Series: Hope Sermon Title: Hope Discovered Passage: Lamentations 3:20-26 Preacher: Dan Weyerhaeuser Date: 4.2.17 I’m not on Facebook a lot. One reason is that my curiosity gets me sucked into silly articles that I spend time looking up (eg: 20 things you didn’t know about “Gilligan’s Island.”) But one I’ve been laughing at lately is a group of pictures under the heading, “Why women live longer than men.” It includes pictures of 1) painters, 2) construction workers, 3) police officers, 4) office workers, 5) college students, 6) dads, and my favorite… 7) community safety workers.
We live in a world where people get hurt, sometimes by their own stupidity, sometimes not. This last week, we’ve had at least one person undergo a 6-hour surgery to remove cancer. One of our folks children had a terrible accident on vacation and was in surgery for hours with a crushed pelvis and broken bones. Others are living with a diagnosis that has a trajectory that does not include healing. At least two in our church family lost parents this week. We still have people unemployed, and more under-employed, who are staring at a financial picture that (without intervention) seems terrifying. I spent hours this week with a friend who’s distant marriage feels hopeless to recover. Some of us are grappling with kids in real pain and confusion. Some who know they are in the last lap of their lives… even well into it and wanting to spend these days well in faith and not fear.
THE thing every one of these people have in common is that they are looking for hope! “Will my ailment get better? Will my kids get to adulthood in stability physically, or spiritually? Is our financial house collapsing? Can I entrust my parent to the Lord? Can I trust my children to the Lord? Can I entrust myself to Him? What reality-based rock of real hope can I have to stand upon?” I am so grateful the Bible speaks to life in THIS world, and offers to us a hope that is real, stronger than any pain or threat, immediately available, and reaching out to YOU this morning! The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations to help us discover the hope HE had found on the worst days of his life. His counsel… Main point: Memory ignites hope! There is an immovable rock of hope you can stand on today in what you remember… about God! In a world where we desperately need it, memory ignites hope. If you are feeling the press of this world and a serious dose of Christian hope would change YOUR life today, you will be helped by this passage in Lamentations 3. Take it! We will see 1) a world void of hope, 2) A God who brings hope, 3) A strategy to revive hope, and 4) A salvation of absolute hope. Things we see here… 1. A world void of hope The book of Lamentations begins with the Hebrew word for “How?” (Lamentations draws its name from the word “How.”) “How could this happen? How did we get HERE?!” Lamentations was written by Jeremiah, the prophet of God, who lived through TERRIBLE days. 600 years before Christ, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar (586 BC). Jeremiah was the son of a Levitical Priest who grew up in the temple and from a very early age experienced the call of God on his life. But he ministered at the end of generations of God’s people who had not honored God. In Jeremiah’s life-time, kings of Judah promoted the worship of pagan gods and perverted practices associated with this including child sacrifice! And so he witnessed God’s discipline of His people: waves of Babylonian soldiers overran Jerusalem, finally tearing down the city walls and looting and destroying the Temple of Solomon!
2 MORE, not only was God not delivering them. It felt as if God was Israel’s adversary! Lam. 3:1 I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; 2 he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; 3 surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.
TRUTH: The triumph of Judah’s enemies was the discipline of God. And indeed, after the exile, Judah never struggled with idolatry again. But it was harsh! Jeremiah’s message was 1) this is the discipline of God, 2) surrender to Babylon, for no rescue from God will come, 3) God WILL take care of us in exile, 4) He will bring our children back whose hearts will be fully his. Jeremiah not only saw the walls and temple of his beloved city torn down and destroyed, but he likely also saw his own neighbors and friends and family members killed or shackled and taken off to Babylon to die. It was personal. Worse than that, HE was labeled a traitor of the Jews for his message. Once he was beaten and placed in stocks. Another time, the king threw him into a well to die, and he was there in the muck long enough that starvation was actually a real possibility. He spent a good amount of time in jail. It was perhaps from his memory of being at the bottom of that well that in C. 3, Jeremiah writes 3:19-26. READ. Jeremiah began by saying… Lam. 3:19 (I)…Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
When you have experienced enough affliction, you don’t feel like you are getting through it… you feel like you are wandering. You’re exhausted, your reserves are used up, your resilience is replaced with fragileness, your perspective is shot… you feel like you are wandering about in the ruins of what is left of your life. On the inside, it feels like… Lam. 3:19 … wormwood and the gall!
Wormwood and gall are related terms. Jeremiah feels like he ate food that was putrid that is poisoning his soul! 20 My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.
Can anybody relate? This is the world we GOT when our first parents rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve essentially said, “We want a world in which WE call the shots, in which WE choose for ourselves what we think is “good” and “not good, “ and God said, “Ok!” It is a world in which families are torn apart and addictions destroy lives, where nations attack nations and neighbors have malice towards others. TRUTH: The days of Jeremiah are not unlike the world of today, which is NOT evolving to a place of better society or personal healing. There is much that IS good in our world, but what is wrong is AS wrong today as it has ever been AND we have no reason to hope that it is going to change any day soon. That’s the first thing we see here. But in the midst of those days of sorrow, Jeremiah wasn’t hopeless. In moments in the bottom of that well, he experienced something NOT of this world. He experienced… 2. A God who brings hope I’m not “romanticizing” suffering. I’m just saying that in it, Jeremiah discovered a REAL hope far stronger than this world. It is at this critical moment that he writes… 21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I HAVE hope:
Notice: HAVE is present tense. What is his hope? Truth: His hope is NOT that he knows his situation will improve. While being beaten in the stocks, he may have died. 40 days in the well, he didn’t know if he would get out. BUT when there was nothing in the world but hopelessness, he tells us, “I have hope” because of what he called to mind. Clearly this hope was not anchored in a change of circumstances. It is anchored in something greater. It is anchored in God and Who He is! 22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
The steadfast love of the Lord… is the source of joy for which our souls life. The richest, most powerful, admired, successful person in the world does not find in their success what really satisfies their soul because what satisfies our soul is our LORD’s steadfast love… and Jeremiah remembers it never ceases. Steadfast love is the Hebrew word, “Hesed.” This is God’s covenant love. It is His love given to His people
3 before His people had done anything but reject Him. 2 Samuel 9, David wanted to show the grandson of Saul, his enemy, “hesed.” He found Mephibosheth (the crippled child of Jonathan), brought him into his palace, promised to provide his every need for the rest of his life, brought him to his own table to eat with David all the days of his life and welcomed him as a son. This is what the hesed of God looks like… for YOU! It is His unexpected, undeserved more-than-you-could-ever-need provision, initiated by God, which is really in the end God’s gift of HIMSELF to you! JEREMIAH remembers, The steadfast love of the Lord…. never ceases and NOTHING in the world can ever take it away! Better still… even when I have done something to deserve judgment… his mercies never come to an end; Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought and is acquainted with all our ways. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still. A. W. Tozer (“God is Easy to Live With”)
God’s mercies never come to an end. To drive this point home, he says God’s mercies… 23 …are new every morning;
His mercy is new every day because you need it for different reasons, for different sins. I’m going to be 55 this year… that means He has “mercied” me 20,700 different ways in my lifetime! This is not to say that HE does not discipline us - clearly. But HE does not throw off! Fascinating: The word mercy comes from the Hebrew word “womb.” God brought His people into being like a mother her child. A mother will forget her child before the Lord will forget His people. BEST of all… great is your faithfulness.
Ours is not a God Who changes!!! This is an anchor for us! Did you know that Australia moves 70 millimeters to the NE every year? This is an issue because the coordinates being used by GPS mapping are based on measurements taken in 1994. So GPS coordinates are off by about 5 feet, which with driverless plows and future cars is an issue. TRUTH: In this world, continents shift… but God NEVER changes! This covenant loving, daily merciful God is ALWAYS the same! And we are anchored to Him through Christ!
We serve a God who brings hope! These verses then describe… 3. A strategy to revive hope Realize what we have seen! Memory can ignite hope. But it can also bring despair! Notice – in v. 19-20, Jeremiah’s memory caused him to be downcast in his soul. When he remembered all the devastation around him, it was wormwood and gall for his soul. BUT, when he brought his memory under his control and remembered the Lord, he was awash with hope. Your memory is like a servant who has two hands. In one hand is the memory of all that is wrong which brought despair. But in the other hand of your memory is all that you know of, and have experienced about the LO RD God. Wisdom will transform memory into an agent of comfort IF you let it bring to us the memory of Him (Spurgeon).
In these verses he gives 3 strategies, three things you can do, that help you discover hope by what you remember. For one thing, 1) Remember you have God! 24 “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
The Hebrew word for portion is the word used to describe portions of the Promise land inherited by the tribes of Israel. Their portion was land. Jeremiah is remembering that HIS inheritance is the LORD! When he thinks, “I’m never getting out of this well. It's going to end for me right here!” Jeremiah ALSO thinks, “but this can’t take from me my inheritance! The LORD is my portion! He is not PART of my portion… HE is my portion! This is how God’s people think when they live like Christians (and die like Christians.) When you are hurting, and all you see is what is bad, you say to your soul, “The Lord is my portion. Cancer, you can’t take
4 from me my portion. Job loss, you can’t take from me my portion. Bottom of a well where I may die… you can’t take my loving, merciful God from me!” Strategy 1: You discover hope when you remember that you have the Lord What about the pain of your situation? BUDDHISM teaches its people to find peace by detaching from our world (just like Jedi). They escape pain by killing desire, by detaching from caring and killing all emotion (bad AND good). But God doesn’t WANT Jeremiah to be indifferent to Babylon overrunning Jerusalem. GOD cares about this and He wants us to be like Him! So even though I can remember that I always have God, what do I do with the pain of this awful situation? Strategy 2 to discover hope… 2) Wait for His help 25 The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
When we are in suffering, HE wants us to wait for Him. Wait = not passivity… it is active dependence. We wait for Him when we remember Him, pray for His rescue, trust He hears us and is working for good, obey today, help others find hope in Him, watch for His work, and trust the future to Him no matter what that future is! That is waiting. Waiting is living in active dependence upon HIM! Did He not provide food yesterday? Do you not have clothes today? He knows what you need, Jesus said!
TRUTH: God shows up when we actively depend like that. The LORD IS (present tense) good to those who wait for Him. Pray and wait…that’s the game plan. And it's not a fall-back position. Strategy 2 to discover hope is pray and wait for His help. More… 3) Seek God through this The LORD IS good…to the soul who seeks him.
Jeremiah is telling us that days of sorrow are not just days you cling to God to get you through. They are days to seek Him. Seeking God means looking for Him in every situation.
When I met up with Lisa in Florida in January, she was picking me up at the airport. We were on the phone, seeking each other. “I’m by the Macaroni Grill in the West Hall.” Finally she saw me and said, “You’re wearing a golf shirt!” She found me… still I didn’t’ see her. I kept seeking her… until we met and hugged! Woo hoo!
Every day we seek God in our circumstances when we think, “You are not just here to get me through this situation, but this situation is here to help me realize my need of You and depend upon You and interact with You and enjoy the presence of YOU!” PROMISE – at the bottom of this dark mineshaft I am in… is a vein of the purest gold called the LORD! TRUTH: Suffering is not only a place to get the help of God. Pain is a place to experience something of what Christ endured to the full for your salvation. Ever feel the pain of being betrayed by someone? Jesus came to save the very people who crucified Him. You are tasting what He experienced in full for you! Ever been abandoned by the people who’d promised they would never leave? This is a taste of what Jesus felt as He left the garden of Gethsemane arrested and all of his disciples’ abandoned him. THIS is what he felt on the cross when His Father turned his face away! Has your soul ever felt down-cast in you? Jesus’ soul was so downcast in the garden at the prospect of the coming judgment of God that He sweat drops of blood. “This is a taste of what you experience?!” Ever faced the last days of your life? Jesus went to cross and grave willingly so that you would live forever. This is a taste of that! I’m not trying to romanticize pain or say that what we are sorrowing over doesn’t matter. But I AM saying that IN this pain, you are experiencing a front row taste of our broken world that your Savior experienced in full for YOUR rescue! Like nothing else, this pain opens your eyes to what HE suffered full strength on the cross in order to redeem you and make you His own. The Lord is good… to the soul who seeks Him on terrible days! Strategy 3 for discovering hope is seek the Lord in it. This text points to something beyond God’s help in our immediate situation. This text points to… 4. A salvation of absolute hope Our verses end…
5 26 It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
A generation later, God's people would MIRACULOUSLY be sent back to Jerusalem by Cyrus, the King of Persia, who would also finance the rebuilding of the walls and the temple. A salvation from this threat was coming. But other threats would rise. After Alexander the Great died, his empire would be split into 4 empires and two of them would war against each other and use Israel as their battleground. Severe persecutions would follow. God would deliver them through Judas Maccabees. However their cry for salvation wasn’t finished. Years later, the Romans would come to occupy Judah and be another foreign power from which salvation would be required. TRUTH: The salvation that people need is not just from enemies, but enmity, evil in others, unfaithfulness in us. What will do THAT? A: One day God Himself would walk on the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. He came, not only to show us what God is like in the flesh, but to take on and defeat our greatest enemy, which is evil in the human heart. The agony of Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s day was an anticipation of the agony of God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ, on the cross! He entered into, not only the pain of this world, but the sin that CAUSES the pain of this world, to die in the place of God’s people and so bring us rescue! Jesus’ final words, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30) are the words of the defeat of evil for God’s people! TRUTH: REAL salvation is more than getting a “no cancer” report or having a secure job or getting your marriage back together. Real salvation is God forgiving evil in your own heart, freeing you from your slavery to it, and reconciling you to God as His child. THIS is the ultimate salvation that came in Christ because God loves us! Response: 1) For you: Call to mind the steadfast love and bottomless mercy that our unchanging Lord has for YOU! Let your memory bring HIM to you instead of just an index of all that is wrong! THIS will IGNITE hope in you on EVERY day! For this reason for these weeks, we published for you our key verses: Lam 3:20-21. When you are feeling lost, call to mind that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases for you! Made a mess of things? Remember that His mercies never come to an end. Truth: they are new every morning. Remembering HIS faithfulness will provide REAL hope for you in this! Some today didn’t know you COULD know God like this… loving, close, redeeming Father! HE is Who your restless heart is looking for! 3 words you can speak to Him today: I’m sorry, thank you, please. I’m sorry for what I’ve done in my life. Thank You for sending Jesus to die for my sins on the cross. Please come into my life as my King and God… I place my trust in YOU! He will! 2) For someone else: How can you bring hope to someone this Easter? I notice that the prophet who said he HAD hope was writing this letter to help US have hope! YOUR hope in Him increases when you help someone else find hope! Do you know people who are feeling an absence of hope? Between now and Easter, what could YOU do to help them find hope? If you pray that God would use you to bring hope to others, He will open a door for you. Maybe it is 1) to pray daily for them, 2) Spend time with them, especially when they are hurting, so they aren’t hurting alone. It is less what you say and more that you listen (Latest Blog). 3) Share YOUR story about Jesus. TRUTH: Memory of God’s unchanging love and mercy ignites hope that cannot end! It was a foggy morning on July 4, 1952, when Florence Chadwick waded into the water off Catalina Island. She intended to swim from the Island to the California coast. The water was cold and fog so thick that she could barely see the boats in her party. Several times sharks had to be driven away with rifle fire. She swam for 15 hours before she asked to be taken out of the water. Her trainer tried to encourage her to swim on since they were so close to land, but when Florence looked, all she saw was fog. She quit… 1/2 mile from her goal! Later she said, “I’m not excusing myself, but if I could have seen the land I might have made it.” It wasn’t the cold or fear or exhaustion that caused her to quit… it was the fog. (Two months later she did it on a clear day and set a new speed record… because she could see land!)
When we lose focus on our goal – our loving God, we lose heart and willingness. But when we remember
6 Him, we have hope today! Jer 24:7 I will give them a heart to know that I am the LORD, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.
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Small Group Leader Notes April 2, 2017 From Pastor Dan… Hello Small Group Leaders and anyone else using these notes, We begin our short series leading up to Easter called, “Hope.” Today introduces the promise that a hope you cannot find in this world can be found in our unchangingly loving and merciful God. Jeremiah would know. He lived through days as horrible as any in human history. Not only was did he likely lose family and friends to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, but he was branded a traitor by his own people who abused and imprisoned him for speaking God’s Word. Yet even in the midst of those days, Jeremiah wrote in order to help us discover the hope he had in the Lord. There is a hope we can discover in God. These great verses will help you group as you let them do their work. Thank you for all you do, my friends, Warmly, Dan Our Scripture Study… Series: Message #: Sermon Title: Passage: Preacher: Date:
Hope 1 of 4 Hope Discovered Lamentations 3:19-26 Dan Weyerhaeuser 2017-4-2
SMALL GROUP QUESTIONS Getting to know each other: Share something important happening in your life these days. Personal Study: As you study (read, reread, consider, ponder, reread) the passage, list observations you make from the text. What is the main point of this passage? How is the theme developed? What “Aha’s” come to you as you read? What questions come to mind? How do you respond to the God seen in these verses? Bring your observations and questions to your Small Group this week! —————————
Lamentations 3:19-26 Jeremiah was a prophet given a challenging task by God. The northern 10 tribes of Israel had been “exiled” by Assyria for centuries. The southern two tribes of Judah had cycled in out of obedience to God… mostly out. And so finally, God raised up the Babylonians to defeat them, carry most back to Babylon, and through this rid Judah once and for all of their tendency to worship idols. Jeremiah’s ministry to was to tell Judah to surrender to Babylon, knowing God would care for them while in the foreign land, and would finally bring a people back who loved Him (See Jeremiah 24:7). Jeremiah was branded a traitor, beaten, thrown in a well, and other various horrible things. 1. In what ways might Jeremiah have lost hope? What are words that describe what it probably felt like to be him back then?
8 From our message manuscript The book of Lamentations begins with the Hebrew word for “How?” Lamentations draws its name from the word “How.” “How could this happen? How did we get HERE?!” This is the first question of a lament, which is a prayer defining sorrow and complaint to God. Lamentations was written by Jeremiah, the prophet of God, who lived through TERRIBLE days of 600 years before Christ, during the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar (586 BC). Jeremiah was the son of a Levitical Priest who grew up in the temple and from a very early age experienced the call of God on his life. But these waves of Babylonian military action in Jerusalem, ending with the walls being torn down and the temple of Solomon looted and destroyed by fire were the worst of all! MORE, not only was God not delivering them. It felt as if God was Israel’s adversary! Lam. 3:1 I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; 2 he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; 3 surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.
TRUTH: Judah was overrun by Nebuchadnezzar’s because God was disciplining His people for their perpetual idolatry. (In Jeremiah’s life-time, kings of Judah promoted not only the worship of pagan gods and perverted practices associated with this including child sacrifice!) The triumph of Judah’s enemies was the discipline of God. And indeed, after the exile, Judah never struggled with idolatry again. But it was harsh! Jeremiah’s message was 1) this is the discipline of God, 2) surrender to Babylon, for no rescue from God will come, 3) God WILL take care of us in exile, 4) He will bring our children back whose hearts will be fully his. Jeremiah not only saw the walls and temple of his beloved city torn down and destroyed, but likely saw his own neighbors and friends and family members killed or shackled and taken off to Babylon to die. Worse, not only was Jeremiah confronted with the evil of the Babylonians, AND the idolatrous hearts of the Jews. He was labeled a traitor of the Jews for his message. Once he was beaten and placed in stocks. Another time, the king threw him into a well to die, and he was there in the muck long enough that starvation was actually a real possibility. He spent a good amount of time in jail. 2. Read Lamentations 3:19-20. Can you relate to what Jeremiah is feeling? This is a group reflection question . 3. What are reasons people in the world today feel like they have no hope? This is a group reflection question. 4. Read 3:21-23. While Jeremiah remained in a terrible place, what ignited hope within him? He “called to mind” the LORD. While his circumstance was not good, nothing in it the world could take from Him the treasure of the Lord! 5. What truths about the LORD most helped Jeremiah? Are they true today? His “steadfast love” which is the OT word, “Hesed” or “covenant love.” This is the same love David showed Mephibosheth in 2 Samuel 9. Mephibosheth was the grandson of David’s enemy, Saul. Yet because of Mephibosheth’s father, Jonathan, who was David’s close friend, David sought to do him good. Instead of harming him (which would have been typical for the relatives of a former king), David sought him out, brought him into the palace, promised to meet his every need for all his life, invited him to eat at David’s own table always, and essentially treated Mephibosheth as his own son. THAT is covenant love, and God has it for us! Suffering cannot take this away! Mercies’ never end: Even while God loves us unconditionally, His mercy is his response to our sin. Truth: WE will never exhaust His mercy. MORE: They are new every morning. His mercy is new every day because our sin is never the same. Great is His faithfulness: This loving, merciful God, will never change!
9 6. Read 3:24-26. In these verses, Jeremiah elaborates on how the Lord of v. 21-23 changes the lives of His people. What does he say? See point 3 in the manuscript above for elaboration on these three points… 1) Remember the God that you have. 2) Wait upon Him for His help in your circumstance. 3) Seek the LO RD IN the circumstance. 7. What things does Jeremiah do to ignite this hope in the LORD? Are these things we can do today while we are in an otherwise “hopeless” situation? This is a “summarize what we have seen” question. How would you sum up what Jeremiah is telling us? 8. What is a practical thing you can do to learn from Jeremiah’s example? The point here is to let each person share how Jeremiah’s words most could help them. 9. V. 23, they were to wait patiently for “the salvation of the Lord.” Several hundred years later, the ultimate “salvation” would come. What was that? Jesus would himself by mistreated by the very people HE came to rescue, not from the oppression of a foreign power, but from the oppression of an internal power… sin in the hearts of people. 10. What would you say to the God of this passage? In other words Jeremiah has told us that our God loves us, is merciful to us, and will never change being this God. If you could speak to God words of praise or thanks, what would they be? Share them with each other. 11. Do you know people who are in a hopeless situation? What is one thing you could do this Easter season to bring hope to one other person? When we enjoyed “The Art of Neighboring” series, the single application of “Learn your neighbor’s names.” This challenge is not as concrete. But I trust God can lead you if you are willing. Do you know someone who needs hope? Could you 1) pray for them regularly, or 2) work on your friendship with them, 3) share the reason you have hope, 4) invite them to Easter?
