Future Uncertainty and Control

There are a lot of things you can worry about: your health, your job, not meeting people’s expectations (our own or others’), not realizing your potential, economic stability, aging, managing stress, the future — the list never ends. Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Bring your worries to church and lay them down before Jesus as we talk about three common things we struggle with.

The future is uncertain, but you don’t have to know what’s coming to trust the One who does. So, stop waiting for circumstances to change, and live now, faithfully, in the place God has put you.

Relax: whatever it is, God’s got it.

Transcript

Good morning, friends. My name is Brian. I’m one of the pastors here at Community Covenant Church. And my family and I moved here in 2019 to plant this church. Funny thing about church planting is that it is an exercise in future hope. You actually don’t have any guarantee that you’re going to succeed. And quite frankly, uh the only thing that you have when you start a church is a dream.

Now I am a dreamer. I love dreaming about the future. Uh, I have a StrengthsFinder profile that includes dreaming except they call it futuristic. So, I’m a futuristic thinker and sometimes my dreams can be my superpower as Gallup StrengthsFinder would tell you and it can help me imagine something really cool that like either my family could do, I could do, or we could do as a church. It’s really awesome. But sometimes I find that my dreams can be something that I put my hope in. Like I literally put my hope in the specific thing that I’m dreaming about. If I could just get that one thing, then everything would be okay. And an example of that is, you know, if we could just get a church building, then everything would be great. like we wouldn’t have to set up and tear down. Uh we could start midweek programming really easily. And I’ve learned that apparently if you have a physical building, people can find you on Google a lot easier.

But there there’s something dangerous that happens when we start to live and hope for our dreams. Um because what happens when our dreams don’t actually appear or become reality? then we’re disappointed. And I think as humans, we’re prone to putting our future hope in all kinds of dreams. Some of us put our hope in a great job. If I can just get that perfect job, all of life will be great. Others of us put our hope in enough money. If I just had enough money, then all the other things would just be fantastic. Some of us, it’s about a healthy body. If I just had a healthy body, then life would be good. And finally, I think some of us are just looking for the right relationship. And if I had the right relationship, then all of life would somehow magically be better.

Well, the people in today’s passage had their dreams crushed and disrupted, and they’re trying to figure out where they can put their hope. The prophet Jeremiah is speaking to them and he has a word for them that I think still applies to us today and it comes from Jeremiah chapter 29 and we’re going to be specifically in verse 11. Now this is one of the most famous verses that is used every spring for people on their graduation cards. Maybe you’ve seen this.

And so this is all part of our relax series. As you saw a little bit earlier, we’re going to talk about some of the most common things that we worry about, expectations, health, and our future. And today, we’re going to wrestle with our dreams for the future. And our theme verse for this whole series is Matthew 11 28 where Jesus says, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” So, we want to help you relax the fall season, all the busyness, we’re getting started, all the things happening. We have the activity blessing today and we want to help you relax in Jesus because whatever it is that you are experiencing, God is with you in that.

So, let’s jump in to Jeremiah 29 verse 11. It says this, “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 a hope and a future. Now, if we’re talking about our dreams, our hopes, this is like the perfect verse, right? God’s got a plan. Perfect. That plan is to prosper me, to give hope and a future. I mean, it really sounds perfect. Who doesn’t want hope? Who doesn’t want a wonderful future and no harm? We’re all signing up, right? Yeah, I’m in there. For the original recipients of this letter, this was an encouraging word to them. But, and there is a huge butt here. They were not standing on the precipice of a bright future like many of our graduates this coming spring. So, we’re going to go back and look at the context and see what’s going on here.

So, we’re going to go back to verse number four. So, if you backpedal a little bit, maybe you have to go back a page. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those carried in that 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.

So the first thing that we learned in the context of this is that God is the one that’s carrying them into exile. What’s going on here? Well, God has been warning the people and the nation of Israel for many years. We can go back to Jeremiah chapter 25, which was written before this exile. So years before Jeremiah writes the same uh writes a word of warning. He says, “Guess what? If you don’t listen to my words, then a nation from the north, Babylon, is going to come down and they are going to conquer you and they’re going to carry you off and you will be there for 70 years. And that’s exactly what happened in 597 BC. Babylon captured Jerusalem and they forced the members of the royal family, the officials, the soldiers, the skilled craftsmen, all the important people in the city of Jerusalem to march off to Babylon. hundreds of miles that they were forced to march.

And now here in 29, Jeremiah says, “Well, now that you’re here, settle down, build houses, plant gardens, marry.” In other words, start living, doing life. He also tells them to seek the prosperity of the city. And this is so counterintuitive, countercultural. I mean, when somebody hurts you, you want them to hurt. But here, they’ve been hurt. And God says, “Seek their prosperity. Seek their wellness because that’s the way of the kingdom, not harming the people who have hurt us.”

But there’s a second problem. Even if they wanted to bless the city around them, how could they? I mean, they had been the ones in power, they had the authority and the ability to make things happen. And now they’re living in somebody else’s kingdom. They’re living under somebody else’s power. So, they’re refugees in somebody else’s kingdom. What power do they have to seek the prosperity of anyone? And isn’t that how we feel sometimes when things happen that are kind of outside our control? We think, “What power do I actually have here?”

Well, Jeremiah says that they have the power to pray to God and that if they do that their captives will prosper and then they also will prosper. But that instruction wasn’t just for them. It’s also for us. Whenever we feel like we are in a place where we can’t do anything, we can pray. We can ask God to do something to change the circumstances that we cannot change. And we can settle down. We can build a life. We can marry, raise families. We can put down roots. We can take care of the people around us. We can seek the welfare of the place where God has put you. And we can pray even when we feel powerless for the exiles.

There was one more big problem. In verse 8, Jeremiah says, “Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says, “Do not let the prophets and the diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them, declares the Lord. These false prophets are essentially telling them whatever they want to hear. And in verse 10, we find out what it is that they’re telling them. And we find out the truth that Jeremiah is proclaiming. He says this. This is what the Lord says. When 70 years, which I talked about, are complete for Babylon, I will come to you. I will fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.

The truth is the exile is going to last 70 years. This is not just a small setback. It’s not hanging there for a couple years, a couple months. No, this is 70 years of exile. And if you think about the ancient lifespan of a person, most of the people that are listening to this, they’re not going to make it through the 70 years. That’s why a quick turnaround was such a nice idea. They like that idea. We like that idea. Who likes longsuffering? That’s what they wanted to believe in and that’s what they were putting their hope in that this would turn around maybe tomorrow.

And I think that’s exactly what a dream can do for us. It’s what we hold on to, what we hope for. It’s a hope that we hide in. We want to believe a building, a job, enough money, a healthy body, or a right relationship will fix everything and will make everything right. And maybe it does for a little while. But none of those things, whatever it is that you’re thinking about, can carry the weight of our hope. Only God can carry the weight of the hope that we have. And I was just thinking, it’s okay to hope big, but it’s who and what we hope in. And that’s exactly what God is teaching the exiles in verse 11.

So, let’s take another look at verse 11. It says this, “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 a hope and a future.” Notice what God isn’t saying. It’s not you will know the plans that I have for you. It’s not come to me and I will tell you everything that’s going to happen to you. It’s also not written to individuals. It’s written to a community of people. Some of these exiles, as we already noted, are not going to make the 70 years. They won’t live to see the story finish. And we may not live to see the story unfold, but their children and their grandchildren did get to see the finish. Some of them got to walk back into Jerusalem. And maybe that’s true for us as well. Maybe we won’t get to see how it all unfolds, but our kids may. Our spiritual kids, our biological kids may get to experience the goodness of God because of our faithfulness. Because we have been faithful to build and settle down and do the things that God is inviting us to do. Maybe our kids, our grandkids, whether they’re biological or spiritual, will experience the goodness of God.

Now, I want to talk about God’s promise not to harm you. This isn’t a promise that you won’t experience any evil, suffering, or loss. Instead, it’s a promise that this is not the end of the story. God has not abandoned you no matter what you are experiencing. And the word translated prosper in our NIV um here is the Hebrew word shalom. And this word shalom means peace. It means wholeness. It means completeness, fulfillment. And if we keep looking at the text and if we were to keep reading 12 through 14 and beyond, we see in the verses following that God says that when they seek him, they will find him. So the real promise here is not the plan. It’s Jesus. It’s God himself. That’s the promise that we have. That’s what the exiles could cling to and that’s what we can cling to.

It’s a promise that they could trust because God had already pulled their ancestors out of slavery in the land of Egypt. He had brought them through the wilderness and he had brought them to the promised land already. And we can trust God as well because we can look back at the resurrection. Jesus who was God came down into our world, lived in our broken and messed up world. He was crucified. He was buried. And on the third day, he rose again. And the empty tomb is the proof that if God can raise Jesus from the dead, then we can trust that God will not abandon you in a time of trouble. And that if you seek God, you will find God. So, God’s invitation to the exiles via Jeremiah is the same invitation that Jesus extends to us in Matthew 11 28. Come to me all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

So, I want to invite the worship team to come on up and play some music because after I close, I want to invite you to reflect on three different questions. Uh they’re going to put them up on the screen for you and I want you to spend most of the time thinking about the last question. Uh that’s the one about faithfulness. Can you get the questions up there for us? Perfect. Because as much as uh Jeremiah’s invitation to faithfully rest in God, it is also about being faithfully devoted to God. I also want to mention at this time that we do have prayer ministers that will be off to the side over there that can pray with you and for you because we’re not meant to do this alone. We need one another and they would love to pray with you and for you.

So in closing, I want to take you back to the beginning where we started. Dreams are good. Dream about great, crazy, awesome, amazing, big, hairy, audacious things. Dream dreams. I love dreams. But don’t let the dream become the thing that you put your hope in. Because dreams change, circumstances change, our health changes, jobs change, relationships change. Even the things that we build change, but God never changes. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So when you don’t know what the future holds, well, you do know who holds the future. God is at work and God will never ever abandon you. And when you come to Jesus, you don’t have to worry about the future because he will give you rest.

Let’s pray. Then we’ll reflect. God, thanks uh for your word today. Thank you for Jeremiah the prophet reminding us of the truth that you are always at work and you are doing good things in our world. Sometimes we experience the brokenness of the world when we go through suffering. But we know that when we go through suffering that that is not because you have abandoned us. You are always with us and you’re doing something even if we can’t see it. So, help us to put our trust in you and help us to be faithful in the meantime. Amen.