The Branch From Jesse

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. Welcome to Thrive. As was noted in the prayers already, I am not the real thing. I am Plan B. I am where I learned to be while I played baseball for one year at Concordia College in Austin, Texas. On the bench. It is my joy to come off the bench to provide Pastor John some respite and some focus on other ministry opportunities. And from there, I see we have Mrs. Roth with us from the city of Frankenmuth. Doing that. That's great. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, in Israel, it's Jerusalem. In Michigan, it's Frankenmuth. So we've been, I'm glad you're here because we've been having some issues with John that I think his mother is the only one who can solve. So thank you for being here. We'll talk later. Chewing gum in church. I don't know what to do about it. So we're looking at the prophet Isaiah during this time. It's going to be a fairly different and lengthy introduction to this because I want to set the tone and give you some background on my understanding of the text. One of the things that I've noticed in ministry is that many of you may not may or may not know that I served 38 years in the ministry. And seven of those were as a consultant and vice president for an organization called Lutheran Church Extension Fund. And what I did for them was travel the country and ask two questions. What are you trying to accomplish and how are you going to fund it? And why I love asking those is because I would normally get kind of a deer in the headlights kind of freeze. And I could see pastors and church councils and people searching for the right answer. What answer does he want? What do you need to give? And we would then begin with a process of, I'd ask that same question to you. I'm not talking to church council. What do you want from life? And how are you going to get it? Let me deepen the question. What does God want for your life? And how is he going to give it to you? There's an issue that I have found pretty regularly in ministry and that is that mission is born. I'll explain this. I kind of give you the principle and explain it, kind of expand it out. A mission is born. But what happens over time is the institutional support of that mission becomes more important than the mission itself. Slowly but surely we kind of take our eyes off the ball about what's most important and take a look at what's ancillary, what was supportive of the ministry. For example, let me show you an obvious example. On Christmas Eve, what you and I are looking for is a worship service, or perhaps are looking for, with candles, singing Silent Night, with the wonderful smell and aromas of gingerbread cookies, and delightful opportunities to eat in our family sausage balls. And it's a beautiful thing because on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day they are calorie-free. And so we have a whole anticipation of how Christmas Eve will be almost romantic, almost hallmark. Are you with me? Where it's just kind of like delightful, you know, and you look for how many times you say the word cocoa because that's relative to hallmark movies and romantic ideas and to look for cocoa. And I get it. I don't begrudge that. I moved to tears many times while I was leading worship as a pastor to light the candles and sing Silent Night. And when I was pastoring and leading a congregation, I would sing it a little softer every verse. And man, it was hard to sing the third verse. It just resonated just above a whisper. The congregation sang and held lights. It was gorgeous. But it had nothing to do with the original birth. I overstated. It had something to do with the original birth. We were celebrating Jesus' birth. But stay with me now. How might this have been more real? How might it be refocused to actually lift up the message of what God had done by bringing a son into the middle of earth? So perhaps, and I'll recommend this to John and the council here, but I'm not sure it's going to receive full acceptance. Instead of the aromas of beautiful candlelight and gingerbread cookies, what if we spread manure around? You with me? And you walked in and there was manure and hay spread over the top of the manure and you went, Ah, Christmas Eve. Now, the example is goofy, silly and pressing the point. But you get it. That's what happens. Now, I don't want to begrudge because I'm going to enjoy on Christmas Eve with our kids and grandkids, which are coming to our house. That's actually going to be 18 of us together. So it's more like coming to our house. It's like flooding our home. And I'm going to enjoy all the candlelight moments and all the regular traditions. And I'm not saying those are bad. I'm just saying here's what happens is that there's a subtlety. We take our eye off the ball. I take my eye off the ball from God entering a barn. And there was no special moonlight that flickered through the straw roof and shone on Mary....