Jeremiah 29, Not 11
Oct 18, 2020 2020-10-18 Aaron MooreA guest speaker (a therapist) reflects on our culture's obsession with immediate, visible results, healing, and progress, using a personal gardening story and Kate Bowler's book "Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" to challenge how we measure ourselves.
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Okay, so a quick question. If you ever heard me before, I kind of thrive on interactions. This is a real question. What was your, what's been your favorite like pandemic activity? Because most people found a new one. So what's like maybe like an old passion or a new passion or something like a new enjoyment or something that kind of that grew out of the past like seven to eight months. I'm curious. Zoom, new passion. Okay. Cool. Very cool. Very cool.
Something's enjoyed. What else? Virtual book club. Very cool. Right. What else? Hiking? Like Florida hiking too. I feel like Florida hiking though like because it's so hot, it's just a different set of challenges. Like it can kill you in different ways. Good. Anything else? Does anybody plan a garden? Okay. Does anybody garden still going? Okay. Has it started yet? Okay. This is nice. After the
activities. All right. So like probably I think it was like April. Very inspired by everybody's gardening. I didn't bake sourdough bread. If you bake sourdough bread, I missed that trend. But we did one day, I was like okay, the garden's happening. We're gonna do the garden. So I built the box and it was a good looking box if I used to myself. I built the box, you know, the fancy box out of like Western Red Cedar and I was like we're starting off on the right foot. It's
gonna be solid. We put it all together and it was like, you know, kid activity, you know, so kids are like trying to use a drill. So I'm like I'm an awesome dad and a carpenter who knew and a gardener all in one. It was like an amazing afternoon. I felt really, really effective. It was powerful. And so we went to the store. We picked out plants together. We got a little tomato plant. We got some pepper plants. We got sweet potatoes. We got okra. And I was about to like have like deep flashbacks into me as a kid with my grandfather. My grandfather had, we
called him Poppy and he was a very kind of southern gentleman and he had a giant garden. And granted it is in my kid memory. It was giant. It might not be giant in reality because I was a short kid. But it felt huge. And we would pick okra and collards all the time and all the stuff. And so we were planting these things and we planted it and we watered it. And we got all these tomatoes within like these little cherry tomatoes. Don't look at me like this is awesome, Brian.
Because it wasn't. I cheated. I bought a plant that was just about to have tomatoes. And Home Depot had done the work for me. The tomatoes grew and within like two weeks we had like 15 little yellow tomatoes. So obviously if the world collapses come to me I will provide your food because I might as well be a farmer. But it was interesting because I did this with my kids and they went in the other room so now I can really tell stories about them. Did this with the kids? And so for the
next slide kind of month or two they'd be like when are we going to eat the sweet potatoes? When are we going to eat sweet potatoes? Where are the sweet potatoes? Where are the sweet potatoes? And so I was like guys for gardening this takes time and patience. And so I of course I acted like I knew everything that I was doing and all I would do was I turned around and do would be like when the heck do sweet potatoes grow? I'm going to use sweet potatoes to take like four to five months to grow. So like four to five months later finally I dug up some
sweet potatoes. Now the catch is by the time I dug up the sweet potatoes one they tasted awful. I have no idea why but they did not taste good at all. So we ate two of them and they were like well this is a bad idea. But by the time we picked the sweet potatoes my garden looked much like it does now which now is pretty much just this like probably 10 foot square sorry the 10 foot square yard of wild sweet potato vines in my backyard. Apparently that's what they do.
Who knew? Apparently lots of people online know this. I did not know this. So the sweet potato vines ate my tomato plant, they might have a plant, they ate my local plant, they ate everything and now they're just wild sweet potato vines everywhere. And as I was thinking about some of the stuff I wanted to talk to you the other day I kept thinking about this garden probably because when we were outside in our backyard I see it and it like haunts me because it's like I said and I'm like man maybe I should have weeded that thing. Maybe I should have like
cut that thing. Maybe I should have trimmed that thing. Maybe I should have done something with that thing and there's all the have like really beautiful gardens you're like well yeah come on man. But I just realized my garden is a kind of clear manifestation in some ways of my attention span. There was like three or four beautiful days of me as a gardener. When we planted it two days when we picked tomatoes and then one day when I just happened to see a sweet potato poking out of the ground and I dug around for 20 minutes and found my
15 sweet potatoes that all tasted bad. That was my career as a gardener. It was really wonderful. It's powerful. It's over now. But my kids and their comments kind of helped me in that because they had very little attention span for it too. Now as a therapist I'm aware like probably their attention span follows my attention span so if I actually weeded the garden every day they probably would be the garden every day. But so much of that for me as I was thinking about this
week I was like my gosh man me and gardening is really tough because I kind of like function where I really want results now. Like if the sweet potatoes would have grown like a week later we'd probably still be gardening. If I plant something and it actually grew like the tomatoes grew we'd probably still be really excited about it. We'd probably still be really pumped on it. But in reality I plant it and my kids are like when are we going to get to eat those and I'm like oh maybe five months from now and then they're like well that's up and they move on to something else. And I get it because that's kind of
that's how my brain works and as I was thinking about this week I think that's really a facility example but I think it really speaks in my mind to how our culture works. You know Ben's been talking about kind of these series of the faith and the things we've learned from them and it's kind of left me thinking in the past few weeks like the results that I want to see in my life. And what do I do with my kind of perception of results in my life? Because if you think
about it if you think about like where you kind of look for results right I mean there's different categories there's like kind of like personally where we look for results there's you know kind of society where we look for results we've spent a lot of time even here on Sundays talking about our desires for cultural change and societal change and some of the justice pieces that we'd love to see happen and and then I think I go home and I click on Instagram and if you haven't noticed everything has like a 30-day thing right. Like everything has
here's like me at the beginning and then 30 days later I've lost like 76 pounds gotten way like super ripped and I'm just way more tan and awesome all in 30 days. I don't know if that's happened for anybody in the pandemic if it has do what you're doing but I feel like we as a culture as society have really been infected by the idea of immediate results right and put it differently I feel like we've really kind of an inundated with this idea of very visible
present immediate progress you know and this isn't like a message or I'm gonna dot on Instagram because I'm on Instagram as much as the next person but but there's a sense where I feel like this idea that my progress needs to be so quickly visible that the growth in my life wherever I want to see growth in my life wherever I want to see healing in my life that I actually want to see it as fast as possible as quick as possible I want to and I need it to be as visible
as possible I need results to be obvious just like just like my son would want to see vegetables on my garden grow literally before his eyes I think this is actually often like what we expect of ourselves I know I do as I thought about this this week it really kind of separate me I was like this is this is kind of how I measure like how I'm doing as a person and this is kind of like how
I measure like am I growing am I like moving towards what I want to move towards you know this is how I measure myself as a business owner does y'all that own a business or you know in your work you might know the feeling when you know give colleagues they do similar things than you and then you're like wait a second like but I just saw that they're doing this and they're doing this and they're doing this and it triggers that part of your brain where you're like maybe I should be doing that why are I doing that has nothing to do with or they're not you want to do that but it hits that part in us it says man
am I supposed to be doing that I should be doing that if I was as successful as I want to be if I was as successful as I'm supposed to be I should be seeing these immediate results all the time I was listening to this podcast yesterday with I'm very familiar with Tate Boller you're a really wonderful book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Love to Believe it's so good so I guess he said it's right you join book club people but it's a
wonderful book about her growing up and living in the church in this mentality that we should be able to find healing when we want healing we should be able to find progress when we want progress and then all of a sudden she had stayed for cancer and none of those things worked anymore she has a wonderful wonderful book wonderful podcast but I happen to be listening to it yesterday and and she was even talking and opening up her podcast it's wonderful I was running it just made me laugh because I've been thinking about this stuff all
week and she says she opened the podcast and says something about hey if you're looking for something that is centered around you being like living your best life now this is not the podcast for you I was like okay I don't know if I'm like oddly encouraged afraid I don't know but she's like this is not the podcast for you this is for those of us who are just trying to be human I was like oh dang okay and so I encourage you to look into her but but let me think
in you know I was listening to her say that I was on a run and I'm running and I'm a goofball with an Apple Watch and the Apple Watch is wonderful because it makes me feel really good about myself and I can look at how far I've run right because I'm like look how amazing my Saturday morning was and how productive I was and I was I'm running and I'm listening to her talk about how like on and not a great idea maybe even not a godly thing that kind of mentality is I'm all for running nothing up but I round the corner I told Michelle was
started I got home I was running downtown and I round the corner and there was like the big the big spout on her thing that put on the side of the road and make people slow down and I round the corner and it says and it flashes for I'm like well goofball driving four miles an hour and turn around there's no car there I was like oh I'm not as fast as I think I am and it clicks down to three like sweet awesome great cool you should guy running three miles an hour I'm really killing it and I joke about that but I realized y'all I've I've been a
lot of how I feel about how I'm doing in life on measurements like that and I'm not saying South Lettic ones I'm saying whatever I see from what somebody else posts whatever I see what I should be doing in my life whatever I see about how you know more successful and best life I should be living now I realized that I place I fall in this trap where I place my worth almost attached to those things and as I thought about this that this week it kind of trickled down into
a couple of things that I think scripture can kind of speak to for us today and I thought about man I kind of attached my worth to these things I'm kind of attached to my worth to these things that fluctuate rapidly like the worst version of the stock market ever and not just my worth but these ideas of am I on the right track is God with me are we actually making progress are things gonna get better like the other paths and the things that we're working
towards whether on an individual basis or as a whole like in our society the things we're passionate about are we actually getting anywhere I was like y'all I measure those things by light the moment I measure those things like this really wacky version of you know of a speed trap machine flashing on the side of the road going oh man no we're not there no we're not there we must be doing it wrong we must be going too slow we're not making enough progress we're not
getting there as fast as we should be getting there and I'm like man I know I don't know if that's how the kingdom function I wrestled with that all this week I was like okay obviously I don't necessarily believe that's how the kingdom God functions but somehow I started to think that way right and in case y'all don't know I'm a counselor so I've a counselor brain which is helpful
and not helpful but I thought about this and I thought man I wondering if that's also you know what conveys into our relationships and I thought of like the young couples that come to see me sometimes and they've been married like two years three years and they're like they come see me and they sit down and we talk like okay what's going on they tell me what's going on we talk about the difficulties they're having and then there's a line that sometimes they'll come out and they'll be like yeah I just married the wrong person and some part
of you want to be like we all marry the wrong person God's what helps us become the right person right none of us I mean all of us have that ability to have these things in us but what it made me think of is like oh man but that's one of the beautiful reasons why marriage is this lifelong thing right because if I judge it based on even a year maybe that's not kind of the full picture so I want to think a little bit about my sweet potatoes our marriage is and and
what it looks like to kind of have a kingdom view of this stuff so if you got a copy of the scripture we're gonna look at Jeremiah 29 and some of y'all are like he's gonna talk about Jeremiah 29 11 Jeremiah 29 11 if you don't know we will mention Jeremiah 29 11 but every time you know Ben and I were talking about this last week and I was like let's talk about Jeremiah 29 11 don't worry because if you graduated high school within the past 30 years Jeremiah 29 11
was on your graduation card right I mean that is kind of like the line for us but I actually want us to look at the part before it okay so to kind of set the stage here right Jeremiah is off obviously the prophet to Israel but what has happened here at this point if the Israelites have actually been taken into captivity meaning that the city has been sacked and they have been led away in
captivity to Babylon so it was starting verse 4 and see what that has a safety Jeremiah to them this is what the Lord Almighty the God of Israel says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon notice God carried them this is a whole another method right but to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon build houses and settle down plant gardens and eat with
a produce marry and have sons and daughters find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too have sons and daughters increase in number there do not decrease also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you in textile pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers you too will prosper yes this is what the Lord Almighty the God of Israel says do not let the prophets and diviners among you to see you not
listen to the dreams you encourage them to have their prophesying lies to you in my name I've not sent them to clear the Lord this is what the Lord says when 70 years are completed for Babylon I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place for I know the plans I have for you to clear the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you plans to give you hope in a future then you will call upon me and come in prayer pray to me and I will listen to you you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart
right so it's interesting to me and this is a passage that is kind of stuck with me for a lot of years interesting to me that when Israel is taken into captivity right are you be one of the most devastating moments kind of in the in the scriptures in the story of the people of God right that they are taken into captivity and to in their mind their city has been destroyed they're
led away in long lines of people and many people have probably perished along the way I mean you know horrible stuff right and they're living in a city that is not their own living in captivity and Jeremiah comes to them and I would and I just think of this I'm like man what would I want to hear if I was living in captivity and and Jeremiah comes to them and says hey God told me to tell you you've been taken away in captivity yes it's really awful but I want you to build
houses and settle down plant gardens and eat what they produce how do your kids get married so that they can also have kids start some businesses in the city and try and actually seek the prosperity of the people who took you there in captivity because if they prosper you're gonna prosper seek the peace of people who took you there as slaves because if they're a piece maybe a piece y'all that
is the wild revolutionary kind of mind-bending stuff if I just been taking away captivity that is not what I would want to hear if I just been taking away captivity I would want to hear like hey I'm gonna get you out of there as soon as possible here's the plan I'm gonna rescue you two weeks from Tuesday under the cover of darkness with some Navy SEALs it's gonna be gnarly we're gonna do it I would want to hear drastic stories of things that were gonna happen immediately
and what God gives is very much the opposite what God gives are these examples of calling them to kind of live what most of us would call really ordinary life really common everyday life as we've thought about these kind of like here's the faith and these practical practical examples of recent history
that Ben has shared right one of the things that left me thinking every Sunday was that man I wonder if the biggest fears of the faith are the people who have pretty much live in anonymity right and I grew up in the church and I think of like the little old ladies who would like pray for you if you ask them to pray for you I have a friend like this I called him earlier this summer and said hey
man here here's some pretty heavy stuff I just really want to share it with you and ask you to pray pray for us he called me like a week later he's like young man I spent a bunch of mornings praying for you guys for a lot of time here's kind of what I'm thinking and we call him I was like what I mean you literally like an hour the next day I'm like that is wild right but that kind of idea that I wonder if so many of the hears of the faith are the people who
did the everyday things that bring about incredibly common grace in our lives see when I'm talking about my garden I realize as I think about it I live very very very locked into this idea that progress and even things like healing and redemption need to happen quickly they need to happen now and you know what I even have a great idea as to how they should happen so if that really wants
to know I have wonderful plans on exactly perfect timelines and steps that he can take to bring about the redemption that I want to see in my life my guess is that the Israelites did too and that's where I feel like this is kind of a good word for us and a good model for us and whether we're thinking individually in terms of things you're longing to see in your life or whether we're thinking in terms of huge you know justice pieces and changes society and culturally as we think about these things God still gives us this model it says hey these things
can happen within these everyday pieces and how we live where we build houses and we plant gardens and we have kids and our kids get married and we start businesses and we seek the benefit of the people around us because here are a couple things that that could happen right that could say hey y'all you know just hunker down wait it out don't become friends with these people don't seek
the benefit of these people just wait it out and 70 years of military you say that right you could say okay like you know we're gonna do this as fast as possible to say that to twist it even farther what do we actually think the average life expectancy was at this point everybody Jeremiah is talking to you pretty much was just told that they're gonna die there
God pretty much just said hey build houses have kids do all these things don't worry I'm gonna redeem this long after you're dead that got heavy for a second right because that's that that feels too wild to me to give man they because I realize because why I feel wild to me because I
would be thinking gosh okay God that's nice but I want out of here I want to see the plan for me right now and to be honest that's how for most of my life I read Jeremiah 29 11 when I read Jeremiah 29 11 God said hey don't worry your life's gonna be amazing right now I think God does invite us into amazing
things but I my point is I think often I read these ideas the same way I would have wanted God to show up if I'd been taken into captivity in Babylon and that I want to I want to see productivity I want to see progress I want to see these things happen for me right now and I even know how it should happen when I look at this there's a couple things I feel like God's telling them
God doesn't tell them to kind of forsake their identity as Israel God doesn't tell them that they're on their own God does not tell them that they're no longer Israel just you know give it up it's over that doesn't tell them that God tells them that they are Israel and somehow in what he's asking them to do and what he's encouraging them to do he's actually making incredible promises to
them promises that go far beyond any individual or short-term view this is what the Lord says when seven years are completed I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place for I know the plans I have for you plans to prosper you not to harm you give you hope in a future he's telling that telling us the people who just said hey build a house
start business start family have some kids have some grandkids but you're gonna die in captivity but have hope it's weird to be told that you're gonna die in captivity but have hope hear me out on this right my kids Michelle I have been reading the little house in the Prairie series of books to them at night which I highly recommend you know right but I grew up with older sisters who made me
watch that show every day in the summer every day TDS 10 am wonderful so it embodies a lot of my childhood and as I read it I'm literally reading it the past like two months because space that there are a lot of those books and I read it and it is like seems to be things when you see when I read these stories and I'm like wait a second you know they're talking about well yeah we're gonna do this we're gonna do this but it's all gonna be okay because in three years we'll
have a week crop and I'm like dang like three-year plan crazy right I'm like well but you know next Tuesday I have an appointment for this and then I have to go do this and I have to do this and I have to do this and if I don't do all those things horrible disaster will befall me right I'm on a 30-day schedule to do the best version of me that I could possibly be because I got to take that into 30-day Instagram tech show against the first of the 30-day Instagram
I'm not really doing that by the way but but that idea of man what was it like what would it be like to have such a long-term view what would it be like to have a view of healing and God's faithfulness and God's promises that extends far after I'm dead and gone I mentioned on a therapist and I have a little
part of my brain back here it's like really like a nerdy therapist brain and anybody familiar with epigenetics okay so for some of y'all that's my way with that I'm probably gonna just completely mature right now but epigenetics is I become fascinated by in the past few years right fascinating stuff but epigenetics is basically some of the studies of how the expression of your genes not your genetic structure itself not your DNA structure itself but the expression of different aspects of your gene makeup is changeable based on your
life and what you go through and examples are really weird things like if you you know went through trauma if you had a family never go through trauma years ago there are these odd trickle-down effects and it's usually things that we never think of but odd trickle-down effects that show up genetically generations and generations later right that there is these odd things in an
example like you know where if they conditioned animals and studies if they conditioned them to a CS shop at the smell of cherries two generations later the offspring of those animals who had never been shocked had a directed version to that smell yeah I'm nerd now on that right now right but there's some fascinating stuff in that right I went down the rabbit hole like looking at that stuff like a year two I was like man wild and but then we're really
thinking about it was I was like wow okay so if trauma trickles down in us for generations what does that say about healing what does that say about the trajectory that our families can deal what does that say about the trajectory of our churches and our faith and our community and our faith me what does that say about and if these negative things affect us the positive things do too and
studies do point that the positive things actually can reverse the negative and that positive can actually create really amazing things in us even on a genetic level how much more can these things happen on a kingdom level for us it's powerful I think we begin to think what does it look like to operate in my daily life with an extremely extremely long-term view what does it look like for me to
hear of God's promise not necessarily promising that it's gonna happen for me the way I want it to happen tomorrow but what does it look like for me to believe that God is going to be who he says he is and he's going to do what he says he will do not just for me but for generations beyond me when the Israelites heard the message of men plant gardens start businesses start families seek the
prosperity of the community around you and the people who have done you wrong they heard it as a promise that God made to his people I wonder what that does and offering freedom for us today to be engaged in things that are gonna take us being engaged and committed for the extremely long haul I don't know what that looks like for you yeah I wonder if there's some place for us to ask
questions of where we may have gone man where we may have almost misinterpreted what we're doing because we said man this is really hard and my relationship is difficult or this business feels impossible or my kids I don't know what to do with my kids I don't know how you know and we misinterpret it I thought man I'm in the wrong place the wrong time doing the wrong thing and we weren't God was with us and God is with us are there places where you have misinterpreted where God's saying hey we're in this we're gonna be in this long term what does
it look like for us to be able to trust in that and what energy does that give us to engage and trust that we can go the hard difficult route for a long period of time when God calls us to the other thing I'm probably last thing I'll share is I do really believe that there's some amazing common grace in what's encouraged of the Israelites right building houses and working and
families and friends and community and dealing with people that you don't like and people that are difficult difficult situations and all these things there is amazing common everyday grace in those things and ways that God grows us and ministers to us but it is often not always the way we want to be we talk a lot about this idea that God has invited us in to be a part of a greater story and it really is a greater story beyond any one of us as an individual I think
it's also this place where God invites us into a story where he is the author of healing and redemption even though at times I find myself really wanting to be the author of the redemption I want to see happen God often has a much kind of greater deeper long-term plan to what he's trying to do in my heart community in the world around us so I hope there's some encouragement in there for you do you have a garden I hope there's encouragement that mine is so awful that
years is probably gonna look amazing when you get home if you run faster than four miles an hour you're killing it but I think there's amazing encouragement for us to do the everyday things with a long-term plan a redemption that can trickle down far after we're done gone so let's pray Lord God you're the author of the redemption that will be brought about you're the author of the redemption that we need to pray you would eliminate the
areas that the areas that we can engage trusting that you're at work the everyday kind of common graces that we can take part in in those ways that you're gonna minister to our hearts of souls our bodies I'm gonna pray that you are spirit we guide us and give us energy and that's what we pray