you. Now, in what I plan to become a bit of a tradition, every New Year's Eve we spend together, we will examine a well-known text that some of us may not understand, and others of us who do understand it may appreciate some more of its riches. Our focus this evening is on Jeremiah 29, 11, a verse that is nearly as popular as our text from last year, if you remember, John 3, 16. So let's read our text in its context, Jeremiah 29, the first 11 verses. 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 Elassah, the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon, to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. It said, 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 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. And here is our text. 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. After the sermon, we will sing our Amen song of Hymn 13, the stanzas 1, 2, and 5. May God bless the preaching of His Word. Beloved in Christ our Lord, somehow, it's already December 31st. Somehow, it's the end of another year. And every year, it seems, it goes by faster and faster. And so here we are on New Year's Eve. I know some of you may wonder why we are here. Some of you may wonder why we meet together on New Year's Eve. After all, New Year's Eve isn't even a Christian holiday. It makes sense that we meet together at Christmas. We can understand why we would get together as the church for Good Friday. It's convenient for us that both Easter and Pentecost are already on Sundays when we normally gather. So those holidays, they make sense. But New Year's, it's not even a Christian holiday. So what are we doing here? Even though December 31st and January 1st, they're not holidays found in scripture, there's actually some precedence for this. It's minimal. You might think that it's a huge stretch here, but it is there. And that precedence is found in Deuteronomy 11. So turn there with me, please. Page 155 of your Pew Bibles, Deuteronomy chapter 11. Deuteronomy 11, page 155, we'll start at verse eight. You shall therefore keep the whole commandment that I command you today, that you may be strong and go in and take possession of the land that you are going over to possess, and that you may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give to them and to their offspring, a land flowing with milk and honey. For the land that you are entering to take possession of it is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and irrigated it like a garden of vegetables. But the land that you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys which drinks water by the rain of heaven. This is the focus here. A land that the Lord your God cares for. The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. Now, one of you may protest and you would say, no, this isn't a verse about what we do. This is a verse about what God does. And you're right. But what do you think worship is? Worship is a response to what God has done. We respond to the gospel love of God. We respond to his love with our songs of praise. We respond with our prayers of confession. We respond with our offerings of thanksgiving. We respond by gathering together because he is the one who has gathered us. And so the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, it being the land, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. His eyes are on the land. And do you think that this is because God has a special love for the rocks, for the dirt, for the trees of the land of Israel? Is it that God loves latitude 31.8, longitude 35, verse 2, more than any other latitude and longitude in the world? Well, no. The eyes of the Lord, your God, are on the land because you're there. What this means is that God is looking down on you in love every day of the year, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So it makes sense, at the end of the year, it makes sense, it just feels right for us to then raise our eyes to Him in worship and in praise. We know that our God, forever faithful, our God, forever true, if this is who He has been for every day of 2024, And this is who he will be for every day of 2025. So we can be certain, we can be assured, we can be comforted that in this new year, God knows the plans he has for us. In this new year, God knows the plans that he has for us. So Jeremiah 29, 11. It's a very popular text. It's one of the most popular texts, second perhaps only to our New Year's Eve text last year of John 3.16. And just as with John 3.16, we have to ask ourselves, do we really understand this verse? Especially given the popularity of this verse, The fact that this verse is written on the walls of homes, this verse is scrawled in graduation cards, perhaps more than any other verse, what do we actually think about this? What do we think about this verse? How do we understand it? Why is it on the walls of our homes? Why is it in graduation cards? Because the worry is that we've done to this verse, as we have the tendency to do to every verse of the Bible, we've made it about us. And we tend to read the Bible with this lens, don't we? With this filter. We have to stop doing this. Because the Bible, the Bible isn't about you. The story of David and Goliath is not there to inspire you to dare to be a David. That's not what that story is about. You know what that story is about? If you want to find yourself in that story, you know who you are. You're an Israelite cowering in your tent. Because David is Jesus and Goliath is the devil. Goliath is not your mean boss at work. You dare to be a David and defeat your mean boss. That's not what it's about. It's not about you. And the same is true here in Jeremiah 29. Because what does the text actually say? What do the surrounding verses actually say? Because context is everything. In Jeremiah 29, we see as the heading there, Jeremiah's letter to the exiles. 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. None of us here tonight are the priests, the prophets, or any of the people that Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. And continuing on in verse four, Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. We have not been exiled. We did not once live in the promised land and we're now in Babylon. The Netherlands, sorry to say, the Netherlands was not the promised land and Canada's not Babylon. We didn't once live in the promised land and we don't currently live in the promised land. Verse 10, for thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. God doesn't promise us this, that 70 years from now, that on the verge of the year 2095, we will then return to the promised land. So with all the context that explains who this text is about, it's very clear that it's not about you. You can't just rip a verse from its context and pretend that God is writing about you here in Canada in 2024. This was written to the Israelites in Babylon approximately 2,600 years ago. But maybe some of you, maybe all of you saw this coming. While Jeremiah 29 11 isn't about you, it is for you. Absolutely is. This verse, this promise of God is for you. And we can then rightly say that in the new year that is soon to be upon us, God does know the plans he has for us. We can rightly appropriate this promise for ourselves. It's not about us. So very little of the Bible actually is. So very little of the Bible is directly about us, but each and every word of it, each and every word of it is for us. Let me explain. Picture in your mind a bell curve graph. Maybe you know what this is, maybe you don't. So bell curve graph, it sort of just looks like a bell. It's down here, and it goes up in the middle, and it's down again. The point is that it's the same at the beginning and the end, and it's different in the middle. So at the start of this particular bell graph, you have sort of the naive and the uninformed, those who don't think critically or look at scripture in its context, and they conclude, yes, the Bible is about me. When God says, I know the plans that I have for you, that you that he's talking about is me. Insert my name there. God knows the plans that he has for me. That's amazing, that's comforting. very start, the naive and uninformed. And when you have some more information, when you look at it in its context, when you do the study, well, the conclusion then, it changes. And then you say, well, actually, this promise is about the ancient Israelites. It is for them. It's not for you. Perhaps we should rip this verse, rip this page, rip this whole book from the Bible. It's not about you. It's not for you. There's no point to read it. You should get no comfort from this verse whatsoever. Never write it in a graduation card ever again. But then the final part of the graph, the so-called genius level, it actually returns a little bit to that original conclusion, although it's slightly altered. Jeremiah 29 11 is for me. All of Scripture, even though it's not about me, it is for me. And so when God says, I know the plans that I have for you, this is a promise that I can take great comfort in. This is a promise that is for me. I can hold onto this promise in the dark night of the soul. And how can we come to that conclusion? How is that the case after everything that we just heard? The context. Makes it clear it's not about us, so it seems then it's not for us either. It's actually fairly simple, really. 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20 clears everything up. This is the last passage I'm gonna ask you to turn with me tonight. Page 964 of your Pew Bibles, 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20. 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20, page 964. 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20, for all the promises of God find their yes in him. That is why we say through him that we utter our amen to God for his glory. And him is obviously Christ. So it is through Jesus Christ that we, his people, we receive every promise of God. As many promises of God as there are, they come to us through Jesus Christ. So all of the promises, all of the blessings that God has given throughout his history of working with his covenant people, all of those promises point first to Christ, and then through Christ they come to us, his people. This is the message of the Old Testament. The whole message of the Old Testament, that God, who makes promises, ultimately fulfills them in the coming of the Messiah. In the Messiah, in the Christ, in Jesus, all of these promises are yes. And that includes the overarching promises. Christ fulfilled the law and the prophets. Christ removed the curse of the law. Christ granted the gift of righteousness. Christ gave eternal life. Christ sent the Holy Spirit. All of those promises already there, already promised, already prophesied in the Old Testament, are ours through Christ. These overarching promises as well as these smaller, more specific promises. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, give you hope and a future. And to the original readers, to the original audience, this would be fulfilled in the return from exile. And we see that in verse 10 in the immediate context. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. But for us, the fulfillment looks a little different. For us, the fulfillment is actually a lot richer than this. We have to remember this. We have to remember that it looks different because there are those who don't remember this. There are those who take these old covenant promises and they transplant them directly to us now in the new covenant. You've heard of these people before. You've probably heard their teachings. The prosperity gospel preachers. Your Joel Osteen's, your Benny Hinn's, your Kenneth Copeland's. Those who speak of the wealth that God promises you. Those who preach the name it and claim it type of gospel. If you just trust in the Lord and maybe send me a bit of money, then you will be young and you will be beautiful and you will be healthy and you will be rich forever and ever. And we look at these preachers with disgust and deservedly so. They're quite literally peddling the Word of God for profit. Their own twisted version of the Word of God. It's not what it's about. This is a bait-and-switch type of preaching. You promise all of this, and you don't deliver any of it. Except that's not the problem. That's not the precise problem. If we think this, then we have the diagnosis quite wrong, I'm afraid. Because the issue with these speakers is not that they go too far with the promises of the gospel. It's not that they are presenting sort of this inflated version of what it's like to be a Christian. No. Truly, it is the exact opposite of that. It is the exact opposite problem. It's not an inflated version. It's a deflated version. They're not promising too much. They're promising too little. What they are promising is what is temporary instead of what's eternal. They're promising those things that moth and rust destroy, those things that thieves break in and steal. That's not who our God is. God's plans for you this upcoming year, God's plans for you in 2025 may include wealth, but his blessings aren't limited to anything that small or that ordinary. You may have good health this year, but aim a little higher than that. So what exactly is it that God promises us in this promise? For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Already there, there's something here. There's something glorious. There's something comforting. God has a plan for us. That means God thinks about us. God thinks about us constantly. There are few things that feel worse than being forgotten by those who you care about, being forgotten by those who you thought cared about you. You have a friend who sticks closer than a brother. You are on God's mind, beginning of the year to the end. His eyes are on the land because you live there. His mind is on you because you belong to him. God thinks about you. God knows your name. God knows how many hairs are on your head. Maybe a more modern version of that would be, and maybe you've heard this before, but if God had a fridge, your picture would be on it. God thinks of you. And when he thinks of you, he thinks of you with an everlasting, infinite love. There's nothing that you can do this year to make God love you any more than He already does. There's nothing you can do this year to make God love you any less. God loves you because He loves you. His love is rooted in His character, not in your behavior. And we will sing this precious truth from Psalm 139 to close our service this evening in stanza 10. How precious are your thoughts to me? Or more accurately, how precious are your thoughts concerning me? How vast the sum of them must be. I try to count them, they are more than all the sand upon the shore. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. God thinks about us. God knows us. He has a plan for us. He has a plan for our life. And what does that plan include? We already heard that it may or may not include good health for this year. There are those in this congregation who are weak. There are those in this congregation who are in pain. There are those in this congregation with chronic diseases. Will God physically heal them this year? Don't aim so low. We already heard that God's plans for you may or may not include wealth this year. There are those in this congregation who are not wealthy. And we can be thankful that God has so ordained in his church that there are deacons to look after the physical needs of God's people, whether these physical needs are about money, their loneliness or sickness. The deacons are there to provide comfort. They're there to show the heart of God. They're there to be the joy bringers. But in all likelihood, God will not make this a congregation of millionaires this year. Don't aim so low as that. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. As we close, let's focus on that last word, hope. As we are on the edge of this new year, so many people have hope. Christians and non-Christians alike have hope. To be human is to hope. And to hope, if we dissect that word, if we dissect that idea, to hope, it means three things. You have a desire, you have an object, and you have an expectation. You hope for something. You desire something. Maybe you desire friendship. Maybe you desire love. Maybe you desire to be understood. Maybe you desire to be accepted. That's the desire. And then there's the object, the one who will provide you with what you desire. And finally, that expectation, that expectation that you've chosen well, that you've chosen wisely. chosen wisely when it comes to your desire and to your object, that you are hoping for something worthwhile, and that the person in whom you have put your faith is trustworthy. Let me encourage you, beloved, with the new year before us, to not waste your hope on lesser things. Don't waste your desire on those things that won't truly satisfy. Instead, let your hope for 2025 be singular. Let all of us, no matter what our circumstances are, physically or mentally or emotionally, let us all hope for the same thing. Let us all hope that God would fulfill his promise, a promise of welfare and not evil, a promise of a future and a hope. Let us hope that God's will would be done in our lives and that through us, he would accomplish his will in the lives of others. And that's not as easy as it sounds. That's not as cutesy and simplistic as it sounds, just wrapping this up with a big pink bow and saying, oh man. Because God's plans, God's will for your life, God's will for my life this year, it's not gonna be what we expect. God's will is sometimes difficult. God's will sometimes involves pain. God's will sometimes involves loss. So many of us, we actually think about this, many of us struggle to pray this prayer. Your will be done. So often we would rather pray your will be changed. We pray my will be done. God put your divine stamp of approval on my will. We struggle with this because we've experienced God's will. Sometimes experiencing his will causes us to question his goodness. causes us to question his wisdom, causes us to question his love for us. Why? Well, it's because our plan for ourselves doesn't match his plan for us. Our agenda, our plan for 2025, if we're honest, it's a life that's comfortable, a life that's pleasurable, and a life that's predictable. A year where there is no suffering at all. A year where there is no difficulty. Where all of us are healthy, wealthy, and gorgeous. What does God say? In James 1, we hear a difficult teaching. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. Let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in for this promise of God, this promise that is ours in Christ Jesus. For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him. So praying and hoping and working for God's will to be done in us and through us is a difficult prayer. So don't pray it lightly. God will answer that prayer. This upcoming year, God is not a divine Santa Claus working to bring you the items on your list. What he's doing is he's giving you something far better. Only you have eyes to see. God sees your desire for happiness. He sees that desire, and what he does is he raises you his desire for holiness in your life. That completion, that end result of his great plan of redemption. God's will for you. present to you as pure and holy, sanctify you through and through, giving you deep and abiding joy. This is the plan. So we can say that in all these things, all these things that might include pain and difficulty, all of these things that God allows for His glory and for your ultimate good, in all these things We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come in this present year, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.