Prince of Peace

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Hi, everybody. My name is Sam, and I am super happy to be here. That looks good. Awesome. My wife and my two sons are here with me today. I just wanted to say that it is so great to be able to come into a place and just feel so welcome, and to be somewhere where you feel good about dropping off your kids in the preschool and the daycare area. So I just want to say thank you to this church for allowing us to be here today and also for taking such great care of us. It really feels like a homecoming now. I think I've preached here at least twice, and it does feel like I get to come home a little bit whenever I'm here because you have treated us like family, and so it's so, so good to be here again. We are continuing this series in Isaiah chapter 9 where we get these four incredible names for the coming Messiah, which is Prince of Peace, mighty god, wonderful counselor, everlasting father. And today we're going to be focusing in on that

phrase Prince of Peace. And Drew on the kids day painted a wonderful picture of what that manger would have looked like on Christmas night. And also putting some kind of realistic expectations on how peaceful that really would have been. One thing that I love about Christmas time are the songs that we sing. And from the time that I was a very young kid, I remember being in Christmas Eve services and we would get these little candles with these little holders on them so the wax wouldn't melt and burn your fingers. And I would just like sit, like shaking in anticipation for that moment where I guess like hold fire in church because I was really excited about that. And but it would be during just one of the most beautiful, peaceful, serene songs ever written Silent Night and we would start seeing that song and they would start passing the candle fired down one row after the other and soon the whole room would be filled just with

candlelight and everyone lifting up that song. Silent. Keep going, keep going. Okay, you can stop, you can get it. That's beautiful. That is beautiful. I'm not, I'm not musically talented. I'm not an acquired director. I don't have to be that good for you guys to make that song sound so nice and so wonderful. And I think that we have this image of what Christmas Eve looks like, not just for whenever we celebrate it, but for what it maybe was, looked like back then when Jesus was actually born. There was these really meager and humbling circumstances. The king of all creation, wrapped in flesh in one of the most lowly places, a place reserved for animals. That's the place that he's born into. And I think before I had children, I had this idea that that night probably was really peaceful and serene and magical. Now having had children and being in the operating room,

whenever the the babies come out screaming and there's pain involved and that's a sterilized room with medication. It is not peaceful. It is not a peaceful place. There is chaos happening. And so I think that the actual circumstances of Christmas, whenever that night took place, was a lot different. There's probably some screaming, some crying, tears, and I think that there's this dual image of what Christmas, we feel like it looks like and what it actually is, the historical event and what it looks like today. Because the truth is, is that Christmas is not peaceful. And that's true in my own life. I grew up with divorced parents. When I was six years old, my parents divorced, and Christmas became a chaotic time. Now it started to feel like this deep pit in my stomach whenever the weather would change. And because I knew that pretty soon the holiday season was gonna be here,

and my parents would kind of pivot back and forth on who would have my sister and I for Christmas morning. And there would be some competition, some guilt involved with that. And eventually it'd be like, okay Sam, Mindy, who do you wanna be with on Christmas morning? I don't know, I don't wanna have Christmas now because you made it weird. And it would just be this really stressful time where I would be afraid of disappointing a parent because I wouldn't be with one of them on Christmas morning and it became about

what, who I was gonna be with. And so there was a lot of conflict and a lot of hurt associated with Christmas. And my wife Kelsey, she noticed that whenever it become Christmas time in our household, whenever we first got married, she would notice that, hey, there's something like weird about how you're talking about Christmas. And I noticed that, oh, yeah, I don't think I like Christmas. I don't think I like this season of year because of the way I experienced it whenever I was a kid. And now that's gotten a lot better now that I've had more, I guess, peaceful Christmases. experience now there's a lot of obligation with Christmas. They're seeing family, there's buying presents, and it becomes about a lot of other things outside of what it's supposed to be about. Then we have like a cultural Christmas experience where we have this what I call the three C's of

Christmas. There's a commercialism where Christmas has kind of become like a brand of something that doesn't represent what it is actually about. There's the consumption of Christmas where it's about buying things. And then there's the competition of Christmas. And don't get me wrong, I love having lights on the house and putting up decorations and things like that and buying gifts for others. But there is a part of me that likes the competition of it more than other things. I like being able to put up nice lights on the house and it becomes a lot about that. Keeping up with the Joneses and making sure that we at least look as good as our neighbors. We're buying the same kind of toys as our friends are and there's a lot of competition that goes into Christmas. So this is not the Christmas that Jesus was supposed to or meant to or is ushering in. Back whenever the Messiah was being prophesied about in

the Old Testament, if you have your Bibles you can turn to Isaiah 61. We're gonna be in Isaiah a lot today so you want to chill out in Isaiah, keep a finger in the Bible somewhere around Isaiah that'd be smart. There's a lot of prophecy in the Old Testament that tells that there is a Messiah that is coming. He's going to be a Prince of Peace, a mighty God. He's going to save those who are captive. And in Isaiah we see one of the most beautiful descriptions of what Jesus is supposed to be ushering into the world. This is Isaiah 61 verses 1 through 4. says the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of prisons to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our

God to comfort all who mourn to grant to those who mourn in Zion to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, so that He may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations." And so there's two contexts that we need to view this verse in. The first is when it was actually written, and whenever Isaiah was writing it down, the Kingdom of Israel had split. So there was a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, and so he was writing to a people that were facing this idea that their kingdom was no longer together. They were being assailed by Assyrians, the Babylonians were eventually going to come in, ransack the city and take people away.

And so Isaiah is writing to a people under occupation. They are being invaded by external forces and so whenever they hear and they see Isaiah saying this stuff or writing these letters, he's saying hey they're going to build up the ancient ruins and they're going to repair the cities. They're thinking in terms of there is going to be somebody who is going to come eventually who is going to restore the things that were broken, the things that these invaders have come in and destroyed, our identity, our temples, our homes. This person is going to come in and wipe those people out and rebuild what was stolen. And that was their idea of what was going to happen. That was their hope in a messiah. And then in Luke chapter 4, Jesus, before he is starting his ministry. So he's just come out of the desert while being tempted by Satan. And he's in the temple preaching and he quotes this verse word by word in Luke chapter four verse

16. If you want to put a marker there and check it out later, that is one of the coolest moments in scripture to me because he reads through this and says, in your presence and your hearing, what what you have heard is being fulfilled today. In other words, he is declaring that this, who Isaiah was talking about, that's actually me. And the context there is that Israel at that time was under occupation by another force, the Romans. And so people who hear this aren't thinking like, oh, this person's gonna die for our sins. They're thinking, oh, this person is a liberator who is going to remove the shackles of Rome off of our hands so that we can be a free liberated people devoted to God again without Rome being over us. So their thought was Jesus was here to deliver us from Rome so that we could have peace. But that was not the peace that Jesus was there to deliver.

It wasn't that temporal or that geographical. was much deeper and much more global and everlasting than that. So I want to take a look at what this word peace actually means. In the original Hebrew, peace comes from the word shalom. You heard that before? Shalom, yeah, it means peace. I looked up the definition of shalom in a Hebrew lexicon and the first word that comes up is not the word peace. The first word that comes up with it is the word completeness, not just freedom from conflict but completeness, holy bodily completeness. So Shalom means complete and so you could say that Jesus is the prince of our completeness. I also looked up what the opposite of peace means. There's two words that came up. One was conflict and the second one I want to, Does anybody want to give a guess what the second one was?

Yeah, okay go for it. That was it. Yes. It was noise. Ah, there it is It was behind me the whole time Speaking of behind me. I saw a bunch of people bringing pillows in this morning And I thought man Drew must have given them a heads up. I was coming today But I figured I was for the pillow for it sounds like alright He definitely knew I was coming today He knew that would connect very dearly to my heart. Pillow forts are a at least once a week thing in the Ross household. The Ross household would not be complete without a pillow fort, or connected spiritually there.

But it was noise. And this is what I felt like. Christmas, Christmas for me has been a very noisy season of life for my entire life. And I don't mean volume of noise. I don't mean like the law disturbing the peace. That's not what I mean. I mean that the noise, like the white noise of Christmas busyness, the occupation of your mind that takes place whenever you are getting through the list of gifts that you have. And Kelsey and I, we now have like an Excel spreadsheet. So we can keep track of everyone we're buying for. We can keep track of our budget and everything. So we don't go over budget. We make sure no one gets forgotten. Cause there's lots of cousins out there, lots of nieces and nephews and lots of brothers and sisters and grandparents to buy for and so there's a lot of things to keep up with. There's the lights, the decorations, the trees, I'm in ministry and so Christmas is a busy time of work

for myself and for my family because they get dragged along into every single thing that I'm doing and so the noise of Christmas just feels like it's continuing to increase. There is much more noise and noise is something that arrests your attention. It literally holds you captive. I did some research on sirens recently as you do whenever you're on Wikipedia and you click on one thing it takes you to another thing and then you find yourself researching sirens. So these are ambulance sirens, tornado sirens, even alarm clocks. The tones, the frequencies, and the pitches with the P in case you're listening on the recording you're like what did you just say are designed to mimic the sound of a baby crying and so it doesn't sound like wah wah but the same volume and tone that a baby would have whenever it releases a blood curdling scream is the same tone that sirens attempt to match because

biologically our brains are wired whenever we hear that tone it affects our brain in a way that everything else that we were focusing on that we were paying attention to drops and it literally arrests takes captive our attention so that we can't focus on anything else and it's really important for like a fire truck or an ambulance to be able to do that because you have to be able to know that they're coming behind you, they're coming fast. Or a tornado siren, because it is trying to tell you stop what you're doing and focus on this because danger is happening. That's what the siren does, but I feel like that's what all noise kind of does for us in life. It arrests our attention so that Christmas no longer becomes about the coming King or the Prince of Peace. It becomes about every single thing around that. The presents, the trips to visit family, the lights, everything else. And I'm not bashing those things. I love it.

I love that stuff. But my attention can get diverted because I focus on the periphery things and not the main thing that all those things are supposed to be pointed to. That's why I love what Drew was doing this morning. Hey, we're going to show you what this is meant to be pointing you to because it's not about the major. It's about who's in the manger. It's not about the lights, it's about who's being glorified, who's being illuminated, and who is the light of the world. And so that's what we're hoping to do with this today. But noise is something that I feel like has significantly increased, not just around Christmas, but do you feel like the world has become more noisy? Not volume wise, but the things that just capture and arrest our attention. This, some more research I've done recently, This is really scary because I think it's a lot deeper than we think it is.

There is more manipulation for our attention than we realize. Some of the things came out about Facebook and the way that they had their algorithms and their feeds, how they were using that to make people angry. I started doing a little bit of research into that. I found some things that were really disturbing about how social media will use our emotions against us. And so whenever you get on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, have you ever wondered like how they categorize and prioritize things that appear on your feed? It's really interesting. Priority number one is people that you've engaged with in the past. And so if you liked your wife's status or shared something that they've done, those will be the things that are first on your feed. The second thing is what's labeled as incendiary content. That's priority number two. In other words, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, they all build a profile of you.

Not your profile that you make, but they build a profile on you so they know your age, your gender, your political leanings, the groups that you like, the groups that you don't like and so they will intentionally push things into our feeds that cause us to react in an angry way and so if you lean conservatively in your politics they'll put things into your feed that will incite anger in you so they'll show you what the left is doing or they'll show you something that you don't disagree with and the reason they do that is because they want to increase what's called engagement on their platform they want to keep you there longer and keep your attention longer. It's really fascinating, but they found out that the thing that keeps people on their website, on their app longer, are things that make you angry. They have this feedback loop of, we're going to show you something that makes you angry,

so you click it, you share it, you comment on it, which tells the algorithm, hey, give them more of that stuff. That's the stuff that's keeping them engaged. If you're saying like, hey, I'm not on social media, I don't do that. The news does the same thing now, where they know their audience, and so they'll push things into their audience that they know will kind of make them angry. Have you noticed how much more angry you've been over the last two years? I can say that confidently that most of us are probably a little bit more angry than we have been in our entire lives over the last couple of years, because that's what all the research is showing. And the news is doing it kind of purposefully so that it will stay tuned into what they're doing a lot longer. And there is a spiritual application here. This is not Sam soapbox on news and social media. I use both every single day.

I think there's a smart way to use it and there's a way that you can use it that will entrap you. So I want to encourage you to use that stuff but use it wisely. This is what I want to bring to your mind right now. our enemy knows us really, really well. And just like Facebook or Twitter builds a profile on what you like and what you don't like, the things that you share and don't share, I think that the enemy kind of operates in the same way. I'm not saying that Twitter is getting their battle plan from the devil, but they kind of operate in the same way sometimes. and that the enemy knows the things that makes you upset.

And he knows the things that will arrest your attention so that your focus will not be on Jesus, especially in the middle of Christmas, but it will be about anything else but Jesus. And it's really difficult to reduce the amount of noise that you get in your life, because life will get noisy. And so you can do some things like you can stop following certain channels, or stop watching certain news programs that you know are going to make you angry, or you can stop following pages on Instagram or Twitter that, you know, kind of invoke those same feelings in you. But Jesus as our Prince of Peace, he does not promise to remove the noise in our life. But whenever his voice is the one that we focus on, we can have peace even in the midst of chaos.

Because Jesus didn't come bringing peace with him. What Pastor Drew talked about last week, he talked about Jesus as wonderful counselor and he talked about this promise that God gave to Abraham. He said, I'm gonna make you a great nation and I'm going to bless people through you. And all of those things, those promises that God gave to Abraham are made complete through Jesus. Jesus did not bring peace, Jesus made peace, and it's a gift. Isaiah 53, 4-6 says, Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities, him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And so whenever Abraham receives the promise from God that I'm gonna make you into a great nation, Abraham just like Israel was thinking whenever Isaiah was writing these prophecies about the

coming Messiah just like the Israelites were thinking whenever Jesus said in your presence these things have been fulfilled. Abraham is thinking numerically here and he's probably thinking I'm gonna be a great nation of single people, all of my descendants, and the people that marry into my family are going to become the strongest city on earth, and we are going to conquer through force. Or whenever the Israelites were under occupation from Syria or from Babylon or from Rome, they're thinking the Messiah is the liberator from occupational forces, and he's going to scatter them and defeat them through violence and through force. And so whenever we say that, hey, Jesus didn't come to bring peace, but make peace. Uh, if we were still in Israel back then, they would be thinking he's going to make peace through violence and by causing violence to other people.

But the way that Jesus does it is not by causing violence to other people, but by allowing violence to himself and making peace through self sacrifice. Ephesians 1, 20 says, and through him, God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ's blood on the cross. Without Jesus, we are incomplete. Without Jesus, we have no shalom. And all the peace that we get outside of Jesus, it's all temporary and incomplete. Just like our decorations and our Christmas lights and our Christmas gifts, they are incomplete without an understanding of who they point to. They're pointing to something very specifically. They have a purpose. And you can get some temporary feelings of peace or completeness by giving a gift to somebody because that's a good thing. That will make you feel good for a little bit. Or whenever you binge watch your favorite show on Netflix

and you get that nice little peaceful feeling, that little comfort feeling, it's not a bad feeling, but it's incomplete and it's not perfect. Perfect peace comes from the Prince of Peace. And knowing him, believing in him, having a relationship with him is the only way that we experience that. So we don't have perfect peace with God because we have sin in our lives which separates us from Him. And that separation from God makes us incomplete people because we were made to be in relationship with Him. And ever we were made to do is no longer functioning, we become incomplete. And this is why Christmas is so special. see the burden of making peace should not have been on God because he's not the one that messed up. He's not the one that sinned. It was us. Adam and Eve in the garden wanted to do things their own way. You and I, we want to do things our own way. And so the burden should be on us to make that relationship right. But this

This is why Christmas is so special. Jesus took the burden on himself so that he could make peace for us before God. And because we have been blessed with the peace that Jesus made, we are meant to be a blessing. Genesis 12, 12, three, this is what God said to Abraham. All people on earth will be blessed through you. The gift of peace that we have through Jesus is not something that's meant to be stored away. It's not meant just to be received. It's meant to be invested into other people and given to other people. God didn't give us peace so that we could keep it to ourselves but so that we could share it. And so I have a few encouragements for you today. First is this, as you're giving gifts to family and to loved ones, give the gift of peace with it. If you have people in your family that don't know Jesus, this is a perfect time of year to be able to talk about that and to talk

about it in a peaceful way. Too often I hear stories about family conversations becoming confrontational, not maybe because of the topic that was brought up, but because of the way the topic was brought up. There is a peaceful way to talk about Jesus in your household. So use wisdom whenever you talk about Jesus with those in your family who don't believe or maybe be on the fringe of belief. Second is this, in the middle of all the noise of the product or the commercialism of Christmas, you can find peace by focusing your attention on Jesus. You can find peace in the midst of all that noise. You can find completeness and quiet whenever your attention isn't focused on the things around Christmas but on the person that Christmas is about. The last is this, if you don't know Jesus today, I want to highly, highly encourage you to enter into a conversation about that. Maybe you make a decision today and say, yeah, I want to

put my faith and my hope and my trust in Him. Or maybe you say, well, I'm not sure yet. I need to talk to Drew. Maybe sign up for these January 9th classes on the Gospel. January 9th, right Drew? January 9th Gospel classes. Sign up for that. Learn more about what it means to follow Jesus. In a little bit, Pastor Drew's gonna come up here to close us out. I'm always making his way. Would you please pray with me. God, thank you so much, Lord, for the gift of peace that you purchased for us through the spilling of your blood on the cross, through your death and through your resurrection. And Lord, for anyone in here who doesn't know you today, I pray that they would take their next step in getting to know you by talking to somebody, by praying, by accepting today. And Lord, for each of us, would our hearts and our minds and our ears be attuned to you this Christmas.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thank you, Sam. Just like you said, this is going to be our time of invitation and we're going to be singing some songs. And I just want to encourage you, you know, if there's just a step that you want to take in any capacity, however that looks, I'm going to be right up here. If you want someone to pray with, please come and pray with me. If you're comfortable with praying with somebody who's right next to you, do that too. It doesn't have to go through me. I'm here, obviously, I want to help. But if there's a decision that you need to make, either you want to join the church or you want to be baptized or you just need some prayer. Now is the time in our service where we open that up. And so I just want to encourage you to do that as we sing. So let's stand and sing.

Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. Oh come ye to Bethlehem. Come and behold Him, Born the King of Angels, O come let us adore Him. O come let us adore Him. O come let us adore Him Christ the Lord. Choirs of angels sing in exultation O sing all ye citizens of and above Glory to God, glory in the highest O come, let us adore it O come, let us adore Him, O come, let us adore Him, O Christ alone, all hail Lord, we greet Him. On this happy morning, O Jesus, forevermore be Thy name adored. The word of the Father Now in flesh appear O come, let us adore Him O come, let us adore Him O come, let us adore Him Christ the Lord Oh come let us adore him