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Book: Jeremiah
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Jeremiah 29:11 What God Thinks of You
I. Have you ever thought that God was angry with you? Have you
sometimes questioned His love?
A. This often happens when we are going through some great
tragedy.
1. Satan often uses the circumstances of our lives to
bring doubt concerning God's love.
2. If God really loved you, why would he allow you to
experience this suffering or sorrow.
B. This often happens when we have failed in our Christian
walk. We have been disobedient to the commands of God.
1. We hate ourselves for the weakness of our flesh.
2. We are very disappointed with ourselves and we thus
presume that God is also disappointed and angry
with us.
C. When our older daughter Jan was just a little girl, one
day she was going through the nobody loves me routine.
II. The people Jeremiah was writing to had real cause to believe
that God's thoughts toward them were evil.
A. He was writing to those who had been taken captive to
Babylon.
1. Removed by force from their homeland, many of them
separated from their families, it seem that they had
been forsaken by God.
2. They were there because they had forsaken God, and
had trusted in lies.
3. Jeremiah is telling them to settle down in Babylon,
to build houses and to plant gardens and not hope
for a speedy return to their native land. That the
time of their captivity was to last for seventy
years.
a. For many of them this was very disconcerting,
for the false prophets were encouraging them
to revolt and telling them that they would
soon be returning to their homeland.
b. Jeremiah is now telling them that they should
seek to live peaceably in the cities of Babylon
for they were to be there for 70 years.
B. Living as slaves in Babylon was not a pleasant experience
and to hear the discouraging message of Jeremiah caused
many of them to think that God had only evil thoughts
concerning them.
III. The message of the Lord to the captives. "Thus saith the
Lord, After seventy years are accomplished, at Babylon I
will visit you and perform My good word toward you, in
causing you to return to this place, for I know the thoughts
that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace
and not of evil, to give you an hoped for end."
A. This is always true, the thoughts of God toward His
children are always those of peace and not of evil.
1. There are times when it is necessary that God
chastise us for our own good.
a. These are the times when we are prone to think
that He does not love us.
b. I can remember when I was a child, every time
I was guilty of an infraction of the family
rules, I would be taken alone into my bedroom,
lectured, then spanked. My father would leave
the room and close the door, and in the
darkness of the room, I would think that
nobody loved me, sometimes I wanted to die, for
then they might feel sorry for me.
c. When God has just given us a good spanking, we
think that He a hates us, and doesn't really
care what happens to us.
d. In reality the Lord has said that His
chastening is a sign of His love. "Whom the
Lord loveth He chasteneth." Thus we are not
to despise the chastening of the Lord. If you
can do evil and get by with it, you better
begin to worry, this could be a sign that you
are not a true son of God.
B. The thoughts of God are of peace.
1. Some of you have been fighting with God, you, as the
people of Judah have been rebelling against Him and
as them, are now suffering the consequences of that
rebellion.
2. Sin often brings its own natural consequences of
pain and sorrow. That is why God forbade you to do
it.
a. God does not always immediately relieve you
from the consequence of your sin.
b. Let us say that you stole some money and you
were caught and arrested. You repent and ask
God to forgive you, which of course He will,
but He still might allow you to spend 5 years
in prison for your crime.
3. While you were thinking of war, and rebellion
against God, He was thinking peace.
C. The thoughts of God are not evil.
1. Even the chastening process is for our own good.
2. There is a difference between correction and
punishment.
a. A parent should be interested in correcting
their child from unacceptable behavior. I do
not believe in punishing your child.
b. If you are a child of God, He will take what
means that are necessary to correct you, but
He will not punish you.
c. Punishment awaits them who are not His children
who persist in evil.
3. The sociologist studied the prison system and saw
the failure to reform the behavior of the inmates.
They decided that the flaw in the system was in the
name of the system, they were then known as penal
institutions. So they had this big reform of the
name and began to call them correctional institutions.
The idea was to correct the bad behavior, rather
than punish the bad behavior. Their experiment was
a total failure, because there was no real
repentance involved. The prisoners were real quick
to catch on to the game, and gave the answers the
psychologists wanted to hear in order to gain a
speedy release, but there was no true reformation.
4. With God if you are truly repentant, He will correct
you, for that is for your own good. During the
correction process His thoughts are peace, not evil.
D. His thoughts are to bring you to an expected end.
1. The Hebrew word translated expected is an
interesting word, difficult to translate into
English. There is the thought of expectancy but
more, you may be expecting something that is bad,
or you may be hoping for something that is good.
The Hebrew word has the connotation of a hoped for
expected end.
2. It could thus be translated "To bring you to a
desirable end.
E. God is always looking ahead to the end of the path. It
may be necessary to bring you some temporary discomfort
in order to bring you into His eternal glory.
1. Man is often to short sighted, we only consider the
moment.
a. Look at how much grief we bring to ourselves by
considering only the moment, rather than the
possible consequences.
b. I think of the remorse being expressed by the
one boy arrested this past week in the drive by
shooting that killed the young boy in the
county.
c. The boys, acting on impulse, and the thought of
revenge, not taking into consideration the
possible consequences fired shots at the house,
and are now facing murder charges.
2. God is always looking down the road to the end, what
are the eternal consequences of that action. Will it
bring you eternal separation from God? Is it worth
that?
3. I think that if a poll were taken that asked the
question, "When you die, do you want to go to heaven
or to hell." I am sure that the overwhelming
majority would vote for heaven.
a. Yet they are not living the kind of life that
will insure that desire.
b. They are more concerned with their present
pleasure than their eternal destiny.
c. This is where a person often comes into
conflict with God for He is more interested
in your eternal destiny than your present
comfort or pleasure.
4. God's thoughts concerning you are of peace, He
desires that you spend your eternity with Him. This
may require that you spend some time in captivity,
which will not be very comfortable, but He is
looking at the end of the matter.
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