Sermon Transcript
In that day, this song will be sung in the land of Judah: We have a strong city; God makes salvation its walls and ramparts. Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the rock eternal. He humbles those who dwell on high.
He lays the lofty city low. He levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust. Feet trample it down, the feet of the oppressed, the footsteps of the poor. The path of the righteous is level. You, the upright one, make the way of the righteous smooth.
Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you. Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. My soul yearns for you in the night. In the morning, my spirit longs for you. Lord, you established peace for us.
All that we have accomplished, you have done for us.
Hey, so I learned something new the other day. I’d love to share it with you. I learned that there’s something called the Global Peace Index, which is the annual report produced by a group known as the Institute of Economics and Peace. And this report assesses and ranks the relative level of peacefulness of countries around the world. They study 23 different quantitative and qualitative indicators, each weighted on a scale from 1 to 5, and then they come up with what they call a Global Peace Index, or a GPI score, for each country.
The lower the score, the more peaceful the country, or so they say. Now, you can do your own research after the sermon, please, and you can decide how much stock to put into something like this. But aren’t you at least a little bit curious to know where the US falls and ranks in this study? Of course you are. I’m gonna tell you.
According to the 2020 report, out of 163 different countries measured, the US is ranked 121st. In terms of overall peacefulness. We’re right behind Azerbaijan and we’re just above Burkina Faso, for what that’s worth. The top 5 most peaceful countries, of course you want to know that, according to the GPI in descending order: number 5, Denmark; number 4, Austria; number 3, Portugal; number 2, New Zealand; and number 1, Iceland. Well, I also learned in doing that research that there’s something called the World Happiness Report.
And it contains rankings of a country’s GNH, or Gross National Happiness, which is based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report then correlates with various quality of life factors, which is a lot more subjective than the Global Peace Index because respondents are asked to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life for them being a 0, and then they’re asked to rank their own lives lives currently on that 0 to 10 scale. And according to the official 2021 World Happiness Report ranking, the U.S. ranks out of 149 countries, the U.S. ranks 19th that were studied in terms of overall happiness. So there’s not a lot of peace in the U.S., but people are fairly happy about that. So we’re at 19th out of 149 countries. We’re nipping at the heels of the Czech Republic, public in terms of happiness.
So if we all do our part in the next few days and try to be happier, maybe we can pass them at some point. You want to know the top 5 happiest countries? Again, of course you do. In descending order, number 5, the Netherlands. Number 4, Iceland.
So they’re not only feeling a lot of peace, they’re feeling a lot of happiness. Number 3, Switzerland. Number 2, Denmark. So they show up in both lists. And number 1 happiest country, Finland.
Finland. Now, I realize I’m obviously making light a bit of these rankings, but there are at least 2 initial takeaways that I believe are worthy of more serious consideration. First, there’s a natural tendency to look at our world and at all of the advancements that we’ve made as a society over the past several years to improve our lives, and you’d think we’d be happier. You think we’d be more peaceful overall than in the past. But is that the case?
Maybe for some, but not if you consider these reports, which make the case that the world overall is actually less peaceful today and actually less happy and less optimistic than in the past. The second takeaway, though, is the reality that behind each of these macro-level reports are actual people, people who matter greatly to God. God regardless of where they happen to live. The daily struggle for people to experience true peace and to find genuine happiness in a chaotic world is very real. People feel it.
Perhaps you feel that too. And for some, especially people who have faced a lot of hardship in life, even the notion that a person could have joy, that a person could have peace in this world, can feel pretty insincere or shallow at times, especially when it’s someone who is in pain and is being told by others to just cheer up or to just choose joy, things will be better. But let’s face it, reports like the Global Peace Index and the World Happiness Report, as informative as they are, are rather abstract and impersonal. But suffering and personal pain are never abstract. It’s never theoretical.
It’s never impersonal, not to the person who is suffering and certainly not to Suffering is real. It’s tangible. It’s personal. It’s specific. And the Bible at no point ever presents suffering as some abstract idea or concept.
What we saw and heard last week in Pastor Dan’s message, that peace and happiness were certainly not what the people of God were feeling in Isaiah’s day. The prophet Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the early 700s, late 600s BC, warns the people that God would use the empires of Assyria and then later Babylon to judge Jerusalem if they persisted in their rebellion against God and if they persisted in their corruption, their idolatry, and their oppression of the poor. This was not a happy time. It was not a peaceful time for them. Their personal peace index, their PPI score, was heading in the wrong direction.
But this was a mess of their own making because they had turned away from God despite repeated warnings and had become corrupt. And now everything for them seemed lost.
But interspersed among all of these warnings and announcements of impending doom in the book of Isaiah are surprising messages of peace and of joy and of comfort. You know how you probably have certain people that you turn to in your life when you need encouragement? They always seem to listen well and to know the right things to say or not to say to you, and you always come away feeling better after having spent some time with them. I’m guessing you probably also have a mental list of certain people that you go out of your way to avoid when you need encouragement. Well, when it comes to people in the Bible, Old Testament prophets weren’t exactly the first people to come to mind if you were needing an encouraging pick-me-up.
Me up. But nevertheless, right smack dab in the midst of a theme of judgment in the book of Isaiah, we find lots of verses about peace and joy and comfort, such as chapter 32, verses 16 through 18. It says, the Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert, his righteousness live in the fertile field. The fruit of that righteousness will be peace, its effect will be quietness. And confidence forever.
My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, says the Lord, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest. Or how about chapter 35, verse 10? Those the Lord has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. Or take chapter 40, verses 1 through 2. Comfort Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all of her sins. Or chapter 51, verse 3: The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all of her ruins.
He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing. A couple more. Chapter 54, verse 10: Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord who has compassion on you. Or chapter 55, verse 12: You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
That last passage there in chapter 55, I add parenthetically here, brings to mind when I was in 7th grade. I was in a youth choir at my church, and we sang a song in my youth choir that was based upon Isaiah 55. I’m not going to sing it for you now. I don’t even remember the title I just remember somebody had the bright idea to give me a solo. And in 7th grade, when my voice is sort of in that in-between stage of being in the process of getting deeper but still kind of squeaking at times, and they gave me a solo that was in a much higher register than what I could probably hit on a normal day, let’s just say that it was filled with mixed results, okay?
I’m just telling you, like, every time we sang this song, it was just— it was a roll of the dice. And I have destroyed all copies of tapes and recordings of my 7th grade solo from the song based on Isaiah 55. But I digress. The point is, is that there are lots of passages in the book of Isaiah, surprisingly, about peace, joy, and comfort. And then we have today’s passage, chapter 26, which according to verse 1 is actually meant to be a song.
It’s meant to be sung as a song of praise and thanksgiving. Forgiving. Maybe you have someone in your life who is always humming or singing. For me, that’s my wife Shannon, and I absolutely adore that about her. She is always singing.
Shannon is always humming. She’s always making music. Always. She sings when times are good, and she sings when times are hard. Maybe you have someone like that in your life.
Well, chapter 26 is a song of joy like It’s a song of unrivaled comfort in the midst of difficult circumstances. And the point of chapter 26 is that sorrow and sadness are not going to have the final word for God’s people, not then and not ever. It’s saying to Isaiah’s audience, and it’s saying to you and to me today, that despite the dark days that may lay ahead, or despite the dark days you’re maybe going through right now, God is going to continue his good work. He’s going to continue to fulfill his covenant promises. He will continue to rule.
He is still in control. He has not forgotten you. He has not given up on you. He will be with you in the storm. He is able to give you peace and joy and a comfort that even the deepest trouble cannot put out.
I think many of us us know this intellectually on some level. We have a grasp of the fact that Christianity at its core is about a love relationship with God more than anything else, and that it’s supposed to be about peace and joy, the kind of peace and joy that if it’s properly nourished and nurtured can actually coexist and even overwhelm the greatest grief or trial, the kind of peace and joy that isn’t based on circumstances but can actually stand up to anything. Do you have that kind of imperviousness to your peace? Do you have that kind of imperviousness to your joy? I know I want that, and I’m assuming you do too as well.
I see 3 lessons in Isaiah 26 that I think can help you and me to experience greater levels of peace and joy and comfort in hard times. So today we’re going to first look at the nature of the peace, joy, and comfort that God offers. First, the nature of it. Secondly, the disciplines by which you can experience this peace, joy, and comfort. And thirdly, we’ll see why peace, joy, and comfort are not simply ends in and of themselves.
So the nature of it, the disciplines by which we experience it, and then why peace, joy, and comfort, as wonderful as they are, are not ends in and of themselves. First, the nature of peace, joy, and comfort that God provides. Nature? What is its character? It’s summed up, I believe, in verse 3, which I’ve preached on before a couple years ago.
It’s one of my all-time favorite verses. It says, you, meaning God, will keep in perfect shalom— that’s the Hebrew word for peace that’s being used there— you will keep in perfect shalom those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Shalom is a word that you may have heard before. It can mean peace or the absence of conflict, but really it’s a much, much broader word than just the absence of conflict. Its most basic meaning for shalom is wholeness or completion, something that is complete.
And it has elements of joy and comfort and contentment mixed in there with that peace. The guys at The Bible Project have, have a beautiful video explanation of shalom if you ever want to look it up. But the core idea with shalom is this, that life is complex. It’s full of moving parts and relationships and situations. And when any of those things are out of alignment or missing, your shalom, my shalom breaks down.
So your life is no longer whole and it needs to be restored. So shalom provides a strong contrast to the state of fragmentation that we often experience around and within us, especially when we go through difficult seasons of life. Shalom is the presence of wholeness or completeness, of restoration of all that is fragmented and broken, whether within ourselves, our relationships, or the world around us. Shalom is about restoring wholeness in all of these areas. We spend lots and lots and lots of money today in order to experience that type of wholeness, don’t we?
We? That sense of inner peace and contentment. We spend money on pills, we spend money on therapy or whatever, and it’s possible that we actually need some of those things, but what we’re really craving is just the ability to be able to cope instead of feeling acute anxiety or debilitating worry. The people to whom Isaiah was writing were facing an uncertain future. You too may be facing an uncertain future right now, and yet Isaiah, what he’s saying here is that you can have Shiloh that feeling of wholeness, peace, joy, comfort, contentment, even in the midst of that.
Secondly, I want you to notice from verse 3 that it says that God is the one who supplies this shalom, not you. You don’t manufacture it itself. You can’t drum up shalom on your own. And it’s also not your circumstances either. It says that God is the one who gives shalom.
He’s the one who gives shalom, but he also keeps you in perfect shalom, perfect peace. It’s the sense of being protected, that idea of being kept. The Hebrew word there for keep is a military word. It means to guard, to protect from dangers, or to keep watch. And it’s very similar in concept, if you think about it, to Philippians 4:7, which says that the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Being kept essentially means to take an army and to surround a city in order to protect it from invasion. If you know you have an army around you like that while you’re trying to sleep, you’re going to be able to rest much easier, aren’t you? You’re going to experience shalom. And that’s getting at something I think really, really important here, that when people try to give advice on how you can be calm and how you can develop a sense of inner peace and comfort, comfort, they almost always talk about removing certain thoughts from your mind. They say, don’t think about negative thoughts.
But here in chapter 6, verse 3, we see that the peace of God is not the absence of some thoughts. It’s not the absence of thinking. It’s the presence of God himself, the God of peace, Jehovah Shalom, who not only gives you shalom but keeps you in perfect shalom. See, Christian peace is not expelling negative thoughts. All you’re doing, all I’m doing by expelling negative thoughts is being in denial about how bad things really are.
You’re not facing reality. But what this passage is teaching us is that peace, joy, and comfort is not that you stop facing the facts, but that you have something in your life that enables you to rise above those facts. It’s a sense of being protected. Protected, held, kept by God himself. That kind of peace, that kind of comfort goes far beyond anything that can be accounted for from an earthly perspective.
It passes all understanding. It’s a peace that Shannon and I have experienced even though we’ve had our share of hurts and heartaches throughout our marriage, lots of ups and downs. And I would imagine many of you could say the same thing about your own life. It’s normal when you go through something like that to feel unprotected, Unprotected, alone, exposed, vulnerable. And yet, I can attest to the fact that verse 3 is absolutely true.
It’s absolutely true. It is possible, it is possible to face difficult and even tragic circumstances and to somehow have a sense that God is with you. You still know exactly how bad things are, But you’ve got something that enables you to feel whole and protected and held together by God himself in the middle of your circumstance. It’s amazing. Well, how is that even possible?
Look at verse 4. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself is the rock eternal. A couple of months ago, Shannon and I drove down to Davenport Beach and we spent a few moments looking out at the violent waves coming into shore and crashing crashing up against these gigantic rocks. Sometimes the waves are so enormous that they’ll completely cover a rock that you may be looking at, and when the waves recede, the rock is still there miraculously. It hasn’t moved an inch.
God is the Rock Eternal, and that’s why he is able to keep you in perfect shalom in the midst of the fiercest storms of Secondly, I want us to consider the disciplines of peace, joy, and comfort. I want you to notice 3 different things that are mentioned here that enable you and me to experience the kind of peace, joy, and contentment that this passage talks about. Yes, God is ultimately the one who produces shalom, and he’s ultimately the one who keeps you in shalom, but there are some exhortations in chapter 26 for personal application that are included here that we need to pay attention to. To, especially because none of them is particularly intuitive when you’re going through a trial. The first is the discipline of thinking, the discipline of your mind.
Verse 3 says that perfect shalom will come to those whose minds are steadfast. That word steadfast is from a Hebrew term that means to lean against, to rely upon, to rest upon, to support. It’s the idea of being held up and being sustained as a result of leaning on something that is supporting you. What does that mean in practical terms? It means that being aware of what you think about, yes, and instead of fixing your mind on your circumstances and letting fear and anxiety run rampant in your thoughts, you’re fixing your mind upon God.
You’re aware of what you’re thinking about, but you fix your mind upon God. But not just God in an abstract way. Way. But specifically, you’re thinking about the character of God, the person of God. If you want shalom, chapter 26 is saying think about who God is.
It’s a rock eternal. Think about him, which, as Tim Keller wisely points out, is so completely different from what you’ll get if you search for self-help books about how to deal with worry and fear. None of those books ever say, hey, if you’re stressed, start by asking some really deep, big questions of life, like who is God and what is he like, and what are you really here for, and what do you think God’s purpose for your life is? No, that never happens in these self-help books. You think that would actually give you a sense of peace and joy to ask such deep questions?
Of course they don’t go in that direction. Those authors never tell you to think about deep life questions. They just jump right to technique— breathing techniques, rest techniques, thought control techniques. Christian shalom is different. It’s just the opposite.
It involves thinking deeply about and fixing your mind upon the nature of God and reminding yourself that everything is going to be okay because he is in charge. It’s the discipline of thinking. Second, it’s the discipline of waiting. Look at verse 7 and the first part of verse 8. The path of the righteous is level.
You, the upright one, meaning God, make the way of the righteous smooth. Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws— that means carrying out God’s laws in obedience— walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you. We hate, hate having to wait for something, don’t we? Just seems so pointless sometimes. All waiting does is keep us from getting to the result or to the thing that we want more We want instant gratification.
Plus, we hate waiting because it’s just another gigantic reminder that we’re not actually in control. Because we think, if I was in control, I wouldn’t have to wait. I could get done faster what it is that I want. Over the years though, I’ve learned from personal experience that waiting on the Lord is one of the most necessary aspects of the Christian life. It is one of those disciplines that helps us to understand a bit more what God told Isaiah in Isaiah 55:7, 8, where God says, my thoughts, Isaiah, are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.
It gives us a wider perspective to wait on God. And as difficult as it can be, waiting also develop— develops spiritual muscles within us in a really unique way. But the benefit is strength from God as we wait on him. Isaiah 40:31 says, but those who wait on the Lord, those who hope in the will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Now we typically think of waiting as a really passive exercise, don’t we? But the point of waiting is to lead you to patient, confident trust in God. Waiting on God is all about hope. It means persevering through trial. It means deliberately humbling ourselves.
Before God and being patient for his timing. When you wait for God, you’re standing fast, you’re holding onto the rock eternal, you’re enduring, you’re anticipating a future that is better than the present. But this kind of waiting and hope, I need to point out, are different than just optimism. Waiting for God is not really focused on circumstances, simply hoping that things will get better. In fact, when you wait for God, there might not be any indication or evidence that your situation is going to improve at all or anytime soon.
Soon. But in waiting for God, you choose hope anyway. What Isaiah 26 is telling us is that you and I will not experience God’s peace, joy, and comfort until we get this, until we acknowledge that life is in his hands, that he is in control, and then wait on him and trust. Waiting creates opportunities for you and for me to see that God really does have a plan even when things look bleak. Romans 8:28 says that if you love God, if I love God, he’s got a plan to work absolutely everything together for good in our lives, even the bad things.
He’s going to weave it all together for your good and for his glory. And you may be going through something right now and thinking, there is no possible way that any good can come out of this.
But to the degree that you’re able to say, God, I trust you. Nevertheless, I trust you. I don’t like my circumstance, but I’m asking you to bring about good from it. I’m asking you to bring glory to yourself through it. I’m asking you to draw me closer to you.
To that degree, you will experience shalom. The 3rd discipline we see here is the discipline of loving God. There may be any number of reasons that you or I might experience trials in life. But one of them is that trials try us. Tests test us.
They test our faith. They have a unique way of revealing who we really are and what we really believe and what our priorities really are when we’re between a rock and a hard place. They reveal the sincerity of our commitment to the Lord. In Matthew 15:8, Jesus describes the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his day, like this. He says, these people honor me with their lips, lips, but their hearts are far from me, which is a really shocking statement to make.
The Pharisees had devoted their lives to studying the scriptures and pursuing the knowledge of God, but Jesus is saying here they didn’t really know God. They knew about him, but they didn’t know him, and they didn’t truly love him. They were only going through the motions. And I think we have a tendency to do that too sometimes don’t we? We confuse knowledge with intimacy, knowledge with devotion and love.
The problem isn’t knowledge of God’s Word or knowledge of God. Studying and learning the Bible and spending time in prayer is invaluable, but knowledge and religious activity can be a false indicator of intimacy. God doesn’t allow you and me to experience difficulty in life because He enjoys seeing us suffer. Suffer. He uses trials to cause us to recognize our need for him and to reveal whether or not we truly do love him, whether we truly really do trust him, not with platitudes and empty statements, but with our whole being, with our heart.
And not just when times are good, but when times are bad. Look again at verse 8 and then the first part of verse 9. It says, yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you. Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. My soul yearns for you in the night, God.
In the morning, my spirit longs for you. It’s the language of love. It’s the language of commitment. It’s a language of devotion and intimacy. Don’t miss this, friends.
We— the reason we don’t have God’s peace and God’s joy and God’s comfort is not because of our circumstances. But it’s because we struggle to love God above all else. What we do is we tend to love the wrong things. We love things that we can lose. We love things that can be taken away from us by our circumstances.
And all that does is create more anxiety and fear within us. The only, the only truly unchanging thing that you cannot lose is God himself. And if you live for anything else, if I live for anything else, we will be restless. You won’t have shalom. So God calls us to evaluate our priorities when we go through storms of life.
In the words of verse 8, what is the desire of my heart, the real desire of my heart? What do I yearn for most? What do I long for? Is it relief from my trials, or is it for more of him and for the glory and out of his name. See, if we truly love God, then we will walk in the way of his laws, as it says there.
We will live for his glory, saying what we see in verse 12: Lord, you establish peace, you establish shalom for us. All that we have accomplished, you have done for us. We love God. We’re saying God is the treasure and the hope next to which everything else just pales in comparison. But here’s why— the third point— why peace, joy, and comfort are not simply ends in and of themselves.
As great a feeling, as great a feeling as having deep peace, joy, and comfort in a difficult circumstance can be, there’s actually something better, something much, much better to which Isaiah is pointing throughout the book. And what he is saying is the best is yet to come.
The best is yet to come. Isaiah looked forward to a future king, a prince of peace, a prince of shalom. And he says this prince’s reign would one day bring shalom with no end. You can read about that prophecy in Isaiah 9. He will come, this prince will, this prince of shalom, make right all wrongs, heal all that has been broken, and bring God’s kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.
And this Prince of Shalom, Jesus, came to the earth and he went about proclaiming the availability and the good news of the kingdom of God. He said the kingdom of God is here, not future tense, but here. When Jesus came to the earth, he said the kingdom of God is here, and he came bringing the news that God still reigns as king, and he came to make this kingdom available to all sorts of people, including you and me. And this is what Isaiah is pointing to in verse 1, which starts with the phrase, in that day. In that day is a phrase that is going to show up often in the book of Isaiah as we go through this study, and it refers to the coming kingdom of God, the coming of this Prince of Shalom, when God will defeat his enemies once and for all, when he will bring his justice on violent, oppressive kingdoms.
He will bring his kingdom of justice and peace and healing love in the future. And if you read chapter 25 and combination with chapter 26, you will see that as part of the coming kingdom, God promises to one day create a new city, a New Jerusalem, in which, as verse 1 says, God will make salvation its walls and its ramparts, and he will reign as king over a redeemed humanity from all nations, tribes, tongues, and languages. And on that day, there will be no more death or suffering. According to 25:8, says God will swallow up death forever, resulting in the ultimate banquet, the ultimate feast and celebration, because death and decay and suffering are gone. The nations are no longer at war, and shalom is restored when the prince comes.
So God says in verse 2, open wide the gates. The invitation: open wide the gates so that all who are made righteous by the coming king may enter into his rest.
So what does that mean for us? Isaiah is saying, if you and I understand what God has done for us, if you understand what God has done for you, and if you understand what is yet to come, you can handle anything here. You can handle anything here. The Bible doesn’t say that to trivialize the hard things that you’ve been through or the hard things that you’re going through right now. Now.
It doesn’t tell you to ignore those things or to be in denial about any of that. What it does is it calls you and me to adopt a bigger picture perspective and to remember that we can have unrivaled peace, unrivaled joy, and unrivaled comfort because God is faithful and because the King, the Prince of Shalom, has come.
Let’s pray together. Father, I want to thank you for this reminder, this this good news of the coming kingdom. And I thank you for the good news of available help to us in the midst of our storms. We don’t simply have to wait for the future. We can right now, today, receive shalom.
We can receive your peace. We can receive your divine help because you, God, are the Rock Eternal. I pray for anyone right now who’s in the middle of a storm that you would send your shalom into that circumstance right now. Now, that they would call out to you and receive your divine help in their time of need. You are an ever-present help in time of need.
You are a fortress. You are a strong tower, God. You are the rock, the firm foundation of our lives. I pray, Father, you would show us next steps that we need to take in following you. And I pray for anyone who does not know the Prince of Shalom, that Jesus, who’s come into the world and gave his That by his wounds we could be healed.
By his sacrifice on the cross, we could be forgiven. The punishment, Isaiah 53, Lord, says, the punishment that was lashed out on him, Lord, is what gives us shalom.
We thank you, God, for that. I pray that you would draw us closer to you this week as we go through whatever it is that we go through. Thank you for being the author of peace and joy and comfort. And thank you for wanting a relationship with us. Us.
What an honor. Lord, thank you for this time today. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
