00:01:08.530 - 00:01:24.130

Andrew Errington: Thank you, Andrew, for the invitation. Lovely to be back here and privileged to bring the word of God to you. Let me start by asking what do you aspire to do and to become in ministry? That's a question about ambition.

00:01:25.590 - 00:01:48.930

Though that word is uncomfortable to us because of its suggestion of self-interest. So let me ask instead about our aspirations, the things we hope to do and to be, and let us think of godly things. What do you aspire to do and to be for the kingdom? Where does your mind turn when you hear that question?

00:01:50.190 - 00:02:07.620

Perhaps the models in faith and ministry, people you have looked up to and would love to emulate. Perhaps it turns to ideas about roles you might have. Church, you might plant an unreached area. You might reach, perhaps you have some specific interest.

00:02:07.710 - 00:02:25.880

University ministry or children's ministry. Perhaps you aspire to scholarship of some kind. Maybe to do a PhD, write a book, maybe even teach here at College. We think a lot about the future, especially in our twenties and thirties, which I am no longer.

00:02:26.840 - 00:02:46.220

When I was in my first ministry roles and at College, I had a real desire, I think, to get where I was going, even though I didn't really know where that was. I think I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to make a contribution to do something. Maybe not anything very grand actually.

00:02:47.070 - 00:03:01.830

Something significant and real. What about you? Not everyone feels like this. Not everyone has great or even modest expectations, and this probably has a lot to do with the hand that we were dealt in life, I think.

00:03:02.760 - 00:03:25.850

But most of us will have aspirations and hopes of some kind. It's quite hard to live without them. I want you just to try to surface them in your awareness as we begin today. Because the passage I'd like to draw your attention to that David's just read is about a man's aspirations and what it meant for him to submit them to the will of God.

00:03:26.840 - 00:03:50.490

When I noticed that you'd been reading through Jeremiah in chapel, I thought I would choose Jeremiah 45, partly because I preached on it in my fourth year at College in 2011, and it's actually been quite a help to me since then. I hope it will be an encouragement to you too. If not, just add me to the long list of guest preachers who kind of misfire here. Am I right?

00:03:53.490 - 00:04:05.880

So have a look at it there. The opening verse gives us a context for this oracle. This happened in the fourth year of JE Hoya Kim's reign. While Baruch was scribing Jeremiah's.

00:04:07.470 - 00:04:34.830

So this locates this moment quite precisely. This was the year that the events recorded in Jeremiah 36 took place, 605 bc. Let me remind you what happened in case you've forgotten. JE Joa Kim's reign seems to have begun a new phase in Jeremiah's ministry. In chapter 36, Jeremiah is ordered to write his prophecy on a scroll so that it can be publicly accessible.

00:04:35.640 - 00:05:11.510

For this, he enlists the help of Baruch ascribe from a prominent family who is introduced in chapter 32 when Jeremiah gives him the deed of purchase for the field at Anato. Now Baruch writes the prophecy at Jeremiah's dictation. Baruch is then given the task of reading the scroll publicly because Jeremiah has been cancelled. Baruch reads out the scroll in the temple an act, which given the contents of the scroll, for example, chapter 11, that we just read, must have been very nerve wracking in this act.

00:05:11.510 - 00:05:35.350

Baruch publicly identifies with Jeremiah, which was probably career suicide. It is something I think he could only have done out of conviction and it deserves our admiration. This reading resulted. In Baruch going into hiding with Jeremiah while the scroll was communicated to the king by a surprisingly sympathetic group within the leadership.

00:05:35.390 - 00:05:55.990

I'm just summarising chapter 36 here. Really, JE Hoya Kim, however, dismisses it with the most bare-faced arrogance famously, do you remember the scene burning it piece by piece? As it's read out, Jeremiah and Baruch subsequently become outlaws. While in hiding though, God commands Jeremiah to write a second edition of the scroll.

00:05:56.140 - 00:06:21.740

There's a PhD in that, or there was. So Jeremiah once again dictates God's word to Baruch who writes it out again. Now the Oracle recorded in Chapter 45 must have come somewhere in the period before Baruch read the scroll of prophecy publicly because that event is dated to the fifth year of Je Hoya Kim, I'm just gonna look at Andrew. She now either for reassurance or humiliation.

00:06:22.660 - 00:06:45.000

Good. That's that's reassuring. So my guess is that this Oracle came somewhere before 36 8 if you're interested, but I don't think we know for certain still this Oracle is clearly connected to those events in chapter 36, which raises the question of why chapter 45 has ended up where it is. But I wanna return to that.

00:06:45.990 - 00:07:04.460

So imagine what it was like for Jeremiah to receive this word. Perhaps it came mid dictation. Perhaps as he was reckoning with what it was going to mean to do what Jeremiah had asked him to do. You know, he's mid typing, so to speak, and then Jeremiah says,

00:07:06.620 - 00:07:17.990

Israel thus says the Lord, the God of Israel. And he's thinking, how many times do I have to write that? You know? And then the next words are about you, Baruch stru.

00:07:19.070 - 00:07:36.410

Suddenly God's word concerns him directly. What an honour and also how frightening God first speaks Baruch's own words. Back to him, you said, woe is me. The Lord has added sorrow to my pain.

00:07:36.830 - 00:07:54.710

I'm weary with my groaning and I find no rest. I think these words reflect Baruch's grief and the content of the message he had given himself to serve. He was writing down words of agony. Words of judgement upon people and places that he loved.

00:07:55.580 - 00:08:31.260

Moreover, it was a complaint he would inevitably feel, again, his association with Jeremiah had almost certainly already cost him, and that cost was only going to increase. Baruch would spend many years after this on the run, exhausted and distressed. I had be prepared to bet too, though we can't know for certain that this complaint had not been spoken publicly. This seems to me like something he had said to himself, the private grief of a private man, which made the Lord's knowledge of it even more powerful.

00:08:31.530 - 00:08:52.060

I imagine God's word to him in response though, is bracing, isn't it? What does God say? I'm going to break down what I've built and pluck up what I've planted. The Hebrew of that phrase, there is a strikingly balanced, poetic parallel, the same number of syllables and obvious rhyme and rhythm.

00:08:52.760 - 00:09:15.870

It has an effect, something like I will smash what I've tended and mash what I've mended. It's as if God gives Baruch a kind of little memory verse, a little couplet that will stick with him to remind him of his intention to execute judgement on the land. The whole Oracle is surrounded actually by indications that God is speaking in earnest. Did you notice?

00:09:16.020 - 00:09:32.280

Thus says the Lord. Thus you shall say to him the oracle of the Lord. God wants Baruch to be perfectly clear, his judgement cometh. And then in verse five, the Lord speaks about baruch's aspirations.

00:09:32.790 - 00:09:50.730

What a powerful experience this must have been to hear his secret longings exposed. You, do you seek great things for yourself? Do you seek great things for yourself? What were these great things do you think that Baruch sought?

00:09:50.730 - 00:10:03.030

It's interesting to consider this. I doubt they were anything particularly grandiose or unreasonable. Baruch was from a noble family. He was educated and intelligent.

00:10:03.720 - 00:10:30.870

Moreover, he was, or he had been a respected man of real character. He is a kind of noble scholar, it seems to me. So I imagine that the great things he sought were simply the kinds of aspirations a person like that tends to have to advance to have some influence and success and to do significant and useful work. We can't know for certain, but I think it's a good guess.

00:10:32.150 - 00:10:54.520

Yet the Lord tells Baruch that in the circumstances these doors are not open. Do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them for I'm going to bring disaster on all flesh. God has a plan and it is firm, and it limits what Baruch may hope for now.

00:10:55.970 - 00:11:19.610

Baruch is faced with the reality that God's purposes have changed the possibilities that are open to him instead of great things. Now all he can hope for is survival. Yet this God guarantees the last sentence there. I'll give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go or let you escape with your life.

00:11:19.610 - 00:11:53.430

Different translations. Now Baruch experienced precisely what was spoken of here. The arrogance of JE Hoya Kim and his son led to the catastrophe of the next two decades when the Babylonians progressively demolished and deported Judean society. Then as the chapters before this one tell, after that catastrophe, Baruch and Jeremiah lived through the further disaster of the promising caretaker leadership of Galia being overthrown by assassination and atrocity leading to civil conflict.

00:11:54.060 - 00:12:30.750

The scattered remnants of Judean society gathered under an anxious leadership that once again refused to listen to God's word through Jeremiah and deserted the land fleeing to Egypt. Baruch and Jeremiah probably reached the ends of their lives there where they had never wished to go. Having seen the total destruction of Judean society, I suspect this history is one of the reasons why Chapter 45 is where it is for in its place. It is a testament to the faithfulness of God, what God said he would do, he did.

00:12:31.410 - 00:13:03.860

Both in bringing destruction and in preserving Baruch's life wherever he went. And I wonder if Baruch wanted the readers of Jeremiah to notice this. I expect also that this chapter is placed here because this word from God was incredibly important for Baruch, and in fact sustained him through the almost unmitigated tragedy he was to experience for the rest of his life. Had God not spoken this word to him at that time, perhaps he could never have made it.

00:13:06.310 - 00:13:45.690

God's word to Baruch was tough, but it was also freeing for it cut through illusions and made his tasks suddenly and stunningly clear. He had to lay aside his earlier aspirations and seek only to endure alongside Jeremiah, and so be part of the witness to God's faithfulness that would remain to the bitter end of the Judean refugees. God's gift to him at that moment in 605 BC, which was surely the turning point of his life, was to simplify his picture of things. Do you see great things for yourself?

00:13:46.790 - 00:14:32.080

Seek them not, it must at first have been a terrible gashing of his hopes, but in time I suspect it was also a gift for, there is grief in hanging on to impossible hopes. And there is a freedom that comes from giving them up and attending to the task that is set before us. We are not in the same position as Baruch. In general, we are given neither the burden nor the freedom of knowing with certainty which paths are closed and which are open, and often both within the Christian community and even in the wider world, there can be a degree of harmony between our service of God and our aspirations for life.

00:14:33.290 - 00:15:06.990

Indeed, it is often right and good to want and to plan, and to hope to do great things for God's kingdom. Yet it remains the case that the same thing that happened to Baruch can happen to us, and I think we are wise to notice this. Our hopes and aspirations too can be defeated or just ruled out by circumstances outside our control. A promising missionary ministry might be cut short by sickness or a war.

00:15:08.100 - 00:15:32.010

An academic pathway might become impossible because of wider cultural changes or institutional difficulties. Big plans for a church might be blown up by a professional standards issue. A ministry career might be torpedoed by mental illness or a spouse's unbelief. Societal collapse may throw all our expectations into disarray.

00:15:34.290 - 00:16:03.990

God does not guarantee that his purposes will accommodate our projects and he does not owe us this. Our personal ambitions may well be worth pursuing in themselves. Yet the time may also come when we have to realise that a door we thought was open is not, and we must make a choice between holding on to the great things we thought we were supposed to do. Faithfulness to God.

00:16:05.820 - 00:16:46.740

Baruch's experience reminds us that it is by no means a given, that our aspirations, even for good things, like a long fruitful ministry or a faithful significant teaching role will coincide with God's plans. The path of faithfulness may be the path of letting go. Now we are not called like Baruch to surrender all our aspirations automatically for we are rarely, if ever given the insight into God's immediate purposes that he was there can be faithlessness. It must be said also in not hoping and not seeking and timidity.

00:16:47.340 - 00:17:23.370

Think of the parable of the talents. We are all called as he was to cherish above all the gift of God's promise to save our lives and to be ready to be content with that if he calls us to be. I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go, or in Jesus' words, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Yet there is one more thing I think we ought to notice before we finish.

00:17:23.670 - 00:17:49.940

A wonderful irony about Baruch's experience. Baruch was called to set aside the great things he had hoped for, for himself in order to be faithful to God as Jeremiah's companion and helpful. But notice, notice that precisely by doing that, God enabled Baruch to do greater things than he could ever have imagined. Maybe not the same things he imagined.

00:17:50.720 - 00:18:23.850

Maybe different things, but greater things for in the providence of God. Hundreds of generations of believers are in his debt for his central role in the preservation of the book of Jeremiah, the very words of God, and he therefore has a claim to be one of the greatest scribes in Israel's history. He did not get to do the great things he imagined. Yet, is there any other scribe from this period whose name you know, could he have imagined such an honour?

00:18:24.450 - 00:18:48.380

I doubt it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer returns to Jeremiah 45. This text a surprising number of times in the letters and papers he wrote from prison over the two years before he was executed at Fossenberg concentration Camp in 1945. We shall have to repeat Jeremiah 45, 5 to ourselves every day.

00:18:48.650 - 00:19:05.060

He says at one point Bon Hofer is such a giant of modern theology that it is easy for us to forget that he actually experienced the cutting off of all his hopes. He was only 39 when he died. Died. Much slay before him.

00:19:05.450 - 00:19:33.830

Marriage work, books to write, ministries to lead people to teach. Hitler set the world on fire and he had to lay all those things down without knowing that God would use his faithfulness to make more of his work and give it a greater power and reach than it could ever have had. Otherwise, it will be the task of our generation. Bonhoeffer wrote not to seek great things.

00:19:34.440 - 00:20:17.570

But to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos and to realise it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building. Yet, like Baruch, precisely by accepting that Bon Herer did things much greater, we could tell other similar stories. Johan Sebastian Bark died with very little recognition, as did Gerald Manley Hopkins. We could tell these stories because this pattern is an echo and reflection of the Lord Jesus Christ, who also suffered the loss of every personal ambition and infinitely more in order to bring out of death the infinite life of the Kingdom of God.

00:20:18.950 - 00:21:01.770

Baruch Bon Hofer and countless others who have died to themselves in faith are stories of carrying in their bodies the death of Jesus. So that the life of Jesus may also be revealed, but in God's good timing and at his good pleasure, I do not know what lies ahead of you in ministry or still ahead of me. But I do know that we need to be ready to lay down our aspirations if that is how things turn out. I also know that the Lord can and will use our faithfulness and our contentment with his mercy to us in ways we could never have imagined.

00:21:02.970 - 00:21:17.250

So let me conclude with an exhortation from Psalm 37. Commit your way to the Lord. Trust in him and he will act. He will make your vindication shine like the light and the justice of your cause.

00:21:18.120 - 00:21:41.490

Like the noon day. Lemme pray. Father, I give you thanks for these brothers and sisters here present and ask for your blessing upon them and for the great work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. May great things be done for your kingdom through then, but also through the humility to give up some of the great things we seek if you call us to.

00:21:42.510 - 00:21:51.420

Lord, grant us the grace of following the Lord Jesus and not merely our own desires. In His name we pray. Amen.