Jeremiah 29:1-13 When It Doesn't Feel Like Prospering

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Good morning, everyone. All right, we're gonna stay fairly relaxed to start our morning. So here's what I want you to do. With your spouse or grab someone around you, I want you to write down what you think are the top eight most popular verses in America.

Got it?

The top eight most popular verses. So I went to Bible Gateway, right, which is the most visited Christian website, and there's 1 .5 billion hits on Bible Gateway and people are searching for favorite verses.

You tracking with me? So you need to think through, just real quick, what do you think are the eight most popular verses in the Bible, okay? So you can either whisper with somebody because I have rewards for the winner.

All right, now what you're gonna do is you're gonna come up with your list just real quick and you don't have to play. I mean, if you're just going, I'm not in a playful mood this morning, that's fine.

You don't have to play along. But I am going to read you the list and what you need to do is keep track in your head how many you get on the list.

Does that make sense?

So just for fun, somebody just raise your hand and tell me what you think one of the most popular verses in the Bible is gonna make this list. Yes, ma 'am, right here in the front. That's it. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.

So not only is it the most popular on the list, but it's actually number one. That was the number one on the list. All right, the rest of you, do you have six or seven in your mind? She took yours. Okay, all right, you got them?

All right, here you go.

You need to keep track how many you get right. A couple of these, I didn't switch, but a couple of them have like two verses together. And so what I did was just did a little bit of, okay, this isn't technical, so just don't bust me on this if you do your own research and you go, no, not quite right, not what I found.

All right, here you go.

The Most Popular Bible Verses and How We Misread Them

Number eight, Romans 12, two. Okay, which says do not be conformed to this world but be transformed. You know this one by the nearness of your mind, et cetera. How many had that on your list? How many had Romans 12?

Ooh, no one. Number seven, Psalm 23, four, which says, anybody? Even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, right? I will fear no evil for you're with me. How many had that on your list?

Okay, there's one.

You're in the lead.

Number six, Proverbs three, five, and six. How many of you had that on your list? Now we're starting to get closer to the top, all right? Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not in your own understanding.

Right, in all your ways, acknowledge him. He'll make you pass straight.

Great verse.

All right, number five, Philippians four, six, and seven. Who knows how that one starts?

What was that?

Not quite, but points for effort. Okay, anyone know? Philippians four, six, do not be anxious. That's the one.

Well done, Jay.

All right, number four, Romans 8, 28. Okay, we know that in all things, God works together for good. How many of you guys had that on your list? That's a good one, all right. Number three, Philippians 4, 13, which says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Incidentally, that verse makes it number one on the most misunderstood Bible verses in the world. All right, all right, here's number two, and it's the verse we're gonna be looking at today. For I'm Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you to caress the Lord, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope in the future.

Okay, it might even come up here in just a moment. And number one, you already got it, John 3, 16, the most popular verse. So these are the most popular verses. How many had four or more correct on your list?

Okay, I don't wanna like get our church in a lawsuit and like chuck these at you. So maybe I'll just pass them down the row, right? Elder throws candy, hits person in eye, church in big trouble. Did you have four also?

Anybody else have four or more? Anybody have more than four?

How many?

You had four as well?

All right, I'm gonna need some help.

Winner, I'm gonna need, you're gonna pass them. You go run those back to those guys there. And then anybody else have four or more?

All right, isn't this fun?

This is fun. All right, you guys, can you kind of work those back that way to that group back there? And then here, you can just pass them around, share amongst yourselves.

Good job.

All right.

Jeremiah 29 in Context: Exile, False Hope, and the Real Promise

So a lot of times what happens is when things are going, you know, this way or that way in our lives, we run to scripture to try to find something that addresses what we're dealing with, agreed? And you probably have friends or just your own knowledge of scripture enough to sort of know how to navigate your way to find something that would be helpful, okay?

The problem is, as we've already alluded to, sometimes the verses that we pick out don't necessarily teach what we might think that they're teaching. And as I mentioned to you, there is a also most misunderstood list.

And I mentioned to you that Philippians 4 .13 is that number one verse. But the second one is Jeremiah 29. Number two on the most popular list, also number two on the most misunderstood list. Because that verse, let's put it up on the screen.

Do we have a screen on there? And if not, I'll just read it to you. Do we have one on that one? Okay, let me just read it to you. Here's what it says, Jeremiah 29 .11. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

Listen to these four words. Plan to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future, okay? Those are the four parts of that verse that we tend to zero in on as we read it. Now, let me just ask how this is stacking up with your life today.

All right, now I always think that church ought to be a workshop. I think we ought to come here ready to work. I think we ought to come expecting the Holy Spirit to do something. I think God's word is alive, it's living, it's active.

And he doesn't intend to you to sit as a bystander. That's what I believe. So I'm gonna invite you from the outset to say, God, where am I at with you today? And when I hear this talk and these worship songs and some of the things on this passage, you should be asking yourself, or at least I'm inviting you to, I'm challenging you to.

God, where am I at with my walk with you today, my relationship with you, and what is it you want to say to me? Okay, so this verse has four words that I think can be challenging. And I want you to start out by evaluating how you're doing here.

First one, the word prosper is in this verse. Title of this message is, what do I do when it doesn't feel like I'm prospering? And so your first evaluation question in your mind right now that you're asking yourself is, am I prospering?

When I describe my life as a life of prospering, right, when I think of prospering, I kind of think of things are improving, it's up and to the right, I have all that I need. You know, it's all there.

But when I've lost my job and I can't make ends meet, or when you are struggling sleeping at night because you have financial pressure, how does that feel like you're prospering? And yet God says it in this verse.

The next one here says, talks about harm. God doesn't harm us. I believe that's true, by the way. And by the way, this verse is true, but I think it's even better than what you think it is. That's what we're gonna try to prove by the end of our morning.

But you're sitting there thinking, God doesn't harm me, but I've been harmed in my life. And some of you are probably gonna go home this week or from this service today and in the course of the week, you'll wonder if you're gonna be harmed again before the week is out.

And what do I do when scripture says, God's plan is to prosper me, not to harm me, but I'm feeling in danger? Does God lie? What do we do with that, right? What do I do when it says that God, his plan for me is to give me hope, but my marriage is just this far from its final days?

Or you're on the other side of that already. I was at a funeral yesterday of a couple, married 55 years, she passed. I'll tell you what he said a little later in the message, but how do you stand in front of that guy and talk about hope for the future when your spouse of 55 years is gone?

Or you lost a child or your kid's in deep trouble. And I'm scared about that. And I wonder about his future or her future, right? What do I do when it doesn't feel like I'm prospering, right? These are real questions.

And it's a good thing that we have a Bible that gives us some real answers. Maybe your questions are much more personal than the ones I asked, which were somewhat general, but maybe some of that applied to you, okay?

You ask your own questions. Make them hard, make them honest, and we'll work on it this morning together, right? With a really, really good verse. So one of the keys is when we study scripture, we need to read and understand things in context, right?

Many of you know this. So what I'd like to do to finish this part of our morning and before Dave comes back up with the worship team is read just the first 15 verses of Jeremiah chapter 29. I want you to see this verse in context, okay?

And you may be surprised to see there's a little more surrounding this verse than just prosperity and future and hope, although it is a key theme. Listen, Jeremiah chapter 29. If you have a Bible, by the way, or if you don't, there's Bibles in front of you and feel free to grab that.

And then later this morning, as we go through this passage together, it would be good and probably helpful for you just to refer back to it as we study together.

All right, here we go.

Jeremiah 29, verse one. This is the text of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the others. Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

It stated, this is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says to all the exiles I carried away from Jerusalem into Babylon. All right, here's what he says. Build houses, settle down, plant gardens and eat their produce.

Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles.

Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper. For this is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says, do not be deceived by the prophets and the diviners among you and do not listen to the dreams you elicit from them for they are falsely prophesied to you in my name.

I have not sent them, declares the Lord. Verse 10, for this is what the Lord says, when Babylon's 70 years are completed, right, 70, I will attend to you and confirm my promise to restore you to this place.

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 and a hope. Then you will call upon 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, declares the Lord, and I will restore you from captivity and gather you from all the nations and places to which I have banished you, declares the Lord.

I will restore you to the place from which I have sent you into exile. Let's pray. So Father, we just come before you with anticipation this morning. And I pray, God, that your Holy Spirit would fill this place today and that we would take another honest look at our journey with you, our walk with you, our relationship, whether we know you as Lord and Savior or whether we do not yet know you.

And God, it's so easy and tempting for us to look around and to pick out verses and be so discouraged because our lives don't seem to be measuring up to some of these things that people say out in our community, what we see when we compare our lives to someone else, when we reflect on the fear and the pain and the struggle of walking out our lives daily with you and then read verses in scripture that we go, God, I just don't get it.

It doesn't seem to match up for me and I'm doubting. And so God, we wanna take all that today to you, our doubts, our fear, our hurt, our frustration, and we want to determine if indeed you're a God who can be trusted or not.

And so the stakes are high, but God, your word is good and it's truth. And so help us to lean into it and to learn to study it and to refer to it over the course of our lives every day if possible. But God, I know it's not true for me, but more and more, help us to just lean into you and learn from you.

You're a good God and we worship you now. We pray this in Jesus' name. Everybody set? Well, hey, I just wanna welcome any of you who may be visiting with us today. Our lead pastor, Don Filcik, as Dave mentioned earlier, is not here this week.

He's currently going through a series on the book of Romans. So it's been fantastic. And just really wanna encourage you if you're looking for a church home, we'd love to have you back. But by all means, I hope that this morning you're gonna feel welcome.

And maybe, I hope, because I've been praying that you'll feel challenged because we really do try to come here and go to work. I'm just gonna give you a little taste on where we're gonna end our morning, okay?

Because if God is prompting you through the course of this service, we've never done a whole lot of, but the elders, just as we met this past week and talking with Don, we're wanting to do more right at the very end of a service to give you an opportunity to respond.

Now, you may or may not know, again, if you're new, we finish all of our services with communion. We'll do that today. But at the end of that time, I'm just gonna invite for any of you who feel like, I think after just reflecting on where I'm at and what I'm hearing from God's word, I would just want to take maybe an extra minute or two to pray.

And so I'm gonna invite you to do that as a response to what God might be prompting you to do this morning. As I mentioned in my intro, I just really believe when God's people get together, the intention is that the Holy Spirit is working through His word, through worship, to move us to change, possibly something, right?

Maybe you just need encouragement this morning. Maybe there's something going on that you think it'd be helpful to have someone to pray with you over that for just a couple of minutes after the service.

And so I'm gonna encourage you to whatever way you need to respond. Maybe you're sitting in your seat during communion and that's gonna be it today and you're gonna do some things as you leave here. All of this is good.

The fear for any teacher, right, is it's in one ear and out the other, right? That we don't take the truth of God's word and apply it to our lives. And so often we don't because we miss it. We miss that first thing that He may be prompting us to do.

And maybe for you today, that's gonna be to pray for a few minutes afterward with someone, okay? So just in this section up here in the front, when we're all done, I'll be there. I'm just gonna encourage the other elders and elders' wives and whoever, if you just see there's a few people that are looking to pray with someone for a couple of minutes about what might be going on in your life, we wanna know that.

We wanna support you. Fair enough?

All right.

Now, I wish I could stand up here and tell you I got this passage. I got this passage mastered in that the course of my life hasn't included doubt and some frustration and some lostness along the way, but that's just the truth of it.

And anybody who's gonna be honest from up front needs to share that. You know, one of the key things that I'm gonna just let you in on, my dad passed away when he was 65 years old. It was before I was married to Christie, before I had a family, never sick a day of his life.

And this is one of those circumstances with me where what I had been taught and what I believed and sort of banked my life on for years as a pastor and some of my background, it just didn't seem with what was happening, it seemed to be lining up with God's word for me.

You ever had that?

And it just, I felt like the promises that were there for whatever reason, I wasn't able to tap into those things and it just didn't, I think do what I expected would happen. I went through a season where I felt like every prayer that I prayed didn't get answered.

You know, that old bouncing off the wall thing. Like, God, are you there?

Are you there? Are you there? Are you there?

And you feel crickets. Maybe that's you, right? I've had some employment challenges. I've been there. I know what it's like to lose a job, okay? We had a dark time where, you know, food stamps was part of our reality.

Life is not easy for Christ followers, but we often hear that it's supposed to be. So let me give you a little background on this passage, which is a wonderful passage, and I hope that you're gonna leave this morning with some encouragement that you can take God at face value, okay?

But it helps that we understand context. Now, there's only so far we can go in terms of how far deep in here. So let me just draw your attention back to Jeremiah 29. Let me give you a couple of background things that are going on that help give some context to what's happening in this passage, okay?

Fair enough?

So, Jeremiah chapter 29. We're in Old Testament history here, and through centuries of being in and out with God, God is sending judgment on his people. And you may have noticed that when I read, look at here at verse one again.

This is the text of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving, which implies that in this last battle and captivity, some didn't survive, right? Surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests and all the others Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile in from Jerusalem to Babylon, okay?

God's people have once again been captured, right? We see this happening over and over and over in the New Testament. Old Testament, sorry. And here, Israel had already been captured. Now it's Judah's turn.

This is just what God cautioned and warned and said, return to me and the people wouldn't. And he gave them chance after chance. And Asa's kingship ended just a short time before this passage. This is 50 years of absolute distance from God.

He is a king led the nation of Judah and Israel into deep, deep sin, child sacrifice, all the immorality you can imagine, worship of other idols and God says enough. Says enough. And so into exile they go.

Jeremiah is writing right at the time that this is all happening, okay? And so the people are carried into captivity. They're down under Nebuchadnezzar's rule in Babylon. And this message is sent because Jeremiah heard from God.

God said, write this down, get this letter off to these people. And this is the message. While you're there in your struggle, do not try to get out of it. Because God knew this is a mercy. And as I was reading about this this week, this is a mercy of God to say, look, you need to sit tight.

You're gonna sit in captivity and you're gonna be there for a while. Hey, did you notice back in verses five and six and then up here in 10, there's an actual number of years. Now this isn't necessarily to be translated perfectly literal 70 years to the day, but it talks about a completeness of time.

You're gonna be there in trouble, in captivity for a while. I will be doing a work. And if you keep trying to revolt and break out of that city, more and more of you are gonna die and be slaughtered. And this is not my plan.

You gotta trust me. You're in it, deep in it, and you're gonna be in it for 70 years. Now, this is not a popular message, is it? This did not go well for Jeremiah to be the deliverer of this talk. But God knew what he was doing.

And he was preserving himself a nation for the future. This promise about hope and a future, and I'm gonna prosper you, is because God has a plan for the people of Israel for the future. He's not done with them yet.

And of course we can take some of that and apply it to our lives, but we have to understand initially this promise is given to a people and about their future.

Make sense?

All right.

Now, to make matters more confusing, you have Jeremiah giving this crystal clear message. It's gonna be a long haul. So settle down, get married, plant crops. You're gonna be in Babylon. Pray for the prosperity of the city because you're gonna be blessed by that.

But this is not about you. It's gonna be about you in the future and preserving you as a nation. Blessing will come. You need to hang in there through this season. Now, here's the hard part. There were prophets, quote, unquote, prophets, who were saying the exact opposite thing.

And all through this book of Jeremiah, you see these contests going back and forth between Jeremiah's truth and the lies of the day coming through the voices of other prophets who were saying different things.

And God, through Jeremiah, is saying over and over and over, don't listen to them, don't listen to them, don't listen to them. I'm not sending those people. They are not telling you the truth. You know what their message was?

Don't listen to Jeremiah. Of course it's gonna be good for you. God's gonna get you out of this in no time. Take Jeremiah and let's, you know, and if you read this book, this poor guy went through it.

He's often called the weeping prophet, right? Because he just, he not cried for himself, he cried for these people who were so easily deceived by the next false message, right? And that false message was, it's all gonna work out for you really quick.

It's gonna be okay. Don't listen to Jeremiah. And so Jeremiah was often running away from people who were looking to kill him, put him in stocks, put him in irons, and he was thrown in a pit at one point.

His life was sought by the other prophets, God's people, who did not understand. I don't know if you have ever, by way of application to that little bit of background on what's going here, there's two things here that just get really tough for us as we try to live out our Christian life in the context of what do I do with all this stuff in God's word?

Here's the first. The first is that God does allow very difficult things into our lives. These people went into exile, and you've had tough stuff too. And I think it's just so easy for us to hear different voices in our culture that say just the opposite.

And they'll say things like, oh, it might be going tough for you now, but you hang in there tomorrow. And if you've ever had somebody, you want to just kind of sometimes punch them in the face a little bit, because you're really wrestling with something, and there's the quick answer and the quick verse and that whole list we talked about from the upfront, a lot of neat promises in there.

And we need to know those promises, and we need to cling to those promises, but they can be used to whack people.

Why are you struggling? Didn't you read the Bible that God said.

It's all gonna work out real quick? But that is just not the truth. It might not be quick for you. It wasn't quick for these people. They were stuck in tough times for a really long time. So either that verse is trying to teach me something different, or maybe God can't be trusted.

And if you're honest with yourself, you have had to wrestle with this at some point in your life. I know you have. Maybe this morning. So here's what happens is I've thought this through and looked at these verses.

You can just see some things happening, even with the people of Judah at this point in time as they're in captivity. And here's the first one. They start to doubt. They hear the promise and they start to doubt, right?

And as a result, the way that that manifests itself is people start going after Jeremiah. They go after the messenger, and he gets himself, you know, sees God get him out of a whole bunch of different pickles that these people, they're just not happy.

So one of the ways that this happens in our culture today is this whole prosperity theology. I looked up a definition. Can I just read this to you? This is the, what I would say would be the false prophets of our day as it pertains to how do we wrestle with trials, with suffering, with difficulty, with pain, right?

Here's the definition of prosperity theology. It's really interesting. Rob would remember this and others who went with Pastor Don and myself to Uganda a couple of years ago, this is just rampant in Uganda.

And in my other experience in other African countries from other stuff that I've done through my, rampant in Africa and it's rampant here. Here's what prosperity theology says. Listen, sometimes referred to as the prosperity gospel, the health and wealth gospel, the gospel of success or seed faith.

It is a controversial religious belief among some Protestant Christians who hold that financial blessing and physical wellbeing are always, that's the key word, are always the will of God for them, not faith.

That's the prosperity message. God wants to prosper you, not to harm you, give you hope in the future. And you can do all things through Christ who gives you strength and this is true. And I don't mean to sound trite about God's word, but taken out, it is.

Taken out of context, that's trite. God is not saying that, but we want to believe that. We're so quick to hear it and other people teach it and preach it and huge churches are built around prosperity because it's a message we are drawn to.

I'd love a little more.

I'd love a little more. The problem with the prosperity theology, the prosperity gospel, this health and wealth thing is that the focus is 180 degrees switched. The point of scripture, the point of your life, my life, God in our lives, his calling you to a relationship with him, that is all about his glory.

Prosperity theology, health and wealth, it's gonna be good for you. What's wrong with you? You don't have enough faith to get past these things and just be happy and go, that is all about you. Your happiness, your success, a little more for me, I certainly have it coming.

Look how hard I've been to church every Sunday for how many years running. Doesn't God owe me a little something? And many will say, a little bit of faith, you'll get a little bit more. It's gonna be okay for you.

You're gonna blow right through that ceiling, what's holding you down, right? And we buy this. Let me ask you a question. If Satan was able to come alongside Adam and Eve in the garden and create doubt in their minds about the goodness of God when everything was perfect, right, how much more so are we susceptible to Satan's whispers and lies in a broken world where there's suffering and death and loss and hurt and pain and you name it and you've gone through it, how much more susceptible are we to listen to that voice that says God's not that good?

He said right here, but it's not happening and you're not experiencing it. And if Satan could persuade, right, Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to sin, boy, are we not susceptible to the same source of temptation that whispered God might not be all he says he is, right?

And so we are faced with a choice. What am I gonna do with that? Let me ask you a really hard question. He was excited, passionate, joyful about your faith today. If you're a Christ follower, right, are you as excited and passionate and joyful about it today as you were back then?

Back then when you met him for the first time and couldn't believe that eternal life is at the end for you. Couldn't believe that he could erase your past and count you as righteous and holy and pure at his sight.

When you couldn't believe that even though it's tough here, the Holy Spirit resides in us, prompts us along the way, he's our guide, he's our comfort, and you couldn't believe that and you go, yes, and what did I do to deserve this?

Nothing, but God loves you and opens your eyes to see Ephesians 2 and I gave you the faith to believe, not by works, right? Do you remember that and how excited you were? How is it today? And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in there, little lies have lodged their way in our heart that cause us to question the goodness of God, that makes it harder to be exuberant and joyful and excited about them, maybe.

So there's a man who is driving in the backwoods of Montana and he sees a sign that says, talking dog for sale, right? I'm pulling over, right? And he pulls over, goes up to the house, guy says, the dog's in the back.

Goes to the back, there's a nice lab, laboratory retriever in the backyard tied up. Man goes to the dog, you talk? And the dog goes, I'm not gonna do like dog imitations, I'm not gonna do dog imitations the whole way here.

But the dog goes, as a matter of fact, I can. Can you imagine? The guy's dumbfounded, picks his jaw up off the floor. Well, this is unbelievable, what's the story? The dog says, well, I figured out I could talk at a pretty young age and, you know, wanted to do something for my country.

And so I let the government know about my gift and they hooked me up with the CIA. And they started flying me from, you know, country to country and I was sitting in on high powered meetings and talk of war and conquest and everything else.

And people would speak freely in front of me because nobody expected that a dog was listening and reporting in and eavesdropping and then reporting back. They had no idea. But all this travel kind of took its toll on me.

And, you know, I thought, you know, I need to do something more local. The jet lag is killing me. And so the dog goes on and he says, you know, so I worked at the airport, you know, for a while after that and won a bunch of awards because I was able to, you know, listen in on discussions and I helped with them drug busts and I helped with all kinds of, you know, security issues.

And I got medals and it was really kind of neat, but I got tired of that too. And so I just decided to settle down. I got married, I had a mess of puppies. Now I'm just retired. So the guy goes to the farmer who's selling the dog and says, that's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

How much are you selling them for? 10 bucks, 10 bucks.

And he goes, what?

10 what? Goes, yeah, everything that dog says is a lie. He's never been out of the backyard. All right, so I'm thinking this is what happens. We, forgive me, this is a little lame, but it speaks to me and my sense of humor, but we have a talking God on our hands, right?

And he says some unbelievable things. But if we start letting lodge in our heart that what he says can't be trusted or worse is a lie and we might not ever say it to somebody, what does that do to our relationship with him?

How far does it cheapen it? And where is God in your life? Is he in the front with a priceless, tag on him that says it's irreplaceable, it's unfathomable. Or do we have a sign on them where we'd sell them for just a little bit?