Jeremiah 26-29
It’s the 14th day of August. Welcome to Daily Audio Bible Chronological. I am Jill. So happy you have found your way here- that you’re here intentionally, or if you’re here accidentally. Welcome. Stick around. We hope you’ll stay. We’re walking through the word together every day in chronological order until we get through the Bible together in a year. We do that individually as we listen ourselves. And the great thing is we do that collectively as a whole community of people that are friends and family, complete strangers, but yet not really, go through the Bible in community together. Today, our reading continues in the book of Jeremiah. We’re reading Jeremiah twenty six through twenty nine. And it is the last day in the Christian Standard Bible. Tomorrow we will start a brand new translation. So, Jeremiah, chapter twenty six.
Commentary:
Well, here we are. We’re at the one of the most quoted scriptures in biblical context, the most marketable. You might see it on a wooden plaque in someone’s house or, you know, a pretty picture painted with, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope. It’s a beautiful passage. We say it to comfort people, to encourage people going through a really hard time. We say it with the intention of, oh, God has a plan in all of this. Like if you just endure a little longer then God’s going to come through, you’re going to come out the other side and your life will go back to Pinteresque, picture perfect worthiness. OK, first of all, we don’t live picture perfect lives through perfect filters. It’s such an injustice to enduring, well, when we keep comparing ourselves to the the filtered phony baloney, but that’s not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about Jeremiah 29:11. Let’s break it down. Jerusalem had been conquered. The people were forcibly being deported out of the land that they knew, into a foreign land in which they have never lived in and never known. Families completely torn apart. Some people lost in battle. Some people perhaps don’t even know if their family has been killed, if they’ve been captured, so Jeremiah writes a letter to these people that have been uprooted. This within this letter is the context of Jeremiah 29:11. Now, if those two sentences stood alone, then we could keep quoting them the way that we do. We can take our selfies and put the scripture. You know, we’re just enduring here. We’re enduring because God has plans. But this is not the whole context. Let’s go back a few verses and grab the letter in its entirety. This is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, find wives for yourselves and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters multiply. Therefore do not decrease. Pursue the well-being of the city. I have deported you to pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive. Do you hear that a little differently now in the context? It’s your families have been ripped apart. You have been uprooted from a land that you knew and taken to a completely unfamiliar land. But start all over again, remarry, start having children. And you’re going to be here a while, a while being seventy years, Jeremiah 29:11. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised and I will bring you home again for I know the plans I have for you. OK, 70 years, it’s a long time. 70 years and five kids, I have three grandchildren and one on the way due next month. And I’m not quite close to 70, 70 years is a long time to wait and to start over again. This would not be a quick fix, this would not be a quick resolution, this would be settle in. You’re going to be here a while. How easy would it be to be bitter, to be discouraged, to be hopeless and want to give up? How badly would you be thinking about just the injustice, the unfairness and the desire to return to the things that you know, that you knew, that were familiar and comfortable? Does this sound at all familiar? Can we relate at all? It reminds me of two words: endure well. But we get so caught up in overcoming, overcoming. I’m an overcomer get me there as fast as possible, as quickly, as painless, as inexpensively as possible. Well I think the message that I hear is endure well, settle in. Change your mindset. It’s going to take a minute. I did a little math for us- 70 years, two thousand one hundred and twenty nine months. Twenty five thousand five hundred and fifty days. One million five hundred and thirty three thousand minutes. Got to settle in. Got to endure well.
Prayer:
Father, help us, help us to endure. Help us to grasp the message that endurance is so much more a relatable part of our story, rather than overcoming. We can overcome again and again and again because we overcome and we fall down, we overcome and we shrink back. We overcome and we lose ground. But we never stop enduring. Renew our patience, renew our strength, renew our hope, take away our bitterness, take away our anxiety and depression for what we cannot change in the past and what we cannot control in the future. But I do thank you and I praise you that you do have plans for us, plans for us to prosper. But like endurance, prosperity is not the only part of that story. Give us hearts of gratitude in every phase of the journey, every situation, every day of our lives. We thank you and we praise you, our hope. We pray this in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Announcements:
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Community Prayer Line:
Hey, my precious DABC fam, this is Kingdom Seeker Daniel. I just want to pray for….I want to pray a general prayer for all the DABCers here. The last couple of days, maybe even three days have just been some heavy calls. I wish I just had time to call everybody’s name, but I don’t. So I just want to pray a general prayer for all of us here at the DABC, specifically those of you that are going through some extreme hardship. So let’s all hold hands family, around this global campfire. Father, oh Father, we need you. We desperately need you right now. Lord, we know that there is absolutely nothing too hard for you, nothing impossible with you, so I come with my brothers and sisters all around the global campfire here at the DABC, asking that you would touch every family member, every home represented here, every situation, every circumstance, every trial, every hardship, every struggle, every problematic issue that so many of your children are faced with. God, would you reach your hands into the lives of these your sons and daughters and cause your perfect will to be established in every detail of every issue of every household? You know the stories and you’re the author and the finisher of them all. God, give peace, give comfort, give strength, give hope and give endurance to the glory of your name. Amen.