old laws, which were used by God like a schoolteacher to "bring up" civilization to a point, and then when "the time was full," Jesus Christ was born as the Son of God to a virgin named Mary in a feeding trough in perhaps the basement of an inn where there was no room.  Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem to obey the royal decree that a census must be taken, and the only place they found to stay was an inn that had no room for them, and this is how Jesus came to be born in a manger, which would have probably been a stone bucket where they put the food for animals like cows and horses to eat out of.  Mary wrapped Jesus in swaddling cloths and laid Him in the manger.

When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she was to bear the Messiah, when she had never known a man, this was a very big deal, and Mary was understandably in awe of the pronouncement, but soon words of adulation flowed from her mouth in glory and honor of the great privilege it is that she was realizing had been bestowed upon her.  Mary was not taken off guard by this, she was in ways prepared as a student of the Word, as is evidenced by her lengthy response recorded in the Word.  They did not have the whole Bible written yet back then, but her response indicates that she knew the Scriptures, and that her surprise was joyful and triumphant.

The life of Jesus Christ from His early years is obscured to us, by God's will at His discretion.  We have a glimpse only into a very few moments from His childhood after His birth, and then most of the rest of the New Testament is a recording of the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ during His 3.5 year ministry upon the Earth in human form.  The Bible says that He wasn't anything special to look at, and He likely would not have drawn attention to Himself as anybody particularly peculiar before His public ministry began, but when it did begin, His mother was already keenly aware of His specialness, as she was the one who asked Him to do His first public miracle, which was at a wedding when the wedding host had run out of wine for his guests, and Jesus was asked to fix it, so He did, and He turned water into wine and it was the best wine those guests had ever tasted.

During the ministry of Jesus Christ, we see our perfect example in human bodily form, enraptured with all the same emotions and grief and hardships and temptations that we go through, and yet the Word says that He was without sin.  This is what set Jesus Christ apart from all of us, this particular thing, in that He did no sin, no guile was found in His mouth, and He fulfilled the will of the Father perfectly, doing only what He saw the Father in Heaven doing.  This same Jesus Christ preached that if a man asks forgiveness a lot of times, we should forgive that man a lot of times.  This same Jesus Christ preached that the Kingdom of Heaven is as unto little children, and that if anybody hurts one of them, it's better for that man to have a millstone hanged around his neck and be cast into the sea.  This same Jesus Christ preached that, to follow Him, one must leave all that he has and hate his father and his mother, and trust that Jesus Christ really is the Son of God.  This same Jesus Christ preached and taught His disciples a way of life which caused James to write in his letter that the only perfect religion is that which visits orphans and widows and keeps oneself unspotted from the world.  This same Jesus Christ preached that we must be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect.  This same Jesus Christ preached that if any man keeps His saying they will never see death.  This same Jesus Christ taught His disciples to baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and His disciples even baptized people for the sake of dead people.  This same Jesus Christ taught that our worth is not related to our wealth.  This same Jesus Christ taught that the end of time would be a terrible and dark time, and people would be going about and marrying as though it were the days of Noah and Sodom and Egypt.  This same Jesus Christ taught parables about the Kingdom of Heaven which contrasted those who entered in and those who were cast into outer darkness, into eternal suffering and torment, into Hell.  This same Jesus Christ flipped over tables in the temple and made a whip to drive out those who turned the house of God into a money making scheme.  This same Jesus Christ declared a prostitute forgiven and set demon possessed people free.  This same Jesus Christ healed lepers and gave the blind people their sight and restored the lame to be able to walk again.  This same Jesus Christ restored a man's withered hand.  This same Jesus Christ brought other people back to life who had died.  This same Jesus Christ put a man's ear back on his head after Simon Peter cut it off with his sword.  This same Jesus Christ taught about patience and waiting on God and about the value of taking time to pray alone with God.  This same Jesus Christ fed more than 5000 people using the faith and food of one small boy's lunch.  This same Jesus Christ walked on water and told stormy seas to be calm and they listened to Him.  This same Jesus Christ enabled Peter to walk on water until Peter took his eyes off of Jesus, and even when peter got distracted, Jesus still helped him back up.  This same Jesus Christ warned us that the world would hate us, but He encouraged us by telling us that when the world hates us, to remember that the world hated Him first.  This same Jesus Christ had a following of many thousands of people, and twelve of them were recorded as His close disciples, and almost all of them died gruesome angry deaths at the hands of gruesome angry men because of their devotion to this Jesus Christ.  This same Jesus Christ rebuked Peter and called him Satan when Peter told Jesus He would not die, and this same Jesus Christ rebuked Peter when Peter told Him that Peter would not deny Him, yet Jesus told him he would indeed deny Him three times, and three times he did, before the rooster crowed.  This is the same Jesus Christ that said many false prophets would rise in His name and say "I am Christ" (like the "Chosen" tv show and also like President Trump), and would deceive many.  This is the same Jesus Christ that said He was before Abraham, He said I AM.  This is the same Jesus Christ Who spoke everything into existence.  This is the same Jesus Christ whom the Word speaks of when it prophesies our messiah, and in John 1 when it describes the Word.  This is the same Jesus Christ Who lived a perfect life and died for our sins so that we don't have to.

This is the same Jesus Christ prophesied many hundreds and even thousands of years before He was born:

6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

7 Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
Isaiah 9.6-7

This is the same Jesus Christ Who has gone to prepare a place for us and Who is returning soon to reveal Himself and take those who believe in Him to live with Him forever in a place where there is no pain, no suffering, no crying, no sadness, no tears, no death, nothing that corrupts, and where we don't need the sun because Jesus Christ is so brilliant that He is our Light.

39 And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:

40 God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
Hebrews 11.39-40

Here in Hebrews we read about a God Whose plan it was from the beginning to "make perfect" the ancient by the fulfillment of the law and the bringing in of a better law, of love and liberty.  There is nothing that surprises God, and nothing that causes Him to be like on the edge of His seat biting His fingernails wondering what's going to happen next.  God does not worry because God is the One Who created all of this and He is the One Who has told us the right Way.  Our troubled hearts can totally completely stop worrying when we trust in God.  In today's world, when people use words like "totally" and "completely" we can suspect that they mean the opposite, but when we are talking about God, I am telling you the truth here.  There is no room for worry in the heart of the believer in Jesus Christ because the focus of our heart is set on Him and we trust in His promises, and His Holy Spirit does a work in us which causes the trials of this present life and its difficulties to pale in comparison with the hope we have of eternity with Him.

This same Jesus Christ is the same Jesus Christ Whom God fore-ordained to be slain for the salvation of mankind.  Jesus Christ is the Lamb which was slain from the foundation of the world, which is spoken of here in Revelation, in the context of describing the beast and its war against Jesus Christ and His followers:

6 And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

9 If any man have an ear, let him hear.

10 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.
Revelation
13.6-10

This is the same Jesus Christ Who gave this warning, after He had departed this Earth in physical form, when He visited His servant John who had been exiled to an island named Patmos and Jesus visited Him in the Holy Spirit.

Do you know this same Jesus Christ, or are you chasing after someone that the world is calling Jesus Christ?