January 12, 2025 AM Service

Well, good morning, my name is Dustin Whitmer. This is a new kind of microphone for me. So we're all in an adventure together here with that. If he has any advice or if anybody has advice about how to make it sound better, let me know.

Otherwise, I'll just crank through. I'll introduce myself since you're seated. I'll just stay seated here for a few minutes. So I serve as a lay elder at Grace Bible Church in Percival, which is in Western Loudoun County.

Just because I'm a Northern Virginia person, don't judge me too harshly. I did grow up in Pennsylvania dairy country. That is my background. So it's wonderful to be here this morning. And I just thank you for your hospitality and your warmth.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we are thankful that indeed you are a firm foundation. As the hymn testifies, the fiends of hell endeavor to shake your church, to twist our minds, to corrupt our morals, to mislead us.

But your word is truth. Your spirit was promised to us to guide us into truth. And we thank you that we do not need to wander aimlessly about. But we know that you have given us your truth and your spirit.

We thank you for the immeasurable blessing of forgiveness in Christ. Something we could never accomplish on our own. Lord, we pray for those in need this morning. I think of those suffering from the fires out in California, even some from Grace Community Church there having lost their home.

I pray that you would bless the firefighters' efforts to contain that and to preserve life. I pray that the gospel would go forth even in the needy situations. I pray that the renovation that this church is doing would go smoothly and go well, and you would provide for them in each situation.

And thank you for those that are laboring and pray that it would go smoothly. Lord, I pray for the children here, those whom Christ showed a special love for and never refused. I pray that you would work in their hearts, draw them to yourself, and as they grow, that they would be mighty in service for you.

We thank you for them. And whether our children are very young or grown up and on their own and have kids of their own, they are near our hearts, and we desire their salvation and their prosperity. And Lord, now for this time, I pray that you would give me the words to accurately represent what your word says.

And may the distractions of a different environment not get in the way, or may nothing about me impede the going forth of your truth. It is more important than anything I think. We thank you and praise you for these things.

In Christ's name, amen. Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 55. In a minute, I'll have you stand as we read it. Isaiah 55, I'm gonna make just a note or two of matter of introduction. Not Isaiah 53.

I know you were just there, so probably you're already kind of used to that spot in your Bible. Isaiah 55, you'll notice that it's poetry, it's Hebrew poetry. We think of like the Psalms and Proverbs as poetry, but there are more parts of the Bible that are poetry, and a lot of the prophets actually are poetry.

And one of the things that is common in Hebrew poetry is a kind of parallelism. So two lines, or a bi-colon to be somewhat technical, two lines back to back that either say the same thing, but in different ways, or maybe are antithetical, or say the opposite in some way.

So something that would be a parallel, but antithetical would be, trying to think of the exact wording of the verse I recently memorized, that basically the integrity of the upright guides him, but the treacherousness of the crooked will destroy him.

Right, those are saying two opposite things. You know, if you have integrity, it'll guide you, and if you're crooked or treacherous, it'll destroy you. What you see a lot here in Isaiah 55 is a lot of what we call synonymous parallelisms, or a synonym.

So you'll see here a lot of back-to-back lines that go together and say the same thing in just slightly different ways. Verse three, incline your ear and come to me. Listen and your soul may live. Those are saying kind of the same thing in two different ways.

So you're gonna see that a lot here in Isaiah 55. That'll be our reading this morning and the passage I preach from. If you're able to, I'd invite you to stand with me as I read through it. I love the heading here, the free offer of mercy.

Oh, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy?

Listen carefully to me and eat what is good and delight your soul in richness. Incline your ear and come to me. Listen that your soul may live and I will cut an everlasting covenant with you according to the faithful loving kindness of David.

Behold, I have given him as a witness to the peoples, a ruler and commander for the peoples. Behold, you will call a nation you do not know and a nation which knows you not will run to you because of Yahweh your God, even the Holy One of Israel for he has adorned you with beautiful glory.

Seek Yahweh while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh. And he will have compassion on him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, declares Yahweh. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bare and sprout and giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so will my word be which goes forth from my mouth.

It will not return to me empty without accomplishing what pleases me and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it. For you will go out with gladness and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

Instead of the thornbush, the cypress will come up and instead of the nettle, the myrtle will come up and it will be to Yahweh for his renown for an everlasting sign which will not be cut off. Thank you, you may be seated.

So we're here in the new year. We just had on Friday what I have recently found out thanks to an Apple commercial trying to sell watches is called Quitter's Day, which is the day of the year that most people supposedly quit their new year's resolutions.

We love new year's resolutions. This is gonna be the year that I stop eating candy bars or I'm gonna start doing this or I'm gonna read my Bible more. They're often good. Some people, I met somebody a few weeks ago says that they had never made a new year's resolution in their life.

I say, I don't make resolutions, I make goals. I'm goal oriented. We have this sense that we should be constantly improving and we know we're not perfect, we should improve. Hey, it's a new year. Maybe if it's around your birthday, my birthday's in the summer so it's a great time to give it a try again.

This passage in a sense is calling on you to make a resolution, certainly to make a change. God is inviting you to come to him. He is commanding you to trust him and he is promising to bless you. These first couple verses here in Isaiah 55 point out the human need.

You're thirsty and hungry. It's a metaphor for a desire for satisfaction, for peace, to be worry-free, for safety. The human condition is certainly characterized by deep longing. Can see it all over the news and the internet and at schools, people always desiring, unsatisfied, clamoring for more, if I can just get something more.

Advertisers love it. I already mentioned one kind of advertisement. You know, look at how they sell soda to you. You know, you're bored, you're dissatisfied, but hey, people drinking Sprite aren't so you should buy Sprite.

You know, and when you put it out in words like that, you're like, boy, that is silly. But that is what they are trying to do. Our former pastor at our church worked in marketing for a while and kind of give us some insights to those kind of secrets.

Within you by yourself, you do not have what you need for permanent, complete satisfaction. And you think that maybe love or money or political victories or better behaved kids or something will do it.

So you put your effort into those things and then as they do in this world, they disappoint or break or something goes wrong. We just had Christmas. Maybe if you're younger, you thought a certain present would make you happy.

If you're older, maybe you thought that continuing those longstanding traditions or seeing that loved one that you haven't seen all year or didn't get to see last Christmas would be the thing. And most of the things I'm talking about aren't bad in and of themselves, but they will not be permanently satisfying.

It is as the passage would say, spending money for what is not bread and spending wages for what does not satisfy. But God here testifies that he has all you need and he is just giving it away. That is in essence, God's grace.

He has what you need and he's just giving it away. I don't know if you've ever been through like a drive-thru where somebody paid for it in front of you. I remember like a couple of days before my wife and I got married, I went through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru and the person in front of me paid for it.

And now without paying, I had this delicious Chick-fil-A meal. I had some that would satisfy the human metaphor level, of course. The beginning of verse three provides a nice summary of the invitation.

Incline your ear and come to me. Listen that your soul may live. God wants you to be inclined to what he says throughout the scripture, paying attention to what God says is one of the primary things he's asking for.

You can't be obedient to the Lord without knowing what he says, without being attentive. I mean, his actual words are important to him. He did not choose them carelessly the way we often do. And he wants you to listen to him and says that if you do, you will truly live.

Well, the next couple of verses here, the second half of verse three through verse five, I think are maybe the kind of verses where we often don't fully understand real well. It's easy to kind of bypass them.

If you're anything like me, start out the day trying to read a little bit from God's word. Read a chapter like this. And it's like verse three, incline your ear, come to me, listen to your soul may live.

Okay, I got it. And I can kind of glaze through a little bit the rest. If I don't get all of it, that's fine. But when we're preaching through a chapter this morning, we're not gonna just hop over and hop over the tougher sections.

So he is making, it appears, some pretty bold promises. He says, I will cut an everlasting covenant with you. The Hebrew verb for making a covenant is the same verb for cutting. So the translations here is trying to be as literal as possible and says cut a covenant.

That's what if you were reading in Hebrew, that's what it would say. It's cut a covenant. A lot of times translations just say, I make a covenant, which is fine, but it is giving you a good flavor here of the Hebrew.

And he's mentioning David. What's going on? What is God promising? Well, specifically God in these verses is promising to fulfill the Davidic covenant, which is a big thing. In 2 Samuel 7, verses eight through 16, God promised that in David's line, God would give his people permanent peace and flourishing through a perfect king who would shepherd God's people.

And David here, this witness, this ruler, this commander, David is not only in a sense the king, he is also a mediator of this covenant, of these promises. He is the one between God and us, not in the sense of like he's interceding for us or something, but we have this amazing promise through God's giving it to David.

Now, if you've read your Bible very much, I'm sure you're well aware that no earthly king ever satisfied this. Lately, I've been reading through 1 and 2 Kings after breakfast with my boys, and it is just like, this king did what was displeasing to God.

This king did what was pleasing, but not totally, not like totally like David. And we know David wasn't perfect. In fact, sometimes I'll just ask him, what do you think? I just name a king, like, what do you think?

This one gonna be good or bad? We know that no king was able to perfectly fulfill those promises that God gave David. And that is why we see in the book of Isaiah, so many messianic promises. Some of those verses that we love to quote at Christmastime come from the book of Isaiah.

Those messianic promises show that God's own son is gonna have to be the fulfillment of his sure love. The New Testament shows that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfillment of those promises to David. And we see that through his earthly life and ministry, we start to see that messianic identification is revealed.

In Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension, his reign has begun. And the book of Revelation reveals that at the consummation of those promises will come in the events that close human history and in eternity.

And God will reign at that point without an intermediary. You can say immediate, that is without a mediator. As believers, we look to Christ as our true king, but there will come a time where every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.

And nobody will be able to ignore it. Everybody will see it. And we look forward to that glorious day. So these promises to David have started to be fulfilled. And yes, there is a yet more glorious fulfillment, but we can already see God's faithfulness in this one of the biggest promises in the Bible.

So there is encouragement there. If on this side of the cross, we can see how God has started to fulfill those promises in Jesus Christ, we can know that God is a God who keeps his promises. And when he promises something to his people, he is faithful to fulfill it.

Now, verse five, sometimes with pronouns, we're not sure, wait, what refers to me? What doesn't? So hopefully I can take a second here and get this clear in our minds. You, Mount Zion Community Church, you are not the second person pronoun you here.

When Isaiah says, you will call a nation, he is talking to his audience, the Israelites. You New Testament Christian are the nation which knows you not, the middle there, that runs to God because of them.

We are the nation that did not previously know God. Paul makes this clear in a couple different passages. I'll read from Ephesians 2, verses 11 to 13. Therefore, remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, which is probably a good way to summarize us, who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision, which is performed in the flesh by human hands, remember that you were at that time without Christ, alienated from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now, thankfully, in Christ Jesus, you who formerly were far off been brought near by the blood of Christ. That is a great description for all of us. Formerly, in our natural state, we did not know Christ.

If you were outside the Jewish nation, like at the time Isaiah was writing, you were an alien to the promises and to the covenants and had no hope, but we were brought near by the blood of Christ. And he says to end that, verse five, for he has adorned you with beautiful glory.

And I think of another passage I'll read in Romans 11. But if some of the branches were broken off and you being a wild olive were grafted in, so he's using an analogy there. I'm not much of a horticulturalist.

I tried to plant a couple of fruit trees, they died. But I get the analogy here. Some branches were broken off and the Gentiles, that wild olive were grafted in among them and became a partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree.

Do not boast against the branches, but if you boast against them, remember it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You should not be arrogant that you have accepted the Messiah and many Jews at least have not, but rather be thankful that what God did through the Israelite nation that we read about all through the Old Testament is what brought about the Messiah and made the salvation possible.

And we can see again from our vantage point, God's faithfulness to his promise and it can give you hope that God is faithful to all of his promises. And so knowing that and seeing that invitation in those first five verses, in verses six through nine, God is commanding you to trust him.

First, the first part of that is your true repentance. Seek Yahweh while he may be found. Can synonymous with that, call upon him while he is near. He is compassionately giving you a chance to seek him.

That while he may be found adds urgency. Think about the original audience, the original audience that Isaiah was a prophet to. Can they still call upon God? Of course not, that's 2 ,700 years later. They've all been passed away for at least probably 2 ,600 years.

Death ends every man's chance of turning to the Lord. And beyond that, much of Isaiah's prophecies are about a future judgment that the nation would experience if they did not turn from their idolatrous practices, something that unfortunately we know did happen because they were not faithful to God.

Warnings themselves are a form of mercy. So I'm a little bit of a World War II buff, so it's not uncommon for me to use illustrations from history. So at the end of World War II, in case you're not a history buff, you know, we were the biggest, the main enemies were Germany and Japan.

We defeated Germany along with our allies and we still had to fight Japan and it looked like it was gonna be a long, hard road. I once read that it took the US Army at least 50 years to work through all the Purple Hearts that they had minted in preparation for the invasion of the islands of Japan.

I don't know if they're still using them or not, but it was just the expectation of hundreds of thousands of casualties on our end and probably millions of casualties on the Japanese end. And then we tested the nuclear bomb.

Looked like maybe we can have an alternative. And President Harry Truman gave Japan a warning, a call to surrender, a warning of, quote, prompt and utter destruction if they did not surrender. Unfortunately, that warning was not heeded, but thankfully, the war did not last longer than the dropping of the atomic weapons.

It is foolish to ignore warnings. You might be receiving warnings from your boss or from your parents or even from the pastor. And the Holy Spirit is likely, if you're in sin, warning you through your conscience.

All of these are, might seem annoying, but they are in fact merciful. You can call upon the Lord now and turn away from your sin before disaster unfolds, before it costs you your career or your family or your health or hurts the church.

More poignantly, repent before it's too late and it costs you your soul. And the second aspect of this is God's true wisdom. If his command, he wants you to trust him, he wants you to repent, and he's gonna show you that he has true wisdom in verses eight and nine.

These are probably the most famous verses in the chapter. And one of the more famous passages, actually, in a book that already has a lot of quotable sections amongst the prophets. My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.

Declares Yahweh, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. And the idea there is straightforward enough. God's omniscience, that is his all knowingness and his holiness means that he has plans for you that you could never understand.

And you can't even really imagine ahead of time. And I think, I bet for many of you who have walked with the Lord for a long time, you can look back in your own life and see that, that he has done that.

He is both infinitely greater in knowledge and greater, thankfully, in love than you realize. But this is not just a general truth, but applicational to your own life. Job 23, 13 to 14, and this is a quote by Job.

Job's friends, God had some words for them. So I wanna be careful about quoting Job's friends, but God said that Job said correct things about him. Job, referring to the Lord says, but he is unique and who can turn him, that is who can, if he's gonna do something, who can stop him?

And what his soul desires that he does. And then I love verse 14, for he performs what is apportioned for me and many such decrees are with him. God, those plans God has are not just general, they are personal and specific for you.

And that is why it's important that we find him trustworthy. You think about a general, a soldier, I'm sure some of you served in the armed forces and it's big in the armed forces, obeying orders. You don't get to ask a lot of questions all the time.

You gotta trust that the people giving orders, especially in times of war, going back to our nation's founding, George Washington was very much trusted by his men.

They probably had no idea,.

Why are we getting in these boats on Christmas and going across an icy river?

It worked out.

He wasn't perfect, but he proved himself trustworthy. From the scriptures, think about the life of Joseph. My family attended a family, like a Christian family camp about a year and a half ago. And the speaker there, one of his quotes that I'll remember, in fact, somebody painted it on a stone and now we have it like in front of our walkway.

And it says, never forsake the God who has never forsaken you. When Joseph was sold off by his brothers, do you think he felt forsaken by God? I bet he, I mean, he certainly would have been tempted to.

I mean, would you think that if you were sold off into slavery? When Joseph was tempted by Potiphar's wife, did he act like a man who had been forsaken by God? No, he acted with character, believing God was there.

This is something I read in a devotional a week or a couple of weeks ago that really struck with me. Think about the morning Joseph woke up in the dungeon, the last morning. Like he is gonna go to bed that night, second in command in one of the most powerful nations in the world.

He wakes up that morning in a dungeon. It would have been tempting then to think, God's forsaken me, given up on me.

I've been here.

I don't know how long he had been in Egypt, a decade, I think at that point. Whatever situation you're in now, don't forsake the God who has never forsaken you. And then in the final section, God is promising to bless you.

This does not mean that for a believer, everything's gonna be easy all the time. But the wisdom literature of the Bible is full of counsel about how family, work, finances, community are blessed when they're done God's way.

God has proven himself trustworthy and now he wants you to expect his blessing. The analogy or the metaphor he uses here in verses in 10 and then brings it back to himself in verse 11 is of the connection between rain and crop growth.

Now, for ancient Israel, as for some societies still today, but really almost every society up until the last one or 200 years, if you didn't get rain, you didn't eat. I mean, I grew up in my extended family was farming.

So I was grown up, taught to be thankful for the rain. Thankfully today, even a dry year, like we've had in Virginia the last couple of years, grocery stores are still full. But for them, the difference between rain and no rain or snow in the mountains that came down in the rivers was the difference between life and death.

But if you got rain, you were gonna get food. They didn't understand all the science maybe that biologists and all they understand today, but they knew if it rained, you're gonna be okay with crops. And God wants you to make that connection with his word.

That the connection between his word going forth and your forgiveness, restoration, fruitfulness is as sure as the connection between rain and crop growth. God does have unknowable ways to be sure, but he has specifically revealed his plan to redeem you and calls upon you to claim this salvation like a famished person looking for bread and milk for nothing.

I think that's why Christians need to stand fast on the doctrine of the sufficiency of God's word. The satisfaction that you seek, the wisdom that you need won't come from worldly philosophies or self-help books.

They come from the word of God. Psalm 119 .50 says, this is my comfort and my affliction. You ever want that? You ever feel afflicted and you want some comfort? Psalmist says, this is my comfort and my affliction.

That your word has revived me. The biblical authors are not ignorant of suffering, of loneliness, of guilt, of worry. They feel all those things very deeply, especially in the Psalms. But the answer to them is God and his word.

They weren't like missing some secret thing that modern wisdom has revealed to us. You might be tempted to think, well, I don't know if God's really forgiven me. I asked, I don't know if he's forgiven me or I'm in this tough situation.

I don't know if God can do anything about it. And look, we're all human. We're weak, we're attacked. It's understandable that you might feel that way, but it's not correct. You can believe those kinds of thoughts or you can believe what God says in his word, but you can't do both.

I think of an illustration from my kids, especially the youngest. We left the two-year-old with grandma today. He'll get a good nap. We got some remote control toys. My boys who are here, they love remote control toys.

The two-year-old doesn't quite understand, right? He has, I mean, I am finite in my knowledge. I am limited and my kids know a little less than me. Sorry, guys. And the two-year-old, I mean, he is just discovering the world.

So like this remote control truck or this, there's like a gecko or a lizard that's remote control and it can go up walls. Like he is completely mystified, which means he's scared. His brothers, in an effort to be nice, will actually let him hold the remote and he'll touch a button and the thing will go and he'll still get scared.

Like you're touching the button. Yeah, and we're all familiar with kids. Like I'm scared, it's dark. Maybe there's a noise in the closet. And we, as parents, we're like, oh, that's nothing. Go back to sleep so I can go back to sleep.

This is how, you think about, so think about how it looks for the parent to the child. That's how our problems look to God. He is not angry with us for how we feel about those problems. He is sympathetic.

He wants to be there for us. He wants us to call upon him, but he holds the whole world in his hand, as that kid's song says. And he already sees you enjoying eternity with him in heaven as sure as if it's already happening.

And his ultimate plans for you are about as likely to be overturned by your boss or the news from the doctor or whatever a politician decides, as like my two-year-old is of being eaten by a remote control lizard.

God has unimaginable joy in his plans. Verse 12, it's poetic. Uses that poetic imagery of mountains and hills breaking forth into shouts of joys and trees clapping their hands. This is the joy. This is descriptive of the joy of a restored relationship, of a clear conscience, of trusting in the Lord and living life at the center of his will.

Where there was once thorns and briars or bitterness or greed or addiction, now there is joy and wholeness and love. Let's go back to the context of this chapter. Isaiah 55 is in a section. It actually closes out a section in Isaiah of hope, of joy.

If you're reading through the book of Isaiah, the first half of it, you're gonna get a lot of like, turn back from your sin and not just like calls and judgments upon Judah and Israel, but even upon like other countries, Egypt and Babylon, a lot of judgment, a lot of calls to repent.

But as you get in the latter portions of the book, there is hope that, hey, even though sin will be judged, even though the nation of Israel and specifically the tribes of Judah would go into Babylonian captivity, there would be a restoration.

There would be a hope. All those promises, like the promises given to David about the Messiah would not be forgotten. There's a great hope for fulfillment. It'll be found in the servant himself, that suffering servant of Isaiah 53.

And every promise of God would be fulfilled. And that's the hope that Isaiah wants to give people. Israel's return from exile or the return of your health or children or career or whatever is well within the abilities of God.

But without the hope of salvation, those are just temporary things and incomplete. The great hope is the total restoration of creation really, which is enjoyed by God's people for all eternity. That is the fulfillment of that covenant referenced in verse three.

I think it would be helpful here to reflect on the parable of the prodigal son, which of course, so the prodigal son, foolish, didn't wanna have anything to do with more with his father, took his wealth, he squandered it.

And his return, which is a picture of a sinner repenting and turning from their ways, what happened when he did that? He was welcomed back without condition, with great joy. There was a lasting temporal consequence.

He didn't get a second inheritance. It all went to the other son. He did not get a second inheritance, but that didn't matter to him. He was home and he was safe and he was loved. Likewise, God may or may not choose to restore any earthly losses your sin cost you.

He may choose to even remove deserved consequences or he may not. But when you turn from your sin and turn to him, you will be safe, you'll be home and you'll be loved.

Amen.

There's a word for this that we use in modern English. I think this is really descriptive of revival. Revival isn't just like a long service. Revival is when people turn from their sin and find joy in the Lord.

Whether it's a wandering Christian or somebody coming to the Lord for the first time and being born again, that is revival. That is not something that any human can do on their own. That takes the Lord.

I mean, he sent his son. We could not have paid the penalty for our sins on our own. He had to do that. I think this is really descriptive of revival. We say, if we want revival, I don't know about you, I pray for revival in our country or in our world frequently.

And I think this is a good picture of it here. Well, the last little section there of verse 13, I think make a fitting conclusion. The result of all this is glory to God. It says, it will be to Yahweh for his renown.

This suffering servant, the suffering servant from Isaiah 52 and 53, who redeems you and forgives you and brings you home, he will be highly exalted and have a name bestowed on him that is above every name.

As Philippians says, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. This description here in verses 12 and 13 is the glorious future that God has planned for his people. He is calling you to be part of it.

And you don't need to do anything or bring anything or pay him anything. You just need to leave your sin behind and feast on his grace. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Lord, thank you for your promises.

Thank you that you do not leave us in despair, but in the fullness of time, you sent your son to be the substitution for us to pay the penalty that we deserved. And now by trusting in him, we can have free and full forgiveness.

Even those of us who have known you for many years, help us to feast on your grace and not be distracted by the things of this world. I pray this in Christ's name, amen.

Thank you.