September 12, 2026
"God Has a Plan" (Jeremiah 29:1-14)
Scripture: Jeremiah 29:1–14
Well, hear now the Word of the Lord from Jeremiah 29. We'll read verses 1 through 14. But verse 11 was Dan's life verse.
These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen and the metal workers, had departed from Jerusalem. The letter was sent by the hand of Elasa the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. It thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters.
Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you. And do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name.
I did not send them, declares the lord. For thus says the Lord. When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, Plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord. And I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. This is the word of the Lord.
In this passage. Dan's verse in verse 11 reminds us that God has a plan. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. God has a Plan.
And today, as we are here in this place, it's a major question of what kind of plan is this.
But in this passage, there is a hope that we are given that calls us to trust God's plan, even as Dan trusted God's plan when he himself had to walk through this church. And so our theme as we study this passage is to trust God's plan. And I want to look at this passage because I think it's a very fitting encapsulation of Dan's life.
1. Make Your Plans (Jeremiah 29:1-6)
We're going to start in verses 1 through 6 where we see that God encourages his people to make plans. You are encouraged to make plans for your life. And look at the plans that God tells his people to make in verses 5 and 6. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce.
Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply their and do not decrease. The people who heard this prophecy originally lived 2,600 years ago. But they really weren't so very different from us in the plans they made for their lives.
They wanted to marry. They wanted to build or to buy houses and make homes. They wanted to have children and to live to see those children grow up to be married and to have their own children, grandchildren, that they could see the legacy of faith passed on from generation to generation. Their aspirations were not extraordinary. They didn't reach too high.
Their aspirations were very normal and ordinary and good. They were looking to the giver of all good things for these good gifts of marrying, of working with their hands, enjoying the fruits of their labors, enjoying their spouses and children and grandchildren. That's the good life. That's the good life that God calls his people, people to in the world.
But while we are encouraged to make plans, what this passage is also acknowledging is that sometimes life doesn't go to plan.
Sometimes life, as much as you might pursue the good things of life and faithfully follow after the Lord to whatever degree. Life does not always go as you want it to. I think it's worth noticing that in the 33 years that Dan was given in this world, this was his game plan. He took a wife, he had three sons, they had just bought a house, they wanted to make a home.
And this was a life that did not go to plan for anybody. But of course, Dan had seen this first hand with his best friend Jacob in 2017, seeing him walk through cancer and then walking through his own cancer again. Dan was trying to Execute the plan. He worked hard, he served hard, he loved hard. He loved being in church and worshiping the Lord.
I love. We will never forget the last Sunday our brother was here. It took all of his strength, but he was determined to be here. He was determined, even as we were singing, to stand up. Though it took everything out of him.
I remember him sitting there, just standing, being a part of God's people, worshiping. This was a man who loved the Lord. And yet here we are today. How do we make sense of this? It's not something you can sugarcoat.
It's not something that we can just wave away because these are incredibly bitter times that we have been given.
While God encourages us to make our plans, we also see in this passage that God often forces us to adjust our plans. And that's what happens here. Because right after the Lord says, pursue this good life, building homes and marrying and having children and living to see your grandchildren after you.
The Lord then reminds them of where they are. In verse seven, he says, seek the welfare of the city. This is not Jerusalem. The city is Babylon, in which the people of God have been taken in various waves into exile and captivity. But the Lord says, seek the welfare not of Jerusalem right now.
Seek the welfare of your captivity city in Babylon. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, because your fate is tied up in the city. For in its welfare you will find your welfare. And don't let so called prophets and diviners rise up and falsely prophesy that you are about to go home because I didn't send them. They're lying to you.
You are going to be there, the lord says, for 70 years. Which means if you do the math, if you were told that for 70 years all of you are going to be in exile, not all of us are going to make it that long. I won't make it that long if it's another 70 years that we're looking at.
The Lord is calling them to adjust their plans.
2. Adjust Your Plans (Jeremiah 29:7-9)
What do we do with this? Well, again, if we have the good life, the vision of this good life over here, of the homes we want to build, the families we want to raise, the work that we want to do, the fruits of the labors that we want to enjoy, then any kind of change to the plan will cut at the very foundations of what we are depending upon for our satisfaction and our joy and our hope for the future. But if our quality of life, if our hope for the future is determined only by the fruition of our plans, only by the success of our circumstances, then Life will be no more than the luck of the draw. Maybe my life will fall on one side of the roll of the dice. Maybe it will fall on the other side of the roll of the dice.
But praise be to God that our life is not determined by chance, by fate, by impersonal forces, or even the actuarial tables of statistical likelihoods for our lives.
Because there is a God who orders all things. Life is about much more than that. But to see the meaning in the midst of our misery, we we must trust God's plan.
3. Trust God's Plans (Jeremiah 29:10-14)
God encourages us to make plans. Very often he throws that curveball, forcing us to adjust our plans. But at the end of the day, he is calling us to trust God's plans. And this is what we see in verses 10 through 14. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, then I will visit you.
Then I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. Now why would God do this? Is he holding a grudge? Is he angry? Does he not actually like the people whom he has chosen and taken by covenant?
That is not it at all. Verse 11. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the the Lord plans for welfare and not for evil. To give you a future and give you hope.
Now how can that be again? If we're looking at this world by sight, we're judging by external appearances, by circumstances, then we come to a day like today and say, what kind of future is there for a man that we are burying? But of course, the scriptures teach us to look beyond what we can see in this world. The scriptures call us to look to the God who is there and the eternal future that awaits all those who have trusted in God's son, Jesus Christ, by faith.
What then is this great future that God is promising for us? Well, look at verses 12 through 14. The Lord says, then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the lord.
And I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
When suffering comes into our lives, one of two things happens invariably. Either that suffering becomes the catalyst, it becomes the change agent, it becomes the threat that wakes us up to whatever we have been blind to or asleep to. And it brings us to do business with the living God while we are still on this side of life and death because this is our opportunity to do that business with God before we ourselves pass beyond this life, pass beyond this veil of tears, and enter into eternity to come.
Or suffering sometimes causes some people not to go to the lord to seek him, to find him while he may be found, but to become increasingly bitter and angry with him. As the old saying goes, the same boiling water softens the potato and hardens the egg. Will suffering and adversity soften you or will it harden you? I remember talking with Dan when something was going on. It was before the full fledged cancer had really come back.
It was when he was dealing with some collapsed lungs. And he told me that cancer was a turning point in his relationship with the Lord. That cancer forced him to do business with God in a way that he hadn't before that point. And he became a different man through his sufferings. His sufferings were not something that hardened him, although this was a hard road to walk.
But they softened him to the Lord. And anyone who has walked by faith through suffering would say the same thing. Today I got to meet Jacob Wishnu's family. I talked with his mother Sandy, and she said, I have to tell you, so many people have come to the Lord because of Jacob's death nearly nine years ago. It is a seed.
You think of Jesus saying that a seed cannot come to life until it first falls to the earth and dies.
What we were praying for, what Dan would pray for in his own life, was that he wanted to get out of his suffering so that he could go and help people. And one of the conversations I had with him on several occasions was to say, understand so many people are looking to you and seeing your faith and seeing your faithful way of walking through this suffering, the way you cling to Jesus.
And they are being encouraged and strengthened and turned to the Lord because of you. The Lord is working out his plan. God has a plan. And if Dan were here today, having passed beyond the veil of this world, to see in greater fullness what God is doing and has done and will do in his life, he would tell you more than anything else. He would urge you, take this opportunity to do that business with the Lord.
Take this opportunity to trust in God's plan. So what is God's plan? Well, God's plan for your life, God's plan for my life. God's plan for Dan's life is built upon a bigger plan. It's built upon, it's rooted down in it, it's intertwined with it throughout it's unfolding through history, namely God's foundational plan and his Son, Jesus Christ.
The scriptures tell us that in eternity past, according to God's unsearchable wisdom and his perfect foreknowledge, God made a plan. This was a plan to redeem and save guilty, vile, wretched sinners like me, like Dan, like you, people who have offended the Lord time and time again, who because of our sin, are disqualified from entering into heaven's glories. Where Dan is now with Jesus, Dan is there, though not because of his plans, not because of what he did in this life. Dan is there because of God's plan. Because in this plan, God determined to hand over his only begotten son into the hands of wicked men who abused him and misused him.
According to this plan, because of the deep love of God for sinners, God's only beloved son was born as a human baby. He lived an ordinary and obscure life until the age of 30, at which time he was baptized and entered into public ministry where he taught and he preached and he healed. And at every point, as we read earlier, he came to do the will of his Father. But the height of that plan, where everything was headed, was when Jesus would be handed over to wicked men, seized, falsely accused, condemned, beaten, nailed by his hands and feet to a cross where he bled, where he had to struggle for each breath. And at the age of 33, the same lifespan that Dan had, he ultimately gave up his life.
The physical was not the greatest suffering he experienced. Though our Lord bore the wrath of God for our guilt and our shame as sinners, he hung on that cross as a substitute, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world as the atoning sacrifice for sinners. Why? So that sinners could look to him and be saved.
So that sinners would not have to be buried not just under six feet in the earth, but into the grave to disappear into the lake of fire into hell for all of eternity. Because that is what we deserve and that is what anyone who disappears beyond this life through death without Jesus will face. If you don't know Jesus, what Dan would want you to know more than anything else today is that you are headed to an eternity of torment and misery in hell. But praise be to God, he has given us His Son, Jesus Christ, handed over according to God's definite plan and foreknowledge to be crucified in your place, so that you, through faith in him, might be forgiven of your sins and saved. So that when you pass beyond this life.
When you are in the casket, when your life is summarized in the picture slideshow, your life is not even more torment and grief than you have today.
But here we Dan and with Dan's Savior, Jesus, enjoying the glory of God for all of eternity. This is the plan that is for your welfare and not for your evil, to give you a future and a hope. Seek then the Lord while he may be found, and find him by faith in Christ. Pray with me.
Heavenly Father, we pray that in this time we would learn from our brother.
We would be reminded that our time in this world is short and that eternity is long. And that the only hope and. And comfort we have in this life and the next, if nothing else than that we belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
I pray, Father, that if there are any who do not yet know Jesus, yet know Jesus, that your spirit would be drawing them to Dan's Savior, not because of the greatness of Dan Dan, but because of the greatness of the Savior who saved Dan.
And we pray that as we think about Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen from the dead, as we await the day of the general resurrection of believers, we pray that you would give us faithfulness to endure the sufferings that you put in our life. Wherever you alter our plans, Lord, help us to trust your plan. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.