There are
a lot of problems in the world. You did not need me to tell you that.
There are wars and threats of wars. There’s persecution in many
places. There are economic problems. There’s corruption.
There are all sorts of things going on that we don’t think are as they
should be.
And according to the polls, there
are a lot of people who don’t think things are going to get better, at least in
the short-term. And that’s true regardless of who wins the election.
People are looking around at what’s going on, and they don’t see anyone
who actually seems to have a plan for making things better. In fact, many
people don’t think there can be a plan for making things can get better.
They don’t think things can get better. Many people believe that
our best days are behind us. They’ve given up hope on the future.
Maybe you share that view, or maybe
you don’t. But just know that this is not the first time people have felt
that way. They were feeling that way at the time of our Bible reading,
the reading from Jeremiah. And that brings us to our message for today.
We’re up to number two in our sermon series, “The Bible’s Greatest Hits”,
looking at the most popular Bible verses according to biblegateway.com.
It’s Jeremiah Chapter Twenty-nine, Verse Eleven. “‘For I know the
plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm
you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
As we said last week, we need to
look at the context in which this verse comes. The once-mighty nation of
Israel has been slowly taken over by other countries. The only part of
Israel that still exists is one province, the province of Judah. And now
it has fallen, too, and is taken over by Babylon. And not only that, but
the people themselves are forced to leave Judah. They were removed from
Jerusalem, removed from the land God had given them and were taken to Babylon.
The people of Israel were about as
low as they could be. And to make things worse, a false prophet,
Hananiah, had promised the people that their exile would be short, that within
two years they would be back in Jerusalem again. And it did not happen.
Hananiah had given them hope, but it was a false hope. And when our
hope is proven to be false, we end up feeling even more miserable than we were
before. The people of Israel had no idea what they should do.
Should they give up? Should they try to rebel? They had no
idea. No one had a plan. No one seemed to have a clue. All
they knew was that things were bad and that there did not seem to be any chance
that they would become better. It looked like their best days were behind
them. And many people gave up hope on the future.
That was the situation when God
spoke to the prophet Jeremiah. Now, remember this is the twenty-ninth
chapter of Jeremiah. Jeremiah had been around a long time. God had
told Jeremiah what was going to happen. Jeremiah had been trying to warm
the people of Israel for years about what was going to happen to them.
And they would not listen. But now, now when they saw that
everything Jeremiah had told them would happen had actually happened, they
realized that God truly had spoken to Jeremiah and that Jeremiah really was a
prophet.
So God told Jeremiah to write a
letter to the exiles, telling them what they should do. And God tells
them, look, you guys might as well make yourselves at home in Babylon, because
you’re going to be there a while. Settle down. Plant crops so you
have enough food. Marry and have children. Pray for peace and
prosperity in Babylon, because its future is your future.
I wonder how the people of Israel
reacted to that. Maybe it made sense to some of them. Because, you
know, what God was basically telling them is, look, I know you’re not where you
want to be, but you might as well make the best of it. Stop wishing
things for things to be different, because they’re not different and they’re
not going to be. Live your lives. Live good lives. Make
Babylon your home, because it is your home, whether you like it or not.
Maybe it made sense to some of them.
But there had to be others who were thinking, “But God promised us
Jerusalem. God promised us our city, our land, our nation. Are we
supposed to just give up on that promise? Don’t we need to try to figure
out some way we can get our city back, our land back, our nation back?
Don’t we need some sort of plan?”
And God’s answer basically was, no.
You don’t need a plan. I have the plan. I know what’s going
to happen. You’re going to be in Babylon for seventy years. But
after that, you’re going to come back to Jerusalem. And listen to how God
says it’s going to happen: “I will come to you and fulfill my good
promise to bring you back to this place...You will call on me and come and pray
to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you
seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you...and will bring you
back from captivity.”
God tells them, yes you are going to
get your city back, your land back, your nation back. But you’re not the
ones who are going to do it. I’m going to do it. “I know the plans
I have for you.” God says, this is going to happen because of my plan,
not because of your plan. Your plans are what got you into this mess in
the first place. You insisted on doing it your way and here you are.
And here you’re going to be for seventy years. But after that,
you’re going to come to me, and you’re going to ask to do things my way.
And you will. And then, you’ll get back to where you want to be.
So what does that mean for us?
Well, it does not necessarily mean that God is going to come along and
solve everything and rescue us from all our problems. This was a promise
made to a specific people at a specific time. We cannot just assume that
it applies to us. It does not necessarily apply to our world, to our
country, or even to our church, much as we might like it to.
But we do know a few things.
We know that God is good. We know that God loves us. We know,
from the promises of the Book of Revelation, that God does have an ultimate
plan for the world, a plan that ends with God defeating evil and bringing about
a new heaven and a new earth. And we know that God does, indeed, have
plans that we know nothing about. And if we believe in a good, loving
God, it follows that those plans will be to prosper us and to give us hope and
a future.
So here’s what I think it means.
We may not have a plan for making things better in the world. We
may not have a plan for making things better in our country. We may not
even have a plan for making things better in our church, whether we’re talking
about this specific church or the United Methodist Church generally. We
may not have those plans, but God does. It’s not our plans that are going
to make things happen. Following our plans is what gets us into trouble
in the first place.
God is the one who has the plan.
So what we need to do is what God told the people of Israel to do.
Here it is one more time: “You will call on me and come and pray to
me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek
me with all your heart. I will be found by you...and will bring you back
from captivity.”
We need to call on God. We
need to come and pray to God. When we do, God will listen to us. We
will seek God, and we will find God when we seek God with all our hearts.
When we get close to God, and when we stay close to God, God will show us
what God’s plan is, or at least as much of it as we need to know. God
will show us where we’re supposed to go, what we’re supposed to do, and what
we’re supposed to say. God will show us what our role is in God’s plan,
if in fact we have any role at all.
I firmly believe that, in all of our
problems, that’s the answer. Call on God. Come and pray to God.
Seek God with all our hearts. Get close to God and stay close to
God. That’s the answer. It’s the answer for the problems of our
church, again whether we’re talking about this specific church or the United
Methodist Church generally. It’s the answer for the problems of the
country. It’s the answer for the problems of the world. Call on
God, come and pray to God, seek God with all our hearts. Get close to God
and stay close to God.
Do we have the ability to make
everyone in the world do those things? No, of course not. We don’t
have the ability to make everyone in the country do them, either. We
don’t even have the ability to make everyone in this church do them. But
we can start with ourselves. We can start by calling on God ourselves,
coming and praying to God ourselves, seeking God with our own heart. We
can start by getting close to God and staying close to God ourselves. And
then, we can do what we can to encourage everyone we know to do the same thing.
It’s not our plans that are
important. It’s God’s plans. God has plans to give us hope and a
future. So let’s claim that hope and that future. Let’s follow
God’s plans. Because one thing we know is that when a plan comes from
God, it has to be awesome.
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