Merredin Uniting Church

This sermon was preached by Rev David de Kock at Southern Cross Uniting Church on 11/10/2009.

Texts: Isaiah 40:1-5

Its good for us to remind ourselves that all of our faith and life is, and must be, centred around Jesus.

And of course, the life of Jesus is not limited to the thirty three years of His earthly existence nor is it limited to  the three years of His ministry on the earth … we remember that Jesus, who is Lord, is the same, yesterday, today, forever.

Jesus is God come to dwell amongst men … not just as a last minute arrangement to fix something gone wrong … but as part of God’s eternal purpose. It was prophesied from the beginning and continually until it was fulfilled.

It is the church’s task to make that known amongst men and to proclaim salvation and hope in His name.

This text from Isaiah .. written 700 years before Christ .. is God telling us to do just that ..

“Comfort my people” – come close to them and encourage them .. not just soppy words that come from the mouth but have no foundation in the heart ..

We often have that at funerals and tragedies ..

“Oh, I’m so sorry … if there is anything that I could do ..”

Oh yes, the intention is there … but the truth is you don’t know what you can do and in fact there is nothing you can do !

What the bereaved family really wants is to have the deceased return to life … and you can’t do that !

What the hurting person really would like you to do is to take away the pain … and you can’t do that !

So what does God intend us to do when He calls us to comfort His people?

What are we supposed to say?

Now listen to this because it is the only real comfort that you can ever offer …

“Tell them that their hard service has been completed and their sins have been paid for ….”

But that’s no real comfort you say …

That’s true if we don’t see it in the context of Jesus Christ – Lord and Saviour of our lives.

The best comfort I can have is to know that Jesus has set me free from the rewardless striving for salvation. I can never do enough to bring me even one minute fraction of hope in salvation. I have sinned – I am separated from holy God, and no amount of work and service will take away my sin.

And because of my sin I cannot ever know the comfort and healing that God brings.

Jesus has paid for my sins … Romans 6:23 says that “the wages of sin is death”. I do not have life at all until I am no longer earning the wage of my sin – until I yield to God and accept, by faith, that Jesus has fully dealt with my sinful state – that is, with my sin of the past, present and the future.

This is comfort !

No matter what my situation is: my pain, my burden, my bereavement .. I can only know the comfort of God once I understand that my hard service at earning His favour is irrelevant and that He has already paid for my sins.

I hope that you understand this – this is the crux of our faith. This is the very reason why Christ came – God amongst us – that our hope might be in Him not ourselves or in false comforters.

If God has brought light into my darkness, and healing for my pain through his incarnation and atoning work on the cross, then I have no need of other comfort.

But still you might not know the comfort, even if I tell you the words. Even when I speak of God’s promises ..

What’s missing ?

Its faith !

You and I must hear, believing.

This is often the hardest part of the ministry. I can tell you in a sermon and you can think that you believe …

But when the tragedy comes, the pain strikes .. then you don’t want to hear anymore and you know that you only thought that you believed.

Why is this? What prevents the faith, the believing?

Listen to this …

“Every valley shall be raised up,

every mountain and hill made low;

the rough ground shall become level,

the rugged places a plain.”

The problem is that our lives are filled with too many valleys,

too many mountains and hills,

too much rough ground and too many rugged places.

What are these?

The valleys are the places of shadows. The things that we want to hide from God. Its our sin, our guilt and our attempts to keep from God and His people all that we think that we can handle by ourselves.

Our lives are full of them – and as long as we keep God out of those places He will not raise them up – they will remain our places of despair and God will not be able to comfort us with the hope that is there in Jesus.

The mountains are the places of pride. They are our achievements, what we hold up to God and the world and demand that our righteousness be reckoned according to these mountains and hills in our life.

But if there is a mountain, there must be a valley. You cannot claim the mountain and try to deny the valley. The proverb says that “pride come before the fall” – its the inevitability of trying to live the counterfeit life that only has mountains in it – you ultimately have to fall over the edge into the valley whose existence you have denied.

My faith and hope in Jesus and the promises of Scripture will always be uncertain as long as I deny the Spirit access to the valleys and mountains of my life.

God’s comfort will not truly come to me until I am prepared to bow before the Lordship of Jesus and to acknowledge before Him that I have failed in my own endeavours and tried to hide these failures by building mountains alongside of them.

I have hoped that God and people would see the mountains and not the valleys … I might fool people, but I will never fool God.

And so, until I let God into the valleys and mountains of my life that he might lift the valleys and demolish the mountains, I can never really know God’s comfort in my pain, because I cannot truly acknowledge that my hard service has been completed in Him and that He has indeed dealt with all my sin.

Amen.

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