Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Isaiah 7:1-17

N:

Opening

Welcome to Family Worship here at Eastern Hills on this wonderful holiday weekend.

I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor, and I don’t know about you, but I have been reminded this weekend of just how much I have to be thankful for that I ordinarily take for granted.

Yes, the last year and a half has been difficult, but God has never left His throne, never taken a break or a nap, and has never been out of control, even though for us it feels like things are that way sometimes.

Praise the Lord for His faithfulness!

If you weren’t able to be here last Sunday morning, I just want to encourage you to go back and watch the message that we were able to hear from missionary Kit Klein, who shared about the missionary task that we are each and all a part of as believers in this world.

It was a great Sunday, and a great meal afterwards.

I want to thank Deanna Chadwick, our church family services chairperson, and the team that she put together for our churchwide Thanksgiving meal.

It was a wonderful time of fellowship and food, and I’m blessed to have been a part of it.

Announcements

Back in June of this year, we had a special service recognizing the ministry of our Pastor Emeritus Larry Miller and his wife Camille as they retired from their respective formal positions within the ministry of Eastern Hills.

For those of you who have become a part of the Eastern Hills family since that time, Larry served as our senior pastor from 1995 to 2018, and then as part-time paid Pastor Emeritus until the end of 2020.

Camille worked with Eastern Hills Christian Academy beginning in 1997, first as a teacher and then as an administrator, retiring at the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

We took up a collection from the church and the school in order to bless them and say thank you for their combined 48 years of service to this fellowship and Academy.

The purpose of the collection was to help them to put in wood laminate flooring throughout their house, as Larry is confined to a motorized chair now, and any transitions make getting around difficult for him.

Well, I was able to go over and see the finished product the week before Thanksgiving, and the floors look incredible!

Here are some pictures.

You might notice in the pictures that there is a transition board at the entrance to the hallway from the living room, but any of those have since been removed and now are level with the rest of the floor.

Larry said his house now is like driving on glass, and I know both Larry and Camille are incredibly appreciative of your generosity, church.

And the total amount given was almost exactly what they needed!

Thank you, church, for the love that you show to your pastors through your gifts, your prayers, and your encouragement.

We can’t say that enough.

Last Sunday was the last day that you could turn in Operation Christmas Child boxes, and you remember how full the stage was with them last Sunday.

Well, the total is in, and Eastern Hills delivered 1,191 Operation Christmas Child boxes to Samaritan’s Purse this week!

Thanks so much, Eastern Hills Family, for giving to help kids around the world experience the love of Christ and receive a Christmas gift.

And thanks to the Delaneys for their year-round hard work with that ministry, and thanks to all those who have helped them throughout the year.

Week of Prayer for International Missions this week, you can grab and information sheet from the Get Connected Table in the foyer.

Dessert Fellowships Monday @ Clarks, Torres, and Wrights @ 7PM.

Please RSVP to the home you’ll visit.

Day of Prayer all day Wednesday here in the prayer room, 6:30 am to 6:30 pm.

Prayer Brunch Friday @ Treeces @ 9:30 am.

Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions kicked off last week.

Goal: $30K.

Given since last week: $9,700!

Remember that 100% of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering directly supports IMB missionaries, and the offering accounts for 61% of the funding that our missionaries receive.

Prayerfully consider how God would have you give to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering this year.

Series Opener

This year for our Christmas series, we are going to spend from now through Christmas Eve in the book of Isaiah, considering 5 prophecies about the Messiah that we find there.

The first prophecy, the one we are studying today, is where we get the title for this series: God With Us, from the name “Immanuel.”

[עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל׃ עִמָּ֫נוּ אֵל : Im-ma (Heb iym, “with”)- nu (Heb nu, “us”) el (Heb el, “God”)]

The promise of the coming Savior was a promise of rescue, for sure, but it was also a promise of something even deeper: it was a promise of presence.

When God promised the first Christmas, He promised that He wouldn’t merely save: He would come and live with His people.

And each week as we unpack another prophecy from the book of Isaiah, we will flesh out another facet of the Gospel as we rearrange the words that make up the declaration “God With Us.”

I hope that you will plan to be here each week as we look at Christmas through the lens of the prophet Isaiah, through promises made 700 years before the baby Savior was found in the manger on that first Christmas morning, the greatest gift that could ever be given to a lost an dying world.

Intro & Scripture

For this morning, however, we will start with the first prophecy of the Messiah, made in Isaiah chapter 7. Let’s stand in honor of God’s Word as we read our focal passage this morning, Isaiah 7:1-17, together:

Thus says the Word of the Lord:

PRAYER

Have you ever found yourself in a the midst of a problem, and someone who had more knowledge, more wisdom, and more experience came along and offered to help, offered to give you a solution, and you said, “No, thanks… I’ve got it.”?

Why do we do that?

I admit that I have found myself in this kind of situation more times than I care to admit.

Whether it’s from an over-inflated sense of my own ability, a reluctance to want to ask for help and take someone else’s time, or simply a fear of looking foolish, I’ve been there.

Fortunately, I don’t always fail in this way.

An example:

When I was called as the Youth Pastor here at EHBC in 2001, I had never been to college.

I had done a trade school for administrative work, but no actual college.

The church family, thankfully, saw God working in my life and suggested that I start a more formal education.

Then, foolishly, on a whim I decided to go and take my placement tests at CNM (T-VI then) to get started on core classes.

I went in cold, without studying, and without having been in a normal educational environment for probably 15 years.

I walked in on a Friday afternoon, sure of my abilities in English and Math, to embark on my undergraduate degree.

And while my English test went well (I had, after all, spent 10 years reading legal documents as a paralegal), my math skills were severely lacking.

I had forgotten how to do fairly simply algebra.

You high school students in the room are going to laugh at this: I had completely forgotten how to multiply binomials: I didn’t remember FOIL.

I have no idea how class numbers work now, but at the time college-level classes started at 100 and went up.

I did not test into level 100 on my first try.

This was frustrating, because I was always pretty good at math!

I thought that I could just go on my own strength and get this done, but I needed help.

I could have tried to muddle through the weekend and figure out what went wrong, or I could have just surrendered to the class I tested into, which wouldn’t have counted toward my degree, but would have just retaught me what was probably freshman Algebra.

But instead, my younger brother Scott (a computer engineering student at the time who tutored other college students in math on the side) offered to help me.

I could have told him, “No, I can do this by myself.”

I could have said, “I don’t want to waste your time.”

I could have said, “Never mind, I’ll just spend money and time taking a whole semester to relearn something I already “knew”.”

But instead, I submitted to his knowledge, his expertise, and let him tutor me.

He knew things that I didn’t.

He understood things that I had completely forgotten.

And after working through just the weekend, I went back in and retook the math placement test on Monday, and tested into Intermediate College Algebra, Math 119, which counted toward my degree requirement.

Now, that might seem like a kind of silly story to open with, but isn’t this what we see (admittedly, on a much grander scale) in this passage in Isaiah?

The Southern Kingdom of Judah, represented by her king, Ahaz, was in a difficult position.

He had a problem, and someone wiser, more powerful, and with more experience than Ahaz (namely, the Lord God) came offering counsel for the problem.

Ahaz was left with a choice: accept the counsel or not.

He knew he had a problem, but unfortunately the true problem he had was not the problem that he thought he had.

1) The problem: Separation

According to what we know about Ahaz from other places in Scripture, he was not a good king.

Even though he was the king of Judah, which was the part of the Divided Kingdom that stayed with David’s line, we find that he acted like all of the horrible kings of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, in the choices that he made:

We also see almost this exact description in 2 Kings 16 as well.

We won’t read it because of length and time this morning, but the picture of the situation of Judah in 2 Chronicles 28 is really bleak.

They were at war with a combined Aramean and Samarian coalition from the north.

Judah had already been soundly defeated by them and lost 120,000 troops and had women and children taken captive, even though they hadn’t been able to capture Jerusalem.

They were raided by the Edomites to the southeast and the Philistines to the west as well.

And over everything political and military in that area of the world at the time was the specter of the might of Assyria.

So when Ahaz hears of the Aramean and Samarian troops massing again for another run at Jerusalem, he’s terrified:

Judah is separated from any military help.

Judah has no real political power.

They are basically alone.

They could see they had a problem, but they knew that they were powerless to do anything about it.

But the military and political conflict wasn’t his biggest issue, even though they thought it was.

No, the greatest issue facing Judah was that Ahaz had lived, and as their representative had led the people of Judah, the people of God, to live in ways that separated them from their Lord.