Let me ask you to turn to Jeremiah 45. This morning, Josh, as we begin, he read from Jeremiah 36 and we're going to look at Jeremiah 36 in a few minutes, but I want to begin in just a moment looking from Jeremiah 45 but I want us to have a little context and share a little context with that as we think about that. You know, when I think about my life, and you may be tired, sometimes I talk about myself, because that's the one person I know the best, and I think that's important. And as I think about my age, I think about what's happening in my life, I have a little retrospect now I look back on my life, and there are things that I look back at, and I think it's fairly rewarding. There are also things that I look back in my life that are very frustrating. And I think in reality, as we look back, our life is probably a little bit of both. And as you look at Jeremiah and his life, he was God's prophet, and as you look back, I think he and his scribe, whose name is Baruch. You remember Josh read from Jeremiah 36 and we're going to talk about Jeremiah, and we're going to talk about Baruch this morning as we think about a scribe and a lesson this morning. And I hope that, as I said, I hope it'll be valuable to you.
Let me give you a little context of Jerez my life, and you probably are aware of this, but if you're not, let me just add a little context to what we're talking about here. Okay? Jeremiah's prophecy occurred between 627, and 582, BC. There were several years in there that Jeremiah prophesied. And what's unique about his prophecy is he prophesied to Judah before it went into captivity. He prophesied to Judah after it went into captivity as well. So both of these, both of these time frames, are very important for us to think about. There were three Babylonian invasions of Judah. They occurred in 606, 597 and 586, and those are, of course, our relative dates. We don't know exactly when that happened, but generally, those are the three dates that we think about. That 606, is when those invasions began, and 586, is when Jerusalem fell. And so during this period of time, as I said, between 627, and 582, Jeremiah was the prophet that came to God's people and talked to God's people about what he wanted them to know. And Baruch was his scribe. Baruch was his sidekick. My guess is Baruch when he was young, he was ambitious. He wanted to do some things with his life that made a big difference, and yet he gets called to be a scribe for Jeremiah, the prophet. And what's interesting about that is, is that Jeremiah was a hated preacher. Nobody in Judah liked what Jeremiah had to say. And the fact of the matter is, is that he kept saying, God wants you to do this, and God wants you to do that. And like a lot of us today, when God tells us what He wants us to do, it's hard for us to listen to what he has to say to us. So Baruch gets called into action, and that's important, because Baruch is a, as I said, he is a scribe. He has a high end job. He has a job of prestige and a job of power. And like any maybe connected, I'll use this term. We have, we have a couple of lawyers in our assembly this morning, people who have used that but that's basically who a scribe was. He was typically a man who was well connected. He was a man who understood what what needed to be done. He was well connected in the community, and he was one who tried to climb the social ladder as quickly as he could. But he was intelligent, he was educated, and so he has an ability to in a society, to really connect with people. That's really who a scribe was.
In Chapter 45 of Jeremiah is a flashback. I want you to think about this. It is a a flashback where God, through Jeremiah goes back and he tells Baruch something about his life, but he does it 20 years after the fact. And so I want to read from Jeremiah 45 this morning, and I want you to follow along now I want you to think about this. This again, when he mentions this in Jeremiah 45 the city of Jerusalem has already fallen, plus God has already through Jeremiah said what he's going to say here in Jeremiah 45, he's already said it to him 20 years earlier, but now he's saying it to him now again, and I want you to think about why that happens. Okay, so let's read from Jeremiah 45. "The word that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch, the son of Neriah, when he had written these words in a book at the instruction of Jeremiah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim." Now that's -- that fourth year of Jehoiakim going to come into play. So keep that in your mind. "The son of Josiah, king of Judah, saying, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to You, O Baruch, you said, Woe is me now, for the Lord has added grief to my sorrow. I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest. Thus you shall say to him, Thus says the Lord, behold, what I have built, I will break down, and what I have planted, I will pluck up. That is this whole land. And do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them. For behold, I will bring adversity on all flesh, says the Lord, but I will give your life to you as a prize in all places, wherever you go."
Baruch says, Woe is me. And God reminds Baruch what he had said. And then God says, Are you seeking the great things for yourself? Do not seek them, for I bring adversity and disaster on all flesh. So the gist of what is going on is he's saying to Baruch, you don't see it, but there will come a time where you will see how relatively unimportant your hopes and dreams really are. I want you to think about that with me this morning. Everybody, let me have your full attention, if I may, and think about this with me this morning. I want you to imagine something with me this morning. I want you to imagine that what's going on in our world. Imagine by the time we get out of service this morning, everything in our life changes. I want you to think about when you walked in this morning, and everything was relatively the same as it was this time last week or this time a month ago or this time a year ago. Everything was relatively the same. I want you to imagine this morning. When we leave this place, we walk out, and there are police at our back doors. There are police at every door. And when we walk out this morning, the whole world has changed. Somebody, some, some foreign invasion has taken place and and our lives has changed in a matter of moments. I want you to think about that with me this morning, total devastation. If this morning that happened to us and when we walked out this morning, everything had changed. Tell me something, tell me the only thing that would matter to you at that point, at least initially. Here's what it would be that you're living. Now, you may be thinking about other people. You may be thinking about how your circumstances are going to change, but if you walk out those doors this morning, and everything in our life completely changes, one of the first things you'll think about is, am I going to live? Am I going to live because everything has changed.
So, what I want us to do this morning is take a quick look at Baruch life and notice some of the things that are said about him. And then we're going to go back to chapter 45 and we're going to look at what God said and how important what he said was to Baruch. This is reading from Jeremiah 36 this is what Josh read for us. "It came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, king of Josiah, king of Judah, that this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, take a scroll of a book and write on all the words that I've spoken to you, against Israel, against Judah and against all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah, even to this day, it may be that the house of Judah will hear all the adversities which I purpose to bring upon them, that everyone may turn from his evil way, that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. Then Jeremiah called Baruch, the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote on a scroll of a book at the instruction of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord which he had spoken to him. And Jeremiah commanded Baruch, saying, I am confined. I cannot go into the house of the Lord. You go therefore and read from the scroll which you have written at my instruction, the words of the Lord and in the hearing of the people in the Lord's house on the day of fasting. And you shall also read it in the hearing of all Judah who come from their cities." God tells Jeremiah to write what he said. Jeremiah writes that on a scroll. Jeremiah goes to Baruch. He says, Now I want you to write it on a scroll, and I want you to go tell the people what I said. And Jeremiah says, I can't go to the temple anymore. They hate me. They won't even allow me to go to temple anymore. Or in words that we might say, they. Let me come to church anymore.
So he tells Baruch, he tells his scribe, he says, I want you to write them, and I want you to go and I want you to preach them. How do you think that went for Baruch? Baruch reads from the scroll in several places, evidently, in the Scribes Chambers as well, which were in the king's palace, and when he reads the message of God to the people, even those who are in the king's palace, the princesses were afraid, and they tell the king, listen, you need to hear what God said. But we're telling you because we're more afraid of you than we are of God. So Baruch reads all the instruction that God gave. Remember, Jeremiah can't do it. Jeremiah said, Baruch, you go. Baruch goes, and he reads it. And after he reads it, not just in one place, not just in two places, but as he reads it to several of the princesses, and as they say, you need to read this in other places. Nobody's listening to it. And ultimately they tell Baruch, you need to go get Jeremiah, and you need to go hide. Don't -- just hide somewhere. Don't come out. And when that happened, they took the scroll, they burned the scroll. Then Jeremiah rewrote the scroll, rewrote the words of the Lord. And evidently there were more words that God told him to write. He rewrites those words. More bad things happen. He's thrown into prison again. Eventually he's freed. I mean this, you can't write this any better, as far as a movie goes, right? There's a remnant that stays in the land, but the remnant, even the remnant, refuses to listen to Jeremiah. And I want you to think about that. The city's been seized. The city's been captured. Jeremiah and Baruch have been told to go hide. Nobody's listening to God, and the people still refuse to hear what God said.
Jeremiah 43 beginning in verse one, Jeremiah and Baruch are sent to Egypt. Okay? They're sent to Egypt with the remnant that said, we're not going to listen to God. If you look at Jeremiah 44 and we're moving, as you can see, I'm moving up to Chapter 45 but in Chapter 44 of Jeremiah, I want you to notice what happens. Verse 16 says, "As for the word that you have spoken to us." This is what the people said. "As the word that you have spoken to us is in the name of the Lord, we will not listen to you." Now think about all the things that have happened, and the people still say we're not going to listen to you. Can you imagine if we had been told, and we've been told for years, there's problems in this country, and at some point in time, there's going to be an invasion, and another country is going to take charge of you, and when that country comes, it's going to be devastating. And if we walked out those doors this morning, and what we had been told for years had come true, would we not listen to that? Would we not have said, You know what? We should have paid attention to what we were told. And yet this tells us that the people didn't listen to them.
Let me read a little further down in Chapter 44 and verse 26 this is what happened. "Therefore, hear the word of the Lord all Judah who dwell in the land of Egypt. Behold, God said, I have sworn by my great name, says the Lord, that my name shall no more be named in the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying the Lord God lived." That's the outcome. That's the outcome of what had gone on. And a very small remnant had not yet returned to Judah, but would return to Judah. If you know your history of Israel, you know that's what took place. The Remnant was going to return. So when you get to chapter 45 of Jeremiah, that is God's assurance to Baruch that his life would be spared. If you knew there would be an invasion of this country, and if you'd been told that 20 years ago, and today was the day that that invasion started, and you had been told 20 years ago, you know, this country is going to go down, this country is going to be invaded. You're going to go into captivity. But your life, Kenny, your life is going to be spared. I don't want you to worry about your life being lost. I'm going to spare you. If God had told me that and I trusted God, that would have been the very thing that I wanted to hear. But if I was a young person, and I had my life ahead of me, I had my hopes and dreams and ambitions ahead of me, if I had got called to do something that was just something that nobody seemed to even appreciate, nobody even listened to. It would probably be that for those 20 years, by when I got called up until the time when the nation was invaded, that I would probably, while I might be saying what God wanted me to say, that would be frustrating to me. Thinking about all I could have been. Because Baruch was a scribe, but he was a scribe now who had been assigned to speaking for Jeremiah.
Well, let's think about the lesson. I titled this sermon a scribe and a lesson, I think that's how I title it, or a scribe and the lesson. When I say the lesson, I'm talking about the lesson. There's a lot of things in Jeremiah, but from Chapter 45 which is five verses. I mean, a five verse chapter in a prophet is really unheard of. Of course, those are man made, man made divisions in Scripture, of course, but I think it's fitting, because what chapter 45 is really what God wanted to say to Baruch. What should we learn? Let me mention a few things this morning that I think we ought to learn from that. The main thing is, is that what is our great focus and purpose in life? This may be because I'm older. There was a time when I didn't think about what I was going to do with my life. I just did it. There was a time when what happened in my life was something that I kind of said I thought about what I wanted to do, but as I began to do that, I didn't really think about what was transpiring over the course of that time. That just didn't cross my mind that much because I was involved in what I was doing. You know what I do a lot now? I sit on my back porch, or I sit in my office, or I get in my truck and I drive and I say to myself, you know, Kenny, most of your life's been lived. What'd you do with it? What have you done with it? Has it been valuable? Have there been some good things you've done? And that goes back to what I said at the very beginning, that when you stop and in retrospect, you look back on your life, there are some things that you say, you know, I'm glad I did that, but there's some things I did that I'm sorry I did. I don't mean that there was a problem moral or anything like that. There was some issue like that. There are just some things in my life that, as I look back, I wish I had done those things differently. You say, Why do you say that? Because the focus sometime wasn't on, the thing that the focus should have been on. And those things, quite frankly, are disappointing to me. There's not anything I can do to change it. That's, as we say, that's water under the bridge. And I'm talking to a lot of people this morning who are at different stages in your life. Don't you do what I just described? Don't you just stop from time to time and say, Does my life matter? Has my life mattered for any thing that is really worthwhile?
There will come a time in every person's life, and I hope it's already come, but there will come a time in a person's life when choosing God over worldly ambition and success will be clearly seen. If you're older this morning, you've already seen it. I don't care how successful you've been. We've got people who are in this audience this morning who are now retired. There were several people who are retired. And by that, I just mean you don't typically go to a job like you've gone to for the past 30, 40, 50 years. And as you, now, as you're older, and as you think about that, what your life has meant, it really starts taking shape, doesn't it? Don't you see, now, after those years have passed, and now you're where you are now, don't you see what your life has meant? And my guess is, as you look back on that some of that may be very rewarding to you. Some of that may be very frustrating to you, but it'll be very clear. You may or may not like it, but it'll be clear because it's the nature of perspective. It's the nature of seeing something at the end and being able to go back and say, You know what? What did I do? I call it sometimes this younger, older contrast. You go back.
Let me talk to those of you who are younger, and I'm gonna use the word and you define it every how you want to. When I say younger, let me use younger this morning as anybody who's not yet retired. Let's put it that way. Maybe anybody who's not as old as me. Then I'm talking to you. You go back and you ask someone who's older than you. You go back and ask somebody who's in a different stage of life than you are. You go back and ask them how much did your worldly success really matter? I'm not going-- I'm not saying, go back and ask them that they should not have supported a family, or should they not have have helped people with what they're not talking about that. I'm not talking about just taking away all that you did. I'm saying, what was the focus of that. You go back and ask them, is all the accolades that they received, maybe some accolades that they want because they were so good at what they did. Now, in retrospect, how much does that matter? Well, it matters. It does matter, but it matters relatively speaking.
Our world is falling. Our world is a mess. I bet that's the first time you've thought about that in the last, what, five minutes. It's hard to see sometime, but it is. And to the question that I have, what will the great purpose and focus of your life be? There's some of you here younger, who are younger, and you're trying to decide that. You don't know. You may be trying to educate yourself now in preparation for that, or you may have already done that, and now you're involved in a life's work, and you're trying to figure out, and you may be enjoying that, you may not be enjoying that, but you're already involved. And so the question is, How involved are you in that? Is your work your focus? Because a lot of times it is. And if it is, there's going to come a time when you're going to be driving down the road, or you're going to be sitting on your back porch, or you're going to be sitting in your office and you're going to say to yourself, What good did all that accomplish? And there will be some good. There will be some good things to say and ask about that, and there'll be some good answers to that. I'm I'm not diminishing that. I'm not demeaning that in any kind of way. But that won't be the question. That won't be the main question. The main question will be, what was your ultimate purpose, what was your priority? And did the people who saw you go about doing what it was that you did on a daily basis, did they see a higher priority in your life than making that sale or healing that body or selling this person something? Do they see you as as somebody different than that? That's what God wants. He's not saying don't have ambition, don't have dreams. And I'm not in any way trying to to douse any ambition that those of you are younger have, and I know some of you have some great dreams. I think it's wonderful.
Somebody said, do you wish -- do you wish you were 20 again? No, not really. My body does, but my mind doesn't. Would I change some things? Yeah. Would I do some things differently? Yes, probably. I'd still marry the same person. I did that good, and there's some other things that I did that I think are good and they're rewarding, but there's some things that I'd change. Are there some things you change? But you can't go back. You can't go back, but you can, on a daily basis, make some decisions about what dreams do you have, what ambitions do you have? And you can ask yourself, is that an ambition? Is that a dream? Is that a priority that's going to please God? You can see the end, and now, can't you? If you're 16 years old this morning, right now, if you have these dreams. You can see the end. You may not see some specifics, but you can see the end. Just play it out in your head. This is -- I'm 16, I'm 18, I'm 25 here's what I'm going to do. I've educated myself. Here's the job that I have, here's the place I'm going to live, here's the family I'm going to have. That may or may not work out. May or may not work. But what you can do is let it play out in your mind, and let yourself get to a point where you're 60, 70, 80, years old, and then ask yourself, is that what I wanted to do with my life? It's pretty serious stuff isn't it. Because we all have those moments. You need to be able to see the end right now, all of us, and we do that by faith. We put our trust in God, and we do that by faith.
So let me finally just say it this way. You need to pursue your dreams. You need to pursue your ambitions. I think Baruch did that. I think he was thinking, You know what, I'm a scribe, here's the trail of success for me. And Jeremiah says, I need you to be my scribe. And everybody hates him. Him and his scribe for the next 20 years, everybody hates him. Tells him to hide. They keep writing it down. Nobody listens. They send him to Egypt. They get him away. And yet the text tells us that God told Baruch I took care of you because you did what I wanted you to do. Isn't that a great lesson for us to learn? And if nothing else, I want the gist of this lesson to be for all of us, regardless of where we are, I don't care if we are retired, I don't care if we've lived most of our life, we can take what our life is right now, and whatever God gives us, whatever he gives us from now on, we can take that and we can refocus our life. That's what he wants us to do. And if you're older this morning, you can do that. If you're younger, you can really do that, and you can pursue your hopes and dreams and not give give up on anything you want, but don't forget God. Don't do it. Don't do it. That's the lesson that I think Baruch teaches us. When I think about him, that's a lesson that I remember, and I hope you'll remember that as well.
I have asked Kenneth this morning to lead the invitation song that he has stated, Jesus, let us come to know you. It's not your typical invitation song, but that's why I asked him to lead it, because I think the words aptly fit what I've tried to say to you this morning. Let us look to Jesus. Let us know Jesus. Forget all the other things. Not forget them in the sense don't do them, but let them not be the priority in our life, and let us come to know Him. I want to reiterate it one more time, and I've said it multiple times, but I want to make sure you hear. If you're here in this audience this morning, and you're younger, you it when you have your life ahead of you, you may or you may not. We're not guaranteed that, but if you do have your life ahead of you, don't get to my age and look back on it and wish you'd done something different. Don't do that. You decide right now what you need to do with your life, and you pursue that. And you make sure that while you're pursuing that, over the next 10 or 20, 30, 40, or 50 years, you make sure that while you're pursuing that God is at the top of that list. If you do that, you will have learned the lesson of the scribe. Be who God wants you to be. May God help us to do that. As we sing this song, in just a moment, I want you to listen, especially to the words. Think about what we've talked about. If you find yourself this morning here, and you find yourself as one who needs to build a relationship with Jesus Christ, or begin a relationship with Jesus Christ. We'd love to help you do that. You hear me say a lot, and it's the truth as sure as it is, I can't do one thing for you, but the Lord can. The Lord can do that. He can change your life. That's what he wants to do. We can help you this morning in your obedience to the gospel. Would you come as we stand and as we sing?
