It's great to be back with you. We want to thank Tenth for their support over the last eight years as medical missionaries in Bruni. But I wanted to thank you, especially for the four years before we became missionary partners with you. So the year was 2005 when Jess and I found ourselves coming to Philadelphia. We were high school sweethearts. We got married really young. We were planning to be missionaries. And we wanted a cross-cultural experience in Philadelphia before we headed off to the overseas. And that we got, definitely, in Philadelphia. But things didn't go quite as we planned. During my internship, God allowed me to fall into a very deep depression, a suicidal depression. And it was really through the ministry of Tenth that God brought a lot of healing to my life and got us through that really dark period in our lives. The young marriage class, our south Philly small group, really helped us rebuild our lives from the rubble. In the middle of that I was sure I would never be able to be a missionary, that God would never be able to use someone like me. But God taught us what it looks like to minister from our weakness instead of our strength. And he took broken dreams and made new things out of it. So we really appreciate that. Also the Gill Commission, we were the guinea pig mentees for the Gill Commission. We were paired up with the Kempens. And apparently it worked out because they also became overseas medical missionaries after us. So that was great. Anyway, so tonight we're going to look at God's word together and God led me to this passage as our family left the field to come back to the states for our home missionary assignment this past year. And we were up in Canada at a missionary debriefing conference run by some of the Wycliffe folks. And we were feeling like we had stayed a little too long in this scorched land. We had been overseas for five years. And God used this passage to really just invite me to drink deeply of Him and to reconnect with His eternal spring that never runs dry, unlike my own. Just in full disclosure, I am not a preacher of any kind. They're taking a risk here tonight. I'm not even one of those great thinker, philosopher doctors that you have here in Philadelphia. I'm just a bush doctor that knows a bit about eyeballs. But it's too late now to stop this, Dr. Gallagher, so let's get started, shall we? So you already heard the text we're coming from, and right away it starts out with a public service announcement. It says, cry aloud, do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a trumpet. This is God talking to Isaiah. Declare to my people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sin. I read the French translation just for fun as well, and in the French it says, denounce to my people their revolt. So this is pretty serious stuff. We're going to have laid out for us here, Gus telling us there's a rebellion. He's going to describe to us what those rebels look like, what their motive is for the rebellion, and then how he's going to disarm and reintegrate them into his kingdom forces. You know, maybe this comes from my background in Africa with, you know, peacekeeping and stuff, but that's kind of how I saw the passage here. So right off the bat, you hear this trumpet blast and the town herald saying, hear ye, hear ye. In modern day, imagine a big breaking news event. You turn the station and every channel's got the same story on it, right? That's what we're talking about here. God wants to get our attention. A modern day example might be, there's been an attempted coup d'etat that's going on, and every station's talking about it. Now in some of the countries we're in, coup d'etats are not an infrequent occurrence, but it's still big news nonetheless. But imagine this one's unfolding in the U.S., you know, the talking heads on the stations are They're going crazy on every channel, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp. I don't even know what you got anymore. They're all on fire. And the pundits are discussing the authenticity of some early leaks that it may have been an inside job by even U.S. citizens. A few hours later, as the story develops, the director of the FBI comes on and addresses the media and confirms that the coup was, in fact, carried about by U.S. nationals, based here in Philadelphia, in fact. They begin to characterize the plotters and then begin releasing the photos of the leaders. And guess what? The first photo of the release, you're shocked. It's this guy here in the front row. He goes to your church. And the next photo, you're horrified. It's yourself. It's a picture of you. That's what God's doing here. He's trying to wake up his people and say, this rebellion is happening in my own house. The people of God are revolting against me. So, we've got your attention, and then God goes on to describe what these rebels look like. In Africa we call them Pooches. So, in verse 2 he says, Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways. Yikes, what's that all about? This isn't the criminal profile I was expecting. These guys are busy, busy, busy, doing things like studying their Bibles, going to church, practicing religiously in small group. They look like a really good 10th member, maybe. Heck, if I'm honest, they look better than I do. Justin and I sometimes joke we're the worst missionaries ever. We have three little kids. And going to church on Sunday in Africa, it's like an all-day affair. It's like sometimes we dread it. We struggle to meet God daily. It sounds like these guys aren't, et cetera, et cetera. But these guys, they seek God daily and delight to know His ways. But there is a catch here. Going on in verse two, it says, as if, as if, they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the judgment of their God. So they're coming to God much like the rich young ruler did. And oftentimes, myself, they want to know what the rules are to be sure they've kept them exactly right. And we'll see that they think they've done a pretty good job doing it as well. They say, God, look, we've kept all the rules. And now here's the clincher. They expect something from God in return. Going on, they asked me for righteous judgments. They delight to draw near to God. Other translations say, they say that they delight to draw near to God. They like having God on their side. They're sure God has been on their side from the start, and now they play their hand and say, okay, God, bless me because I deserve it. Look at that guy over there. I know he hasn't kept all the rules nearly as well as I have. Maybe it's the political conservative who's sure God has to be on her side and not the liberals because of their view on certain things. Or maybe it's the liberal, sure that the conservatives are going to hell because of their perceived coldness of heart towards the critical social issues of the day, be it immigration or poverty or racial reconciliation. But look what happens when we play our hand to God and tell God this is how we expect Him to act on our behalf. We're going to see now the motive behind the rebellion and that really is disappointment with God. Verse 3, we fasted and you don't even see, you see it not. We've humbled ourselves and you take no knowledge of it. So these folks, they've fasted, they've afflicted their souls. We even read about how they would sometimes even whip themselves. They've kept all the rules, they've done their religious duties, they've voted for the right candidate, they've backed the right priest or pastor. They've done exactly as they thought God had shown them to do. And now, God is silent. He hasn't even noticed them. He seems not to hold the same high regard for their just living. He has not acted on their behalf. I've had this happen to me on many, many times, but one example was, I was in Kenya at the time doing a two-year fellowship, and God had brought this little one-year-old boy all the way across Kenya, two days journey, and he had pediatric glaucoma. He came in with these huge eyes, we call it buphthalmos, in Greek it means cow eyes. The pressure in his eyes were so high that his eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger, and he was going blind. It was crushing his optic nerves. And I thought, you know, this is wonderful. God brought me here. God brought this kid here. so we could help him. We go in the yard and the surgery was a total disaster. You know, the kid was going to end up blind. I wasn't going to be able to help him. And I remember in the middle of that surgery, as things were not going well, I was just so angry with God that He would align all these things. I had done all He asked me to do and then He's going to let this happen. And so I just felt it was, just couldn't be right that God would act this way. So anyways, This is, we're gonna go on in verse 3b. This is what a disappointed, highly religious person can look like. Behold, in the day of your fast, when you hear fasting, of your religious activity, you seek your own pleasure. Another translation puts it, your own profit. And you oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice be heard on high. It's almost like this person is now beginning to loathe their religious duty and now is full of spite and takes it out on everyone around them. Their colleagues, their employees, their families. It could be their wife and kids. You know, they can make a really bad boss or spouse. They're going about their business getting profit in the midst of their religious exercise. They're trying to extract something from everyone around them. And man, they can end up, They like to argue. They're always trying to prove how right they are, probably to themselves partly and to other people. And I know for me, my family, when I'm in that situation, usually my family's the closest thing to do that to. When we're disappointed with God, we try to extract from others what God has failed to come through with. In verse five, it says, it's such the fast I choose, a day for a person to humble himself, to bow his head down like a reed and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him. Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? God's asking you, am I looking for a bunch of solemn religious activity that has the aim to prove to yourself, to God and others, Just how good you are? And the obvious rhetorical answer is no, it's not. So now we're gonna look at how God is gonna disarm us and reintegrate us. God's gonna show us a bit of his heart. So how do we get out of this miserable, hopeless situation where we find ourselves pitted against the king of kings in his kingdom? God's gonna share with us what he's really looking for. God says, trust me, enjoy me. Trust me with your time. Trust me with your talents I've given you. Trust me with the money I've given to you to steward. Put your faith in me, not your religious activities, not your reputation, not your riches, and not to walk away like the rich young ruler did with your head down when Jesus told him to sell all he had and to follow him. God says trust me even with your disappointments. Let me show you what it looks like to love somebody. Let me show you the paradox of my economy where in dying to self you find life, life abundant and free, really free. Let me unleash for you what I really made you for. So in verse 6 God says, Is not this the fast I chose, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? This is what God wants us to be about, breaking the chains of injustice, fighting exploitation, canceling debts, removing heavy burdens from people. This is the work of God's people. This is the work of the kingdom, and this is the good news, part of the good news that Jesus talked about in Luke 4. This is dangerous work when you go up against oppression. Job described it like breaking the fangs of a lion. Can you imagine? I've seen a lion close up and I don't like your odds of going up and breaking the teeth of a lion that's in the middle of assaulting someone. In Burundi sometimes My work looks more like brokering peace deals with rivaling mobs and rumors of hits being put on people's heads, alleged poisonings, and people warning me to watch my back, and that's just in the church. And I'm not kidding. Verse seven, is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? We're to share our bread, we're to give shelter and warmth to the homeless. When we encounter the addict on the street, we don't hide from them as an unaffordable inconvenience of our time. Instead, we can look them right in the eye, we can touch them. We can restore their dignity as a fellow image bearer of the king. Just a warning though, it will be exceedingly costly and probably really inconvenient. So this is a word that the Lord has for the church in America, a church left depressed and empty after succumbing to the false advertising of the American dream and a me first attitude. What happens though is we dare to enter into the pain of the world around us, the suffering and the darkness. In verse eight, And nine, God says, then shall your light break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up speedily. Your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry and he will say, here I am. I've experienced these verses quite personally during my preparation to become a medical missionary and as a missionary. On the darkest day of my depression I referred to earlier, in the middle of my internship, I could literally feel the cosmic battle of the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light fighting for my soul. After hours of suicidal plotting, everything, I had prepared everything. Just as I was about to set in motion my insane plan to make sure there could be no turning back, I cried out to God, help me Father. He stayed in my hand at the last possible moment, At the time, though, it felt like I was even a failure at being suicidally depressed. Now that's really depressing. I wasn't sure if I was grateful or not for God acting on my behalf. Over the coming year, God brought healing. As we say in Africa, poli poli, slowly by slowly. And he did that in many ways. I wouldn't necessarily say I experienced the speedy aspects that you see here in this verse, but over the course of months, God brought healing. And not an insignificant part of that was through caring for other people. One particular instance stands out to me. There was a man, I admitted him in the ER up at Albert Einstein in North Philly, and he was acutely suicidal. And I admitted him upstairs to his bedroom. It was a pretty busy night, but later in the night when things quieted down, I went up there to his room when I had a moment. And I shared with him that I had just come from being in his shoes. For a moment, I was able to share hope with him like no one else. could, and we prayed for his healing together. In the morning after being stabilized medically, I'm sure he was transferred over to the psychiatric service, and I really don't know how God showed up more in his life, but it was through those kinds of moments that continued to bring healing to myself, to my own soul, while bringing a glimpse of hope to someone else. God, like his son, calls us to be wounded healers. Going on in the second part of verse eight, your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Today in Burundi, I often imagine our ministry there kind of like a diplomatic convoy, and we're his ambassadors. Darkness and brokenness surround us. Threats at times seem to hem us in, but we have no marines, no special forces to protect us. Instead, quite literally, we have our good works. that have paved the way before us, protecting us from attacks from all parties of the political and ethnic divides, because we've helped politicians' grandmothers, literally helped them see and walk again. In addition to that, we have Christ's righteousness, who is our true righteousness. We don't have to depend on our own. When I'm attacked personally, I can let Christ be my righteousness, and I don't have to prove my own because of that. And then on our backside, our rear guard, It's secured in French, par la gloire de l'éternel, by the glory of the eternal. Whom then shall we fear? No one. But at times, we're kind of like Elijah's servant when we can't see the host of heaven surrounding us and we do need to cry out. And God reminds us in verse nine, once again, I am here. So just in case you didn't quite get this, God's going to repeat this in a little bit different thing and do another cycle of this, of our call and His response. In verse 9b-10, if you take away the yoke, if you take away oppression from your midst, the pointing of the finger, which means judging and blame shifting, and speaking wickedness, gossiping, confessing other people's sin for them to someone else, or flat out slander, making up sin for them. Going on, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted. So this is really, I think, some of the most beautiful imagery in scripture. You know, I just imagine my life like a cup and we're tipping the cup and pouring ourselves out for the hungry and the thirsty and the afflicted. In the King James it says to draw out thy soul like water from a well, to share it. That sounds beautiful, but in real life, this is really painful stuff. This is dying to self. And first I'm going to say, dying to self, well, it feels like dying. It's really not very pleasant at times to do this stuff. Sometimes it takes us right up to death's doorstep, in fact. And that's when God promises in verse 10b and 11. Then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong. And you'll be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. says the Lord will guide us continually. We have a funny saying at Mission Hospitals when someone asks us, do you believe in miracles? We say, no we don't believe in miracles, we depend on them. A little instance, and we've seen miraculous healings, all sorts of things, but just a little example of that. One day I had a guy come in, he was born with only one good eye, he had a bum second eye, and in his only eye he had a retinal detachment. He was gonna go blind unless we could do a retina surgery. And I really had to have one specific thing, a 50 nylon on a spatulated needle. And I didn't have one, I knew I had used up my last one. But I looked and looked and looked, I couldn't find one. So finally, I stopped and I prayed and I asked God, I need this suture, help me help him. And then in the next bin in my storage unit, there it was at the bottom, one single 509 with a spatulated needle. So God can guide us in small things like that or big things in life as well. Again, and the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places. In Burundi, at the front of our church, right here, there's a big red cross. And up above there, in very crooked, cockeyed letters, painted red as well, it says, Yesu Adahadze, which means, Jesus satisfies. You know, if I tell you that today, it doesn't mean a whole lot to you. But when my pastor, Pastor Hilaire, says, Jesus satisfies, I know that's something profound. Because I know Pastor Hilaire struggles to feed his kids. Like 60% of other Burundian kids are probably malnourished. He's thinking how he can get clothes on them and get them to school. You know, he's not thinking about, you know, if he might be able to take his kids to Disneyland someday. And so when someone like Pastor Hilaria tells me, Jesus satisfies, yesu adahadza, I know it's something more than a sprite motto. He's learned what it means to lack so many things in this world and find satisfaction in Christ. So God calls us to these really scorched places. Sometimes that's maybe the concrete jungle here in Philadelphia. Sometimes it's places like some of your partners are at, like Burundi, South Sudan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Maybe it's someone who's depressed or addicted to heroin next door. There's really no lack of scorched places in the world that you'll find yourself next to. And God's calling us to go into those places, places where if He doesn't show up, you're going to be in trouble. You're praying He comes to you on His promise. So ask yourself, are you going into places like that, into relationships like that? Are you staying in your high-security, kind of double-insured world that's so common in America? God's asking us to trust Him and to go into these places. In French, talking about that spring of water, it says it's an inexhaustible life source. Oftentimes, if we try to pour ourselves out for the poor on our own, and we aren't really tapped into God, we're gonna run dry pretty fast. But the Lord invites us tonight to drink deeply from Him, to connect to His eternal spring of life that doesn't run dry. And miraculously we can continue to pour our lives out when we don't think it's possible. God says we can. In verse 12 he says, and your ancient ruins will be rebuilt. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations. You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. So God's in the business of taking broken things and making them new, taking our lives, our families, even our communities and making them new. using broken people like us. And we can be called the restorers of the streets to dwell in. You know, there's parts of Philly that desperately need God's children to reinvent their block, to create communities that have streets to dwell in. Verses 13 and 14, if you turn your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, call the Sabbath a delight. in the holy day of the Lord Honorable. If you honor it, not going your own way or seeking your own pleasure or talking idly, then you will take delight in the Lord. And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken. I talked about this a little bit at lunch, but our team has really kind of chosen to delight in the Lord of the Sabbath. As a medical missionary, there is endless need, and we've really chosen as a team to have a life rhythm of stopping on the Sabbath, if at all possible, sometimes there are medical emergencies, and enjoying that rest God gives us. For six days a week, we're called to pour ourselves out on behalf of others, to establish God's reign in the broken world around us by doing the things we've just read and heard about in this passage. But on one special day, God invites us to put everything else aside and to drink deeply from His well. One day a week, God asks us to trust Him with all our work, all our ministry, even His kingdom work. to give Him our worries and to enter into His Sabbath rest. It's a day to remember that our value isn't in all we're doing, how profitable we are, what kind of ministry we're doing, but our identity is rooted in being a child of the Father. So as we make our delight God Himself, He promises that we'll ride on the heights of earth and he'll set before us a feast, literally a feast worthy of Middle Eastern patriarchs. And some of our partners are from the Middle East here today, and they know what kind of a feast that means. It's gonna be amazing. So, in end it says, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. So it's gonna happen. As I wrap up, let's set aside trying to generate our own righteousness through dead religion, which only leads to disappointment in a world full of oppression and self-interest. Let's just leave that whole rebellion behind, and instead let's follow Christ's example, the wounded healer who emptied himself for us. Let us prod our lives for the oppressed, the marginalized, the poor, the hungry, the naked, the sick and vulnerable. Because Jesus promised us in John 7 38, whoever believes in me as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. Amen. Let me pray for you. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for words of life. When we're in scorched places, when we're in the desert, we're so thirsty for you, and it seems you're silent. Lord, we thank you for breaking into that silence to share what's on your heart for us and for the nations and how you care for the people you've made. We pray that we'll be able to bring Your good news, not only in word, but also in the deeds of our lives. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.