God's Miraculous Love Letter

The book of Isaiah. Dear little flock, you're all wandering away from me like sheep in an open field. You have always been running away from me and now you're lost. You can't find your way back.

But I can't stop loving you. I will come to find you. So I'm sending a shepherd to look after you and love you, to carry you home to me. You've been stumbling around like people in a dark room, but into the darkness a bright light will shine.

It will chase away all the shadows like sunshine. A little baby will be born, a royal son. His mommy will be a young girl who doesn't have a husband. His name will be Emmanuel, which means God has come to live with us. He's one of King David's children's children's children, the Prince of Peace.

Yes, someone is going to come and rescue you, but he won't be who anyone expects. He will be a king, but he won't live in a palace and he won't have lots of money. He will be poor and he will be a servant. But this king will heal the whole world. He will be a hero who will fight for his people and rescue them from their enemies. But he won't have big armies and he won't fight with swords. He will make the blind see and he will make the lame leap like deer. He will make everything the way it was always meant to be. But people will hate him and they won't listen to him. He will be like a lamb. He will suffer and die.

It's the secret rescue plan we made from before the beginning of the world. It's the only way to get you back, but he won't stay dead. I will make him alive again. And one day when he comes back to rule forever, the mounds and trees will dance and sing for joy. The earth will shout out loud. His fame will fill the whole earth as the waters cover the sea. Everything sad will come untrue.

Even death is going to die and he will wipe away every tear from every eye. Yes, the rescuer will come. Look for him. Watch for him. Wait for him. He will come.

I promise. Poor Isaiah. He read God's letter over and over to God's people, but no one listened to him. At all.

Ever. They didn't want to hear God's promise because they didn't believe it. Did it sound maybe too good to be true? A story that ends happily ever after? Well, it does sound like a fairy tale, doesn't it? And as anyone will quickly tell you, fairy tales aren't true. Or are they? Thank you.

That's all of our campuses. Let's pray together. Father, thank you for the beauty of the story. God, the letter that you wrote to us 2700 years ago. And we pray that, God, this morning we would not hear it simply as words, archaic words written down in an old book, but we would hear in them the God of the universe speaking to us, telling us about our lives and the rescuer he sent for us and the plans that he has for us. God, we need faith to believe, and so we're asking God for that faith. We're asking for the Holy Spirit to anoint the words so that they come alive in our hearts. We pray in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name, and all God's people said, amen. Amen.

Thank you, Allie. Good morning, Summit Church. If you have a Bible at one of our campuses, I'd love for you to take it out and open it to Isaiah chapter 52.

Isaiah 52 and a little bit of chapter 53. I want to talk with you on this last weekend that I will be here for a few weeks. I'm taking this mission trip I told you about last week.

I'll be starting this Friday. And so on this last kind of weekend before I'm gone for a handful of weeks, I want to talk with you about why I believe in God, in Jesus, the Bible, the mission, all of it. Faith, as I have told many of you before, has not always come easily for me. I always feel like as a pastor it's supposed to come easy for me.

It's just supposed to be what I do, but that is not true. Throughout my life, I have wrestled pretty significantly with different questions of faith. Do I believe all these things simply because this is how I grew up? And if I've grown up in a different house, maybe I believe different things?

Or is this all just a fairy tale that we have made up together so that we can feel affirmed and secure? Just this week, I was reading in a magazine called The New Yorker, which is not a Christian magazine at all. It was an article in it by an atheist who was explaining why he did not believe. It really caught my attention what he said.

Here's what it is. Extraordinary claims, he says, require extraordinary evidence. It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than 100 billion galaxies, each containing more than 100 billion stars.

And then he waited 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved in atmosphere, sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again for thousands of years. And you read that and you think, wow, that sounds like a significant question. I want to explain to you that I believe that there are extraordinary reasons to believe. In fact, I believe these reasons are quite compelling for those who have ears to hear. You see, the problem I'll go ahead and tell you that people have with what I'm going to present to you today is not that this stuff is not compelling in and of itself. It's that the implications of these things being true would lead to a number of conclusions that certain people find objectionable. Well, I just don't like how God rules the world. And if this is true, then that means that there's a good God in charge and I can't reconcile that or I don't agree with this or that moral approach or something along those lines. So from the very beginning, many people approach these things with the attitude this just can't be true.

It would just create too many problems. Now, we're all inwardly biased, including me, so I would encourage you as much as you can to just hear what I'm going to present to you this weekend and consider it with an open mind. I understand that some of you doubt the Bible's message, and I know that many of you feel like you have very good reasons for doing so. My question for you as we begin is this. Are you willing to doubt your doubts in the face of some pretty substantial evidence? Do you pride yourself on being a doubter? What about doubting your doubts in the face of some pretty overwhelming evidence?

Are you willing to consider this evidence just for what it is without a bias, a preconceived bias against it, because you are not sure of what it would lead to? Let me just start this discussion with the CIA. When the CIA gives a double agent in the United States a means to identify themselves to the U.S. authorities, they use a number of layers of identification because they don't want any chance of getting the wrong person.

For example, I read about one Soviet double agent who wanted to reveal himself to U.S. authorities, so they gave him these instructions. They had six different things he had to do. He had to go to Mexico City where he was number one to write a letter to the secretary and sign his name as I. Jackson. Then he was number two after three days to go to the Plaza de Colon in Mexico City. And at noon, number three, he was to stand before the statue of Columbus, just looking up at it. Number four, with his middle finger placed in a guidebook. When he was approached, number five, he was to say it was a magnificent statue.

And number six, despite his Russian accent, that he was only visiting from Oklahoma. God's way of verifying his messenger was through giving layers of prophetic fulfillment. In fact, you remember if you were here a few weeks ago when we went through Deuteronomy in this whole story series, we saw what God had said would be the validation of what God says versus what other people say that he says, that it's not true. Deuteronomy 18, 21, if you say in your heart, how can we know the word that the Lord has not spoken? Here's the answer, verse 22, when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously.

He or she has made it up. Nearly 25% of that Bible that you hold in your hand is prophecy. Prophecy means God foretelling things that had not happened yet, often in great detail. They almost all have to do with a rescue plan that God was commencing, a rescuer that God would send who was called, in Hebrew terminology, a messiah. There are 322 direct prophecies specifically about him, not to mention the dozens of historical pictures and analogies that are embedded in Scripture, many of which we have unpacked together over the last six months as we have walked our way through the Old Testament. We're going to focus this morning primarily on only one prophet, that is the prophet Isaiah, because I think he is a great example of all the prophets together. His writings point us to the main subject of prophecy, Jesus, as well as give us a glimpse, a taste of the miraculous nature of prophecies. Now, I am, without shame, going to take us through Isaiah's prophecies today in a little different way than we typically do things.

I'm going to use the text of Sally Lloyd-Jones' Jesus Storybook Bible, which my daughter read right at the beginning of the message, but we use in our family devotions as we are going through the year, where Sally Lloyd-Jones summarizes Isaiah's prophecies in the form of a love letter that God wrote to Israel. You say, Jesus Storybook Bible? Isn't that a kid's book? Aren't you a PhD in theology?

Aren't we all adults? Why, yes you are, yes I am, and yes it is. But I'm going to do it this way for three reasons.

Here they are. First, I've encouraged you, all of you, to read this book along with us as we work our way through the Bible this year, especially those of you in families. I said it would be great for family devotions, so I thought it would be good for us to actually use it one time here in the sermon. Second, I think that she just does a great job of capturing the entire message of the whole of Isaiah's message, and I think that sometimes we adults can get so bogged down in the particulars that we miss the beauty of the whole, so we're going to use her kind of summary of it. And then third, we're going to have her, Sally Lloyd-Jones is going to be here in a few weeks as a guest, and so I want any of you who run into her on the sidewalk to be able to say, Sally, loved your book, and to be able to say that with integrity because you will at least heard one chapter of it, okay? All right, well we had Ally, my daughter, read it at the beginning of the message. Like I said, let me walk you back through it now, a few different parts of it, and explain it, and I'm going to put the references where she gets the things from out of the book of Isaiah, because literally just about every word in that chapter just comes from a verse.

It's like she strung together a bunch of different verses. So here we are, let's start at the beginning. Dear little flock, says Isaiah, you're all wandering away from me. Like sheep in an open field, you've always been running away from me, and now you're lost. You can't find your way back. This is the substance of the Bible's description of the problem.

From the Garden of Eden onward, we've all been running away. And now, Isaiah says, we're like sheep, sheep that every one of us believes we know the best way for us to go, and so we choose our own way. Now, most of you probably don't have a great deal of experience with sheep.

I certainly do not either. But those who do say that sheep are a particularly dumb animal. They walk right into harm's way. If they're in the mountain regions, they will step right off the cliffs and drop hundreds of feet to their death. They will step into fast-moving streams and just drown. In fact, just this week I saw an article, you may have seen this, that a shepherd in Spain fell asleep for an hour, and 1,300 sheep went into downtown Madrid. That's where they ended up.

They clogged up for five hours. What is there in the sheep's mind that thinks that's probably a good way to go? Let's go where the buildings are.

Let's go where all the traffic is. They're just dumb. They've got particularly bad eyesight, so they can only see a few feet ahead of them. They're really nearsighted, plus their heads hang down. You know how they kind of walk around, which means that they're not animals of forethought or keen insight. All they pretty much think of when they think about where to go is, where's the next bite of grass? When they look up because their heads hang down, all they can see is the hiney of the sheep in front of them, and they follow that. There are layers of symbolism in that for the human race.

Furthermore, when they fall over, the sheep become what they call cast, like a beetle where you just kick your legs and you can't turn yourself back over, so you have to flip them over or they'll die. Now, this is not a very flattering picture of us, but you have to admit, while unflattering, it's pretty compassionate, because this is how God sees us. He sees us like sheep who have lost their way. We don't even know where we came from. We don't know how to get back, and we're confused.

We're lost. So God continues, but I can't stop loving you. I'm going to come to find you, so I'm sending you a shepherd to look after you and love you, to carry you back home to me. Y'all, the gospel is not that we came searching for God. The gospel is that God came searching for us. That book that you hold in your hand is not a collection of insights from enlightened men and women who had lofty thoughts about God.

It is the story about God's relentless pursuit of rebellious people who didn't want anything to do with him. And he said, I did this, Isaiah 43, 4, I did this because you were precious in my eyes and I love you. Y'all, that word precious is not a word that I use a great deal, because precious means that something is so valuable to you that you'd give up anything else for it. There are very few things that I have that would be precious to me. My kids are precious to me. Which means that if a doctor came to me and told me that one of my kids had a disease, the disease was fatal, and the only way for them to be cured was to get this medicine that was extraordinarily expensive and that insurance didn't cover it and it was going to cost millions of dollars, and the only way I could get it was to sell everything I own and mortgage my entire future without even thinking.

I would give up everything I have, everything I would have to be able to get this medicine because my kids are precious to me. The God of the universe, Isaiah says, he looked at you, the rebellious sheep, and he said, you're precious to me. So I'm going to come, like a shepherd, to find you. In Luke 15, Jesus would describe that shepherd. He's talking, of course, about himself, by describing him like one who had 100 sheep, that's a lot of sheep, and discovered late one night that one of them was missing. And Jesus said that shepherd, this shepherd, left the 99 ones that he had to go after the lost one, which honestly does not make a lot of financial sense.

It does not make financial sense to put yourself back in harm's way for only 1% of what you have, right? I mean, why would you do that if the only way that you would do that is if each individual one was precious to you, like my kids? A couple of years ago, we were at Disney World, and the thing happens, and it may have happened to some of you parents, for like two minutes, I lost one of my kids in that crowd.

I mean, you know what it's like, that moment where you're like, I cannot find them. I did not turn to Veronica and say, well, we got three more. We still got the majority of them. We're going to be fine. No, each one is precious to me.

So we hang on to the three, and we went to find the one. Isaiah says, chapter 49, 15, he said, could a nursing mom forget her newborn child? Of course not. Would she ever have no compassion on the child she's just born? I've told you guys before that my wife, when we had our kids develop this, I mean, it was crazy, X-man kind of spidey sense, being in tune with our babies at the slightest whimper that I didn't even hear.

She was out of bed and up the stairs. One of the dumbest things that I ever said in my marriage was, that's amazing, our baby's only two weeks old, and I think she slept through the night. Veronica said, the baby was up six times last night.

You slept through the night. The baby and I did not. God says, Isaiah 49, 16, he said, you're even more precious to me than a newborn child is to a mother. A newborn mother would never forget.

I will never forget. In fact, you're more precious. I know how many hairs are on the top of your head.

My wife, as in tune as she is with our kids, never knew how many hair follicles were on their body. God says, this is how I see you. And then God continues through Isaiah. He says, I'm going to do more than just come after the sheep. I'm going to give up my life for the sheep. Isaiah 53, 4.

If leaving the 99 to go after the one didn't make financial sense, then this is just insane. And why would a shepherd give his life for the sheep? The life of a sheep does not equal the life of a human. Right?

I mean, think about it. I'm sure you love your dog. If your dog went tearing across the interstate and your 12-year-old went tearing across the interstate after them, you don't get them back and say, that's so brave.

I'm so proud of you. No, you're like, you got to let the dog go. Because you're like, yes, we love the dog, but the dog's life does not compare to your life. The shepherd's life does not compare to the sheep's life.

Why is the creator dying for the creation? This is crazy kind of love. And he has this love. What's even more staggering, he has this love for people who don't even love him back. And I've told you before that groupies are people who love somebody that'll never love them back. Some of you ladies watch how teenage girls today swoon over Zac Efron or Michael B. Jordan or Channing Tatum or somebody like that, get their pictures up on the wall, and you're like, sweetheart, give it up.

He ain't ever even going to know who you are. But you have a hard time being judgmental because you remember when you were convinced that you were going to marry Donny from New Kids on the Block, don't you? You knew exactly how it was going to happen. You were going to put on your best pair of acid-wash Jordache jeans and you were going to go down to the concert, New Kids on the Block concert, and you were going to stand there in the front row with the thousands of other girls. You were going to scream as Donny walked by, but your scream was going to be just a little bit louder, and he was going to turn and y'all were going to make eye contact. And about halfway through the concert, a bouncer was going to come up to you with this little note written from Donny that said, you got the right stuff, baby. You're the reason why I sing this song. And you guys are going to get married and y'all are going to live happily ever after, right?

But unless your name is Jenny McCarthy, that never happened. Instead, you married Phil from accounting, a slightly overweight, balding man who wears penny loafers and drives a minivan. And you're okay with that because as you got older, you realize it's just not wise to love people who are never going to love you back. You know, the most amazing thing in scripture is that we see God loving people, giving himself to people who don't love him back and coming after them relentlessly and then laying down his life for them. What kind of love is this?

Are there any words, any analogies we even have to describe that kind of love? Charles Spurgeon, the silver-tongued orator, the British pastor of the 19th century who could say anything they said. He could put it beautifully. He said, if there's one subject that makes me back away from this platform, utterly ashamed of my poor, feeble words, it is the subject, the love of Christ. The love of Christ is the most amazing thing under heaven, if not in all of heaven itself.

He says, I can't stop loving you. You've been stumbling around like people in a dark room and into the darkness, a bright light is going to shine and that bright light is going to chase away all the shadows like sunshine. You see, you don't have God in your life.

Life without God feels like darkness. You're not sure where you come from. You're not sure where you're going. Tragedy, you don't know how to deal with tragedy. You don't know how to open tragedy.

You don't even know how to deal with success. You just feel like you're lost. And he says, into this darkness, this light is going to come, but it's not going to be a light like you would expect. The light that is going to show up, the sunshine is going to come in the form of a baby. A little baby is going to be born. His mommy is going to be a young girl who doesn't even have a husband. He'll be born miraculously to a virgin and his name will be Immanuel.

Immanuel, which means literally in Hebrew, God has come to live with us. He is also, Isaiah says, going to be one of King David's children's children's children. In other words, he's going to be fully God, God with us, but he's also going to be the son of David, a very real human with a lot of real problems, a lot of real flaws, including betraying his best friend, sleeping with his wife and having him murdered. This Jesus is going to be the son of both God and man, fully God and fully man.

Yes, somebody is going to come and rescue you, but he won't be who anyone expects. He's going to be a king, but he won't live in a palace and he won't have lots of money. He's going to be poor. He's going to be a king like nobody you've ever seen. He'll be a servant, but this king is going to be able to heal the whole world. You see, like David, the shepherd boy, everybody's going to overlook this king.

This king will not be one who amazes us with his power or wealth. In fact, he's going to take the form of a servant and live like somebody who's poor, but his poverty and his servant stature is going to enable him to do for us what no king has ever been able to do, and that is heal us, which is going to help us, listen to this, see his true glory far better than any display of might or wealth ever could. Isaiah opens up the book of Isaiah with this vision of seeing God high and lifted up. Isaiah 6, I saw God high and lifted up, and the scene is exactly like you would think it would be. It's God, you know, on his throne and glory and angels and smoke and trembling and fire and fear, and Isaiah's on his face feeling like he's going to die. Exactly what you would think of God high and lifted up. Isaiah only uses that phrase God high and lifted up one other time in the entire book of Isaiah, only one other time, and it's right before Isaiah 53. It's there in Isaiah 52 when he says God high and lifted up is going to be shown in Jesus' death on the cross when he humbled himself and he died for sinners.

You see, God could have been glorified by coming to earth to avenge the wrongs and to punish the criminals, but God said there's a greater glory that I will get that doesn't come through smashing them but comes from being smashed for them as I give myself and love to receive them. Athanasius, the early church father, used to say, you can tell the strength of a flame not by its ability to burn upwards but by its ability to burn downwards. The weakest flame, strike a match, the weakest flame will burn upwards. But if you're going to have a flame that burns downward, that takes a blowtorch, it takes the flame coming out of a rocket engine.

You can tell the strength of a flame by its ability to burn downwards. He says in the same way you can tell the true glory of God not by his ability to create the expanses of the universe but by his willingness to humble himself and die for people who had rejected him and turned against him. Now, y'all, if you reject his offer, he will come a second time in judgment.

That is clear in Isaiah. But he would prefer to be glorified in saving you, not judging you. But you've got to make a choice. He will be glorified either way in your life, either through saving or through judging.

I choose. But the Messiah that came said, I'm going to allow you to glorify God by demonstrating the extent of his mercy and his kindness in your life. And that's what he prefers. He will be a hero. He'll fight for his people, but he's going to rescue them from their enemies.

But he's not going to have big armies the way most heroes do, and he won't fight with swords. This Messiah is not going to fight with weapons because this Messiah's aim is to heal and to save, not to avenge. I read this, and I was reminded of that scene in Les Mis where Jean Valjean has gotten out of prison, and he's a criminal that has been released from prison on probation, and he's going out. He's trying to find a place to stay, and a priest very graciously allows him to stay in his house. Jean Valjean gets up in the middle of the night and begins to steal all the silver and gold out of this priest's house. The priest, at least in the movie, confronts him, and Jean Valjean punches him in the face and takes his stuff and runs. Well, the police catch him, bring him back to the priest's house, and says, is this the silver that he stole?

He claims that you gave it to him. The priest is standing there, and this is the moment, because all the priest has got to say is, yes, he stole this silver. All he's got to say is, Jean Valjean, go back to the prison for the rest of his life, and justice will be restored. But the priest does something that nobody's expecting. The priest says, oh, well, I did give it to him.

In fact, he forgot to take all the other things I gave to him and begins to pull out other riches, these golden candlesticks, silver candlesticks, and begins to put them in Jean Valjean's bag, and Jean Valjean can't believe it because he's giving him grace, and this becomes this transformational moment where for the rest of his life, Jean Valjean becomes the most gracious, loving, just person you could ever imagine. The writer that wrote that, what he was trying to say was, there is a righteousness, yes, that satisfies the law, but there's an even greater righteousness that creates righteousness in people that you have previously been unrighteous. God could have restored justice by just punishing all sin, but God wanted to not just restore justice. He wanted to make just and righteous people. So when it came time to wield the weapons, he turned them not on you who deserve them.

He turned them on himself so that in him we could become righteous. Jesus or Isaiah says he's gonna make the blind see. He'll make the lame leap like a deer. He'll make everything the way it was always meant to be, but people, even though he does those things, are gonna hate him, and they won't listen to him. He'll be like a lamb. He will suffer and die, but he won't stay dead. I'll make him alive again, and one day, one day, when he comes back to rule forever, the mountains and the trees will dance and sing for joy. The earth will shout out loud. His fame will fill the whole earth like the waters fill the oceans.

Everything sad is gonna come untrue. Even death is gonna die, and he will wipe away every tear from every eye. One day, he will heal the whole earth and bring that existence that we have yearned for and crave for all of our lives, and we get a glimpse of that, by the way, in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. One day, God will do to you and me and the entire earth what he did to the body of Jesus. Y'all, two-thirds of evangelical believers, I mean, people in churches like this one, two-thirds of evangelical believers do not believe that we'll have actual physical bodies in heaven. I guess they think that we're floating around up there, you know, on clouds, playing harps, wearing diapers, toy bow and arrows.

I don't know what you think, but it's not true. Jesus had a real body. In Jesus' body, we're gonna be raised like him, plus the Bible describes where we're headed as the new heavens and the new earth. New heavens and new earth means like the old, but a lot better, right? I mean, you know, if you tell me you got a new car because you drove a 1983 Toyota Corolla, and I go out there in the, you know, thing, and I'm looking for a new car. I'm not looking for a jet.

I'm looking for a helicopter or a horse. I'm looking for a car like your Toyota Corolla, but a lot nicer. Well, in the same way we got an old heaven and an old earth that's been crushed and broken by sin, God is gonna put us in a new heaven and a new earth that has not the slightest trace of sin in it, which means that all that we love and enjoy down here, a better version of over there or up there or down here, wherever it's gonna be, music, food, nature. There's gonna be a heavenly Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon we see now has been cursed by sin. What's the real one gonna look like? How about the heavenly Hawaii? I'm looking forward to flying over that one because I think I'm gonna be able to fly in heaven.

It's gonna be awesome. I've even told you I expect there to be a heavenly Dean Dome where the Tar Heels win every single game. And God wipes away every tear from every Tar Heel fan. You're like, well, who are they gonna beat every time?

The devils, naturally, okay? That's not preference. It's just theology, folks. That's just theology. He's gonna wipe away every tear and he's gonna make all the sad things come untrue. Now that phrase, sad things come untrue, that's not from the book of Isaiah. That's actually a quote from J.R.R.

Tolkien from Lord of the Rings. And there's a great little phrase because what it means is not that God's gonna make us forget everything in the past. He's not gonna take out the little flashy stick like in Men in Black and all of a sudden we don't remember anything. What he is going to do is he's going to heal every hurt and he's going to show us how God used even those hurts to weave something so beautiful and so glorious and filled with so much joy that while we remember what happened in the past, there's not an ounce of pain that goes along with it because it's been swallowed up and the glory and the beauty of what God has done. Y'all, what an incredible story.

What an incredible story. But like Isaiah laments, nobody believed him. Nobody believed him.

Why? Why did they not believe him? Well, it's like Sally Lloyd-Jones ends the chapter. She says, it seemed probably like a fairy tale, like it's too good to be true.

It's just now it's a story you make up to make yourself feel comfortable and we all know that fairy tales don't come true. Let me, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay. C.S. Lewis was a literary scholar at Oxford before becoming a Christian.

And C.S. Lewis wrote this essay on fairy tales and myths in the process of becoming a Christian in which he explained, listen to this. He says, all of mankind's myths and fairy tales, they all follow a pattern. And that is because they are expressions, listen, of a yearning deep in our hearts. All these fairy tales follow a pattern not because our hearts are making them up but because they are hungering for the very thing they were created for. You see what he's saying there? All these fairy tales follow a pattern because there's something behind them that we're yearning for and we almost know is true.

I'll give you an example. Beauty and the Beast. And yes, I'm very aware that in the last 12 months I have told you this is the third fairy tale that I've told you, okay? We did Cinderella, we did The Little Mermaid, and now we're doing Beauty and the Beast, which tells you that I have at least four children that are under the age of 13 in my house and three of my girls. Here we are, Beauty and the Beast.

Listen to this. In the Beauty and the Beast, what do you have? You've got a man who is disfigured beyond human likeness because of selfish, proud decisions that he has made. And as a result, he is appalling to look at. That's a picture of the human condition. Many of us feel like at least inwardly we're really ugly and we don't want people to see inside of us because if they saw inside of us, they'd be appalled too. So what we want to do is we want to try to work on our exterior beauty and keep people at a distance from our inward ugliness. So some of us work really hard at looking good on the outside. Others of us looking great on the outside is not really an option. So what you do is you try to make yourself beautiful through becoming really good at what you do. And maybe you're really good.

Maybe you're good at your job or making a lot of money or maybe you're just good morally. You become this attractive person that's adding beauty so that people will love you. But for the beast to be saved, Beauty has to actually kiss him. Belle has to kiss him. Why would she kiss him?

She has to kiss him because she loves him. Jesus is going to go a step farther than Belle ever did because he's not only going to love the beast and kiss the beast, he's going to become the beast in our place so that by becoming him, him becoming us, we can become him and we can become beautiful like he was. Deep down, all of us yearn for that to be true. You see, our hearts know that kind of love exists, which is why the theme appears in so many of our fairy tales. The details of the fairy tales are all made up, but the yearning behind them is real because we're created for that kind of love. So it's not a fairy tale. It's not a fairy tale.

It is the story that undergirds all of our greatest aspirations and hopes. The other reason Isaiah said that nobody would believe him is he says because we don't want it to be true in some ways. I know that sounds like a contradiction. Part of us wants it to be true, but part of us doesn't. Isaiah says they don't want to hear God's promise because their hearts are sinful. Listen, and if these things are true, if these things are true, then that means that God is God. And that means that his ways are right, and that means that he's in charge, not us. And for us to confess that this is really from God means we have to confess that where he and I disagree, I'm in the wrong, and that means I've got to stop arguing with God about how I think things ought to be.

Let me give you an unusual example on this one. A few years ago, I befriended a girl named Carolyn, who was a Muslim who had grown up in Central Asia and was now in the United States. Me and a group of friends shared the gospel with her numerous times. After about six months together, six months studying through different things, she said, I've come to the conclusion that Jesus really was the Messiah.

I believe he died for my sins, and I believe he rose from the dead. She said, the one thing I cannot accept and I can never accept is that he was part of this thing you call the Trinity. The reason she said that is because from childhood, raised in Central Asia, she'd gone to a mosque where every week they said God cannot be a Trinity.

God cannot be a Trinity. She says, it doesn't make sense to me. I can't accept that.

So we showed her where the Bible taught that numerous times. I said, I can't accept it. One night, we were sitting around a coffee table, and I said, Carolyn, listen, what if Jesus, all of a sudden, right now, the resurrected Jesus showed up, somehow proved to you that it was him, and then he looked at you in the face, and he said, Carolyn, I'm not going to explain the Trinity to you.

You're never going to understand it, in fact, in this life. But it's true, and I want you to trust me that it's true, even though you don't understand it, and one day when we get to heaven, I will expand your mind, Carolyn, and then you can understand it, but until then, you're just going to have to trust me, even when you don't understand it. I said, would you do it then?

Would you believe him and trust him then? She was a super smart girl. She kind of sat back, and she said, well, I guess that's really the question, isn't it?

The question is, am I really to trust God if I can't understand it, and do I believe that this Bible that you keep pointing me back to is the word of God? She went home that night. She calls the next morning, 6 a.m., just out of her mind, just like she's out of breath, and she's like, you're not going to believe what happened to me last night. She goes, you're going to think I'm crazy. You need to sit down. I think I'm crazy. She said, last night at 4 o'clock, I woke up, and somebody was knocking on my door, and I tried to ignore it, and they kept knocking on my door, and eventually I got up, and I walked over to my door, and they knocked the entire time until I got up to the door, and I opened the door. I went open.

Nobody was there. She said, I know you think I'm crazy, but I am positive that that was Jesus putting that sound in my heart, trying to show me that he wanted me to receive him. She goes, maybe I am crazy, but I know that Jesus really is who he says he is, and if he says that he is a part of a trinity, then I'm willing to trust him even though I don't understand it. Now, listen, that may not be your issue. In fact, it probably is not if you weren't raised in a mosque, but you got something. I don't know why God's doing this in the world.

Why does he say this is wrong? You got any number of things you can't understand. If you wait on Jesus to answer all your questions, you will never come to him because he never promises he will this side of eternity. Faith is accepting what you cannot understand based on what you can understand. And what you can understand is that these promises are divine.

These prophecies are legitimate and real. Or here's my other favorite definition of faith. Faith is the unexplainable meeting the undeniable.

It's when the unexplainable meets the undeniable. Jesus did not show up with an encyclopedia after he resurrected. He didn't hand him a book and say, here's all the answers to your questions.

Let me know what you think. No, he showed up. He put nails in hands. He's like, he's like, who wants to argue now?

Anybody? It's the unexplainable meeting the undeniable. And what is undeniable is that these prophecies are divine. These prophecies tell the life of Jesus, both the purpose and the details of it with staggering specificity.

I mean, just think about it. Scripture tells us that the coming Messiah would be born of a virgin, Isaiah 7, 14. He'd be from the line of Abraham, Genesis 22, 18. He'd be a descendant of the line of Judah, Genesis 49, 10. He would be from the household of David, Jeremiah 23, 5. He would be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5, 2. He would be presented with gifts at his birth, Psalm 72, 10.

And then be forced to flee an evil king who wanted to kill all the children in the region of Bethlehem on his behalf, Jeremiah 31, 15. He'd then be exiled to Egypt as a kid and return home to Israel from there, Hosea 11, 1. He would claim to be God with us, Isaiah 7, 14. He would function as a prophet, Deuteronomy 18, 18, a priest, Psalm 110, 4, and a king, Psalm 2, verse 6. He would be a teacher of parables, Psalm 78, 2. He would be preceded by a messenger who cried out in the wilderness, Isaiah 40, verse 3. He would begin his ministry in Galilee, Isaiah 9, verse 1. He would perform many miracles, Isaiah 35, 6. He would enter into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, Zechariah 9, 9. And then there are more than 20 prophecies that get fulfilled in his life in one day. Scripture tells us the coming Messiah would be betrayed by a friend, Psalm 41, 9.

Sold for 30 pieces of silver, Zechariah 11, 12. That same silver would be thrown back into the temple and then be used to buy a potter's field, Zechariah 11, 13. In the hours right before his death, he would be abandoned by his friends, Zechariah 13, 7. He would be accused by false witnesses, Psalm 35, 11. He would stand silent before his accusers while they taunted him, Isaiah 53, 7. He would be wounded and bruised, Isaiah 53, 5. He would be mocked, Psalm 22, 7. He would be beaten and spat upon, Isaiah 50, verse 6. He would have his garments split up and gambled for, Psalm 22, 18. He would physically stumble under the weight of his affliction, Psalm 109, 24. At his death, he would have his hands and feet pierced, Psalm 22, 16.

Be executed between two criminals, Isaiah 53, 12. He would experience great thirst, Psalm 69, 21. He would pray for his persecutors while they killed him, Isaiah 53, 12. He would have his side pierced, Zechariah 12, 10. Despite great physical travail and having his hands pierced and his side pierced, not one of his bones would be broken, Psalm 34, 20. He would die at midday, and during the hour of his death, darkness would miraculously descend upon the earth, Amos 8, 9.

He would then be buried in a rich man's tomb, Isaiah 53, 9, after which he would be resurrected to the Father's right hand and pour out gifts on his followers, Psalm 16, 10 and 68, 18. Now, you think, well, maybe some of that's just coincidence. Mathematicians say the odds of all these things kind of randomly happening to one person is 1 in 10 to the 157th power. That means 1 in 10 with 157 zeros after it. 52 comets separating those 157 zeros. Just to put that in perspective, this book I was reading said, Mathematicians, 1 in 10 to the 16th power.

Here's how they would describe that. If you were to take silver dollars and cover the surface area of the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, in silver dollars, two feet deep, so up to your shins, in silver dollars, everywhere, paint one of them randomly red and just hide it, mix it up somewhere at one of them. Then take a blind man and catapult him from somewhere in Maryland and let him land in the middle of these states and give him one shot to pick out the right silver dollar, the chances of him doing it, 1 in 10 to the 16th power. This is 1 in 10 to the 157th power.

Burrell's law, it's a mathematic law that says anything beyond 1 in 10 to the 50th power is a statistical impossibility, an impossibility. You say, well, what about other predictions in history? Didn't Nostradamus seem to anticipate the rise of Hitler? Have you ever read those prophecies?

Honestly. When people say that, I'm like, you obviously showed me that you just watch too much stuff on the National Geographic channel. They are vague. Nostradamus got a lot of things wrong. These in the Bible are given in great detail and not one of them has ever proven incorrect, which put them into an entirely different category of Nostradamus or the Mayans or anybody else. You say, well, I know, maybe the gospel accounts have been doctored up to confirm the prophecies. Like, you know, the early church was like, hey, you know, I was reading Zechariah, this 30 pieces of silver thing, let's make up a story about Judas.

All right, yeah, that may have worked for a few of them. They may have been able to get away with it, but most of these prophecies were out of their control, and they would have been easy to refute if they weren't true. Y'all, the early Jewish and Roman leaders had a lot of motivation to refute these things. They would have been like, he wouldn't mourn in Bethlehem. He didn't grow up in Nazareth. We never gave some kind in Judas 30 pieces of silver. And the idea, by the way, that the early church just destroyed all the conflicting accounts of Jesus assumes that the church had some kind of controlling power that historically is just not true. For the first 300 years of the church's life, Christianity's enemies vastly outnumbered its followers. And many of these were the ones who had all the power. And if it had existed, they would have brought forward the things that would have undermined all these claims, yet nobody ever did.

Plus, you've got to ask this. Why would early Christians lie about these things if they weren't true? There's got to be a motive. People lie, but there's always a motive. Typically, when people lie, it's to get them power or prestige or they're trying to escape harm or something. Is that what happened to the early followers of Jesus?

They're the opposite. Their confession got them persecuted. They lost their homes, even their lives. You say, well, you know, lots of people have died for a religious lie. Yeah, but there's a difference between dying for a lie and dying for something you know to be a lie.

There's a huge difference in those two. A great historical example of this, Chuck Colson, who just died last year, was one of Richard Nixon's, they called him the henchmen, his inner circle. He went through Watergate with Richard Nixon. He was not a Christian at that point, but he said that the day that it broke, they all got together in a room, these six men that had all been a part of Watergate.

He said, I'm looking around the room. These are the toughest men I've ever known. He said three of us were out of the Marine Corps, CEOs, just really tough, accomplished men. He said we vowed to one another that none of us would actually tell the truth.

We would all maintain this story. He said within two and a half days, every single one of us had broken, every single one of us because of the threats that were coming against us. He said the idea that 12 uneducated, untrained fishermen would maintain this lie knowing it was a lie to the day of their death could only be postulated by somebody who has no experience with these kinds of things. It's like Blaise Pascal, one of my favorite philosophers says, witnesses who are willing to have their throats cut suddenly become believable. Do you know what Isaiah says the implications of this are?

Do you know what his love letter? It gives you a handful of things. Listen, really quickly, and this is how we'll wrap this up. This is one you've got to believe. You've got to believe the arm of the Lord is revealed. You've got to believe.

Maybe you're like my friend Carolyn. Maybe you've got all these reasons why it can't be true. Are you willing to doubt your doubts? I know you pride yourself on being a doubting person. Will you doubt those doubts in the face of evidence like this and at least consider it?

Because that's the invitation. You say believe it. Believe it. It's verifiable. It's true. It's confirmed by things that could never just happen. Number two, to the church, he says persist. You've got to persist in proclaiming this even when people don't believe it because it is true.

And people's life and their death depend on it. You know, Isaiah got the most ridiculous commission of anybody I've ever heard. Isaiah chapter six, when God calls Isaiah, he says, Isaiah, I want you to spend your whole life talking about this and nobody's ever going to listen to you. Never.

They're going to reject you. They're going to kill you, Isaiah. But I just want you to keep preaching. And Isaiah kept preaching. He kept preaching.

He wouldn't give up. In fact, you notice right there in your Bible how he opens up Isaiah 53, the great prophecy about Jesus' crucifixion. He opens up by saying, who is believed to report? Nobody.

Nobody's listening. To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? But he kept preaching.

You want to know why? I love this. Isaiah 52, 13. Go back to those verses.

There's a promise. My servant will prosper. God says, my servant one day will prosper and Isaiah reasoned this way. Jesus would not have gone to the trouble of dying just so that people could reject him. He went to the trouble of dying because he wanted to save people. And so Isaiah went to people who weren't listening and he held up his hands and he proclaimed to them because he knew, he knew that God would not have sent Jesus to die if God was not also going to give certain people the power to believe. Which leads me to number three, depend.

Depend. You've got to depend on God to change the heart. Look right there at verse 15 in Isaiah 52. This is awesome. He, the servant, will sprinkle many nations.

All right? What's he sprinkling them with? Like magic pixie dust?

What is it? Well, watch what happens when he sprinkles them. Kings will shut their mouths on account of him. For what had not been told them they will see and what they had not heard they will suddenly understand. You see the contrast?

Nobody believes. And all of a sudden the servant stands up and starts to sprinkle. And as he sprinkles, all of a sudden these people start to say, whoa, now I see it.

Now I understand. You see, what's got to happen when you tell these people in your life or in other nations that aren't listening is the servant, Jesus, has to start sprinkling. And he starts sprinkling not pixie dust but the Holy Spirit power that gives people the ability to believe. Which is why I tell you that you never ever ought to talk to men and women about God without also spending a lot of time talking to God about those men and women.

Because you preach all day long and nobody will believe but then that servant stands up and he pulls out the Holy Spirit and he just starts to sprinkle like this and all of a sudden people begin to come alive. So you've got to persist. You've got to depend. And then the last thing. You've got to go.

You've got to go. See what Isaiah says of chapter 52 verse 7? How beautiful up on the mountains are the feet of Him who brings good news. Y'all, no one has ever called my feet pretty. My feet are not pretty at all.

They're exceptionally ugly feet. But my feet, my feet are beautiful. Not because they look good but because they bring good news. And I publish peace. I bring good news of happiness. I publish salvation. I say to Zion, your God reigns. We get to go, Summit Church, into places whether it's in our community or neighborhoods or around the world and we get to go in and we get to proclaim death does not have the last word. You do not have to die under condemnation. Jesus has suffered in your place and died.

Jesus is raised from the dead. I remember being in Southeast Asia when I began my ministry over there. I remember being there in a family that I'd gotten kind of close to on the street where I lived on there. My father died. He was a taxi driver.

He got killed in a car wreck. He left behind a widow and two young children. And because I'd gotten close to the family, they invited me to be a part of the funeral proceedings. And there was a ceremony the day before the funeral that, I kid you not, lasted nine hours.

Nine hours. Where all we did was sit in a room. They burned candles and they just wept for nine hours.

It was the most heart-wrenching thing I'd ever been a part of because it was just cries of despair. The father was gone. The husband was gone. The daddy, the provider was gone.

What are we going to do? And I sat there, yes, feeling the grief of this family around me but something inside me burning, saying who was going to tell them that death doesn't have the last word. Jesus said, I'm the resurrection and the life. He that lives and believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. That he has been crucified for their sin. He has taken the sting out of death. He has taken it into himself.

He has paid it all so that you don't have to fear death anymore because Jesus has overcome death. Who's going to tell them? There's families like that all over the world in unreached people groups. You want to know why this church is involved in missions. It's not because we're looking for adventure. It's not because we love to travel.

And people say that to me, like, oh, you do lots of mission trips. You must love to travel. I hate traveling. I don't like airplanes. I've got kind of a simple thing about most airlines now. I've got to deal with it at some point.

I need to see a counselor, but I don't like this. I do it because we go over there because there's people like that that need to hear that God reigns. That's why I'll be leaving here in the next six or so weeks to be on the mission field.

It's because of that. That's why we've got a lot of mission teams that are going out this summer. And for those of you that aren't going, here's what we say. Pray, give, go.

Those are the three things you've got to do. And if you're not going this summer, we want you to be praying and giving. We want you to be a part of what's happening as we take the gospel to these places around the world. And if you are praying and giving this summer, I'm going to go ahead and tell you, we want you to go next summer.

We want you to go ahead and make plans now and just go. And you're like, oh, I don't know. That's for you younger people. I'm kind of older. We would a hundred times rather take an older person than one of those high-maintenance young people. I'm going to go ahead and tell you.

That is totally legit. You ask them because you guys just don't know how to roll with it. So we want you to go. We want you to decide to do that. This is why we do what we do, Summit Church.

We're not trying to build an empire. We're trying to publish a gospel of peace everywhere in the world. We pray for us at all of our campuses. And let's pray that God will renew our commission to this, renew our response to Isaiah's letter. God, I pray in Jesus' name that you would renew this commission to me, to this church. God, that we would see multiple people raised up and empowered to go. I pray and ask that God, I pray for those people who've never believed personally, that this weekend they're wrestling with undeniable evidence that leaves them with unexplainable questions. I pray that you would give them the ability to hear your voice in this and that they would know that it's true. I say, God, in Jesus' name, amen.