The Tangle Of Two Cities

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. It's good to have you here as we start a new series called Untangling Christmas. And from just a couple of chuckles I hear, I have a feeling you've had that problem as well. The one thing I dread every time I start decorating outside or inside is that ball of lights from last year, and then half of them don't work. You can't figure out which one it is, and you just decide to throw it out and start over again. Well, yeah, I think that's a metaphor for how this season becomes such a tangled mess in so many ways. Overscheduled, overworked, overcommercialized, overanxious, distracted, exhausted, Christmas can be that, can't it? It doesn't have to be. But the first one was actually exhausting and confusing and a tangled mess. And even the times that were prophesied about the first Christmas, they were too also times that were a tangled mess. You know, it's so ironic. The whole idea of Christmas is that God came into this world through his son, Jesus Christ, to start untangling the mess that we made of this place. God entered into the snarl of our own sins and deceptions and power plays and exploitations, and he brings light into this darkness and hope into despair and joy into the midst of our sadness and peace into the midst of our conflict. And he doesn't do it through some divine edict from above or from some military muscle that he shows through an angelic army, but actually by becoming part of the tangled mess itself, becoming a baby born in a manger. And so the whole point of Christmas is that we celebrate how God is untangling this mess. And yet the irony is we make more of it by celebrating Christmas, right? So the series, by the way, we're going to be looking through the first 12 chapters of the prophet Isaiah. And these are some of the most famous passages in the whole book, at least some of the snippets of those passages. And how many of you were in children's Christmas programs for Sunday school or other pageants as a child? How many of you also memorized a couple passages from Isaiah, like for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. Anybody? Yeah. How about, for a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he will call his name Immanuel, God with us. Or those who are sitting in darkness have seen a great light. Those are some of those passages that are here in Isaiah chapters 1 through 12. And when I remember those Christmas pageants, we kind of snip those little passages out. Totally out of context of what was going on in Isaiah's day and age, as if he was just speaking in the midst of, well, I don't know. He could have been anywhere at any time saying these words and just basically 700 years before Jesus was born to show that God had a plan. It was divine. It was predicted and he accomplished it. And that's all these passages were used for at the time. And there's truth to that. That's not a problem. But boy, as an adult now, I'm starting to read Isaiah again and going like, what a mess that he spoke these words into. A tangled mess called Judah and Jerusalem. And we find it was just an amazing contradistinction between the good news that would be coming and the bad news of his day and age. And that's actually good news. It's good news because so often I think we're always trying to create this idealized, I don't know, home alone-ish version of Christmas. You know, the what? Yeah, I guess there's a violence in it, you know. Yeah, I know there's some violence in it. But, you know, that whole feeling like all the families together and everybody's celebrating in the end and everything's wonderful, right? And so often Christmas isn't that. And then we go like, oh, it's such a mess. How many of you are wondering if Thanksgiving is going to be a little of a mess around the table with the conversations and the people that are coming over? Hmm? Yeah. The good news is the fact that God comes into the tangle of our mess. He untangles it all with his grace and goodness and truth. And that's going to be the case. That's still going to be true no matter what this Christmas season is like. So we're going to be looking at Isaiah, and we're starting today actually in Isaiah 2 that will refer back to Isaiah 1. And we're going to read Isaiah 2 verses 1 through 5. By the way, you can follow along in the Bible app, the You version, there are notes for all of this. But let's read this now, Isaiah 2, 1 through 5. The word that Isaiah, the son of Amos, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills. And all the nation shall flow to it. And many people shall come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us h...