{Edit: If you would like to download the sermon audio from which this post is taken, please click here. The sermon is from Ember’s first series, Run with Horses, on the book of Jeremiah. It is called Letter to the Exiles.}
One of the hardest words I’ve ever had to preach came from the passage that most Christians memorize for the comfort and hope it brings them. You know the verse I’m talking about: Jeremiah 29:11. “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.” Go ahead and admit it. This is your life verse. It’s the desktop wallpaper on your computer–superimposed over a kitten in a basket. It has brought you comfort in times of trouble. It has helped you to hold out for God’s best when you just wanted to give in or give up. This verse has been a sparkling promise of God, like the North Star on a dark night.
I get it. Really, I do.
But here’s the thing. This verse doesn’t mean what we think it means. When we look at the rest of Jeremiah 29, we get a very different sense of what God is saying here. We get the sense, even, that he’s saying the opposite of what we thought. You see, this verse comes within a much larger prophecy to people in exile. They had been ripped away from their homeland, the Promised Land, the holy land. They were living in Babylon, a strange country where the customs, people, and language were foreign to them. Engulfed by the unfamiliar, they longed desperately to taste, to see, to touch what they had always known. They longed to be home.
Most of the prophets living with them in exile saw this and had compassion on the people. They prophesied compassionately. “Just two more years,” they proclaimed, “and God will bring us back to Jerusalem. Just two years longer and he will crush the head of our oppressors.” But compassionate prophecy is often false prophecy. The term of exile would not be two years, Jeremiah declared, but seventy.
For grown men and women, seventy years is a death sentence. For all but the youngest of the exiles, this meant they would never see their homeland again. They would die in this foreign land. They would be buried by unclean hands in unholy soil. Exile is a fate worse than death.
“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.” In other words, live in Babylon as though you were living in Jerusalem. Engage with your new reality. Embrace your exile.
We hear a lot of talk these days about finding God’s best life for ourselves. We talk a lot about destiny and calling, always with the thought in mind that we are meant for something great. “God has a great plan for your life that will exceed all your wildest expectations!” It sounds so breathtaking and exhilarating–the spiritual equivalent of climbing El Capitan every day for the rest of your life. How many Christian brochures have you seen with a guy standing on the top of a mountain with his arms spread wide? The message behind the message is, “This should be your typical spiritual experience. This is what God destined you for!”
We hear this message again and again about personal greatness, about achieving your destiny, about realizing your dreams and actualizing the genius within you. And so images of personal significance and professional greatness dance in our heads as the false prophets of Christianity tickle our ears with the repackaged nonsense of Tony Robbins and the positivist promoters of a self-help philosophy that is nothing more than a theology of self where you have replaced God at the center of creation. “I’m going to do great things! …for God. I’m going to take this city! …for Jesus. I’m going to make my life count! …for the Lord.” False dreams interfere with honest living, as Eugene Peterson has said.
Jesus talked a lot about losing your life, and how losing your life for his sake is the only way to really find it. Did he mean that, or was he just joking? Is that how we’re being encouraged to live these days? To lose our lives for the sake of Jesus? To surrender our dreams? To relinquish our genius? To forsake personal greatness? Are any of Christianity’s prophets talking about how to live well in Babylon, or are they all selling us roadmaps back to Jerusalem?
You and I are being seduced by a Christianity that has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth, who grew up, lived, and died under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire; no, we are being seduced by a Christianity that has everything to do with the cult of the self and the drive for power. We are taught that Jesus is most supremely interested in me, and making me a very important person, helping me to actualize my potential and realize my dreams. In Christian America, Jesus isn’t a Savior who died to free you from the curse of sin and reconcile you back to God; he’s a life coach that shows you how to be the best you you can be.
Embrace your exile. God has never promised to make all of your dreams come true. He has never told you to follow your heart. He has not guaranteed your best life now. The truth is, most of us are born for Babylon, and we need to embrace our exile or we will be miserable our entire lives, chasing false hopes and kicking on escape hatches that will never open. Can you live with Jesus if living with him means living in Babylon? Can you follow Jesus if it means you may never see all your wildest dreams come true?
The only place you have to be human is where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at this moment. …The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible—to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love. -Eugene Peterson
You cannot live God’s life for you, you cannot live life with God, if you are always trying to get out of the life you have been given. You cannot live with God if you are constantly trying to get out of your circumstances, dreaming of being somewhere else, someone else. Escape from exile is not the answer. Escape from this world, this life, these problems, is not God’s way. Every day you face the choice between comfort and depth, between escape and engagement. Every day the unredeemed desires of your heart will allure you away from the reality in which you live, to daydreams of a so-called better life. But there is no other life out there. The life you’ve been given is the only life you have in which to live deeply and thoroughly for and with God.
Embracing our exile allows us to live in the reality in which God lives, the reality that he has given us, and the only place we can find him. As we embrace our exile we learn to embrace God, and trust him no matter the circumstances. God is the God of the good times and the bad. He is the God over Jerusalem and the God over Babylon. Embracing our exile means being content with God’s presence within, and oftentimes despite, the circumstances of our lives.
Only by embracing our exile will we learn to live with hope, real hope that transcends our circumstances and rests not in the actualization of our potential or realization of our dreams, but in the resurrection of our bodies and life forever in the full presence of God. We look forward to a future where the victorious Jesus rules and reigns over all creation, where God’s dream has been fully realized, and where we have become fully and perfectly human, ruling and reigning with Jesus the king on this throne.
And so we come back to everybody’s favorite 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.” So what is God’s plan? What is this prospering he promises? What does the future look like?
We think that God’s primary agenda is to pull us out of exile, to lead us out of Babylon and into Jerusalem. We think his plan is to make our lives better. But the plan has always been, and will always be, simply this: Jesus Christ. Jesus is your prosperity. Jesus is your hope. Jesus is your future. And we will always find Jesus in the midst of our exile. Jesus walks through the deserts of Babylon, not to lead a mass exodus to Jerusalem—not yet. No, he walks through Babylon to find you, to sit with you, to say, “I am with you. I am here. I am your God, and you are mine. Worship me, only. Follow me, only. And in doing that, become like me.”
We have hope, not because Steve Jobs rose from rags to riches and we can too, but because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and we will too. And on that day he will welcome in all who put their trust in him and not their own potential, who put their faith in him and not their own power, whose hope was in him and not in their own dreams. If you are in exile, embrace your exile. That is where you will find Jesus. There are no shortcuts to realized hope. Only by embracing your exile will you learn to live with the true and lasting hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Postscript.
In many ways, my life is not what I wanted. My son’s health has forsaken him, leaving him a shell of the boy he was and could be. My dream of Ember Church died. Six months ago, I was fired. I am not in pastoral ministry–the vocation to which I sense that I am so strongly called, and toward which I have directed my entire life–and I don’t know when or if I will ever be again. Like many others I know, I live in an existential exile. Embracing this is hard. Daydreaming is easy. So is bitterness. My sense of entitlement drives me to dark places. But if I am to find God in this life–the only life I have–I must embrace the circumstances of the hours I wake and the ground on which I walk. I must embrace my exile in order to find God’s presence, and it’s when I find God here, in Babylon, that I am reminded that the only hope worth having will never be fully realized in a fallen world, but it awaits us as sheer grace, utter gift, on the other side of faithfulness. God’s plan for the world, and for me, is Jesus. There is no harm in Jesus. There is everlasting prosperity in Jesus. The only future worth having is found only in Jesus. That helps me. A lot. And I hope it helps you, too.
WOW Andy, you are growing so much into a humble, Spirit-led, and wise man of God. I wish the church could be exposed to this kind of transformational teaching. Your heart reminded me of my favorite poem:
When God wants to drill a man, and thrill a man,
and skill a man,
When God wants to mold a man,
to play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart,
to create so great and bold a man,
That all the world shall be amazed,
watch His methods, watch His ways.
How He ruthlessly perfects whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
and with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay which only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying,
and he lifts beseeching hands!
How he bends but never breaks
when His good He undertakes.
How He uses whom He chooses, and with every purpose fuses him;
But every act induces Him to try His splendor out.
God knows what He’s about. —–Henry Lyte
Thanks, Toni! I certainly resonate with that poem, especially in this past year. It makes me glad, though, that even in the hammering process, God is so gentle with us.
Holy crap, how did you read my mail?
THANK you for this. It IS all about Jesus, and despite difficult circumstances, we still have reason for the Joy of the Lord and the hope we have in Him. Also, this is not a “zip code” message, but true for Christians all over the planet.
Thank you, Lois. This message has resonated with a lot of folks. Thanks for the encouragement!
I didn’t! Promise! 😉
I am so encouraged by you Andy. Thank you for this, my friend. Praying for us both, in those dark spaces.
God bless you, Chandra!
Great thoughts Andy. Thank you for sharing. Reminds me of what I knew but couldn’t put into such poetic terms like you did. As a Soldier I identify with the Sojourners in Exile, always longing for home, never getting to know my neighbors, moving, deploying…I have to keep telling myself it is much easier to change my perspective than to change my circumstances. Its nice to know also that I am called to it, something I didn’t realize for the last 8 years of my life, its quite simple if I am in it, I am called to it, at least for that very moment. Thanks again, this helped confirm some big decisions this week.
Justin, thank you for your service. I know you have very little control of your circumstances, but I’m glad to hear that you have been able to find God in the midst of it all.
Elisa Merva I don’t know, taking a verse that is used to find consolation and turning it into a dark side troubled play on words and history just doesn’t sit right with me. Especially when one of his quotes is a direct jab from the title of Pastor Joel Osteen’s book. whom I have found to be very uplifting and encouraging in my darkest days. Taking a literal translation of the Bible is never good idea as it was given as a guide and because the israelites wandered for 70 years doesn’t mean we are doomed to 70 years of exile. I know that in todays times it can seem like when things go wrong we are a far cry hope or healing but God also said to take up our crosses and follow him. There is also the book of Job where no matter what pestilence, or negative critics he faced he always believed and patiently waited for God’s deliverance. I don’t think that believing are best days are yet to come leaves us falsely filled Christians who all believe will one day be billionaires , success mounts itself in many different forms whether they be material or spiritual. I understand this former pastor has hit a bump in the road and that his son is not a (shell of his former self) God gives each one of us trials we cannot label those as BAD. We have to embrace that what we are given can very much be taken away and that God may just be in fact testing our FAITH and Tenacity for Him. I will pray for Anthony today and for those who read this post that the light of Christ of his ability to do unbundantly more than we can ever ask or believe if only we GROW our Faith, if it takes one day or 80 years that is what are testament would be into eternal life with our Father in Heaven. Always remain hopeful, always pray for those who are called to serve God in any way shape or form, St. Charles of Borromeo is the Patron Saint of Religious and those who are called to write Catechal books to lead others to the Divine Teacher of Truth I pray he blesses Andy in this time and reconsiders his interpretation and critique on Pastors who are successfully leading Christians to Christ and as always finds healing and comfort for his son as he embarks on a new journey to find where God wants him to be and in the period of waiting he finds joy. In jesus name I pray, Amen
Elisa, thank you for your response. I’ve tried to represent the point of Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles as faithfully as possible. Unfortunately, what he was really telling them is a lot different from how we often read this passage. God bless you!
Jesus was in exile once. In Egypt. God sent him back to be crucified.
Andy, Thank You very much for this message! It is tonight’s devotional as we sit in the family room.(Yes, there is a plaque with Jer.29:11 right on the wall as we exit our home.)I appreciate you and your words (hard to hear at times) expounding on this verse. We are constantly on the alert to protect our family from buying into prosperity preaching and the many falsehoods “American Christianity” promotes. Anyway, I am so glad that my guys will now be reminded of the context and real message of this verse as they read it on their way out the door! For, we will all be “Embracing our exile”