Sermon Tone Analysis

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace []

Stand for the reading of the word of God []

Last week we started a two part study on the names of Jesus from Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the Messiah.

The names Isaiah gives concerning the Messiah were 600 plus years before Jesus would walk the earth, yet Isaiah spoke as if he saw Jesus himself…I believe through faith it was as if Isaiah did see the Savior…just as real as if you or I 2000 plus years removed from Jesus walking the earth see Him, through the eyes of faith, as if He were here with us now.

We can come to know Jesus and have a personal relationship with Him through faith and through trusting in the word of God.

Today’s names we’ll look at cover a very personal relationship with Jesus, as Everlasting father and prince of peace.

Last week we looked at Jesus as wonderful counselor, might God.

We saw that Jesus is wonderful…we looked at the wonderful birth of Jesus, Jesus wonderful life, we examined the wonderful death of Jesus, and His wonderful coming kingdom that is yet to come in it’s fullness.

We saw Jesus as counselor who made Himself available to mankind by becoming a man.

As counselor He came with all the right answers and still answers our questions today.

The wonderful counselor Jesus came with and gave assurance for hopeless sinners…in a world of hopelessness…Jesus offers assurance of hope in Him.

Jesus as mighty God came and brought those in darkness into His marvelous light.

As mighty God Jesus came as the mighty problem solver…though the world makes promises to offer solutions to problems…Jesus is the only one who can solve our main problem…the problem of sin.

And as mighty God Jesus is mighty to save all those who trust in Him.

This wonderful counselor, Mighty God awaits for us to call upon Him and trust Him with our lives.

Today we look at the last two names Isaiah gives us concerning the nature of Jesus the Messiah…Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

I do believe these two names give us some very personal characteristics of Jesus.

Once again, as we did last week, we’ll look at various other places in the scriptures to develop this.

First is...

Everlasting Father []

For the name everlasting Father we’ll look at , now the first thing we should note when looking at this name are two things this name does not reference.

First, this is not a reference to the 1st person of the Trinity God the Father, you’ll immediately go wrong if you think this is a reference to the Father.

This is a Jesus reference, a reference toward one of the qualities the Messiah has for His people…a fatherly characteristic.

[NT refers to motherly characteristics] not gender based, parental.

Two, everlasting is not a reference to the eternal nature of Jesus, we know Jesus is the eternal Son in nature who was and is and is to come, one without beginning or end…eternal God.

But this everlasting is not referring to that…it has more of a perpetual feel to it i.e. we might better wrap our heads around this title by saying Jesus is father forever.

It’s referencing the never ending nature of His care for His children.

This title has a very personal feel to it, Jesus is like a good father forever, one who does not abandon His children and who never will.

I did a little research on fatherless children and the numbers were staggering.

[US dept. of Census] 43% of US children live without a father

[US Bureau Census] 90% of homeless and runaway children are fatherless.

[US dept. of health and science] 71% of teenage pregnancy comes from children from fatherless homes.

[US census of disease and control] 63% of teenage suicide comes from fatherless homes

[US census of disease and control] 85 % of behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes

US dept. of health and science] 75% of adolescent in substance abuse centers come from fatherless homes.

{National dept of High School] 71% of HS dropouts come from fatherless homes.

[US dept. of corrections] 70% of juveniles in state institutions come from fatherless homes

85% of those in Federal prison come from fatherless homes

i.e. fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to end up in jail and four times as likely to have some sort of emotional and behavioral problems.

That shouldn’t surprise us, the need of a father in one’s live is very very important.

With that being said, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jesus shows fatherly like characteristics toward His own.

We desperately need Jesus in our lives like we need a good father.

But Jesus is so much more than we could ever want in a father…He will never let us down.

paints for us a picture of this fatherly love Jesus has towards us.

Notice verse 13, “as father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him.” here is the nature of true parenthood…every father views their children in a way that is special and different from the way he views other’s children right?

There is something special about how a father has compassion upon his children…and Jesus has that compassion for us as well.

Now I know some of us may not have had the best relationship with their earthly father, so what does it mean for Jesus to show traits of father forever?

1.

He Forgives us completely [;;] Those are some wonderful verses.

Jesus forgives us completely, but even though He forgives completely, that doesn’t mean He ignores or overlooks our sin.

To have Jesus overlooking our sin would make Him some sort of a benevolent Santa Claus… “I know you’ve been naughty all year, but I’m going to give you this anyway because that’s what I do.”

No No No.

God does not overlook our sin…our sin has to be dealt with.

That’s the thing with God’s love, people love to talk about the love of God but what we have to remember is the love of God displayed must be in keeping with the nature of God…and God is holy and pure and can not be in the presence of sin, so to say that God just kind of throw’s out or overlooks the bad things we do is to have a wrong understanding of who God is…sin must be dealt with…and God did deal with sin…by sending His Son Jesus to die.

We may not like to be confronted with this issue of sin…but it must be confronted.

I believe many around Christmas time can easily overlook the “why” Jesus came…he came to die for sin so you and I wouldn’t have to.

Life is full of distractions right, we often, probably not intentionally, fill our lives with distractions so we don’t have to deal with the sin problem.

We get caught up in materialism, careers, hobbies, etc. often times to avoid this sin issue…but we must deal with sin…God dealt with it…we must to.

We can’t get to the forgiveness of sin by only looking at a baby in a manger…we have to follow that baby to becoming a man who was lead like a lamb to the slaughter.

Who, as Isaiah puts it, had all of our iniquity laid upon Him, the punishment for our sin was upon Him.

If we just stop at the pretty little nativity scene and say that’s nice, I feel really good now…we’ve missed the greater purpose…Jesus came to die in our place so that through Him we might be forgiven completely.

As father forever Jesus also...

2. Knows us thoroughly [] [v.14]

The human frame is extremely complex, take for example… The human eye which is enormously complicated itself- it’s a perfect and interrelated system of about 40 individual subsystems, including the retina, pupil, iris, cornea, lens and optic nerve.

For instance, the retina [the back of the eyeball where neurons are converted] has approximately 137 million special cells that respond to light and send messages to the brain.

About 130 million of these cells look like rods and handle the black and white vision.

The other seven million are cone shaped and allow us to see in color.

The retina cells receive light impressions, which are translated to electric pulses and sent to the brain via the optic nerve.

A special section of the brain called the visual cortex interprets the pulses to color, contrast, depth, etc., which allows us to see "pictures" of our world.

Incredibly, the eye, optic nerve and visual cortex are totally separate and distinct subsystems.

Yet, together, they capture, deliver and interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages in a milli-second!

And that’s just our eye...

Yet as complex as our frame is…we have a Savior who knows us thoroughly,.

Notice something in verses 15-16…we have a shelf life, sounds grim but it’s the truth…these bodies will not last forever, many of us here are experiencing that our bodies don’t respond like they once did.

But the wonderful thing is we don’t have to get caught up in that because we have a God who knows our frail state.

We have to face something that is unavoidable…one day we will be gone, and it may be sooner than we’d imagine…so there are three questions that we need to be able to answer before our time is up…that is… who am I?

Where did I come from?

And where am I going?

Can you answer those questions without thinking about them?

Who am I? I’m a child of the one true king Jesus!

I may be many things, husband, father, son, brother, Pastor…but that’s not who I am…I’m a child of the king.

Where did I come from?

I am fearful and wonderfully made by the one true King.

I’m not just a number, or a statistic, I’m made in the image of God, though I am flawed in my humanity…I’m an image bearer…I have a God who knows my name, who knows my frame, my weaknesses, and loves me in spite of them.

Where am I going?

I’m going to be with my God who’s image I bear, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of what Christ has done.

I’m an created by God and for God to have a relationship with God and one day I will be in the glorious presence of God forever.

Because...

3.

He loves me endlessly [] The God whom I ignored and rebelled against in my youth.

The God I chose to disobey and dishonor is the same God who sought after this rebellious man, who sought a personal relationship with me.

who deliberately step into time and took on the form of a man and humbled Himself to the point of death on a cross, He did that for me…and He did that for me and you.

This love of Christ is truly from everlasting to everlasting.

The one who was before time began made Himself subject to time so that you and I who are subject to time might be with Him for all time!

Through faith in Christ.

This everlasting father certainly is also

Prince of peace

There are three dimensions of peace offered through Christ… Peace with God, the peace of God, and peace on earth.

First...

1. Peace with God [] “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” Millions today seek after peace with God.

Some try religious rituals, some try good works, some try giving money or possessions…but with all these efforts of man they still come up wanting.

There will always be this void..they will always have to ask...what rituals work the best?