Don't Get Caught Resting On Your Lees

"Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity: therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed.Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will send unto him wanderers, that shall cause him to wander, and shall empty his vessels, and break their bottles." Jeremiah 48:12&13, KJV.

Although I've been reading through Isaiah I came across this verse in Jeremiah. Both Isaiah 16 & 17 and Jeremiah 48 predict the judgement and invasion of the land of Moab. Dave Guzik is one of my favorite commentators. In his notes on Isaiah 15 he refers to this verse from Jeremiah. After quoting this passage he says, "When we are at ease, and are never “poured” from vessel to vessel, we “settle on the dregs(lees)” and are never refined. God uses the “pouring” process to refine us".(Insertion mine). I didn't pay much attention to the word "dregs" but when I read the verse in the KJV it used the word "lees". What are lees, you wonder? So did I.

According to Wikipedia, lees are "deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate, or are carried by the action of "fining", to the bottom of a vat of wine after fermentation and aging." Did you get all that? In other words, it's the junk that settles to the bottom of the barrel when wine sits for a long time. Now, sometimes lees can be useful to flavor other wines, but for the most part they're tossed out by "racking" the wine. Hmmm...racking...

Racking: the process of siphoning the wine or beer off the lees into a new, clean barrel. To put in language even I can understand, racking is the process of moving wine from one barrel to another, leaving the lees behind. As the lees settle to the bottom the purer wine rises to the top and is skimmed off. In order for wine to be refined it has to be moved to prevent itself from getting clouded up with dead yeast, the stuff it doesn't need anymore.

The moral of the story: we need to be kept moving to refine us and keep us from getting sedentary. Moab was resting on its lees. It was a small but prosperous community surrounded by superpowers that had been picked on since they were built. Interesting. Small but sedentary versus challenged and large. My wife and I often discuss where we would like to go someday to retire, to slow down, to live a slower pace of life. But so far God has not allowed that. We have moved, and moved, and moved. In 7 years of marriage we have lived in 7 different places, sometimes living with other people. Sometimes (ok, often) it's easy to look at that and get down on ourselves. If only we had stayed in school, if only we had better jobs, if only we had planned better, we shoulda, coulda, woulda...

I have even used the David angle: how long, Oh Lord? When is it ever going to just get easier?! Seems no matter what we try to do it fails or is just so painful we wonder why we try.

But maybe we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves. For this is God's fermentation process. We are being racked. Boy, are we being racked. Why? To prevent us from getting sedentary and to purify us of the lees, the dregs, the old junk that settles at the bottom of the barrels of our hearts and minds and keeps us from being as pure, refined, and full-bodied as we can be and to help us grow. Yet along the way, we had many opportunities to minister and to see God move in our lives in ways we wouldn't otherwise have known. It's no accident that there's a correlation between little, unshaken Moab and big and powerful yet persecuted Israel. There are tons of examples of this in the Bible: wine being racked, and eagle stirring its nest, gold being refined in the fire, Job being tested, and, not least of which, the temptation of Christ.

God seems to speak in threads, probably because he speaks to us right where we are, and the thread lately has been simply, "Press on. Don't give up. I'm not done with you yet. Yeah, you've taken some lumps and dropped a few balls, but I'm not done." I've come to realize this morning that God is racking me, sifting me, keeping me moving so to get the good part of me to rise to the top and leave the junk in the old barrel. If we will not rack ourselves, then God will rack us. I'd rather do it myself. I'm looking forward to my new barrel.

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on..." Phillipians 3:13-14.