As we were entering into this new year, I took some time to reflect on 2022. It was a good year for me. There were a few tough patches, but, overall, I had a good year. However, I got to thinking about some people who did not have a good year last year. If you were a Christian in Afghanistan in 2022, you did not have a good year. A lot of Christians died for their faith in Afghanistan last year after the Taliban regained control. If you were a Ukrainian refugee, you had a tough year last year. How many of you had a difficult year last year? It’s okay if you did. You can admit it. We won’t live in a place of feeling sorry for ourselves, but it’s okay to admit it if last year had some tough spots. Some people spent last year in prison. It is hard being in prison. I tell people that prison was hard for me sometimes. I have the Holy Spirit living inside of me. He brings me peace, but prison was still hard for me at times. Some days were harder than others, but let me tell you this: I could not imagine doing time in prison without the Holy Spirit. It would have been absolutely miserable. If you were in prison in 2022 and you did not have the comfort of the Holy Spirit, you had a difficult year. But I want to report to you today that it is 2023. Praise God. 2023 is going to be a good year, and I will tell you why. We have the God of the universe on our side. Turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Lamentations. It’s right in the middle of the Old Testament between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. We are going to look at Lamentations 3 and talk about a guy named Jeremiah who also had a tough year or two once. We are going to talk about what Jeremiah went through and how God gave him contentment, peace, and indeed favor as he went through it.
The first thing I want you to see as we dive into this passage is that times will come when you will experience things you will not like. Jeremiah lamented,
I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked. He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all people, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD.” Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. (Lam. 3:1–20 ESV throughout)
“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath” (v. 1). That is poignant. To feel like you are under the wrath of God himself. To feel like almighty God has made you his enemy. Wow. “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape” (v. 7). I have felt that before. Walls everywhere. Locked doors, and I don’t have a key. Not a great feeling. “He has made my teeth grind on gravel” (v. 16). This is some dark stuff Jeremiah was feeling. Before we get into what exactly was happening to make the prophet feel that way, I want to talk briefly with you about two things, biblical genres and feelings. Lamentations represents the lament genre. In other words, it is Jeremiah describing his personal feelings about the situation in a way that is full of imagery and metaphor. Most of it is not to be taken at face value. We have to read it critically to understand the message that this book conveys because there is something I heard once about feelings that rings true: Feelings make great servants but terrible masters. We cannot be led by our feelings. We are led by God. We walk by faith not by feelings, and Jeremiah knew that. He communicated that to us in the latter part of this passage, but we are not there yet. So, what was happening to make Jeremiah feel this way?
Jeremiah spent his life prophesying to the nation of Judah regarding their fate if they would not repent of their sins and return to God. The moral state of Judah had been devolving from bad to worse. Josiah was the last reforming king. He died and his son Jehoahaz succeeded him. Jehoahaz undid all of Josiah’s reforms. He led the people back into idol worship. His brother Jehoiakim became king after him. Jehoiakim followed suit. Jehoiakim’s son Jehoiachin also led Judah into evil, as did his uncle Zedekiah who succeeded him. Zedekiah was king when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem. Jeremiah received his prophetic call during the reign of the good king Josiah and continued to prophesy through the sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Throughout that whole time, Jeremiah continued to tell the people of Judah what would happen if they did not repent of their sins. God would allow the Babylonians to conquer them. The people did not listen, and it finally happened. The Babylonians broke down the gates, destroyed Jerusalem, and burned the temple of God. Jeremiah was right there for all of it. He felt like his world was ending. That’s why he wrote this lament we are reading now. Have you ever felt like your world was ending?
I have experienced that feeling a few times, but I want to tell you about one in particular, November 11, 2017. To understand the gravity of November 11, 2017, you need to get some background information. In May of 2017, the warden of Coweta County Prison allowed me to go to the Work Release Center (WRC) after I had been in prison for five years. I guess he had gotten some information from the parole board that I would be making parole soon. I was five years into my bid at the time, and my parole eligibility date was August of that year. I remained at WRC from May to October, working for a site development company, while I waited to learn what the parole board would decide regarding my release date. Since the warden allowed me to go to WRC, I assumed I would make parole either that year or the next year. On October 14, I checked my parole date on the website while I was on the way back to the WRC after work. What I saw shocked me. My tentative release date was August 2024. I was devastated. I thought I was going home that year. Instead, the parole board told me I would have to wait seven more years. I did not know what to think, so I just started praying and kept that knowledge to myself. I figured maybe it was a mistake and they would fix it. A couple weeks later I contacted a parole lawyer to look into the situation. He determined that it was not a mistake. At that time, the parole board wanted me to do seven more years (that would change, but we didn’t realize that at the time). Then, when I came in from work on November 10, 2017, Officer Corson informed me that I would not be going out the next day because the warden wanted to talk to me. The warden had found out about my new release date, and he had to remove me from the program. I got to return to the Coweta County Prison and resume my paving career on the work detail.
Why does this type of stuff happen? Why do bad things happen? Ultimately, it all goes back to Adam and Eve. When Adam and Eve sinned, they introduced rebellion into the human race. Everything negative in this world traces back to that Original Sin. Tim Keller said it like this, “Human beings are so integral to the fabric of things that when human beings turned from God the entire warp and woof of the world unraveled. Disease, genetic disorders, famine, natural disasters, aging, and death itself are as much the result of sin as are oppression, war, crime, and violence.” Negative stuff in life traces back to the Fall in different ways. Sometimes our bad choices bring us bad things. For example, if you live a criminal lifestyle, you will probably wind up in prison. We have a tendency to make these bad choices because we inherited Adam’s sin nature. Other times, we experience negative effects from the Fall that we did not necessarily bring upon ourselves. Sometimes we experience negative things that are a result of another person’s bad choices, such as getting robbed, for example. Or, Jeremiah, the righteous prophet, becoming collateral damage in this punishment of the nation of Judah. By the way, did you know that the priests of Judah had Jeremiah thrown into a well for warning them about their impending punishment? Bad things will happen sometimes in this world because it is fallen. How are we supposed to respond to the bad things? I would submit to you that we do what Jeremiah did.
If you trust God during the hard times, He will give you contentment. Jeremiah described the contentment of God as follows:
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I will hope in him.” (Lam. 3:21–24)
“But this I call to mind, and, therefore, I have hope.” I love that line right there. If you were paying attention, you remember that line provided the title for this sermon. “But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.” What is Jeremiah saying? True, life is hard right now. True, I have been through the ringer. All this is true, “but this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.” What did he call to mind? “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” That’s how you find contentment during the tough times. Recite that verse to yourself when you are feeling down, and, my friend, you can’t help but feel better. But don’t misunderstand me. We’re talking about contentment right now. We’re not making God out to be a genie that will poof from the lamp and give you a billion dollars. God will give you contentment. What is contentment?
Let’s look briefly at how Paul described contentment to the Philippians. In Paul’s words, “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:11–13). Contentment is choosing an attitude of joy despite your outward circumstances. How do we maintain contentment when outward circumstances seem so bleak?
We remember who God is. We focus on the God we serve and what He has done in the past. We look at what His Word tells us that He has done. Amazing things like the Exodus from Egypt. God brought Israel out of the heart of the richest nation on Earth at the time, and He made the Egyptians give Israel their riches! We think about people like Joseph who went from prisoner to Prime Minister of Egypt. And He is still the same God. He will do it again. Not only that, but we think about the stories of things God has done for our friends. One thing we do at this church regularly that I love is we have testimony services. We testify about what God has helped us through. God has provided for us in some incredible ways. And He is still the same God. He will do it again. Then, remember the things he has brought you through. Think about all the things God has brough you through in the past. Has He changed?
Now back to my story about getting set off in 2017. It was hard. I wanted to go home. I pouted for a couple weeks. I’m not going to lie to you, but my faith in God actually grew stronger because He gave me peace and contentment during that time. I found contentment through reading the Word of God and trusting promises such as what we are reading here in Lamentations as well as Romans 8:28. I also found contentment because I remembered what God had brought through during my first five years in prison. Let me tell you a brief story about when I left Jackson in 2013. My dad tried to help me out. He had a friend that knew a friend in the Department of Corrections. I had a good bit of time to do, and they decided that Jack T. Rutledge would be a good prison for me to go to until I could get to a county camp. It was small and close to the house. They had it all set up for me to go to Rutledge, and I left Jackson and went to Wheeler. I did not want to be there. It is a huge prison with about 3000 inmates when I was there, and it is four hours from home. But God knew what He was doing. At Wheeler, I got involved with the GED classes, and the principal was this nice lady named Dr. Monk. Dr. Monk helped me get in contact with some of my professors at the University of West Georgia. When I went to prison, I was three classes shy of graduating from West Georgia with a degree in Applied Math. Between Dr. Monk and my professors, they got it set up where I could do those last three classes at Wheeler through correspondence, and I was able graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Applied Math from West Georgia in May 2014. I cannot imagine how that would have happened anywhere else in the state. Then, in Fall 2015, my dad tried to help me out again to get me transferred to Carroll County Work Camp. Carroll County is where I’m from so it seemed like a nice idea. Again, plans didn’t work out, and I wound up at Coweta. In my opinion, and in my experience, Coweta is the best prison in the state. I kept trying to make these moves. They would fail. Then, God would trump that apparent failure with a better move. Every time. Thus, when I was enduring the difficulty of getting set off by the parole board, I was able to look back at my own experiences, as well as to the Word of God and my friends’ stories, and I found contentment based off the fact that I serve a faithful, powerful God who does not make mistakes.
Today I can report to you that my contentment was well-founded, and my trust in God was absolutely warranted. That leads to the final point of this passage: better times are coming. Let’s see what Jeremiah had to say about better times:
The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him; let him put his mouth in the dust—there may yet be hope; let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults. For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men. (Lam. 3:25–33)
I really need you to trust in that point. Better times are coming. It only gets better from here. There are so many facets to this idea of better times coming, but for the sake of time, I will hit on three that seemed important to Jeremiah and me. The first thing within this idea of better times coming that I want you to see is the concept of delayed gratification or making sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. Jeremiah suggested, “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth” (Lam. 3:27). This yoke analogy refers to oxen pulling a cart. The ox willingly pulls the cart when it is young and strong. Then, when it gets old, it can relax in the pasture. That is kind of the idea. I was young when I went to prison, and I took that verse quite literally. I will do this time while I am young and I will get something out of it that I can take with me. I will spend time reading, learning, exercising, praying. I will improve myself mind, body, and soul. Then the man who walks out those prison doors will be better than the man who walked in. Redeem the time. Make the most of the time. I did that. Also, I think it will help if you look at tough times a little differently. Approach this difficult situation as an opportunity to prove how strong you are. It’s a trial by fire. Are you strong enough to handle it? Then, take that concept of proving your strength and apply it to your faith. How strong is your faith? Do you have strong enough faith that you will maintain and even grow more faithful through this difficult period? Let me tell you something, and I want you to get this: you don’t know how strong your faith is until you have reason to doubt it. A martyr who dies for Christ, refusing to renounce His name, that person knows how strong her faith is. Lean into the tough times. Prove that you are not just a fair-weather Christian. Bear the yoke in your youth.
However, it hit me recently that Jeremiah was not young when he wrote this book. He was an old man. How could he talk about bearing the yoke during youth as an old man? The second subpoint to better times coming requires us to change how we view time. Jeremiah was old in terms of this world, but he was young in light of eternity. We need to think in terms of eternity because we are eternal beings. My grandpa is eighty-two years old, which is pretty old compared to me, but did you know that scientists say that the universe has already existed for almost fourteen billion years? So, Pa and I are both very young compared to the age of the universe. Every one of us is an infant compared to eternity. “When we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.” That was Jeremiah’s point. Paul made the same point when he wrote, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). If you have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, better times are most definitely coming with His return, but I would submit to you that better times are coming in this life as well.
Hence, the third subpoint of better times to come is this: God will give you favor even in the wilderness. You will experience God’s favor even during the so-called hard times. I love where Jeremiah said, “He will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (Lam. 3:32). Not might. Not maybe. He WILL have compassion. He will have compassion from an ABUNDANCE of steadfast love. God wants to bless you in ways that you haven’t even thought to ask Him yet. When Jerusalem was sacked, Jeremiah did not get carried off with the exiles to Babylon. He was allowed to remain in his home (Jer. 40). Plus, think about people like Daniel who experienced favor and purpose IN BABYLON. Now think about yourself. How bad do you really have it?
Now I’ll be honest things looked bleak for me when the parole board set me off those seven years. I was not pleased about that, but I trusted that God would work it out. And He did. He did not work it out in exactly the way that I wanted Him to. God is funny like that sometimes, but so many incredible things have happened since 2017 that would never have happened otherwise. I got to start a church at Coweta County Prison. It began as a small Bible study, which we started in 2018, but it morphed and really exploded in 2020 after COVID. When the pandemic started, all prison visitation got shut down, which included all the Christian ministers. Suddenly, our In-House Bible Study was the only show in town. We realized that we needed to provide a real church service for the prison, and the prison church was born. I never get the experience of starting a church if I get out in 2017. Something else amazing happened. The former Warden McKenzie allowed me to enroll in seminary in August 2020. Now I am about to complete a Master of Divinity in Biblical Studies. There have been so many blessings related to my studies. I will tell you more about it some other time, but I seriously doubt I would have enrolled in seminary if I had gotten out in 2017. And, there has been one more recent development. I just got engaged to the most amazing woman I ever met. She was not single in 2017. If I got out then, no telling who I would be with. But let me tell you a little bit about Angela. If I could have drawn up the perfect woman for me with everything I would want, the relationship with God, the brain, the looks, the personality, everything, that perfect girl would not hold a candle to Angela. I’m telling you, God made her just for me.
Now I can look forward and see the shape of this amazing life that God is providing. I’m going to marry Angela. I have multiple strong mentors that are guiding me into full-time vocational ministry. In our passage, Jeremiah lamented the loss he and his people experienced, but it was not permanent. After the Persians conquered the Babylonians, King Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their homeland.
The restoration of Judah serves as a type of the restoration of this world, which God will soon provide. This world is fallen. Bad things happen here from time to time. “But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.” But God. Those are two of the greatest words in the entire Bible. “But God sent his only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life” (John 3:16). This is not the end. These tough times are not the end. This world is not the end! Jesus paid the price of sin and death, and one day soon He is going to return and make everything sad come untrue. In the words of the apostle John,
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Rev. 21:1–4)
But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. If you know and trust God, you can have peace and contentment even when it seems like the world is ending. However, if you do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I will be frank with you: I don’t know where you turn during the tough times. If you have not accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you do not have hope for eternity. The outlook, my friend, is not good. You need to get that right first, and I want to give you an opportunity to do that today. If you are ready to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, get down on your knees right now and pray a prayer something like this:
Dear God, I know I have sinned against you, and I am sorry. I thank you, Jesus, that you paid the price for my sin by your death on the cross and that you rose from the grave so that I can have a personal relationship with you. I ask you now, Jesus, to enter into my heart and save me. I dedicate the rest of my life to serving you. Amen.