Well, it's certainly good to see everybody who has made it this
morning here with us to worship. And if you would please open
your Bibles to Isaiah Chapter 9, Isaiah Chapter 9.
And Isaiah is a book filled with so many prophecies about Jesus
and God and, and, and so much description and, and of, of what
we can learn about. And what we're going to read in
in Isaiah 9 is just really just a couple verses and specifically
verse 6 and what it says there starting in verse 6 of Chapter 9
or yeah, verse 6 of Chapter 9, it says for unto us a child is
born unto us a son is given and under the and the government
will be upon his shoulder and his name will be called
wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of
Peace of the increase of his government, the P and peace.
There will be no end upon the throne of David and over his
Kingdom to order it and establish it with judgment and
justice from that time forward, even forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
A man by the name of Thomas Lie wrote this quote in the 17th
century and I wanted to he wrote it to kind of encourage the the
Christians that he was worshiping with and I want to do
the same. It says God often brings his
people into such a condition that they don't know what to do.
He does this so that they might know that he talking about God,
what God can do. God is with his people at all
times, but He is most sweetly with them in the worst of times.
God often brings His people into such a condition that they don't
know what to do. He does this so that they might
know what He can do. The context of what Isaiah is
writing about here in the previous verses in this chapter
is really not a good outlook. In the experience of Isaiah,
there was a vision, if you want to say that was kind of slowly
and softly creeping into his consciousness, allowing him to
see what others, of course, could not see because he was a
prophet of God, making it possible, possible for him to
speak into a Dark World concerning the light that he was
seeing. And I want us to recognize that
there has been this basically a kind of an illumination in
darkness and that illumination given away to liberation,
setting captives free, that the liberation gave away also to
celebration, a joy that was virtually unbound.
And that's all wrapped in the reality, of course, in the
incarnation of God, the wonder that is all of God, God's
answers to the dilemma then and now in this person, of course,
that it's talking about, which is Jesus the Son.
So I want to look at the activity of or or the, the the
names that we see here concerning Jesus of that child
that is mentioned here and can by conveyed by these four names.
And we may be familiar with these in a way in the
terminology. However, we may not have a
complete understanding of what there is to know here, of
course. So the first one that we come
across here is wonderful counselor, so wonderful
counselor. He's a counselor who is
wonderful or he is a counselor who is supernatural, or he is a
counselor who is unparalleled to any other counselor.
Earthly kings, earthly presidents, rulers of all
countries are all surrounded by advisors and councils that they
seek and go to. And they are honest to recognize
enough to recognize that the the task in front of them they of
course cannot do on their own. So they bring all these other
people in around them to help them and support them and give
them advice. And the great distinction
between those type of people and this individual is that he in
himself, of course, talking about Jesus is the embodiment of
wisdom. And if we look forward a couple
chapters in Isaiah 11, verse 2 will notice that they're
Speaking of the same individual, Isaiah says.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of
wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel in might, the
spirit of knowledge and fear and the fear of the Lord.
So in other words, what he's saying here is he is wonderful
because he defines wonder himself.
One of the difficult is difficulties that we have with
language sometimes is that it changes on us all the time.
And it often, you know, language is devalued by the way that we
use terms, for example, like the word awesome.
You know, if we use the word awesome, it's it's no longer
possessive of the distinctions that it would have had because
it's just used about everything. Like I could say, Jose, those
are awesome boots. Well, they may be nice boots,
but they're not awesome. So you see the word, the words
are devalued because we overuse them sometimes.
And in the same way, the word wonder or the word wonderful
here has a particular purpose in language.
And as an adjective is certainly in the Hebrew, it means that
which God requires. Excuse me, It means that God
which requires which got my tongue twisted here, hang on a
second. It means that which requires God
as an explanation, that which requires God as an explanation.
So that when we read the wonders in the Old Testament, the
wonders of, you know, the sea splitting in two so the
Israelites could walk across the dry ground to the other side of
the Red Sea, the walls of Jericho coming down, the wonder
of the people entering into the promised land, the wonder of the
deeds of Elijah and Elijah and so on, and the intervention of
God in those contexts, those are foundationally wonderful.
Those are something to wonder at when we see them and read them.
And This is why when we read in the Psalms, we find that this is
a recurring emphasis in Psalms 7811 through 13.
It speaks there how the Ephraimites forgot God's works
and they forgot the wonders that he had shown them in the sight
of their fathers. He had performed wonders in the
lands of Egypt, in the fields of Zohan.
And then it goes on to say he divided the sea and he did all
these things. And the problem for those people
was they had forgotten who God was and, and the wonderful
things that he does. And as a wonderful counselor,
God has a perfect plan. As mighty God, He has the power
to execute the plan. So Isaiah, when he writes and
continues in his prophecy, he eventually gets to Isaiah 40
verse 13, and I'm paraphrasing here.
He says who has understood the mind of the Lord or instructed
him that he should be his counselor?
And the answer of course is nobody.
The mystery of it all is that we discovered that the Lord Jesus
then embodies all of this and all this and, and more besides
that. Of course they found him, Luke
says, as a 12 year old boy in the middle in the temple sitting
among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions.
And then in Luke 2 verse 47 with, you know, Luke always has
an eye for detail, he says, and all who heard him were amazed at
his understanding and his answers.
They were amazed because he was a wonder.
He was a wonder like no other wonder has ever been seen or
ever will be seen. And now the the people in
Isaiah's day knew that they needed counsel.
The problem was they were going to the wrong people to get that
counsel. And we go back to if you go back
to Isaiah chapter 8, we can read that and discover that the the
oppression and darkness and the disruption in their lives in the
prospect of war that they were facing, in the reality of being
separated from family members and so on.
They know that they needed help and they know that they needed
answers on what they needed to do to move forward.
The problem is they that they went to what they call mediums.
You know, they Isaiah calls them out on it.
He says, should not a people inquire of their God?
Should they inquire on dead behalf of the living?
And people are going to ask the question, you know, in darkness
and the deadness and emptiness of things in the hope that they
may find kind of what the meaning of their life is when
they're down and out. If you want to say now, nothing
has really changed for us, you know, despite all the passage of
time, the streets of our towns and the cities of America are
filled with opportunities and signs for you to go and inquire
upon if you want to say and, and go to tarot card readers and and
people who who do those things. But of course we see that it
will only take us into deeper darkness if we do that.
The people know they need a counselor because so much of
contemporary life is marked by feelings of indecision and
anxiety. Some might be feeling
disappointed for the way that life is maybe turned out for
them. We thought it was going to be
very different the way it looks now.
You know, it wasn't, it's not all nice and pretty and roses
like we thought it was going to be.
Whatever that ceiling that we were looking for was hit, we hit
our ceiling, whether it was a glass ceiling or a wooden
ceiling or a concrete ceiling, we had set out and we thought
we'd have so much more by this point.
And as we grow older, we see that we have these little
retirements and they're just kind of wasting away all these
pots that we've built and save for ourselves, you know, made
sense of it all. And but at at now, they're
really not going to last forever.
How it's all kind of dwindling away.
Somebody may have to look after us when we're older because we
haven't life hasn't turned out the way that it we thought it
was. And it's just a dark, gloomy
future. Men and women know either
disappointed, you know, at what life has brought to us or, or
what, you know, we could be anxious about what it's going to
look like in the future. We know that we need a counselor
and people come and they may ask you, you know, do do you know
anybody I can talk to, you know, somebody I can talk to about a
counselor or. Yeah, I know somebody can talk
to a counselor. We can read the go to the
Gospels and read the red letters of Jesus every day.
He is our counselor. We get that kind of counsel from
him. We read about life and him.
We can have it in all all his fullness.
John 1010. We read about stuff,
materialism, and he'll point out to you that it's all absolutely
profitless exercise to try and gain the whole world and lose
your own soul. We can read about rest and
security, and we'll discover that He says it's found only in
Him, that if you take His yoke upon Him and rest in Him and
learn from Him, we will find rest for our souls.
All of this because He is a wonderful counselor.
Secondly, a mighty God. As a wonderful counselor, He has
a perfect plan. As a mighty God, He has the
power to execute the plan, and a plan in and of itself is no good
unless it's executed. We could have it all written
out, but if we don't do anything about it, it's of no value.
So he says here's my plan and who are you?
He says I am almighty God. He is the one, as we've seen,
who of course releases the captives from burden out.
It's on their shoulders because on his shoulder represents all
authority. His authority will never come to
an end until he hands it back over to God the Father.
Now again, we see when we take this and we, you know, what
we're seeing here in in Isaiah and we Fast forward to the New
Testament, we, we come to the Gospel records, Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John. We realized that these, what
these writers are doing is recording for us the life and
death and the resurrection of Jesus.
But we need to understand that it's not just history that
they're writing. It's it's, it is historical.
That's a fact. But they're not simply writing
biography, but it is a biography.
What they're doing here is they're writing a gospel.
They're writing the gospel of Jesus down.
They are presenting Jesus as they would have discovered him
and all the facts and realities of his personhood.
And they discovered him to be a mighty God.
And This is why we read the gospels.
We discover that he's walking on water, that he's healing the
sick. You know, he's doing all these
things that people just aren't understanding, all these
miracles. Maybe they think he's a, he's a,
you know, a magician of some sort.
But no, it's actually a declaration of His Majesty that
that he's showing to them. He's establishing the fact that
he is powerful over all forces of nature, that He is not only
the agent of creation. As John says in his John 13,
without him nothing was made. That he has been made, but he is
also Lord of creation. Have we ever thought about that?
Have we ever tried to maybe dismiss Jesus as just another
figure in history? You know, we can't do that.
We need to understand who He is. We think about it and there's a
logic to it. Who would we expect to feed the
5000 with five loaves of bread and two fish?
Only He who declared himself to be the bread of life, who would
you anticipate, could open the eyes of a bland blind man called
Bartimaeus, except he who said I am the light of the world, He
who follows me will never walk, walk in darkness.
Who else could stand at the grave of his friend Lazarus and
call him out of the tomb except he who said I am the
resurrection of life and the wonder of wonders, miracle of
miracles, that God has entered into creation, into our
circumstances. That the Creator assumes the
frailty of all creatures as a human enters into time and that
the immortal dies. That is a wonder all.
Because He is a mighty God, He's able to save to the uttermost
Hebrews 725 all who call upon God through him.
Next everlasting Father. So he has a plan, He has the
power to work it out. And then thirdly, He's
everlasting Father. So we move from His power to His
fraternity. Now this term everlasting Father
here in Isaiah does not refer to the Godhead as we know it.
It does not refer to the first person of, of God the Father of
God the Son and and God the Spirit.
Some people can read this and get confused.
Well, I thought the person was the first person was the Father
and the second person was the Son.
And how can the second person who is the Father, be son, be
the Father and so on. So it can be confusing, but
that's not what it's talking about here.
It's not a reference to the Godhead.
What it's saying here is that Jesus as a Messiah is like a
father to his people. He's like a father to his
people. There's an old hymn that says
praise my soul, the King of heaven.
And he goes on to save feather like he tends and spares us
well, our feeble frame He knows in his arms he gently bears us
and rescues us all from our foes.
And in other words, in having died so that we could be adopted
into God's family, He's not going to abandon us.
He's not going. He hasn't gone to the extent of
living a perfect life and enduring all the the pain and,
and suffering and, and, and friggins of sins and embracing
us and doing all these things in order to just leave us on our
own. That's not what Jesus did.
Everlasting is not a reference to his eternal being.
It is a reference to his never ending dimension of his care.
He's not an everlasting father because he comes from
everlasting and lives to everlasting.
But it is fatherly care that never comes to an end.
He never says, you know, as as parents we can say, you know,
get out of here, go outside and play.
Leave me alone for a little bit. Go do something else.
Jesus never does that. He's always there for us.
He is everlasting Father and when he says he for but we're
forgiven, we are forgiven completely.
And sometimes we have a hard time with that.
Sometimes we have a hard time believing that when we ask for
forgiveness of sins that we're forgiven of them.
Psalms 1O2 says he puts our sins out of his recollection.
He chooses not to remember. And that is a great picture.
That's a wonderful picture. You know, we ever look at the
the ocean or the sea and we, maybe it happened to me, but
I've lost my ring in the ocean, my wedding ring.
We were snorkeling M and I and, and Kylie and we were snorkeling
and we were in probably 12 foot deep of water.
And I don't know what happened, but my ring slipped off and I
saw it fall to the ocean floor. Now you try to find a ring on
the ocean floor that's not going to be very easy to find to fall.
But luckily I have a fish for a daughter who was able to see it
and she swam down and she was able to grab it.
Boy, I was lucky. Tom Morris, some who consider
maybe the father of golf in some ways in Saint Andrews in
Scotland, he was he was also capable of of designing golf
courses. He designed a golf course in
Ireland called Rosapenna. And on occasion that he was
designing that golf course, history reports that on a number
of occasions he went to a certain spot and on the grass
and he hit golf balls into one of the largest ponds or lakes
out there on that golf course. And as a result of that, it
became kind of a tradition or or a thing to do.
And year after year, people would go there and they would
sit, stand in the same spot that he stood in, and they would hit
these golf balls into this lake. And as they hit him, of course,
it became an opportunity for onlookers or fans to go and
dredge the bottom of that of that lake to find those old golf
balls hit by this guy and others.
Jack Nicholas done it. Gary Palmer has done it.
Rory McIlroy, They all did it. And they were all there looking.
All these people were looking for these golf balls because if
they could find these golf balls, of course they could sell
them for maybe a little bit of profit.
And they look, of course, in vain for the golf balls hit
there by old Tom Morris. They are buried forever.
That's the image, the way our sins are buried.
If we look, if we are in Christ, we we need not spend a
millisecond to go and dig and look for those old sins that
were forgiven of gone forever. He has buried them in the depths
of the sea. Jesus is the only one who is
able to mediate between our lostness and God's holiness.
You may ask me why I'm happy, so I'll tell you why.
Because my sins are gone. And when I look at the others
who asked me why they are gone, I say my sins are gone.
They're underneath the blood on the cross of Calvary, as far
removed as darkness is from dawn in the sea of God's
forgetfulness. That's good enough for me.
Praise God, my sins are gone. You know, maybe there's some
here who are absolutely trapped by guilt from.
Whatever happened in our life, you know, we may go to
counselors, they're able to help us in some manner with the
situations that we're in, but they'll not be able to free us
really from guilt. There's only one place that that
can be done. It can be found and it's at the
cross of Jesus Christ and his secured work, and it's conveyed
by the love of Christ. And all we need to do is tell
God about it, pray to God forgiveness of our sins.
And they are gone. They're gone the first time we
asked if we're sincere about it, we repent of those things.
We're not the last four digits of the Social Security number to
God. We're not worthless.
We're not molecules held in suspension.
He knows us and He loves us thoroughly from everlasting to
everlasting. The Lord's love is with those
who fear Him, a love that takes the initiative.
And He is so vastly different from us when He comes and joins
us, the strength, He's not just a stranger that we may run upon
or sit next to on a bus or a bench or anything.
He knows us because he's our friend and our Savior.
So when we think about him as a wonderful counselor with that
plan, it is absolutely perfect, mighty God with a power that may
execute that plan and His paternity as forever Father.
So we want to deal with our guilt and we deal with it right
here. That's where we deal with our
guilt act. We want to deal with our self
identity, we deal with it here. We want to deal with our
unfulfilled longings, we deal with it here.
And finally, he is Prince of Peace.
Every generation in history that has confronted strife in any way
looks and longs for peace, and we're no different.
It happens, All the advances in science and technology, despite
the increases of understanding of so much in our universe,
despite our interest in health and safety, we still live with a
little bit of frustration and alienation.
So what are we to do about that? John Lennon and McCartney and
Paul McCartney wrote this option number one, we can work it out.
We can work it out. Think of what I'm saying.
Do I have to keep on talking till we can't go on?
We can work it out. In other words, just life is
just a do it yourself project and particularly spiritual life
is your own project. And essentially the word that is
out there on the religious front today is all reinforced by these
self help books that we can pick up and read.
We listen to things on the radio as we drive and it's just the
same old story again. Look at yourself and see what
you can muster up in yourself to do.
You'll find God within you. He's in there somewhere.
If you just root around a while and find Him, and if we manage
to lay a hold of him, then he'll sort you out.
We can work it out. We don't need anybody from
Nazareth. We don't need a baby from
Bethlehem. We don't need a mighty God.
We don't need any of that. We can work it out.
That's what we see all the time from the world coming at us.
So we need to ask ourselves, how is that going?
How is that working for us? Let's go with a different song.
1965 Help. I need somebody help, not just
anybody. See, the one we need is the one
who has come to us, the one who is described for us.
Here is the second-half of verse 6A.
Peace that is found in him and him alone.
He's the only one who is able to mediate between our lostness and
God's holiness. He is the only one who is able
to take the place that we deserve to take because of our
mess that we have created. See, sin spoils things.
It spreads like a weed. It separates us from one another
and from God. And you know, we see in 2nd
Corinthians 519, God was in Christ reconciling the word to
himself. You know, as we the more we grow
in Christ, the more we understand Him and what God has
done for us. We what I kind of what I love
about it is it is it it helps me more spread or talk to some
people about it to have the courage to understand that where
we were before Christ, before we were baptized for the remissions
of worse our sins. When we understand where we were
at and where we're at now because we're a safe Christian
man. We got to get that news out.
We got to let people know about it.
It's not about fixing ourselves. Rather, it's a belief on what
God in Christ has achieved. All that Christ has done for us
and his coming and his living and his dying and his rising and
his descending, all that Christ has done for us is of no value.
As long as we remain outside of Christ, we don't do anything
with it. It's of no value to us.
In other words, a simple intellectual awareness of facts
do not in themselves transform us.
Just knowing it, just having the education does not bring about
change. You know, we have engineers, we
have architects here, those who write things down and and on
plans and drawings and everything.
Well, they are 0 value if those plans are not taken and they're
used to build something. That's the reality of it, and
this is what the truth that is conveyed here about the same
Jesus. It's in order that we might
accept what He has achieved. So back to our earlier quote,
God often brings His people to the place where we don't know
what to do so that we might discover what He can do or what
He has done. You see, without Jesus
possessing everything, we really have nothing.
And with Jesus possessing nothing, we have everything.
When we read our Bible and we start to understand it and start
to discover, you know, the the incurable sickness of the world
is not about economic incompetence or about economic
equality or anything like that. The incurable sickness of the
world, the Bible says, is about the fact that we have ignored
the maker's plan and we are in a simple state unless we are
reconciled to God, that is this incurable, that is the sickness
of the world. And as Isaiah looks forward here
in Isaiah 9 to the coming of the Savior, so we look forward to
the coming of Christ as triumphant king, as Lord.
And God's desire for His people is that we might be content in
His Son. Without Jesus possessing
everything, we really have nothing.
And with Jesus possessing nothing, we really have
everything. Philippians chapter 2, beginning
in verse 5. Let this mind be in you, which
is also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did
not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself
of no reputation. Taking the form of a bondservant
and becoming like the likeness of men, and being found in
appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to
the point of death, even the death of the cross.
Therefore God is all. God also has highly exalted him
and given Him the name which is above every name, and that at
the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those in heaven
and those on earth and those under the earth, and that every
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
To the glory of God the Father, every knee will bow.
So the question we need to ask ourselves, are we going to bow
the knee now? Are we going to bow the knee
later on when it's too late? Regardless, we're going to bow
our knee, our knee, and we're going to recognize Jesus as who
he is. So are we going to do it now or
we're going to do it when it's too late?
That's all I had this morning. Maybe there's someone here who
needs to or wants to be baptized for the remission of their sins.
We believe in, in that Jesus is who he is, that he becomes Lord
of our life. We need to confess our sins,
repent from our old way of life, and start turning around,
living, living for Jesus now, confessing that he is the Son of
God, and then being baptized for the remission of our sins.
Also, if there's one ear who just needs to make a public
confession in any way that has brought shame to the church or
to Jesus, or just needs the prayers of the congregation, we
ask you to come now, while we stand and while we.