Articles by Dr. David Jeremiah
Mark Twain once quipped, “Clothes make the man; naked people have little or no influence in society.” Yes, but who makes the clothes that make the man? Try Savile Row, a prestigious street in London’s Mayfair district for more than two hundred years. It’s been called “The Golden Mile of Tailoring.” Throughout the 1800s as residents of Savile Row became increasingly fastidious about their appearance, a proliferation of tailors began opening shops on the street. One famous client of the Savile Row tailors was Beau Brummell, a dashing conversationalist and man of fashion. He’s responsible for a style that lives to this day—the modern suit, trousers, and necktie. Customers like Brummell “spoke for” every detail of their suits, giving rise to Savile Row’s most famous phrase: “bespoke tailoring.” The word “bespoke” refers to custom-made clothing as opposed to mass-produced garments. If a garment is “bespoke,” it’s tailor-made to the buyer’s specifications, and is "be spoken for." Historically, it refers to clothing and to the individual tailoring that encompasses everything from fabric to style to size to stitching.
The word control often has a negative connotation but think about how important “control” is in your life. I don’t mean the negative dimension of being a controlling person. You want someone in control of the airplane you are a passenger on, so all control is not bad. I mean self-control—the ability to resist impulses and temptations and accomplish the things that are true, noble, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous, and praiseworthy (Philippians 4:8). It’s no wonder that Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, in their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, cite research indicating that “poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison.”[1] [1] Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 2.
If you’re like me, you are concerned about the state of our world. I wonder if what I feel about our world matches up with what I know about our world. The reality is, we know far more about our world than any generation in history. Since 1993 when the World Wide Web became available to the public, the flow of information on the Internet has grown exponentially. Every tragedy, every disaster, every battle in every war, every moral failure, every immoral trend, everything that happened throughout history, but no one knew about . . . it is now seen every day online. Yes, positive stories are also reported—but bad news sells—and that’s often what we see.
At times life seems harder than we can bear, especially on days when we’re stunned by grief, worried about the situation in the world, distressed over health or finances, or reeling from waves of trouble. We long for joy in the morning, but sometimes we’re in the darkest night. In 1 Samuel 30, while fleeing the armies of King Saul, David was attacked at Ziklag by the Amalekites. His family was kidnapped, the town was burned, and his men rebelled against him. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and it was David’s darkest hour. He wept till he had no more strength to weep. According to 1 Samuel 30:6, David responded to his trouble by strengthening himself in the Lord. That simple statement is a sermon to our souls. David was under incredible strain as his circumstances had gone from bad to worse. Yet he refused to give up. He knew how to strengthen himself in the Lord by shifting his attention from his hopelessness to his Helper. Today, we need to remember that all our troubles are temporary, and all our blessings are eternal. We don’t know when David wrote Psalm 13, but the psalm certainly fits this occasion.