Good morning, everyone. Hello? Hi. Good morning.
Wow. Thank you. It's so good to be here. So good to have you here, each one of you.
And be good if I can find my notes. That would be really good. There we are. We're going to be looking in the book of Isaiah in a few moments.
So you can turn to Isaiah 40 and continuing on with a sort of mini-series that we started way back when on comfort, the comfort of God. And when David contacted me and asked me, would I speak this day? He being the salesman and he is. And probably feeling a little bit ashamed of having conned me into doing the Mother's Day service.
He said that he had given me a Sunday that was in the sweet spot. It was close enough to Christmas that I could do a Christmas message in far enough a way that I need. So it's a sweet spot. Salesman McDonald, thank you very much for this opportunity.
We are going to continue. And as far as the Christmas part, Merry Christmas, everyone, that's the Christmas part. Jerry and I, God willing, will be away and missing all the wonderful things that are going on here at Northbrook. Truly missing them.
I had the privilege last year of being here for the Christmas Eve service meeting. It was a special day for me. It was the day I got out of the hospital. And it was so good to see you guys again.
Good to be here. One year ago today, my dear wife threw me into the Jeep and lugged me off to the QE2. And to my surprise, left me there. And however, she was so faithful and coming to see me daily and spending so much time with me in your prayers with me.
It's just a testimony to your faithfulness and faithfulness of God that I'm here today, really. And we do sincerely want to continue to pray for those that have been mentioned this morning already for prayer. And it's just, you know, things happen so quickly, don't they? We don't know from one day to the next what our health will be or whether we'll even be drawing a breath.
So it's so important that we are absolutely ready for that moment when God calls us to himself. So let's pray for one another to that end that we would be ready, that all would be ready, that our loved ones would be ready, and those that we are friends with, those that we work with, everybody would come to hear of the Savior who is able to break the curse of sin and able to tear away the chains of death that we were just singing about. One wonderful thing it is to know of our salvation. Isaiah chapter 40, and I don't know whether my brothers in the back are able to, there's not a scripture up there.
So they may not be able to get that for us this morning, but if you have your Bibles or your devices, then you can look these verses up. Isaiah chapter 40, and we're going to begin reading that verse number one. If the scriptures in the system come around, I'm sure they'll put them up there for us. But for now, in your Bibles, Isaiah chapter 40 verses 1 to 8, I'm reading from the New American standard.
Verse 1, comfort, O comfort, my people says your God. Speak kindly to Jerusalem. And call out to her that her warfare has ended, that her iniquity has been removed, that she has received of the Lord's hand, double for all her sins. A voice is calling.
Clear the way for the Lord and the wilderness. Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up in every mountain and hill made low, and let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain abroad valley. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken. A voice says, call out. Then he answered, what shall I call out? All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness like the flower of the field, the grass withers, the flower fades, and the breath of the Lord blows upon it.
Surely the people are grass, the grass withers, and the flower fades. But the word of our God stands forever. Heavenly Father, we pray that as we look into your word today, that your Holy Spirit would guide and direct our thoughts. My words, but most importantly, the thoughts of those who are here.
Help us to stay focused on your word this morning, Lord. There are a lot of things that are distracting us. A lot of things that would call us away. Every voice crying out into our hearts and minds of distraction, I pray, would be silenced.
And only the voice of the Spirit of the living God would speak clear. Drowned everything that I might say that might be distracting as well. And just emphasized your God, your word, and your truth today. We ask this in Jesus' name.
Amen. I've talked to you about some comforting thoughts. And we talked, first of all, in this passage of Scripture, and I realize that what we're doing is by way of application. I hope you realize this too.
I'm not giving you the interpretation of the Scriptures here so much as the apple Scripture here so much as the application that I want to make to our daily lives. We could go back and do that historical interpretation again, but I'm not going to do that for timesake. My son and daughter-in-law have to leave and get home for a meeting this evening. And I told them without letting them know that I was speaking today that the get-out time at Northrop depends on who the preacher is and how long when do they are.
Had they known it was me. They might have been wise to duck out early. But anyway, they're still here. And I don't want to go over that historical part again and the actual interpretation part.
I want to do the application with you. And we talked by way of application of comfort to the believer. And one of the things that we talked about in the first couple of verses here is the comfort of salvation. Remember that?
The comfort of salvation. You notice in verse number two, we were to call out to Jerusalem that her warfare has ended, that her iniquity has been removed and she has received the Lord's hand, double for all her sins. We talked about the comfort, the peace that comes through salvation, the pardon that comes through salvation, and the provision in that verse that comes from God's hand because of salvation. And I would like to pause right now and ask, do you understand any of that?
Do you understand God's peace in your heart? Do you have the pardon that you need for your sins? Do you understand that God is able to provide for you, even in the deep dark valleys of life that come by? And we've been thinking about some of our brothers and sisters and some people that we love dearly, some who are not safe, who are going through valleys right now, we've been praying for them.
Do you understand the provision of God in those times of great need? This is a comfort of salvation that those of us who know Christ receive. Then we talked about also the comfort of communion, verses three, four, and five, the comfort of communion, having a relationship with the Lord. And we talked about how we had to prepare away for that.
That doesn't come naturally. That is something that we have to prepare. And the road that we prepare for communion with the Lord, and I know the Lord has made that way for us. We're talking about that this morning at the Lord's Supper.
We're hearing about how God has made away for us. He has broken down the wall that separated us and Him, the wall of sin. And we have a way to Him now. We are to boldly approach Him now.
But when it comes to our daily lives and all those other distractions that get in the way, the Lord is seeming to say to me that we need to prepare away. Clear the way, verse three, says, for the Lord in the wilderness. Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. That word smooth actually means could be translated straight.
So we need a straight highway. We need a level highway, and we need to take all the bumps out of that highway. All the debris that could be in the way. Anything that comes between us and our relationship, our fellowship with the Lord.
Our relationship is secure, but our fellowship with Him can be bumpy at times, can't it? If we're honest with one another. And if we're going to have the comfort of communion with the Lord, we need to do something about that by making sure that there's nothing in the way of our fellowshipping with the Lord. Now today, I want to talk about the comfort of salvation and comfort of communion.
And I'm trying to find words that have an ION on the end. If you notice that, I tend to do that. It's a problem I have. But I tend to either have words with the same first letter or rhyming words or now it's ION that I'm looking for.
And I want this next section, verses 6, 7, and 8, to have a comfort value to it. And I'm going to call this the comfort of, and I know I'm stretching on this one a little bit. The comfort of conjunction. The comfort of conjunction.
How about that? The word conjunction, conjunction is something that joins something together. That was joined something together. Some of you have studied grammar.
I have not. That's why I slaughter the English language. But grammar, and grammar is not like your father's mother. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the study of syntax and how sentences go together. If you're looking at grammar and a conjunction, a conjunction is a joining word. It joins words or it joins phrases. It could join clauses, whatever they are.
Plural of clauses. Clorals of clauses. Conjunctions like the word and. And.
So and so went to the store and bought groceries. A conjunction. Or the word but. And we're going to look at conjunctions today and how important and how comforting those words are in the scriptures.
From this passage of scripture. There is a quote that I did give you and I think my friends in the back may be able to put that quote up for you. It's a quote from a theologian. Edward J.
Young. And it will come. It's a quote that you may remember but I want to remind you of it again. It's about comfort.
True comfort. I don't have to turn around. It's right there. It's still an island.
True comfort. I'll read it for you. Consists in setting forth the entire truth concerning the people's tragic condition and in causing them to see God as their only hope. Now I realize that that's a long quote.
It would be easier if I had five words instead of twenty five words. But true hope again consists in setting forth the entire truth concerning the people's tragic condition. And in causing them to see God as their only hope. There's a conjunction in there.
Did you hear the and? And in causing them to see God as their only hope. We're going to look at the tragic condition first. All right.
Charlie and Fred were having coffee at Tim's. They were having their traditional double doubles and they were sitting across from each other talking and Charlie. He looked a little disconcerted and Fred was interested in knowing what was going on. Charlie said, I've been to see my doctor and I'm really not sure how to feel about the situation.
And Fred said, why? What did the doctor say to you? And Charlie said, well, it's not just what he said, but he said, I'd be okay. But conjunction.
But I'll have to take one of these pills every day for the rest of my life. And, well, Charlie, that's not so bad. I mean, when you get to be our age, it's usually not just one pill a day. There's probably a lot more than that.
So just taking an a pill a day isn't so bad. So what's the problem there, Charlie? Charlie said, well, he only gave me three pills. One pill a day for the rest of my life.
Okay, so Charlie was getting the message. Charlie was reading between the lines. He only had three days left. That's the bad news, right?
That's the bad news that we don't want to hear. Today's voice, the third voice in this section, they're actually four that I'm going to talk about, but I won't talk about the fourth day. You'll be happy to know. That's for another time.
The third voice is the voice of reality. The voice of truth. Like it or not. This is the truth, right?
Do you remember playing hide and seek when you're kids or maybe as adults? I don't know. And somebody hides their eyes and they count to ten. And then at the end of that, everybody else is scattering to hide.
And at the end of that, they say, ready or not? Yeah, here I come, right? Well, that's the way reality is in our lives sometimes, right? Ready or not?
Here I come. And so God speaks to us in his word and he says there's a voice that says call out. Call out. Make a noise.
And in this passage in verse number six, he answers. And that he could be any one of us answering the Lord and saying, what is it you want me to call? What shall I call out, Lord? What shall I say?
What do people need to hear if I were to speak on your behalf? And I think one of the things that we need to speak out is this passage right here in front of us. What do we call out? Don't be silent.
And it's more than just speaking up when you were questioned about something. It's to cry out, to proclaim, to preach. It actually, according to strong, it actually means to a cost somebody. To a cost somebody.
Stand in their way, intervene in their lives, interject, cry out. What shall I cry out? All flesh is grass. And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers. The flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows upon it. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers in the flower fades.
When I read this, I realized that in my heart of hearts I rather God said, what are you saying is you and I are like grass, right? And I would rather be like an oak tree. Would you rather be an oak tree than grass? An oak tree stands there and stands there.
It is enduring. It can stand there for a couple hundred years perhaps. But grass. Well, that is so temporary, Lord.
I grew up in the little metropolitan area called Glenwood. And in Glenwood, and surrounds, some of us had little firms. And they were little firms, but we had cattle and we would go in the summer months and we would have to make hay, right? To feed the cattle in the wintertime.
And one of the things that I learned as a kid working in the hay fields was that we have a short season in Nova Scotia to make hay. Make hay where the sun shines. And the sun doesn't shine that much in South West Nova. A lot of foggy days.
And we have a short season. Grass is only good for cutting for hay in that short period of time. It grows and we love it. Don't we love it when the season of winter goes by and the snow and the ice and all that's gone?
And we start seeing the grass green up and we start feeling all good. This green grass is coming and I'll get the lawnmower around. And it will be wonderful. And it's no time at all when that grass is turning brown and withering.
And if you're making hay, it's even faster than that because our lawns seem to grow. Stay green for a longer period of time. But I know that in a hay field, you've got a small and a very short season. The grass is grown up in its green and it's lush and it's thick.
And you have probably four to six weeks to get that harvest brought in. And after that, it turns brown and the nutrients are gone and the grass withers. And it's no longer of value. It's temporary.
It's transitory. All its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The flower fades. You folks are familiar with Lupins.
Lupins. I don't know whether it's our provincial flower or not, but it grows abundantly down in our neck of the woods where I came from. And in fact, we used to have right at the end of our driveway, there was a big patch of Lupins, Rockwell, remember. And when I was a little boy, our next door, my next door neighbor, Dorothy, used to go out and she would gather the Lupinsies and scatter them around.
Now they would scatter naturally on their own, but Aunt Dorothy, she like to gather the seeds from the flowers that were most beautiful. And then she cut the other ones down through them white and get the seeds from the beautiful ones and scatter them around to try and have more beautiful Lupins. But they were profuse. They were beautiful for about a week and a half.
And then, do you know what Lupins look like after they fade? Oh my, they are ugly. They go gray and dingy and dull. Its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
That's us, God's talking about. This is the people's tragic condition. I want to be in oak tree, but God says I'm grass. I'm temporary.
And the further along I get in life, I realize how temporary I am. There's another voice crying out there. And this voice is, you're not getting older. You're getting, I see I'm too old for you guys.
Because this was an advertisement of probably 30 years ago. You're not getting older. You're getting better. Thanks.
Better. You're not getting older. You know who said that? That was on a Nivea commercial.
They wanted to sell cream. Right? And if I put enough on my face, if I could get to my face, maybe I'd look better. Who knows?
You're not getting older. You're getting better. That's a lie, folks. That's not the truth.
That's not the truth. The voice of reality says, and that's not true. The voice of reality has a face. And that face is me looking in the mirror every morning.
And it's not saying I'm getting better. That's for sure. I'm getting older. And we might try and postpone the march of time.
And we might, you know, we do our exercise. I shouldn't say we. Some people do their exercise between routine. Some people are really careful about their nutrition.
Some people apply cosmetics. And they try and stay young. But folks, it's a losing battle. The calendar and the mirror tells us differently.
Right? We are getting older. First look in the mirror every morning tells it all. Mercifully, my eyes are failing, too.
So I can't see all the horror details of this. But it's absolutely true. We are withering grass and fading flowers at very best. The poet said only one life will soon be past.
Remember that? The hymn writer said, life at best is very brief, like the falling of a leaf, like the binding of a sheaf. It's very brief. What shall I call out?
Let people know that life is temporary. We're only here for a short time. We are a dying race. Are you guys encouraged yet?
I hope you're encouraged. Tell them, tell the people that they only have three pills. That's all they have. Let them know this.
You and I are destined to die. But why? Why are we destined to die? Because there's something in our hearts, isn't there?
This is, I don't, I don't, you know, I feel like I need to live on. You know? This dying thing, I know that it happens because I see it all around me. There's this one to one ratio for people to get born.
They also die. It happens. Why is that happening? Because I feel like I should go on forever.
There's something about living that I like. I want to live. Why is it that we die? I want to talk to you about the sad story of sin and death.
You know, when God made us in the beginning, He made us to live, not to die. He created us, the Bible says, in his own image, in Genesis 1, 27, in his own image. We were made like God, not physically like God because God doesn't have a physical side to him, apart from the Lord Jesus. But the side of God that we have is our intellect, our emotions and our will.
Our intellect so that we can know God, our emotions so that we can love God and our will so that we can choose to love God. You on board with me? God created us with that. We have the capacity to understand God.
At least to a degree, right? We know that there is a God. We know that He exists and we can understand from reading His word about Him. We can.
And He gave us emotions so that we could love Him. And we hear that love expressed many, many times by brothers and sisters. And we have that love in our hearts if we know Him. And He gave us a will so that we could choose.
And if you don't know Him and you don't love Him, I want you to understand that you have the ability to choose to know Him. You have that ability. God made us that way. But you know what we did?
We chose differently, didn't we? I certainly did many, many times. Though I had the opportunity many times to choose to know Him and to love Him. I purposefully chose not to.
I chose not to. And in the very beginning we chose not to. We chose to rebel against the sovereign God in Adam. We chose.
We went away from God. And as we chose so poorly, as we rebelled against His sovereign way, sin entered into the human race and we die. That's why we die. Romans 3, 23 says, for all have sinned.
We have all chosen against God's will. We have sinned. That's what sin is. We have thought or deed against God.
And we have fallen short of His glory the scripture says. And then we have Romans 6 and 23 that says the wages of that sin, what we read from that sin is death. So you see there's this correlation, this conjunction between our sin and death. The reason that we die is because of our sin.
That's why we die. A few years ago I had a friend who started having pain in his back. And many of us have experienced pain in our backs before. This pain he went to his doctor, he went to a chiropractor, he went to everybody he could think of to go to.
And they couldn't figure out what was wrong. And this went on and on and on. He was a big strapping fisherman guy and he knew the Lord. He was a great man in our community.
Everybody knew this man and everybody respected him. But he had a pain. And he couldn't get rid of the pain. And it was, it rendered him unable to do the work that he needed to do.
And then finally they put him in the hospital and he started running tests. And the tests were not good. And the doctor walked into John's room. And he said, John, John was in his bed.
He said, John, are you prepared for the worst? And John said, no doctor. I am prepared for the best. I am prepared for the best.
Because John was right with the Lord. John's relationship with the Lord was true and right and established. And so while the news the doctor had for him was seemingly negative, and the doctor could not understand what John meant at all when he said, I'm prepared for the best. I want to ask you a question.
Are you prepared for the best? Are you? Are you prepared when reality's voice speaks to you and brings perhaps truly bad news? We are withering grass and fading flowers, but that's not the end of the passage.
If you look in Isaiah 40 and verse 8, and you look at the latter part of that verse of various, it's the very small part of the portion that we've read. It says, surely the people are grass, the grass withers, the flower fades, but there's a conjunction again, but the word of our God stands forever. See that? Now I told you this was a message about encouragement.
You guys don't look too encouraged. And I don't blame you because everything I told you has been about death, isn't it? Here's the encouraging part at the end. The truth is coming to us.
The bad news and the good news. The truth is the word of our God stands forever. Reality's voice has some truly bad news for people. We're transitory.
We'll die. But we're going to have some good news too, and that is this. God's word stands forever. It's astonishingly good news.
The comfort of conjunction. God's word does not change. Psalm 19 verse 50 says, this is my comfort in my affliction that your word has revived me. In the midst of my affliction, your word has revived me.
The voice of reality, the voice of true comfort doesn't lie to us saying you're not getting older, you're getting better. It says, you know what? You've got three pills. That's all you have.
It's the voice of truth. So how does this unchangeableness of God's word really help us? I want you to flip over to the book of 1 Peter. And I'll do this as quickly as I can.
The book of 1 Peter. Because we have this passage in Isaiah quoted in the New Testament. 1 Peter 1 verse 23. Thank you guys.
Verse 23, for you have been born again. Now Peter's writing to Christians here. You have been born again, not a seed which is perishable but imperishable. That is through the living and enduring word of God.
And here's our quote, four. All flesh is like grass. And all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls off.
But the word of the Lord endures forever. See that? There's that Isaiah passage being quoted by Peter and he's speaking to Christians and he's saying, you guys, you know what? You have been born again.
You're different than you were before. For those of us who have come to know that Christ's or Savior things have changed. These people had found through the gospel preached to them. And I want you to see the end of verse 25.
The word of our God, the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word which was through the gospel preached to you. Now your translation might not have the through the gospel part, but the word preached indicates that it is the gospel message that they had heard. So this is the word.
This enduring word of God is the message, the word which was preached to you. And it has changed your life because it has made you alive again, a new birth. You have eternal life within you now. You were like grass.
There's no doubt about it. And physically we are like grass. We're only temporary. But there is something new in the believer.
There's something new in profoundly good and profoundly eternal. And these people had found through that gospel message that though they were sinners, God's son Jesus Christ had been born into the community so that he might suffer in shoulder, the guilt of our sin, die in our place and offer complete and free forgiveness through simply repenting of their sins and receiving the free gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. Have you done that? Have you repented of your sins and trusted Christ as your Savior?
God's word is eternal. And you can be born again of God's word and have eternal life in that way. It's not comforting to be reminded that we're temporary and like withering grass, but the conjunction, but true comfort consists in setting forth the entire truth concerning the people's tragic condition and in causing them to see God as their only hope. God is our only hope.
But what I hope he is. Absolutely. While he is the one that we have offended, he is the only one that we can turn to for forgiveness and cleansing. And we can turn to him all because of the cross of Christ, all because Jesus Christ died on that cross for you.
You can turn to Almighty God, the one that you have offended, the one who should be condemning you and say, Father, because of Jesus Christ, because of the bloodshed on the cross, I come to you for forgiveness and to be received as your child for all eternity. Let me ask you this question. Are you prepared for the worst? Now you ask me, what do you mean by that?
Well, I'm not talking about just death. You might think that's the worst, but that's not the worst. The Bible says in Hebrews 927, it is appointed unto men once to die. And after that, the judgment, we stand before Almighty God.
Hebrews 10 verse 31 says, it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. That's the worst thing to fall into God's hands as your judge. Are you prepared for the worst? You say, well, Clyde, how do I prepare for the worst?
How do I prepare for the worst? You prepare for the worst by saying goodbye. You say goodbye. What do I say goodbye to?
Matthew 8 verse 12 talks about a place called hell. And it says, in that place, it's a place of outer darkness. You say goodbye to light. Say goodbye to light.
Do you enjoy light? I enjoy light. But that's the place of outer darkness. You will not see again.
You prepare for the worst by saying goodbye to light. You say goodbye to joy. In that passage, that same passage, Matthew 812, it says, it is a place of darkness. It is a place of weeping.
Say goodbye to joy. Say goodbye to comfort. It is a place of gnashing of teeth. And say goodbye to hope.
Because Revelation 20 verses 10 through 15 tells us that there is no hope. It is forever. My friends, are you prepared for that? Are you prepared to say goodbye to light, joy, comfort, and hope?
Or are you prepared like John Nickerson was for the best? How do I prepare for the best? I don't want to prepare for the worst. I want to prepare for the best.
Are you there? Do you want to prepare for the best? I hope you are. Some of you are prepared for the best, aren't you?
Maybe you are here and not prepared for the best. You know that you are facing the worst. How do you prepare for the best? How do I prepare for that client?
Well, first of all, you need to admit something. You need to admit that before God, you were a helpless and hopeless sinner. You have no merit of your own. And there is nothing you can do to change that.
Nothing. And then you need to go to John 1 verse 12. And you need to read there in that wonderful passage of Scripture, another conjunction. For it says in verse 11 that he, the Lord Jesus, came to his own.
And those who were his own, did not receive him. And then there is the word in verse number 12. It's the conjunction, but. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe in his name.
You see that verse on the wall? I want you to focus on three words in that verse. In the latter part of the verse you will see, to those who believe in his name, believe. You must believe that Jesus Christ is who God says he is, the Savior.
The one who died on the cross for your sins. For those who believe in his name and those who, at the beginning of the verse, receive him. There is the word receive. It's not enough just to believe.
You know what? I believe that truth about Jesus. I believe that from the time I was a little kid. I believed it.
But it wasn't until I was 17 years of age that I received him. That I trusted him as my Savior and received the forgiveness of sins. Have you ever done that? Have you ever trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior?
As many as received him, to them he gave the right to become the children of God. Believe, receive, become. You believe, you receive, and God does the become part. He makes you his child.
It's that simple. Have you done that? That's how you get ready for the best. Romans 623 says, for the wages of sin is death.
That's our tragic condition. But the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. But the free gift of God is eternal life. Do you have it?
So the truth is, you only have three pills. You are withering grass. Your time is running out. But God offers you eternal life through Jesus Christ.
Do you have God for your only hope? He is your only hope. Have you embraced him as that? Conjunctions are special things.
The most special conjunction of all is when you were joined to God through Jesus Christ. He brings light and life and peace and joy and truth and eternal life to you. And I pray that you will admit, believe, receive, and become his child today. Let's pray.
Thank you Father. Thank you for the truth. Your Word brings truth. We are temporarily here.
In this time of grass likeness, we have the opportunity because of the cross of Christ to turn from our sin to a Savior and to receive eternal life through him. How I pray that your Spirit would work in the hearts of every one of us here today. And if those of us who are sitting in this place are believers, that we will be encouraged because your Word endures forever. And we have been born again of that eternal Word.
And if those that are sitting in this place today that do not have Christ as their Savior at this point that they would believe the truth of Christ to receive him as their Savior and become a child of God today. Thank you, Jesus, Jesus, and Jesus. Precious name. Amen.
Thank you very much.