“Before I Formed You”

Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” [Jeremiah 1:4-5].

There was a moment, early in my mother’s womb, when there wasn’t really a “me” at all. There was just “us” —my identical twin, Todd, and me, completely and utterly conjoined, sharing the same cellular beginning, the same genetic blueprint, the same dark, warm universe that would nurture us both. We were, for that brief time, one flesh in the most literal sense possible.

But then something mysterious happened. Somehow, in ways that science can describe but never fully explain, we became two. Not just two bodies—that’s the easier part to understand—but two distinct persons. Two different souls, if you will. Two unique calls waiting to unfold, even though we would share identical DNA—we still do—identical early experiences, even identical environments for years to come.

I’ve spent decades wondering about that moment of separation, that divine mystery of identical twinning. It is as if God built this peculiar circumstance into our story to make a theological point that would take me seventy-four years to begin to grasp: divine calling operates beyond our capacities, circumstances, or choices. It flows from something far more fundamental—God’s particular knowledge of who we are before we even know ourselves [Jeremiah 1:5].

These words from this Sunday’s Old Testament lesson [Jeremiah 1:4-10, Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year C] operate in that mysterious space that precedes our ability to construct ourselves or determine our own destinies.

God speaks to one particular person—not to his family, not to his neighbors, not to the religiously gifted or obviously qualified— “You, Jeremiah. I knew you.” Todd and I may share the same genetic code, but God’s call upon each of our lives has been utterly unique. Neither better than the other, but each special in ways that have nothing to do with our merits and everything to do with God’s mysterious purposes.

The prophet’s call story forces us to confront a truth that our culture of self-determination finds deeply unsettling: we are not the authors of our own stories. We enter a narrative already underway before we arrived, discovering our identity by listening to the voice that called us into being before we had ears to hear.

The Illusion of Self-Construction

Our world teaches us that your life is yours, that mine is mine, that the so-called choices we have before us are ours to weigh and decide. This gospel of self-construction shapes our thinking about everything from career decisions to spiritual formation. We hear endless advice to “follow our passion,” to “be true to ourselves,” to “take control of our destiny.”

Much of this sounds perfectly reasonable, even virtuous. But lurking beneath these contemporary pieties lies a fundamental assumption: that we are the primary agents in determining who we become and what our lives will mean. The self becomes both the raw material and architect of its own construction project.

The problem, as our friend Will Willimon puts it so directly: “Which God am I worshipping and how is that God having God’s way with me?” Make no mistake—we are all worshippers. The question is never whether we will serve a god, but which god we will serve. The god of self-construction promises us control, autonomy, the freedom to craft our lives according to our own vision of fulfillment and success.

This god particularly seduces religious folks like you and me because it doesn’t deny the divine. It simply relegates God to cosmic consultant, available to bless our projects and provide resources for our self-improvement efforts. We pray for guidance, but reserve the right to evaluate whether that guidance aligns with our own sense of what would make us happy, fulfilled, or successful.

Jeremiah’s call narrative explodes this framework entirely. When God says “I knew you before I formed you,” there’s no consultation process, no divine career counseling session. There’s simply the announcement of what has always already been true: “I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” I appointed you. Past tense. Done deal. The call reveals what God has already determined.

The Radical Demand – “I Want You”

Our natural self recoils from divine sovereignty. Jeremiah’s immediate response is telling: “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” Jeremiah’s trying to negotiate, offering God his résumé of inadequacies, hoping divine wisdom will recognize what seems obvious—that he’s not qualified for this position.

C.S. Lewis identified this as the fundamental misunderstanding most of us have about what the Triune God wants from us. In Mere Christianity, Lewis puts it with his characteristic bluntness: Christ says,

Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours [Mere Christianity].

Jeremiah thinks the problem is his inadequate speaking ability, his youth, his inexperience. But God’s response reveals the real issue: his assumption that his natural self, improved and trained up, could ever be sufficient for God’s purposes. “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy,’” God replies, “for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you” [1:7].

The LORD changes everything: “Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, ‘Now I have put my words in your mouth’” [1:9]. Complete replacement—God doesn’t want Jeremiah’s words, however eloquent they might become with practice. God wants Jeremiah’s mouth as the instrument for God’s words.

Lewis’s image of wanting “the whole tree down” captures this perfectly. The prophetic calling involves the death of the self-constructed identity altogether, so that something entirely new—something genuinely God’s work rather than our own—can emerge in its place.

Living from Divine Initiative

The temporal markers in Jeremiah’s call reveal how this radical surrender works in daily life. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God says, establishing the eternal dimension of divine purpose. But then: “Today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms.” Today. Present tense. Immediate reality.

That word “today” echoes throughout Jeremiah like a bell calling the faithful to worship. Each occurrence reminds us that every day is a “today-I-appoint-you” day. Each morning we wake up to discover anew that our lives are not our own, that we exist to serve purposes larger than our own comfort or fulfillment.

The contemporary spiritual marketplace offers us techniques for discerning God’s will, as if the divine purpose for our lives were something we need to figure out through careful analysis. But Jeremiah’s experience suggests something quite different: living faithfully means learning to recognize what God is already doing in and through us, whether we feel equipped for it or not.

Years into his ministry, Jeremiah discovers how costly this surrender can be. He tries to quit: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” [Jeremiah 20:9]. He can’t quit because the call has become who he is. But he also discovers: “The LORD is with me like a mighty warrior” [Jeremiah 20:11]. The God who will not let him off the hook is also the God who will not let him go.

When we stop trying to be the authors of our own stories, we discover that we’re characters in a much larger and more meaningful narrative than anything we could have written for ourselves. Todd and I may have emerged from the same cellular beginning, but we each carry a unique part of that larger story—not because we chose our roles, but because the Author knew exactly what the plot required before the first chapter was written.

Today—this very day—God appoints each of us to the particular calling that has been ours since before we drew our first breath. The only question that remains is whether we will continue to worship at the altar of self-construction, or whether we will finally surrender to the strange and liberating truth that we belong to Another, and that belonging is the source of whatever meaning our lives will ever have.