Encouragement

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IN CAPTIVITY



For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you,and you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.

Jeremiah 29:11-13 (NKJV)




Reading Jeremiah, images of captivity come easily to mind. People torn away from home and hearth and hearts. Loved ones dead, dying, left behind … or linked together with chains biting deeply into bleeding flesh, being led where they do not want to go.

A strange ache may tap my heart, momentarily … but it’s another place, another time, another people. So the pain pricks little more than the surface of my heart, and though it may draw a drop of blood, it passes away, quickly forgotten. At first. Then Truth shed His light, and a deeper, more personal piercing occurs.

Jeremiah is all about captivity … judgment, despair, tearing down, stripping away. But Jeremiah’s also all about hope. About restoration. About returning. About me. About you.

How often we quote Jeremiah 29:11. In fact, it has been the family verse of my children and me for over twenty-five years. I’ve read it an unknown number of times ... just as I've read Jeremiah, but it wasn't until this morning that I got it! The context. Captivity!

We may live in the 21st century, but we’re not strangers to captivity. Not one of us.

How multi-faceted, captivity. Before knowing God, our captivity is to the evil one, to sin and death. In that place, and as Paul reminds us in Romans at just the right time when there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, God's peace falls upon us, and He spreads before us hope and a future with Him.

Even after coming to Him, however, we may know seasons of captivity. We will know seasons of captivity. Captivity of our own making, through poor choices, through outright disobedience. Captivity through the actions of others. Yet even here, in the midst of our own captivity, God's thoughts towards us remain the same: thoughts of peace and not evil, to give you a future and a hope ... a reason to call upon Him.

Jeremiah’s pen spills forth the promise. What comfort to know that God will always listen to our cry, is eager to be found by us, when our searching is with all our heart.

But other captivities also emerge through Jeremiah’s pen. Captivities designed by God's own hand that we see only as a captivity, but God knows to be the means to our salvation. It was those taken captive to Babylon that would be saved. Those that seemed free would only know death and destruction, a death by God's own hand. Deep thoughts to ponder.

I need to be reminded, especially in those seasons when I fight against my apparent captivity, bound to places and events that I don't want, don't choose, that it may actually be time to take stock. To turn my eyes upward and ask boldly, determined to hear God's answer. Is this a captivity? Is this season a place to fight out of? Or is it actually a season of planting, though not a planting of my choosing, a planting by God's own divine design? A planting all part of God's plan to bring me into fuller salvation? A time that as I seek Him with more and more of my heart, I will discover a depth in Him I never would have found elsewhere, or otherwise.

So much to ponder! So many unavoidably visible transplantings in recent days (Katrina, Rita, Wilma ... to name but a few). But transplantings go on around us, go on in our own lives, all the time. Spouses left alone through death, or against their will, as marriage partners desert the very ones they pledged enduring love. Illness. Unemployment. Empty nest. Death of a parent, a child, a sibling, a dear friend. Transplantings!

God's words can't help but call out to me here: Seek the peace of (name the situation) where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord in it; for in its peace you will have peace.

In our 'captivity' God's thoughts toward us are peace, not evil - hope and future, not condemnation. They are the place of our salvation, if we but turn to Him, with all our heart, seek His face and lay hold of the restoration His love holds out to us.





© DeAnna Brooks
3 November 2005

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