And now if you will, turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Jeremiah.
I'm going to be reading Jeremiah 29, verse 1 through verse 14.
This morning in Sunday school, you're dealing with the Ten Commandments.
And one of the problems that a lot of people have when they look at God, they think that
it's all about obedience, it's never about grace.
But before you get to the Ten Commandments, God tells us, people, I'm the one who brought
you out of Egypt.
I'm the one who saved you.
The Ten Commandments are in response.
Another problem we have in looking at God is the prophets, because we think, well, it's
all about judgment, it's all about the bad things that people have done, God's people,
the nations, and they deserve to be punished.
You read Jeremiah, there is no doubt that is there.
But there is also prophecies of grace.
And that's what I want to look at this morning.
Yes, God's people sin.
They sin greatly.
Yes, God's people were taken into Babylon as punishment for their sins.
But Jeremiah does not leave God's people hopeless.
Let's listen to what he says to them.
This is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the surviving
elders among the exiles into the priests, the prophets, and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar
had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.
This was after King Jehoekjin and the Queen Mother, the court officials, and the leaders
of Judah and Jerusalem, the skilled workers and the artisans had gone into exile from
Jerusalem.
They entrusted the letter to Lasha, son of Shepin, and to Gamaria, son of Hilikai, whom
Zedekai, a king of Judah, sent to King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon.
It said, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says to all those I carried
into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.
Build houses and settle down.
Plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Marry and have sons and daughters find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage
so that they too may have sons and daughters.
Increase in number there.
Do not decrease.
Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.
Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says.
Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you.
Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.
They are prophesying lies to you in my names.
I have not sent them, declares the Lord.
This is what the Lord says.
When 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise
to bring you back 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 to future.
Then 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, declares the Lord, and will bring you back from captivity.
I will gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you, declares the
Lord, and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.
Let's pray and ask God to bless this reading of his word.
Our Lord and our Savior, we need to hear the good news of the gospel, especially in a sinful
world where your people have to live.
This morning we need wisdom on how to live and not to be overly disappointed by what
we see around us.
Help us to trust in your promises which always come true.
So bless your people this morning.
Amen.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a foreign country?
Some of you may have had that experience.
No, I'm not talking about going to a foreign country for a few weeks as a tourist because
when you are in those foreign countries they have the tourist places and it's just like
being in America.
They have their McDonald's, they have their Starbucks, they have their Burger King.
I'm pretty sure there's a Chick-fil-A somewhere in Europe.
So you can go there.
And by the way, most of the people can speak English in those tourist spots.
So you may feel like you're at home.
But that's not what I'm talking about this morning.
I am talking about being forced to leave your home and live in a foreign nation.
I want you to think about the challenges you would face.
You would not know the language.
Can you imagine going to the store and not knowing the language or you could not read
the labels or the prices?
You'd be struggling and you'd try to communicate and people would know what you're saying.
You would have the problems with currency.
How much is this?
And there are many people who go to foreign countries, they don't understand the currency.
Here's the money if I got any change, okay.
And there are the local customs.
How do you greet one another?
What about tips?
What about standing in line for hours?
The closest a lot of us get to that experience is probably going off to college or going
into the military where it is a whole new environment.
Well, in history, people have been taken from their homeland by force and placed in a foreign
country that was not their own.
It happened all the time and it happened to God's people.
Their home was supposed to be Palestine, Israel, but God's people sinned and sinned greatly.
And the northern kingdom of Israel was invaded by Assyria and people were carried off.
Later the southern kingdom would be invaded by Babylon and the people were carried off
to a foreign country to a land that is not their own, to a language they probably did
not understand.
They seem to be abandoned.
They did not know the laws, they did not know the language, they did not know the customs.
And yet as we think about our own situation today, we're a lot like them.
We are exiles.
We were meant to be in heaven, in the new heavens, the new earth, we were meant to be in Eden,
but where are we?
We've been kicked out, we're wandering around.
It is no wonder that the Bible says we're pilgrims and exiles in this world.
We are not at home.
This is not our home country.
We are destined for some place else.
And so we need to listen to the message that Jeremiah has for us this morning because it
answers the question, how then should we live in a land that is not our own?
Because this land is not ours.
We are simply passing through exiles on our way back to our heavenly home with Jesus.
So how do we live?
How do we live?
What kind of wisdom are we looking for here?
Well, let me tell you here what Jeremiah is saying to God's people in exile.
He is telling them, you have to deal with the hand that you have been dealt with.
You got to take what has been given to you and make the best out of it.
That is in essence what he is saying in the first part of chapter 29.
Now they are in exile.
They're in Babylon.
But what do you think God's people were going through at that time?
No more temple where they could go and watch the worship services.
No more daily sacrifices.
No more king sitting on the throne at Jerusalem.
No more feasts and festivities.
That's what they are facing.
What should they do?
Should they forment rebellion?
Stir things up for the local government there?
Trash the king of Babylon saying that he's not a good king.
He's a tyrant.
Should they plot to escape to go back to Jerusalem and the promised land?
Should they create riots in the streets and steal from their Babylonian neighbors because,
well, they deserve it.
They're ungodly.
So what does God say?
What does God say to his people?
Do that.
We would probably want to do those things.
But here Jeremiah says something different.
And what we have here is a letter that he wrote to the Babylonian exiles.
And it is a letter which is carried in a diplomatic pouch, we would say today, to the people who
were in Babylon.
And he is telling them how then they should live.
And I want you to look at the commands, the imperatives that he gives God's people.
Here's what he says in verse 5.
Build houses.
Settle down.
Plant gardens.
Eat what they produce.
Hurry and have sons and daughters find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage
so they too may have sons and daughters.
Increase in number there.
Do not decrease.
What Jeremiah has basically told them is what God told mankind in the Garden of Eden.
Take care of your daily business.
This is the hand that you have been given.
You are to build a life for yourself in this place.
Now I got to tell you here, this is very average.
It's very mundane.
It's very everyday.
Get a job.
Raise families.
It's not glamorous.
It's not headline grabbing.
It is not outstanding.
It's not going to make the covers of evangelical Christian magazines.
It's not going to make the headline story of seminary publications.
But this is what life is about, isn't it?
This really is what it means to be successful.
What is telling us people, you're going to be there for 70 years.
You've got to make the best of it according to my word.
And what God wants for His people is to prosper the best that they can in an alien environment.
Want you to think of 1 Timothy 2.
What does it say?
Pray for all those in authority.
Why?
So that you can live quiet and peaceful lives, godly and dignified in every way.
What does it say in Ecclesiastes 5 verse 18,
Behold what I've seen that is good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all
the labors that you labor under the sun the few days of your life that God has given you.
What is saying to His people today, get on with the average, everyday business of life.
No, it is not spectacular, but it is His will.
And what we do is follow after His will.
That's what you should want.
Not the super spectacular.
The average every day.
God is pleasing to God just as much as the spectacular.
Not all of life is going to be a super bowl.
A lot of it is the Monday.
And I want you to notice something else, he says in verse 7 that they are to do in exile.
In verse 7 it says,
Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile,
pray to the Lord for it, because it is if it prospers you too will prosper.
He is saying pray for Babylon.
Why?
Because if Babylon is stable, if Babylon prospers, guess what?
You will too.
You need to pray for the country you are in because it's good for you.
And I want you to notice in the Bible how a lot of God's people in exile were very supportive
of the country they were in.
Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, Esther in Persia, both supported and helped the nations
they were in.
So then how do we live?
Looking at what we've just seen here, you make the best of your life.
I wish I could get up here and promise you a miracle every minute.
I wish I could say to you that miraculously something great will happen that will take
away all your problems.
And I want you to think for a moment what people would have thought back then.
Oh God, do a miracle.
Don't wait seven years.
Do it now.
We want Israel to prosper, but it wasn't happening.
They were invaded.
They wanted something different.
And what about you?
Don't you want something different, but yet you feel it's not going to change?
You're in exile too.
You're away from Eden.
And we want things to change and we expect a miracle.
Sometimes Christianity seems to breathe that on people in the congregation, but it may not
work.
And what God requires of you in exile is to just get on with the business of life as best
as you can.
That is one thing that we are told to do here.
Beware of thinking that true holiness is becoming a missionary, the preacher, having
static experiences.
Now those things, they are fine if you want to do those.
But let's remember what most of the people were doing back then.
They were common ladies.
Just getting by with life.
And we sometimes think that isn't good enough.
But it is.
It certainly is.
Keep in mind very few of you people are going to change the world.
Only God can change the world.
And if you can't change the world, then we have to do what we are called to do on a daily
basis.
And one other point here we need to make is certainly pray as Christians for the United
States of America.
Because sometimes I think we are on the precipice of disaster.
You may feel that way too.
From incompetence all over the place, for people who can't get along, and the divisions
that we have, and the spending, and all of that.
I got to tell you, if the United States goes down, there's going to be an awful lot of
hurting amongst Christians.
And we need to be praying that God will change this nation.
He will protect the nation.
He will keep it going.
And I hope in your prayer lives you are praying.
What does it say in 1 Timothy chapter 2?
Pray for those in authority so that you can live peaceful lives.
Remember that it is the churches in this land that are providing an awful lot of missionary
support to increase the kingdom of God.
We don't want revolution.
We don't want an overthrow.
What we want is this nation to act like it was founded upon a constitution.
We need God to help us.
So keep that in mind.
And those are very, very average everyday things.
That is how you deal with the hand that you have been dealt.
It is not always thinking about another world or another land yet.
It is simply going about your business.
But there's something else that we've got to keep in mind here.
Yes, he tells us we've got to keep on with our daily business of having a job, of having
families, of praying for our nation.
But he doesn't leave us without hope either.
Because the second part of what I read is full of hope.
It is looking for the hope to come.
It is going about the task which God has called you, but it is also looking for the hope to
come.
And every last one of you, you've got to have hope.
If you don't have hope, you cannot go on.
There was a study done one time on why is it that certain prisoners during the Holocaust
in Europe made it and others did not?
Why?
The ones that made it had some sense of hope.
I don't know any other species in the entire universe that has to have hope like human
beings have to have hope.
And the prophet here does not leave God's people without a sense of hope.
Yes, he tells them you're going to be there for 70 years and that's not going to change,
but he also tells them something else as well.
He tells them you do have a future.
I want you to think for a moment what these people might have had going on in their heads
while they were in Babylon.
God doesn't care for us.
God has forgotten us.
God has rejected us.
God's promises for us are not true.
Seems hopeless.
But let me ask you, have you ever had those thoughts as well?
He's rejected me.
He doesn't care for me.
Everything is lousy.
But then look at what verse 11 says.
Read it.
Memorize it.
Get it into your thinking.
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.
God has not rejected his people.
God has a plan for his people.
And that plan is ultimately to prosper us and it is ultimately to provide for us.
He is saying you have a future.
There's a lot of people in life today that don't think they have a future.
They don't think they've had a future because the cards they have been dealt in life.
And they did not get a great hand.
But God says to his people, if you are with me and you are one of mine, there is hope
and there's a future.
And that hope and that future ultimately comes.
And Jesus comes again.
And we are no longer going to be the poppers of this world, no longer the second stringers,
no longer the rejected, but it will be fully known that we are the treasured possession
of God.
And in a land that is not our own, what you need to focus on is yes, doing those everyday
tasks, but also having that vision that one day Jesus is coming again.
And look at what it says in verse 12 that we will have.
Then you will call on me and come to me and I will listen to you.
You will seek me and find me with all your heart.
I will be found by you.
Declare the Lord.
You'll be with God.
You'll be with Him.
And isn't that ultimately what we really want?
What's going to change life once and forever is to dwell with God.
And you're saying to yourself, what am I to do now?
I want you to think for a moment about the life of Jacob.
And Jacob had a rough life.
I mean conflicts with Esau, conflicts with Laban, conflicts with his wives, driven out
of the promised land, winds up dying in Egypt.
But what does he say at the end of his life?
The Lord has been my shepherd.
He realized at the end of his life that God had been keeping his promise.
And part of the value of old age is that we can begin to see that in ways that we cannot
see it when we are younger.
But also keep in mind the promises of the New Testament and Titus as well, where God says,
while we wait for this blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus
Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify himself
of people who are his very own.
Ultimately that will come to fulfillment.
Yes, God is taking care of you now.
He has fulfilled his promises.
But one day he is going to want to do it even more so.
So there is a future.
There is a future.
After I had left home and moved all over the place in the south, I'd often wanted to go
home back to Colonial Heights, Virginia, back to that place which I knew the most.
But that's not my home.
Not at all.
My home is with Jesus in the new heavens and the new earth.
And to get there, I've got to rely on God and I've got a hope in him.
But I also have to get on with the daily business of life, praying for our country, doing a
job, raising a family.
Don't think that makes you a second class kingdom, a second past person in the kingdom
of God.
Let's pray.
Our heavenly Father, we ask now that you will be