Let me begin by asking you to
turn to two scriptures. The first in Isaiah 61. Isaiah
61. And then Luke 4. After you find
Isaiah 61, put a marker or hold your finger in Luke 4. And I'll do the same. Isaiah 61 and Luke 4. I've entitled this message, after the first few words that
we read in this first verse of Isaiah 61, the Spirit of the
Lord is upon me. Because the Lord hath anointed
me to preach good tidings unto the meek, he hath sent me to
bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. to proclaim
the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our
God, to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn
in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness,
that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting
of the Lord, that He might be glorified. Now we know that these
verses are speaking of our Lord Jesus Christ because He told
us as much in Luke chapter 4. We find an account there of the
Lord going into the synagogue. We read on the Sabbath day. As
was His custom, it says. And standing up to read Scripture.
Verse 17. Let's flip over there a moment.
Verse 17 in Luke 4. tells us that they gave unto
him the book of Isaiah. It says, And there was delivered
unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened
the book, he found the place where it was written. The Spirit
of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach
the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight
to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach
the acceptable year of the Lord. And our Lord declared in that
one sentence, His entire purpose for coming to this earth. He
told those present in the synagogue, this day is this scripture fulfilled
in your ears. He told them, I am the one that
is spoken of here. I am the one whom God has sent. And dropping down to verse 22, And it says, And all bear him
witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded
out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's
son? And he said unto them, You will
surely see unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself. Whatsoever
we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.
And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in
his own country. But I tell you of a truth. Many
widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heavens
were shut up three years and six months, when great famine
was throughout all the land. But unto none of them was Elias
sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was
a widow. And many lepers were in Israel
in the time of Elias the prophet, and none of them was cleansed,
saving Nahum the Syrian. Both the individuals spoken of
here were Gentiles. And all they in the synagogue,
when they heard these things, were filled with wrath. and rose
up and thrust him out of the city and led him into the brow
of the hill, whereupon their city was built, that they might
cast him down headlong. They wanted to murder the Lord. But he, passing through the midst
of them, went his way and came down to Capernaum, a city of
Galilee, and taught them there many days. Our Lord begins by telling us
here in Isaiah 61 that the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. Now we know from what we just
read, or from what I should say, what was spoken by John the Baptist
in John 3.34, that God the Father gave to the Son the Spirit without
measure. It says in that verse in John,
For he whom God sent speaketh the words of God, for God giveth
him not the Spirit by measure, And the first part of that verse
tells us that Christ speaks the very words of God the Father.
And in his prayer to the Father in John 17 verse 8, our Lord,
speaking of his disciples, says to the Father, For I have given
unto them the words that thou gavest me. Then John 3.34 goes
on to say, For God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. Now when it says that Christ
has given the Spirit without measure, it simply means that
there are no limits. to the degree of which the Spirit
of God is to be found in this man, Christ Jesus. Colossians
2.9, speaking of Christ himself, says, For in him dwelleth all
the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Every attribute of God Every
characteristic of God, every bit of power of God, all the
goodness of God, all the grace of God, all the love of God,
and every other good thing that can be contributed to our God
is found in its fullness. in the man Christ Jesus. We read
throughout the holy book of how Christ is the very wisdom of
God. Colossians 2.3, in whom are hid,
speaking of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge. when we receive any gifts of
the Spirit that come from the storehouse of Christ Jesus, where
all the treasures of our God are hidden. Also, the love of
God is found in Christ without measure, meaning that God the
Father loves His people as much as He loves His Son. Why? Because His people are one with
Christ, inseparable from Him. Paul tells us that in Romans.
Chapter 8, verses 37 and 38. For I am persuaded that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the
love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Now I enjoy telling my
wife and other members of my family, I love you. And I hope
that at least some of the time my actions prove how much I do
love them. But sadly, that's not always
the case. I do what I can for them, but I'm limited, so limited
in my ability and means to do for them what I would desire
to do. Not so with our God. Some verses
in 1 John chapter 4 tell us this is where we read, beginning in
verse 7, Behold, let us love one another, for love is of God,
and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not
God, for God is love. And he demonstrated that to the
nth degree because we read in the next two verses of 1 John
chapter 4, in this, in this action that took place. And this was
manifested, the love of God toward us, because God sent his only
begotten son into the world. that we might live through Him,
hearing His love, not that we loved God, but that He loved
us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Sent His Son to become a bloody
sacrifice and offer His very soul, as we're told in Isaiah
53, His very soul as an offering for sin. There has never been
a greater manifestation of the love of God than this. God the
Father, for reasons known but to Himself, sent God the Son
to this earth. We're told in Proverbs 8 that
Christ was daily His delight, speaking of the Father, rejoicing
always before Him. And further, God the Son manifested
His love toward us in the fact that He was willing to come when
sent by the Father and suffer unimaginable sorrow and wrath
simply because we needed to be brought to God and Christ was
willing to do that. Next we read in Isaiah 61. If
you want to flip back there, this is where we're going to
spend the bulk of our time. If you don't mind, I'm going
to peel off this coat. Back in Isaiah 61, we read next,
that God hath anointed Christ to preach good tidings unto the
meek. The anointing of the Spirit in
the Scriptures is compared to the anointing with oil that took
place in the Old Testament. Anointing oil is mentioned 20
times in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. An anointing
in the Old Testament was a rite of inauguration into three offices
in the Jewish commonwealth. Prophets were sometimes anointed
to their office as Elijah was instructed of the Lord to anoint
Shaphat in 1 Kings 19.16. Priests were anointed to their
office as well. In Exodus 40, God gives Moses
instructions about the anointing of Aaron and his sons. Anointing
was also a divinely appointed ceremony in the initiation or
inauguration, I should say, of Jewish kings. In 1 Samuel 10.1,
it gives us an account of Samuel anointing Saul to be king. And in 1 Kings 1.34, Zadok the
priest and Nathan the prophet are given instructions on the
anointing of Solomon as king. And we read in the scriptures
where David was anointed three times. You see a pattern here? The three offices anointed were
prophet, priest, and king. Sound familiar? It should. Because
our Lord was all three of these in one person. And He fulfilled
these offices better than any fallible man ever could. And
He continues to be our advocate priest and our king. His anointing was not done by
any man, as was the case of the Jewish kings and prophets and
priests, but rather by God Himself. And the anointing was not done
with oil, as was done in the Old Testament, but rather He
was, as we just read, anointed with the Spirit without measure. Peter declared in Acts 10 37
and 8 when he was preaching, that word I say ye know, which
was published throughout all Judea and began from Galilee
after the baptism which John preached, how God anointed Jesus
of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power. who went about
doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil,
for God was with him. And further, his anointing was
unlike the anointings we find in the Old Testament Scriptures
because he was sent to preach good tidings unto the meek, those
same meek whom Christ told us in Matthew would inherit the
earth. Now let me for just a short moment
address the two different versions of the text that we find. You
obviously saw between Isaiah 61 and Luke 4 that there is a
significant wording difference. And the more I looked into this,
It became more and more complicated as the authors that I read talked
about how the Hebrew text versus the Greek and how the Dead Sea
Scrolls contain different versions of Isaiah 61 and the Aramaic
translation being different again. But I finally got tired of reading,
so let's just suffice it to say that there's a reason in our
King James Bible that there's different wording. And I'm convinced
that both are accurate and scriptural. because we find them there, so
I'll just leave it at that. Now in the account of Christ
reading this text from Isaiah in the synagogue that we read
in Luke 4, it reads, Because he hath anointed me to preach
the gospel to the poor. This preaching is one of six
miracles which Christ spoke of in Matthew 11.5 when He told
the disciples of John the Baptist. You remember the story where
the two disciples came to Christ and said, Are ye He that should
come or should we look for another? And our Lord replied, Go and tell John the things that
you saw and heard. Then Christ lists six miracles. The deaf receive their sight,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the
dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached to them,
exactly as promised in Luke 4. Now, none of the first five miracles
are as amazing to me as the last. But you say, how is that a miracle? We sit every Sunday and listen
to the gospel preached. The reason I say that is modern
medicine can sometimes restore the sight to the blind. It can
sometimes, with an operation, cure a birth defect that has
kept someone lame from their birth. It can cleanse leprosy,
surely. Sometimes it can help the deaf
to hear. And there are times when we are
told that people die and they use the defibrillators and bring
them back to life. But the one thing that modern
medicine cannot do is bring a lost sinner to Christ. That Gospel
is divinely appointed for that very purpose, to bring lost men
and women to the feet of Christ. Now next we read in Isaiah 61
that Christ came to bind up the brokenhearted. The Lord God promises
in Ezekiel 34 16, I will seek that which was lost and I will
bring again that which was driven away and will bind up that which
was broken and will strengthen that which was sick. Our great
physician binds up our wounded head that head that contains
a carnal mind mentioned in Romans 8 that is enmity toward God,
that is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
But Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2.16 that we now have the mind
of Christ. We have that sound mind spoken
of in 2 Timothy 1.7. And He binds up our heart, that
same heart that is spoken of in Genesis that I mentioned this
morning, from which every imagination is evil from our youth. And He
doesn't just bind up our heart, He actually promises to give
us a heart of flesh to replace our heart of stone. He binds
up our hands, those hands that before were swift to shed innocent
blood, and He now makes us fit to ascend into the hill of our
Lord and stand in His holy place, which is spoken of in Psalm 24.
He binds up our feet, which before used to run to evil and make
haste to shed blood. And he brings us up out of an
horrible pit, we're told, out of the miry clay and sets our
feet upon a rock and establishes our going. He delivers our soul
from death, our eyes from tears, and our feet from falling. He
binds up our eyes, which were once blind but are now unable
to see the glorious light of Christ. And two, is that blind
man healed by Christ to help us see every man clearly. And lastly, He binds up our ears
which before could not hear the glorious gospel of Christ crucified,
but now soak up the preaching of Christ like a sponge. The
Psalms have much to say about this thing of a broken heart,
that heart which Christ said He came to bind up. Psalm 34,
18, that text that we're very familiar with. The Lord is nigh
unto them that are of a broken heart, and saveth such as be
of a contrite spirit. He is nigh unto them of a broken
heart because He knows what they're going through. His heart was
broken more than any man who ever lived when he was separated
from the Father, when he hung on that cross between heaven
and earth. when the Father laid our sins
upon Him. Psalm 51, 17 says, The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God,
Thou wilt not despise. And He does not despise these
sacrifices because He's the one who does the breaking. When He
shows us our vile sinfulness, He gives us a heart of contrition.
And in time, His goodness leads us to repentance. Psalm 147.3
says, He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds. This term bind up means to wrap
with bandages, to care for a wound, which is what our Savior does
to His elect when He begins and in time accomplishes the finished
work of salvation. He wounds and then he heals.
We're told in 1st Samuel 2, 6, the Lord killeth and maketh alive. He bringeth down to the grave
and bringeth up. Exactly in that order. Isaiah
1, 4 through 6. Turn there with me. We're over
in Isaiah. Flip over to chapter 1. This
perfectly describes lost sinners and their rebellion against the
Holy God. Isaiah chapter 1. We'll begin reading in verse
4. A sinful nation, a people laden
with iniquity, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers,
children that are corruptors. They have forsaken the Lord.
They have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger. They are
gone away backward. Why should ye be stricken any
more? Ye will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick,
and the whole heart faint, from the sole of the foot even unto
the head. There is no soundness in it.
but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. They have not been closed,
neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment." Before Christ
came to us where we were, we were like a soldier who had a
deadly disease, and not only that, who had been mortally wounded
on the battlefield. Sin had put us spiritually on
our deathbed, ready to perish. But along comes a great physician,
binds up our wound, heals a broken heart, broken over sin, and applies
the only ointment that will mollify our deadly wounds, the salve
of the righteousness of Christ. This word mollify is not a commonly
used word. We don't usually ever hear it,
but it means to soothe, to soften, to make less harsh. Christ soothes
our wounds when He finally speaks peace to the repentant heart
after giving us the gift of faith to believe. So when this verse
tells us that Christ came to bind up the brokenhearted, it
encompasses all that our merciful Savior does for the wounded lost
sheep that He has sought out, found wounded and wandering in
the wilderness, puts on His shoulders, brings back into the fold, and
nurses back to perfect health. Now the next thing we find in
our text in Isaiah 61, the next reason that Christ came, is to
proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison
to them that are bound. Now when I read this story, my
mind went to stories I've read, movies I've seen, and I'm sure
you have too in different pictures, about how our troops in Europe
during World War II How they liberated the prisoners from
German concentration camps. And our minds simply cannot comprehend
the horrors that these men and women who were held in these
camps went through. Most of you have probably seen
pictures of these captives. They were basically skeletons
covered with skin. Those that had not been executed
swiftly. Their existence, their very existence,
consisted of days of utter, absolute misery, dying of disease and
starvation. Days, weeks, months spent simply
waiting to die. And some had been held captive
for many years, slowly starved to death before finally being
executed. And our minds cannot begin to
even slightly understand the elation, the utter joy, the relief
that these men and women felt when they saw those American
soldiers knowing that their liberation was actually going to take place.
No more suffering, no more sickness, no more starvation, no more sorrow,
no more being surrounded by constant death. But we can relate to what
it was like to be held captive under the horrible conviction
of sin when our merciful Savior began to work in our hearts and
put us in the prison house of conviction. Spiritually, we experience
some of what these prisoners endured, which is described in
the verses that I just read in Isaiah chapter 1. When all hope
was lost and our doom was sure, there being only a matter of
time before we perished under the wrath of a holy God, our
blessed liberator appeared and said, look unto me. and be ye
saved, all the ends of the earth. For I am God and there is none
else. Look and live. Look and live. And unlike most, if not all,
of those Jewish prisoners who were liberated but later died
only to perish under the fierce wrath of our God for eternity,
our liberation is permanent. It's eternal. There is no second
death for those found in Christ. For as He lives forever, and
we are in Him, we shall also live forever, beholding the bliss
of His face and singing His praises throughout eternity." The second
part of that sentence declares that our Lord opens the prison
to them that are bound. Now picture in your mind how
prisoners of old were only kept in the filth and darkness of
the prisons of that time, but they were also many times chained
to the wall, unable to move or do anything to help themselves.
And when your arms and feet are chained to a wall, you literally
cannot relieve yourself of human waste. You simply lay in your
own excrement and filth, which is a spiritual picture of us
before the Lord finally freed us from the disgusting corruption
of sin in which we dwelt our entire lives. And as disgusting
as that picture may sound and that picture may be, it's nothing
compared to the disgust that a holy God feels when He looks
at sin. But as He did for Paul and Silas,
He sends the earthquake of His love. And the chains fall off
our wrists and our feet The prison doors are flung open, and we
walk out of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ. Next
in our text in Isaiah 61, we read another reason Christ was
sent, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Now some of
the commentaries that I read when I was looking into the meaning
of this phrase, including John Gill and Matthew Henry, stated
that one of the meanings had to do with the year of Jubilee,
which happened every 50 years. That year when the priests went
throughout the land blowing trumpets, proclaiming liberty for the slaves,
the slaves were freed, the remission of debts, all debts were forgiven,
and the restoration of possessions to their original families. If
you had lost what you had lost because of poverty, maybe related
to sickness, that was returned to you in the year of jubilee.
Leviticus 25.10 says, And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year,
and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants
thereof. It shall be a jubilee unto you,
and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall
return every man unto his family. John Gill said that this acceptable
year of the Lord was a time which he willed and fixed for the redemption
of his people, in which he showed his goodwill and pleasure unto
sinful men in the gift of his Son to them and for them. Matthew Henry said of this text,
By Christ sinners may be loosed from the bonds of guilt, And
by His Spirit and grace from the bondage of corruption, He
came by the word of His gospel to bring light to those that
sat in darkness, and by the power of His grace to give sight to
those that were blind. And I believe that this also
has to do with the fact that God Himself in human flesh was
on earth among sinful men to proclaim the gospel of His grace
and goodness." That gospel that we just read of in Christ's reply
to the two disciples of John. Next in our text in Isaiah 61,
another reason that our Lord came to earth was to proclaim
the day of vengeance of our God. Now there's many places where
the scriptures speak of God carrying out vengeance. Vengeance is defined
as the infliction of punishment in return for a wrong committed
or for an injury or offense. In Deuteronomy 32, 35, God declares,
to me belongeth vengeance and recompense. Ezekiel 25, 17 says,
I will execute vengeance. upon them with furious rebukes. And they shall know that I am
the Lord when I shall lay my vengeance upon them." And Nahum
1 verse 2 gives a very solemn warning to the ungodly. It says,
God is jealous and the Lord revengeth and is furious. The Lord will
take vengeance on his adversaries and he reserveth wrath for his
enemies. Our God will indeed carry out
vengeance on those who hate Him and on those that have done His
people wrong. Now, I don't know about you, but usually my first
reaction when someone does me wrong is, I'm going to get them
for that. I hate to admit it, but it's
the truth. And I think maybe many of you
may feel the same way. That feeling doesn't last very
long, thankfully. but it's just the weakness of
the flesh. But our Lord tells us in Romans 12, 19, He says,
vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord. And you can be sure of this,
the vengeance that our God will carry out on our enemies far
surpasses anything that we're capable of. Because the vengeance
that we carry out is temporal. The vengeance of our God is eternal.
The vengeance He meets out lasts forever. And then we read in
Isaiah 61 of how our Savior came to offer aid and solace to those
that are sorrowful. He says, He came to comfort all
that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion to give unto
them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment
of praise for the spirit of heaviness. This is something into which
we can truly hope, we can find encouragement, we can find consolation,
that our Lord is called a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief. He suffered depths of sorrow
that we will never know. So He's able to console His people
when they suffer heartache. In the book of Lamentations 1
verse 12, we find that verse that describes the sorrow of
our Savior when He was forsaken of His Father and cried out,
My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? That verse in Lamentations
1 reads, Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by, behold and
see if there be any sorrow, like unto my sorrow, which is done
unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His
fierce anger." When our sins were laid on our Savior, as Bob
read this morning, the Lord inflicted fierce anger upon His Son. That
blackest of all days in the history of this world, when an angry
God poured out His fury on the sins of the elect, when those
sins were laid on Christ. And as there will be no mercy
in the day of judgment, so was there no mercy on that day when
our sins were laid on Christ. He suffered the full brunt of
God's fierce wrath. And no human has ever suffered
the depths of sorrow which our Savior suffered that day. Through
the eons and ages of eternity past, our Savior had enjoyed
the sweetest fellowship with his Father. They were one. But even our Lord, before our
Lord was crucified, he told his disciples, my soul, not my heart,
he said, my soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. So because He's borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows, He's able to comfort His people in
the times of the most extreme heartbreak. Isaiah 51-11, He
promises, Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return and
come with singing unto Zion, and everlasting joy shall be
upon their head. They shall obtain gladness and
joy, and sorrow and mourning shall flee away. What a blessed
promise. Those who once mourned in Zion
will now return with singing. A similar promise is found in
Jeremiah 31, verse 12. Therefore, they shall come and
sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness
of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and the young
of the flock, and the herd. And their soul shall be as a
watered garden, and they shall not sorrow any more at all. He promises the most blessed
of trades. He will give us beauty for ashes. This has to do with the many
references I'm sure you're familiar with in the Old Testament and
times of sorrow and repentance of God's people sitting in sackcloth
and ashes. And many times, those ashes were
heaped upon their head. And I would imagine that it would
be... Well, I don't know if I can imagine
or not, but it would certainly be a sorrowful thing to behold,
and somewhat scary, and I'm sure particularly if those ashes were
mixed with tears of sorrow. But the Lord promises to replace
that ugliness with beauty, when there will be no more weeping
or sorrow, but only joy and singing. And we're going to swap mourning,
He says, for the oil of joy. Now there are many mentions of
oil in the Old Testament. One we find in the book of Esther,
where oil is used in the purification and the beautification of Esther
and the other women as they were going through the process of
purification before they entered into the presence of King Ahasuerus. So does the oil of the Spirit
beautify and purify us to make us acceptable to enter into the
courts of our God. We've already reviewed how oil
was used in the anointing of prophets, and the priests, and
sometimes kings. And our text calls this oil the
oil of joy. Once we've been anointed with
this oil, there is no more sorrow, but only joy, knowing that our
God will do us good forever. Next, we read in Isaiah 61 that
our Lord came to give us the garment of praise for the spirit
of heaviness. What a swap. What a trade. We read in Psalm 69, 20, a verse
that clearly speaks of our Savior when He was made a sacrifice
for sin. It reads, Reproach hath broken
my heart, and I am full of heaviness. And I looked for some to take
pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none. He was full of heaviness because
He not only bore His own sorrow, but as Isaiah 53 tells us, carried
ours as well. That is why He can promise to
swap our spirit of heaviness for a garment of praise, that
pure white garment of the righteousness of Christ, which will be ours
to wear for eternity as we praise our God and Savior for all the
goodness that He has bestowed upon us. And lastly, because
of all that our Lord has done for us, we will be called, in
Isaiah 61, trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that
he might be glorified. Psalm 92, verse 12-14 says, the
righteous shall flourish like the palm tree. He shall grow
like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the
house of the Lord will flourish in the courts of our God. They
shall still bring forth fruits in old age. They shall be fat
and flourishing like a mighty aged oak that still brings forth
its fruit after decades. So our Lord promises that His
people, those who have been planted by the Lord, shall bring forth
fruit as long as they live, fruit of righteousness, fruit of the
Spirit, as listed by Paul in Galatians 5. Those fruits being
love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
meekness, and temperance. In John 15, 13, Christ told his
disciples, after one of the many times he had insulted the Pharisees,
he said, every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted
shall be rooted up. They will not be as those planted
by the Lord, as the seeds that fell on good ground and brought
forth much fruit in the parable that our Lord spoke. Rather,
they'll be like the tares that He speaks of in another parable.
They'll be rooted up and cast into the fire." And all this, everything listed
in these first three verses of Isaiah 61, will be done for one
reason. which is the last thing we read
in this text, the last three words, that our God and Savior
might be glorified, that He will be highly lifted up and greatly
praised by those whom He hath redeemed throughout the ages
of eternity. In Isaiah 42, our God declares,
thus saith the Lord, he that created the heavens and stretched
them out, he that spread forth the earth and that which cometh
out of it, he that giveth bread unto the people upon it and the
spirit to them that walk therein, I the Lord have called thee in
righteousness and I will hold thine hand and will keep thee
and give thee for a covenant of the people for a light to
the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out of prison
the prisoners. And then that said in darkness
out of the prison house, I am the Lord, that is my name, and
my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images. These last three words of Isaiah
3 says that the Lord might be glorified. And our Savior does
everything that He does for the good of His people and the glory
of His name. That name which is above every
name, that One who is known by many names in the Holy Scriptures,
the Angel of the Lord, the Author and Finisher of our faith, the
Good Shepherd, the Mighty God, the Author and Finisher of our
faith, The Chief Cornerstone, Emmanuel, Everlasting Father,
the Friend of Sinners, the Holy One of Israel, the Great I Am,
the Lamb of God, the Light of the World, the Alpha and Omega,
the Rose of Sharon, Wonderful, Counselor, Son of God and Son
of Man, just to name a few. Now, we look forward to the day
that we shall see him as he is and be enabled to praise him
as we ought. And I pray the Lord will use this message to give
some degree of comfort to the brokenhearted among us. And that
above all else, Christ will be glorified. And I thank you for
the privilege of speaking to you, and I pray that the Lord
will bless this to your heart. And I pray for comfort for this
congregation in the days ahead, because I know you're facing
heartbreak. But we have the consolation that
we don't despair as others who have no hope. Because we have
the best hope in any man or woman we can have. We have our hope
in Christ the Lord. Lord bless you.