The year was 2007. Josiah was eight years old, not the strapping young man you see today. We were camping in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and stopped at a scenic overlook a short distance away. Suddenly we saw Josiah where he shouldn’t be. He had climbed over the fence and was walking on the ridge right beside the drop-off, with nothing between him and death.

We were shaken. My first impulse was to yell, but I didn’t want to startle him. So I approached him carefully and quietly, and asked him to come back on the other side of the fence. He did, and he was safe again. But I still have that moment frozen in my mind even today. It was horrifying.

The question that we all face is: what do we do when we see someone who’s in danger? In Josiah’s case, it was physical danger. It’s usually a no-brained to take action when someone is in physical danger. But what happens when someone is in some other kind of danger, when they are making decisions that will do them harm? That’s a lot trickier. The default today is to mind our own business out of a sincere desire to mind our own business and not intrude in the affairs of others.

But the Bible presents another option. Actually, it’s not even an option. The Bible calls us to a better alternative. My goal today is to tell you about it, and then to describe how it could work in a church like Liberty Grace.

Danger!

If you’ve been around, you know that we’re in a series about our life as a church. We’ve been looking at what the Bible describes as the life of a church. As part of this, we’ve been looking at some pretty challenging topics, and today is no exception.

Today I want to look at a passage in Jude. Jude was written by Jesus’ half-brother. What’s interesting is that Jude doesn’t follow the typical formula that people used to write letters in that day. Jude skips all the pleasantries, because he’s writing to the church, and he knows that the church is facing a danger.

That’s why he writes in verses 3 and 4:

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Jude gets right down to business because he knows there’s a danger. They’re on the other side of the fence, and a lot is at stake. What is the danger? False teachers have infiltrated the church. False teaching is a serious matter, and you can see how concerned Jude is. False teaching never stays at false teaching. In verse 4 Jude says that it’s perverting God’s grace and turning it into sensuality. It’s a denial of Jesus Christ himself. It’s a serious matter.

Here, in Jude, we’re asked to contend.

…Our mind is forced to go on red alert. We are being asked to read standing in readiness. Jude is finished with pleasantries; some required action is at hand. Urgency and immediacy move him. He wants contenders, and he wants them now. And with this letter he means to raise them up. (David Helm)

Let me pause here and say that this danger is one that hasn’t passed. We read later in verse 18 that the apostles predicted that it would happen, and it has happened indeed throughout church history right to the present day.

A man in Britain suffered “horrendous” symptoms for three days after mistakenly taking a drug prescribed for high blood pressure. He was accidentally given the wrong prescription at his pharmacy. He said that it “felt like someone was standing on my chest and I was having to take big deep breaths every few minutes throughout the entire night and following day as the medicin…

Big Idea: Gender and sexuality are gifts from God to be cherished and protected.

One of my favorite passages from the book of Proverbs may be surprising to you.

Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a virgin. (Proverbs 30:18-19)

Okay, that’s a strange choice.

Agur describes four ways that are extraordinary, that go beyond what we’d normally expect. They’re astonishing.

The way that an eagle soars in the sky — artfully, endlessly — is amazing.

The way that a snake is able to glide over a rock with no legs and nothing to hang onto is astonishing. Maybe a little more creepy than the eagle, but also amazing.

The movement of a ship crashing through the waves, defying the depths, was inspiring then as it is now.

The thing that all of these have in common is that they’re all amazing, and yet they just happen when you have the right agents in place. Eagles were designed to fly; snakes were designed to glide; ships were designed to sail.

Agur’s list builds to a surprising crescendo with the final item that amazes him: the way of a man with a virgin. It’s the hardest of the four to understand. The Hebrew term for virgin has a range of meanings, and here probably refers to a young woman who’s sexually ready for marriage. And what he describe is probably a sexual encounter, possibly her first. He’s talking about the wonder of human sexuality. He’s saying that sex is amazing. What amazes him is that something so amazing happens so naturally.

Where am I going with this? Today I want to talk about two of God’s amazing gifts to us: gender and sexuality. And I want to begin by saying that they are amazing gifts. They’re gifts we all get to enjoy, and yet they’re gifts that have been tarnished by sin.

My goal is simple today. As we look at forming a covenant community, a membership, here at Liberty Grace, I want to speak honestly about one of the issues in which our church is most out of step with our culture today. I want to do this for two reasons:

First, I want to be honest so that there are no surprises.

Second, I want you to enjoy these gifts of gender and sexuality.

My goal today is to explain these two gifts of gender and sexuality, why we don’t enjoy them as God designed, and how God offers us an opportunity, by his grace, to begin to rediscover and enjoy them as they were meant to be.

Let’s get started by looking at what gender was meant to be.

What Gender and Sex Was Meant to Be

To understand gender and sex, we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible. Genesis 1:27 says:

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

This is the first poetry in the whole Bible, which is significant. The first time that the Bible speaks of our gender, it expresses itself artistically in order to communicate the wonder of what’s taking place. The high point of God’s creativity is found here.

Though you could travel a hundred times the speed of light, past countless yellow-orange stars, to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light-years below the plane of the Milky Way, though you could slow to examine the host of hot young stars luminous among the gas and dust, though you could observe, close-up, the protostars poised to burst forth from their dusty cocoons, though you could witness a star’s birth, in all your stellar journeys you would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being. (Kent Hughes)

And here’s the amazing thing as we look at this: it not only says that we’re created in God’s image — that somehow we’re like God and represent God — but that our genders are …

“If you could dream up the perfect church, what would it look like?” asks a recent book. The author then goes on to describe his ideal church: located in a major city in an environmentally sensitive building with a great urban design. It would include a coffee shop, roastery, and event space for the community. The church would be active in justice, mercy, and outreach. It would hold to the best of conservative theological tradition while learning from the best of other traditions too. It would be gospel-centered, Spirit-led, and mission-minded. It would plant other churches, take church membership seriously, and engage its members in active service. It would also offer engaging courses on a variety of topics to the community. It would also own several homes and apartments in the community and rent them out as a way of building intentional community.

Sounds good to me! I think we can all dream of the perfect church in our minds. We all have ideas of what it would look like, and how it would embody our ideals and values.

The author then says:

I am a bit disgusted with how easy it is to describe in such detail my hypothetical “dream church.” It’s easy because this is how we’ve been conditioned to think. “Have it your way” consumerism is the air we breathe…

Here’s the kicker:

What we think we want from a church is almost never what we need. However challenging it may be to embrace, God’s idea of church is far more glorious than any dream church we could conjure. It’s not about finding a church that perfectly fits my theological, architectural, or political preferences. It’s about becoming like “living stones” that are “being built up as a spiritual house” focused on and held together by Jesus, the stone the builders rejected who became the cornerstone (1 Pet. 2: 4–7).

I love this.

We’re accustomed to being the customer in almost every relationship. We can shop around and find what we like in almost every category. It’s so easy to bring this same attitude to church. And yet God’s idea for church is much better than anything we could come up with.

Instead of driving twenty miles away to attend a church that “fits my needs,” what if we committed to the nearest nonheretical, Bible-believing church where we could grow and serve— and where Jesus is the hero— however uncomfortable it may be?

Commitment even amidst discomfort, faithfulness even amidst disappointment: this is what being the people of God has always been about.

We’re in the middle of a short series on the church. We are implementing, for the first time, membership. We’re asking you to sign up, to commit to being part of this church.

Normally when someone is trying to get you to join and become a member of something — a gym, Costco, whatever — you get a list of all the benefits. I’m going to do the very opposite today. I’m going to tell you that joining a church is uncomfortable, sacrificial, and costly. I’m also going to tell you that it’s awesome — not because it’s easy, but because it’s both what God designed and what we need.

For just a few minutes, I want to look at the passage we just read to see how God designed us to live. And then I want to spend a few minutes talking practically about what this looks like in a church like Liberty Grace Church.

How God Designed Us to Live

Peter, one of Jesus’ closest friends, writes to a group of churches located in what is now modern Turkey. He’s writing to Christians who hadn’t always been Christians. They were mostly Gentiles. They had worshiped idols. And now they were followers of Jesus Christ right around the time that Christians were starting to be persecuted for their faith.

One of my friends — a man I really respect — says we ought to pay a lot more attention to this letter than we do. We’re in a very similar position. We’re a…

Big Idea: We’re a group of people who are so amazed by Jesus that we’re ready to suffer to make an eternal difference in the lives of others.

They had won it five times before. This time, though, they were the underdogs. They — the L.A. Dodgers — were playing the Oakland A’s in the Major League Baseball World Series, and most people expected they would lose.

To make it worse, their star, Kirk Gibson, was injured. He wasn’t just a little injured. He had sustained a torn hamstring in his right leg and ligament problems in his left knee. He was a mess, and could barely hobble.

When the game started, he wasn’t even there. He was in the clubhouse watching the game on TV while getting physical therapy.

In the ninth inning, while the A’s were trying to close out the series opener, Gibson was called to pinch hit. He stumbled his way out to the batter’s box to face down Dennis Eckersley, one of the better closing pitchers of that era. With a 3-2 count he knocked a slider out of the park. He hobbled around the bases and pumped his right fist as his jubilant teammates stormed the field. The Dodgers won the game, 5–4, and would go on to win the World Series, four games to one. That play later became a finalist in a Major League Baseball contest to determine the sport’s “Greatest Moment of All-Time.”

What would cause someone with multiple leg injuries to hobble up to bat? Nobody likes to suffer. Nobody likes to go through that kind of pain. Well, Gibson did it because so much was at stake.

For the next few weeks, we’re going through a short series on our life together at Liberty Grace Church. Today we’re looking at our mission: to invite people into community to share in the beauty of relationship with Jesus. We want to be radically hospitable — to invite people into community — so that they can see the beauty of relationship with Jesus in our lives.

As we’ve talked about this as a church, we’ve talked about things like saturating Liberty Village with the gospel. We’ve begun to pray about the audacious goal of seeing 1% of the population of Liberty Village become followers of Jesus Christ. That’s 100 people. We want to reproduce one day and plant another church. In a few weeks, I’m going to be asking you to consider committing and joining this church.

The question arises: why would we do this? It’s a lot of work. It’s uncomfortable. In the next few weeks we’re going to be talking about what it means to be the church. It’s going to cost. It’s going to tick some of us off. Participating in the life of the church and following God’s commands is costly. There’s no other way. Dietrich Bonhoeffer nailed it years ago when he said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Who’s in? Who wants to die? This makes playing in the World Series with an injured leg look wimpy. Why would we even go there?

The answer is: Because of what’s at stake. It’s worth it.

My goal today is simple. My goal is to take a look at our mission through the lens of the passage that we just read. My goal is to challenge you to sign up in the mission we’ve been given, and to make your life really count, despite the cost.

First, a little background. Paul is writing this letter from prison in Rome. His friends have abandoned him. He expects to die soon. He’s suffering. Paul is playing injured.

And yet he writes to Timothy and tells him to step up and suffer too.

As I stared at this passage this week, I noticed three themes that inform our mission as a church.

Start With the Beauty of Relationship With Jesus

As I said, our mission is to to invite people into community to share in the beauty of relationship with Jesus. That’s a mouthful. We’ve thought of simplifying it. We even had one meeting in which we talked about getting rid of the beauty part just to shorten it. On…

Big idea: The church is a bigger deal than you realize. It displays God’s multifaceted wisdom to spiritual powers.

As we gather today, I want to tell you that what you’re doing right now is a pretty big deal.

I’ve always liked the words of Annie Dillard:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

I love that — we should all be wearing coach helmets. What we’re doing here matters. It’s not safe at all. The church is a bigger deal than you realize. Today we’re going to look at one reason why.

For the next few weeks, we’re looking at life at Liberty Grace. We’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of what we’re all about as a church. I’m going to be telling you things I don’t think I’ve ever told you about our church before. I want to invite you in to join and to be a part.

But first we have to ask: why does it all matter? All of this takes lots of time, energy, and money. Why do we even bother? The answer comes back: The church is a bigger deal than you realize.

Let’s look at why.

Reason One: The Gospel Is for Everyone

We only have one theme here. We keep things pretty simple. The one theme is Jesus and what he’s done for us. We talk about it a lot, and for good reason. It’s the center of everything we do.

The book we’re looking at today, Ephesians, was written to a church plant like ours. The man who wrote it, Paul, was an enemy of Christianity until he met Jesus, and it changed everything. Once he met Jesus and understood what Jesus did for us, he couldn’t stop talking about it. So for the first two chapters of Ephesians, he’s been discussing the incomprehensible fact that Jesus died to save us. You can’t put it better than Paul did in Ephesians 2.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:4-10)

Friends, it doesn’t get any better than that. We were dead — not just sick, but dead. But God has acted in Jesus to make us alive and raise us up to new life. We’ve been saved. It is all of God. It’s a gift that we can simply receive, and it changes everything. I want to encourage you to receive this gift if you haven’t already. There’s nothing more important you could do today than this.

But Paul continues in chapters 2 and 3. Not only does he explain this good news, but he also says that it’s for everyone. But it hasn’t always been that way.

The story of the Bible is the story of God creating a good world, and of us rebelling against him. Instead of writing us off, God has chosen to save his people. But he didn’t choose to work with everyone. He chose to work with a small nation called Israel. He told them back then that he would use this tiny nation to bless the whole world, but they mostly missed th…

Big Idea: God is eternal, and our lives are short and hard. To prepare for the New Year, number your days and seek his mercy.

We are small, really small.

In his book Principles, Ray Dalio explains exactly how small we are.

It is a great paradox that individually we are simultaneously everything and nothing. Through our own eyes, we are everything—e.g., when we die, the whole world disappears. So to most people (and to other species) dying is the worst thing possible, and it is of paramount importance that we have the best life possible. However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/20,000 of the Earth’s existence. In other words, we are unbelievably tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish, our impact will be insignificant.

It’s humbling. We are unbelievably small. And it’s a good thing for us to realize this.

In Psalm 89, which we haven’t read, the king is lamenting his mortality.

Remember how short my time is! For what vanity you have created all the children of man! (Psalm 89:47)

It’s bewildering to him. It seems that he can’t get his head around it.

And he continues this theme in today’s Psalm, which we did read. It’s about living in light of mortality.

That’s not a message that we necessarily want to hear today, but it’s important and useful. The last day of a year is a perfect time to think about where we are right now, and to chart a course for moving forward.

Psalm 90 is going to ask us to consider two things, and then to take two actions.

First: Consider Two Things

This psalm has 17 verses. 11 of the 17 are spent getting us to consider two realities. In order to take the action prescribed in verses 12 to 17, we need to take in the realities this psalm presents us in verses 1 to 11. Before we can navigate to where we want to go, we need to understand where we are right now.

Notice that this psalm was written by Moses. It was written in the wilderness during the 40 years that Israel was wandering in the desert. Some two or three million people left Egypt; a whole generation of people had to die as they made that 40-year trek. There would have been constant funerals. As Spurgeon said, you could track the progress of the nation by the graves they left behind. In the middle of this, Moses reflects on two realities that were true then, and they’re just as true today. It’s ironic that to find our location today, we need to turn to something written thousands of years ago. But there’s no better place to turn.

Psalm 90 wants us to find our current location by understanding two things.

First: God is eternal.

Verses 1 and 2 say:

Lord, you have been our dwelling placein all generations.Before the mountains were brought forth,or ever you had formed the earth and the world,from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Think about this. Moses zooms out to consider time. A few years ago, the Art Gallery had an exhibit on King Tut and Egypt. I remember walking through the exhibit, marveling at the age of what I was seeing. Some of the exhibits are over 4,000 years old. I couldn’t help but think about Moses as he grew up in Egypt.

We think Moses is old, but back then Moses zooms out and says helps us see time from another perspective. Before Egypt, before there were any mountains, before there was even an earth, God was God. God has no beginning. He was God before the mountains…

Big Idea: Jesus gives us everything we need. Follow him. Trust him. Rest in him. Bow before him.

If there’s one thing we have enough of, it’s trouble. We have personal troubles: bills, health, career, the daily grind. The world has problems: political problems, crime, poverty, and more. We could use a lot more of a lot of things, but we don’t need more trouble.

“God’s answer to everything that has ever terrorized us … is a child” (Ray Ortlund). Think about that. The passage that we just read says this:

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

(Isaiah 9:6–7)

Judah was terrified by their enemy, the Assyrians. They were not nice people. Isaiah tells them that God’s answer is a child.

For just a few minutes, I want to look at the four titles of Jesus in this passage and what they teach us.

As the Wonderful Counselor, he has the shrewdest strategies. Let’s follow him.

The term “counselor” is not what we think of today in terms of a therapist, or someone we tell our problems – although Jesus is that as well. It’s more of a military strategist. It probably refers to a king who has the ability to come up with a winning military strategy. You could say “Extraordinary Strategist” (NET Bible).

Isaiah predicts a baby that will become an Extraordinary Strategist. Jesus is a Master Strategist, able to deliver his people from hopeless situations. Many of these situations are of our own making. Judah’s was. He is a strategist who can handle situations that look hopeless to us.

Jesus is the Master Strategist who can deal with our problems. These are the problems that keep us up at night – finances, health, job insecurity, family problems. Jesus came across people with all kinds of problems. He is not surprised by the messes we have, even the problems we get into. Jesus is the strategist who is not surprised, and who specializes in hopeless situations. He brings hope when there doesn’t seem to be any hope. He is also able to deal with our ultimate problems, problems that we aren’t even aware we have.

Got any hopeless situations? Got anything that you can’t solve on your own? Tell him. He has never found a problem that he is surprised by, even if the problems are of our own making. God can deal with any problem you’ve got.

Jesus can even deal with our deeper problems. He came to forgive us, to bring us into his Kingdom. He came to reconcile us to God, to adopt us, to make us his own.

That is Jesus, the Mighty Strategist, the one who can deal with hopeless situations. As the Wonderful Counselor, he has the shrewdest strategies. Let’s follow him.

As the Mighty God, he defeats his enemies. Let’s trust him.

When Isaiah wrote these words, Isaiah was facing one of its greatest crises. They faced enemies. What could they do? They had a hard time believing that they could trust God. What would be the strategy that would save them?

Isaiah counsels Judah to trust in God’s strategy: trust a baby. You can see why Ahaz wouldn’t have been too excited about trusting the baby.

Who will you trust? When the marriage is falling apart, where do you turn? When the finances are drying up, who will you trust? When things are going wrong, whom do we trust? We all trust someone – ourselves, some other person, some other thing to get by.

You can depend on Jesus, the Mighty God, against impossible odds. Even though we face impossible odds, and even though Jesus …

Big Idea: Joy comes, not in popular or expected ways, but through the birth of a baby.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come; Let earth receive her King!

We sing those words every Christmas. In fact, we’re going to sing it in a few minutes after the sermon. But it wasn’t originally written for Christmas. In fact, it wasn’t even written to be a song.

Isaac Watts was one of the great hymn writers in church history. In 1719, Watts published a book of poems in which each poem was based on a psalm. Rather than just translate the Old Testament texts, he adjusted them to refer more explicitly to the work of Jesus to show their focus on Christ.

One of these poems was an adaptation of Psalm 98 and Psalm 96:

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth;break forth into joyous song and sing praises!Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre,with the lyre and the sound of melody!With trumpets and the sound of the hornmake a joyful noise before the King, the LORD!(Psalm 98:4-6)

Watts interpreted this psalm as a celebration of Jesus’s role as King the church and the whole world. More than a century later, the second half of this poem was slightly adapted and set to music to give us what has become one of the most famous of all Christmas carols.

It makes you wonder, though: what kind of joy is the song talking about? Today is the third Sunday of Advent, the four weeks in which we prepare for the first coming of Jesus, even as we keep an eye on his future return. And it’s the Sunday in which we usually focus on joy. But I think you’d have to admit that joy is in pretty short supply both in the world and in the church. You could say that we suffer from a joy deficit. It feels like we’re living with the Paris effect.

Have you heard of the Paris effect? It’s the disappointment that many first-time visitors to Paris experience after hyped up expectations from the media. A recent (2015) article in The Wall Street Journal explains that it often “affects women … who arrive expecting an affluent and friendly European capital where slim, beautiful Parisians walk around smelling of Chanel.”

The article went on to note that many visitors

expect a place full of romance, beauty, and wealth. Instead, they find pavements peppered with cigarette butts and aggravated commuters in packed metro trains … For some, the shock is too much to bear, prompting them to seek medical help for symptoms that may include irritability, fear, obsession, depressed mood, insomnia, and a feeling of persecution by the French. In extreme cases, the only remedy is a one-way ticket out of France.

In other words, disappointment sets in when visitors realize that daily life in the City of Light is nothing like the romanticized vision in movies like Midnight in Paris and Amélie, or Sofia Coppola's evocative Dior commercials. The suggestive images of Paris in the media inevitably build up high expectations and create a lot of room for disappointment.

It feels like that with life sometimes. And so when we sing, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” we need to decide whether that’s just a sentimental song we sing, or if it’s really something that’s available to us.

As someone who’s interested in joy, I want to know if it’s something that we can expect. We’re spending more and more money on trying to get happy. Books are coming out. We have more available than ever. And yet it seems that we’re not really happier. Can we discover joy? Isaiah has something important to tell us on the topic.

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the book of Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet who lived 2,700 years ago in Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. Isaiah speaks and writes at a time when the Assyrian empire had grown and gobbled up the northern empire so that its borders were just eight mile…

Big Idea: The good news after the bad news is that a King has come, and you can count on it.

After the bad news, we sure could use a dose of good news.

You hear that your condo is on fire and that you’ve lost everything. That’s the bad news. The good news is that your insurance adjuster tells you that they’ll cover everything.

The doctor says you’re sick. That’s the bad news. The good news: there’s a cure, and you came in just at the right time to get it. You’re going to recover completely.

Your boss comes in to tell you that he’s letting you go. The good news: you get an offer for an even better job, and it starts next week.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like the bad news doesn’t sting. But it sure helps to get a dose of good news after you’ve been hit with some bad news.

The passage that we just read begins with these words:

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that her warfare is ended,

that her iniquity is pardoned,

that she has received from the LORD’s hand

double for all her sins.

(Isaiah 40:1-2)

That sounds kind of nice. Those are the sort of words that I can picture on a plaque on a Christian bookstore. What you might miss is how stunning this good news is, because it is the dose of massive good news that comes after really bad news.

But it’s not just the good news that comes after bad news for the people who would have heard this 2,700 years ago. It’s also good news for us. I have one goal today: to show how Isaiah’s news is good news for us too.

The Bad News

Before we look at the good news, I’d like to show you the bad news that made Isaiah 40 such good news.

Isaiah 40 marks a major break in the book of Isaiah. The break is so dramatic that some scholars think that it was written by a completely different person. Chapter 39 ends with some pretty brutal news: that Judah would be carried into exile into Babylon.

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord of hosts: Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your own sons, who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” (Isaiah 39:5-7)

Isaiah looked into the future and saw the day when Jerusalem would be destroyed. This happened over a hundred years later in 586 BC. The Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem. It’s devastating. Jeremiah tells us that the Babylonian king’s bodyguard “entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down” (Jeremiah 52:12-13). Jerusalem was completely destroyed. Thousands of people were taken captive and shipped away hundreds of kilometers. Only the poor were left behind.

This would have been devastating news for the people who heard Isaiah. They were supposed to be a mighty nation blessing the whole world. Instead they’re a hundred years away from being destroyed. This news would have left them bitter and disillusioned.

You can’t appreciate the good news of Isaiah 40 until you see the bad news of Isaiah 39. The bad news is devastating. That’s what makes Isaiah’s words in chapter 40 even more interesting.

The Good News After the Bad News

In Isaiah 40, the scene shifts. Isaiah is now looking even farther into the future. He’s picturing the day over a hundred years into the future when the exile has already happened. Chapter 40 is spoken to the captives who are a thousand kilometers from their home, which has been destroyed.

Isaiah comes with very good news after the bad news.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

…

Big Idea: Walk in the middle of difficulty in light of the hope that we have in the rule and reign of Jesus.

I have a question for you this afternoon: What is your hope?

No matter how good your life is right now, you’re living off the hope that things will get better. We all are. Nobody wants just more of today. We can’t survive without hope. In a recent article, psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty observes the startling rise in deaths from suicide and drug overdoses. He points to a number of long-term studies that have analyzed the difference between high-risk patients who survive and those who die by suicide. Here’s his conclusion of this research:

Over a ten-year span, it turns out that the one factor most strongly predictive of suicide is not how sick the person is, nor how many symptoms he exhibits, nor how much physical pain he is suffering, nor whether he is rich or poor. The most dangerous factor is a person’s sense of hopelessness. The man without hope is the likeliest candidate for suicide. … We cannot live without hope.

That’s pretty amazing. Nobody wants to suffer, but you can suffer if you have hope. Nobody wants to be poor, but you can survive being poor if you have hope. “The most dangerous factor is a person’s sense of hopelessness. The man without hope is the likeliest candidate for suicide. … We cannot live without hope.”

So let me ask you again: What is your hope? Is it a certain level of income? The perfect romantic partner? A certain level of career success? Children? We’re all hoping for something. To be human is to hope.

The problem, even if we have hope, is twofold: life is hard, and our hopes don’t deliver as much as we desired. Usually the thing that we hoped for doesn’t turn out to be as good as we’d hoped. But even if it does, it doesn’t last that long. Or even if it does, it still doesn’t satisfy us as we’d hoped. Historian Daniel Boorstin suggests that we suffer from all-too-extravagant expectations. In his much-quoted book, The Image, Boorstin makes this observation:

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive …. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

Read that last part again: “Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.”

Lost Hope

We’re not the first to experience disappointment, of course. This morning we’re looking at a passage from the book of Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet in Israel who lived 2700 years ago during a time when things weren’t very good. Israel was controlled by Assyria, a major world power. Moses had said that God had promised to “set you in praise and in fame and in honor high above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the LORD your God, as he promised” (Deuteronomy 26:19). But Israel felt like a two-bit backroads state with not much going for it. Israel knew war and destruction. When Isaiah wrote, Assyria was expanding its power while Israel went through a succession of kings. Israel lived under the shadow of a great empire that threatened to swallow it up at any moment. Talk about disappointment! God’s promises didn’t seem to be coming true.

On top of that, Isaiah hardly seemed to be helping things. Isaiah …