Hope for Dark Days

Well, good morning and welcome. My name is Mark, one of the TLC pastors, and we're so glad that you're with us here on this wet Sunday morning. Grateful for a little bit rain here in the Santa Cruz area, or if you're somewhere else on planet Earth, I hope it's a great day for you as well.

We're in the second week of our Advent series, "A Thrill of Hope," and if you missed last weekend or you fell asleep, René had a great message. You owe it to yourself to go to our website, check it out, and I also want to thank René for a message he gave several years ago that informed some of my thinking today.

We're in Isaiah 9, and it's a promise, a passage that promises hope in dark days, and after this year, I think we can all agree, we are in need of a hope infusion. It reminds me of a time when I was a little boy. Here's what I mean by that. I was born in 1963, and so for the first 10 years of my life, we were at war in Vietnam, and I can still remember, like with the pandemic, every night there would be the nightly news. Walter Cronkite would come on and give updates on the war and talk about how many American soldiers had died, and then locally, the local networks would give the names of soldiers from our area who had died in combat.

What made this very personal to me as a young boy is that my uncle Tony was a soldier fighting. He was a paratrooper. They'd drop him into the jungles. They'd fight their way out. He did two tours there, and I lived with this abiding fear that a night would come, and I would see my uncle Tony's name on the TV screen, and so it filled me with this ongoing anxiety.

Not only that, but this was when we had the mandatory military draft at 18 years old for males, and I can distinctly remember on my ninth birthday thinking to myself, "Well, that didn't take long. I'm halfway to 18," and bear in mind, as a kid, this war was all I'd ever known, and it just seemed like it was going to go on forever. Kind of feels like this year, right, in this pandemic. It is a grind that we find ourselves in.

In fact, last weekend, René shared a study, a survey, that indicated that 48 percent of Americans are feeling down, depressed, or hopeless, and get this, that study was taken at the beginning of June of this year. Yeah, June. Before the lightning complex fire here in the Santa Cruz Mountains did so much damage, and thousands more like it tore through the western United States. It's before the COVID surge that we're seeing right now, before the social and political divisions in our country got even deeper, as if that was even possible.

I mean, six months ago, half of us were feeling hopeless. Well, how about now? I mean, maybe you, like so many people, you find yourself struggling to maintain hope. Maybe you feel like a prisoner in your own home, isolated, and lonely, and discouraged. Well, I'm here today to remind you that there is still hope in dark days. In fact, if there was ever a time for us to affirm this, it's right now during Advent.

I mean, let's face it, probably for many of us in years past, Advent is just, you know, one more Christmas tradition. You know, you read some verses, check, light a candle, check, you know, kind of like a little pit stop in an otherwise very busy Christmas season. But this year, man, it's different. Every time we light a candle on the weekend, it's a declaration. We're affirming with Christians all around the world that this darkness will not last.

Now, do you believe this? And not as a result of, you know, positive thinking or even wishful thinking, but because the light of the world has come and He is going to return. Well, the Scripture that we heard today in the Advent reading is part of this amazing, grand story of God's salvation plan unfolding on earth. And it is a story that if you get caught up in it and you find your place in it, it will change your life and it will give you unshakable hope.

So let's look at our passage today in Isaiah 9, verse 2 reads this. It says, "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in deep darkness, a light has dawned." Now, again, familiar verse, but what is it talking about? You know, who are these people and what do they have to do with you and with me? Well, let's unpack this a little bit.

This passage of Isaiah is really about three things. It's about a problem, it's about a promise, and it's about a person. So let's start with the problem. The people of Israel and specifically the 10 tribes in the north are living in the darkest days imaginable. And in the verses leading into chapter 9, if you just roll back two more verses into the end of chapter 8, verses 21 and 29, look what it says.

It says, "Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land. When they are famished, they will become enraged, and looking upward will curse their king and their God." So remember, they are cursing their God. It's so dark, it's so bad, but it goes on. It says, "Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom." You're getting the picture here? "And they will be thrust into utter darkness." Terrible, terrible times.

And Isaiah is describing the Assyrian conquest of Israel, something that played out just as he said it would. And Israel was no match for the Assyrian army. They were merciless. Those that didn't die were scattered refugees. They lost everything. They were just crushed, broken hearted. And so in response, they cursed their king. And why? Because their king, like so many before him, had perpetuated this legacy of idolatry and even included terrible things like human sacrifice, sacrificing their own children and the people joined in with him.

And so they curse him for his influence. But they also curse God because God used the Assyrians to humble them. Well, the cool thing is that God doesn't curse them back. Instead, in the face of their problem, he gives them the promise that the darkness will not last forever. In chapter 9, verse 1, it says, "Nevertheless," this is such a great word, don't miss this, "Nevertheless, while they're cursing him, nevertheless, he's not going to abandon them. There will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.

In the past, he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali," that's talking about northern Israel. "But in the future, he will honor Galilee of the nations. By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of deep darkness. A light has dawned." Okay, what is that talking about? What is this, you know, way of the sea beyond the Jordan and the Galilee of the Gentiles?

Well, check this out because this is just absolutely fascinating. Here's a map of the Middle East and in Bible times, Rome, Greece, Persia, Egypt are among the superpowers in this area and they built a road along really the edge of the Mediterranean here on the eastern side, a trade route so that they could trade between each other. Well, there's one little spot where it gets really narrow in passing along this road. It's right here where there's somewhat of a bottleneck and if you can control this spot, which is called by the way of the sea or the Via Maris for obvious reason, it just wraps right around the Mediterranean here, but if you can control this spot right here, you pretty much control the whole trade route.

And so this is very competitive territory here. And so let's zoom in just a little bit closer on where this bottleneck is. Here is the northern coast of a lake known as the Sea of Galilee and on the other side there's a Galilee Mountains and here's the Via Maris or the way of the sea. It goes right along the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee and it is this tight little spot that all of these empires vie for control. You know, one empire has it for a while and then they get defeated and another one moves in and you can see why this would be such a strategic place to control.

And so over the years if you live here, you know, you're living in a war zone and then the locals, I mean, they're just getting beaten to a pulp in the process. But that's why, by the way, to this day you can still find ruins, pagan temples, Greek, Roman, Egyptian ruins because they all occupied this area and for this reason the Jews who are headquartered down in Jerusalem, they despise this place. They despise the place, they despise the people because they see it as defiled, it's been polluted by all of this pagan influence and so they call it the Land of Darkness.

But here's where it gets so cool because right here on this little choke point there's a little city called Capernaum. You've probably heard of it and the reason you've heard of it is because this becomes, right here in Capernaum, becomes the center of ministry for Jesus right here in Galilee. He lives right in Capernaum. That's his hometown and why is it so important? Because there's really no better spot in the whole world to which to influence the rest of the world. Everybody travels through here.

I mean the world washes up on your doorstep every day because of this trade route, the Via Morris. It's so brilliant how God would orchestrate this as part of his grand plan and not only that but Isaiah who's talking about this centuries earlier, he's predicting where this light will be seen, where it will dawn, where the Messiah will emerge, where he will live down to the street that he will live on. It's just incredible and it's so encouraging how God works in ways we don't even understand at the moment and yet his plans are unfolding.

And there's more because Isaiah not only talks about the place that the Messiah would rise up in fulfillment of his promise, God's promise, but he talks about the kind of person that he will be like. Verse 6 in Isaiah says, "For unto us a child is born." To us a son is given and let's stop there for a moment because the first thing we learn about the Messiah is that he will enter the world as a baby, right? A child. Not kind of descend down out of heaven with peals of thunder and lightning and be like an angel or some celestial being. He will be a fully human child but there will be something different about this child.

It says he will be the Messiah and the government will be on his shoulders and watch this, he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. These are four descriptions of Jesus the Messiah. They're four things that are about him that can give us so much hope today but this is where it becomes, you know, our part. This is where it brings us to a response because, you know, these truths, they call for a response.

Like what are you going to do with what this says about Jesus? If you just ignore it then they're just words but if you lean into it it will change your life and your hope will soar. If that's what you want today, if that's what you need today, then I want to give you four questions to ask yourself to help us all apply this and make this a reality in our lives on a deep, deep level.

The first question is this, "Am I willing to listen to my wonderful counselor?" Not just hear him but am I willing to listen because the word wonderful right here in Hebrew it means, you know, beyond understanding, too wondrous for words, supernatural. It's the kind of stuff that only God can do and it says that he'll have this wondrous God-like ability to be a counselor and that doesn't mean he's our therapist although he understands everything there is to know about it.

Counselor here means one who instructs and so the Messiah Jesus, he instructs us with perfect wisdom and that's so encouraging because if you think about it that means he came to help people with problems. People who need his instruction, you know, lost sheep who need a shepherd but the question is, "Am I willing to listen?" I mean, do I really want to change?

Here's what I mean by that. Reminds me of a story in John's Gospel, chapter 5, where Jesus comes across this man who's been camped out by this pool. The pool is thought to have healing powers and this guy has been camped out there for 38 years, yeah, 38 years and he's disabled and Jesus comes up to him and says something that at first seems really, really insensitive because Jesus looks in the eye and says, "Do you want to be healed?" What do you mean, do I want to be healed? Look at me.

But here's the thing, Jesus is putting his finger on something deeper than this man's problem. At the root of his heart there's something else going on. Do you want to be healed? Because here's the thing, sometimes we can become so comfortable at home, at least accustomed to our problems because they're familiar, we know what to expect, it's just what becomes normal for us.

We become so at home in our problems that we prefer them over what God might do in our lives because we're not exactly sure what that might be. We would say his ways are good but at times they are mysterious to us. Well, it reminds me of another guy named Augustine. Augustine was one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church. I mean, after the Apostle Paul there's Augustine. He had a towering, towering intellect but one of his most memorable lines is really actually very down to earth.

As a younger man Augustine was somewhat of a womanizer and so as God is starting to get a hold of his life he says that he would pray this, he would say, "Lord, make me chaste but not yet." It's totally honest and it touches on the suspicion that if I were to really and truly give myself over to the Lord, like here's the keys Lord, have your way with me, if I do that he's going to make me miserable.

You know, he's going to meddle in my relationships, my finances, he's going to maybe change things in my personal life that I become quite at home with but I want you to think about this. Think about who Jesus is. Being human, Jesus knows exactly how I feel in these areas. He knows he gets it. He understands our hurts and our hang-ups, even our temptations and yet being divine Jesus knows exactly what I need. He is our wonderful counselor.

In fact, I have a verse that illuminates this even further in Psalm 32:8. The Lord says this, "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my," what? "My vindictive eye, my judgmental eye." No, my loving eye on you. It's about God's love saturating every area of our lives, including those dark places. So I encourage you this morning to ask yourself honestly, honestly, am I willing to listen to my wonderful counselor?

The second question is this, "Where do I need to rely on my mighty God?" Where do I need to rely on my mighty God? Okay, that's a trick question because if you think about it, is there any area of life where we don't need to rely on God's power? But yeah, I ask it that way because if you're like me, sometimes I have a tendency to only go to God for the big stuff.

You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like that show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" from years back where if you got stumped on something, you could phone a friend, you remember that? And every once in a while, there'd be like a guy call a friend and be like, he'd go, "What's the answer?" And his friend would be like, "Oh, dude, I have no idea, but thanks for calling me, bro." You know, God doesn't do that to us.

But how many of us when the, it's only when the going gets rough, we're willing to say, "Help me, Jesus. I'm ready to rely on you." But all the other times, you know, it's like, "Yeah, I'm good. I got this. I can be the kind of husband you call me to be. I can be the best father, neighbor, coworker, friend. You know, I'm good, Jesus. So, you know, you can just go ahead and, you know, go ahead and, you know, run the universe and do all the God things you do. And, you know, if I get in a pinch, I'll give you a ring." That's not how we're called to live.

In Matthew 5, Jesus preached, "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek." In other words, He's saying, "These are the people who rely on My power, and these are the people who live in My power." It's why I love my friends in recovery because, you know, they get this. They model this. They live this out. And if you think about it, we're all the same. I mean, don't fool yourself. We are all synaholics.

And so, your spiritual growth, my spiritual growth, is directly tied to our spiritual dependency. They just go hand in hand. So, again, ask yourself, "Where do I need to rely on my mighty God?" In fact, not just to forgive you, but to transform you. So, I want to invite you to do this. I want you to think about something in your life that you're struggling with. In fact, you've been struggling with it for some time.

And here's what I want to say about that thing. You got it in your mind? Okay. You don't have the power. You don't have the power to overcome it. That's why you're still struggling with it. How about in that area, daily, maybe hourly, moment by moment I say, "Lord, I don't have the power, but I want to rely on You, be my mighty God." I know people who every single day of their life, they get on their knees and they pray that God will overcome a struggle that they've had in their lives because they know they have to rely on Him to that level.

Yet, the next question that has to do with God's transformation in their life is this third one. It's really related to the first two. And it goes like this. "How do I need to trust my everlasting Father? How do I need to trust Him?" Jesus is called "Everlasting Father" here because it's like a king who's called the Father of his people, the provider of his people. And also, it's because it's through Jesus that we become the sons and daughters of God.

But maybe the word "Father" triggers you. Perhaps your dad died when you were young or he was otherwise, you know, too busy, unavailable to you. Maybe he was impossible to please, just never satisfied or maybe he was even abusive. If that's you, I can understand how this would be a difficult concept, this father concept because of that deep wound. But just stop for a moment.

Instead of thinking about your dad and the way that he may have disappointed you, I want you to think about Jesus for a moment. Think about how he entered this world as Mary's, you know, little baby, just completely fragile. And yet in his human fragility, he did the most powerful act of love ever. He paid for the sins of the world. And why? Because he loves us.

God made himself vulnerable to save you, to save me. And he experienced real pain, suffering and death. Again, for us? I mean, this means that God loves you like the best father in the universe. And you know what? That's exactly what he is. So let me ask you, what is one step that you can take towards trusting him today?

For example, let me suggest this one. And again, I have to acknowledge that I have an awesome dad. And so this is, it's not hard for me to conceive of God as a loving father. I was given a picture of that in my own dad. But I know that not all of us are blessed in that way. And if that's you, can I encourage you to take just one step? Rather than seeing God through the lens of your father, your earthly father, what if you were to ask him, ask God to help you set that lens aside and to see him for who he truly is?

To say, Lord, bring clarity where I have confusion. Bring healing where I have hurts. And along these lines, fourth question to ask as we make this a reality in our lives is, where do I need to receive the Prince of Peace? It all starts in our hearts. And yet one of the things that robs our peace even more than our hurts or our circumstances is guilt and shame. That is the number one peace robber as far as I can tell.

And maybe that guilt that you carry is robbing you of your peace today. You don't have to live that way. You could have the Prince of Peace settle that issue for you once and for all. It says in Romans 5:1, we have peace with God through Jesus, through the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, Jesus paid the penalty for our sins. That is the most amazing gift that we will ever receive. Peace with God, peace with ourselves, our past.

And from there, it overflows into all other relationships, our families, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors, our community and beyond. And it's not perfect, but it's real, it's substantial, and it is a, it's a foretaste, a glimpse of what's to come when the Prince of Peace returns and governs the world in perfect peace.

Well, let me end with this final question. Because if this was all part of God's plan, if the Prince of Peace, if the Messiah came to do all of this, you know, and it starts not someday, but now, why is it that sometimes I don't feel led by God? How come sometimes, you know, I don't feel confident in His power or calm in His fatherly embrace? I mean, how can I experience this? Again, not just someday, but today.

Well, I think that the secret is in this often overlooked phrase that we saw earlier, and the government will be on His shoulders. Again, one day He will govern the world in perfect peace, but why wait for that? Why not affirm His rule, His authority in your life right now? I mean, really the key to all of this is that I allow God to rule in my life.

And this is so important. There's so much distraction when it comes to just government, right? I mean, governments fight and they contest for power, especially here, as we've seen in recent days and months. It's become our national obsession, but don't let that distract you from affirming who is the ruler of your own heart.

I mean, because listen, there's really two options here. We're all going to kind of go through the season together, and during this Christmas time, you're going to see the words, "Wonderful Counselor," "Mighty God," "Everlasting Father," and "Prince of Peace" all over the place. It's going to be plastered on cards, on ornaments, on sweatshirts, even, yes, on COVID-19 masks.

And it can all just amount to words, to wallpaper, backdrop of the season, or these can be living vital realities in our lives because there are real living truths in our hearts. Remember, "For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace." May this fill your heart with hope, even in dark days.

Would you pray with me right now? "Gracious Heavenly Father, we're overwhelmed with gratitude for all that you intend for us, for how through the arc of history you have been working through nations and events and people and places to bring the light of the world to us. And so, Lord, we thank you for the reminder of that that we have, especially this season.

Thank you for sending your Son, Jesus Christ, the Messiah into this dark and desperate world, and not just to the world, Lord, but again, to each one of us. And, Lord, I just want to mention to those who are watching or listening to this right now, but they've never received the Prince of Peace into their hearts. But, Lord, today they do. They want to rely on you. They want to listen to you. They want to trust you.

If that's you, you can just say, "Jesus, count me in. Thank you for coming and dying for my sins. And now, Lord, I want you to be the King of my heart. I put the government of my life on your shoulders. And, Lord, for all of us, please I ask that you rekindle our hope today as we reaffirm your rule in our hearts. And, Lord, again, we praise you for being such a good and gracious God. We pray this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Amen.