11/16/14-Jeremiah 29:1-14; 1 Tim.2:1-4-“Follow Plan J”
The prophet Jeremiah lived a long, long time ago, and he wrote this passage to his people when they were hurting.
To really grasp how welcome these words would have sounded, we must go back to biblical times.
After Moses, Joshua, Saul, David, and Solomon, when all finally seemed peaceful in the kingdom of Israel, things started to go south. God’s people began to forget about Him and started to live without Him, doing whatever felt right with no regard to the Holy One who had redeemed them to freedom.
God loves Israel like a husband loves a wife, and these wrongs and sins and chasing after other gods is just like infidelity. Yet, God wants to give His beloved another chance, and another, and another.
And so for 400 years, God sent prophet after prophet after prophet to try and win his bride back, to woo her back, out of his deep care.
Yet, Israel would not listen, so they became vulnerable to attack, and they got into a war, and they lost. They lost a war, and they were taking captive away from their homes to the capital of the empire that just beat them to live as refugees for the rest of their lives.
If anyone needed to be reminded that God was still there, it was these guys, and here is Jeremiah and he saw all of it.
These guys needed to know God knew the plans they had for them. They needed to know there was hope and a future and, that is exactly what they got. 🙂
Pray for the land you are in to prosper, for we as believers know that we too are refugees in a way. Our home is heaven, so we can pray for the prosperity of the land for our land.
And we too can pray for the land we are in for we as believers are called to pray for all sorts of reasons. Do we pray for the lost in our land, that they would come to know Jesus? We mention our joys and concerns, yet we must not forget those who still have yet to have the hope that we claim.
Do we pray for our leaders, even when we disagree with them? Because remember, God desires to save them too.
When the people in Jeremiah’s time lost everything, they thought God had abandoned them.
He hadn’t. In fact I would think that the reason he sent them away to a foreign land was so that maybe the foreigners would be exposed to the truth of God as well.
He knows the plans he has for all of us.
He was using Jeremiah to reassure the people, “I have this all under my control, and this is going to work out for your good”.
Listen here today, God has not left you, He has not abandoned you and He has not forsaken you.
At times in our lives, we think God may have left us, moved on, but no friends, God may be preparing you, friend, just as he did then, for a new beginning with Him at the center.
And He gives us the most precious gift of all: Himself, in the Person of The Holy Spirit.
God’s goodness is secure, and we can have peace in that. When you enter times of trouble or sudden change, pray diligently, and move ahead doing whatever you can rather than give up.
Take it to Jesus, do what you can, then trust Him that He also knows the plans he has for you, plans to give you hope and a future. He knows the future, so we need not fear. His plans for us are good and full of hope.
Not only will God forgive, He will do much more than that.
To them, and to us, He will end the captivity by breaking the chains of sin, discouragement and doubt, giving us freedom to love.
To them, and to us, He will restore His people, like an artist restoring a masterpiece to its original brilliance.
To them, and to us, He will gather us from our lostness and darkness, and guide us by His holy light until we are gathered to our true land, heaven.
If we seek him wholeheartedly, he will be found. Neither a strange land, sorrow, persecution, nor physical problems can ever, ever break our fellowship with God, for we are His. No matter what we endure in life brothers and sisters, we can press on, “for He knows the plans He has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.”
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