Bloom Where You’re Planted
Bloom Where You're Planted - Audio/Visual
This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I
carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: "Build houses and settle
down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and
daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so
that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not
decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have
carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you
too will prosper." Yes, this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel,
says: "Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not
listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to
you in my name. I have not sent them," declares the LORD. This is what the
LORD says: "When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to
you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. 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. (Jer. 29: 4-11)
Authorities in California, while investigating damage that had been done by a recent forest fire, found the body of a man in a burned-out section of the forest. Astonishingly, the guy was dressed in a wet suit, including scuba tanks, flippers and a face mask. A post-mortem revealed that he hadn’t died from burns, but from massive internal injuries. Understandably, investigators wanted to figure out how a scuba diver could end up dead in the middle of a forest fire.
Apparently, on the day of the fire, the decedent had gone for a diving trip off the coast, some 20 miles west of the forest. Meanwhile, firefighters, trying to control the blaze as quickly as possible, had called in a fleet of helicopters with huge dip buckets to dip water from the ocean and dump it on the forest fire. Apparently, one minute our diver is making like Flipper, the next he’s doing the breast stroke in a dip bucket 300 feet in the air. Apparently he extinguished exactly 5'10" of the fire. “Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.” (Source: California Examiner, March 20, 1998)[1] Pretty bad day, if true. Here’s another.
A man was working on his motorcycle on the patio of his house; his wife was inside making lunch in the kitchen. While racing the engine, the motorcycle accidentally slipped into gear and dragged the man through the glass patio doors, dumping him on the floor inside the house. Hearing the crash, the wife ran into the dining room and found her husband lying on the floor cut, bleeding, lying next to the motorcycle and sprawled on the shards of glass from what was once their patio doors. The wife immediately called 911, and because they lived on a fairly large hill she ran down the several flights of stairs from the house to meet the paramedics on the street below. After the ambulance arrived and transported the man to the hospital, the wife righted the motorcycle and pushed it outside. Seeing some spilled gas on the floor from the overturned motorcycle, she got a few paper towels, blotted up the gasoline and threw them in the toilet.
Meanwhile, the man was treated and released from the hospital. When he arrived at the house, he looked at the shattered patio doors and the extensive damage done to his prized motorcycle. Depressed, he went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. After finishing the cigarette, he flipped it between his legs into the toilet bowl. That’s when the explosion occurred – and then the screaming. The wife, hearing the commotion, found her husband lying on the floor. His pants had been blown off and he was suffering burns on his buttocks, the back of his legs and his groin.
Once again the wife called 911 and the very same paramedic crew who had earlier responded was sent to the residence. The paramedics loaded the husband onto the stretcher and began carrying him down the stairs to the street. While they were going down the stairs, one of the paramedics asked the wife how her husband had burned himself. She told them what happened and the paramedics started laughing so hard that one of them slipped and lost his grip on the stretcher. The man fell out of the stretcher, tumbled down the remaining stairs and suffered a broken arm. (A Florida Newspaper)
Ever had a bad day? Have you ever been put in a difficult position? Or have you ever been asked to do a difficult job that you knew wouldn’t make you many friends? Doing the right thing is not always easy, and the prophet Jeremiah, the writer of our text, knew all about that. This was a particularly rough period in Israel’s history. Jeremiah had been sent by God at a very young age to prophesy to the people of Judah – the southern two tribes after Israel was split into two kingdoms after the reign of King Solomon. He went to live at the capital, Jerusalem, in the thirteenth year of the reign of the good king, Josiah. That was 628 B.C., and Josiah was bringing about tremendous reform among the people of Judah until his untimely death in 609 B.C.
After Josiah’s death, however, Judah went downhill. And fast. So, Jeremiah’s job was to warn the people that God was going to punish them for their disobedience, especially for their idol worship. As you can imagine, Jeremiah wasn’t exactly popular. In fact, the king and the religious leaders accused Jeremiah of spreading lies and dissent among the people. Apparently, “Fake news” isn’t new. But Jeremiah had been told by God to be vocal because the Babylonians were right outside the gates of Jerusalem and poised to overrun the nation. So, when the future seemed to be just about as bad as it could get, Jeremiah was prophesying doom and gloom which was not a particularly popular message.
Finally, in 597 B.C., God allowed the Babylonians to conquer the Israelites and cart the best and the brightest off to Babylon. Then in 587 B.C., some ten years later, God brought the Babylonians back to completely destroy Jerusalem and take all of Judah back to Babylon. And that’s when the message changed. You see, God’s message through the prophets was anachronistic, or chronologically misplaced; sort of out of step with the times. So now, when the Israelites were at their worst, God’s message to them was at its peak of hope. A little backwards it seems.
Have you ever gone through a rough patch in your life and people have come up to you and said that everything was going to turn out just fine? Although well-meaning, I’m sure, the message can sometimes be all wrong. And too often we can give the wrong message to others. We tell people everything’s going to be okay when they have cancer, or when their father’s had a heart attack, or when they’ve lost their job, their health, or even their hope. Sometimes, it’s not okay. Let’s face it – bad things happen sometimes. But God has a plan, even in the midst of bad circumstances.
Back in Jeremiah’s day, there were so-called “prophets” who were telling the Israelites that God would come in, rescue them and take them back to Jerusalem. But that was a lie. Instead, God, through Jeremiah, told them to work hard in Babylon, to invest themselves in the culture where God had allowed them to be taken, and to then wait on the Lord’s salvation. In other words, he told them to bloom where they were planted. That’s what Martin Luther referred to as the doctrine of vocation.
It was thought in the Middle Ages that the only people who truly pleased God were the priests, monks and nuns – those who were on God’s payroll, so to speak. However, Martin Luther rediscovered what Christians have known but forgotten from time to time: that whatever you do using your God-given abilities as a Christian is God-pleasing. You don’t have to be a minister to please God. When you are the best father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, friend or employee that God has made you to be, God is pleased. God calls you to bloom where you’re planted. God has planted you here, in your present circumstances, for the time being, and in whatever station you find yourself in life. And God has called you, where you are now, to bless the lives of the people with whom you come into contact.
God tied the promise to his people to the land, to the location where his people found themselves, despite their dire circumstances. They couldn’t see for the life of them how God was working in their lives, but they were encouraged to wait on the Lord, to trust in his providence and to rest assured that he had a plan for their hope and for their future. And maybe you don’t know how your present experiences fit into God’s plan for your life. And as difficult as it may seem, the advice is to wait; be patient. The Israelites couldn’t see how their experiences were even close to being a good thing, but God eventually brought them back to the land, but only after seventy (70) years of captivity. The land, it appears, was God’s means to his end.
Centuries later, wise men from the East would come to visit the infant, Jesus. Many believe that these “wise guys” were from Babylon. And who was the leader of all the wise men in Babylon? Daniel, who probably shared the message of the coming Messiah with his captive counterparts and colleagues. They were part of the history of the Messiah, the same Messiah who came to pay for our sins through his suffering and death so he could free us from our lives of sin through his glorious resurrection.
Through Jesus we can always bloom where we’re planted. Through him our bad days can be turned into days of rejoicing – not because they’re “bad,” but because God is in control and has a plan. Not rejoicing in the fact that we are in the midst of a pandemic, for instance, but joy in the fact that God knows us, he has plans for us, and his plans are for our hope and for our future.
A Future? Yes, a future. There’s a future for those who will wait on the Lord. God has a plan for you, a plan to prosper you and not harm you; a plan to give you hope and a future. So bloom where you’re planted – it beats scuba diving in a forest fire.
Grace,
Randy
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