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Grace-based biblical teaching and sermons with Pastor Jason White. Messages that focus on Life in Christ and practical application as New Covenant believers.
Series: “That’s Not What That Verse Means”
Week 6 – Jeremiah 29:11
Today as we continue our summer message series, we are going to look at another verse that gets taken out of context and said to mean what it really doesn’t mean…especially for us today.
And the verse we are looking at, I would say is one of the most popular verses in all of Scripture.
As a matter of fact, according to the You Version Bible app, it was the second most searched for verse in the entire Bible in 2023…and that verse is Jeremiah 29:11, which says:
11 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.
Now my guess is that you are familiar with this verse. It may be a verse that you have hanging up on a wall in your home or in your office.
It’s an extremely popular verse. A lot of times it’s even used a lot around times of graduation. It’s on graduation cards, or we quote it ourselves when talking to someone and thinking about their future.
We love this verse…and not just because of what we think it says about our kids’ or grandkids futures but for ours as well.
It seems to be saying that God has plans to prosper you in the future.
You may think about your education and getting into a great college or maybe it’s sports…God has got something great for me in the future in these areas.
Maybe you think about your career or a business you are starting up and how God has plans to prosper your business or your career.
Maybe you think about having children and building a family…how God has plans to prosper you with kids of your own and the joy they will bring you in life.
Or maybe you think about your health or the health of someone you love. This verse brings you hope that one day God is going to prosper you or the person you love through healing.
Things are going to get better. Not just better, but one day in the future, things are going to be great. I’m going to prosper. The Bible says so right here in Jeremiah 29:11!
And here’s the deal…it’s not just with individuals. There are entire churches that are built around this verse and this ideology.
As a matter of fact, here is a direct quote from one church’s statement of beliefs on their website:
It is God’s will for every believer to become whole, healthy, and successful in every area of life.
And what they and many others like it go on to use to back this up Scripturally is Jeremiah 29:11. And they’ll go on to claim that on the cross, Jesus bought for us not just spiritual healing but physical healing and financial healing…
and that His intentions are to prosper you in those areas…you just have to have faith.
And if you find yourself in situations and circumstances where you are not prospering… You are not prospering financially, physically, or in your career or relationships, THEN that is because you have a lack of real, genuine faith.
BUT if you begin to believe enough…if you name it and claim it…if you follow the rules, give, and serve enough, THEN God will bring those plans to prosper you into fruition!
\But here’s the problem: THAT’S NOT WHAT THAT VERSE MEANS
And when we use it in that way, then it can cause people to end up in some pretty dark places when things don’t go their way in life…when they don’t see the prospering that God supposedly has planned for them.
Take Marge, for example. Bob George, who ran a large radio ministry, had Marge call him one night while he was on the air. At first she asked him if it was possible for a Christian to commit suicide and still go to heaven.
But Bob knew that people don’t usually just ask that out of curiosity. He figured that this was something Marge was actually contemplating in her own life.
And sure enough it was. She began to explain that she had been a Christian for a number of years and had been a part of a church who taught her that God had plans to prosper her in all areas of her life.
The problem was that she was not prospering.
They told her that it was because she was not doing the right things…she wasn’t reading her Bible enough, praying enough, fasting enough, giving enough. She didn’t have enough faith.
Here was her response:
“But I was giving, and I was studying, and I was praying, fasting, seeking, and trusting in the Lord. But I still had financial problems. I was still a single mother raising a teenage son. I was still lonely. I was still struggling with being overweight. I was still angry. What was wrong??? I was told that if I did all the right things, then God would deliver me. I would prosper, according to His great plans for me. But He didn’t deliver me. I wasn’t prospering. The only thing I could assume is that God was rejecting me.
And so, Marge was ready to end it all.
It’s a dark place to be in if you are taught that God has plans to prosper you in all areas of your life and you don’t experience that prosperity.
TRANSITION: But again, THAT IS NOT WHAT Jeremiah 29:11 means.
We think that this is a verse written directly to us as individuals and that we can use to claim future plans of prosperity that God has for our lives, but that is not what this verse is saying.
So, let’s look at it in its’ proper context…
First of all, this verse is obviously written in the Old Testament of our Bibles. It is at a time when the nation of Israel was under the Old Covenant…
And they had been unfaithful to that covenant. They had said they would do everything the Lord commanded of them, but they had not. They had been unfaithful and begun to worship idols and were involved in many sinful things…
So God’s judgment was coming down on them. The kingdom had been split into a Northern Kingdom and a Southern kingdom.
The Northern kingdom of Israel had been taken into exile by the Assyrians, and now the Southern kingdom of Judah was being conquered by the Babylonians. This is what was taking place at the time Jeremiah 29:11 was written…
And in Jeremiah 28, one chapter before the verse we are looking at today, we are told that another prophet was trying to tell the people that it would only last for 2 years.
But Jeremiah writes a letter to them and says… “NO THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT THE LORD SAYS”
10 This is what the LORD says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.
So not 2 years but 70 years. 70 more years in exile, in a land that’s not your own…a culture that’s different than yours…a different language…and who knows what they are going to force you to do or to keep you from being able to do!
70 more years of that… That’s 840 more months… 3,640 weeks… 25,576 days… 613,824 hours… 36,829,440 minutes of exile…
Which means that most of them, if not all of them, will be dead before that time is up.
So for those who would be reading this letter from Jeremiah, then there is no future prosperity for them because they’ll never even make it out of exile before those 70 years are up.
So we look at Jeremiah 29:11 and try to use it to apply to each one of us individually and how God is going to prosper us in the future with these great plans He has for us…
But when we are looking at it in context, we see that most of the individuals this was written to at the time were going to have to suffer for 70 more years…and they may not even be alive at the end of that time!
So if that’s the case, then that’s a pretty far stretch for us today to try and say that this verse applies to each one of us as individuals and the prosperity that God has planned for us…
And again that’s because that’s not what this verse means…
When God says what he does in Jer. 29:11, He is talking about the nation of Israel as a whole.
God was saying that even though suffering is a part of my plan for you for the next 70 years, I do have plans to preserve you as a nation…
And this of course was all part of a larger plan and promise that God made to Abraham all the way back in Genesis 12 called the Abrahamic Covenant where God declared that through the nation of Israel, He would be a blessing to all people…
And that fulfillment ultimately came through Jesus Christ. Galatians 3:14 tells us this:
14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.
So watch this: the future prosperity that is mentioned in Jeremiah 29:11 was to the nation of Israel, referring to bringing them back from exile and preserving them as a nation in order to fulfill His long-term plan of sending the Messiah through them so that the blessing given to Abraham might come even to all people and that we would be able to receive the promise of the Spirit one day.
This was God’s great plan: To ultimately offer the forgiveness of sins to all people and for them (us) to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ!
And that does certainly mean that one day when Jesus comes back that we will find ultimate prosperity through healing and wholeness in every way as we spend eternity with Him in Heaven.
But…this prosperity also includes having every spiritual blessing now in this life, as we are told in Ephesians 1:3…
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
If you’ve put your faith in Jesus for salvation then you are IN CHRIST.
You are in a spiritual union with Him, and you have every spiritual blessing that there is to have in Him all the time… no matter what your situations or circumstances are.
And listen, that is such a big deal…
Because the promise of Scripture is NOT that you will have financial prosperity, physical prosperity, or prosperity of every kind in this life.
Jesus never promises this!
He never promises that we will be exempt from suffering, or that if we do all the right things and have the right amount of faith that we will prosper in all areas of life.
But what He does promise is that we will have Life in Him. We will have Peace in Him. We will have Joy in Him.
In other words, Jesus is our prosperity!
Which means that we have to look differently at this verse found in Jeremiah 29:11 which says…
11 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.
We can’t take this Old Testament verse written to the nation of Israel and apply it to our dreams and hopes for our career, sports’ achievements, graduation plans, financial or physical prosperity, or any other kind.
Now, does that mean that God doesn’t have good plans for you in any of those areas?
NO, God certainly put you on this planet to play a role in shaping this world we live in through the work He called you to do.
He has a role for you in the Body of Christ as a part of His Kingdom work that He is up to here during this time.
And those things are good, and we should look to Him to guide us into those plans and how He is working through us in these ways…
BUT first notice the difference: We are looking for His plans for our lives, not our plans.
Those might include financial blessings, achievement in a career, or physical blessings in some ways…
but they are not necessarily for your happiness and fulfillment but for God to use as a part of His Kingdom work to bless others and to bring Him glory!
And here’s the even bigger thing that we have to realize as we think about the plans that God has for us in the future…
They might include suffering. But even in that suffering, God is at work for our good and His glory…
And listen: we don’t have to get out from underneath that suffering in order to experience prosperity.
Because Jesus is our prosperity, and we can experience real life, real peace, and real joy in Him as we walk through times of suffering.
I think I’ve shared this story once before, but it is just so appropriate for what we are talking about right now…
In one of William Lane Craig’s books, he talks about a time when he was visiting a nursing home and ran into an elderly woman named Mabel.
This is the way he described her…
Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. She was 89 years old and Mabel had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone for 25 years.
Talk about suffering. I mean 25 years is a long time to be bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, alone, and dealing with cancer. I mean what about Jeremiah 29:11?
What about the plans to prosper and to give you a hope and a future? Where’s God in all of this?
But listen to what happened…
One day after visiting her off and on for several weeks, William Lane Craig asked her, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here hour after hour, day after day, week after week?”
And this is what she said…
“Oh, William, I simply think about my Jesus. I think about how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. Lot’s of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned, but I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus because he’s all the world to me.”
And then immediately after saying that, she began to sing…
Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without Him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.
Mabel was prospering. She was prospering in Christ and the Life she experienced in Him, regardless of her physical sufferings in this life.
And so this is the truth we need to know. When we see this verse, we look at it and say, “that’s been fulfilled in me through Christ!” “He is my prosperity!”
“I don’t know what my future holds in this lifetime. It may include suffering, but I know I have all that I need in Him! He’s my life, my joy, my all.”