““For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” I’m sure plenty of you are familiar with this verse - in fact, Jeremiah 29:11 is the best-known verse in the entire book of Jeremiah. Yet it seems at odds with the rest of the book, which is largely doom and gloom.
If you don’t know much about the prophet Jeremiah, he is often referred to as the “weeping prophet.” Do you think he felt like Jer 29:11 was true? This picture of a “weeping prophet” - someone with so much investment in God’s message and empathy for his fellow Israelites - is indeed a powerful picture of a sacrificial servant from the Old Testament. Today, we are going to take a look at Jeremiah and what we can learn about God’s call to each one of us to step up to the plate and become sacrificial servants.
What does sacrificial service look like?
1. Dedicating your whole life to the service of God & others
You’ll notice that I never said that being a sacrificial servant was easy. In fact, you can probably guess from the name that it’s not. One of the challenging aspects is that there is no room for our pride or selfishness. In fact, there’s no room for us at all. Like Paul says, it needs to be Christ living through us (Gal 2:20), not us living for ourselves.
Jeremiah was the son of a priest; one of the better positions you could have in Jewish society. He was on track to take over his father's role one day, but God called him to a different form of service when he was just a youth (Jer 1:6) - perhaps a teenager. However, Jeremiah dedicated his life to God’s service, and faithfully prophesied God’s messages over the next ~60 years, calling out the sins of his fellow Judaites and calling them to repentance. Jeremiah saw a lot during this time. His ministry began during the reign of the good king Josiah, followed by his wicked sons Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim, then Jehoiakim’s son Jehoiachin for 3 months, and his uncle Zedekiah. During this time, the kingdom of Judah was nominally a vassal state of Assyria, before that empire collapsed and she was briefly independent. Then Judah became a vassal of Egypt, and a vassal of Babylon, before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, and took the king and many of the people into captivity at Babylon.
While there were religious reforms during king Josiah’s reign, they seemed to be temporary and superficial - peoples’ hearts were still the same and things rapidly degenerated after Josiah died.
Jeremiah’s call to service was not just on a whim, God said that he consecrated and appointed him as a prophet before he was even conceived (Jer 1:5). I’m sure he couldn’t have imagined what it would involve and what it would cost him, but he said “yes” to God’s call and kept saying “yes” throughout his life.
And it did cost him a lot.
Like Paul, he was called to a life of singleness for the purposes of his ministry. He was specifically forbidden from taking a wife and having children in Jer 16:2. Due to the harsh conditions and volatile political climate, his wife and children would have died from famine or disease or killed by attackers (Jer 16:4). Can you imagine how lonely he must have been? With no one to talk to or support him.
Sometimes Jeremiah wished that he had never been born (Jer 20:14-16). And yet at the same time, he trusted in the Lord, saying that “He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.” (Jer 20:13b).
One aspect of sacrificial service which you may not think about is the necessity of speaking up. At one point, Jeremiah had had enough and was probably sick of nobody listening to his message and turning from their wickedness. But God’s spirit in him compelled him to keep preaching. There were no days off for Jeremiah. He said, “But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” (Jer 20:9).
Have you ever experienced that? Where you are scared to speak up for what it might cost you, or for the division it might create? And yet deep inside you, your conscience will not let it go. You know that you must say something.
When we live as a sacrificial servant, then we are obligated, we are compelled to speak out when we see injustice happening or when we see our brothers falling into sin.
2. Persevering even when it seems like there are no results
Leading on from what I just mentioned, perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of Jeremiah's call was to keep going when there was seemingly no response. I think we all hate doing pointless things. I'm sure Jeremiah often felt like he was banging his head against a brick wall.
But when we know that we are doing the right thing, we cannot give up. Like Steve Rogers, we need to be able to say, “I can do this all day”, no matter how hard it gets.
The most famous missionary in Africa, Dr David Livingstone, spent three decades of his life preaching the gospel in Africa and fighting against the slave trade. And yet in all this time he only converted one person to Christianity, a tribal chief called Sechele. However, he planted the seeds for subsequent spread of the gospel by Sechele and later missionaries, bearing abundant fruit which he never got to see. Today there are an estimated 658 million Christians in Africa, something that David Livingstone could likely have never foreseen.
It took William Carey, the “Father of modern missions”, eight long years in alligator- and malaria-infested India before a single Hindu converted to Christianity. Yet by his death 34 years later, his work could account for around 700 converts. Today - despite severe discrimination and harsh conversion laws which make preaching the gospel very difficult in India - there are around 28 million Christians in India. If we give our life to God, then he will use it for something far greater than we could ever imagine.
I’m sure Jeremiah often felt like his work was useless. Can you relate to that? In fact, God told him up front that the people would not listen to his message. In Jer 7:27, he said, “When you tell them all this, they will not listen to you; when you call to them, they will not answer.” And yet, he was still called to keep on preaching and keep on calling for repentance.
But it wasn’t just that nobody would listen to his message that made Jeremiah upset. It was the content of the message they were not listening to. The kings and priests and prophets of Judah - even the everyday people too - were rejecting God and choosing to do things their own way. They were worshipping false gods, trying to make themselves rich by ripping off other people, killing and taking advantage of the orphans and widows, even sacrificing their own children to Moloch. They had become worse than the nations around them, which they were meant to serve as a positive example for. And so - through Jeremiah - the Lord said that he would send Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and bring judgement on these people. Jeremiah was weeping because he knew that judgement was coming on his brethren and they wouldn’t repent in order to save themselves.
I remember a time when I was a young boy and I was sent with an important message from Dad to my other siblings, telling them to get ready as we were going out to a friend’s place for dinner. So I dutifully went and told my siblings that they needed to get ready to leave, but they didn’t believe that we were going out that evening. They thought that I was joking. And the whole time I knew that Dad was coming soon to confirm the message, and he would probably be quite annoyed at them for not believing it and preparing themselves. Now, because I was a wicked little child, I kind of enjoyed this - having my siblings not believe me and knowing that soon they would be in trouble for it.
But Jeremiah was the complete opposite of that. He had great sympathy for the plight of his people because he knew that the judgement would be harsh and in many cases, fatal.
3. Suffering for the sake of your message
Many of us have grown up in a safe, comfortable environment which is positive or apathetic towards Christianity, although that may be beginning to change. Yet throughout history, this is actually the exception rather than the rule.
God’s people suffer for sharing the gospel message, and Jeremiah is a prime example of how much suffering this can involve. He was constantly derided and disbelieved throughout his ministry. He was beaten and put in the stocks, where he was made an object of public ridicule (Jer 20:1-2). He even had the death sentence pronounced on him (Jer 26:11), although this was never carried through. During the Babylonian siege, he was locked up in prison (Jer 37:15), and then thrown into a muddy cistern where he was left to die (Jer 38:6). But one of the king’s officials heard about this and came to rescue Jeremiah before he succumbed. And when he wrote down his message for king Zedekiah, the king not only ignored it, but essentially spat in his face by cutting up the scroll and throwing it in the fire (Jer 36:23-24).
Now fortunately most of us will never be called to suffer as much as Jeremiah did. But he is a prime reminder that being a sacrificial servant will inevitably involve suffering in some way. As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
So is what Jeremiah said in Jer 29:11 actually true? ““For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Are God’s plans for us actually good? Yes, they certainly are. But they may be very different to what we think of as “good”. If we look back at Jer 29:11, you will note “For I know the plans I have for you…” It doesn’t say “you know the plans” - God knows the plans.
To quote a book which I read recently, “God is often kind in ways that will offend your mind”. In Isaiah 55:8-9, the Lord says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
We are so short sighted. I was perhaps a little dramatic as a child, but I can remember so many times where it seemed like disaster was about to ensue - it was basically the end of the world to my small mind. Even as an adult I encounter situations where I cannot identify a way to move forward; I have no idea how I’m going to get myself out of this pickle. And yet I am standing here today, probably happier than I have ever been. Circumstances suddenly change, people step in, coincidences happen - except they’re not coincidences; it is God orchestrating his plan. And yet even now when I am faced with seemingly unsurmountable challenges, I often forget how God has led me through the wilderness in the past and think that this time I must come up with a solution on my own. Lord help me - help us all - to increase our trust in You.
So what does the life of the prophet Jeremiah teach us about sacrificial service?
Sacrificial service means dedicating our entire lives
We must persevere even when we don’t see any results
We may suffer derision and even persecution for our faith & acts of service
It’s a lot of work, and often not particularly pleasant. So why do we do it? Do we do it because the benefit to us is so great?
No, when we choose to become sacrificial servants, we do it out of love. We do it because God has first loved us; he has already done it; he has already sent his son.
References
Thompson, J.A. (1980). The book of Jeremiah. NICOT.