God has a plan for you
Does God have a plan for your life?
About 15-20 years ago I became friends with a guy who was a former football player for Alabama. He played under the legendary Coach Bear Bryant.
Now… if you know me at all, you know I’m a die hard college football fan and the team I pull for, cheer for, the team that either makes my day on Saturdays in the fall when they win or leaves me in the pit of despair when they loose, are the Auburn Tigers. I grew up in south Alabama and when you grow up in Alabama you have to choose who you’re going to pull for. It’s almost as important in that state as choosing a church.
So for me, a die hard Auburn fan, to become good friends with a former football player who played with Alabama… you know there had to be good reason.
And there were. Actually 3 good reasons. First, we were a part of the same church. Second, his kids were in my youth group. And third, he made the best BBQ I had ever eaten in my life.
My friend taught me the secret to good BBQ. It’s not much of a secret. It’s time.
If you want good BBQ, it takes time. It takes hours on the smoker. And if you’re patient, if you’ve got a good dry rub, good wood, and you’re willing to wait, you can have life changing BBQ.
Becoming takes time
You can’t microwave good BBQ. In fact, that’s almost blasphemous to suggest. You can’t cook it fast if you’re in a hurry. If you’re in a hurry, eat something else. Good BBQ takes time. We understand that.
What we sometimes don’t understand is that the same thing is true in our lives.
We want what we want and we want it now. We want it fast.
We want quick solutions to take away pain. We need quick answers to fix whatever is broken. We get annoyed when we can’t get our packages in two days or less.
Yet at the same time we understand that good things take time and discipline. This is true whether our goal is to lose weight, become debt free, or earn an advanced degree… whatever the goal, good things take time and discipline.
Here’s the principle I want you to see… Becoming always happens over time through discipline.
The Promise
The good news is that God, your Father, is highly interested in your becoming. And He understands that it takes time for you to become who you were created to become.
The truth is that becoming most often happens through pain.
Sometimes we experience pain as a result of our own poor choices.
Sometimes we experience pain because we live in a broken world.
Sometimes we experience pain because we want to change.
Sometimes we experience pain because God wants us to change.
But the good news is that no matter the reason for the pain, no matter the cause, no matter the severity of the situation, God in His mercy and in His grace can work through it for our benefit. And I want to share with you today one promise you can hold onto in the middle of your pain, your problems, your struggles, or the difficulties you’re facing today.
But first, let me share with you the broken promise, the way we’ve misread and misinterpreted this verse, this promise of God, for a very long time.
Jeremiah 29.11 says this…
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.
If you’re having a hard day, you can get this verse embroidered on a pillow for you to put on your couch.
Having a tough week, don’t worry… you can get this verse framed to hang on the wall in your kitchen.
Did things not work out the way you hoped or anticipated, we’ve got a coffee cup with this promise of God for you to look at every morning to help you remember that God has a plan for you. His plans are good, to give you hope and a future.
And what we mean by that, most often, is that God is promising you that whatever you’re going through will be over in a day, or maybe a week, but God doesn’t want you to suffer. God doesn’t want you to experience pain. God wants you to prosper. He wants you to be happy, healthy, and wealthy!
And when that doesn’t happen for us, we assume that God has broken this promise. What’s worse, because so many people believe that this is the promise they stop believing in God altogether when their suffering and their pain doesn’t end in a short amount of time. When they aren’t happy, healthy, and wealthy, they assume God isn’t real, or if He is that worse, He doesn’t care.
But the truth is, that couldn’t be further from the truth. And what God says here in Jeremiah 29.11 through the prophet Jeremiah is exactly the opposite. The promise is that on the other side of that pain is something even greater than we could have ever imagined!
The Real Promise
Jeremiah was a prophet of God who was called to preach to Israel who had lived in complete rebellion to God and because of that, were now taken away to live in captivity in Babylon. So, just to be clear, this was not an easy assignment. Jeremiah is often called the weeping prophet because for the most part he’s delivering bad news to a people who have decided to turn away from God and live in opposition to God and are dealing with the real time consequences of those decisions.
It was a time of national and international crisis. Babylon was the dominant world power at the time. Jeremiah himself was taken against his will to live in exile in Egypt. And yet he’s been called by God to live in this tension, to speak truth to power, to announce the end of an old era and to proclaim the promise of a new beginning, a new era, for the people of God.
That future hope, however, can only be realized if the people of God living in exile would turn from their sin and return to God.
Here’s what God says through Jeremiah in 29.10-11
This is what the Lord says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again.
Now I don’t know about you, but 70 years seems like a long time. It’s a lifetime for many people! Living in exile, in captivity, in a foreign land, for 70 years… this is the consequence for their sin. And this isn’t God being harsh. This isn’t God being mean spirited. This is the reality they have brought upon themselves as a nation because of their collective decision to turn away from living with God.
Our Suffering Won’t Last Forever
So here’s what I want us to understand today… God has never promised that our suffering would be short. That our pain would be temporary. That if we name it and claim it when it comes to this promise, that we’ll be out from under that pain quickly and on to a happier life.
Here’s the promise… that suffering won’t last forever.
True hope is found in the promise that exile won’t last forever. That pain and suffering don’t get to have the last word in your life. And that our pain, our suffering, all of it has a purpose. All of it can be used by God to help us become who He has created and called us to be.
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.
Another translation says, For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. (AMP)
That word for peace, also translated good in some of your Bibles, is the word Shalom in the original language.
In his book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Carlos Plantinga defines Shalom this way. He says,
“The webbing together of God, humans and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he lights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”
— Cornelius Plantinga
So the plans God has for us, the thoughts God has towards us, are plans for PEACE. Are thoughts of us living life in a world where things are restored to be the way they were always intended to be.
Does God have a plan for you?
So does God have a plan for your life?
Some of you may feel like you’re in the smoker today.
You may feel like you’re enduring a long season of pain, a long season of suffering. You may be wondering if this promise of God is even true. If God even has a plan for your life?
God had a plan for His people then and God has a plan for His people now.
Becoming always happens over time through discipline.
Many people give up on God in the middle of their suffering. And it’s because they’ve held on to the wrong promise. They’ve actually held onto a lie. They believed some preacher somewhere that told them God wants them to be happy, healthy, and wealthy.
But that’s not the promise.
The promise is that God will be with you through your pain, that God will bring you through your pain, and God will use your pain to make you more like Jesus.
This is God’s plan for you.
Will you turn to and hold onto the true promises of God in the middle of your pain so that God can do in you, for you, and through you immeasurably more than you could ask or imagine?
Only you can answer that question. My prayer is that you will.
Because God does have eternal plans for you. They are plans for your shalom, not for disaster. His plans are to give you a greater future and a greater hope than you could ever imagine. And those plans could be realized in your life if you, if we, would turn from our sin and return to God.
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