In this sermon, titled 'Build, Dwell, Plant', Scott Brown discusses Jeremiah chapter 29, where Jeremiah provides instructions to the captives in Babylon. Brown identifies nine actions that Jeremiah tells the captives to do while in captivity, including building houses, planting gardens, and getting married. He emphasizes the importance of having the Word of God as the center of one's life and seeking the peace of the city. Brown also highlights the promises that God makes to the captives, assuring them of His presence and good plans for their future.

Well, please open your Bibles to Jeremiah chapter 29. Jeremiah chapter 29. The text here forms really the heart of what we want to say over the next hours ahead. And I want to use it as kind of a jump off point for the things ahead that we want to communicate. But thank you for coming.

I know that it takes quite a bit of money and effort, allocation of time, great sacrifice for many of you to be here I remember I was just thinking about this earlier you know raising a young family it's hard to allocate so much money and so much time to do something like this and I pray God really blesses you that it would be very helpful to your soul and to your life as you as you go go forward and I I hope I hope that the time won't be just another theological treatise. We're not here really primarily to spend all of our time denouncing the tyrants. We know who they are, we know what they do, We're experiencing their hot hand. But what we really want to do is be an encouragement to you and to help you make your way through. One of the great downsides for me is my wife is not here.

Debra's not here. She just arrived in Nebraska for the birth of her 27th grandchild. And she, I mean, she just got, just a few minutes ago, I got this text from my daughter. She said, my mama is here, everything is okay. Smile, smile, heart, heart.

So there you go. Maybe there'll be another baby in the next 24 hours. So you've come from all over the United States and thank you for making the trip. There's somebody here from North Pole, Alaska. So you need to maybe meet them and find out, you know, you might ask them about Santa Claus.

But North Pole, Alaska, isn't that wild? Well, we wanna proclaim the beauty of the Lord in all of his ways and to put as best we know how to put the glory of Jesus Christ on display. God is a Redeemer, He's a Restorer, and everything that He is doing is for the glorification of His name. And to be involved in that is such a privilege as a human being. The men who are going to preach here, I've known for many, many years, I'm so thankful that they're here to come and preach to you.

I know they'll be a great blessing. I've done something to them, though. I've asked them to preach 20 minute messages. 20 minute messages. If you've ever been preaching you know how difficult that is.

What a pain in the neck to try to do that. But the reason I asked them to do that is because there were so many things I wanted us to cover. I wanted us to touch on one blessed truth from the word of God after another, and I couldn't fit it in without squeezing these men for their time. But the great thing about being squeezed for time is you know you got to get to it real fast. You know, you got to say what you're going to say, you know.

And you know, one year in our national conference, The platform was running like over an hour behind schedule and we hate to have things not run on schedule. We hate it, we hate it. And so we're like over an hour behind and so I went up to Kevin Swanson. I said, Kevin, Kevin, we're in trouble. This whole platform's in trouble.

I said, you're gonna have to preach a 35 minute message. Yeah, I mean, you know, Kevin Swanson, he's gonna have an hour message. And he looks at me, you know, his big saucer eyes, and I said, Kevin, you can do it. And he got up there, and in 37 minutes, he gave one of the most powerful messages. It almost killed him, I'm sure.

But the next guy behind him was Josh Bice from Praise Mill Baptist Church. And Josh looked at his, he said, that guy just gave me 15 extra minutes. So It's really hard to try to preach short messages, but. 21 years ago, we held our first national conference of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches. And the year before that, Doug Phillips had gathered a number of men together.

I was one of them, and Jeff Pollard was one of them. And we decided that we would start using a term called family integrated churches to try to explain at least one element of returning to biblical order in the church and in the family and and that's what that conference was was all about and you know at that time we looked around and we knew that the Church of Jesus Christ was in ruins and the only hope would be for the Word of God to be central and Jesus Christ to be the heart of everything and that families would return to biblical order because in the 20th century The whole doctrine and practice of the family was destroyed in America. And we were all feeling the pain of that destruction and the, you know, You know how youth groups were destroying our children. And so we gathered here to talk about all of that. And we're here now after many, many years, after lots of battles, but lots of victories too.

Now, you know, I'm seeing a new generation growing up and they're having children and they're, and so many of them are following in the ways of the Lord. I couldn't be more encouraged myself. I'm just so grateful for all these things that have happened. Well, please stand. I want to read honey word of God.

Jeremiah 29 4. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who are carried away captive whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon Build houses and dwell in them plant gardens and eat their fruit Take wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters, that you may be increased there and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city, where I have caused you to be carried away captive. And pray to the Lord for it, for in its peace you will have peace." I want to draw from this passage of scripture nine things that Jeremiah tells the captives. Would you pray with me?

Oh Lord, we pray that you would give us wisdom. We pray that you would give us understanding and obedience. I pray, O Lord, that you would also fix our minds on Jesus Christ and all of his good ways, that we would walk in them, and that you, Lord, would come and fulfill your word and to bring about your promises toward your people amen so please be seated so I want to give you nine things that Jeremiah tells the people to do. And of course, you know, all of this really stands under the centrality of the Word of God. The people of God make their way by the Word of God.

And the beautiful thing about the people of God is that they know how to live. The people of God always know what to do because the Word of God is sufficient for everything. And you know, just this morning I opened my Bible according to the schedule that's in my Bible app called Journey Through the Bible, which is based on a book that I wrote called Journey Through the Bible to help families just read through the Bible. I use it every day. And I opened it up to chapter 18, just in my normal reading.

And there in Jeremiah 18, Jeremiah gives the heart of the problem and why the judgment of God was on their nation. And he said that they've abandoned the snow waters of Lebanon, the cool waters that flow down from the mountains. That's always the problem with the people of God, not nourished in the Word of God. And it reminded me of Isaiah chapter 8, where Isaiah says, before Jeremiah, he says that the people have refused the waters of Shiloha, which flow softly. And if anything comes out of a conference like this, I hope that there's just a greater hunger for the Word of God because God teaches his people how to live.

And so the Word of God is so central. You know, we live in a time today where we're so addicted to our phones And our heads are always in our phones. And I saw this really funny video the other day where a guy was illustrating, he said, if your Bible was like your phone, If your Bible was like your phone, this is what it would look like. You would be doing this, you'd be doing this all day long, you know, you'd be going, you'd just be swiping from one page to another, and then, and then the guy he went like and and you would do this you know when you would walk you know and you'd look up and you'd you know you'd crash into things because you're always looking at your phone but he said if we treated our Bibles like our phones we might do a little bit better and it's so important that we have our minds fixed on the words of Jesus Christ. So We're living in a time of spiritual warfare, where everything in the Word of God is being contradicted.

And you know, earlier this month our church did what we do every year. We do a father-son retreat and a father-daughter retreat. And we do that in order to bring our people together in our church and review what biblical manhood looks like and what biblical womanhood looks like. Because those things are disappearing in our culture and the kids that are growing up in this culture are going to have to be fortified with the Word of God, particularly in matters of manhood and womanhood. We need God.

We need the Word of God to help us to understand how to be the people of God and during that conference one father came up to me and he said it's so good to have some gender-affirming therapy And we all need it. We need therapy every day from the Word of God because we're like strangers in a strange land. Everything that we do at Church and Family Life is to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. That's our great hope. Whenever any one of our preachers stands up, we want them to have that as the center of their target.

That Scripture is sufficient in everything. That God has revealed himself in a completed revelation, the 66 books of the Bible, and the Old and the New Testaments, and what is there is fully adequate for everything pertaining to life and godliness. And so that's what we really want to be doing here. And so we turn to Jeremiah 29. This chapter is actually written like a pastoral letter to captives, written to people who are in exile, who are at the beginning of a 70-year exile in Babylon.

And so in this letter, it's written to people whose properties have been confiscated, their cities have been destroyed, and now they are 900 miles away from home and their King's eyes have been gouged out so things are really hard they've experienced tremendous pressure from the tyrants and and so they'd lost their homes Many of them had lost their loved ones. Their young men were castrated. They lost their livelihoods. Many of them were broke in Babylon. And so God gives Jeremiah words.

One thing he says in Jeremiah 10 5. It says do not be afraid of them and He also warns them about the dangers of syncretism and he says in Chapter 10 verse 2 do not learn the ways of the Gentiles for the customs of the people are futile. In other words, you're living in Babylon but don't become like the Babylonians, live like Christians. And I was reading Matthew Henry's commentary on this statement here. He says this about the way of the Gentiles.

The way of the heathen is very ridiculous and absurd and condemned even by the dictates of right reason. The statutes and ordinances of the heathen are vanity itself. And I love this last statement. He says they cannot stand the test of rational disquisition You they just can't stand the test of being anywhere near reality and that's the kind of world that we live in right now where unreality has become reality and it's just a start it's breathtaking what's going on we're not really here to camp on that but what we are here to camp on is what God tells his people to do in a time of captivity. One of the interesting things about this passage is found in verse 4 because it starts out with, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, captive whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon.

First of all, God is saying, I'm the one that got you to Babylon. I'm the one that raised up the tyrants. I'm the one that had you deported to Babylon." But he says, it says, thus says the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts. He's reminding them that he is the potentate.

He is the one who is in control. And he is the omnipotent ruler of all the kings of the earth the Lord of hosts it's it the Lord of hosts is nomenclature for the Lord of the armies of heaven God is in control The people of God never have to worry about anything because God is doing it all. All of the insanity that's falling upon the world right now, the strong delusions that seem to be everywhere, all of these are from the hand of God. All of them are so that God would be glorified in his people as they live through times like this. And so we don't need to be afraid.

You know, one of the one of the joys of the last three years for me and for our congregation in Wig Forest was that when COVID broke out, for some reason I had it in my mind to preach through the book of Revelation. Revelation has got to be the most encouraging book in the entire Bible because on every page it says Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He's the ruler of the kings of the earth. God is orchestrating everything in history and what a blessing it is to be under the care of the Lord of hosts and this is the one who is speaking to the captives and so I want to give you nine actions nine things and we can learn from every single one of them in our times, nine things that Jeremiah tells the captives that they must do while they are in captivity. And the first action is build houses and dwell in them.

That's in verse 5. In other words, settle in, abide, establish yourself, remain, stay. The terminology is household terminology. Make a home. Create home life.

Things happen in homes that can't happen anywhere else in the culture And I think Jeremiah is saying go and go and dwell in your homes and create the culture of the kingdom of God there in your home. Lay down roots, stay. And, you know, when people move around all the time, it always sets them back. And often, you know, people want to move to get out of the situation there, and now of course, just saying that just reminds me how often I've encouraged people if you don't if you don't live near a good local church you should move okay I think people should move for that but here Jeremiah is is But here, Jeremiah is telling the captives to secure their home life, to build houses. If you're going to build a house, There's some level of optimism that God will bless you there so build houses Second the second action plant gardens Plant gardens and eat their fruit.

That's in verse Five and this this also implies a certain kind of attitude. It's a positive attitude, that you're gonna work hard and you're going to enjoy the fruit. And by the way, it is really hard to actually bring forth a garden that's fruitful. But if you plant a garden, it means that first of all you're going to engage your own labors, you're going to be taking dominion, you're going to have some mentality about being self-sustaining, you're going to take action, you're going to work and you're going to create food for yourself. You know, it's so easy to get discouraged about the economy.

But I think what Jeremiah is saying is, look, get to work. Go plant a garden. You know, have a visionary understanding of your life and go and do something that will bring forth fruit. And, you know, take dominion over your land that God gives you. This is what it means to take dominion is that you improve every little piece of your life You improve the ground that you live on You if you have a car your you maintain your car you maintain your relationships you take dominion over things and you make them better.

It's why God put you where you are, is so that you would plant gardens and they would bear fruit. You know this is very much like that great Psalm, the Psalm of Ascension in Psalm 128, where he says, When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you." In other words, this is satisfaction for the simplest things, just for eating the fruit of your garden and having a meal together and being happy in what God has given you to do. And then the third action is take wives and beget sons and daughters. That's verse 6. Take wives and beget sons and daughters.

This actually I believe is a word to single men. In other words, get focused on getting married. I think one of the things that this implies is that the mission of God to take dominion is so big that you need help you need a partner you need a help me what God has called a family to to be and to do is so gigantic it's so facilitated by a husband and a wife who are unified together. So He's really telling young men to get ready to be married and find a wife and go get married and go do good things in a foreign land even though you've lost your homeland. Don't stop, don't stop doing the will of God no matter what the conditions really are And I don't know when a person should get get married whether they should get married early or late Everybody would like to get married early, but God in his providence doesn't ordain that Was Isaac at age 40 was it too late like did Did God make a mistake Did his parents make a mistake when he got married at age 40?

I don't think so. People get married, people basically get married when God's timing matures for them to get married. And they might be young and then they might be old but I think you know what what this means is for young men to throw off immaturity you know to take life seriously, to prepare your fields. You know, what about single women? What should they do?

What can they do? Now, I would just say, you know, single women should throw their weight behind their local churches. And if they're living with a family, to be a blessing to the mission of that family, or if they're still in their house, you know, to be a blessing, use their superpowers for the expansion of the kingdom of God, for the blessing of that family. But women have a problem today. It's men.

You know, all over the culture, I was just reading some statistics just the other day about secular culture, and There's a real problem with young men today, and even in the church, even some homeschool boys, they're not working. They're not making money. They're not positioning themselves to have a family. They're buying irrelevant toys. They're spending their time on irrelevant games and sports and personal idols.

And that actually puts women in a really hard place. I read recently this of secular men. Too many, there are too many economically and emotionally stunted young men. But what women need are strong men. Women with strong men know that they'll be protected.

Women with strong men know that they'll be provided for. Women with strong men know that the next cute girl won't sway them because they are strong men but that begins when you're young and so take that as an exhortation young men be strong be courageous and prepare yourself for battle we are actually in a war and you know hanging around and doing nothing and playing games is one of the stupidest things a young man can do. Makes life hard for a girl. You know, we have a pornography epidemic. You know, I don't know what the statistics are for this group, but using pornography destroys the protection of women.

I read the other day that looking at pornography increases infidelity 300% in a man's life. So, you know, men are meant to take dominion. And here, this is the admonition is for these young men to take wives to to take dominion and and to act like men You know think about taking dominion over your phone. Well, here's the reality. Either you take dominion over your phone or your phone will take dominion over you.

But there's so many distractions for young men today that that eclipse their their actual readiness to be married because they're acting like boys and so we need we need men and we need men who set themselves up to be married and that means that they have to work well enough on that for the fourth action take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands so that they may bear sons and daughters. So what this means is that parents actually have a role to play in the marriages of their children. This admonition argues for parental involvement in getting children married. I don't think it's an argument for arranged marriages. I think it's an argument for significant parental involvement.

And it's a blessing to children and their marriages when they're when their parents are involved if they have godly parents And I frankly I've seen this work out So many times in my own church Where The young people that are getting married in our church, they all sought the favor of their parents. All of them did. And what a blessing it has been to them. And God protected them from all kinds of trouble as a result of it. You know, children need to be raised with marriages in mind.

Parents should always be training their children for readiness to marriage because someday they will be married. And there are times when there are disagreements regarding a child's choice of a spouse. That can make things very, very difficult. It has to be worked through very carefully and prayerfully. Those are very difficult situations.

But the thing is is that in the Bible daughters are given in marriage. Sons take wives and daughters are given in marriage. That language runs through the Bible and you find it right here in this passage. And then the purpose of marriage is stated, this is the fifth action, Multiply and increase in the land. That you may be increased there and not diminished.

This has to do with multiplications. Setting your eyes on increase in the fruit of the womb. You know, this sentence contains imperatives that they may be increased and that they may be multiplied. This is the exact same language in Genesis 127, the very first command in the Bible to be fruitful and to multiply and not diminished, but to be many in number. This is what the church does.

You know, people can argue all day long about whether they can ever interrupt fertility or anything like that, but what's undeniable is that God commanded his children to have to have children and to be fruitful and multiply That's just the that's just the plain Language of the Bible and the people of God just should take it seriously God says he loves it. So go for it And that means that you have a sense of optimism. You know, people say, oh I wouldn't want to bring any more children into this world. That's not a Christian attitude. Bring as many as you can and bring them up in the training, the admonition of the Lord, and make your home a little piece of heaven.

And send them out like arrows. That's what God wants you to do. You know, I have a friend who visited me from the Netherlands a little while ago. And he told me that in the Netherlands, in one more generation, there won't be any more atheists. He says in the Netherlands, there are two populations that are growing.

He says there's like a Christian Bible belt in the in the Netherlands and those people are multiplying and then Muslims he said in a generation the Netherlands will be filled with Muslims and Christians that's it But that's a result of this the ridiculous proposition that the atheists have adopted to kill their children, to wipe out their heritage. I really don't understand why they don't see what they're doing. They are wiping themselves out. This is what the devil does. So multiply The sixth action, seek the peace of the city, verse 7, and seek the peace of the city or I have caused you to be carried away.

In other words, don't be trouble makers in your city. Don't obsess about Nebuchadnezzar's problems. Build your own houses. Dwell in the land. Plant your own gardens.

Get married. Raise your children. Go do that. This is not to say that believers should be silent in their society. We should be vocal.

Those who've been called to be vocal should be vocal and should write and should engage in political office if they're called to do that. But seek the peace of the city. Seventh, pray for the city and pray to the Lord for it, for in its peace you will have peace. And the eighth action is to endure. Verse 10, For thus says the Lord after 70 years are completed in Babylon.

What Jeremiah is saying is look, this time of captivity, this is your life. You're gonna be in Babylon for three generations. You know, some of the people that are hearing what Jeremiah is saying, they are, they're going to, they're going to have passed away by the time captivity is over. And the false prophets are out there saying, oh, this is going to be short. And Jeremiah says, don't listen to them.

They are lying. Because it's going to be a long time You're going to be in captivity a long time So, you know be patient 70 years is three generations, you know, if this was us and our captivity began now, we would be in captivity till 2090. And what Jeremiah is saying, this isn't going to be a short trial. There's no miracle escape. You're not going to be raptured out of this captivity.

God has put you in the midst of captivity to build and to dwell and to plant. And then the ninth action is to believe promises. Believe the promises of God. Verse 10. The first promise is that God will work.

God will work among you. I will visit you and perform my good work toward you and cause you to return to this place. God promises that he'll work amongst his people. No matter what the government does, no matter what the culture does, God works. The second promise is that God has plans for good.

This is one of the most famous verses in the Bible, often so misunderstood. Verse 11, 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. God has good plans. Everything that God does is to give a future and a hope to his people. And then finally, verses 12 through 14, God promises that he will listen to your prayers.

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 I will be found by you says the Lord so nine things that you ought to do first build houses and dwell in them second plant gardens and eat their fruit third take wives and beget sons and daughters. Fourth, take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands. Fifth, multiply and increase in the land. Sixth, seek the peace of the city. Seventh, pray for the city.

Eighth, endure. It's going to be a long season. And ninth, believe in the promises of God. Well at this conference, What we want to do is we want to say, Scripture is sufficient for everything that you're facing right now. The people of God always know what to do because they have His Word.

You are a special people for God's own possession. And He's promised to guide you with His eye and to open up His Word to teach you in the ways in which you should go. This is the beauty of living in captivity, is that God is alive. He's the Lord of hosts and He teaches His people all that they need. So Don't waste your life, don't waste your exile pining away, don't waste your exile getting caught up in distractions, don't be paralyzed, do the powerful things, do the beautiful things within the kingdom of God.

So build and dwell and plant in your time of exile. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, we thank you for the snow water of Lebanon, for the waters of Shiloha that flow softly, those beautiful, cleansing, refreshing waters of your Word. I pray that you would wash your people with it, with the water of the Word. And I do pray Lord that you would perform all of these promises and give every person here in this room such a heart to follow you in all of your ways, that Jesus Christ would be preeminent in all things.

Amen. Thank you.