Trinity Baptist Church

Making the Best of a Bad Situation

What You Seek, You Find

Jeremiah 29:12-14

 

Do you find it difficult to walk by faith?  There are some things we make decisions about and the consequences aren’t that big of a deal.  But there are some others where the wrong decision can be disastrous.  And if there is the possibility of things blowing up in our face, it can be extremely difficult to live by faith.  

 

Complicating things is that we all like to think if we obey God and do what he tells us to do, then things may be tough but they will work out somehow. And in the big scheme of things, that is true. Obeying God is always the best way to go, and the results of obedience will ultimately always be best. 

 

But it’s that little word “ultimately” that trips us up. Sometimes obedience may seem quite bitter to us when we have tried to do the right thing, ventured out in faith, taken the next step, obeyed God’s will with as much courage as we could muster, following the leading we were given, and still we end up frustrated and wondering if somehow we made a mistake.

 

To put some Biblical perspective on things, let’s think about Abraham for a moment.  Think about the circumstances that greeted Abraham when he finally arrived in the Promised Land, having left Ur of the Chaldea’s.  Not knowing where he was going, by faith he chose to follow God’s call. And when, after much difficulty, he finally reaches the Promised Land, who is there to greet him?

No one.

 

In fact, Hebrews 11:9 says that he lived in tents. He was like a foreigner in the land of promise. In many ways this is even more remarkable than leaving Ur in the first place. As long as he was traveling across the desert, he could dream about the future. But when he got to Canaan, cold, hard reality set in.  Think of what he didn’t find:

 

* No “Welcome, Abraham” sign.

* No discount coupons from the merchants.

* No housewarming party.

* No visit from the Welcome Wagon.

* No mayor with the key to the city.

* No band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

* No ticker-tape parade.

 

Nobody expected him. Nobody cared that he had come. Nobody gave him anything.

 

God had promised him the land, but he had to scratch out an existence in tents. Hundreds of years would pass before the promise was completely fulfilled. Abraham never saw it happen. Neither did Isaac or Jacob.

 

 

Was Abraham in the will of God? Yes. Was he right to leave Ur? Yes. Was he doing what God wanted him to do? Yes. So why did he wind up living in a tent? It is because God’s timetable is not the same as ours. He’s not in a big hurry like we are.

 

 

That is a very stark reminder that God works across the generations to accomplish His purposes while we’re stressing over which shirt to wear today. 

There is a big difference in those two perspectives.

 

But there is something else even more remarkable in Genesis 12. What happens when he gets to the Promised Land? He moves from place to place, he sets up an altar and worships the Lord. Then a famine strikes (verse 10). What’s up with that?

 

Here’s a man who has dedicated everything to follow God. He sacrificed his career, gave up his security, traveled a long distance, couldn’t even find a home of his own, and now there’s a famine? How do you explain that?

 

As it turns out, Abraham ends up going down to Egypt where he gets in trouble because lies about Sarah to Pharaoh (verses 11-20).  It doesn’t make any sense. Why the famine and why the test?

 

The answer is, the test is the whole point. After all that Abraham has been through, you would think that God would give him a period of peace and quiet. Life is rarely that simple for any of us. God often sends trouble following a period of prosperity in order that he may test our motives.

 

Are we serving him just because things are going well? But what if we lose our job? Our marriage? Our friends? Our reputation? Our wealth? Our home? Our health? Will we still serve him then?

 

 

 

Donald Grey Barnhouse commented that just as every coin has a head and a tail, so every event in life either draws us to God or leads us away from him. If Abraham had stayed in Canaan during the famine, he would have learned to trust God in a brand-new way.

 

If he hadn’t lied to the Egyptians, he would have given God a chance to meet his needs without resorting to deception. But because he didn’t do those things, that same famine led him away from God.

 

How much better it would be if we would learn this lesson. Instead of complaining at every trial and saying “Why me?” we would be better off to say, “Lord, what are you trying to teach me through this?” Every difficult situation gives us the opportunity to become a student of God’s grace or a hapless victim of negative circumstances.

 

When the famine comes, remember that God has not abandoned you. He sends the famines of life in order to see if you will trust him even in the most difficult moments. We should say, “Here is another opportunity for me to trust God. I wonder what wonderful things he is going to do for me this time.” It’s not easy to say that. But sometimes it takes more courage to stay in the Promised Land than it does to get there in the first place.

 

We rarely can know when we are in the middle of a discouraging circumstance why it is has happened or how things will turn out. Sometimes in our desire to do God’s will, we focus too much on questions such as, “Am I right where the Lord wants me to be?”

 

Good question, but to ask it that way puts too much of the focus on us and on our own decisions. We naturally tend to see life with ourselves at the center of the universe. We naturally spend hours worrying about questions regarding our career, our education, and our future plans.

 

In one way, that is healthy. If we don’t think about our future, no one else will either so we ought to spend some time thinking about the details of life. But life doesn’t begin and end with us. Deep inside we know this is true, but we live as if the universe exists for our personal benefit.

 

A few years ago I read about a football team that lost a big game by the humiliating score of 51-0. It’s hard to get beat that bad in football. You really have to play lousy to lose like that. After it was over, the coach, trying to console his players, told them to forget it about because “there are 800 million Chinese who don’t even know we played a game today.” If it had happened today, he could have said there were 1.3 billion Chinese who didn’t know!

 

And along that line, I am reminded of something I read from a guy named Vernon Grounds.  He said when we face a major decision, we ought to ask ourselves, “What difference will this make in 10,000 years?”

 

He went on to say that most of our decisions—the ones we agonize over—won’t matter at all in 10,000 years. What a liberating way to look at life. Ninety-nine percent of what you worried about this week won’t matter three weeks from now, much less 10,000 years from now.

In the year 2452 it won’t matter whether you lived in Oklahoma, Santa Fe, or South Carolina. But what will matter is that you decided to follow Jesus Christ. All those trivial, piddly details that soak up so much energy will in that day be seen for what they really are–trivial, piddly details.

 

So how are we to approach life, with all its challenges and decisions?  Perhaps the most significant thing to keep in mind is where I should focus. 

 

Even when we are depressed and frustrated and dealing with grief and problems and challenges, we focus in one of two places:

 

We either focus on our problems or we focus on God.

 

To focus on our problems only leads to confusion and more discouragement. Starting with God leads us to the only solid ground for hope. I am not smart enough to reason my way from my problems back to God.

 

Most of us are not spiritually minded enough to see the great purposes of God in the difficulties of our life.  We don’t get the job we want.  We see it as rejection.  Our finances are in a mess.  We’re simply wondering how to pay the bills.  Our health leaves us.  We’re simply sick and hoping to find a diagnosis. 

 

But it’s very possible the rejection and mess and loss of health are God’s ways of moving us where he wants us to be.  And unfortunately, most of the time What God is doing is the farthest thing from my mind. 

And even if I am spiritually minded enough to think in those terms, I can’t understand or comprehend what God is up to.  When I look through the tiny lens of my life and try to divine God’s huge purposes, I am like a flea riding on a cow’s tail trying to count the stars in the sky. You can’t start with yourself and hope to find satisfactory answers.

 

If you start with you, you’ll end with you and be no better off.  So we have to start with God.

 

And that’s where we make our way back to Jeremiah 29.  The last part of the message from God to the disappointed exiles in Babylon contains a promise, a condition and a reward.

 

Verses 12-14

 

Here we find a promise, a condition and a reward. 

 

The promise is, I will hear you when pray (verse 12).

The condition is, Seek me with all your heart (verse 13).

The reward is, I will bring you home (verse 14).

 

Consider what these things mean:

 

In regard to

 

 

God always intended to bring his children home again.  God invites them to seek him even in captivity.  God desires an intimate relationship with them right now.

 

I find this very suggestive and very hopeful. As we peer into the unseen future, we know that God intends to bring us to his appointed end for us. That means he will see to it that we are led step by step from where we are to where he wants us to be.

But exactly how he will get us there and the steps we will have to take in the meantime is not revealed. 

That means that sometimes, just like the Israelites in Babylon, we may feel that we are consigned to Babylon, that God has forgotten us and we have messed up so badly that there is no hope or future for us.

 

But God says, “Do not judge my purposes by what you see in the mirror or what you see around you.” God is reminding his people that they are in no position to judge him at all.

 

What is left for us when we find ourselves discouraged and confused? That’s when we need to remember

 

 

We are invited to seek the Lord. What a thrilling thought this is. God wants us to seek Him because when we do, we will find him. He’s not playing hide-and-seek with us. He is always near at hand.

 

And don’t miss the point of Jeremiah 29. This invitation to seek God was given to his own wayward children who had blown it so badly that they were taken from their homeland and transplanted into the heart of heathen idol-worship. Many of them would never go home again because they would die in Babylon before the 70 years came to an end.

 

What do you do when you find yourself in Babylon?

 

Seek the Lord!

Seek him with all your heart!

Seek to know him!

 

As we study the events of life and try to discern what it all means, keep in mind that God intends to bring us to the place where our hearts will be focused on him alone. And that explains why it was good for the Jews to end up in Babylon.

 

Were they being punished? Yes, but that wasn’t the end of the story. God put them there so that in Babylon they would seek him in a way that they had not done in Jerusalem. His promise was to bring them home.  He does the same thing with us.  That’s where we discover

 

 

What they would discover was “Home” didn’t have to be Jerusalem.  It is wherever God was.  That’s why Jerusalem can become like Babylon to us, and Babylon can become like Jerusalem because God is not limited by time and space. He cannot be contained in buildings built by man—not even by the beautiful temple in Jerusalem. He is above and beyond all human limitation.

 

When Paul explained this principle to the men of Athens in Acts 17, he pointed out that God gives us life and breath and spreads us out in different nations around the globe—and he does it “so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26).

 

Have you ever wondered why you were born into a particular family at a particular moment in history? After all, you could have been born 500 years ago or in Brazil or India or New Zealand.

 

Why did you end up where you are right now? God arranged everything in your life so that you might seek him. You are where you are right now because God wants you to seek him and to find him. He desires a personal relationship with you.

 

This sheds some light on things like cancer, the death of a loved one, financial collapse, and the breakup of a marriage. Why would God allow such things? One part of the answer is that God uses these awful events to teach that we can’t make it without him.

 

Many of us could testify that it wasn’t until we hit rock bottom that we finally found the Lord. When you are flat on your back, totally broke, health gone, marriage dissolved, children scattered, career ruined, with nowhere to turn and no hope in the world, in the blackness of that moment you cry out, “Oh God, have mercy,” and he responds, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask for my help.” So we learn the hard way that life is meaningless without the Lord.

 

We come at last to the bottom line as we face our own personal Babylons. If you are in a hard place right now, do not despair and do not think that God has forgotten you. Remember these truths:

 

    * God often puts us in places we don’t like so that we are forced to confront our own weakness.

    * We will often be in those places longer than we like.

    * Those times are wasted if we mope or complain or become bitter at God.

    * Those times are redeemed if we use them for our own growth, to serve others, and to know God better.

 

Thomas a Kempis (who wrote The Imitation of Christ) said, “Seek God, not happiness.”   We have it all backwards. We seek happiness and hope to have God thrown in as a bonus. But we end up with neither. The paradox of the gospel is that when we truly seek God, we find him, and we get happiness (deep fulfillment, lasting joy, the abundant life) too.

 

 But it takes years for many of us to figure that out, and some of us never get it straight. To the very end, we pursue earthly happiness and our own agendas and we wonder why life leaves us frustrated and disillusioned.  But here’s the deal:  What you see determines what you seek.

 

If all you see is Babylon, you will be miserable.

If you see the hand of God, you will have hope.

 

John Adams was the second president of the United States.  He lived to be 94 years of age.  He outlived his wife, several of his children, and all of his contemporaries except Thomas Jefferson.  We don’t have HBO at our house, but back in 2010 they did a miniseries on the life of our 2^nd president John Adams.  Adams’ life, although filled with great accomplishments for the nation, was filled with heartbreak and tragedy. Adams disowns his son, who dies an alcoholic; later his daughter dies of cancer.

Towards the end of his own life, Adams wanders the cornfields at Peacefield, his Massachusetts farm with his son Thomas, who has remained faithful to him in the midst of his losses. He says this:

 

“Still, still I am not weary of life. Strangely. I have hope. You take away hope and what remains? What pleasures? I have seen a queen of France with eighteen million livres of diamonds on her person, but I declare that all the charms of her face and figure, added to all the glitter of her jewels, did not impress me as much as that little shrub. [pointing with his walking stick to a small white flower in the field] Now my mother always said that I never delighted enough in the mundane, but now I find that if I look at even the smallest thing, my imagination begins to roam the Milky Way. Rejoice evermore. Rejoice Evermore! It’s a phrase from St. Paul, you fool! REJOICE EVERMORE! I wish that had always been in my heart and on my tongue. I am filled with an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees right here in admiration.”

 

Life is so short for all of us, we come quickly, we leave quickly, we will all be buried someday. But oh, how precious is the gift of life, and how blessed we are to be here.

 

Even in Babylon, we can seek the Lord. What sadness if we go through life complaining about our misfortune, focused on ourselves, and blind to all the beauty that God has placed in our path instead of rejoicing evermore.  After all, what you see is what you seek.

 

Let’s pray.