December 3, 2006 Sermon

God’s Long-Range Plan
Jeremiah 33:14-16

God has a long-range plan. Creation has a way of obeying that plan. Things happen as God predicts, as God commands. Learn and embrace God’s plan.

This plan of God comes to fruition over time—often a great deal of time. Let us go back in time to find one great example of how this works. We just read from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived 600 years before Jesus, or 2,600 years ago. At the specific time he made the prophecy we are studying, Jeremiah was a prisoner of the King of Judah, the southern half of the Israel we know today. The Assyrian army had already erased the northern half. The Babylonians now besieged the Jewish capital, Jerusalem . Jeremiah lay in chains because the king feared how his prophecies stirred up the people in such threatening times. He was a political prisoner silenced for speaking out against the government.

With half of the Promised Land gone and a mighty foreign army on its doorstep, all Judah knew it would soon submit. In this desperate situation Jeremiah bought a piece of property. Why would he do that? Would you waste your money on real estate if you believed a new regime would soon take all the land for its own? Yet Jeremiah did. He did it as a form of prophecy, a vivid way to show his faith in God’s long-range plan. Jeremiah believed in God’s future. He believed that someday God would restore the Chosen People, his fellow Jews, to freedom in their land.

Jeremiah added words to this active prophecy. Those words speak of a righteous Branch springing up out of the root of David. A new king would arise, executing justice and righteousness in the land. Jeremiah introduced this prophecy by referring to an even older word from God: the covenant promise God had made hundreds of years earlier to Israel , a.k.a. Jacob. We met Jacob earlier this fall when we worked our way through the book of Genesis. To him God had promised land, the Promised Land Jeremiah predicted the Babylonians would take. God had also promised Jacob an unbroken line of descendants. Jeremiah now predicted that one of those descendants, in the line that stretched from Jacob to David, would come to save the people. Jacob lived about 1,100 years before Jeremiah, or 3,700 years ago today. God has a long-range plan.

As Christians we read this prophecy of Jeremiah’s to refer to Jesus of Nazareth. His family line fits: the Gospel of Matthew opens with his genealogy, including King David. He preached justice and righteousness. He himself claimed to fulfill, to complete, the prophecy, to be God’s appointed savior. But his kind of saving did not match what his fellow Jews expected. We Christians still must struggle to accept it as well. Our sinful human nature compels us to seek the same things the Jews in Jeremiah’s time coveted: security from our enemies, and riches. But Jesus offers future victory for those who believe in him, not security in the here and now. Jesus offers spiritual salvation, not earthly wealth.

Can you learn and embrace God’s long-range plan for salvation? Or do you find yourself so driven by your short-term needs that you cannot hold out any longer? Time passes. Our lives pass. We still await the return of our Savior, the One God has promised. The prophecies of Jesus himself tell us he will come again. Can we wait?

Last week we had the blessing of re-gathering our family and driving south to visit our extended families for Thanksgiving. The four Riggins brothers (I am the eldest) gathered there for the first time in a couple of years. God knows when we might all come together again. Linda’s and my parents are all alive and well. The entire trip felt like a gift. How much longer can we expect all of us to survive? How much longer will our children be able to join us? If God wills it, in a startlingly short time they will fall in love, marry, and have holiday obligations that separate us.

On our way back north to drop our daughter off at college, having said goodbye to our Indiana families, a deep melancholy settled over me. Though she said nothing, no doubt my wife Linda felt it. Our children have become great friends (another blessing from God), and I imagine they felt sad as well. They took turns deciding what music we would listen to as we drove. One of them put in a compilation of songs from Disney movies. It started way back, with Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo and A Spoonful of Sugar. I flashed back to my boyhood, when mom got a full tank of gas at the Standard station in our town. After wiping the windows the attendant smilingly handed her a 33 1/3 L.P. with a bright yellow label. It was a gift for filling up, a record of those same Disney tunes that came out of our car’s sound system this past Sunday. I remembered playing that record in our basement while roughhousing with my brothers 40 years ago.

As if that were not enough nostalgia, on came the song I Can Fly. All through her childhood we called our daughter Peter Pan. She never wanted to grow up. She wanted to play, to have fun, not to worry about all those stupid things that drive adults crazy. Now here she was, a young adult sitting in the back seat of my car as we drew ever nearer to saying goodbye to her, belting out a song from Peter Pan that I, too, could sing word-for-word since I was five years old. It was almost too much to take.

And yet it was not. Because I believe that God has a long-range plan. I further believe that my wife, my daughter, my son, my parents and I all have a place in that plan. We must wait to see it fulfilled, but as we wait we constantly receive reminders of the joy that God has in store for us. Looked at correctly, that moment of listening to both my nearly grown children sing a song from Peter Pan was just such a time.

We live in the times between God’s promise and God’s keeping of that promise. God has already done miraculous, almighty things to start keeping that promise, as we see especially in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah who belongs to the family line of David. But we still must wait for the completion of the promise, for the ultimate and final coming-true of God’s plan. We wait for safety. We wait for peace. We need moments like the one in our car to keep us believing in the plan. We need to believe in God so we can see these moments as gifts from God, and we need moments like these in order to keep believing.

Jeremiah bought property and shouted God’s promises even in the face of certain destruction. Today we face threats from radical Islam, nuclear weapons, and even our own abuse of the planet God has given us. But during these in-between times we can, in a sense, buy property and shout God’s promises just like Jeremiah.

We buy spiritual property, or faith in Jesus, by setting aside all else each Sabbath day in order to worship the Lord together. We can forgo shopping, kids’ sports, even our own desire to sleep in, and gather to praise the name of Jesus Christ. Worshipping Jesus together on a regular basis builds faith in God’s promises. It means obeying God’s call without reservation or rationalization. And it works.

We can read the Word of God. We can study it at Sunday School and on Tuesday mornings at Clancy’s Kitchen. We can learn what God has promised so when it comes true all around us we can celebrate even in the midst of the pains life deals us.

The officers of this church continue to work at the process of setting the specific missions of this congregation. Your officers are attempting to learn and embrace God’s plan for our church. Please pray for them as they work on this critical task. Without question they will determine that God continues to call us to worship and to study the Bible. They will ratify the decision to expand our building. But what else does God have in store for our church?

What else does God have in store for you? Learn and embrace God’s plan. Obey it, and watch your faith—and joy—increase.