Intown Community Church Sermons
Waiting for Comfort and Strength
It's great to be here today. I brought a friend, figured I'm going to need that before the morning is over. Yeah, it's good to be here. My name is Lionel Messi. Not really. I spent some time in the hospital last week and got asked a lot of questions. Was this your first stroke? I thought so. The MRI says apparently not. Thank you. Thanks, Luke. Always looking out for me. You know it's going to be a good day when Luke brings out the accordion. Do you know you have low blood pressure? Yeah, I've always known that. And here from my dad, do you know that you have a very low heart rate? Yes, know that. Do you know that you look like Lionel Messi? Nope, never heard that before. Well, when Alex Fernandez hears that someone said that about you, you wind up with a jersey two days later. And so in honor of Messi, I'm going with the scruff look today. Because I've never seen a picture of him clean shaven. And so this is like your invitation to come join us for our picnic after worship today. It's very good to be here today. It's a sobering thing to walk out of the hospital. On your own two feet and realize that nobody else on the floor you were on can walk. It's good to be here. You're going to hear in just a few minutes as Tom reads for us from Isaiah 40. Words that land in a totally different way for me now than they would have two weeks ago. Words about comfort. And the promise that God gives strength to those who are weak. Returning a corner in our study of Isaiah this summer. Chapter 40 starts to ask the question, where do you find strength? Where do you find strength to live in this world when you know that the worst is coming? You've survived one threat, but the worst is yet to come. Isaiah was writing to God's people who lived in and around Jerusalem the kingdom of Judah. Judah and Benjamin were kind of a separate nation at this point in the history of God's people. Ten northern tribes were called Israel. They had been taken into exile by Assyria. Judah has survived that threat. Congratulations. Good news. You made it. But Isaiah now had to say to Judah, the worst is still coming. Over the next hundred years our nation will decline. Over the next hundred years our leaders will become more and more corrupt. The prophets, the priests, the kings. We'll see some people turning back to God in faithfulness. Some people recovering from the worship of power and money and self. But on the whole we're going to mostly see compromise. Just whatever it takes to survive as a nation. And eventually the Babylonian Empire will come and destroy Jerusalem and slave our people and take us into exile for 70 years for three generations. Here's Isaiah saying, "Your great grandchildren will still be slaves in a foreign land." The worst is yet to come. We will be living in circumstances designed to crush our spirit. And every day we'll hear the message. You want to make it in this new world and you better forget your God and everything he stands for because he is weak and you are weak. Where will weak people find strength to live in a world where we know that the worst is coming? The prophet Isaiah begins to answer that question in chapter 40. And what is known as the book of consolation, the book of comfort. You'll hear why in just a minute. Tom, we come read for us. Thank you. Today's scripture is from Isaiah chapter 40 verses 1 through 5 and 25 through 31. "Comfort, comfort my people," says your God, "speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she as we see from the Lord's hand double for all her sins." A voice of one calling, "In the desert prepare the way for the Lord, make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God, every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low, the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it for the mouth of the Lord. To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal?" says the Holy One. "Left up your eyes and look at the heavens, who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing." Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the Lord. My cause is disregarded by my God." Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the ever-lasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired and weary, and is understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary. He increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar like wings on eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint. This is the word of the Lord. Well, I've been thinking a lot this week about what it means to be weak. What it means to need someone else to give you strength for about 20 minutes. On a Wednesday night, my body was kind of at war with itself. And part of my body said, "There's a blood clot here that shouldn't be here, so let's get rid of that. Let's send it on up toward the heart." And then my heart says, "Shouldn't be here. Let's send it somewhere else." And then the heart says, "For the first time in 54 years, let's send it through this tiny hole that's not supposed to be here." Over to the other side of the heart, where it can go straight into the brain. And so my whole left side of my body is paralyzed. I can't talk. I start choking while I'm brushing my teeth because I can't swallow. That's when I knew something was wrong. And then my brain starts swirling. One of the worst parts of the whole experience was that while my body was so weak, I could understand perfectly everything was happening. I could understand the way Tricia is responding. I must be having a stroke. I could understand I'm not supposed to be having a stroke. I'm pretty healthy. I could understand sometimes when this happens, you don't recover. Sometimes when this happens, you die. I could understand the fear of not wanting Tricia to be alone, not wanting our kids to be alone. So I'm lying in the bed so I wouldn't fall down. Tricia is a great nurse, by the way. A great friend. There's nobody else I'd rather have walking with me in those moments than her. So I'm lying in the bed, praying. Can't say anything out loud. At least nothing comprehensible. And I'm thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts. One thought is what if I can't talk again? What if I forget how to read? What if I can't speak English ever again? And then the worst. What if I can remember English, but I forget Greek? So in my head, I'm singing my way through the Greek alphabet. Okay, great. My mind's still working. What about Hebrew? Go through the alphabet. I'm not saying I was having rational or sane thoughts. Just, you know, this sort of sense of, this is the weakest I've ever felt or been. And in that kind of moment, when you're weak, you've got three options. One is give up. The other is to kind of lash out in desperation. Just accept your weakness and give up or try to prove that you aren't weak. Lashing out. And the third option is to wait. Wait for somebody stronger than you to help you. This is where Isaiah takes the people who are trying to figure out how to live in a world where things are just going to get worse. We're following God won't make any sense, and yet it's their only hope. Where every circumstance is designed to crush their trust in him, and yet he is the only way forward. Every human being is weak. And so the Bible uses the theme of literal exile when a foreign nation conquers you and slaves you and takes you out of your home country and plants you somewhere else on the face of the planet. Exile. The Bible uses that reality as a metaphor for the fact that all of us are in exile. That all of us are alienated from everything. We're alienated from the way things are supposed to be. We're supposed to be in relationship with a God who is our father, and we become strangers toward him. We're alienated from each other, alienated from ourselves, our own minds are at war within themselves. And one day death will exile our souls from our bodies. All of us are weak. What does it look like to wait on the strength of God when we are in this situation of weakness? So studying with my friends Isaiah the prophet and Tim Keller the pastor. Three options when you're weak. Three things that waiting could look like. Waiting could look like this. Resemble the world around us. Sacrifice your identity as a child of God in order to maintain your place in this world, in your culture, just sacrifice the one in order to secure the other. It's a posture where you just express weakness in order to gain strength. In order to gain strength within the systems around us, we just give up, go along, resemble whatever's happening around us. This is certainly what the Babylonian Empire hoped would happen when they took Isaiah's contemporaries into exile. The people to whom Isaiah was writing. The Babylonians hoped that people from Judah and Jerusalem would just give up. Just blend in. Just go along and get along. Second option is to reject the world around us. Okay, I'm going to sacrifice my place in the culture by maintaining my identity as one of God's people. I'm in a posture of weakness. I'm surrounded by this hostile world. And so I'm going to demonstrate strength in order to compensate. I'm going to fight. I'm going to resist. I'm going to reject the world around me. It'll cut me off from my neighbors, most of them. Anybody who doesn't worship my God, I won't have anything in common with them, won't have anything to do with them, but I will maintain who I am as one of God's people. This is that lash out option. If you resemble the world around us, waiting could look like that. Waiting could look like rejecting the world around us. But what God is actually calling us to, what becomes clear throughout the prophets, not only Isaiah but others. God is calling us to restore the world around us. Waiting looks like this. Waiting looks like seeking the good of the culture in which God has placed us. By maintaining our identity as people who are loved by God. You see, the first two responses have to do with human strength. The world is stronger than me, so I'll just give in and go along, resemble. The world looks strong, so I'll be strong too. And my rejection of the world will be stronger than its pressure on me, but it's still about human strength. I will show that I'm strong. I'll show that my God is strong. This third approach is not about human strength at all. This third approach is about God's strength. We are loved by God who shares his strength with people who are weak. And that's the way we're called to live in this world. And I want you to remember that every time you walk into this room and see that piece of artwork. This is our church's logo. When you see it in print, you see different colors most of the time, but here it is in wood. And you'll see this concept of at the center is across. I hope you can see it. At the center of everything we are and everything we do is this God who comes to us in weakness to share his strength with us. Jesus steps into our world, he draws people to himself and he unites us to become a family. You see the circle around the whole thing on the outside? Kind of expressing this sense of unity. When you see it in print, you see all these different colors inside the circle. Jesus is drawing all kinds of people to himself from all over the world and uniting us together. You see all this reflected on the outside wall there. We're changed by grace, the cross at the center. The grace that God gives us through His Son, Jesus transforms us. We are known in community. We are united into this family. And then you see these arrows and rays pointing out from the center. There are little holes there shaped like arrows and then there are these eight points emanating out from the center. We are sent to restore. We are not sent to resemble the world around us. We are not sent out into the world in order to reject the world. We are sent to restore. We are sent to do in this world what God has done in this world through His Son, Jesus. He has brought His strength to those who are weakest in order to set right everything that's wrong. And that's who we are. Those are three ways that waiting could look. We could find ourselves in this posture of weakness and decide to wait by resembling the world around us and just kind of give in and go along. We could decide to fight while we wait, reject the world around us, show that we are stronger than it. Show that the us is stronger than the them. But what God calls us to is the kind of waiting that shows that we are loved by God who shares His strength with people who are weak. All right. Who is it we're waiting for? Strength will come when we know what is this God like, the God we're waiting for. Who is He and what is He like? And Isaiah gives us two pictures of that in this chapter. The first, he shows us a picture of a mighty king who speaks comfort. The imagery that you began to hear in verse three is that of a mighty king who has won his greatest battle and he is going to display his glory in triumph. And he announces that his royal presence should be prepared for. When the royal chariot rolls down the road, it doesn't want to hit potholes. So we're going to have this massive engineering project ahead of time to flatten out the road, to make it bigger and wider. He's in triumph and he's bringing in this massive people who are his servants celebrating him, honoring him. And so he sends the word out. Hey, out there in the desert, in the wilderness, in that desolate place, prepare the road for the Lord. Prepare the way of the Lord. Way can also be translated road. Make it straight. Make a highway for our God. Fill in the valleys. Bring the mountains down. Triumphant kings don't want to have to work hard to get up hills. They don't want the horses slowing down, pulling the chariot. Level the mountain tops down. Fill in the rough places because the glory of the Lord will be revealed. And all flesh will see it. The NIB translates all mankind when this verse is quoted in Luke's Gospel. It tends to use a more literal all flesh. The whole world is going to see God's glory. The glory of a king who does what? How does he show his glory? Number one, he shows his glory by comforting weak people. Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Hey, people. Spend a hundred years comforting one another because you know this moment of exile is coming. Hey, people, 70 years in Babylon. Comfort one another. The verbs here are all plural. Y'all comfort each other. Y'all speak tenderly to each other. That's the kind of God that I am. I know the reality of the pain that you are going through. I know what it means to hurt. I will know what it means to suffer pain when I enter your world as a human baby. The Son of God incarnate, born of the Virgin Mary. And I will suffer and I will feel pain. I will know what it is like to want someone to speak tenderly to me. And so I know what it is to speak tenderly to people who need comfort. I am a God who knows what real pain is like. And so I am a God who moves from a desolate place to a devastated place. You see the imagery? Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Cry out to her. Let her know that I want her to be comforted. Where is this king going? He is going to his people. His people here are represented. The metaphor of this city, Jerusalem. Speak tenderly to my people, to Jerusalem. Because I am going to start out here in the wilderness. This place where it is desolate and nothing can survive. I am going to make my way to a place even more devastated. Where is he headed? The Jerusalem that this mighty king is going toward in this picture. It is a Jerusalem that has been destroyed by the Babylonians. A Jerusalem that is empty because everybody has been enslaved and hauled away. A Jerusalem that is full of weeping, hurting remnants. A shell of a city. A shell of a people. A shell of a nation. A defeated people. A people who has become the laughingstock of the ancient world. Because hey, you said your God would protect you no matter what. And your God lost, and the Babylonian gods won. And our God says that is the kind of city I want to move toward to show my glory. He doesn't say make a highway going to Babylon because I want to show up where the winners are. Because that is the kind of God I am. I am the God whose ruthless who wins at all costs. He says make a highway for me. Start it in the middle of nowhere. And make it go to the most devastated place on the face of the planet. That is how I show my glory. He is a king who knows pain. He is a king who is tender toward brokenhearted people whose heartbreak came from their own direction of him. He is a king whose victory tour takes him to the place of defeat. It sounds like telling the story of Jesus, doesn't it? I will display my greatest strength, my most powerful victory in the place of defeat and weakness. How can we want to restore the world around us? How can we want to share our strength with people who are weak and needy? There is only one way you get strong enough to live like that. First you have to be loved like that. Loved by a mighty king who knows pain and who wants to comfort devastated people. There is a second picture that Isaiah paints for us toward the end of the chapter. Who are we waiting for? Where will the strength come from that we need? We are waiting for a mighty creator who shares strength. That is the picture of verse 25. God asks the question, who are you going to compare me to? And then he says, lift up your eyes on high and look at all the stars. Who created those? Who caused them by name? Who brings them out at night? Who has the power to do all of this? Not one of them is missing because of the greatness of the might of this God. This is just a mighty God who knows us. He knows our temptations. Verse 26 sounds like it is just saying, I created the stars and that means I have to be powerful. But in the ancient world, especially in Babylon, the stars were gods and goddesses. Here is God saying, I know you will be tempted to worship things that are not gods. I know you will be tempted to believe that your fate is dictated by cold powers that are distant from you. And you will be tempted to despair. I know what your temptations will feel like. Because I am planning to come into your world myself and endure those temptations too. He is a God who is mighty, who can make all the stars, but he knows our temptations. He knows our fear. Read verse 27. Why do you say, oh Jacob? Jacob becomes a name for God's people. One person standing in for the whole group. Why do you complain of Israel another name for Jacob the patriarch that comes to designate the whole of God's people? Why do you say my way is hidden from the Lord? My cause is disregarded by my God. He knows us well enough to know what we are afraid of. We are afraid of being forgotten. We are afraid of being abandoned. We are afraid of being weak and needy and somebody says, I have all the power in the world to help you. But I just don't give a rat's backside about you. I could do it that I won't. I am not that into you. He knows our temptation, he knows our fear, and he knows our weakness. Verse 30. He goes right to the, hey, who are the people on this planet most likely to think they aren't weak? Ah, young people. Even young people will eventually get faint and grow weary. They will run out of steam at some point. Even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall. The word for young men there means young soldiers. These are the hand-picked strongest. The people who have been trained for battle. The people who are best equipped to survive when it's life and death. And here's God saying, yeah, they're stronger than everybody else. They've got, they're the Marine Corps. They're the few, the proud. They are the, but you know, eventually. When they meet an enemy strong enough, they will stumble and fall and you know what comes next. When soldiers fall, they die. He knows our weakness. He knows how weak we are. There's so much gray down here. I don't know what the real Lionel Messi is like. I want to hope as much gray as showing in his stubble. Vanity makes me want to hope that. The pictures I've seen, I don't think so. I've heard he dies his beard. I want to think I'm not that old, right? I'm 54. Put your hand up if you think 54 is pretty young. Now if you're putting your hand up, you're over 54, right? It's, we know how this works. Young is whatever, yep, I'd see you Marshall. Young is whatever's under me. I'm young, 54. I'm healthy. That's what all the tests said, except for the one looking for the hole in the heart. Okay, otherwise very healthy, cholesterol, low, heartbeat, 40 beats a minute, resting. Do you know that, do you know you have an athlete's heart? Yeah, well, okay. They look at Tricia and be like, does he, does he work out? Does he ever exercise? Tricia's like only if running six to 12 miles a day counts as exercise. That was one of the first thoughts I had when I'm having a stroke. This is not supposed to happen to me. This is supposed to happen to somebody else. We're all weak. Every one of us is weak. If we live long enough, our body will go to war against itself. We're weak. Tiny little microscopic thing in tiny little microscopic blood vessels. Can go through the wrong tiny little hole. And do incredible damage. We're all weak. But God still wants to be our God. Can you imagine having enough strength and power to make every star in the whole universe? How many stars are there? I'm going to leave you with that question. Because it depends on how many galaxies you think there are. And scientists are changing their minds about that. So roughly 100 billion stars in every galaxy. And then how many times you multiply that depends on whether you adopt the old, smaller number, smaller number for how many galaxies there are, the new, bigger number. But it just gets to a scale you can't imagine it, right? The small number is a one with 24 zeros after it. Imagine being strong enough to make all those stars and then saying, I care about people who are tempted to worship things that ought not to be worshiped. I love people who are too weak to survive past 80, 90, 100 years. I love people who are afraid that I love them in a weak way so that one day I will forget them and abandon them. I love people who are that weak to have all that strength and say, can I be your God anyway? Can I be your God? You can even call me my God when you're saying you think I've forgotten here. Do you know anybody who's that strong who loves that way? This is something utterly unique in the history of the world. A God who speaks and says of himself, I am stronger than anything you can ever imagine. And I love weak people. You see, this guy can't imagine having all the strength and not wanting to share it with people who are weak. He can't imagine getting all the likes and not wanting to share it with the people who are afraid they'll never be liked. He can't imagine being so full of love and not wanting to share it with people who think they're forgotten and abandoned. He can't imagine being able to comfort hurting people and staying away from their world. He can't imagine having resurrection life and not wanting to share it with all who will wait on him. One word of application and then I'll show you a picture. Okay, don't be afraid. I do have some pictures of the inside of my heart, but I've been told not to show them to people so I want. So I'm not going to, right? It's not that picture. Wait for God's voice of comfort. If you're living in this world, and especially if you're part of Gen Z. The voice you are best at listening to is a voice called pain. Your generation is being a little more honest about how bad it hurts to live in this world. That's one reason you're learning to listen to the voice of pain. But you're just practicing listening to that voice more than any other generation. And so kind of pain becomes your defining identity. God says, "Wait for my voice of comfort." The pain is real, but it's not the ultimate reality. Your pain does not define who you are. The stroke I had was on a Wednesday night at midnight, and this Wednesday night, as midnight was coming, I was just a mess. And Tricia and I were like, "We couldn't look at each other without crying. Am I going to have another stroke on Wednesday at midnight? Probably not. But man, going back to that moment a week later, it was hard. And I just had to stand in front of the mirror and remember, "Hey, you are not defined by that stroke." That is not the most important thing about you. Jesus has said he is the most important thing about you. Jesus has said you belong to him. That is not to find you. The pain is real, but it's not the ultimate reality in your life. And that's the only thing that's going to enable us to move outward toward other people when they're in pain. He can wait to hear God's voice of comfort, because he loves to come into a world full of weak people. This is a picture I took at a cathedral in Gloucester, England on a sabbatical a couple of years ago. And it's a fairly standard image, except for two details. It's an image of Adam and Eve being exiled and sent away from the Garden of Eden. Again, the exile theme runs throughout Scripture. Sometimes it's talking about Israel and Judah being exiled from a particular land and taken to another place. But earlier on in Genesis 3, the whole human race being exiled from the goodness God created us for, represented by the Garden of Eden. Here's Adam and Eve leaving the Garden. You see Adam's face buried in his hands, just full of shame. Interesting details about this picture. Who's sending them out of the Garden? When you read Genesis, it's an angel with a sword that's on fire, barring the way back to the Garden. But here is Jesus himself, the one against whom we have rebelled, the one we have forgotten, the one who sends us into exile. He's also going to come into our world one day to put out the angel's fiery sword and open the way back into his presence. How do we know that the artist is trying to depict that? Well, there's one other detail. You'll have to trust me. You may not be able to see it. Adam's burying his face in his hands. Eve is looking back and there's a halo around her head. There's not a halo around Adam's head. Why would there be a halo around Eve's head? The artist is wanting us to look forward and see. Eve is the mother of life. She is the foreshadowing, the forerunner of Mary. This God will come back into this world. He will endure all our weakness. He will be born as a human baby. He will submit himself to being a tiny baby inside Mary's womb, totally weak, completely dependent on someone else providing him with strength. We're all weak. We live in a world full of weak, hurting people who hear the voice of pain and devastation every day. Where do we find the strength to bring restoration into that world from the God who uses his strength? To raise up those who are weak. You have come into our weakness and our pain. You have made it holy because your feet walked on this path. Right now, whatever I'm going through, it is a privilege to share in the sufferings of Jesus. Not because suffering is good, but because you have walked here. When I got to that place in my prayer, that's when everything changed. I could begin to speak again. I could move my body. Again, the EMTs were confused. They were giving me tests and saying, "Looking at Trisha going, we thought you said he could talk." The doctor said that the results should have been much worse at that moment. God heard our prayers. I don't know why, but he enabled me to walk away from something that the doctor said was meant to be much worse. He gives power to the faint. To him who has no strength, he increases strength. This is the God we wait for. [BLANK_AUDIO]