SPEAKER_00 0:00

Uh hey, let's pray and we'll get we'll get rolling. Lord, thank you for today. And uh Lord, I I pray, Father, that you'll protect everybody in the heat. Uh we got a lot, um, a lot of guys work outside, a lot of guys have teams that work outside, and so we just pray, Father, you keep them safe in the heat. Thank you for letting us be here together. Thank you for the crowd today, and all the guys are here. I pray you'll bless us as we go through this time in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, I want to have one more prayer time if you'll do this with me. Um, our partner in ministry, one of our partners in ministry, uh, we've talked about before, Pastor Joel uh Schofield in London. Uh at one of his churches, you know, he's got two churches, kind of uh he's working with there. The one that he's the original pastor of, Stone, and then Ainsford is the church they've taken under and are replanting in the little town outside of London. Uh, they had a they're having vacation Bible school this week, started today, and they had a mission team uh that got jammed up in their traveling and didn't make it there to help them. And so they are really kind of under it and scrambling. And he texted this morning and asked if we would pray with them. And so I wanted to take a minute and just really, if you wouldn't mind, pray with me over that. We've put them on our prayer list, our prayer warriors are praying for them. And so, if you don't mind, let's do that if you'll join me in that. Lord, we thank you for Pastor Joel. We thank you for his leaders there, and we thank you for the work that you're doing in really tough ground to plow there in England. Uh, but you are working there and you are building the church there. I thank you for Pastor Joel's heart for evangelism and pastoring and reaching people in their churches and his commitment to vacation Bible school there to reach folks. And so I pray, Father, that you will really sustain his people, uh, raise up some new hands to help. I pray, Father, that you will help them manage all the details of that. I pray, Father, that you won't hold back on letting kids come and just raise up the church to be able to handle so more kids can hear about Jesus and how much Jesus loves them and how he came to be their savior. I pray, Father, you'll sustain them this week. I pray you'll provide some extra hands. Just give them an excitement about what's going on. I pray that you'll take this moment that Satan probably attacked and meant for evil, and you'll turn it for good, and you'll do something that has your thumbprint, something God-sized in this moment that will stir his heart's church and remind them that you are our God, and that the gospel is the power of God into salvation, and that Jesus made it clear when he told Peter, I will build my church. And that Satan, the gates of hell, his minions, all of that cannot stand in the way of Jesus Christ building his church. And I pray that you'll do that somehow in the way that you do that this week as they are serving. And I pray you'll help us to stay in prayer for them, be faithful partners in ministry and prayer warriors. And Father, we just um we just thank you for them and we pray you'll be with them. We pray this in the name of Jesus and everybody set. Hey, thank you guys for doing that. And if y'all be reminded to pray for Pastor Joel, he has an incredible heart. It really is an awesome thing when you're doing ministry with other churches like that, to be in proximity with someone who has such a heart for their people. It really stirs us and challenges us that we need to have the same kind of heart for people when you're with a guy like Joel in a place that's kind of hard to reach people, and you get a chance to see what it means to have a passion for for lost people in your area. So it's a great, great, great time. Uh okay, you got your sheet there, and here's what I want to talk about as we're going through our chronological reading. We are deep in Isaiah right now, so we're doing a lot of Isaiah, and it's really hard to kind of select what you're gonna pick in a book like that because it's just incredible how much is there. You have the historical part of that, and him speaking to uh Judah and Israel and Sennacherib and all these battles, and you got all that kind of stuff. You have all the prophecies of Jesus and all those sorts of things that are going on. There's just so much in there. It's one of the most quoted books in the New Testament. It's one of the most quoted ones. And so it's an incredible book, and it's just so rich. And so you're trying to figure out what to do with all that. And uh, one of my favorite chapters in all of the Bible is Isaiah 40. And one of my favorite verses is Isaiah 40, 31. I learned that as a kid uh when I was a fourth grader. Uh, you guys remember uh when we used to sports used to happen through church teams and church leagues. Y'all remember those days, right? And so I played basketball and baseball and all that with our church teams and all that. And we had one team that was a little bit higher level, and you had to, they were almost like a like a traveling baseball team, and you had to audition for that team. And usually you played in the same age division for two years, two school grades. And so the second school grade, they let everybody play on it, but for you to make it as a fourth grader, you had to be really good, right? And they played tournaments and they did all that, and their names, they were the War Eagles, and everybody wanted to be on the War Eagles, and they had a team verse, uh Isaiah 40, 31, and they were cool. Uh, that was the first time I ever saw anybody. You were on the very front end of tennis shoes becoming basketball shoes and all that kind of stuff. Uh, this would have been in the late 70s uh when I was at that age playing, and so they were awesome. They had converse, high top Chuck Taylors, they wore red and white uniforms and they had red laces on their uh converse basketball shoes. It was the coolest thing you ever wanted to be a part of. The uh the coach was Dr. Van Snyder, he was a pediatrician and one of the greatest guys I've ever had the honor to have as a role model. And he was awesome, man. Everybody loved him. He was a deacon of our church and Sunday school teacher. He loved kids, he was highly invested in kids, and so everybody wanted to play for the War Eagles. And to play for the War Eagles, you had to memorize Isaiah 40, 31, and it was our theme verse. And so it became one of those things that was in my in my life, and there's a lot in this chapter we'll look at in a minute, related to creation and God is creator. And so those formative things uh in our childhood carry often through our lives. And so when I was in Cabot, First Baptist Cabot, um, we Cabot, as you know, is a bedroom community. It functions different than Fort Smith does. Fort Smith functions is like a capital city type deal. I mean, you got manufacturing and you know everything in the world here. Cabot is a huge Walmart, lots and lots of neighborhoods and schools, and that's what Cabot is. There's nothing else but that. And the seven years that I was the pastor there, the first four years in a row, they opened a brand new elementary school at 100% capacity. Four years in a row. They also built a new uh larger junior high, uh the junior high north, and they then built a ninth grade academy because they had so many students and it was growing so fast. Everything was all that. So, as we were pastoring and all that, children's ministry had to be a major focus of what we were doing. And for Janet and I, our kids were little, and that was always our thing anyway. So we started a children's church there, and we called it Genesis Lab. And the foundational truth that we were teaching in that was God is the creator. Because when you're teaching children, there are certain fundamental existential truths that you need to ground them in as a part of their learning what spiritual life looks like. And so one of the most fundamental things that we can teach children is God is the creator. God is the creator, and there's a lot of things that flow from that. If God is the creator, when you tell a child God loves you and he created you and he has a plan for your life, that is an incredibly significant truth for a child, and it's built on the premise that God is the creator and he can do that. When you tell a kid why you need to be saved, all of us are sinners and falling short of God's glory, as we quote that Romans from the Romans road. Well, you beg the question, well, then why is that the standard? Why is it God's glory? Or why isn't it good enough? Why can't I be good enough to earn my salvation? Well, because if God is the creator and this is his creation, then he has the right to determine what is sin, what is right, and what is wrong, and what the standards are. Because he's God, because he's a creator. And then when you start to give salvation that Jesus stepped out of heaven and died on the cross, rose again, conquering death and sin, and literal kids are teaching them, well, how do we come back to life? Like that doesn't happen. How's that happen? Well, he is the creator, God, and the author of life. And he is the only one who can do that. And there's so many fundamental truths. And we also know kids are fascinated with dinosaurs, and when did that happen? And you know, all that kind of stuff. We know that Satan has been attacking the character of God since the Garden of Eden. And one of those major attacks is that God is the creator. If he can get people to dismiss God as the creator, then they get to dismiss scripture and all of the gospel. That's why we have these lifelong throughout human history arguments about science versus religion and people trying to disprove God and all this other kind of stuff. That's why evolution is a thing. Like if you just step back from the politics and the sin and the man's humanity and you know, humanism and all, if you step back from all that, there's nobody in their right mind who would ever believe that as a thing. It's just idiotic. I mean, it's literally just idiotic. And now, virtually every principle on which Darwin created his theory of evolution have all been disproven. So, like, you couldn't even write that now. But we still have PhDs and everybody else who are arguing, that's what we do, all this kind of stuff. Why? Why does that go on in human existence? Because Satan's attack on God as the creator, and so it starts as children, but it does not stop as adults. It gets elevated to a whole new intellectual level and becomes a justification that somebody buys into that I don't have to follow God as creator. But in the same way that that truth of God as the creator is fundamental for children, it is fundamental in our lives as well. Even if we're you got saved and you're a believer and now you're a follower of Jesus, it still comes into play in almost every choice of faith that we make. And so when you read Isaiah 40, there are a lot of themes through this incredibly rich chapter. It is an incredible chapter. And I is one of my favorite chapters in Scripture. But one of those themes is if you take the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, that's all God's pronouncement of judgment on Israel for their sin. Like you just track all that through. But beginning in chapter 40, it turns on its head, and now it becomes the prophecies of God's restoration and redemption and all of that. And chapter 40 is the fulcrum on which that turns. And so when he's now saying, I'm going to restore Jerusalem and this is my redemption for my people, and all of that, one of the ways that he tries to prove to his children in the nation of Israel that this is real and his promises will come to pass, is he builds that on the strength of the truth that he is the creator God. And as the creator God, he can accomplish that. As the creator God, because he has the ability to accomplish it, then they need to trust in him and trust that he will accomplish what he promised. And it's an incredible theme that's driven through this. And so I've kind of wanted to take a minute and just dive into this because it was here, and because I really do think it applies to us as grown men every bit as much as it does to third graders learning about it, right? So God is creator and why it matters. Here's what I'm going to dive into this, where he pulls this argument and he is building a foundation for his promise of restoring Israel and his promise of providing a redeemer, the Messiah, is built on his capacity as creator God to do everything that he's promised. And so here's what he says. Oh, that's the wrong, we got the wrong chapter here. I'm sorry. I confused Charlene this morning. Let me read it to you. That's 41. Let me read it to you in 40. Here's what we're doing. He says, um, to whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness compare with him God? An idol. He's a rhetorical question. A craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and casts it for silver chains. He who is too impoverished for an offering, in other words, he can't afford to make it out of gold, he chooses wood that will not rot, and he seeks out a skillful craftsman to set up an idol that will not move, or will not change, or will not rot. That's this rhetorical picture of this is what a false God is, what an idol looks like. Then he says in verse 21, Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. It's he who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to dwell in, who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth when he blows on them and they wither and the tempest carries them off like stubble. And if you look at the history of mankind and the rise and fall of nations, that is exactly what goes on right there. And then he says, verse 25, To whom then will you compare me that I should be like him, says the Holy One? Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these, he who brings out their host by number, calling them by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power, not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. And so he builds this incredible picture on of his faithfulness in being able to redeem his people, to hear their cries, to restore them, to bring a redeemer. And in the first part of chapter 40, there are prophecies of Jesus, the Redeemer. And all of that can happen because he's the creator God of the universe. And if he's the creator God of the universe, he can do anything and everything he sets his mind to. And so so often it's important for us as we step back, making choices of faith, as we are setting direction in our lives, as we're determining whether I'm going to make this choice of faith where I can trust God's promise or not. Too often we gloss over the fact that these promises are written to us by the Creator, God of the universe. And so it's important that we recognize as God is creator. You must recognize who God is as creator in order to recognize who God is. You cannot understand who the person of God is if you don't understand that He made all of this and it is all His and He is omnipotent and He is omniscient and He is omnipresent in all of it as its creator. You cannot understand who God is. How can you truly understand the depth and the power of John 3.16 if you don't understand God is creator? For God so loved the world that he sent his only son. Who can do that but the creator God of the universe and the author of life? And what does it mean if the creator God of the universe who created all of this and determines that is sin, and that sin I'm gonna judge by my holiness, he is the one who loves us so much that he sent his own son into the world to pay the price for our sins, that whosoever believes in him will never perish but have everlasting life. When you ask the question, how do you know you can't lose your salvation? How do you know that's not gonna last forever and all that kind of stuff? Because the creator, God of the universe, the author of all life, is the one who determined, I'm going to give you eternal life through the sacrifice of Jesus to pay the price for our sins, to be raised again to conquer death and sin. It's incredible when you start to think about what it means to us who God is when we acknowledge Him as God. You cannot acknowledge who Jesus is without understanding his deity and part of the Trinity. I mean, the Bible makes it clear that Jesus is the Creator. John chapter 1, his name for Jesus, the name that he used when he was describing Jesus in the Gospel of John and in his letters in John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, he says this in John chapter 1. You know this scripture. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and all things were created by him and through him. It is clear that the gospel is founded on the truth, that Jesus is the Son of God and the promised Messiah. In Colossians, it says that all things were made by him and through him and for him. And all things consist by him. In other words, atoms don't explode and separate, not because of some electrical charge business and all of that. Ultimately, it happens because everything consists through the person of the creator God, Jesus, who holds everything together and makes it all live. He is the author of life. He is the author of new life. And without focusing on God as creator, you cannot really understand the gospel or who God is or who Jesus is. And so here when he is telling them, I hear your cries, I know that you're crying out in judgment, and you're going to face this judgment because you sinned, but I've promised to bring you redemption, and I need you to know, as bad as you think it is, I will accomplish it. I hear your cries. I have not walked away from you. I can restore you and bring you back as I've promised. I can send you the Messiah Redeemer that I promised. I can do that because who is greater than me? I am the creator God of the universe. And I've created it all and I see it all and I own it all. And so he literally builds the foundation of his ability to accomplish his promise by reintroducing them to himself as the creator God of the universe. Have you not heard? Have you not heard or known? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. And so acknowledging him as creator is how we know who he is. And then you go from that to the next logical step in this. Recognizing God as creator means that he can more than handle everything that we face in our lives. When I come to make a difficult decision, or I'm in a tough time, or I'm in a struggle, or whatever it is, how do I know that God can carry me through that? Well, if You know who God is, then you know God is the creator God of the universe. And He can handle it. Nothing is greater than Him. And He literally builds His ability to meet those promises on His character and person as creator, which means He has the power. Listen to what it says. The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. Therefore, he does not faint or grow weary. Then it says, His understanding is unsearchable. And so he knows what we need. He knows greater than what we need. He knows what's around the corner. He knows in his power that there is nothing that can phase him and his plan and his work in the lives of his people and everything else. And so we face these times where we panic and we take back control of our life and we do all this kind of stuff. How much less would we do that if we spent more time acknowledging God as the creator God of the universe? Pastor Raggrup used to tell us all the time, warn us, he said, listen, it's great. We paint God as a heavenly father, and it's great. Scripture does that, and we need to know that. And there are people who don't have good images of dads. And so when you see God as our heavenly father and all of that, it's important and it's vital and impacts us. You know, uh, every good gift and every perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights in whom there is no shadow of turning. When they ask Jesus in Luke 11, teach us how to pray, and he teaches them how to pray, keep knocking, keep asking, all that. And he says, if you as earthly fathers know how to give your kids good gifts, how do you think that your heavenly father is going to be? Right? So he paints that picture. But Dr. Rogers would say, you can't just do the one. Or we end up creating this lesser picture of God. He's like this gentle, grandfatherly, you know, whatever kind of a deal and that sort of thing. And in some ways, we actually emasculate the full orbed picture of God. Where does the judgment come in? Where does the right to judge? Where does the power of mercy and grace forgiving come from if we don't have the God of the universe? Where does the awe of God come in? When Proverbs says, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Now that's not afraid, like, you know, I'm terrified of this and I'm gonna, you know, get run over if I cross the street right here. It's not the kind of terror that you get when your wife says, Does this dress make me look fat? That's terror. That's not the same word we're looking at here. We're looking at this awe from I have seen and understood as much as my mind can experience that God is so omnipotent, He spoke all of this into being. Now I'm in awe. Now I'm in a reverent fear of who God is. I'm going to obey, I'm going to surrender, I'm going to follow because that's who God is. And even the pictures of God as a heavenly father are greater when you have the picture of God as the creator God of the universe. That He would be that and is that, and then would love us as a Father loves us. It's an even greater picture of who God is. And it calls us to recognize He can more than handle all these things. He does not grow weary. He does not lose strength. There is nothing beyond what he can understand. His ways are unsearchable. And so whatever it is that I'm facing, whatever it is that I'm walking through, whatever challenge I think I have in front of me, it pales in comparison to the wisdom and might of the creator God of the universe, who is my heavenly Father, when I know him that way through giving my life to Jesus as Savior and Lord. And then finally, that leads to the final conclusion. It deepens our faith to trust in his provision and his protection. Now, all of a sudden, his provision for us, his protecting us, his guiding us, it has a whole nother level of power that we can rest in when we have started with the understanding that God is the creator, God of the universe. Now listen how he builds down to this last point. He begins chapter 40 by saying, listen, there's going to be a salvation. I'm going to restore Jerusalem. I'm going to bring you back. He gives the prophecies of Jesus, the one who would come, the verse that we know about John the Baptist, there's the voice of one crying in the wilderness, making the way. That comes at the beginning of Isaiah 40. You get all of that. And then he builds this. I am the creator God of the universe, and I have this strength, and I never grow weary, and all of that, and I can accomplish all these things. You go make these false gods in your life. If you make them with gold, it still doesn't matter. If you can't do that, you make them with wood, it doesn't matter. None of those work. They cannot compare to me. Have you not known from the beginning of time that I am the creator God of the universe? And listen how it ends. The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. Now listen to this last. He gives, he, that God, gives power to the faint. And to him who has no might, that God increases his strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary. It doesn't matter if you're 30 in the prime of life. You will run out of physical strength. And young men shall fall exhausted. But they who wait for the Lord, he shall renew their strength. They will mount up with wings as eagles. They will run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. Why? Because the Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. So when we start with that premise that the promises of God were made by the creator God of the universe, who created everything to the ends of the earth and never faints or grow weary, then we know He can handle everything, and we know He will have everything handle everything. And we can place our trust in His promises. Let me pray for you. Lord, thank you for today. I thank you for the beauty of this chapter. Lord, I'm sorry I don't have the eloquence to explain and depth, pull the depths of the riches out of this chapter. But Lord, I pray that you'll stir these men's hearts to go read it so that the Holy Spirit can do that in their life. I pray you'll give them some time where they just sit down for a few minutes with this inspired scripture that you wrote and crafted in this way. And I pray it'll be an encouragement to them. I pray it'll call all of us to not take for granted the reality and the truth of you as Creator and what that means in our lives as you step into our lives, as you save us, as you walk with us, as you provide for us, as you direct us, as you correct us to get us back on path. All of those things, what they mean in our lives. I pray, Father, that you'll just use this time to stir them to get into your word so that the Holy Spirit can really speak to their hearts in the way only you can. Just as this chapter says at the beginning, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of God lasts forever. I pray that everlasting eternal quality, beauty, depth, and meaning that's in this chapter will speak to their hearts today. We thank you, most of all, for the gift of salvation prophesied here, accomplished in the person of Jesus. We thank you for salvation in his name. And everybody said hey, you guys have a great day.