The posture of God's people

Good morning. If you have your Bibles, turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 29. Jeremiah chapter 29. We're going to be looking today particularly at verses 5 through 7, but I'm going to read the first 14 verses just to give us some context for this passage.

For the past couple weeks, we have taken a break. We've been journeying through Matthew this year, but one of the things we've done is taken a four-part series here which we titled Missio Dei, which is really just the Latin phrase for the mission of God. One of the major themes in the Bible is that God is on a mission to reconcile a people to himself. We see in Genesis 3 the fall of Adam and Eve. God creates this perfect, beautiful, wonderful world, calls them to be fruitful and to multiply. They fall, and we find that God throughout the rest of scripture is working to restore and redeem a people to himself.

A couple weeks ago, we looked at how God comes along and calls a people to follow him. We looked at the life of Abram particularly as one of those where God covenants with Abraham and he says, "Look, I'm going to bless you, but through your life you will be a blessing to all nations." Somehow through his lineage and his people, and ultimately through Christ, God is working through this line of people, and he calls us—the church and Christians—into this mission and into this calling for our lives.

Then last week we looked at purpose—that we are also called with a particular purpose in our lives, that God has called us to ultimately proclaim to the world the one who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. We looked at 1 Peter chapter 2 for that, seeing that God is building us up as stones as a spiritual household, where each one of us forms a body and a community that corporately witnesses and reflects this priestly role to the world around them. We are called to be this priestly people that call the nations and call people to know the living God, to hear the gospel, and to know the grace of God, which is profound to our thinking. So we saw that.

And then this week, what we're going to be looking at is a posture. A posture. And we're going to particularly be looking at Jeremiah. Because one of the things that Peter last week when he was talking to the church talked about is he addressed them as strangers and as aliens. And why? Because they are exiles, as he says, in the land. The church and the people of God—this is not our home. Our citizenship is in heaven. We have a home, but now we are here in this world, left here by God for a purpose, called as a people. As we are in this world, our time isn't just by and by, do whatever we want, whatever makes us happy. God has a posture that he wants us to hold.

And so the words of Jeremiah to a people who have just been taken into exile—we'll talk about that in just a second—the words of Jeremiah as he tells these people the posture they need to have in exile wasn't just true for them, but the principles are true for us today, just as Peter is calling the New Testament church and us strangers, aliens, and exiles.

Historical Background of the Exile

Just before we look at this text, maybe a brief overview. In the year 597 BC, Israel was under Babylonian dominion. They had stopped paying their dues. You're supposed to give tribute to the empire that reigns over you. They stopped doing that. Well, the Babylonians come along, surround Jerusalem, and decide to crack the whip. And so Jerusalem surrenders. There's nothing they can do; they're outmatched by this very superior force.

Babylon comes in. At this point in time, they don't destroy everything—they'll do that in another 10 years. In 597, they do the first wave here of this exile. They take the king, they take the nobles, they take the educated, the elites, some of the major players, and they take them out to Babylon. They do a fairly significant exile and move them to another land.

And so these people now have been sitting in another land. One of the major things is to assimilate them into a culture so that all your elites basically don't become a people group anymore—they just marry off and disappear. This was a successful strategy that was not only used by the Babylonians, but the empire before the Babylonians known as the Assyrians as well.

And so this is going on, and yet Israel just cannot accept this. Jeremiah's spent his life trying to tell these people that exile's coming, the Lord is going to punish your rebellion, and yet they just can't hear it. So they even go into exile, and there are false prophets who rise up and say, "Babylonian strength is about to be broken. Two years from now, we're back home." And this creates a mindset, because the people are now living with a temporary mindset: "Ah, the exile is not going to last." And so it plays into the way that they're living.

And yet God now through Jeremiah has a letter written. Jeremiah is still back in Jerusalem in Israel, and he writes a letter, and some of the envoys carry it as they're going to Babylon and deliver this letter and this message, the word of the Lord.

Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 29:1–14

Here we are, Jeremiah 29, verses 1 through 14:

"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 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 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 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 God's word.

Let's pray. Lord, we just thank you for your word. I pray in this moment, Lord, that you would soften our hearts. Just as the people of Israel sometimes would have hard hearts not to hear your word, Father, so we can too. I pray for all of us and even for myself, Lord, that we would hear what you have for us today. That you would help me to speak and to proclaim what I believe that you've shown me from your word, but that ultimately you would speak, that you would increase and your word increase and I decrease. So, Father, we just pray for soft hearts, open ears, open eyes, and a willingness to do what you proclaim and tell us to do from your word, so that we might not just be hearers of the word, but doers of the word for the glory of your name. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Invest in the Place God Has Called You

So, as we look at this today, Jeremiah is telling the people how to live out your time in exile, the posture that you are called to have in exile. What we're going to look at is verses 5 through 7. I'm going to pull this into three things, three principles that we might see rising to the surface from these.

The first one here is that God calls them to invest in the place that God has called you. He speaks in verse 5 here, so you'll see it: "Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce." Each of these things is actually in the Hebrew in an imperative. Build, live. This is not an optional thing. He's telling them very firmly: build, live, plant, eat. For the people that are living in tents at this point in time, this is a striking and very different course, because it means: I'm not going to live in a temporary mindset that I'm out of here, that this place is just a place that I stay for now and I'm out. He's saying, invest in the place that I've placed you. Who sent them there? God said it back in verse 4: "I sent you here. I put you in this place." And while you're in this place, and while you're here for, by the way, 70 years, I want you to invest in this land.

You don't build houses overnight. You don't plant gardens overnight. And if you're going to eat from those gardens, and if you're going to live in those houses, it's a long game. Depending on, for example, the crop that you plant, it may take time. I mean, if you're planting a vineyard, it's years. It's years. If you're planting fruit trees or olives, it's going to take years. And so he's saying, invest and place yourself into the livelihood of this land.

If you build homes, you move into these cities. You don't stay out on the outskirts of town. You begin to live in the world—in the world, not of it, but in it. It offers the way to know neighbors, to invite people to your table, to interact with the population around you. To plant gardens involves cultivation and economic participation.

This is one of the things that the monks did during the medieval ages when the Catholic Church was very corrupt. They were actually some of the best missionaries, because they would move into these Gothic lands that were very, very pagan and set up a monastery, but they would plant gardens. And so they would sell wine or beer or different things that they did, crops, and it became a local trade. In Ireland, they taught the local fishermen how to fish. They learned how to fish and become experts at trapping fish in these tidal pools and they taught them. And so they worked alongside, and when they worked, their way of life, their livelihood, their communication, and their posture allowed moments where the gospel would be shared.

In the same way, God envisions this: invest in the place and in the land that you are in. Become a good example of citizenship in the land. You're going to go there and you're going to live out your priestly calling as the people of God in the land. Just because you got hauled off doesn't mean all those things are gone. Yes, the temple is far away. Yes, your religious way of life and the sacrifices that you participated in are far away, and everything seems gone. How do you pick up the pieces? God says, "You pick up the pieces by putting down roots right where I have placed you, because I have a plan and I have a purpose, and it is to prosper you. It is for good. So trust my plan. Even though this is punishment for something where you wouldn't listen and you rebelled, I'm still working in it. I'm still for you. I haven't written you off."

And so they come into the land. They live out their godly lifestyles. They celebrate the Sabbath. Just the order of their life and their ethics become noticeable, because that was the thing: the law of God was strikingly noticeable for its day and age. It was very different. They would plant fields, and guess what? You follow the gleaning laws. You let the poor of the land actually reap the crops from the edges of your field. You care for people who, by the way, aren't even Israelites. And the Babylonians and the people of the land that you're living in look at that and they say, "Man, these people are really gracious, and they're caring, and they're humble, and they live differently. Their lives are a model of something." Slowly over time, it became a witness and an opportunity to point to the living God that they served, who called them to live this kind of way in their lives. Invest in the land.

We can have that same sort of mindset in our own land, where we can either choose to invest in the land or to use it for our own purposes. We can live lives that model where we coach, we neighbor, we invite people to our table, we're honest, we pay our taxes, we live our lives in such a way that show wisdom, godliness, goodness. I'm not just talking about being shiny or moral aptitude—there's something different, Holy Spirit-empowered living that God calls us to where the gospel changes and reorients us. It pulls us away from pride. It tells us that you are not better than anyone else around you; you have been saved by grace. Through that grace, you have nothing to bring to the table and say, "Well, I'm a good person. I'm going to show all these people what a great person I am." No, you're a person that's been forgiven. By the grace of God, he drew you to himself, and now he's just calling you to show the effects of what happens to a person that has been called out of that darkness, to show other people: "Once I was blind, once I was broken, once I was hurting, once I was lost, God found me and he changed my story, and he can change yours too."

One of the ways that as I thought about this, Tim Keller used to talk about this. He was a pastor in New York City, and he talked about how in reflecting, a lot of people would come to New York City and they'd actually not love the city, they would use the city. They would move into the city because they were there for the top of their career. This was the place where things were happening. So they went there to make the money and to get the career and the title, and then life would happen. They'd have some kids, and oftentimes they would move out. They'd do something else, go on their way, find another job somewhere else. And so they never really poured into the city. They never really thought about the social needs of the city or the crime or the schools or any of those types of things. He said in a way that people were using the city, not loving the city.

When I thought about that, I actually thought about—I hope this doesn't go too far off—a movie called Christmas with the Kranks. It's one of those Christmas holiday movies that you watch. But in the movie—not to belabor the story too long—Luther Krank is involved in suburbia in his community. He buys the biggest Christmas tree every year from the local Boy Scout troop. He buys the police calendar and supports the police. He pulls Frosty up every year on his home and decorates his home. They have a huge Christmas party for the whole neighborhood. He's involved in the community. Well, his daughter joins the Peace Corps and she's not coming home for Christmas. Luther all of a sudden, because he had a transactional understanding of his community, says, "Well, all of these things gave my daughter happiness, and seeing her happy made me happy. Because she's not going to be here to be made happy, none of this really matters. This is just a line item. It's just an expense. So I've paid my dues to the community, and I'll just take that money now and put it elsewhere. I'm going to take a cruise."

Well, Blair decides that she's coming home for Christmas—that's his daughter. They have hours to pivot, because she has no idea that he's been a big Grinch for Christmas. So he has to pivot, and he's failing. They can't get a turkey, they can't get a ham. He's trying to decorate the house, and he falls off the house and is hanging by a rope upside down. Fire truck and police show up, and all the neighbors gather in the yard in this moment that has come to a head here. We learn what has happened, and the community leader stands up and says, "Let's help him. Let's rally, because this is what communities do." And people are like, "No, why should we help this guy? He's been a jerk; we're not going to help him." But then one of the guys says, "No, this is what communities do. We care for one another. We invest in one another's lives, even when one of us is behaving badly. We're not even doing it for him; we're doing it for Blair. We're doing it for her, for the one who watched our kids, the one who invested in our lives."

He comes to a realization by the end of the movie that he's been a taker. He's been using the community for the happiness of his daughter. He's had a consumeristic understanding, and he wasn't really invested in the lives of those people so that when his daughter moved off, he was still showing up. We too can have in subtle ways not realized that our lives are spent that way, where we're taking, we're using, but we're not investing in the land.

Even for us as a church here at the Baxter Y, I thought: are we invested here? We have a collection that we do, which is a good thing where we collect food, canned goods, and so forth for the Fort Mill Care Center, and that's good. But I started thinking: what are the needs of the people, and how could we invest in their lives? The YMCA wants to build people up physically strong, but they also believe in mental, physical, and spiritual health. What if we looked and said, "Marriages—we could have a talk on marriages one evening." Or maybe we start a local mothers' group where we pair people from the church with people from the community, and we talk about life and the hardships of mothering, especially young children—older parents with younger parents—and all the beautiful ways that we could be a witness. Or a seminar in raising kids or kids in technology, or so many other ways. It just reminded me that even outside the walls of this Y, we are called not just to use the land or take from the land, but to invest in the land.

Sorry I went a little bit long on that one, but invest in the place where God has called you.

Remain as God's People

The second thing is: remain as God's people. Remain as God's people.

When you have been exiled from the land as they had been, you can start to lose your way. The goal of the Babylonians was to take a people group and move them into a foreign land. Over time, that people group would begin to marry off their kids into the culture, and they would assimilate. They would take on that identity of the land, because that's what you do: you pick up the culture surrounding you, you assimilate, and your people group disappears. That's the goal.

The goal of Israel right now is a two-year mindset. So they have a mindset of what I call withdrawal: "We are over here in our tents. We are not going to move in that town. We are not going to invest in this. We're going to be gone in two years; we're out of here." And so they have this sort of "we're going to keep our way of life, we're going to hold down the fort right here, we're going to isolate ourselves from the culture so that we don't become assimilated into their ways and their customs."

But right here, what God is calling them to do is to invest in the land, to build houses, to live there. Then he says to marry, to have kids, to marry your family. He's not telling them to assimilate, but he's also not telling them to withdraw. He's telling them to stand in the middle—to be in the world, but not of it. They would have married and grown, and he says, "Increase, do not decrease."

Let's look at it right there in verses 5 and 6. He says: "Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease."

When you think about the call for them to multiply, it's rooted in really a couple things. All the way back into the idea of creation, where God created his people, Adam and Eve, he told them to be fruitful and to multiply. We see this also told to Noah as well later. Then with Abraham, when he calls him into covenant, he promises Abraham, "You're going to multiply. You see those stars up in the sky? So your descendants shall be." By stepping in and continuing—not having a temporary, "we're not having kids, we're not raising families, this isn't our home, we're not going to raise our kids in this foreign land, we'll wait a couple years before that happens"—God says, "No, you're going to be here for a while. Continue to step into your covenantal calling. Continue to grow and to prosper and to multiply and to expand. Live out that kind of way of life even in the land."

Find ways to continue to step into your covenantal calling to increase as a community and to live. God has not forgotten you; he will use this time. He says it in verse 11, that beautiful verse that a lot of people memorize: "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 is working in his people. There is good even in the small thing of raising their families, because it naturally would have necessitated them to pass on, to do the Deuteronomy 6 thing where they talk about the way of the Lord. They love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, and then they teach their kids the ways of the Lord. They raise their family in the ways of God, and they give their wives and sons and daughters, and they continue to expand this family, this tradition to celebrate the Sabbath, to live the law. The law is written in your hearts to follow the ways of the Torah, to listen to the ways of God for your life.

And so they would expand and become more and more, even in exile, a people group who were strikingly noticeable in the land as they continued to penetrate and live among these people. There was a godly calling in that: to remain as the people of God. Don't assimilate. Don't take on their ways. Don't disappear into the land. Don't withdraw.

In the church today, there's always the temptation to do one of those two things. We can take on the ways of the culture and just say love is love, and we live how we want to live and do what we want to do. Or we can say, "The world is evil, and it's a terrible place, and we've got to protect ourselves, so we're just going to wall ourselves off and throw rocks of truth at the world and preach at them." God calls us to neither. He calls us to be people of grace and of truth—to live in this world, to thrive, to prosper, to stand in our covenantal calling, and to continue to raise our family. God calls them to obey, to invest in the land, to grow families, and to train them up in the Lord.

You can find and serve God and your purpose in ordinary callings of life. Sometimes we look for the big thing—we want to start something huge and change the world. But there's good in the mundane. There's good in the ordinary, as long as it's intentional. Don't lose your way in it. There's good in the work of your home and in your parenting. These are continuous imperatives that he calls them to. The same thing here about raising families: he uses that same thing. These are not optional. He's like, "Do it." In fact: increase, do not decrease.

Grandparents, you can invest in your grandkids. Sometimes you can be a different voice than their parents can be. You have their ear in special ways. And you still have your kids. It takes a little more wisdom parenting adult children, but in some ways, the job doesn't end. There's ways to be a voice of wisdom in their lives when they need it—that hard night when they don't know how to parent, when they've lost their way, when they're considering that new job. There's ways, and it seems so mundane and ordinary, but you can have godly wisdom and godly counsel, and there's good in passing that on.

Moms, dads, don't miss the calling of the mundane moments: playing with Legos on the floor, calling your kids around the table and being that godly witness at dinner time. Slowly, God will give you ideas and inspiration as you pray about it of ways that you take the mundane and ordinary time and teach life lessons. You teach the ways of the Lord when you're around the table, when you're putting them to bed at night, when you're walking along the way, when you're driving them to school. Those ordinary moments add up. There's good work in it. It matters. It's meaningful.

For brothers and sisters, for all of you, there's good in investing in the lives of others. You have spiritual brothers and sisters. You can sow into their lives. Whether you're single or whatever stage of life you're at, there's other people that you can disciple, that you can encourage, you can build up the family of God. There's callings and purposes for all of us among God's people.

In this, God builds up his church. He takes, like he says in 1 Peter, those stones, and as our lives show up and as we're present in the lives of other people, we become this household, this temple to the Lord that he is building up for his glory. The world will look on, and they will notice. They will see.

Seek the Good of the Land

All right, third thing: seek the good of the land. Seek the good of the land.

Your translations will have a few different things. In verse 7 here, it says: "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." That word "welfare" in my translation—other ones may have "seek the peace"—that word in the Hebrew is shalom. If you're not familiar, some Hebrew words are incredibly rich because they have a range of meaning in them. One of the ways that you can translate that word—and that's why they're struggling to figure out: is it peace, is it welfare?—the word that I like to use often is wholeness. The shalom of God is when all is right, it's as it should be. Yes, it's peace, the absence of conflict and disturbance and noise and all of those things. Yes, it's welfare. But it's this wholeness, this goodness when things are as they should be, as really God created them to be.

He's telling them: seek that for the land. This was striking, because these are the people that hauled them off. These are their enemies. You read the Psalms, and you find they don't have good thoughts about the Babylonian people; they do not have goodwill. And yet God says, "Have goodwill for them." We think about the words of even our Lord Jesus: pray and love your enemies. We're called to love our enemies. Right here we see this same model for God: seek the shalom of the land and the people. Find the needs of the community and of the people in this land, the places where it's broken, where it's hurting, and bring that wholeness, bring that peace, bring that goodness. It may even just be gleaning the edges of the field—who knows what it is?—but find ways to meet them.

You can see already we can have that same calling in our own life. We live as strangers, aliens, and exiles. This isn't our home. God has a purpose here; he's left us here. And so as we are here, we seek the good of the land to meet the needs of the community, to address the brokenness. Why? Because God sent you here. The principle that he told Abraham is still true: "I am blessing you, Abraham, and through you you will be a blessing." The principle is: blessed to be a blessing. You're not the end in yourself. The work that God does in you, he does also through you, and he calls you to spread that wherever he puts you, because he puts you there just as he put them in exile, unthinkable as it was to them.

How do we do this? How do we seek the good? I think one of the ways he specifically says is: pray. Pray for it. Pray to the Lord on its behalf. Petition him. It's hard to keep hating people when you pray for them. It's hard to have unforgiveness and a wrong heart toward people when you pray for them, because you invite the Lord, and you start talking to God. Sometimes you talk honestly: "I'm mad. I don't like him. I don't want to pray for him." You pray those things, you're honest. God already knows it; you're not telling him anything he doesn't know. But God in that meets you in your prayers and works on that.

You've probably felt this: when you pray, God will direct your prayer. He will direct your heart and your eyes, and you will begin to pray in specific ways, maybe even for specific people in the land in which you are, and you will care for them. You'll care enough to pray for them. Prayer changes the heart. Then it changes us in a way that we become change agents and representatives and ambassadors of God in the places that he calls us.

We seek shalom by serving—that's the second thing. How do we do it? Praying, and seeking shalom to find the needs and meet those needs wherever they are, to seek its good, because in that we find our good. We want a land where there's peace. We want a land where there's wholeness. We don't want a land where there's brokenness. We want to promote and live the kingdom principles that Jesus calls us to right where we are. As we live those out, it will make a difference. The light of God will shine in those places, and it will open up doors. Somebody around you will be walking through something hard and say, "How do you get through that?"

"I don't know, it just is what it is. It doesn't have to be like that. I tried to do that and it killed me. There was a moment that I came and I broke. The tough do not get tougher all the time—sometimes you get crushed. So where are you going to look then?"

Those are the doors. Those are the moments where we can testify. We don't use the land; we seek its shalom.

In the 1980s, there was a man who moved to a small town and built a factory. He felt like this is a good place for economic welfare, where this would be good jobs, a place where it would be good for jobs to be created. So he came believing that God had put him there. He called him, he prayed about it, and wanted to set up his factory there. It was a good factory: it paid well, and the people were treated fairly. There was a good culture and environment in the company. The workers took pride in what they made.

As you would guess, when a factory goes into those small towns—I grew up in some small towns in Georgia—those places start to flourish. Those paychecks go into the town, the local shops, the restaurants, and the homes. The whole economy begins to thrive. Well, this guy was a believer, and he didn't just see it as, "I'm just trying to make a buck and set up a factory and do business." He saw a deeper peace. So he didn't stop at the paycheck. He lived in that town, and as a believer he prayed for it, and he asked God to show him what was broken, and he paid attention and started to see.

His son's school was run down, and the athletic team was in shambles, so he made repairs to the school. He paid for them, and he gave to the athletic program just so that they could have proper equipment. Then he noticed many of the children of his workers would roam the streets. They were latchkey kids after school; they had nowhere to go. That caused problems: sometimes they'd get into trouble, and they were unsupervised. He noticed that, and so he partnered with a local church and started an after-school program. This church really started it, and as a nonprofit, some of the church members would work there, and the kids had a safe place. They had adults who cared for them, helped them with their homework. There were years when it would have been easier and more profitable to cut the program or move the factory somewhere cheaper, but he stayed. He believed that if God sent him there, then the town's good was part of his work.

Whether it's a big thing or a little thing—you may not be starting a factory—the work we do, whether it's in your family or your workplace or your hobby or where you play, the places God calls you and places you, there's good work there. There's meaningful work there. We need to be intentional about those places to pray to the Lord for how he might have us meet the needs of our community.

This ultimately is about what I call faithful presence: being present and invested in the places that God calls you for his good and his glory. To be rooted as a people, but to also be rooted in the unchanging message of the gospel. To be deeply loving God is something that we convey with faithful, rooted presence in our lives. We build lasting relationships, we stay consistent, we are faithful among the people of God in our family, our work, our life, and then we see how God will use it for his glory.

Summary

We can do all of this, and it can really just turn into social work. Isn't it nice we made the land better? Isn't it nice we labored? And we can actually lose the whole reason we do it. We do it because we are people who have been changed by God. We have encountered his presence, we have been called by him, we have been given a purpose, and now we are called to hold a certain posture in the land in which we live.

It's only by remembering the message of the gospel and the work that God has done for us—how he came and postured in this world and drew us to himself and saved us from our sins—that therefore we go into this world as the ambassadors of Christ doing good work in the land, healing where there's brokenness through the power of God, making things better, restoring, bringing God's shalom. But we ultimately preach and point to the ultimate source of the reason that we do that and the one who makes all things right, who doesn't just address the social situations and needs, but the deeper ones, because the heart and the soul are behind the social brokenness.

So we also point to the deep work, the deep things in life. We can never just turn this into a social gospel. We must always remember to point to the one who gives us a reason to hope, a reason for why we do these things, the reason that we are on this mission. We can't just bring a Band-Aid to fix social problems, but to heal the whole person. Only when we realize that it's not better schools or feeding the poor or any of those things that will address the root of the issue, we must point to the one behind those things.

The remedy is in Christ. In the end, he is our peace. The day will come when he calls us out of exile and he calls us home to our own promised land. But the work we've done and that God does through our faithful presence that we've left behind will matter, because God blessed it and called us to it.

Knowing this, as one of my favorite mentors used to say: "Knowing this, what are you going to do about it?" It was his action point always to me. Maybe the challenge and the question for each of you is: what are you going to do about it? How are you going to invest? How are you going to be present? Again, it doesn't have to be big; it just has to be intentional.

Let's pray.