Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

Bible Study & Prayer this Wednesday starting at 7pm.

We’re currently working through the psalms, one psalm at a time, it’s truly been a blessing to study through the passage.

We’d love to have you join us.

Please know that at 6pm on Wednesdays, we also offer a meal for anyone who’d like to join us—we’ve been doing those meals out here in the auditorium, but starting this week, we’re going to hold the meal portion in the Activity Room, but still have the service in the Auditorium.

The meal this week is homemade lasagna with garlic bread.

I do want to point out that we’ve made a change to our church’s website as well as the emails that our church utilizes for communication.

We did this for simplicity, but I do want you to be aware so that there isn’t any confusion:

When we started the church’s website, we utilized the domain graceandpeacepa.com,

which has served us well, but because of its length, it’s sometimes difficult to use especially when trying to give someone the church’s email address.

We still own the rights to that domain name and we’ll continue to for quite some time.

However, to make it a little bit easier, we’ve moved the website to www.gapb.church.

Thus, the church’s new email is info@gapb.church

and you can contact me at danielarter@gapb.church and Natalie at nataliearter@gapb.church.

That information has been updated in the worship guides, on business cards, and online.

You’ll notice the graceandpeacepa.com

domain utilized primarily in two places, the signs that we have by the offering box and by the front door.

And that’s fine, because the domain now just redirects anyone who types it in to gapb.church

On occasion, I like to remind everyone of our current focus on outreach.

Church plans grow primarily through outreach and without intentional outreach, we simply won’t grow.

We evangelize in a number of different ways as a church including flyer distribution, door-to-door evangelism, and through community events.

However, statistically, it’s been reported through numerous organizations that the most effective way to bring people to know Jesus Christ is through one-on-one evangelism in which the two people already know each other.

In other words, evangelism works best if you already know the person.

So, let me encourage you to have conversations with your friends, your family, and your co-workers about Jesus Christ; and then invite them to visit our church.

We have several hundred flyers made up for this very purpose.

Each flyer has contact information as well as where they can go online to find more information about the church at.

Feel free to take as many as you’d like.

I was hoping to have some made for the start of this Christmas series, but because of my own mistake, we won’t get them until tomorrow.

However, when they do come in, they do provide all the details of special services over the next few weeks, please use them to invite your friends and family to Carols and Lessons and our New Years Eve Celebration.

Speaking of special events coming up:

Please make note that there will be no Wednesday evening Bible Study & Prayer times on December 22nd and 29th.

Instead, please join us for the following events:

On Christmas Eve, we’ll have Carols & Lessons at 7pm in the Auditorium.

It’ll be a great time of worship in a way that might be a little different—I’m not going to preach a full message that night.

I plan to give a short devotional instead, and the rest of the service will be filled with Scripture readings and carol singing as we trace the redemptive storyline through Scripture.

I’m excited for it and I think you’ll enjoy the evening.

Following Carols & Lessons, we’ll have a dessert social in the Activity Room.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to bake your favorite dessert, bring it, and enjoy fellowship with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

On New Years Eve, we’ll have have our celebration starting at 7pm-midnight.

Of course, this isn’t a service and quite frankly, if you don’t want to stay the whole night, you don’t have to.

Come and enjoy some food, we’ll have all your traditional New Years foods, we’ll have the ball drop on the screens in the Auditorium, and we’ll have board games and card games in the Activity Room.

Let me remind you to continue worshiping the LORD through your giving.

To help you give, we have three ways for you to do so: (1) in-person giving can be done at the offering box.

If you write a check, please write it to Grace & Peace and if you want a receipt for your cash gift please slip it into an envelope with your name on it.

If you’d prefer to give via debit, credit, or ACH transfers, you can do so either (2) by texting 84321 with your $[amount] and following the text prompts or (3) by visiting us online at gapb.church and selecting giving in the menubar.

Everything you give goes to the building up of our local church and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Prayer of Repentance and Adoration

Call to Worship (Psalm 37:1-11)

Our Call to Worship is from Psalm 37. Psalm 37 is a psalm written by David and it is a lengthier psalm, so we’re splitting it in three parts to work through over the next three weeks.

In Psalm 37, David writes specifically to man in what is sometimes referred to as a wisdom psalm.

It is an acrostic poem, which simply means that David originally utilized letters from the Hebrew alphabet to separate themes in the text, but in our English translations, we don’t see the Hebrew letters, however, the ESV does an excellent job at dividing the psalm up by theme.

You’ll notice in most ESV’s every couple of verses are separated, that’s the delineate the different sections.

This morning, we’re going to responsively read Vs. 1-11, which focuses our attention on quieting our souls and trusting in the LORD.

Please stand and read Psalm 37:1-11 with me responsively—I’ll read the odd-numbered verses, please join me in reading the even-numbered verses:

Congregational Singing

O Come, All Ye Faithful

Joy to the World

Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne

Scripture Reading (Luke 1:26-56)

I’ve asked Stacey to read our Scripture Reading this morning from Luke 1:26-56, which is a little bit lengthy of a passage, so let me give a brief few words about it while Stacey comes up.

As you know, our theme for Christmas this year is hope, so the sermons as well as the Scripture readings are focused on hope, particularly during Christmas.

So, all our Scripture Readings during this series are focused on aspects of the account of Christmas that concerns hope, particularly in pointing towards Jesus as the Messiah.

This morning’s passage tells us of the angel Gabriel foretelling Jesus’ birth, it tells us of John the Baptist who was still in Elizabeth’s womb leaping for joy because of Jesus who was still in the womb of Mary, and it ends with a beautiful song of praise by Mary that we sometime refer to as her magnificat.

If you have your Bibles this morning, please follow along in Luke 1:26-56 as Stacey reads:

Sermon (Isaiah 7:10-25)

Introduction

This morning’s sermon is a continuation of our Christmas series on hope.

And just to get everyone caught up to where we are, we started this series last week by sort of dipping our toes into the ideas of hope and the celebration of Christmas.

Last week’s message was meant to get your appetites whet as we started digging into hope with Christmas in our view.

We did that in two ways, we took a systematic look at the tabernacle and the temple along with an expositional study of Ephesians 2:11-22 and we came to the realization that one of the key themes throughout the Old and New Testaments is simply that God wants to dwell with his people, but man cannot dwell with him apart from repentance and belief.

Ultimately what our study last week showed us was that the only reason we can have hope is because God wants to dwell with his people.

Thus, the celebration of Jesus’ birth during Christmas exists because Jesus’ birth is the first step of his perfect, sinless life as the substitutionary atonement for our sins.

We celebrate Christmas because it is the first step in God reconciling us through Jesus and us as the universal church being his dwelling place.

We only have hope because God wants to be with his people.

This morning’s text is Isaiah 7:10-25 and it’s a little bit deeper of a dive into why we can have hope in that it orients us toward the coming Messiah.

Or in other words, we’re looking at a key prophetic work that prophesied the coming Messiah.

And what we see in this prophetic record is a prophet speaking to a king of Judah and in the midst of this prophecy, Isaiah tells of a virgin who will conceive and bear a son named Immanuel.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s read the text and I’ll explain how we’ll break it down.

As we study this passage, we’re going to start with some historical context, because we’re sort of parachuting into the middle of a specific event and to understand it properly we need to understand the context.

After we talk about the historical context we’ll then break the text into two parts: (1) Vs. 10-16 is The Sign of Immanuel—this records the prophecy of the coming Messiah.

We’re going to see King Ahaz reject the first sign and then God through Isaiah telling him of a coming son who will be called Immanuel.

Intermixed with this prophecy is a second prophecy concerning King Ahaz himself, which we see in Vs. 16 as well as into the second section (2) Vs.

17-25, the Judgment of the LORD.

It might seem odd for us to talk about this passage when we focus on hope, but please understand that in the Old Testament, many prophecies were two-fold.

There was a typical shorter-term prophecy that proved that the longer-term prophecy would actually occur.

The shorter-term prophecy is the Judgment of the LORD and because the judgment truly came to pass, they knew that the Messiah would truly come.

Likewise, our message of hope this morning is predicated on a similar concept—we know that Jesus will return because he kept his word about coming the first time.

Thus, we can have hope.

Prayer for Illumination

The Historical Context of Isaiah 7

Isaiah 7 starts by giving us a significant amount of detail concerning what all is happening in Israel and its significant because it paints a picture of great strife and discord amongst the people and the nations.

At this time in Israel’s history, they were not one united kingdom, they were divided into two—You had the Kingdom of Israel in the north, which was sometimes called Ephraim and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.

This split followed the death of King Solomon, when his son Rehoboam was set to become the next king and Jereboam (one of his other sons) confronted Rehoboam to demand a lighter tax burden.

When Rehoboam refused, Jereboam and the ten northern tribes separated from the united Kingdom and formed the Northern kingdom while Rehoboam and the two remaining tribes formed Judah.

Rehoboam initially made plans to take back the ten rebelling tribes by force, but the LORD prevented him from doing so in 1 Kings 12:21-24, which might be because God had already decided to allow the kingdom to split as punishment for the people forsaking him in 1 Kings 11:26-40.

Jeroboam and the northern tribes almost immediately went into idolatry by worshiping a golden calf to prevent the people from going to the southern kingdom to worship Yahweh in the temple.

This went on for a few hundred years.

And it’s notable that the northern kingdom of Israel, had mostly evil kings who rejected the LORD, whereas the southern kingdom of Judah had a mix of good and bad kings.

It is also of note, that the king in question in Isaiah 7, is one of Judah’s evil kings.

King Ahaz according to Isaiah 7:1 was the present king of Judah, with King Pekah as the King of Israel.