The Sign of Immanuel

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 to Thrive. It's good to have you here today, and it's a great time to gather together again for our series called Untangling Christmas, okay? Now we're in the fourth week of this, and you know what's amazing to me is this is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. Have you ever heard that song? Yeah, I find it the most stressful time of the year. I find it a confusing time of the year. I avoid things like shopping, the mall, going out to eat, and thank God there's very few Christmas parties on our schedule. I mean, we have them, the hangout tonight, you know, white elephant gift, but that's not stressful. It's some of these office parties and these other things that people have to go to and endure, you know, because, right? Do you have one at your ... I went already. You went already? How was it? It was okay. You endured it. You endured it, yeah. So what happens is really, you know, we put all this pressure on this time of the year to be so wonderful, and we know in reality life is a struggle and difficult, and it's not always wonderful because we're just not always wonderful people. At least I'm not. Hugo, maybe, I better ask your wife. Don't ask her, please don't ask her. How wonderful is he? Yeah, but the real message of Christmas is God came into this tangled, messy world, and the whole idea of Christmas is Jesus came into the mess of it all, and the manger shows us that. I mean, look at how he was born. It's not like he was born in a maternity ward in some sterile, antiseptic, wonderful, everything, all that. He was born in a barn, you know? It's like, were you born in a barn? Well, Jesus was, okay? And what we also find out is the prophecies that foretold the birth of this Messiah, Jesus, were not spoken in some vacuum or in some ethereal state where the prophets were like, oh, isn't this wonderful, and look at what's going to happen. They lived in a real world of palace intrigue, messy politics, difficult, you name it. It was just a disaster going on at the time of Judah when Isaiah spoke these words, and they were like little pierces of light in the darkness of their day and age. Tell me, you know, I sound like an old man at times. Man, I have not seen in my lifetime, I don't remember a time quite like this. Do you? Now, I was a kid during the 60s into the 70s, and maybe that was a tumultuous time, and some of you remember it more clearly than others. I was two years old, I think, when Kennedy was shot, and I was eight years old when we had all sorts of racial conflict going on in the United States and the Vietnam War protests and all that stuff. So I don't remember that time period, but this is the first time I'm wondering what's going on in our culture. It seems to be a tangle of both progress and regress, of both advances and retreats. We've got great technology and breakthroughs in medicine for cancer and other diseases, but retreats in politics and civic engagement. We still haven't solved some of the basic issues. We have a world that's more connected than ever and more dangerous than ever. I think words from Martin Luther King Jr. that he spoke years ago during the 60s still are so sadly true for today. He said, though our scientific and technological genius, through it, we have made of this world a neighborhood, and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make it a brotherhood and a sisterhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we'll perish together as fools. Do I hear, I don't know if you want to say amen to that. Well today's reading was one of those crisis cataclysmic times. It's actually kind of a turning point for Judah. In fact, people like, I think it was Gerhard von Raad and other scholars and exegetes from 40, 50 years ago said this is the crisis moment, Isaiah 7, that changes the fate of Judah and its future. It's what happens between Isaiah, the prophet, and Ahaz, the king, that makes all the difference. It's kind of like that turning point. All of a sudden, everything happens in the future as a result. And so we get this really historical passage, and in the midst of it, such an amazing prophecy of what God is still going to do. It just blows me away, it just blows me away. By the way, you can look at and read the notes for this message on the You version of the Bible app and can follow along with it. It looks like that little holy Bible in the corner of the app. And then you'll find the notes for this sermon, and Kathy always looks them up, she's got them. Do you actually take notes? I just save it to download. You just save it to download later and look at it later? Right, follow along as you go along. Isn't that cool? I think it's pretty cool. Of course, I never did that when I was young. As a kid, what do you do? I looked at the front of the church and cou...