There’s a state of mind that happens when we face something traumatic. And we can be in a state of shock, a state where you think differently, where you probably can’t even process and think through it. We’ve all been through that with dealing with trauma, with family members, with news that surprised us, situations we’ve been in where it seems like our world collapses, but it’s probably hard to tell, hard to completely understand what Israel was like when they were in this state after, well, the prophets had been warning them for a couple of generations of how they’d fallen from God.
And they said, repent or your world’s gonna be destroyed. Destroyed. Jeremiah was speaking to the people of Israel, well, really specifically the people of Judah, when Babylonia, when the Babylonians destroyed them and took the people back to Babylonia, all the leaders, all the people of influence went to Babylonia, and Jeremiah continued his prophecy.
And in the middle of this state of shock where the people were hurt and feeling destroyed, Jeremiah had an amazing message. Now, today is the culmination of what us talking about, a holiness of heart and life. And Jeremiah came with a message of future hope.
We’ve talked about how we need to, increase our spiritual strength, increase, have financial fortification, have family foundation, strengthen our relationships, have a fitness focus in our life for our physical health, for our mental acuity, for our emotional strength, and for our spiritual fitness. All those things that are pertinent to this life and having a plan for each one of those tells us something about where we are headed. Jeremiah said these words to the people who were hurting and felt like everything was lost, that they were abandoned by God and they had nothing left to live for in Jeremiah 29, 10 through 14, where you stand as you’re able.
For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 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.
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear 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 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.
The word of God, inspired by God. For the people of God, thanks be to God. Amen, you may be seated.
Jeremiah had a message from God that was different than the reality around the people of Israel. They thought they had nothing left to look forward to. And Jeremiah said, not only will you have a future as the people of Israel, not only will Israel not be annihilated from the face of the earth, but I will bring you a future and a hope.
Now this weekend when I was thinking about this and that this sermon title was Future Hope, it seemed a little bit redundant because all hope has to do with, you know, you’re not hoping that you have a great past. I sure hope yesterday was a good day. You’re hoping for the future, but the truth is not everybody has a hope when they’re looking at the future.
They may even be thinking, I don’t even know what’s gonna come next to mess with my life. A future and a hope is what God promised to the people of Israel through Jeremiah. And you walk through this, and it shows us how when we have a plan in our lives for holiness of our heart and holiness of our lives and living for God, that it all culminates to this thing with a future hope, but there’s something missing even with all the plans we make if we don’t catch what Jeremiah is telling us.
Now, I think almost everybody has heard me tell some of the stories about when we started at One Hope and the scripture verse that we kind of had as our theme verse where the name One Hope came from was, does anybody know? I should, anybody but Lisa call that out. Ephesians 4.4. Listen to Lisa’s words though. Ephesians 4.4, and I love the NLT version which is what we have used.
I think that’s what we put on the website, but the NLT version ties it to Jeremiah 29.11. It says, for there is one body and one spirit just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. Now, if there’s anything we should do as a church, especially if your name’s gonna be One Hope, we should give people one glorious hope for the future, and that one hope is only in Jesus. That one hope is the one, our living hope, the one who came and gave everything so that we might live, and there are people, we offer, we have a two-tiered hope.
When we’re talking about holiness of heart and holiness of life, we offer a two-tiered hope that is given to us by the gospel of Jesus Christ through the Lord himself. One is a hope for the future says, someday, no matter what our struggles are here today, that God will bring us home, and our true home is in heaven. We are citizens of heaven, and in this heaven, it is paradise where he wipes away every tear, where we have no sickness and no pain.
Does anybody not live with pain of some kind? We have a future hope in that someday, we will be called home. Jeremiah said to the people, you’re spread out all over the world, but in specifically in 70 years, you will leave Babylon and come to the promised land once again. We have that hope that someday, we will be with our father in heaven.
That’s a pretty cool hope. Tier two of that hope is that while we are in Babylon, while we are here on the earth, God loves us. God says to us that it’s not just about when you die, it’s about when you live, that we can live for Christ today.
The holiness of life that we have says that God is with us now. Now, the part that is missing, even if we make all our plans, the Bible tells us over and over, people make their plans, but God laughs. Yeah, like you can control that.
So the first thing we gotta do, we need to align our plans with God’s plans to have a future hope. God knows our future. God has great plans for us too, a plan for welfare and not for evil to give us a future and a hope, but he says we need to seek the Lord to give him all our heart and life, and then we’ll find the Lord.
That’s our holiness of life today, to seek the Lord, to give him everything in our heart, everything in our lives, and find him. They say that tradition says that John Wesley on his deathbed, the last words he said was the greatest of all, God is with us. I mean, you talk about hope.
I mean, the man saying it on his deathbed, not saying the greatest of all is, I’m outta here, boys, I’m going to paradise. Good luck with this. He said the greatest of all, God is with us.
No matter what we suffer, no matter what we go through in this life, our future hope says that God is with us. He is the same yesterday and today and forever. God is the same in all circumstances, and when we seek him, when we give him our heart and our life, we will find him.
Jeremiah says that over and over again, but why do we resist God’s plans? Why? If they’re so good, why? Now, most of the time, we might not openly do this, but the reason we resist is because we fear they’re going to conflict with our plans, and we think our plans are pretty cool, that our plans are going to bring us peace, that our plans are going to give us the best future we can have, but God’s plans are greater than our plans. God’s thoughts are greater than our thoughts. God’s hope for us is greater than where we stand today, and that’s pretty cool.
Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy wrote about the Battle of Antietam in 1862. Guess how long this battle lasted? 12 hours, and that ranks as the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. 10,000 Confederate casualties, and even more on the Union side.
At least the sun went down and the battle ended, wrote one historian. Smoke heavy in the air and the twilight quivering with the anguished cries of thousands of wounded men. Though militarily a draw, the mediocre Union general, George McClellan, was able to end the brilliant Robert E. Lee’s thrust into Maryland, forcing him to retire across the Potomac.
How is this possible? Two Union soldiers had found a copy of Lee’s battle plans and had delivered them to McClellan before the engagements. Bailey and Kennedy remind us that in some respects, we are no match for our adversary, who is Satan, whose wiles we are told to be wary of, but as with the General McClellan, our enemy’s plans have fallen into our hands. We know the usual strategies to entice us through lies, lust, greed, and the like.
With such knowledge given us by God’s word and God’s spirit within, we too can resist the enemy’s advances. Future and a hope. We have a future and a hope if we seek the Lord Jeremiah 29, verse 12 says, then you will call upon me and pray to me and I will be near you, you will seek me.
When we seek God, we call upon him, we pray to him, we search the scripture, we ask for the Holy Spirit. I mean, it’s hard to really know God and experience God unless we ask for the Holy Spirit. And then 1 John says, we test the spirits.
Test the spirits means, is this of God or is this not of God, that seeking God? It’s not just going out in the world and finding ourself. It’s not just making our own plans. It’s bringing the Holy Spirit into our heart and life.
Luke, Jesus puts this in a really cool way in Luke 11. In the scripture where he says, ask and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. And then he said, if you then are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? When we seek the Lord, we ask for the Holy Spirit.
Give me more of your spirit. Give me more. Give me more of you in my heart and in my life.
Seek the Lord, then you will call upon me, pray to me and I will hear you. Pray to me and I will hear you. Seek me, find me.
When you seek me with all your heart, when you seek the Lord with all your heart and life, Jeremiah says, that’s when you will find him. I mean, sometimes we think, well, God is love, God is good, God is here, God is present. So, you know, why don’t I experience him? And it’s because we’re not only called to seek him, but we seek him with all our heart, which means we give him our hearts, we give him our lives, we give him every step and every plan we have.
We turn it over to God. So, when we give God all our heart and life, we choose God and God’s plans. We choose God above any other plan we may have.
We resist the devil and we humble ourselves before God. Deacon Lawrence tells the story about Lexi Fowler, who is a shepherd and she has a sheep ranch in the west and she tried to do about everything she could do to keep those crafty coyotes from killing her sheep. She used odor sprays, electronic fences, scare coyotes, not scare crows, scare coyotes.
She has slept with her lambs during the summer and placed battery-operated radios near them. She has corralled them at night, herded them in the day, but the southern Montana rancher has lost scores of lambs, 50 in the last year alone. Then she discovered the llama.
You didn’t think I was gonna say that, did you? She discovered the llama. The aggressive, funny-looking, afraid-of-nothing llamas. Fowler said, llamas don’t appear to be afraid of anything.
When they see something, they put their head up and walk straight towards it. This aggressive behavior is as far as the coyote is concerned and they won’t have anything to do with that. Coyotes are opportunists and llamas take that opportunity away.
James 4.7 says this. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. In other words, repent.
Holiness of life doesn’t come without repentance. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. Give all your heart and life.
Resist the devil. Stop resisting God. Resist the devil.
Know that if you’re resisting God, you’re giving in to the devil. Know that if you resist the devil, you’re giving in to God. Humble yourselves before God.
Giving God all your heart and life, humble yourselves. It says, I am no longer the king or the queen of everything in my life. I have one king and I have one hope in God.
And that means we wash, we cleanse ourselves, we purify ourselves, we repent, we come back to God with hearts that are open to receive God. And then we can choose God and God’s plans. When we choose God and God’s plans, then we have something that is amazing, something that Jeremiah promises and that we find the Lord.
When we find God, we find a future and a hope. And that future tells us that God’s got something good in store for us, that God has great plans for you. Not just for Israel, not just for a few, but God has great plans for us.
But we gotta live into those. We gotta live out our calling on our lives. Our calling, first of all, I believe starts with being holy, which is a sanctification process to grow closer to God every day in our lives and to live a holy life before God.
Jeremiah tells us so clearly. Seek the Lord, give Him all your heart and life, and you will find the Lord. And you will walk every day in this life, every day in the life to come, and say God is with us.
God is here. I sought God. I gave God all I have, and I found a future and a hope.
And that’s what we offer to everyone because we have such a great God. Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you so much for Jesus Christ.
Thank you that in Jesus we have a future and we have a hope. Thank you that your plans are even better than anything we can come up with on our own. Help us to seek you in all that we do, to receive your spirit.
Help us to give everything before you, to humble ourselves, to trust you with everything we have and everything we are. Help us to find you, Lord. Thank you that your presence is here with us today, but is also with us all throughout the week, all throughout our lives, in good times, in difficult times.
Even when we are in a state of shock, you offer us hope, hope in life, hope in death, hope in the life to come. Praise God, praise Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Amen.