Well, That's Not the Whole Story
Jordan Day · Tidal Church Moncton · September 3, 2023 · Twisted Scriptures series
Jordan Day looks at Jeremiah 29:11 in its full context, alongside Paul's story in Acts 16, and shows that God's promise is about His character as He pursues His people. He calls us to a life of purpose and obedience, not prosperity.
More from Jordan Day · The Twisted Scriptures series
Topics: Faith, Purpose, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] What a full circle moment. This is for me specifically and for probably many of you in this room. As Jeremy was mentioning, just 15 years ago, I was just this five year old kid just recently adopted, and I walked through the front doors of this church and I experienced the love of Jesus in a very, very real way. And that's impacted me greatly. It's directed me towards Jesus. It's directed me towards Him in obedience and reading the Scriptures and following after what He really has for me. And that's thanks to to many of your guys' obedience in this room. And I'm forever grateful. So it's an absolute honor to be able to journey with you today and read the Word and see what God has for us through the Scriptures. So as I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a family, and I was adopted and the family was quite large.
[0:55] I had seven older siblings, which, as the youngest of seven and having lots of siblings, I've found out very quickly the siblings argue. And that happens in all families. And I heard a few chuckles, and maybe that's hitting home for a few of us today, whether you have kids or whether you have a bunch of siblings like me. We all know that siblings argue sometimes, especially young siblings, and always in arguments. There's a few points in the argument that escalates the argument and it gets greater and greater and greater and greater. And one of the classic lines that I've used many times and it's been my go-to is the classic line: I am telling Mom. And we've all heard it, whether from the mother's perspective or the father's or as a sibling.
[1:51] And my dad had two rules in our family, jokingly, but there was much truth in it. The first rule was Mom is always right. And rule number two is if Mom is wrong, refer to rule number one. So he would joke with us like that, but there's much truth in that. In our family, we knew that if we had an argument, our mother would see the truth and that's who we went to. So we would hear the classic line, one kid would think they had the upper hand in the argument, can neither confirm nor deny this was me. And I would think I'd have the upper hand and I would go running over. And you go and you hear the classic line I am telling Mom, but the second line I think is even better. And that line is the other kid coming over and saying, oh, well, that's not the whole story.
[2:41] And we hear that's not the whole story. And it made me think maybe sometimes we do this in our lives. Maybe sometimes we do this. When we read the Bible, when I was younger, I used to close my Bible and I used to flip through it, I would stop at a certain point and then I'd point and I'd open my eyes and I'd read the words that I was pointing at. And I thought it was the profound thing that God was telling me that day. Now it seems kind of laughable now, but that's kind of what we can do sometimes when we hear something that's nice or when we hear something that's quotable and we like to pick and choose. Well, thinking about that saying, well, that's not the whole story.
[3:26] Usually when that line, when that sentence has to be used in a situation, it means things aren't that great. We see when the whole story isn't told, we get problems, we get miscommunications, we even get conflicts like me and my brother sometimes, because the whole story needs to be told. And sometimes when the whole story isn't told, we can go as far to say that things can get a little bit twisted. So as we continue our Twisted Scriptures series, we're gonna be chatting about a verse that is pretty well known. Some of you might know it in this room, some of you might have never heard it before, and that's okay.
[4:13] I know I've heard it all over the place. It's quoted, it's on mugs, it's in grad quotes, it's even in Instagram bio. So we quote it all the time. It's nice to hear, it's positive, it's quotable, right? And the verse is Jeremiah 29:11. And some of us are going, ah, yes. And some of us are going, oh, what is that verse? Well, we're gonna dive deep into the Scriptures today and we're gonna see what this verse actually is. So here's the verse. It says, "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 hope and a future." So there it is, it's positive, it's quotable, it's nice, it sounds good. It's easy to roll off the tongue.
[4:58] Some of us are like, oh, I understand why that's quotable. And some of us have heard that verse a thousand times. But the question that I want us to answer today, going with that line, well, that's not the whole story, is can this one verse, Jeremiah 29:11, can this verse, can it tell the whole story? So we're gonna dive deep into Scripture, and we're gonna see if this verse can actually tell the whole story. We're gonna jump around to a couple different places. So I need you guys to kind of track with me as we dive deep into the Word and what it has to say. So we're gonna start at the start of Jeremiah 29.
[5:45] We're gonna look in verse 1 and see what it has to say. This verse is positive, it's quotable. We like to quote it for ourselves. So let's see if it actually applies to us. So it says, "This is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the other people Nebuchadnezzar had carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon." Hmm, that's not exactly my situation. I'm sure it's not exactly your situation, but let's see if maybe their situation can apply to us. We're gonna look in verse 4 now. And it says, "This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon." Well, I know for a fact I'm not in exile.
[6:38] So let's jump to the text that we're gonna focus on this morning. It's Jeremiah 29 from verse 10 to 14, our quotable verse, our nice verses in there at the bottom, verse 11, we see it. Let's start in verse 10. It says, "This is what the Lord says: When 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill My good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you." Hear this, this is the verse that we hear all the time. "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 hope and a future. Then you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all of your heart.
[7:25] I will be found by you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I've banished you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile." Hmm, interesting. I want us to focus on one thing here back in verse 10. I want us to look at one thing. It prefaces our verse that we're looking at, verse 11. But we see in verse 10, if you wanna go back to it. Yes. And it says, "This is what the Lord says: When 70 years are completed in Babylon." Wait a second. I just want you guys to know I am 20 years old. I live in Sussex, New Brunswick, as free as can be. And we're here in Moncton, New Brunswick, worshiping Jesus very freely.
[8:17] I know for a fact that I am not in exile, that the Lord is commanding that when 70 years are completed in Babylon, that I'll do this. Hmm. It's an interesting perspective to now take and look at. It's interesting to see the whole context. It's actually important. One thing that we hear all the time in Bible college is context determines meaning. All the time we walk into conversations, or at least I know, I walk into conversations and I hear like one line out of the whole conversation. It's like 20 minute conversation. And I come in at the 20th minute and I say, and I hear one sentence.
[9:05] And then what do we say immediately? Oh, what? What were you talking about? What did you just say? We don't go off that one sentence and then all of a sudden start talking and being in the conversation like nothing had happened. We wanna be brought up to speed. So that's why context matters, right? Because we need to be brought up to speed. We can't just start in verse 11 and then not read verse 10 when it says, "When 70 years are completed in Babylon." We just skipped over that part. That's a big part to skip over. 70 years, that's a lifetime. So maybe we're in this awkward situation where we're just reading verse 10 for the first time and we're realizing, oh, maybe, maybe that's not me. And sometimes personally I love awkward situations.
[9:57] Sometimes I can get a chuckle outta them and sometimes I really dislike awkward situations. And it's September and school's starting soon and we've all been in the place where we're greeting new friends, we're greeting old friends, we're meeting people we've never met before. And the awkward situation that I dislike the most is in situations where you're greeting a lot of old friends, and maybe that's us this week. Some of us are going back to school, some of us are going back to work after vacation. But it's when someone is waving at you and you're like, "Oh, they're waving at me. I know them, right?" Like, "Oh, I'm forgetting their name, but I'll wave back." And you wave back and then you slowly turn around and you realize they weren't waving to you and then you try to play it off, right? We all try to play, "Oh, I'm fixing my hair." You're like, "Oh, I'm scratching my head." "Oh, you know, just tightening my backpack." If you're going to school, you know, you just like play off the wave, right?
[11:03] And maybe we're in this situation right now where we thought Jeremiah 29:11 was all for us. It was all for us. It was a whole calling, a whole life calling. Yes, God has plans to prosper me. God has plans for hope for me. And that's all that this life that God has for me entails. And we were waving at it. We were like, "Yeah, I'm down for this." And then we saw the 70 years in Babylon and we were like, "Hmm, maybe not. Maybe that's not for me." So the reality is that this scripture right here, much like most of the Old Testament, is not actually to us. The scripture is not to us, but the scripture is for us.
[11:49] I know I can do this lots and I'm sure all of us have, but we live in a world where sometimes we can tend to think that it's all about us. And Jesus calls us to be countercultural and to think about God and to think about others first, right? Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. And we see that Jesus calls us to be counter-cultural. But that's because culture thinks of ourselves first. And I know I've done this lots and I'm sure that lots of us have, but we start to think of ourselves. So we have become so obsessed with finding ourselves and defining ourselves that we have lost sight of the bigger picture here.
[12:40] We've become so obsessed with what this scripture has for me that maybe some of us in this room today have lost sight of the bigger picture of what God is actually trying to tell us. So it's not surprising to think that we've gone into Jeremiah 29, verse 11, and we've brought our own perspectives in it. It's not surprising to think that, oh, we thought it was all about we. But the bigger picture here, the bigger picture is that the verse actually tells us way more about God than it tells us about our story. For much of the Old Testament, we actually see more about God's character than we do about our story.
[13:37] We don't actually have to insert ourselves into all of scripture and say, "How does this affect my story?" We can actually maybe shift our perspective and say, "Hey, who is God? What is His character?" Because God remains the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. So it's the same God, but it's not the same story. Hear that: it's the same God, but it's not the same story. So we see in this verse, in verse 11, we see that God is actually trying to pursue His people because they're in exile. And then He's saying, "I still have these plans for you."
[14:24] So He is trying to pursue His people. So that's the, that's the little nugget that we can take from this and we can, we can see what God's character actually is, is God's actions in this story is that He's pursuing His people. We're gonna come back to that in a bit. But like I said before, we're gonna dive deep into scripture and see if this actually tells the whole story. If verse 11 really entails all of our calling and all of our life and our whole story. So we're gonna be looking at someone who maybe is in more of a similar situation to us. Someone who lived after Jesus came and after Jesus died and after Jesus rose from the dead. He's a follower of Jesus.
[15:16] He's a devout follower of Jesus and he's preaching the gospel everywhere he goes. This man's name is Paul and he wrote most of the New Testament. And I think that we can actually relate way more to his situation than we can to Jeremiah 29, 'cause I dunno about you, but I'm not in exile in Babylon for 70 years. So let's look at this life of Paul. We're gonna jump to 2 Corinthians. We're gonna stay here just, just very briefly, but we read, "Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited," this is Paul talking. "I was given a thorn in my flesh." Hear that, a thorn in my flesh. We're gonna come back to that.
[16:03] "A messenger of Satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.'" So we see this and it goes on and it says, "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight." I actually delight in weakness, in insults, in hardship, in persecutions, in difficulties. "For when I am weak, then I am strong." So let's jump back to the start of that verse. I want, I want us to take something out of that first verse and it says, "But I was given a thorn in my flesh." What does this mean?
[16:52] A thorn in his flesh. Lots of us know what a thorn would look like. All of us have jumped into a thorn bush or grabbed a rose and we've felt a thorn before. And the root word for thorn here actually means thorn. But what we can take from this is every time that root word is used, it's used to inflict pain. So we know that this thorn in his flesh that he was given actually inflicted pain upon Paul. We don't actually know what that thorn represented because that thorn wasn't actually a physical thorn. It represented something that the Corinthians, who Paul was actually writing to, very much knew what it was.
[17:41] We don't know exactly what it was. It could have been, some people think it was a physical ailment. Some people think it was an illness. But we know it was something, something physical that was very well known to the Corinthians that Paul was dealing with that inflicted pain. Now if we think about Jeremiah 29:11, God has plans to prosper me, but God's life for me is positive and it's good. And we see that when we evaluate the context of the whole biblical narrative, we start to see the difference between things that are written for us and things that are written to us.
[18:27] Because we see Paul's thorn in his flesh in a similar situation to us, post Jesus, after Jesus' time on earth. And he could have quoted Jeremiah 29:11, but he talked that he actually delights in weakness because God prevails. God is shown. So where's the prosperity for Paul in this? And maybe some of us are in Paul's situation where we have that thorn in our flesh. Something is bringing us pain. Maybe it's physical, maybe it's emotional and we're experiencing pain and we're thinking, "Well, why isn't God taking this away?" Remember later in the verse it says, "My power is made perfect in weakness."
[19:17] So when we evaluate the biblical context and we see, "Oh, maybe Jeremiah 29:11 wasn't written to me. Maybe it was just written for me," 'cause there's things I can learn through it. We're gonna jump to Acts chapter 16. And I'm just gonna give some brief context here because we're focusing on context, right? And then we'll read some later. But it says, "Once we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us shouting, 'These men are servants of the Most High God who are telling you the way to be saved.' She kept this up for many days. Finally, Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and he said to the spirit, 'In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her.' At that moment, the spirit left her and when her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and they dragged them into the marketplace.
[20:27] They faced the authorities and they brought them before the magistrates and said, 'These men are Jews and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.' The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods." You see what happens when the whole story isn't told. If we look at what Paul was actually doing, we see that he was being obedient to Jesus. He was following Jesus. He was preaching the gospel. He was healing people. He was casting out demons in Jesus' name. He was being a missionary. He was writing letters to churches in the early church. Paul was following Jesus, being stripped and beaten with rods before the magistrates and the people of that city in Rome.
[21:19] That was not something that he deserved. It was not something that Paul had coming. So when we look at it through a different perspective, we see again what is written to us and what is written for us. So if you read this verse and I know we just heard it and we were listening to Paul's story and we're gonna read more of it later, but if we see these two situations that Paul was in and you see prosperity in it for Paul, then we are being ultra positive, way too positive, to the point of delusion, because there's no prosperity in that. For Paul, and for Paul and Silas, there's none.
[22:11] Prosperity is defined as the act of being prosperous, and prosperous is defined as successful in material terms, flourishing financially and bringing wealth and success. So let me tell you today that God is not calling you to live a life of prosperity. He's not calling us to live a life of prosperity. In reality, He's not calling us to preach a gospel of prosperity either. He's calling us to preach a gospel of truth. If we think about our different situations, if we think about the city of Moncton, we think about people who are struggling, struggling with homelessness, struggling to make rent.
[23:04] We think about our brothers or sisters or our family or our friends or the people we work with. And we know that people are struggling financially, struggling with material things, struggling with an ailment and pain. And if all we do is preach a gospel of prosperity, I'm telling you that we are letting them down. We are, because when we evaluate the biblical text, the biblical narrative, then we see what is written to us and what is written for us. We have to differentiate that. We have to see the difference, because when we read Paul's situations and Paul's stories, we don't see prosperity in it. But then we quote Jeremiah 29:11, and then everything goes from there. We forget verse 10, we forget verse 13, we forget verse 1 and verse 4 that tells us that He's speaking to the Israelites in exile. But we take it out of context.
[23:59] I've taken it out of context and we've said, God only has prosperity and hope for me, but He has so much more than just prosperity and hope. Now, I'm not attacking prosperity by any means. If we are being blessed by God, then that is amazing. That is fruit from God that has been given to you. That's a blessing. Blessings are good, but blessings are something that comes from God. And blessings aren't the life that God is calling us to. It's just something that life includes. So I'm sure Paul had blessings and we'll see later that he had blessings.
[24:52] But we see in this story that the entire life calling, remember what we're evaluating. We're not evaluating one story. We're evaluating the whole story. We're evaluating our story in God's story to see what God has in store. So if God blesses us, then that's totally okay. We all receive blessings from the Father, and that is fine. That's not what I'm getting at. I'm getting at that the gospel is not one of prosperity, it's one of truth. And the truth is that our God does bless us. That's not all of the good news by any means. There's much, much more. So let's go back to Jeremiah 29.
[25:40] Let's read our text and let's read it through a different perspective. Let's read it with the perspective that it's about God and not about us. So let's read. It says, "This is what the Lord says: When 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill My good promise to bring you back to this place." Again, not about us, but it is for us. So then it says in our quotable verse, "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 hope and a future. Then you'll call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you."
[26:28] You see how there's a condition there? I don't know if you're in my situation, but when I read this and when I understood this for the first time, I thought it was this unconditional promise. I thought it was this amazing thing. But then you read further and it says, "Then you'll come to Me and pray to Me," and it... And then you realize that there's this condition on the Israelites in this situation, in their story, and we see that they actually have requirements. God is requiring something from them. So then it goes on and it says, "You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all of your hearts.
[27:13] I will be found by you," declares the Lord. See how much we learn about God, that He reveals Himself to us when we seek Him with all of our heart. You see what happens when we flip the script, we're not so focused on the prosperity in Jeremiah verse 11, but we're focused on the fact that our God is for us and our God reveals Himself to us when we seek Him with all of our heart. And it goes on and says, "I will bring you back from captivity," that action of pursuing His people. "And I will gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you," declares the Lord, "and I will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile." So again, if we go back and we look at this, we see that it's way more about God's character than it is about our story. And we actually learn so much from this.
[28:00] We learn that God's character is to pursue His people, and He's redeeming His people. So what does this mean? That God is pursuing His people and He's redeeming His people? Well, something that I want you to hear today is if you're a follower of Jesus, then you are His people just as much as they were. You are His people just as much as they were. Your story is just different. Your context is just different. You're living in 2023. We're not living before Christ in exile. So we are, as people, we just have a different story. But the good news for us is that it's the same God then that He is now. And there's so much that we can take from this.
[28:54] So God is in pursuit of His people, trying to redeem His people. It says, "I will bring you back from captivity and I will gather you from all the nations and places where I've banished you." So God is bringing back His people. He's in pursuit of His people. He is trying to redeem His people. Well, what I want us to hear today is that God is trying to do the same thing for you. God is trying to redeem us. He's trying to pursue us. And the reason for that is because He wants a relationship with you and He wants a relationship with me. And He wanted a relationship with His people even when they were in exile. And we see that here in the scripture. You see how much we learn when we look at it through a different perspective.
[29:42] Perspective. So this relationship that God entails for us has so much more than just prosperity and hope, and so much more. So let's dive into that. We're gonna jump back to Acts chapter 16. We're gonna continue this story of Paul, but we're gonna continue reading it through that shifted perspective. And we're gonna see what we can learn about God through it. So it reads, "After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks." Not just the prison, but the inner cell.
[30:29] And maybe some of us are in this situation today, remember we're still His people, but we have a different story. So maybe you're not actually in an inner cell in ancient Rome with your feet fastened in the stocks, but maybe you feel like it. Maybe you're not experiencing prosperity, and we've just been trying to quote Jeremiah 29:11, but God has plans to prosper us. So let's keep our hope up again. God has plans to bless us, but His calling for us, the life that He's calling us to has so much more in store. So maybe you feel like your feet are fastened in the stocks.
[31:14] Maybe you feel like you're in the inner cell. I've definitely had times in my life where I felt like that, where life isn't going exactly how I planned, life isn't going great by any means. And maybe you feel like this, and I want us to think about maybe we felt like that before, where life isn't going great, or maybe we feel like that. Now I don't know what we've all brought in this room today, but let's look at the reaction of Paul and Silas and let's see what we can learn from them. So their feet were fastened in the stocks and they were in the inner cell. And it says about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.
[31:59] And the other prisoners were actually listening to them. Wow, there's so much we can learn from that. They were in a situation that they did not deserve. They were in a situation where they were just being obedient to Jesus and they were being punished for it. So we see that this life that God entails is not just prosperity and hope for us, but it's so much more. And I feel like in that moment, Paul understood that, as him and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God. And if we go further, we see suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken at once.
[32:48] All the prison doors flew open and everyone's chains came loose. There's the blessings, right? They were in a hard situation, a situation that they didn't really deserve. But we see the blessings in the same God that wanted the Israelites to prosper after their exile is the same God that shook those prison doors open. So the prison doors came loose, they flew open and everyone's chains came loose. And the jailer woke up. And when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, Don't harm yourself. We are all here.
[33:44] The jailer called for lights and rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" We see that their reputation preceded themselves and they replied, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. At that hour of the night, the jailer took them, washed their wounds, and then immediately he and all his household were baptized. The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them. He was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God, he and his whole household.
[34:32] So there was a lot of different things in this story. For Paul, we see that he was wrongfully imprisoned. He was wrongfully stripped and beaten. So a lack of prosperity. And then we see prosperity. We see good things that God had given them. And the earthquake came and, opened the prison doors and their chains came loose and they, had the opportunity to leave. But the thing that Paul knew, and the thing that we need to know today is that God's desire for you is so much more than just prosperity and hope, because God calls us to a life of purpose and not one of prosperity.
[35:24] He calls us to a life of purpose and not one of prosperity. We see that in the situation that Paul was in when he was in jail. If we go back to that, story of the jailer, and we see that Paul had the opportunity to just take prosperity and run, but Paul's life that he was living for God had so much more than just prosperity and hope. It had purpose. And we see that the jailer actually, him and his whole family came to the Lord. The last verse of the scripture in Acts 16:34, it says, the jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them.
[36:13] And he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God. He and his whole household. We see that Paul didn't preach the gospel of prosperity to that jailer. He preached the gospel of truth. He preached a gospel of truth because Paul wasn't experiencing prosperity during that whole story. So that means Paul's life, all of it, the whole calling was not just subject to prosperity and hope. It had some hard times. But we see in the whole story that there was purpose, that God was working through him with a purpose. And we see in Jeremiah 29:11, that God promises His people prosperity and hope. He promises the Israelites in exile to Babylon.
[36:59] He promises them prosperity and hope for a purpose, not just to call them to this whole life of just prosperity and hope. Prosperity and hope is included in this life. It doesn't define our lives. The truth of the gospel, the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ that Paul preached to that jailer, the truth of the good news in Jeremiah 29, the whole chapter, that truth that God is pursuing His people just like He is pursuing His people in this room today, is the good news. Whether you know Jesus, whether you've walked and had a relationship with Jesus for 60 years, or whether you've just come to know Jesus, or whether you've heard the name of Jesus for the very first time today, I want to tell you that God is in pursuit of a relationship with you because He created you, and you are the only thing in God's creation that He said was very good.
[38:02] And He is in pursuit of His people. He's in pursuit of redeeming you. So again, God calls us to a life of purpose and not prosperity. So if we go back to Jeremiah 29:10, we see that the Israelites are in exile. So again, remember what I said at the very beginning. We're looking at the whole context. We wanna see the whole story. If that verse, verse 11 tells the whole story, and I said, we're gonna be diving deep into the Bible. So we're gonna be looking at one other passage in Zechariah chapter 7, verse 8. And it says, "And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah.
[38:52] This is what the Lord Almighty said: Administer true justice. That's a good commandment. Show mercy. Another good commandment. And compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other." He had good commandments to His people. He's speaking to the same Israelites. Zechariah in this book that he wrote in the Old Testament, is actually prophesying about the people in Babylon that were in exile. And it goes on to say, let's see what their response was. But they refused to pay attention, stubbornly. They turned their backs and covered their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by His Spirit through the earlier prophets.
[39:48] We see that in response to God, trying to redeem them, in response to God, pursuing in a relationship with them, the Israelites, what did they do? They refused to pay attention. Stubbornly, they turned their backs and covered their ears. I don't know about you, but I wanna make sure that that is not my response to God's pursuit of me. I wanna make sure that I'm on the other side of it, that I'm Paul in the jail, knowing that God has a purpose in my story, that God is moving in my story, and that the story that God has for me entails so much more than just hope and prosperity. But the story that God has for me has a purpose.
[40:45] I wanna challenge us today to not be like the Israelites, not be the ones who cover their ears or turn their hearts away to make their hearts as hard as stone. I wanna challenge us to not be like that. Yes, God is in pursuit of His people. We see it all throughout the Old Testament, and we see it through Him sending His Son Jesus for us. But God requires a response from us. We see that He gave the Israelites commandments in Zechariah. We see that later. The Israelites were sent into exile because of their disobedience.
[41:31] There is a response required by His people when God pursues them. God didn't want them serving anybody else but Him. God wanted them to obey His commandments. And that's what I want us to hear as we close today: That there is an obedience involved in this. God is pursuing you in purposeful relationship, but He requires purposeful obedience in response. He requires purposeful obedience in response.
[42:17] So Jeremiah 29:11, it's not to us, it's not about us. It's way more about the God we serve who has never changed. And that's what we can learn from this verse, that God is pursuing us, but in God's desperate pursuit of His people, He needs a response. And that response is living in obedience. And hear this, living in obedience is living life with purpose.