"Plans for your welfare and not for harm"

For the umpteenth time, I’ve gone through a period of uncertainty about some difficulty, which eventually became clearer as time when on and things fell into place. Although I’ve always had a sense (hopefully a humble sense) of being led by God, that has never prevented me from expending tremendous emotional energy worrying and feeling bad about myself during times of uncertainty. I’m surprised God puts up with me; his patience with the Israelites at Messah and Meribah (Exodus 17) was tentative. My anxieties are---I hope----more in the category of “help me in my lack of faith” rather than the Israelites' outraged murmuring. (But they were, after all, out of water.)

I wish I’d bookmarked a blog post I read, about a man who was counting on the promise of Jeremiah 29:11-14: For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. But after counting upon this verse for over a year, the writer was still unemployed, and he was still thinking about ways God provides for us, even amid apparent absence.

This is a wonderful passage. We often neglect the context. There is actually a very large biblical context. God is speaking to the people of Judah as they face years of exile in Babylon. But the horror of that reversal will not last forever; God is, in fact, already planning to restore God’s people in the land. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell of the people’s return and their reestablishment in the land. Christians also believe that Jesus Christ is part of that overall plan, for the promises of God to the people in Jeremiah, Isaiah, and elsewhere gain new meaning in the life and work of Christ.

So in an important way, that Jeremiah passage holds wonderful promise for Christians even if our lives are full of difficulty and God seems slow to help (or if God seems not to be helping at all, or is working in your life in ways you may not recognize for years). All the “everyday” miracles of God---access to God in prayer, reconciliation between God and us and between us and other people, the strength and grace we receive in fellowship and the sacraments and the preached Word, the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives and through the scriptures, God’s continual closeness in spite of our struggles and doubts and failures---are always available to us, even if the “special” miracles we hope for don't seem to be (or are not) forthcoming.

There are numerous New Testament encouragements to “hold fast” to one’s faith, and I think the idea is not so much that God will always solve problems right away if only our faith was strong enough. We do have to take care that we don’t become disappointed and doubtful about God if our problems are ongoing. Rather, the truth of God and the blessings of Christ outweigh life’s difficulties----so we shouldn’t let those difficulties diminish our affirmation of those truths, which (unlike our troubles and struggles) are permanent and eternal. Those truths are the greatest part of "our hope and our future."


But.... in spite of what I just said, I do believe that God works in our lives for good and brings blessings out of difficulty! These are affirmations and truths that we must balance a little, so that we don't rest our whole faith upon outcomes we anticipate from God, and yet we can and do trust upon God's goodness and provision. Remember that “faith” not only has to do with agreeing with certain doctrines; it also means “trust,” and God knows that our feelings of trust may falter because of things, great and small, that happen to us.

After I finished this, a Facebook friend posted this Oswald Chambers quotation: "The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer."