God's Appointments - Part 1 — Joshua Daniel

Daily Bible Study as the Source of Light

Please be seated, dear friends. Now if you have a Bible and you're not studying it every day, please know that you're walking without any light. Oh, how I long for light from God's Word. If you do not have a Bible, please go to the bookstore and buy one.

God's Appointments in Isaiah 61

That's the greatest thing that you can find on earth. Tonight, I want to speak to you of God's appointments. If you will please turn to the 61st chapter of Isaiah, you will see something of what the Spirit of the Lord appoints or gives.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, the third verse, to appoint unto them that morning Zion to give unto them beauty for ashes.

The oil of joy for mourning. The garment of praise for the Spirit of heaviness that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Now dear friends, how helpless one feels before a house full of mourners.

God's Appointment of Beauty for Ashes

You are short of words, you feel there is nothing that you can say. But here is an appointment from God to those who mourn in Zion to give unto them beauty for ashes. You know, death and bereavement and mourning bring a lot of darkness into a heart and into a home.

And it leaves you with a feeling that there is no way by which that gap or that sorrow can somehow be reversed. You know, we don't like to go to the house of mourning, we would rather go to the house of feast.

Enduring Lessons from the House of Mourning

But, honey, when you go to a house of mourning, there are some enduring lessons to learn. Some deep lessons. Lessons that will enlighten you. But when you go to the house of feasting, it is a very shallow trifling spirit.

But you know what our preference very often is. But, honey, God's Spirit appoints beauty where there are ashes. Ashes symbolize total destruction. Who can reverse an ashen situation of desolation into the beauty that is immaculate?

William Carey's Printing Press and the Ashes of Desolation

No man can do that. You know, once William Caring stood in the midst of the ashes of his printing press so painstakingly set up. And as he surveyed the ashes to which years of valuable work and manuscripts of the Bible had been reduced.

What did he say?