-Transcript-
00:29 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:33 Welcome to the cafe. Thank you for joining me. My name is Pastor Clark Covington, Heartland Community Baptist Church of Kings Mountain, North Carolina.
00:37 And Heartland Ministries, we’ll throw that in there too. We do a lot of different stuff, including this radio ministry, which is at the top of the list of things the Lord has called me to do, at least. It really is.
00:52 I mean, I pray to God, you know, Lord, what would you have me to do? And he put the radio right square smack dab in front of me over and over again. And I surrendered to the Lord and said, Lord, I’ll do it. So that’s why I’m here today.
01:04 Amen. I believe the Lord wants me to preach on the radio and I thank everyone for listening. I don’t take anyone for granted.
01:10 If you have taken time to listen to the program today, thank you so much. Appreciate you listening. It’s my earnest prayer that you get something out of this, that the Lord, by the working of the Holy Spirit, stir something up in you, helps you to be edified if you’re already saved.
01:26 And if you’re not saved, wins you to himself. The Lord does the saving. We plant the seeds.
01:34 The Lord does the saving. And here I’m in Jeremiah 29 today, and I’m also going to be referencing Romans 11. So those two books, Jeremiah 29, Romans 11, maybe you’ve got your Bible.
01:44 Maybe you have two Bibles. If you have two Bibles, that’s awesome, okay? If anyone out there is listening and they’ve got two Bibles, then you can open one to Jeremiah 29 and one to Romans 11.
02:02 Or if you’ve got a computer, you can open one tab to Jeremiah 29, one to Romans 11.
02:07 Or if not, if you’re driving or something, then just keep your hands on the wheel and I’ll try my best to explain it to you. But we are looking at the context of a very familiar verse, Jeremiah 29:11.
02:14 And I’m going to read that verse, and then I’ll tell you a little bit about why the Lord had put on my heart to do this.
02:22 Jeremiah 29:11, for I know the thoughts that I think toward you, sayeth the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.Okay, so we’ve heard this verse a lot. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, sayeth the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
02:38 Now we look at this verse oftentimes, and preachers are guilty of this, including me, citing this verse as God’s there with you and God is going to provide and God wants to give you this gentle landing.
02:53 Eventually everything is going to be okay. But much less do we really reference the context of this verse.
03:00 And the context of this verse deals with captivity, being in captivity, Jeremiah, the prophet, God’s mouthpiece, if you will, amen, is there speaking to the Israelites who have gone far off from God.
03:14 They’re worshiping pagan gods, they’re committing idolatry, they’re breaking the law. They are spiritually adulterers and God’s saying, you all are going to be judged, Babylon’s going to carry you all away, the Babylonians will, Nebuchadnezzar, as I understand it, the most powerful army ever to exist, and you’re going to face judgment.
03:34 And so Jeremiah 29:11 is really God’s mercy within his judgment taking place. And I heard Dr. Tim Shetler, I think he was associated with West Coast Bible College for a season there, preach a message through Embassy Media. If you haven’t already looked Embassy Media up, they’re a great organization.
03:59 They have that, I think it’s called like the Basic Institute for Life or something, Basic Instructions for Life, and it’s been around forever and it’s a great organization.
04:09 And they had a featured message from Dr. Tim Shetler preaching about conquering in a corrupt culture, and he was mentioning Jeremiah in relation to COVID. And it really kind of light bulb went off in my head.
04:21 I said, you know, it’s not that I wasn’t aware of the context of Jeremiah. I mean, Jeremiah being the weeping prophet, Jeremiah just being totally distraught at what was going on in his time and how the people that were supposed to be worshiping God were not. And I relate to Jeremiah a lot.
04:39 Oftentimes I’m very grieved by seeing God’s people, those that have been saved. Amen. And we’re going to get specifically into who God’s people are in a bit, but seeing them afar off, seeing them in false worship, seeing them doing things that are completely antithetical to the ways of Christ.
04:54 And so I can relate to Jeremiah. I know the book, I’ve read the book and I’d say several times, at least if not many times, but I never thought of it in the context of COVID and being in captivity that way, like literally being locked down, you know, and what that all could mean.
05:13 Because you can ask someone that’s out in the world, was COVID God’s judgment? They may say no, they may say yes.
05:20 But ask a pastor and a pastor is going to give you a response or a viewpoint from what they saw from their congregation, what their congregation went through, what they saw some that rose up and was serving the Lord and praising God as everything looked like it was about to end
05:38 and others they saw just completely walk away that had maybe gone to church 10, 20, 30 years and just walked away. And so pastors saw this from a different light.
06:01 And certainly it does seem from from that pastoral standpoint that it was a judgment from God in the sense that God was saying, OK, who’s for real? Who’s not? Pastor Ronnie Dale from Holland Memorial Church.
06:05 I saw him in a pair of overalls at the farmer’s market out here in the country one day during the thick of COVID. And he told me, Brother Clark, this is God’s final altar call. That’s what it looked like.
06:11 And I thought that was a great way to put it. That was God’s altar call saying who is going to come to me? This is it. I’m going to shake everything up one last time before I return.
06:18 And now things have calmed down and people are kind of trying to forget about COVID. But all these facts still exist. And again, if you’re a pastor, you’re in the ministry, you’re still dealing with what happened during COVID, good or bad or whatever it was, it’s a very different place.
06:32 We’re out of a building now. Amen. Our little church is out of a building and we were in a building during COVID.
06:41 There’s other churches that have had to move or change buildings or whatever it may be. A lot of things have changed since COVID.
06:48 And so we see here, you know, what has got up to because our text says that he knows the thoughts that he thinks towards you and that he thinks thoughts of peace, not of evil.
06:56 And he wants to give you an expected end. So what happens when we consider God himself is the one that has brought or at least allowed difficult times to come our way?
07:07 Because how can a sovereign God, a totally sovereign God, allow things to happen without him allowing it to happen, so to speak? He can’t, right? You know, think about this.
07:18 If God is completely sovereign now, he may not be the one that does it right.
07:24 Like the Bible says that God is not tempted. He cannot be tempted and he will not tempt. Right.
07:28 So if you’re facing a temptation, God, I don’t believe, brought that temptation to you. But God allowed that temptation to be brought to you by the devil. Why? Why would God allow that? Well, it’s a test of your faith.
07:36 It’s to see if you’ll turn to him and on to grow patience and to spiritually mature. Does that make sense? There’s nothing that’s happening in the world today, as I understand the Bible, that takes God by surprise. He has all knowledge.
07:51 He has all previous knowledge and all foreknowledge. He knows everything past, present and future. He is everywhere.
07:55 Everything was created by him and for him. And without him, nothing was made. Amen.
08:01 And so to tell me that God is in sovereign is to tell me that I don’t understand God. I’m pretty clear on who God is. He is all powerful, almighty.
08:07 And yes, the devil is loosed for a season in a sense. And the devil’s bringing about things. And the devil’s the author of confusion.
08:13 But why has God allowed it? Now, we don’t know today. Right. We haven’t.
08:21 No one I don’t believe has spoken to God today about it. Well, what can we do? We can go back to his word and look at captivity in his word and what that looked like and see what we can learn from that.
08:33 And we can see in his word, in Jeremiah, 29, the Israelites were facing captivity and they were in big trouble.
08:41 And Jeremiah is writing this letter. And in verse one, it says, Now, these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah, the prophet, sent from Jerusalem unto the residue of the elders,
08:52 which were carried away captives and to the priests and to the prophets and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon.
09:01 So clearly here in Jeremiah 29:1, it tells us the Bible tells us that this this here letter was for the elders which were carried away captive, the priests, the prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away.
09:16 And if you study Jeremiah, what you realize is in the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah refers to Nebuchadnezzar as God’s instrument, that God is using Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon to take away and put in captivity the Israelites.
09:30 Now, what’s really interesting about this is as Jeremiah wraps up, you know, in terms of the end of the book there, the latter chapters speak of Babylon being judged and being judged very harshly for what they did to God’s people.
09:42 So God both used Nebuchadnezzar to bring judgment upon the Israelites for turning their back on on a sovereign God, for not serving him, for not living for him, for not doing what they’ve been called to do.
09:54 And at the same time, God is going to bring in a remnant back to Jerusalem. God is going to restore his people and God’s going to punish those that hurt his people. So that is only done by a sovereign God.
10:07 But again, the idea that God is benevolent or ambivalent, I can’t think of any other big words, but that God is just, ah, la-di-da-di-da, I’ll just let this happen, is not true. God had a purpose. God had a purpose.
10:19 He had a purpose for what he was doing. We see here the letter being sent to everyone who had been carried away, and in a broader sense, to God’s people.
10:29 And so in this letter, in Jeremiah 29, we have this verse, for I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
10:41 So we have this idea of this olive branch, where even though God has seen so much rebellion and hate and blasphemy and pagan worship and all these things, God is saying, I still love you. I still care about you. I’m still going to bring you to myself.
10:57 Now, someone may be listening and saying, well, Brother Clark, that’s great. But you’re speaking of the Jewish people. How can we call ourselves God people?
11:07 Well, we are God’s people, not by blood, if you being a Gentile like me, but by grace, by being grafted in by the grace of God.
11:17 And what does it mean to be grafted in? Let’s look at Romans 11. We’re going to read a little bit here in Romans 11, starting at verse one. I say, then, have God cast away his people?
11:27 God forbid, for I, this is Paul writing, for I also am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
11:33 God hath not cast away his people, which he foreknew? Wot ye not that what the scriptures sayeth of Elias, how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying, Lord, they have killed the prophets and dig down thine altars, and I am left alone and they seek my life.
11:47 But what sayeth the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal.
11:57 And this here, of course, is speaking of Elijah and how he was persecuted for his faith and for standing firm on what God had had him to stand firm on.
12:11 And that comes out of 1 Kings 19, right? You had Ahab, evil Ahab, and Jezebel. They wanted to kill Elijah. He’s like, man, I’m the only one left.
12:23 But no, in fact, God says there are 7,000. Amen. Verse 5 of Romans 11. Even so, then at this present time, also there’s a remnant according to the election of grace, and if by grace that is no more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace.
12:41 But if it be of works, then it is no more grace. Otherwise, work is no more work. What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for, but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.
12:52 According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes they should not see, and ears they should not hear unto this day. So we see here from verses on, you know, five, six, seven, eight, but certainly verse eight, that God hath blinded the Jewish people for this season so that they couldn’t see him. Amen.
13:10 That’s why you could go like with the book of Isaiah to a Orthodox Jew and show them and say, how do you not see Jesus in this book? And they’ll tell you, I don’t see him.
13:19 They’re not lying to you. God has blinded them and God won’t reveal it to them for this season. Verse nine, and David saith, let their table be made a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a recompense unto them.
13:31 Let their eyes be darkened that they may not see and bow down their back all way. I say, then have they stumbled that they should fall God forbid, but rather through their fall, salvation has come unto the Gentiles for to provoke them to jealousy.
13:44 Here in verse 11 of Romans 11, we see a very unbelievable truth.
13:58 That is, that is a truth. Amen. Nonetheless, that God allows the Gentiles to be saved so that the Jewish folks could be, uh, the Israelites could be jealous.
14:06 Amen. Glory to God. We are out of time for today, but I encourage you to tune in next time as we look at the second part here of this message on the context of Jeremiah 29:11.
14:11 I believe it’ll bless you as we learn about the full depth of why God is saying what he’s saying, when he’s saying it and why it’s such good news for us in the midst of our troubling times, because that’s where a lot of us are here today.
14:25 So tune in next time. Thank you for listening. Take care, God bless and amen.