Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Making Things Better (Jeremiah 29:1-14)
Date: July 21, 2024
Let’s start with what is going to sound like a strange question today. Have you ever been kidnapped and dropped off in a country that was totally different from your own? I can’t say that I have experienced anything quite that traumatic, but I can imagine it would be pretty terrifying and disorienting. Actually, check that. I probably can’t imagine how horrifying that would be. It would be even worse, though, if there weren’t any meaningful prospects of getting back home anytime soon. What can you do in that kind of a situation? There are basically two options before you. One is to do whatever you can to get out of the situation, whatever it takes. That’s certainly where our mind might go first. After all, who would want to remain in a horrible situation for even a second longer than is absolutely necessary? The other option is to stay put and make the best of your new situation whatever it happens to be. Now, to a certain extent, factors beyond your control will impact which option is meaningfully available to you. It may be that you want to remove yourself from the situation, but you simply cannot.
Okay, that’s about enough of that, but let me put just one more spin on the situation. What if you were in this situation because you were a follower of Jesus? How would you handle it then? How would that change your thinking at all? I don’t suspect any of us have ever experienced something like that, and, Lord willing, we won’t ever. And yet, as followers of Jesus, there’s something here that informs part of what it means to live like Jesus is coming back. That’s what I’d like to explore with you for a little while this morning.
Today finds us in the second part of our series, Who Do You Want to Be. Since it’s been a couple of weeks, let’s refresh ourselves a bit on where we are and why we’re here. A couple of weeks ago we explored the idea that if Jesus is really coming back, then how we live matters. If there really is a life after this one, and if our experience of that life is going to be determined by the way we live in this life, then how we live in this life really does matter. Well, as it turns out, this kind of thing is exactly what the various New Testament writers envisioned when they were talking about the end of the world. The implications of this are staggering.
C.S. Lewis really captured some of this in his essay, “The Weight of Glory.” Listen to this: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
If this is the case—and I think there’s a good case from the Scriptures to be made that it is—then every single decision we make is suddenly flush with significance. The apostle Paul made as much clear in the conclusion to his powerful reflection on the necessity of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:58: “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” This question then, who do you want to be, is indeed one of the more significant questions we will ever ask in our lives. Do you want to be the kind of person who reflects Jesus, or the kind who doesn’t? If the former option sounds at all appealing to you, stay tuned for this and the next three weeks as we talk about some specific ways we can do that very thing.
In order to explore the first of these, come with me for a moment back in time to when the prophet Jeremiah was doing his work for the Lord. He ministered during an extraordinarily turbulent season when God’s patience with the Israelites in Judah finally ran out, and the consequences and judgments for their many sins that had long been prophesied finally started coming to bear. This happened primarily and most devastatingly through the conquest of the nation by the Babylonian Empire helmed by King Nebuchadnezzar.
It’s hard to overstate how much of an existential crisis this conquest would have been for the Israelites in the kingdom of Judah. Their whole identity was prefaced on the idea that their God could not be defeated; that He was the one true God while the gods of all the other nations were little more than figments of the imaginations of those who worshiped them. Yet what this conquest signified to many—at least the ones who had ignored or otherwise disregarded the messages of several prophets over the previous couple of generations—was a failure of their God to protect and preserve them. Had He abandoned them? Was He really not as powerful as they had been led to believe? Or, were the prophets right, and He was really bringing judgment on them for their sins by allowing Babylon to conquer them? Yet this final thought was countered by a number of self-proclaimed prophets who insisted that God had not abandoned His people at all, and that they needed to rise up to fight against their oppressors. The group who had been taken as captives back to Babylon needed to be prepared for a short stay because the deliverance of their God was nigh.
And just for a second: can you imagine how those kinds of messages were received by the people there in Babylon? They were still shellshocked, and were looking for any kind of a sign that their collective misery would soon be over. They just wanted to go back home so they could live their lives in peace. Of course, what many of them may not have realized is that they didn’t have any homes to go back to. Babylon had destroyed everything, including the temple, which they tore down to its foundation. In any event, when these folks who were desperate for some word of hope heard these self-proclaimed prophets speaking exactly the oracles they longed to hear, they lapped them up like a thirsty dog. And yet, in clamoring for what they wanted to hear, they were setting themselves up for the profound disappointment that would arrive when they experienced what God’s plans actually were. Jeremiah sought to fix that. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to Jeremiah 29, and let’s take a look together at what God’s prophet had to say to the exiles.
Look at this with me starting right at the beginning of the chapter. “This is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining exiled elders, the priests, the prophets, and all the people Nebuchadnezzar had deported from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Jeconiah, the queen mother, the court officials, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and the metalsmiths had left Jerusalem. He sent the letter with Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hiljiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.” That’s a lot of detail, but do you understand what’s going on here? Jerusalem is in chaos in the wake of Babylon’s initial conquest. From out of the midst of that chaos, Jeremiah was sending a letter with a messenger that King Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar’s puppet king, was dispatching to his boss.
Well, if the people who received Jeremiah’s letter were expecting some sort of a message that amounted to, “Buck up! Things will get better soon,” number one, they didn’t really know Jeremiah at all. And, number two, they were in for a big disappointment. Jeremiah had something else to say to them entirely. Check this out: “The letter stated: This is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves, and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.”
Can you imagine a more unexpected and unwelcome message than this? “Hey guys, I know you’re really looking forward to getting back home as a sign that God is obviously for you still…but He’s got other plans. So, settle in and get comfortable, because you’re going to be there for a while.” And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, Jeremiah anticipated their rebuttal, “But the prophets said…” Keeping reading with me at v. 8 now: “For this is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘Don’t let your prophets who are among you and your diviners deceive you, and don’t listen to the dreams you elicit from them, for they are prophesying falsely to you in my name. I have not sent them.’ This is the Lord’s declaration.”
Of course, some of them might have pushed back a little hard—and who could blame them—asking the question of how they were to know this was from the Lord and those other messages were not. Well, one of the more obvious indicators was that Jeremiah had literally nothing to gain by telling them something they rather decidedly did not want to hear. What’s more, he had something to lose. If word got sent back that he was discouraging the exiles, the current king could have had him punished for it. As a matter of fact, Jeremiah was punished for his refusal to give any news that was good for his contemporaries. The other answer took a little more patience. It amounted to, “Wait and see.” The prophet who was really speaking on God’s behalf would be proven right by history.
No, Jeremiah didn’t have much in the way of good news for his contemporaries, but he did have quite a lot of hope to share for the future. God may have been punishing them now, but this wasn’t going to last forever. He had good plans for His people in the future. Look with me at one more part of Jeremiah’s letter. “For this is what the Lord says: ‘When seventy years for Babylon are complete, I will attend to you and will confirm my promise concerning you to restore you to this palace. For I know the plans I have for you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you’—this is the Lord’s declaration. ‘I will restore you to the place from which I deported you.’”
Historically speaking, we know that’s exactly what happened. About seventy years after Babylon sacked Jerusalem and took its people into exile, the Persians had conquered the Babylonians, and the Persian king Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral homeland to rebuild their society. In other words, Jeremiah was right, and all the guys who specialized in telling the people what they wanted to hear were wrong. The people really did need to settle in for a long haul.
But they didn’t just need to settle in. That’s not what Jeremiah instructed them on God’s behalf to do. He told them to build a life. They were to build a life that would maintain their beliefs and cultural traditions. They were to build a life that would be to the benefit of the people around them. They were to “pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to.” They were to “pray to the Lord on its behalf.” Why would they do such a thing that could benefit these people who were representatives of the barbarians who came and destroyed their homes and forced them to live in this foreign place? Because “when it thrives, you will thrive.” Rather than leaning into the anger and resentment they were no doubt feeling for the people around them, God’s people were to begin working to make their new community better by the patient and steady application of their lives of faithfulness. They were to be the best citizens they could be. Their life outcomes were going to be tied to those of their new community. The better the city did, the better they were going to do.
Now, when we grapple with a passage like this, the first and easy reaction is to claim it for ourselves. Of course, we don’t want to claim all of it for ourselves. We just want the good and fun parts like vv. 11-14 there at the end. God preserved what we see here in the Scriptures so we can better understand His character and to help us see the pattern of His engagement with us. When we live outside the bounds of a covenantal relationship with Him, life’s just not going to go as well as it will when we do. And before you object, no, that doesn’t mean unbelievers today are all living terrible, pitiful, pathetic lives. That’s a silly notion. It doesn’t mean either that believers don’t still go through horribly hard things. We very obviously do. Rather, it means that being in a relationship with God and pursuing His way of life gains us access to hope and peace and joy that are not otherwise accessible. Life is better in God’s kingdom both now and in the long run than life outside of it. But, that statement is only going to really make sense to someone who is on the inside. You’ve got to experience it to really understand.
Okay, but if this letter wasn’t written for us, then where does all of this land for us? Well, look again at what God was telling the people here. They were in a hard situation. Really hard. It was a situation that was unimaginably hard as far as we are concerned. Yet God’s promise wasn’t to immediately pull them out of it. It was to leave them in and call them to continue seeking Him from out of the midst of it. He promised that He was eventually going to make things right, but their best path from where they were to where they were going to be was to be faithful to Him in the midst of the hard. They were exiles from their home, but they weren’t exiled from Him.
Here’s the thing: We are not exiles like the Israelites who received this letter from Jeremiah. There’s no reason to try to pretend otherwise for the sake of easy application. But we are exiles in another sense. This other sense is something the apostle Peter points us to right at the beginning of his first letter. He addresses the letter to “those chosen, living as exiles dispersed abroad,” and goes on to list some of the places where the churches who received the letter were located. These believers weren’t living apart from their earthly home, but they—like we and all other members of the household of faith over the centuries—were living apart from their ultimate and heavenly home. In a spiritual sense, they were living in a foreign land where they were not particularly welcome. They were tolerated, sure, but not really welcome. And the tolerance was running thin.
And how were they to live in this spiritually foreign environment? They were to reflect God’s holiness in all their ways. They were to be set apart as different from their neighbors, a difference highlighted by their application of the character of Christ in all their dealings with the people around them. As we have talked about recently, Peter told them in 2:12 to “conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.” He went on to tell them (and us) in 2:15 that “it is God’s will that you silence the ignorance of foolish people by doing good.” Jesus Himself told us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. The people around us aren’t going to understand this and will hate us for it, but we do it anyway. Speaking of those who might attract persecution for their commitment to the character of Christ, Peter said in 4:19, “let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator while doing what is good.”
Are you starting to get a picture here of what God’s plans for His people are in this life? We worry a great deal about all the little details of what God’s will may or may not be, but while He isn’t unconcerned with those, His much greater concern is that we pursue the character of Christ in the big picture of our lives. If we are pursuing the character of Christ, all of those little details will be far more likely to work out in a way that honors Him. What’s more, when we pursue the character of Christ, we will be actively making our communities better places. When Jesus returns, He is going to bring a grand and glorious renewal to all of creation. If we are going to be a people called by His name who have been called to be a part of His body, doing His work while we wait for His return, that’s exactly what we should be doing as well. That way, when He returns we’ll be caught doing the same work He will be doing. This is what it looks like for us to live with the end in mind. Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
Okay, so how do we do that? Most of you already know this. You’re already doing it. That’s one of the real strengths we have as a church. We are deeply invested in our community. We are a community church in the best sense of the word. But still, concrete is better than abstract here. What does this look like in practice? Well, it starts at home. Make sure you are taking care of your own families and raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. If you are married, love your husband or wife well. Show them the sacrificial love of Jesus. If you have kids or grandkids, teach them to love the Lord, His church, and the community in that order, but with the clear understanding that all three necessarily go together. If you don’t get one right, you won’t get the others right. If you don’t get one right, it’ll be because you’re not getting the others right. If you aren’t taking care of your own house, you can’t make your community better. And living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
Once your house is in order, start moving out. Be a good neighbor. If you live in Oakboro, you have more and more neighbors to be good to. Get to know your neighbors. Aim to be sufficiently invested in their lives that you are able to minister the Gospel to them when they are in need of it. Now, this doesn’t mean being a religious busybody—nobody likes that—although it is perfectly acceptable (not to mention encouraged) to invite them to church. It means caring about them. Learn their names. Learn their stories. Learn their kids’ names and their stories. Build a relationship with them. And don’t do this because you want to share the Gospel with them. Do this because you’re being a good neighbor and that’s a worthwhile goal in and of itself. Besides, when you have a relationship with them, because the Gospel is such an integral part of who you are as a follower of Jesus, sharing it will come naturally. Communities where neighbors know and love each other are better communities than ones where that isn’t the case. Well, living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
The next step is to simply move further out. Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now. So, what are the things going on in our community right now? How can we be more invested and involved in those? How about by volunteering in our local schools? Volunteering with our local Meals on Wheels during the week? Helping pick up trash off our roads and sidewalks? How about by participating in important civic functions? I’ll be honest: when you go to Town Council meetings, most of the crowd is usually from here anyway, but what if that was always the case, and not just because of the people we have serving in various official capacities? What if our people always outnumbered everyone else there, not to raise any issues, but just so we were invested and informed and praying over every single decision our leaders made? Think that might make for a better community? Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
Imagine for a minute the impact of this church’s gaining the reputation as the church with people who have their hands in everything that happens in this community, and who are always making whatever they touch better for everyone around them. We’re already well on our way there, but how can we do even more? What if the first thought that came to mind when people heard the name “First Baptist Oakboro” was of how much those people love their community? Oakboro is our field, to borrow from Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. It is our responsibility to follow His lead in making sure it is being planted with good seeds that are being properly cared for so they can grow healthy and strong. That’s living with the end in mind. Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now. That’s exactly what we are called to do. It’s who we’re called to be.