So last week I ragged on my mom a little bit. I got a phone call from us. I've got a thing with you at video Sunday morning, and they posted on Facebook. Like mom watches it now and sees what I said.
And I got a phone call. She said, you made fun of me for a while in Christmas a little bit, huh, didn't you? And so I've got to say, there's pieces of Christmas that I really do get into. And one of the things that I love is I love Christmas music.
So when I was coming up, I had them play just a little bit of the Charlie Brown Christmas special soundtrack. And this has a special place in my heart because when Meredith and I moved to Kentucky, we were 14 hours away from home. I spent several finals weeks when I was in grad school, at my master's degree in seminary. I spent several final season.
It was usually this coming up a week. So it's like getting close to Christmas. We're 14, 15 hours away from home. Haven't been home in six months.
Haven't seen our folks in six months. I would study to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. And it was good to study music, but also maybe really think about Meredith and I, like how we were having a grownup Christmas. We were having this adult Christmas doing things on our own.
It was a certain special thing for us. And so I think back, I love that soundtrack so much. Also though, this is one of my favorite ones. I'm not going to butcher the pronunciation of this be fully prepared.
But Ben Crosby classic, Melika Licki-Laki. Is that right? It's phonetic on here. I still want you to say it.
It's like a Christmas vacation. There's the classic, like the Hawaiian song. I love it because it makes me think about like tacky sweater parties and just Christmas fun and eating a lot of sausage balls. I can get more sausage balls than anybody else in this room.
I promise you. I think that's a corny, kitschy, ugly sweater contest Christmas fun. But possibly my favorite piece of Christmas music is George Frederick Handel's The Messiah. A lot of us from there at the Hollywood League of Chorus.
Well, we might have heard that or sung that somewhere. I love The Messiah, the whole sequence. I landed across this a few years ago. It's a four L-P set of the London Philharmonic playing The Messiah.
And so for ages, I've just taken this everywhere from me and thrown on record players. It's actually kind of rare and worth money. And not anymore because I've played it all over the place and got it scratched up. But the second song in this whole big, huge, beautiful piece of music is what I want to play just a little bit for y'all this morning and just to think about some of these words and so let's turn this on.
It's going to sound scratchy because it's old. But we can deal with that. So Handel wrote The Messiah. And it's a huge, long piece of music.
And it's all about the story of a God who comes to our world. It's the perfect, advent music. Because it's all about preparing for what's going to happen. And the words that he chose to start this off, this is the first time you actually hear anybody singing the Messiah.
And he's saying this, comfort, comfort my people. It's a prophecy from Isaiah, chapter 40. That's what we're going to think about this idea of comfort today and how comfort played in 2000 years ago, but also how comfort plays into our life right now. So we have your Bibles.
We're going to open them up. We're going to read Isaiah chapter 40. We're going to start and just read verse one through two to get started. But this is what says, you can read it on here.
You can use your phone if you have your Bible and your phone just check in to Facebook first. And then it's on the screen behind me. But this is what it says, comfort, comfort my people says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her that her sad days are gone and that her sins are pardoned.
Yes, the Lord has punished her twice over for all of her sins. Now, comfort is this interesting word. The first way we think about comfort is a little bit different from what biblical comfort is. In biblical comfort, initially it has this idea of a sorrow, for sadness.
It's aware of something that's happened. But it also carries this degree of repentance and forgiveness. And Hebrew also, it's a lot more expressive of a language than English. It's a lot more physically expressive.
And one of the things that comfort also means it has a physical definition of this idea to take a deep breath so that it's a visible display of our body's awareness to a situation. That's what biblical comfort is. But then also there's this idea. And I think about this because when I think comfort, especially during the holiday season, every single thing we do is about comfort.
Like think about what your ideal, like holiday evening would look like. You're at the house with your friends and with your family. Since it finally got cold last week, you have a fire built. Like your dress warm, the lights are turned down and the clothes and the Christmas tree lights can be on.
Like we're eating comfort food like sausage balls. Like we're drinking hot cocoa or side or something like that. It's like every single thing that we do during the holidays, this ideal picturesque, which actually never really happens. But every single thing we do, it speaks to comfort.
And part of me thinks a lot of times the way that we handle this want for comfort during the Christmas season is our heart and our mind and our soul are yearning for the biblical promise of comfort for this cry. We know we need comfort. We know we want comfort. And so we're going to do every single thing we can to try to create it.
Also, another idea of comfort, another one of these definitions for comfort is that it signifies the beginning of a new day. And that's what's going on in this prophecy of Isaiah. It's God telling himself, the comfort, comfort, my people. It says you're God.
That something new is happening. That you're going to be able to mark time before and after this. That comfort signifies a dramatically different kind of life than what you're previously aware has been going on. That our hearts and our minds and our bodies cry out for comfort.
And let's turn to the next few verses in Isaiah as we continue in this prophecy. And it says this, listen, it's the voice of someone shouting, clear the way through the wilderness for the Lord. Make it straight highway through the wasteland for our God. Fill in the valleys and level the mountain and hills, straighten out the curves and smooth out the rough places.
Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed. And all the people will see it together because the Lord has spoken. So wilderness is this interesting thing. Because think about what the wilderness is.
I guess a desolate place with little to no life. Like we have a hard time. And we're not working the wilderness anymore. We're going to carry stuff in there with us.
But in scripture, wilderness is one of those things that there's a whole vocabulary list of words, like wasteland, desolate places, desert. And all of this, this idea of the wilderness, it always signifies a transition that God is taking someone on. Like this is the place where you were changed. This is the place where things are changed.
So from the middle of a desolate, lifeless place, God is going there to bring us out of it. That God is coming into the place that sin put us into. And he's going to bring us out of that. There's two other words in here that are interesting.
It's this idea of listen. I'll read it again. It's huge. Listen, it's the voice of someone shouting, clear the way through the wilderness for the Lord.
I like to listen. This is actually the same idea we see in the Psalms. A lot. This is a call to worship.
It's God to himself. Things are about to change. Listen to what's going on. Prepare yourselves for what's going to happen in Revelation.
It always says, for people who have ears to hear, let them hear is the exact same thing going on. Like if you saw Mary and I finally got the movie theater and saw the Martian. If you don't know what's on the Martian, you don't even see the Martian. Well, on DVD because it's not theaters anymore.
But like, it's a story of Matt Damon, who he's stranded on Mars for years with like enough supplies to last like 10 days. He ends up like finding an old Mars rover and like completely rednecks it to work and establishes contact back with Houston. I think he's dead and all of a sudden they're getting transmissions off this like 25 year old satellite that he like rigged up to work. He's establishing contact.
To listen, this is God saying, I'm establishing contact with you again. I'm establishing contact in a new way. So be listening to what's happening. The second thing you talk about, the clear.
The clear, it just, it means to repent. And repentance doesn't mean like we're going to have to like flog ourselves or grovel around. But repent means one thing, it means simply to turn. So it's two human actions that the prophet's telling us, these are things that you need to be doing.
You need to be listening. You need to be turning. Because God's coming to take you out of the wilderness. We're previously situated right now.
We're going deeper into the wilderness. Scriptures say, just turn yourselves. Because God's going to lead you out of the wilderness. Listen and turn.
Those are things that we have to be doing. But anytime where we have to be making something big, where we have to be doing something big, we need some category change agent. We need a person to show us the way out. And what's interesting is usually the person who does that, any situation in our life, in our families, in our work, anybody who does that, it's kind of funny because they're the least likely person that we thought about that.
The least likely person ends up going to bring a moment of clarity and comfort to a really, really odd situation in a way we never thought they could. This prophecy is so filled by one of these people in scripture. We read it again in Luke chapter 3 by God named John the Baptist. But the easiest way for me to explain John the Baptist to you is for us to think about cousin Eddie.
Because John the Baptist and cousin Eddie are almost the exact same person. You're looking right now at the chat. You're crazy. Think about this.
OK? They both live in the middle of nowhere. So cousin Eddie, like who is, I was like Kansas. John the Baptist, his parents were significantly older than him.
He was most likely orphaned as a young child. And he was raised by a group of people called the Essenes that lived out in the wilderness. He was like a super, super, super, weird compound of these people that wanted to bring about a radical, violent revolution in Jerusalem. John the middle of nowhere.
They both show up in very unexpected ways. So cousin Eddie pulls up in his RV. John the Baptist. Just 30 years in his cousin, Jesus' ministry just shows up.
And everybody starts falling. They're all aware of him. He's right there on the edge of the desert, baptizing people in the Jordan River. They both wear really weird clothes.
There's all sorts of outfits Eddie likes to wear. John the Baptist said he used to work a camel skin blanket with a rope tied around his waist. It's weird. It's different.
Both like to eat weird things. Because he doesn't eat squirrely more because his bad vehicle is raw. As from the safe and neck. John the Baptist is eating locusts, like dead bugs.
That's the guy who lived off of dead bugs. But he has this really, really odd person who serves as a change agent in the situation. This prophecy is all about John. John is called the forerunner.
His job was to come and to prepare people and to call people to preparation for Jesus coming. Without John, we would have had the whole story. Because he wouldn't have gone and kidnapped the boss. And everybody got a swimming pool.
These change agents are going to need to be the oddest people in odd situations. It's the least likely way we think things are going to happen. And if we think about our own stories of change and transition and transformation in life, what you'll probably find out is it comes about in the least possible ways, in the least possible situations. My change agent story was when I almost failed out of school.
And I locked myself in my bedroom for a quarter of tech. And the last person I thought would come. And I literally pick the lock to my bedroom and get me out of the house. Here's a change agent for me.
That change agent is always going to work in really different ways. So we're going to read this prophecy again in Luke chapter 3 and the way that John the Baptist is telling it. So Luke 3, 4 through 6. This is what it says.
Isaiah had spoken of John when he said, he has a voice shouting in the wilderness. Prepare the way for the words coming. Clear the road for him. The valleys will be filled.
And the mountains and hills made level. And the curves will be straightened. And the rough place is made smooth. And then all the people will see the salvation sent from God.
This is almost word for word, but the main difference is a completely astounding difference. Because the difference is the word will. And Luke, the guy who wrote this gospel, what he's doing is he's using the most absolutely expectant way he can. It's like, if I say I'm going to catch this charwise, I will eat it in crispy basket.
It's Luke saying the valleys will be filled. The mountains will be leveled. The road will be straightened. And we will see the glory of God.
That will changes everything. And instead expect and hope that Luke has is what we can draw into our own lives. If we talk about the things that are going to happen, where we can find comfort in those scenarios. First place for us to find comfort is this.
It's the one that Jesus is going to push things down. Think about in Luke what he says. We'll be back to it. The mountains and hills will be made level.
Now remember, listening and clearing always requires human action. This is our participation in what God is doing. The simple thing for us to understand, we're trying to listen. We're trying to clear as we realize that we have to have human action because human disaction is what God is here in the first place.
When we're not listening to what God is doing, not listening to what God is saying. When we're not turning, we're busy following our own path. That's what gets us to the place where we need comfort out of. God comes into our wilderness.
When we turn around and say, if we're going deeper into it, we start following him out of it. So we're just have a conversation about sin. We quit thinking about sin as a list of do's and don'ts. But instead we realize that sin is bad because it stops us, because it kills us, because it steals from us, because it destroys things.
That call to turn is simply a call to turn away from what kills you. Instead, turn forward what gives you why. That Jesus is going to come. He's going to push things down.
He's going to help you push that stuff down. The next thing is that Jesus is going to pull things up. Think about that. What do you have in life right now that you need comfort for?
What inadequacies? What things are stopping you because you're terrified of what folks know about them? What are the things that you have that you've allowed to hold you back from stuff? Where are the places, perhaps the places of brokenness in your life where you need healing from?
So Jesus says, I'm going to push all the stuff down. We're going to take care of that. Just call for your focus on me. And when you start focusing on me, you realize that what we need to be concerned with is just simply putting Jesus into those places.
By focusing on him, we realize, here's the space in my life where I need something else. And I'm going to let you feel that. Jesus is going to pull things up for us. The last thing is this, that Jesus is going to straighten things out, instead of a winding road.
He's going to make this path clear and obvious and straight for us. This is where we start following the leadership of the Holy Spirit, because we've already turned, face God, the face the way out of the wilderness. We've already let him start filling in the places that only he can fill. Because I'm not telling you all about us focusing on what we're doing wrong.
This is about us focusing on Jesus. If we can find the leadership and the directive of the Holy Spirit. The only way I can really explain this idea of this God straighten this road out is this. It was the last time you saw someone using a tow rope.
I saw somebody almost pull a car into the median right by a fish house this week. I think about having already used a tow rope before. Our tow rope's ever a good idea. Like, let's double the ski rope over four times and tie it to the ball of the truck and keep our fingers crossed.
And also think about it. Most of the time when you see someone using a tow rope, the vehicle in front is doing the pulling is actually smaller than the vehicle in the back that needs help. And then you've got the whole problem with, you've got to put somebody in that back vehicle, you've got to put it in neutral. And they've got to be following where the driver's going, so they have to be turning it just the right moment.
They've got to be breaking, so they don't rear in the person that's pulling them. But the only problem with the tow rope is that back car is actually in control. The vehicle that is disabled is the one actually in control, because you can start putting your brakes on and affecting that car in front of you. You can turn that wheel wrong.
You can start pulling that car that's towing you in the wrong direction. You can completely manipulate every single thing that's going on. Now, so we have a tow bar, it's a different story. You have that solid piece of steel that's linked to the bumper of the bumper.
Put the back car in neutral. That front car is in complete control. They're controlling the stopping, they're controlling the going, they're controlling the turning. A lot of times where we get in trouble is we think that we're using a tow rope following the Holy Spirit.
The second we get uncomfortable, we put the brakes on. When Jesus starts turning, trying to go one way, we don't turn good enough. We try to turn the opposite direction sometimes. We try to manipulate Jesus.
And that's never going to work out, y'all. That's not going to be good for us. It's not going to be good for what he wants to do in our life. Instead, it's just we're harnessed to him.
He's gone in. We've listened and we've cleared. He's filled in those low places. And now we're just following him.
Hebrews says it has to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. He knows everything. It's going to have to happen. Also says it in Hebrews that his hope is an anchor to our soul.
We find comfort in this last step. We harness ourself to Jesus. We trust the path that he has taken. So the comfort that we find, the comfort that we're looking for in life, the comfort that every single part of our being is trying to get to, is found in this prophecy.
Three pretty simple steps that take us a lifetime to get ahold of. We realize that Jesus is going to push things down, the things that we need help with, the things that we need to divine intervention. Jesus is going to pull things up, this blank space that we have in our life, this place is brokenness, and we don't have comfort. He's going to fill those in for us.
And the last thing is he's going to pull that road and make it straight, and all we have to do is just to attach ourselves to him. God comes into the wilderness of our life. And not only does he lead us out of there, but he leads us out of it in a way that's manageable to us. So the call that we have is we just prepare for Christmas.
It's simple. It's just to ask, am I listening? And am I turning? That's the only thing we have to do.
To listen and to turn. The call that Isaiah said 3,000 years ago. The call that John the Baptist said 2,000 years ago. Still does that same call to our lives.
Comfort, comfort, comfort. He's got this. I say oftentimes just don't worry, because Jesus is nothing on the barbecue is good. We don't have anything to worry about.
Comfort, oh, comfort my people for your sad days are gone.