So today, if you got your Bible, you want to turn with me, Book of Isaiah, chapter 40. We're jumping ahead. Chapter 40 in the Book of Isaiah is kind of like a dividing line in the Book of Isaiah. In fact, from chapter 40 on, chapter 40 on through the end in chapter 66, Isaiah's tone and the central themes that come up over and over becomes so different, so unique from what he was focused on at the beginning that some more liberal scholars say this can't be the same Isaiah. There's other reasons that they say that, too. I don't believe that's the case. I believe this is the same exact Isaiah who wrote the first thirty nine books of Isaiah. But we see the Lord taking a turn in his ministry and in what he focuses on, because one, focus that we saw coming up over and over as we've spent time in Isaiah. We've been, early in the year, I believe we looked at the first six chapters. And then since, after finishing Jonah, we came back and we've been looking at the passages in Isaiah that talk about Jesus, that prophesy about Jesus coming, looking at Jesus through the eyes of Isaiah. And chapter 40 is one of those passages But one of the themes in the first 39 chapters of Isaiah was judgment and a king. Judgment and a king. God was bringing judgment upon the nations because of their sin, because of their rebellion. that God was going to raise up a king from the throne of David who would come and reign, a righteous ruler. And interspersed in there were some messages of hope, but a lot of it was pretty dark about things that were coming. On Wednesday night, we got just a little bit, we're looking through four chapters of Isaiah on Wednesday night, and it's different because it's not prophecy, it's history. It's about things that happen, and we're focusing on Hezekiah, who was the king after Ahaz. Hezekiah was Ahaz's son. what we will see from Hezekiah in his day. Remember, we've been talking and talking and talking about the Assyrians, right? The Assyrians were coming. The Assyrians took out that Northern Kingdom of Israel. The Assyrians were coming for Judah. And that's what Hezekiah's in the midst in that we were talking about in chapter 36, and we'll be talking about in 37. But I'll tell you, spoiler alert, the Assyrian thing is gonna be handled. God's gonna take care of that. But that doesn't mean that they're gonna be out of the woods as a nation, because in the place of the Assyrians will rise another nation, the Babylonians. In fact, something that Hezekiah did during his life was gonna put a target on Judah, on his country, on his people. And one of the things that's prophesied at the end of chapter 39 is that one day those Babylonians will come and will take all the people of Judah and will lead them away captive. And Isaiah is not the only one that talks about this. In fact, Jeremiah speaks a lot about that and other prophets talked about that Babylonian captivity. And we'll have some interesting discussions as we talk about that more on Wednesday nights. But Isaiah's tone now changes. He's laid out this prophecy of a people who are going to go into captivity. He was telling them, this is coming for you. But now Isaiah's tone switches. Now that he's told them what's going to happen, he starts to offer them some hope that even though they're going to be in captivity, would actually end up lasting 70 years, that there would be deliverance, that God was not gonna leave them in captivity. And another focus in these next chapters of Isaiah is rather than focusing on a king that's going to come, Isaiah speaks about a servant who will come. He talked about a king. in the first 39 chapters. And now Isaiah is gonna start talking about a servant. Now that servant is not mentioned explicitly in this passage we're gonna look at today, but he will be the theme of what we'll be focusing on probably the next few weeks, Lord willing. And so this chapter was written years and years before they were even taken to captivity. But this was meant to be a message for them that would be preserved and held on to the people that would be read by them when they were in captivity, okay? Something that would be held on through their generations and would one day be very, very relevant. Something very, very important, okay? So let's start reading here, Isaiah chapter 40, verse one. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. A voice cries, in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low. The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." A voice says, cry, and I said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news. Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news. Lift it up, fear not. Say to the cities of Judah, behold, your God. Behold, the Lord God comes with might. and his arm rules for him. Behold, his reward is with him and his recompense before him. He will tend his flock like a shepherd. He will gather the lambs in his arms. He will carry them in his bosom and gently lead those. that are with young. And I'll stop our reading there and we'll pray before we go further today. Father, thank you for this prophecy that you preserve not only for that generation that would face captivity, Lord, but you preserved it for us, for Lord, today. You seek to speak to our hearts as well. You seek to bring us into deliverance, Lord, and you seek to make us into a herald, a voice that will cry out, Lord, and boldly tell people Behold, your God. Lord, I pray for your help and your grace today, Lord, as we try to bring this message that you would help me to be clear and to the point, that you would help to engage the hearts of the hearers today, and that we all, Lord, might rejoice in you and who you are and what you've done. We pray and ask this in Jesus' name, amen. In these 11 verses that I read to you, If you look at the structure of this, and it depends how your Bible is set up, but there's four sections. There's verses one and two, which speak about comfort for the captives. There's verses three, four, and five, which focuses on preparing the way of the Lord. Verses six, seven, and eight focuses on how flesh doesn't last, but God's word lasts forever. And then finally, verses nine through 11 is a message to take the message of God and go and proclaim it. Four sections. There's at least two things that are woven throughout these 11 verses that bind these four sections together. One is the word cry. Now, when you think cry, you're thinking tears. That's not the way the word cry is used here. It means to cry out, to proclaim, to yell, to share publicly. You see that? Look in verse two. speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her." Not weep, but to proclaim loudly and boldly. Verse 3, it says, a voice cries in the wilderness, shares and proclaims. Verse 6, we see a voice says, cry. And I said, what shall I cry? Well, here's the message to cry. And then finally, we look down in verse nine and we see that Zion is told to lift up her voice with strength, to lift it up and don't be afraid. And so one thing that is woven through these four sections, these 11 verses, is this theme of crying out, proclaiming something. Why is that? Is this about volume? Is this about preaching this message really loud? That's really a kind of a scary thing for me today on a day when I'm trying to like save my voice a little bit for this Christmas program. But to cry out and proclaim is not so much about volume, although volume may be used. But the point is that this message is something that everybody needs to hear. This is a message for everybody to hear. And it needs to be proclaimed publicly, and it needs to be proclaimed in a way that everybody who hears it sees and hears and understands that this has to do with me. This is a message to me to hear and to understand. And that's part of my prayer today is that you would see this connecting to you because it's meant to. There's a second thing that goes through all of this, and I'm gonna tell you about that later, okay? There's a second thing that is woven through this whole passage. So let's dig in here, and let's start at these first couple verses. This is written for a people who were going to be in captivity, and they were told that when they were in that place of captivity, what's it mean to be a captive? It means to be in bondage, right? It means that you're not able to leave. Your freedoms are lost. You're stuck. They were to be told in their captivity, they were to be comforted. This was a message that they were all supposed to hear in their captivity, that there was hope for those people to be delivered. that God wasn't going to forget them in their place of bondage, in their place where they were stuck, but that He knew about them, He heard about them. In their circumstance, their captivity was the result of their sin. They as a people had sinned, and so God sent them as a people into captivity. It's interesting, when God first made them into a nation, right down there in Egypt, the whole thing was to bring them out and take them into their promised land. And God did that over the course of a couple generations. And then they sinned, and so what did God ultimately do? He took them out of their promised land, put them in captivity, tried to do this work in their heart that needed to be done, then to bring them back, eventually. And that's what he did, okay? But what it says to hear here in Isaiah 40, it says to, verse two, it says, to speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Don't go and yell at them. Don't go get in their face and scream and browbeat them. But to speak tenderly means to speak to the heart. It means to speak to the heart. The heart is the center of who you are and what's going on in your life, where you're really at. And Isaiah is being told here to go and speak to the heart of the people, to comfort them, that this captivity is not going to go on forever. Now, the thing that was dominating their mind, The thing that was that was forefront in their mind is that they were people living in a land that was not their own. OK, they were living in a place that was not their own. They were not in their home. They were under service to the Babylonians. They could not go back home. And so that was at the forefront of their minds. And so the deliverance that they were thinking about that was relevant to them was being able to go back home. Go back to Jerusalem and Judah and all that area where they were taken from. My friends, deliverance is not limited. Captivity is not limited just to be physically bound up, physically exported from your home and made a prisoner in some cell someplace. That's not the only type of captivity that's out there. In fact, I believe this passage, I'm going to show it to you here in a moment. This passage is really speaking primarily on a spiritual plane. And the types of captivity that we can find ourselves in can come in all sorts of different forms. And I'll guarantee you today with just the number of people we have gathered here, that there is captivity going on in this place. That there are types of bondage that we have been caught up in, that we have been held to. Things that dominate our life, control our life, restrict us in some ways. And perhaps many times, not always, many times that bondage is a result of our sin. Sometimes it's a circumstance that's beyond your control, but yet it is some sort of captivity that you're engaged in. That's not God's desire that we stay captive. You know, the bondages that we can get caught up in today, I said, are many. They can be obvious things like drugs and alcohol, where addictions are formed. Very painful addictions, addictions that can ruin our finances and addictions that can ruin our health and and hurt our job situation and and destroy relationships. They can be addictions to things like pornography, things that are illicit and wrong. Attractions that should not be there and yet have been caught up in this bondage and the way of thinking and looking at things, things that aren't right, that that draw our hearts. And even if you say, I'm just going to stop, everyone just can say that I'm just going to stop X, Y or Z. But yet you find yourself drawn back over and over to the same things. Perhaps it's a bitterness. Just a bitterness in your heart. over something that's beset you or happened in your life, something someone has done or a situation that's occurred, something that's befallen you in some way, and there's just this residing bitterness upon you in your life that taints the way you look at things, taints the way you speak and act and think. Maybe it's a shame. a shame of something in your life that's happened and you just cannot seem to escape this shame that weighs you down, that's always speaking in your ear that you can't go forward, you can't do this, you can't do that because of something that looms over you from the past. Sometimes maybe this bondage is people pleasing. You are so focused on pleasing whoever that person is or those people are that it's like a bondage and you're tied up in it and everything that goes on in your life is not really done for the glory of God, but to somehow please certain people in your life and it just, it can ruin your attitude and change and twist the way and the why that you do things. Maybe it's anxiety. Even though you know you shouldn't be anxious, and some degree of nervousness is not unusual, but to be dominated to the point where you can't function as you should because anxiety comes and looms over you. In fact, you become anxious about being anxious. It becomes a self-perpetuating thing, and it's like a cycle that you're caught up in, and you can't pull out of this, or maybe it's a depression. or just a gloom, a darkness that just seems to hang, and you know, and people say you shouldn't be sad, but somehow there's this sadness that looms over you, and you feel captive to this, or maybe it's greed that you just can't get enough. You can never be satisfied, and you get more, and you think this is gonna do it, and then it's not. But there's more, and you want more, always looking for that next thing. My friend, all these things are bondage. All these things are bondage to us. And there's more. I mean, we could go on and on. There is more. And this message from the Lord is to go and to speak to His people and to offer them comfort. He says, speak to their hearts. Come and comfort them that they don't have to stay in bondage. I desire to deliver them. I want to mention just briefly, don't underestimate the power of hope to somebody. You want you to think about this for a moment. Those people of Judah, like many other nations that the Babylonians conquered. They were taken out of their homeland. This is the way they used to do it. When they conquered a people, they don't do what, you know, the U.S. does now when they go and they have a war in Iraq and they go there and they beat the people or whatever, take out the regime. And they try to go set it back up and put in different leaders and set up a new form of government. That's not the way they used to do it. They didn't say, we're going to go try to fix your country. They would go and just take everybody and put you in their country and put other people in your country and just say, this is the way it's going to be. OK, and a lot of times what happens when that happened to a nation, they would lose themselves. They would lose their identity. They would lose their language. They would lose their customs. They would lose all those things because they would be taken and they wouldn't all be put in one spot in one state, so to speak. They'd be dispersed all over the place. And so they would just kind of blend in. to everybody else. And many of these nations we read about in the Old Testament, they don't exist distinctly anymore. They've become dispersed and they're part of other people groups now. And you can't even find their genetic lineage. But the Jewish people remained a people, even in Babylon, even as they were dispersed all over the world. Why would they still remain a people? Why would they remain distinct? It's because of passages like this that offered them a hope. that captivity would not have to be forever, that there would be a coming back, that their God had not forsaken them. And my friends, hope is a powerful thing because it allowed those people to stay together as a people and to continue to try to worship. And God eventually would deliver them and bring them back. That's how that happened. Passages like this and others don't underestimate the power of hope. Because my gut, not just my gut, the truth of the word of God is that, my friend, if you're in bondage, you need some hope. Because it can feel like a very hopeless place, like there is no way out. And my friends, sometimes getting to that point of desperation is not a bad thing because that's exactly what we need for these next passages to really start to click for us. That place of desperation is really what you need for these next passages to click. But you're not without hope. What is the message to the captives? Verse three, four and five, a voice cries. In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. I kind of think this is where they got joy to the world, that part about in every heart, let every heart prepare him room. That's what this is talking about here. You got two Christmas songs that come from this passage in Isaiah. We'll get to the other one in a minute. In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley, the valleys that are lower are gonna be lifted. The mountains that are higher are gonna be brought down. What's the idea? What's the picture? The picture is of maybe paving a pathway, paving a highway. Okay, I mean, if you ever done much hiking in Alaska and you really get out, you realize how blessed we are to have roads and trails here in town. Because going a mile here in town, you get on a straight road and it's easy. You can go with a vehicle, you can go on your bike and you can go from point A to point B, no problem in a mile. But you go out in some thick tundra, you go out in the woods and you say, go a mile. Well, you gotta go up and down and around and find a way over this and find a way over that. And going a mile is rough. And so the idea is to take all this uneven ground and the highs and the lows and make a nice pathway. Why? A pathway for the king. A pathway for the king to come in. Make a highway so that the Lord will come in. Now, if you're familiar with your Bible history, jump to the New Testament, Do we know of any place in the Bible where verses three, four and five are fulfilled? Keep your finger here in Isaiah 40 and go with me to Luke chapter three. Luke chapter three. This is after the birth of Jesus. In fact, it's maybe about 30 years later. So Jesus is about 30 years old, but he's not started his ministry yet. but somebody else starts their ministry. Who was the forerunner of Jesus? John the Baptist, right? And John started preaching. If you read here in Luke chapter three, it starts off talking about the wind, the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar and goes on and on. Verse two, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. Now this is the John that's grown up. Now remember Elizabeth was pregnant with the baby and Mary went to go visit her, her cousin, and the baby in Elizabeth's womb leapt for joy because Mary had come, because she had found she was pregnant, you know, and all that happened. Well, this is that baby that was in Elizabeth's belly that's now grown up. Okay, and it says in verse three, he went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Notice this, as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet. And then it quotes what we just read, verses three and four and into five. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. So it goes on, you can read all that, but that's exactly what we read in Isaiah. And Luke, and not only Luke, but Matthew does this, and I believe Mark does this, they say, John is the fulfillment of this passage in Isaiah. That's what Isaiah was writing about. And we think about what Isaiah was, what John was doing. John was going and he was preaching and he was preparing the way for Jesus who would come and begin his ministry after that. Now, when John preached, and we'll look at this more in just a moment. When John preached, was John operating a road grader out there in the wilderness of Judea? Was he out there and trying to assemble a crew to take down all the high places and to build up the low places and to make a smooth plain, a smooth, easy path for Jesus to walk during his ministry? Was that what John was doing with his ministry? No. I don't know if the man ever picked up a shovel in his life. But what he did do was preach. And John had a very specific message. The message was this. There needs to be a real repentance in your heart. There needs to be a real brokenness and change in your heart. In fact, repentance in the Bible is kind of in a picture. It is like taking hardened brown and breaking it up and making it soft. Right? If you're going to go and plant something, a bush, a tree, a flower someplace, you don't just stick it on top of the soil or it's never going to grow. It's going to dry up. It's going to die. What you've got to do is you have to go prepare the soil. And if there's weeds there and roots from previous things, you've got to go dig it all up and you've got to get that mess out of there and make that soil rich and ready to receive that good that's going to come into it, that new plant. And that's the message of John. That was the message of John to get the people ready to be receptive, to repent, to turn away from the things that they had been trusting in and prepare themselves for the one that would come after him. John spoke of the one that would come. And what's interesting, I wanna drop down in John's message, and we could read all this, but for the sake of time, when John was telling these people to repent here in Luke chapter three, and people were asking him, verse 10, the crowds asked him, what then shall we do? And he answered them, whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none. Whoever has food is to do likewise. Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, teacher, what shall we do? And he said to them, collect no more than you were authorized to do. Soldiers also ask him. And we, what shall we do? And he said to them, do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusations and be content with your wages. What I want to point out by looking at that is just that this was different for everybody. You know, the sin that was rooted into their hearts and their issues was different from person to person. And the way repentance, real repentance, played out in each of their lives was was unique. They all had their own problems. They all had their own bondages. They all had their own sins and these things that they were clutching to. And what's so interesting, and this is so often the case when it comes to bondage, is the thing that we are clutching to the most is the very thing that's hurting us the most. Hear that again and think about this. And may God's spirit help us to know and identify what that is. The thing that we seem so hard to want to clutch to is the very thing that's killing us. Is the very thing that's putting bondage into our life. And it's hard to see that. It's hard to see that. But my friends, when you look to the Lord, God can help you see. When you look to Him, God can help you see what it is that's tying you up. He can reveal those chains to you. And as as John preached this message and John proclaimed Jesus to these people, not specifically Jesus, but the one that would come. It says that back in Isaiah 40, that when all the hearts are being prepared, those that are repenting and looking to the Lord, the glory of the Lord will be revealed. and all the flesh shall see it together. That's the way it was described when Jesus came. That's the way it was described when Jesus came. John said, you know, he came and the glory of glory we beheld, the glory as of the only begotten son, full of grace and truth. But did everybody see that glory when Jesus came? When Jesus came around, did everybody see that glory? Only those hearts that had prepared and made him room. The hearts that have been humbled and broken and and let go of those things, repented of that. We're ready to receive the king, their hearts have been opened. The valleys. The hills, the mountains of pride and whatever else they've been holding on to were leveled, ready to receive the Lord. Go with me now to this third section here in Isaiah 40. A voice says, cry. And I said, what shall I cry? And you get this message. It sounds kind of like a downer at first. All flesh is grass and its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades. And when the breath of the Lord blows on it, saying that we're not going to last forever. Our power, our strength, what we do, what you do in your life, the money you make, the money you save up and you throw into an account, millions upon millions, even if you could do it, it's not going to last forever. You're not going to last forever. I mean, even even great men and women who were used to establish this great nation, You know, and we have this constitution and we see all these things that, that, you know, have blessed us so much. I mean, it's only been around a couple hundred years and we see threats all the time, taking the hard work, the good work, the blood that was spilled to enable us to have the freedoms that we enjoy this country and things are threatening them all the time. I mean, we think it's just going to last forever that the U.S. is going to be here another 500 years. I'd like to think it is if the Lord Terry's is coming, but I, I mean, greater and mightier nations have fallen, folks. Even the best of what we do, most beautiful houses. I mean, people today, you know, go in different places and they tour, you know, the ruins of Machu Picchu or, you know, things like that of the past, you know, things that I used to call the seven wonders of the world. You can't even find most of them today. And they're called ruins for a reason. These great civilizations and towers and all of those things, they're called ruins. No one lives there anymore. They're just things people go and they look at and they think, wasn't that neat? But it no longer serves a useful purpose. My friends, all that we are and all that we have and all that we do is not gonna last. And here's the thing, every one of us here, if you live long enough, You're gonna figure that out for yourself. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, as you get older, and you start to get a little more perspective, and age starts to creep up on you, that you realize your strength and your vitality is fading. Your abilities are not what they once used to be, whether it be your strength, or your speed, or your eyesight, or your memory, or your height, or your ability to even stand up straight, or the ability to keep your hands from shaking, or the ability to speak so you can be heard, all sorts of things. Your ability to hear is not what it used to be. I said your ability to hear is not what it used to be, right? And we recognize, you know, the pain and all the things that come. And you look at somebody who is 100 years old, and there are very few that live to be that old, you know. And they wake them up for a few minutes to sing happy birthday to them, and then they go back to their nap. Right? I mean, we kind of laugh, and you hope that there's more to it than that. But there's not a lot. There's not a lot. and the phase of their life where they had whatever power they had or usefulness or ability, even if you're some great billionaire, like a Warren Buffett type. I mean, when you're 100 some years old, chances are no one's gonna be letting you make trades on the stock market. They're not gonna trust you with all that money when your mind is at that point. We're all gonna figure that out if we live long enough that we fade. But this is really a message of hope here in these verses, why? Because there is something that lasts, there is something that will endure, and it's the Lord, and it's his word. And this is about trust, because it is our tendency to wanna trust our strength, to wanna trust our ability to get it figured out, to get it worked out, all of those things. In some way, we're gonna do it, but my friends, the best of us are not good enough, we're not. And so this message here, this passage is about trust. There is something solid for you to trust in. There is something to build your life on that's gonna last longer than your body, longer than your mind, longer than whatever you can build. You can put your trust in the Lord. And then this message right here, we started off talking to people who were in captivity saying, there's hope for you, there's comfort for you. And the pathway to get that deliverance is going through a repentance. And it's going through a place of trusting God. And my friends, this is not just about being saved. This is not just about being saved. This is about living the Christian life. Let me tell you, a couple of weeks ago, some of you know, I had to do a presentation. It was, I had to teach a class during a day for seven and a half hours. And, you know, obviously I'm not super scared of public speaking. You know, it's more scary when it's people that I don't know and all those kinds of things. But I wasn't gonna even get up and talk about the Bible, something I spend a lot of time studying. I was gonna have to talk about this other stuff. I'm not gonna even bore you with it, because if I tell you about it, you'll fall asleep. Okay? But I had to get up and talk about that stuff for hours. and hours, and I didn't know this audience, and I didn't know how much they knew, and this is something I've been trying to learn about for several years now, but I was scared. And those of you who know me know that when I get anxious, my tendency is to not sleep. I'll nod off about nine o'clock, but then I'll be right up at two or three, and that's pretty common for me when I get whatever. All right? And so, I'm up, it's the day of the presentation, I'm there laying in bed, you know, and everybody at work's trying to pat you on the back saying, oh, you're gonna do good, you're great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I could find zero comfort, zero comfort that night thinking about all the nice things people said to me when I'm laying there in bed and I know I need rest, because I gotta be on my game, The only place I found comfort and actually was able to get some more rest was when I was thinking about how faithful God has been to me. And that God allowed me this opportunity and God's not going to let me fall on my face. And even if he does, there's a reason for it. God is enough. God can help me. God is gracious. And my friend, when I put my heart and my mind on those truths, I was able to get some more rest that I needed. What are you gonna trust? Are you gonna trust yourself? Are we gonna trust Him? And that's just a simple thing in my life, but it translates to each and every one of us in different ways, because go on now to this last section. Go on now to this last section. I told you that there is, well, a couple things I told you. One, that there's another Christmas song in this passage, and I think you probably can figure it out if you look at the verse nine. Go up on a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news. Go tell it on the mountain, okay? Lift up your voice with strength, but there's something else that binds this passage together, and I wanna show it to you, because I think this is really important, because this is part of giving you hope. Who is the one who is the audience in the first two verses? Who's the audience in the first two? Who are the ones who are being cried to, heralded to? Jerusalem. The people, God's people, were being cried to, were being told. They were being comforted, right? In their captivity. And there's this message that continues to go to them in verses three through five about the need to repent and let go of those things that you're holding on to. And then verses six through eight, the need to quit trusting in other things and put your trust in the Lord. But what has changed now here in verses nine through 11? Who is the one doing the heralding, doing the crying? And who is the audience? The ones in verses 9 through 11 who are doing the crying, who are doing the heralding, are the ones who were being comforted back in verses 1 and 2. In this passage, we see, in a spiritual sense, this pathway where the one who was in bondage is now liberated and they are the one who is reaching out and encouraging others. to behold their God. What do we see happening? We see that the one who was the victim, the one who was oppressed, the one who was in chains, the one who was in captivity is now released and they are the one who is going and telling other people, behold your God. That's pretty cool. You know, one of the things that we're going to see here in this last part of Isaiah, when we look at some of these passages we're going to pull out about Jesus is that he's called the servant. He is the servant. OK, but part of what the servant came to do is to make us into servants so that we might serve. And we'll never serve greater than he served. We'll never give more than he gave. But he came to purify a people for himself that might be able to bring praise to the glory of God. And what is it that these servants say about their God? These people who've been delivered. Well, two things, verse 10 focuses on what? He's gonna come with might. He comes with power. He is a mighty warrior. He's able to break the chains. He's able to set us loose. He's a God who can. But what about verse 11? He comes like a shepherd and he comes and he takes the sheep and he puts them in his arms and he holds them close to themselves. He's the good shepherd, the shepherd who would leave the 90 and nine to go after the one because he cares about the one just like he cares about the 99. His sheep know his voice and they recognize him and he knows them and he's gonna watch over and care for them. So we get this picture of this mighty warrior shepherd. Not just a God who comes in power and who can order things around and break chains, but a God who cares about you deeply. A God who loves you. A God who's aware of what's going on in your life. He knows and sees your bondage. He cares about you. And he not only cares, but he has the way to help you. And when it comes down to breaking out of our chains of bondage, my friend, we can go in the Bible and we can talk about all sorts of important things, the importance of prayer, the importance of being in the Word, of meditating on the Word, of accountability, hearing the Word, all of those things. We can talk about other things that we can do very practically to help us overcome. bondage in our life. But at the heart of all of this, it always comes down to a heart that is repenting of the things we clutch to that are wrong and putting our trust in Christ. At the heart, it comes down to that. And the way that plays out is going to be unique to all of us. But that is the heart. This is the pathway. to deliverance and not just to be delivered, but to be a vessel that will proclaim the King. If you want to be more bold about your Jesus, my friend, continue to be delivered from the power of sin and death through Jesus Christ. That will bring more boldness to you because the song will break forth. The song will break forth as the chains fall and we become more and more like Him. We want to be the ones who can boldly say, behold your God.