Plans To Prosper

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Now odds are, this is one of those verses that appears almost everywhere, like on a coffee mug. Some of you might have that coffee mug, drink out of it every day, you love that verse and what it says. Now others of you might have received a graduation card with this verse. Congratulations, for I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity. Or in some translations like NIV, plans for you to prosper and not to give you harm. To give you a hope and a future. Congratulations, God's got plans for you. It's the most popular Bible verse that's put on a graduation card. Anybody get one of those? Yes, right? And then maybe you've got a grandma who has cross-stitched nicely and made a plaque for you to hang on your wall with Jeremiah 29 11. I don't know. I wonder, does Hunter have this tattooed anywhere? No. Okay, people would. This is one of those Bible verses, for I know the plans I have to prosper and a future. And have that tattooed in one form or another. Now, it's a comforting verse, it's a soothing verse, it's a hope-filled verse. And what I want to do today is to kind of both deconstruct and reconstruct this verse. That is, to reframe it, to show to you that this passage actually has more hope in it than the way that we individually just apply it to our own lives. But how it really was a hopeful verse for the people of God then and is a hopeful verse for the people of God now. And in order to do that, like we've talked about the last few weeks, we're going to go through three different sections on this. Three different ways that we interpret anything in the Bible. First is we have to look at the context. That is, who wrote it? When was it written? To whom was it written? Why was it written? What was going on? And then, how does that fit into everything else in the context of God's people? Secondly, we're going to look at interpreting Scripture with Scripture, because the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible itself. It helps us understand, what does it mean? What does this verse mean? What did Jeremiah mean by it? But also, what does it mean in the whole grand scheme of things? This idea of prosperity and a future and hope and all these words. And then thirdly, we want to apply what we have learned. Rather than simply reading it and studying it like any other textbook to forget about it after the exam. I know how this works, right? God's Word is not a text to be studied as much as His Word to us to be applied and lived out and transform our lives. So that's what we're going to do. Jeremiah 29.11 So first, context. To understand the context of this verse, For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, to give you hope and a future. We have to look at the context. And I think it comes up in Jeremiah 29.1 And this is what it says, right? I'm lost here. These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests and prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Okay, first question. Who wrote this? Jeremiah. Yeah, ding, ding, ding. It's not that hard, right? To whom did he write it? Okay, to the surviving elders. Okay, something happened, didn't it? To the surviving elders of the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. So there's a very specific context for this verse. And what's going on is in 586 BC, we even know exactly the date. Not the date on the calendar, but the year. Nebuchadnezzar came into Jerusalem and destroyed it, flattened it, destroyed the temple, everything else. Took, I'm sorry, the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was not in Egypt. It probably was melted down for gold, the ark, and the gold taken to Babylon. Okay? Just saying, you know, don't treat Hollywood as if they know what the Bible's about. But it was a good story, wasn't it? It's a fun movie, yeah. Okay, but anyway, so now why? Why in the world did they get stuck in Babylon? That is one of the big questions in the Old Testament that people have got to go, like, wait a minute. Why are we here and not back where God had promised that he was going to give us a land? And why are we here? And the answer comes all the way through the prophets' time and again from the beginning of the kings all the way through. Basically saying, you broke the covenant God made with you. And they had turned to idols again and again and again. They were worshiping false gods again and again. Not just once. It's not like God says, oh, you blew it, boom, you're gone. Over 700 years, generation after generation after generation, God's people. The rule of thumb you can use for the time of the exodus in Egypt in about 1200, 1400 B...