Keep Calm and Carry On

 “Keep Calm and Carry On” // Jeremiah 29:10-14

Sunday, June 2, 2013 @ Jericho Ridge Community Church

New Series: Stuck

Good morning everyone!  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and I want to invite you to come in and take you seats.  A few months ago, Meg and I were watching a documentary on the CBC’s Doc Zone…  words that would never have come out of my mouth in my 20’s or early 30’s.  But, it was a documentary entitled “The Trouble With Experts” which did a masterful job of pulling apart this notion that somehow people with special sets of skills or expertise can do a better job of predicting the future with accuracy than the rest of us.  The documentary highlighted a 20 year study of experts who make a living predicting what is going to happen in the near future - political pundits, economic or political experts and the like – and they showed that they were right only about 50% of the time.  What was more troubling, perhaps, was the unnerving truth that “the more famous the forecaster and the more overblown the forecasts, the more wrong they are”.      

Now, granted, it’s difficult to forecast the future, no matter who you are, but often we think that so called experts ought to know best and so we place our confidence in their opinions.  Here’s a few of my favorite quotes from the related book “The Experts Speak: The definitive compendium of authoritative mis-information”. 

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, October 17, 1929

“Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.”

Irving Thalberg’s warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind”

“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”

Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962

“With over fifty foreign cars already on sale here the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.”

Business Week, 1968

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

The future is notoriously slippery to predict.  And while it’s funny to laugh at how these people got it wrong, for many of us, when we think about the future, we become paralyzed with fear, anxiety, worry and we get, well Stuck.  Last month, we asked you on Sunday morning, via Facebook and Twitter the question “in what area or areas of your life do you feel stuck?” and you had some poignant answers and some really good questions.  One of the areas that came up frequently was this notion of the future….  Fear about what might happen.  A sense of angst about losing control or not being prepared.  We long for security and certainty in our lives… This is, after all, the entire basis for suburbia.  But if there’s one category where our predictive models can fail us, certainty elude us, and fear has the potential to grip us, it’s when we think about the future.  The unknown and unknowable has a way of creating discomfort in our souls that can rob us of peace and can at times, threaten to overwhelm us, if we let it. 

The Old Testament wisdom book of Ecclesiastes says pretty matter of factly in chapter 10:14 “No one really knows what is going to happen;

no one can predict the future.” yet it doesn’t stop us or the experts from trying, does it?  A few pages over from that verse, is the book of Jeremiah, a man who lived around 600 years before Jesus and is generally known as the weeping prophet because he didn’t have really happy things to say about what was going to happen to the people of Israel in their future.  This was because of the people’s rampant and repeated disobedience of what God had asked them to do.  The whole books reads as a bit of a critique of the so-called experts who say to people “peace and safety are coming your way… Don’t worry about things!” when in fact, God has promised consequences for their actions.  This is why it comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I hear a person engaged in a conversation about the future and they glibly quote Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future.”  And they say to their friend, “don’t worry, friend… you just need to believe this verse.  Magic Jesus wants to make it all better.  The trajectory of your life will be up and to the right.”  To me, it sounds less like Jeremiah and more like, well, a North American TV infomercial or television preacher.  “Prosper. Hope. Future.  Just say them again and again friend, name it and claim it, and you’ll get unstuck.” 

Without negating the role of confident faith in our lives, I’m going to suggest here today that if we go around quoting Jeremiah 29:11 as a kind of spiritual pick-me-up to people we have allowed North American culture to set the interpretative lens by which we look at the Bible as opposed to letting the Bible speak for itself.  Let me show you what I mean.  Let’s look at the few verses around Jeremiah 29:11 to get a better sense of what is going on and what the text was saying not only to its original hearers but also to us today as well. 

Let me set a bit of historical context for us as we dig in.  As you go through the Old Testament, the story of a particular people begins to take prominence.  The lens of the Biblical story focuses primarily on history and activities of the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, known as the children of Israel.  They live in and around modern-day Jerusalem.  But after a while, we begin to see that like any family, they have some obedience issues.  Despite God’s repeated intervention in their lives and His invitation to worship Him, they chose to put their trust in other sources of hope for the future.  They trust their own strength, they trust other nations, they trust in pretty much anything but God.  So God warns them about the dangers of this course of action again and again but they refuse to listen.  So eventually, God allows the nation of Babylon under king Nebuchadnezzar to invade their land and to carry off most of the people of Israel into captivity.  This is a low point in their national history.

So sometime after 597 BC, the prophet Jeremiah writes a letter to those who have been carried off into captivity and are now living in exile, and this is what it says.  I’ll be reading from Jeremiah 29:1-14, when I get to verse 10 the words will come up on the side screens so till then you can follow along in your Bible or on your smart phone, just download the YouVersion Bible App.  [Media: Please wait until 29:10 to put up 2 Scripture Slides]

The people of Israel who were exiled were stuck.  They didn’t know what the future would hold – would they be going home tomorrow, would they be living out the rest of the lives in Babylon, so they weren’t even sure if they should plant a garden this spring not knowing if they would be around in the fall to enjoy the fruits of their labour.  As you can imagine, it’s tough to live like that.  But what made it even more tricky was that in chapter 28, we see that there were people running around who claimed that they were speaking for God and who were telling these exiles “within two years, you’ll be home again, happy as can be!” This was causing them to live with a very-short term horizon and inward focus.  And God sees that they are stuck and confused, so He graciously sends a message to them through the prophet Jeremiah.  In verse 10 “you will be in Babylon for 70 years. But then, I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again….  I will end your captivity” (verse 14) “and will bring you home again to your own land.”  For those of you who are parents, you might be able to identify with this: It’s basically a 70 year time out.  You need to sit over there until you get it through your head that what you have done is wrong and there are consequences for your actions!

So stick with that image of a “time out”… Imagine, parents, that you give you child a time out, and another person in the house goes over to the kid who is in the corner or on the stairs and says to them “you know what, I know mommy or daddy says that you’ll be here for ‘x’ number of minutes. But let’s just leave now.  I mean, what do they know anyways, right?”  You wouldn’t stand for it, would you?  Your purposes in that period of discipline would be thwarted by their glib and underhanded attempt to cut things short.  Well God feels the same way about these exiles.  He knows that as a people, they have a lesson they need to learn.  And part of that lesson is to learn to trust in Him for the future.  And God knows that this kind of lesson doesn’t sink in overnight… They’re going to need 70 full years to figure this out.  So to remind them not to give up hope in that period of time, God says to them “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.”  But notice how this vision of the preferred future wasn’t coming tomorrow…  That’s why I think so many well-meaning people mis-handle or mis-quote this verse.  They usually mean it to be a kind of quick fix, bless-me-Jesus and get me out of this pickle kind of sound bite.  But when Jeremiah writes his letter to the exiles, he is intending to communicate to the people at least Three Lessons about the Future.

The first lesion that we see here and through the Scriptures is that

1. The Future is Fully Known By & Belongs Fully to our Sovereign God

Nothing catches God off guard or by surprise or unaware.  The reality that they would be in exile for 70 years but after that they would return, was already worked out by God.  This is why another only God can say   

• “I will tell you the future before it happens”                                                                Isaiah 42:9

In Psalms 139:16, God reminds us that “Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.” 

• “Life and death, or the present and the future. Everything...belongs to God.” I Corinthians 3:22

The moment, the circumstances of your birth and your eventual death, the details of your life, your past, your present and your future are all known and cherished by God.  The future is not mysterious to Him…  As that song Already There by artist Matthew West & Casting Crowds reminds us “to God, my future is a memory” because He is already there”

And because of this, we learn our second lesion about the future.  That because I may not know the future, but I know that God knows my future,

1. 2.    You and I can live with confident hope, even in the midst of uncertainty

Circumstances don’t have the final say as to how you and I think about the future because everything about the future belongs to God.  We don’t need to get fearful when the experts come with dire predictions or bad news.  I love the way that this is pictured for us in Proverbs, where a women with confidence in God is described as…     

• “She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future.” Pr. 31:25

Or she laughs literally at the future.  Not in a glib or dismissive way, but in a way that says “because I believe that the future is fully known to a God who loves me, even if it takes 70 years for this to work itself out, I will trust in Him”. This morning I want you to meet two of the women of Jericho who are living this out.  In profound ways.  One of them can’t be here with us in this season of life because she is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer and so her immune system is compromised and public places of any kind are where germs tend to hang out so she’s lying low but staying regularly engaged by listening online, receiving personal visits, and via email.  Some of you will know Herta Thiessen.  This past week, we got an e-mail titled Chemo Update #5 with this picture of her undergoing treatment.  But what struck me about it was how the finished her letter.  She quoted Psalm 31:14-15 and said “But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, You are my God.  My future is in your hands.”  Some people might look at that and say “Herta, how in the world can you be sitting in a cancer clinic with that kind of confidence?”  But it’s because Herta’s hope and confidence is not rooted in an ultimate sense, in the efficacy of her treatment plan.  It is rooted in something far deeper and more eternal.  Her hope and confidence is rooted in her faith in God and her trust that he holds her future and ultimately her eternity in His hands.  Can you say the same here today, friend?  Is your future in secure hands?  If not, then when we come to our response time, I want you take action by inviting God to take leadership of your heart and your life and to place your confident trust in Him and Him alone.  You do this, the Bible says by confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord over all.  And by believing in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that he is currently in Heaven seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty preparing a place for those who love Him and who trust Him with their eternal future.  If you’ve never made that choice then I would invite you to seriously consider what your picture of the future is rooted in.  Herta’s hope is built on an eternal and secure foundation – a living and vitalized relationship with Jesus. 

I want you to meet another of the women of Jericho who lives out this same kind of trust and f=confidence in God in the middle of everyday life and an uncertain existence.  I’m going to take the mic over to her.  She is going to share her story and next weekend, she is going to be baptized down at the Fraser River.  And since it gets really cold down there and it can be hard to hear and I don’t want her or I to freeze, we’re going to have her share her journey story with us now. 

Thank you so much for sharing.  I love that phrase you ended with “So I step forward in obedience. I intend to press on in my relationship with God… to continue to work on understanding His love for me”  That’s powerful!  I think that’s really the heart of Jeremiahs 29:11 and our third lesson that we see about dealing with fear of the future in this text:

3.God invites you & I into obedient engagement & meaningful choices

• “If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.” Jeremiah 29:13

The first two lessons speak to the question of peace about the future.  If I believe that the future is fully known by a God who knows me and loves me, then I can live with confident hope, even in the midst of uncertainty.  I can ‘Keep Calm’. 

But this last lesson reminds us of the place of active participation.  As people of faith, we are not fatalists – “oh well, God knows the future so I guess I’ll just sit around and wait for Him to work it all out.”  God invites each of us to seek, to look, to find.  In Jeremiah 29:7 God says “work for the peace and prosperity of the city I sent you to.  Pray yes, but also.  Roll up your sleeves and dig in.”  Keep calm yes, but also “carry on” 

Keep Calm & Carry On.  The sign was originally designed in 1939 by the Ministry of Information in the UK to keep people from growing fearful during the Second World War.  With widespread bombing of major cities immanent, they needed to communicate to people the notion that they both needed to have a sense of safety, but they also needed to engage in meaningful plans for the future.  My sense here today is that God wants to remind some of us about one of both aspects of this.  So I want you to find your insert – one side says “reflect & confess” maybe you are gripped with fear and you need to speak that out to God or to a trusted friend.  Write it out, draw it out.  Maybe it’s about your kids, business, health…  Invite the peace of Christ to dwell richly in your heart today.  Maybe you need to come to the back and tape it up on the board.  Maybe for you, the second part is more salient: Affirm and Act.  Tell God and others that you will not be afraid: act in a way that says God “I do trust You” (giving, risk). 

Kevin & the team are coming and will play a song that invites us to reaffirm our confidence in God: Listen to the chorus – In you I rest, in you I trust.