The Peace and Prosperity of the City, Jeremiah 29:1-14 (November 9, 2014)

1 The Peace and Prosperity of the City, Jeremiah 29:1-14 (November 9, 2014) These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 2 This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and the metal workers had departed from Jerusalem. 3 The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. It said: 4 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 8 For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the LORD. 10 For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, declares the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. PRAY We re in our fifth week in the book of Jeremiah. And we ve skipped forward to chapter twenty-nine. Now, the first twenty-eight chapters of Jeremiah are doom and gloom. Jeremiah has been sent by God to prophesy the forthcoming attack of the Babylonian Empire on the people of Israel, and then it came and many of the people of Jerusalem were carried off into exile. The Babylonians forcibly removed them from their homes in the Promised Land and resettled them in Babylon. So it s all been bad news from Jeremiah for twenty-eight chapters, but now in chapter twenty-nine we get a message of hope from Jeremiah. He tells the exiles in Babylon, very plainly, that good things will come: 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11. And what I hope to show you from these fourteen verses this morning is how Christians should view and can relate to the world around them. What do I mean by that? Jesus in John 17 said this about his followers he s praying to the Father, and Jesus asks him for something: 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. John

2 17:15-16. Christians are to be in the world but not of the world. In the world, involved in it somehow, yet not of the world, distinct from the world, separate from the world somehow. Another famous place (the Sermon on the Mount) Jesus says to those who would follow him: 14 You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Matthew 5:14-16. This has been a much-debated subject for virtually the entire history of the Christian movement, and they ve taken these commands to be in the world but not of it in radically different directions. For example, the English lawyer John Winthrop in the seventeenth century led a group of Puritans to America to establish the Massachusetts Bay Company, and either just before these Puritans left England or while they were on ship he preached a sermon on Matthew 5:14 A city on hill cannot be hidden. The way these Puritans thought they were going to be in the world but not of it was by fleeing the iniquity and the corruption of England and establishing a brand-new civilization in the New World. Other Christians, however, thought that the way you must relate to the world is not to flee from corruption but to move in. Move into the economically depressed areas, move into the inner city, move into the government run housing, and be a light amidst the people. Same teaching, different applications. Which is it? How are we to live in the world? I think we can learn a lot from Jeremiah 29, and then we ll take the Lord s Supper. Three things: first, what we are. Second, what we must do. Third, how we can do it. First, what we are. Jeremiah 29:1: These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. The people of Israel were exiles. The Babylonians had invaded their land and forcibly removed many of the most prominent Jews in Jerusalem and now they lived in Babylon, far from home. And there they longed for home. They didn t want to make a life for themselves in Babylon. They were exiles who wanted to go back home and make a life there. By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres. 3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion! 4 How shall we sing the LORD s song in a foreign land? 5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Psalm 137:1-5.

3 Christians, the Bible says we are exiles, too. This world is not our home. 11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 1 Peter 2:11. Where is our home? Heaven. Philippians 3:20: But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ The only place, Christians, we will truly feel at home, we will truly fit in, is with the Lord Jesus in heaven. But the shame is we don t really believe that, do we? We are so often tempted to believe that we are not in exile but that this world is our home. We try live as if this world is all there is and as if this world is all that matter. But here s the thing about being an exile: you cannot feel completely at home, you cannot feel comfortable, you cannot feel like you fit in when you re an exile. The other day I was picking one of my kids up from school and I noticed that almost all the little boys walking out were wearing the very same thing they were all wearing Under Armor attire of some kind, neon socks, and neon shoes. If one kid was wearing that dozens and dozens were. That must be what is in for kids that age. Now I m not saying it s bad if you wear Under Armor and in fact I think these boys were a little too young to be worried about it my guess is their moms were buying these clothes for them. But it took me back to being a kid and wanting more than anything else to fit in with the crowd. And, you know, that feeling never really goes away. To some degree we still all want to fit in with the crowd. Maybe it s the crowd at work, or the crowd at the Grove, or the hunting camp, or the crowd of moms at the playground, or the crows of friends who post their nights out on Facebook (because they look like they re having so much fun!), or maybe we just desperately want our kids to fit in but it s a universal desire, and for Christians it s absolutely wrong. Christians, so many of us work so hard to sing the songs of the various crowds, trying to fit in with them, but we were made to sing the songs of Zion. We re living by the waters of Babylon, and our calling is to remember and long for heaven, our hearts true home. Joni Earekson Tada has a book titled: Heaven: Your True Home, and in it she writes this: Heaven is your journey s end, your life s goal, your purpose for going on. If heaven is the home of your spirit, the rest for your soul, the repository of every spiritual investment on earth, then it must grip your heart. Does it, Christians? Does heaven grip your heart? Do the songs of Zion fill your life? Or does some crowd on earth? Second, what we must do. The exiles in Babylon wanted badly to go back to Jerusalem, so when Jeremiah tells them in verse 10 that they will have to live seventy years in Babylon when basically Jeremiah is telling them that if you re an adult you will die in exile they don t want to hear it. So some false prophets rose up in Babylon and told the Jews that they weren t going to stay in Babylon long (we can read about some of them

4 later in chapter twenty-nine). These prophets said that soon - a couple of years, tops they would get to go back home to Jerusalem. So don t settle down in Babylon, they said. Stay outside of the city, live way out in the suburbs of Babylon. You re going back soon to Jerusalem. And don t let those dirty Babylonians contaminate you they will if you get to close to them. So, stay out, and don t get contaminated. But Jeremiah tells them something different. Jeremiah 29:4-6: It said: 4 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. Jeremiah doesn t say stay out, he says, settle down. Settle down in the city, into Babylon, and make a life for yourself build houses, plant gardens, get married, have children. Jeremiah said, You re exiles, Babylon is not your home, but move into the city anyway and establish yourself there. Now, we are exiles, too. How do we apply this to us? Does it mean that if you kind of live outside of town Wellsgate, Yocona Ridge, North Point, College Hill Heights that you need to move closer in, and buy an apartment on the Square? Is that the application? No that s not right. Here it is: the vast majority of Christians will not go into full-time, vocational Christian ministry. They will not serve as missionaries in some far off place. They will not serve as itinerate preachers, traveling from place to place with the gospel. Some will, some will be called to move hundreds or thousands of miles from where they grew up, in order to serve the Lord in that way. But the vast majority of Christians will do what Jeremiah said for the exiles to do: they will build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce (or get jobs and buy their produce from Kroger), and take wives and have sons and daughters. In other words, most Christians will settle down in some place, probably not too far from where they grew up, or at least in the same culture in which they grew up, put down roots, get a job, a build a family. And you know what that can be a wonderful way to serve the Lord. There s a lot of potential in that kind of life for tons of ministry as an exile for the Lord Jesus Christ. To live in the same place for decades, to faithfully work at your job, to raise a family. Some of you, and probably all of you, know of some people who lived in the same town for fifty years. They weren t missionaries, they certainly never thought of themselves that way. But they were Christians, and for forty years they lived in the same town, same neighborhood, maybe even the same house. They raised a family in that town. They

5 worked in that town at basically the same job for forty years. They were faithful members of the same church for forty years. But because they settled down in that town and made a life for themselves in that town for so long, they had so many connections. So many people knew them. So many people interacted with them at work and found them honest and fair and kind that they had built up a tremendous name for themselves in that community. Their kids grew up in that town so they got to meet so many parents and children and interact with them. In their church they d been able to serve so effectively because they d built up so much trust with the other members. Nothing flashy, nothing sexy, nothing anyone would write a book about, just a quiet life. But we all (everyone of us in this room!) know of men, and women, and couples, and families like this and how wonderfully they had served the Lord, how tremendously over the decades they d served others and provided a powerful witness for the gospel. How? Basically by just moving into a city and settling down. There are a couple of verses in 1 Thessalonians that I ve still never heard anyone preach on and, frankly, I think some people are scared of. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 (NIV 1984). The ESV has aspire to live a quiet life. Now, why would some people be scared of those verses? Well, a lot of Christians, understandably, get nervous when they read those verses because they re afraid that too many Christians will hear them and instead of settling down in the city in a good way, they ll settle down in an unhelpful way. If we talk about this too much, they fear, Christians won t just be in the world, they ll be of the world. They ll try to fit in too much. They ll forget they are exiles. That s an understandable, because that very thing has happened to a lot if not most of the American church. Much of the American church, it seems to me, has indeed forgotten that it is in fact in exile, and is trying to hard to fit in to the world. We are wearing the Under Armor (again, I m not picking on kids who wear it). We ve forgotten the mission! So what s the control? What keeps exiles from settling down to fit in and instead settling down to serve? Two things, both from verse 7: 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. Christian friends, if you want to settle down in Oxford without selling out to Oxford, you must do two things: seek the welfare of this city and pray for this city. So many people are in Oxford, probably most of them professing Christians, and are seeking their own welfare, and that s all. You come here to go to Ole Miss, or you move

6 here because of Ole Miss and you want to get on campus every chance you get, or because of your job, or because of the school system, or because of all the social opportunities there are here. And of course there s nothing wrong with benefiting from living in Oxford, because this is a great town with a lot to offer. But to only seek your own welfare here is a profoundly unchristian attitude. We must seek the welfare of the city and we must pray for it. How? It will be different for each one of us. Certainly, it will have so much with how we spend our money, certainly it will have something to do with where we live in this city, how we spend our time. But I will give you one specific example. I am so thankful that it worked out that I m preaching on this text on the Sunday we announce our move to the middle school. I didn t plan that at all in fact, I didn t connect the dots until this past week. Do you know why we re moving to the middle school in January? Yes, primarily for the space we do need more space. But also because churches can be guilty of simply existing in a city and seeking its own welfare. And friends, for whatever it s worth, the leaders at Grace Bible are mildly terrified that will happen to us, and we see this move to the middle school as a wonderful opportunity to seek the welfare of the city. Do you know how many students are enrolled in the seventh and eighth grade at Oxford Middle School? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Do you know how many of them really need help with basic tutoring in math and reading? A bunch I don t know the number, but it s a bunch. When the schools administrators in Oxford find out some of the poorer kids need school supplies, clothes, do you know who they call? It s not a church it s the Junior Auxiliary. Now, I m thankful for any person or group of people who are willing to help the poor, and certainly I am not opposed to the JA. But it s a shame it s not a church. Do you know how many teachers serve in that middle school? Do you realize what an impact they have on the welfare of this city just by virtue of the fact that they are around so many of its children? We have an opportunity with this move to partner with these teachers (many of whom go above and beyond in their jobs), encourage them, equip them, to love on these kids and, in turn, love on this city. As Grace Bible Church we have an opportunity to, in some very tangible ways, move into and seek and pray for the welfare of this city (this is a Jeremiah 29:7 move), and friends we can t pass it up. We just can t do it. That s the bottom line. That s not to say we will always meet at the middle school or that buying land is not on the table for the future of our church it is. We do plan to buy and build one day. But until such a time as that comes, for such a time as this we can see no better way to seek the welfare of the city. But how can we do it? How can we give no thought to our welfare like that (because when you re seeking the welfare of the city you re by definition not seeking your own)? And it s going to take sacrifice we won t have a permanent home of our own on

7 Sundays, we re going to have to set up and break down each week, it will be a lot of work. How can we do it? Third, how can we live this way. Read verses 11-14: 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, declares the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. God tells Israel, Yes, you are in exile. Yes, you re having to settle down far from home. But I am coming for you. I am coming for you, and I have plans for you. I have plans for your welfare, and I will restore your fortunes. Israel could afford to seek the welfare of Babylon because God himself was seeking their welfare. He was going to take care of them. And Christian friends we have the same promise today. We can afford to seek the welfare of this city and pray for this city (and not worry about our own) because God himself is taking care of our welfare. You know that, right? Matthew 6:33: Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Fundamental truth: you are not qualified to worry about your own welfare. If you do that it will only cause you anxiety, and stress, and turn you into a selfish and angry and bitter person who holds onto their money and doesn t volunteer their time who looks at all the people around them wondering why they aren t doing more for you and considering your needs more than they are. We re not qualified to worry about our own welfare. So God says don t try. If you concern yourself with your own welfare you will never serve in the kingdom of God the way he s called you to. The way you can live the life you re called to live as an exile here in Oxford is to remember how God has plans for you, for welfare and not for evil, to restore your fortunes and prosper you. And one of the best reminders of how God does this is the Lord s Supper. In the New Testament, in 1 Corinthians 11, at the end of that chapter, Paul describes how the church should take the Lord s Supper. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord s death until he comes. 1 Corinthians 11:26. Every time we take the Lord s Supper, we are reminded that we are exiles. But we are also reminded that someone is coming for us the Lord Jesus Christ. He s coming, and he has a plan for your welfare, plans to restore your fortunes. And he s coming to bring you home.

8 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 1 Peter 1:3-5. Jesus has come once, and he s coming again to take us out of exile and bring us home, bring us into our inheritance kept in heaven, guarded by faith, ready to be revealed in the last time. Now, did it cost Jesus anything to provide for our welfare? Yes, it cost Jesus everything. Isaiah 53 says that no one can speak of Jesus descendants, for he was cut off from the land of the living. What if just imagine this what if Jesus had looked down from heaven on our city and said, You know, I m not going down there to help those people unless I can prosper, unless I can make sure my welfare is looked after. What if Jesus had done that? Where would we be? Look at the Lord s Supper what is it? Body and blood, broken for you, shed for you. What does that mean? With his life, Jesus Christ did not seek his own welfare. He sacrificed it all for you. To give you a future and a hope. Friends, if we are going to be the hands and feet of Jesus in Oxford, if we are going to seek and pray for the welfare of this city, we must remember how Jesus has done it for us first. We ll take the Lord s Supper now. All Christians, whether members of this church or not, whether baptized in a particular way or not we, the elders of Grace Bible Church, welcome all believers in Jesus Christ welcome to come to the Lord s Table. But as we take it we take it to remember not just that Jesus saves us in an individual way (though he s certainly done that), but that now there is a calling on our loves as exiles to move in and settle down. To seek the welfare of our city, because that s what God has called us to do until he returns to bring us home. PRAY. To help us understand what we re doing in the Lord s supper, I want us to read a question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism, which is an old, 16 th century, Christian document How does the Lord s Supper remind you and assure you that you share in Christ s one sacrifice on the cross and in all his gifts? In this way: Christ has commanded me and all believers to eat this broken bread and to drink this cup. With this command he gave this promise: first, as surely as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup give to me, so surely his body was offered and broken for me and his blood poured out for me on the cross. Second, as surely as I receive from the hand of the one who serves, and taste with my mouth the bread and cup of the Lord, given me as sure signs of Christ s body and blood, so surely he nourishes and refreshes my soul for eternal life with his crucified body and poured-out blood.

9 Ushers, if you d come down, they will pass out bread, then come back and pass out the cups, then we ll take the Lord s Supper together. Please place your cups in trash cans in the lobby when finished (not in buckets).