Transcript
Our central passage of Scripture tonight will be found in the Old Testament. But before we turn to it I wanted to read a few verses found in the New Testament in the Gospel according to Luke chapter 3. So will you turn with me to Luke chapter 3, beginning to read from verse 1.
And when the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod the tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the Word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins,
as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places shall be made smooth. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
We’ll skip down if you will to verse 10.
And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? He answered and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none. And he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you. And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages.
Now turn with me to the prophecy of Isaiah chapter 40, beginning to read at verse 1.
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. For she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. And the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
Joe Gonzales is a little ten-year-old boy in Houston, Texas, who is going blind according to his doctors. By the end of the year Joe will be living in a world of darkness. Some time ago Joe was examined at school by his school nurse, and she felt she detected a visual problem. He was sent to an optometrist who examined him and assured him that there was no problem.
Seven months later in a rescreening at school a visual problem was definitely detected. This time it was discovered that Joe was suffering from a tumor-like condition of the optic nerve. Surgery was performed, but it was in vain because the disease had progressed too far.
Joe’s father is an employee in a grocery store in Houston, and he filed a suit against the optometrist who had failed to diagnose Joe’s disease. Just last month the suit was settled very much to Joe’s financial advantage. Joe will receive twenty thousand dollars next year, and the annual payments will increase each year until Joe lives to his full life expectancy of sixty-eight. He will have received somewhere around seven million dollars.
Not only that, Joe is receiving thirty-five thousand dollars immediately, and his parents say they’re going to take him to Disneyland and to some other special places and anywhere else that Joe might wish to go. So between now and the end of the year Joe will be using his eyes as much as he can until the darkness closes in for good.
And I suppose that when we hear a story like that the first question that comes to our minds is this. Which would I rather have, seven million dollars or my eyesight? And for most of us there is no hesitation in replying, my eyesight. After all, seven million dollars is small comfort. It is very small comfort indeed for the tragedy of a life lived without vision.
But that’s the kind of world that we live in. It is a world of small comforts. Here is a family whose house has burned down and they’ve lost everything that they own, and the insurance pays off, and that’s a comfort. But it’s a small comfort. Here is someone else who is very ill in health, and they are visited by friends and family in the hospital, and that’s a comfort. But it’s a small comfort.
Here is someone who has lost a loved one, and they receive cards and flowers from those who sympathize with their grief, and that’s a comfort. But it’s a small comfort. And it’s easy for us to forget that all around us in Franken County there are men and women whose lives have been torn apart by tragedy and heartbreak. And the only comfort that they know anything about is the weak and insufficient and completely inadequate comfort of the world.
And they are ignorant of that grand truth of which the Apostle Paul was writing when he said, “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
And the question that I would like to confront you with this evening is a very simple question, and it is this. What do you really know about the comfort of God? Do you really understand that comfort in your own life and experience, and are you able to share it with other people?
I guess that there are very few passages anywhere in literature which are more famous for their treatment of the theme of comfort than the passage we have read tonight from the prophecy of Isaiah. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem...” And yet it’s also easy to forget that those words of comfort first began to be fulfilled in a barren wilderness.
You see, the New Testament tells us that at a specific point in history there appeared on the scene in Israel a mighty preacher, a great prophet of God. And he did not look for his pulpit in the crowded courts of the temple at Jerusalem, and he did not look for his pulpit in the synagogues all over the land of Israel where people gathered every Sabbath day. Instead he had his pulpit out in the desert.
There were no seats for his audience to sit in. There was no roof over their head to shield them from the blazing Palestinian sun. There was no air conditioning to keep them comfortable as they listened to the Word of God. And yet the Bible tells us that from Jerusalem and from all Judea people streamed out into the desert by the hundreds and by the thousands to hear this man of God.
And why did they go out there? It was because John the Baptist spoke to them in the power of the Holy Spirit, and he brought to them a marvelous message of comfort. You see, it was John who proclaimed the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
And every intelligent Israelite knew that the long history of their nation’s warfare and bondage and oppression would never be ended until the kingdom of heaven was established upon earth, until Israel’s iniquity was pardoned and God’s hand was lifted from the judgment which He had sent upon that nation. And it was then that the nation would receive the comfort of God.
I was reading quite recently a chilling account of child slavery in the land of Thailand. According to this account every morning at four fifteen at the train station in Bangkok, Thailand, dozens of little children get off the train clutching the hands of their parents. Their parents are almost as frightened as the children are because they have come from the poverty-stricken countryside to sell their children into slavery. And the hundred dollars that they will get for this transaction is a fortune to them.
They tell their children that their employers will give them ice cream and take them to the zoo on Sunday. But the reality is often quite different from that, and the children usually wind up working long hours month after month without wages under the complete control of their employers. Abuse of the children is common, and wounds are often treated with soap or herbal oil or fish sauce or even toothpaste.
In one factory where thirteen little girls were working they stood on their feet ten hours a day, six days a week, and slept on a crowded uncomfortable floor. The UN Commission on Slavery has been informed that there are literally thousands of children in Thailand that are sold into this kind of working situation every year. It’s against the law in Thailand for a child to work under the age of twelve, and every once in a while the Thai police raid one of these places.
They free the children. They send them back to their parents in the countryside. But there’s no way of guaranteeing that their parents will not sell them again because they desperately need the money. And the Thai government has confessed that it cannot solve the problem of child slavery until it solves the problem of poverty which causes it.
And frankly I’m glad I don’t live in Thailand. I would not find it very comforting to live under a government that could not cope with the problem like that. And yet when I stop to think about it I don’t find it very comforting to live under our government that is unable to cope with the rising tide of crime and violence and immorality which we see in our own country.
But there’s one thing that I find immensely comforting, and that is the assurance that is given to me from the Word of God that someday the kingdom of heaven will be established upon earth. And when that happens there will be no child slavery in Thailand. There will be no war between Iran and Iraq in the Middle East. There will be no surging crime wave in America or anywhere else because the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
And if you’re here tonight and you’ve been born again by personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you trusted Him and what He’s done for you and nothing that you can do, if you’ve trusted Him alone for your eternal salvation, that should be comforting to you. You see, even though John beamed his message directly at Israel it had far-reaching worldwide implications. Because when God comforts Israel He will comfort the world, and when God brings peace to Jerusalem He will bring peace to all mankind.
But wait a minute. John the Baptist has been dead for nineteen hundred years, and the voice that once cried in the wilderness of Judea is crying there no more. And it is obvious that the warfare of Jerusalem has not yet been accomplished. Why? Why? The answer is very simple and is very important. I want you to listen to it carefully.
God’s people were not ready for God’s comfort. Let me repeat that again because it lies at the heart of what I want to say to every Christian in the audience tonight. God’s people were not ready for God’s comfort.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
And as surely as God was saying to Israel through John, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, God was also saying get ready, get ready, get ready. You know how many of you have ever eaten escargot? I never have. I hope I never have. Escargot is a gourmet delicacy prepared by French chefs, and for the ladies who do not already know what it is my apologies. It turns out to be nothing more nor less than cooked snails.
Do you know that it’s popular all over the world? And would you believe this that in nineteen seventy-eight French companies imported thirty-eight million dollars worth of snails from nineteen different countries because there are not enough snails in France to meet the demand. They cooked them, they packaged them, and they sold them at home and abroad. And they were talking in nineteen seventy-eight about the greatest cargo crisis.
The French scientists were being urged to find ways of making the snails reproduce themselves more rapidly. And the problem was that the snails kept falling asleep. I really do not know how the historical crisis is coming in nineteen eighty, but there is one thing I do know. When it comes to responding to the Word of God the human heart is a great big snail.
I’m speaking honestly to you tonight when I say that when I look back on my own Christian life I am shocked and horrified at how slowly, slowly I have learned some of the basic lessons that God has been trying to teach me so He could bless and comfort my life. And I have to admit that when it comes to responding to the Word of God I have often moved at the pace of a snail.
And that was what was wrong in Israel. It was not that they couldn’t get a crowd out to hear John the Baptist. They had thousands come out to hear him. It wasn’t that they couldn’t get anybody to go through the waters of baptism. Hundreds of people were baptized. But when it came down to the nitty-gritty of really doing what John wanted the people to do they simply were not ready.
You see, the voice that cried, Prepare in the desert a highway for your God, insisted it had to be level. He insisted that every valley should be exalted and that every mountain and hill should be made low. Now maybe when you read that in the past you simply thought that God was talking about the physical landscape of the land of Palestine.
But if that’s what you thought you weren’t reading that passage very carefully. It’s true that John the Baptist and his audience were out in the desert, but when John said, Prepare in the desert a highway for your God, he obviously did not mean that his audience should get out picks and shovels and construct a literal physical highway for the Lord to travel on.
Clearly the highway they were to prepare was a highway that could only be prepared in their hearts and lives. And to put it plainly it was the highway of repentance from their sins. I think you will agree with me that if you are trying to build a highway it is not desirable to try to build it through terrain that has a lot of high hills and a lot of low valleys.
And if you’re trying to go through territory like that it would be better for the valleys to be lifted up and for the mountains to be made low and for the land to become a level place for the highway which you’re building. I want you folks to know that I was bragging to the people in Texas last week about the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I know that the turnpike is getting old and the last time I rode down it it looked like it needed some resurfacing.
But I still consider the Pennsylvania Turnpike a considerable engineering feat. To run a highway across the state that has so many mountains as Pennsylvania does is no mean undertaking. And of course as everybody in this audience at least knows, and I had to explain it in Texas because we don’t have things like this, there are tunnels through the banks of the mountains for the vehicles.
The kind of highway that God wanted His people to build could not be run through the base of the mountains, and God did not want His highway to go up hill and down dale and up hill and down dale. And that is why we read that the people came to John the Baptist and they said, What then shall we do? And John replied, He that hath two coats, let him give to him who hath none. And he that hath food, let him do likewise.
And you see John was saying there are tremendous inequalities among you. There are people among you who do not have enough to eat and enough to wear, and there are other people who have more than they need to eat and to wear. You’re going to prepare the way of the Lord. You must even out those inequalities.
Howard Hughes the billionaire spent a great deal of time in the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Nevada, and he loved to watch television, particularly westerns. But his prime time viewing hours were from twelve midnight to six a.m. And the problem was the station KLAS in Las Vegas stopped transmitting at eleven p.m. So he repeatedly sent his representatives to the owner of the station to encourage him to run westerns in the wee small hours of the morning.
And finally the owner got so exasperated with this he said, If that’s what Hughes wants to do why doesn’t he just buy the television station and run his own westerns. And that’s what Hughes did. He paid out three and six tenths million dollars to buy station KLAS. And I suppose from then on he watched as many westerns as he wanted on the late late show.
But when you stop to consider it there are millions of people in the world who have never even owned a television set much less a television station. And to them financially Howard Hughes is a great high mountain. For that matter I suspect for almost everybody in this audience tonight, if we were to compare ourselves materially with Howard Hughes or H. L. Hunt they indeed are tall mountains and we are the low valleys.
But wait a minute. How about if we compare ourselves to the poverty-stricken peasants of Thailand for whom a hundred dollars is a fortune? Then you see we are the tall mountains and they are the deep valleys. And I wonder if you realized that when God looked down upon this world he sees immense inequality. A few people fantastically rich. A few nations tremendously prosperous. And billions of people abjectly poor.
Right now across a broad band of Central Africa there is a famine. Some of you may have seen grisly pictures as I have seen on the television of men and women and children who are starving to death. In America we rake enough uneaten food into our garbage cans to feed millions of people. The world socially and economically is a landscape with towering mountains and deep, deep valleys.
And I’ll tell you something. When the kingdom of heaven is established God will eliminate inequalities like that. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low. And if we are individuals who profess to be preparing ourselves for that kind of a future then we have to be concerned with these inequalities ourselves.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not advocating communism. I am not suggesting that we ought to elect a socialist government. But I am suggesting that the Bible encourages those who have much to give to those who have a little. James said, Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
And the Bible also declares, Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? And it should be evident that our hearts and lives are not ready for the blessings with which God desires to comfort us until we know something about comforting other people in their needs. He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none. And he that hath food, let him do likewise.
But there was something else. For not only did the voice that cried in the wilderness insist that every valley should be exalted and that every mountain and hill should be made low, it also insisted that the crooked should be made straight. That the crooked should be made straight. And that is why we read that the publicans came to John the Baptist and they said to him, Teacher, what shall we do?
And John replied, Exact no more than that which is appointed you. And if there is one word in the English language that perfectly describes the publicans it’s the word crooked. Crooked. They were the tax collectors of their day. And the Roman government didn’t pass out tax tables so that its citizens could know how much they owed. They found out how much they owed from the publicans.
And the publicans customarily inflated the amount of taxes that they were supposed to collect and then they skimmed off the extra money and stuck it in their own pocket. That’s how that little runt Zacchaeus in Jericho did so well. He may have been short on stature but he was not short on cash because the publicans were crooked.
And I think it is very, very obvious that the human heart is not prepared for the blessings with which God desires to comfort it if the human heart is crooked. I probably don’t need to tell you this evening that honesty is a vanishing commodity in the United States. In nineteen twenty-four Liberty magazine sent out a hundred letters containing each of them one dollar bill.
And the letter informed the recipients that the one dollar bill was a refund for an overpayment. Of course there had been no overpayment. In nineteen twenty-four twenty-seven out of the hundred letters came back indicating that it was a mistake. In nineteen seventy-one Liberty magazine sent out another hundred letters with one dollar bill, and this time thirteen letters came back.
And I’m wondering if the magazine did it in nineteen eighty how many letters would come back. Or to put it more plainly, if you got one what would you do with it? Would you maybe say, Well Liberty magazine makes thousands of dollars and they will never miss this dollar bill, and you stick it in your pocket even though you know perfectly well it is not your dollar bill?
Unfortunately my friend the unsaved world around us does not have a corner on dishonesty, and it has often seeped into the life and experience of the church. There was a preacher who was caught one time by the IRS as they were doing an audit of his income tax return. They were puzzled by a deduction that he had claimed, four hundred and fifty dollars for a clerical collar.
Now I have never tried to wear a clerical collar, but if I did I don’t think I would have to pay that kind of money for it. And the preacher confessed that he had forgotten the decimal point and that it should have been four dollars and fifty cents for the clerical collar. Well they let him pay the extra tax and six percent interest, but one of the employees was suspicious.
And so he checked back over the preacher’s returns for several years and he found out for the last three years the preacher had forgotten the decimal point. And I’m wondering this evening if we realize that God does not approve of a Christian who cheats the government or cheats the people they do business with even if they only cheat a little bit.
And God does not appreciate Christians who lie to their bosses or to their supervisors or to their neighbors or to their families even if the lies are only little white lies. You see if our hearts are crooked they are not prepared. They are not prepared for the comforts and blessings of God. That which is crooked must be made straight.
But there was one more thing. Not only did the voice that cried in the wilderness insist that every valley should be exalted and that every mountain and hill should be made low, not only did it insist that the crooked must be made straight, but it also insisted that the rough places should be made plain or smooth.
And that is why we read that the soldiers came to John the Baptist and the soldiers said to John the Baptist, What must we do? And John said to them, Do no violence, neither accuse any man falsely, and be content with your wages. And if the right word to describe the publicans was crooked, the right word to describe the soldiers was rough. Rough.
You see the Roman army was composed generally of mercenary soldiers. They made a business out of fighting the Roman wars. Many of them were drawn from the fringes of the empire from half-civilized lands. And like all occupying armies throughout history when they settled in a foreign territory under the control of Rome the soldiers drank too much and they got into fights and they threatened people and they extorted favors from people.
And sometimes they even rebelled against their superiors because they were not content with their wages. And John said to these soldiers you’ve got to stop being so rough. Your dealings with other people have got to be a lot smoother. Now I know I’m not talking to an audience of soldiers this evening.
I know that you are not physically rough probably with most of the people with whom you have dealings. I’ve been around Christians long enough to know that even when the literal push doesn’t come to a literal shove Christians can be awfully rough with other Christians. They can be nasty. They can be inconsiderate. They can be cruel.
And it ought not to be that way. The Bible says, Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. There was a man who opened a delicatessen one day one time in a neighborhood where there were already two salami parlors in the neighborhood.
And out in front of one salami parlor there was a sign that said, Best in the world. And out in front of the other salami parlor there was a sign that said, Finest in the universe. As you’ll pardon the pun I think the delicatessen owner thought that both of the signs were a lot of baloney. And so he decided to be more moderate and he put up a sign in front of his delicatessen, Nicest in the neighborhood.
And wouldn’t it be wonderful if the people who lived with us in our neighborhood and on our streets would be able to say to each other, You know that Christian family that lives across the street. You know that Christian couple that lives three doors down. There’s a nicest family. There’s a nicest family in the entire neighborhood.
The Bible says, Let your moderation, let your gentleness, let your kindness be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. The rough places must be made smooth. And then the voice declared, And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
And you see when the spiritual terrain among God’s people is high mountains and low valleys and twisty lanes and rough spots God’s glory is hidden by those unacceptable features. But when God’s people pursue equity, honesty, kindness, then God’s glory can be seen in the midst of His people and other men will see it there.
And because Israel did not pursue these qualities God’s glory has not yet been revealed in Israel. But we are God’s people today. And spiritually if we possess these wonderful qualities God can be seen by men in the midst of us. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one for another.
The middle-aged couple came very late one night into the lobby of a cheap third-rate hotel. They approached the night clerk and they said to him, Please, please don’t tell us that the hotel is full. We’ve come from a distant city. We did not realize there was a convention in town and all of the other hotels have said there are no rooms available. No rooms at all.
The night clerk said, Well, he said, all our rooms are filled except my own personal room. He said, It’s where I sleep during the daytime, but he says, I don’t need it. Well I’m on duty at night. If you’d like to, he says, you’re welcome to stay there. And the couple gladly accepted his invitation and left for the night in the night clerk’s personal room.
The next morning the couple was sitting at the breakfast table and they asked the waiter to summon the night clerk to come to their table on a matter of urgent business. The night clerk came. He sat down. And the couple thanked him for the favor he had done. And then the man said to him, You’re too good a hotel man to be working in a place like this.
He said, How would you like it if I were to build you a brand new hotel in New York City and make you the manager of the hotel? Well the night clerk had difficulty suppressing the impression that the man didn’t know what he was talking about. But he was a gracious individual and he said finally, Well I guess that would be sort of nice.
Then the man said to him, Well that’s what I’m going to do. Permit me to introduce myself. My name is John Jacob Astor. And you know that John Jacob Astor, that wealthy man, did build in New York City the world-famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and he made this night clerk the manager of the hotel. And the night clerk became one of the most famous hotel men in the entire country.
And sometimes you and I make the mistake of thinking that God is looking for geniuses or orators or superstars or rah-rah guys. And what God is really looking for are people who have a genuine concern for the needs of other people, who are scrupulously honest, and who already know something about the art, the art of kindness and consideration and gentleness toward all.
And when God finds an individual like that He can build him the kind of life which can be filled with the blessings and mercies of God which will be the only true comfort of the human heart. Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. And God is always eager to comfort His people, even you, even you, if you are prepared to receive it.
Shall we pray?
Our Father we rejoice in Thee because Thou art the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ our Savior from sin and hell, but also because Thou art the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. And we pray Father that each individual in this audience may appropriate this word from Thee in the manner that they need. That any individual here who needs to open their heart to Your saving grace may do so, and that those of us who are Your people may open our hearts and prepare our lives for the experience of Your rich blessings and comfort. We ask it in Christ’s name.