September 15, 2002

Service Theme – "Our God is Faithful"

Jeremiah 29:11-14a

A Dilemma: God’s Plans or Our Plans?

1. Introduction

1. Illustration – Lillian Perigoe (SermonCentral.com) tells the story about a family who asked a priest to help ‘straighten out’ a rambunctious young boy and his sister. After he agreed to speak to them separately, the older child, a girl of 8, went in to the office. She found the priest sitting solemnly behind a big desk. Silence - then the priest asked, "Where is God?" More silence; the question was repeated. This happened three times, at which point the child burst out of the priest’s office and ran for home, straight upstairs to her room. ‘Boy, are we in trouble,’ she reported to her anxious younger brother. ‘Why? What happened?’ ‘God’s missing and they’re blaming us!’
2. Context – We’re often like those kids; we don’t have a clue where God is or how He is working. So we push forward with our own plans like those kids, and find ourselves in trouble. But God gives a wonderful word of encouragement and hope through Jeremiah that can help us know how to stay out of trouble and how to follow God and His plans instead.

1. Scripture Passage

1. Jeremiah 29:11-14a – "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 upon 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 your heart. I will be found by you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back from captivity."

1. Which Plan Do You Think Is Better?

1. There is a powerful contrast between our plans and God’s plans. Our plan: to do everything we can to prosper ourselves materially and monetarily no matter what the cost. Our society craves possessions! We always have to have the most money, the best cars, the latest and greatest stuff. Even Christians have found excuses to do their best to get rich. They claim that the way God blessed people in the Old Testament is the same way He blesses us! That’s called prosperity theology. It says that the closer you follow God, the richer and more prosperous you will become. That is idolatry! It is worshiping money and possessions! God blessed those who followed Him in Old Testament times only because material blessings were the only things that would prove to the nations around Israel that their God was stronger and more powerful than any other god was. But He doesn’t need to do that anymore! God’s plan: that we would be so committed to Him that our lives would be transformed and our spiritual prosperity would witness to His love and grace. That’s what our world needs! It doesn’t need Christians running around acting like everybody else in the world! In Philippians 3:10-11, Paul writes, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. That’s God’s plan. That’s where our focus has got to be if we’re going to be transformed and witness to His great love and grace. That’s what following Jesus wholeheartedly is all about! And if we follow Jesus as hard as we can, no one can harm the eternal part of us, our souls. We can take that promise to the bank! Our plan: material and monetary prosperity. God’s plan: spiritual prosperity resulting from hearts and lives that are transformed by a personal love relationship with Jesus Christ. Which plan do you think is better?
2. Our plan: to rest our hopes and futures in our investment portfolios and life insurance policies, in a good economy that gives us job security. God’s plan: to give us an eternal hope and future through relationship with Jesus Christ, as well as the hope of His presence in our hearts every minute of our lives. Again, our plans are based on what we can see and touch and taste and hear. Our plans are based on what we experience here in the physical world. But 2 Peter 3:7-13, reading from the New Living, says, And God has also commanded that the heavens and the earth will be consumed by fire on the day of judgment, when ungodly people will perish. ⁸ But you must not forget, dear friends, that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. ⁹ The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise to return, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to perish, so he is giving more time for everyone to repent. ¹⁰ But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and everything in them will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be exposed to judgment. ¹¹ Since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives you should be living! ¹² You should look forward to that day and hurry it along—the day when God will set the heavens on fire and the elements will melt away in the flames. ¹³ But we are looking forward to the new heavens and new earth he has promised, a world where everyone is right with God. Now let me ask you a question: if everything on this earth is going to be destroyed, why would God invest His time and focus His effort on material possessions? And why would He want His people to focus on them? Jesus, in Matthew 6:31-33, said, "So don’t worry about having enough food or drink or clothing. ³² Why be like the pagans who are so deeply concerned about these things? Your heavenly Father already knows all your needs, ³³ and he will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern." God promises to meet our physical needs. Yes, He expects us to work hard and to be good stewards, but He does not expect the pursuit of our physical needs to be the driving force in our lives. Our plan may be to invest our hopes and futures in portfolios and insurance and a good economy and stable jobs, but God’s plan is to give us something much more valuable – hope of His presence today and an eternal future with Him. Which plan do you think is better?
3. Our plan: self-reliance and rugged individualism. God’s plan: utter dependence on Him. We don’t like anyone telling us what to do and how to do it. We also don’t like to ask anyone to do anything for us. There’s a word for those attitudes that we don’t like to hear in any kind of negative context: pride. Proverbs 16:18 says, Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. Pride is what cost Satan and his angels their place in heaven. Proverbs 16:5 says, The Lord despises pride; be assured that the proud will be punished. Yes, we see many proud people every day of our lives, and we wonder why they get away with the things they do. We forget that life is to be lived from an eternal perspective! Proud and evil people may get away with murder here on earth, but they will not escape eternal punishment unless they repent and turn to Jesus. God says, "Rely on Me, not yourselves! I won’t let you down!" Verse 12 of Jeremiah 29: Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. He is saying, "After I call you back to Myself and rescue you from eternal death, you will realize how much you need Me and you will call upon Me and pray to Me, and then I will listen to you." God has always kept His word! Our plans may call for us to be self-reliant and independent and rugged individualists, but God’s plans are so much better – counting on Him for both now and eternity! Which plan do you think is better?
4. Our plan: seeking after the ultimate betterment of ourselves, also known as self-actualization. God’s plan: seeking Him with all our hearts. Secular humanism, which is the driving force behind belief in the theory of evolution, teaches that man is the greatest being ever to evolve and should do everything he can to become even greater. That’s a major league simplification, but it’s ultimately what drives so many people. You can become a better human being if you work at it. Mormonism is growing because it plays into this ideology. According to Mormon belief, you can become a god just by working hard enough. Couple that with our self-reliant individualism, and you have a powerful motivating force for many people in our country and our world. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Paul tells us exactly what the people of our world are facing: Satan, the god of this evil world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe, so they are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News that is shining upon them. They don’t understand the message we preach about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God. People who don’t have a personal love relationship with Jesus Christ are blinded into believing that they are their own god. But what did God say through Jeremiah? Verse 13: You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. We talked a little bit last week about obsessions. We will become obsessed with someone or something in our lives. When it’s a person we call it codependency. When it’s stuff, we call it good. But we cannot become the people God has created us to be unless we become obsessed with a personal love relationship with Jesus Christ. We have to seek God with all our hearts if we’re going to experience a rich, rewarding relationship with Him here on earth and a blessed eternity with Him in heaven. Remember the first part of God’s plan we talked about, that we would be so committed to Him that our lives would be transformed and our spiritual prosperity would witness to His love and grace? Our hearts and lives cannot be transformed until and unless we seek Him with all our hearts. We will find that God satisfies all of the deepest longings of our hearts when we seek Him with all of our hearts. There is no other way! Our plan: seeking after the ultimate betterment of ourselves. God’s plan: seeking Him with all our hearts so that we can become all we were created to be. Which plan do you think is better?
5. One more. Our plan: avoiding the true and living God at all costs, because we want to control our own lives. God’s plan: that we find true relationship with Him and be delivered from the tyranny of sin over our lives. We love to be in control. We hate having anyone tell us what we can and can’t do. That’s why we even try to tell God what church should be like and what its purpose is. Joel C. Hunter wrote (Leadership, Vol. 7, no. 2), A vision for what God could do is one thing. Planning exactly what God will do is quite another. We try to extend our control over our lives to everyone around us and even to God, because we know how everything should work out. Not that it’s wrong to plan, but it is wrong to plan God into a box. We put spiritual terms on our desires and couch them in a way that anyone against us seems unspiritual. That’s exactly what our world does! It spins the truth in such a way that we get to do what we want and call it God’s plan. That’s our plan, doing what we want to in the name of God. God’s plan: for us to figure out that we can only find our true selves through personal love relationship with His Son and so be delivered from the captivity sin has held us in for so long! He wants to restore us to the relationship with Him we were created for! He wants to make us into His likeness, to bring us back to the way He originally planned everything to be when He created us! We will be slaves to someone, either God or Satan, and it’s our choice to make. We can choose to do nothing and remain Satan’s slaves and remain in bondage to sin. Or we can be God’s slaves, freed from our slavery to sin and to be remade into God’s likeness! Eternal darkness and death or eternal light and life. That’s the choice. Our plan: avoiding the true and living God at all costs, because we want to control our own lives. God’s plan: that we find true relationship with Him and be delivered from the tyranny of sin over our lives. Which plan do you think is better?
6. In reality, we all know which plan is better. We all know deep in our hearts that God’s plans are so much better than ours that there is no comparison. But we all know which plans we want to follow more. We face a dilemma: our plans or God’s plans. If we choose our plans, we get the illusion of having things our own way. If we choose God’s plans, we get the reality of a lifetime and an eternity following and serving Him. Whose plans will we choose?
7. Illustration - Helen Roseveare wrote (Living Faith, "Heart to Heart," Today's Christian Woman), As I came home from church one evening, I was struggling to recognize God's guidance for my life. Suddenly, I drove into dense fog and could see nothing. Poking my head out the window, I noticed a tiny light from the road ahead. As I inched my car forward, it blinked out and another set of oncoming headlights took its place some yards ahead. I crawled along, following just the short distance I could see--one light after another--until the fog cleared. Then I realized that this is how God guides me. He shows me how far I need to go at any given moment. And step-by-step, I move from one light to the next. Confident of God's guidance, I let go of the need to see his complete plan. Only as we let go of our need to be in charge will we see how, step by step, God’s plans will lead us into a future with Him that filled with hope and light and life.

1. Conclusion

1. Charles Swindoll said, Nothing under God’s control is ever out of control (as cited on Sermoncentral.com). And as we consider this morning God’s plans vs. our own plans, that’s an important truth to remember. We’ve had some time to think this morning about the way we’d like things to be in our own lives contrasted with the way they really are. We’ve had some time to think about how God’s plans compare with the reality of our own lives.
2. It’s time for us to stop merely thinking about what we’ve learned this morning. It’s time to take action. It’s time to choose whether we’re going to keep living by our own plans or start living by God’s plans. I struggle with this just as much as you do, because there are many areas of my life where I would really like to be in charge and go by my own plans. But if I am going to become the man God has created me to be, I’m going to have to commit to following and serving God and His plans, and leaving mine in the dust. That’s what I’m doing right now. And if you are committing with me to follow God’s plans instead of our own, please come forward now and kneel at the altars and place yourself in God’s hands. It’s the best thing in the world we can do. Come forward now.