We've been looking at the word grace as it is found in scripture. You'll find some more fascinating things about God's grace as we trace the word through the Old Testament. And through the entire Old Testament, that's considering about 20 or so verses. And we've just started right in the book of Genesis and we're making our way slowly through. And before we go too deeply into the scripture, let's open in a word of prayer and ask the Lord's blessing. Dear Lord, I thank you for everyone who's come out here at Sunny Hill this afternoon. I pray that you'd give us some good understanding about your grace to us, undeserving sinners, and Christ's death on the cross. what that accomplished for us. Pray that you'd give us good understanding today. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Remember the word, the meaning of the word grace? Grace is God's favor to undeserving sinners. Now, Of all of us here today, how many of us are undeserving sinners? Could I see your hands? Yeah, I think that's like everybody. The Bible says, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. That is the Bible's first occurrence of the word grace in Genesis chapter nine. Do you know what kind of world Noah lived in? A very sinful world. And that's what brought on the flood. A very sinful, wicked world. Would you like to have more of the grace of God in your life? The Bible explains how this takes place in the believer who reads, studies, and believes His word. The unbeliever does not know the grace of God, but believers know the grace of God. Wouldn't you like to have more of that in your life? And the way we get more grace in our lives as believers is to obey Him more and more and understand His word. Since the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, man has lost his fellowship with God. And so, because of their rebellion against Him, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. In Exodus 33, beginning in verse 12, the Bible says, At this time Moses said to the Lord, See, you say to me, bring up this people, but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, I know you by name, and you have also found grace in my sight. And Moses continues into the next verse. Sometimes don't you just need God's direction? Just some decisions you need to... need to make and you don't know how God is going to do something that's ahead on your schedule for the week. But we can trust Him for all these things. Do you have a prayer relationship with your Lord from day to day? Do you pray asking to know Him better? That is what Moses was getting at. Do you ask Him to help you to find His grace, His favor, from day to day? Wouldn't you like to be favored by God each day? We are today finishing our survey of the word grace as it is found in the book of Proverbs, where we left off last time. If you have your Bible, please turn to Proverbs chapter 22, verse 11. There's so much grace and truth in Proverbs 22, 11. What I do as I do a word study on a particular word like grace in the Bible, I look at a verse and I start to make a couple of observations. And that's what we're doing here as we look at Proverbs 22.11. I'm going to read it a few times before we're done. Because there's just so many different observations that we can make just on our start in Proverbs 22 verse 11. That verse says, he who loves purity of heart and has grace on his lips, the king will be his friend. So what can we learn from this verse? Well, we can observe this. Grace can be found on the lips of believers. Did you know that? If you're ever looking for the grace of God, maybe look for a believer and you may see God's grace coming out of their mouth through their speech. Grace can be found on the lips of believers. So if you're a believer, one place where others can find that is on your lips, your speech. So ask yourself, is it evident by my speech to others that I know the Lord Jesus Christ? Secondly, we notice in the same verse, the one that goes, He who loves purity of heart and has grace on his lips, the king will be his friend. Grace on one's lips gains the believer quality friends. You know, if the king were my friend, I would value that friendship. And that's what believers have. We have an advantage over other people who do not know the Lord in that Based on a verse like this, Proverbs 22 verse 11, we have, it seems, better friends than the average Joe. Grace on one's lips gains the believer quality friends. Because that grace on our lips in our speech is attractive to other people, they want to hang out with us. Maybe because we're not swearing. Maybe because of what we say to them. Who would not want to have notable people, such as a king, as their friends? So it seems from this verse that Christians gain for themselves some pretty good people as their friends. Third, from Proverbs 22 11, he who loves purity of heart and has grace on his lips, the king will be his friend. We learn that grace on one's lips has its source in purity of our heart. One evidence of a pure heart is gracious lips because, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. There is also an overflow of good, encouraging observations about God's grace in our lives that comes out of Turn to Isaiah chapter 26, and we're going to look at verse 10, where we'll notice a grace command from Isaiah 26.10, which says, to the wicked let grace be shown to the wicked yet he will not learn righteousness in the land of uprightness he will deal unjustly and he will not behold the majesty of the lord and yet the command is for us believers let grace be shown to the wicked do you do that do you show god's grace to people who do not know him We have this command in scripture. Even if some people do not look receptive to the gospel, we share it anyway. Because it's commanded here in Isaiah 2610, let God's grace be shown to the wicked. Secondly, Let God's grace be shown to the wicked. He will not learn righteousness in the land of uprightness. He will deal unjustly, and he will not behold the majesty of the Lord. Grace extended to people does not always result in a good outcome. Did you ever notice that? They often will not learn from it, even in a land of uprightness. Third, Isaiah 2610, let grace be shown to the wicked, yet he will not learn righteousness. In the land of uprightness, he will deal unjustly, and he will not behold the majesty of the Lord. Sinful man actively resists God's grace. And fourth, the will of the sinner is determined to resist God. He will not behold the majesty of the Lord. He will deal unjustly. He will not learn righteousness. He's determined to resist God, oppose Him, and deal unjustly with his fellow man. That is sinful human nature. No one seeks to follow after God unless God first does a real work in his or her life. Did you know that? We cannot just start going to church with our parents and then turn middle-aged and then elderly and just by going to church every week. We cannot conclude from that that we really know God any more than putting a car in a garage You know, if you walk into a garage to get in your car, that doesn't make you a car. We can go to church all our lives, that does not make us Christians any more than a car in a garage makes it something else. The will of the sinner is determined to resist God, to oppose Him and deal unjustly. Let grace be shown to the wicked, yet he will not learn righteousness. In the land of uprightness, he will deal unjustly and he will not behold the majesty of the Lord. Sinful man's resistance to the grace of God hinders him from learning righteousness and seeing the majesty of the Lord. And it's only by God's grace that he ever opens up the eyes of our understanding that we may understand what he's saying to us in his word. After these verses from Isaiah, we find the next mentions of the word grace in the book of Zechariah. Does anybody know where Zechariah is found in the Old Testament? Well, it's the next to last verse, next to last book, excuse me, in the Old Testament. So if you go to the end of the Old Testament, then just back up maybe five pages from Malachi, you'll start to look at the book of Zechariah. We've been looking at a number of Old Testament verses that teach us about the grace of God. We've been noticing such verses in order that we might better understand the gospel. And when I first discovered that we'd be going into the book of Zechariah, I asked myself, what do I know about the book of Zechariah? In this study Bible that I've been carrying around the last 50 years, I didn't know that I'd ever done much really serious study of the Book of Zechariah. But I see it's underlined, it's highlighted. It seems that at one point in my life, my 70 years, I must have studied the Book of Zechariah. But because I'm so old, I don't really immediately remember that I've studied the Book of Zechariah. But we're going to be looking for a while into the book of Zechariah. There are two or three, maybe four passages, or maybe more if I get really interested, passages we may look at. In the prophetic book of Zechariah, we are going to find some more verses that teach us more about God's grace. And in the process, we are also going to trip over some other great sections that use some other vocabulary that relate to our gospel of grace. Such as... I was surprised to learn the first six verses of the book of Zechariah, you know what they're talking about? They're talking about a word that's related to the grace of God and that is the word repent. Repentance, turning from sin. And that's going to be the first passage that we're going to look at in Zechariah today. The book of Zechariah is full of rich truths about Christ. It's an Old Testament book, but it's talking about Jesus Christ, who we see arriving in the Gospel times, but he's spoken of throughout the Old Testament. Zechariah talks about his person, his work. His first coming and His second coming. Did you know that both comings of Christ that we are right now living in between are spoken of in the book of Zechariah. And so many of those that predict His first coming are so clear. You know, we trip over those as we read through Zechariah and we go, oh yeah, I've read that in the Gospels. There's a number of verses like that that we'll be looking at. And his grace abounding and overflowing towards us. Would it surprise you to learn that the book of Zechariah was written by, who do you suppose wrote that book? Zechariah. Pretty good guess. 29 people named Zechariah are found in scripture. So which one was he? Well, I haven't sorted through all of them yet, but I know one of them is a prophet and a priest and he wrote the book of Zechariah. The name means the Lord remembers. Now don't you wish you would or you could remember some things as we grow older? but it means the Lord remembers. Maybe we can remember that the meaning of the word Zechariah is the Lord remembers. He was both a priest and a prophet. After 70 years captivity, the Lord remembers Zechariah and brings him and about 50,000 others Back from Babylon to the land of Israel. This came about by the decree of Cyrus in 538 BC. Over 500 years before Christ, Zechariah is led back into the Holy Land in 538 BC. Zechariah is the source of a good number of familiar Old Testament prophetic quotations of both the first and second comings of Jesus. Having the benefit of seeing the fulfillment of Zechariah's prophecies of his first coming helps us to rightly understand the texts that predict his second coming. What I mean by that is, if Zechariah predicts the first coming, of the Lord that we see fulfilled in the Gospels in such plain language, and he speaks about something that seems about Christ's second coming, then we can take that as plainly as it is also written. He's not going to speak plainly about the first coming of Christ and then give us a great mystery about his second coming. No, he writes that he might be understood. Zechariah's book certainly contains some very interesting text. I hope that we can, in a future message or two, get to three or four passages that deal with the word grace. So we will see that a number of Zechariah's prophetic verses are familiar to us as they speak of the coming of Christ to die for his people. Zechariah writes of his Messiah in such plain words that the reader does not have to strain his brain to understand them. Don't you like that when the scripture does that for us? We don't have to scratch our heads and wonder, what does this mean? Zechariah, in many places, writes very plainly. There are in all some 40 or 41 quotes or allusions from Zechariah found in the New Testament. We also will look at some grace-related passages. Do you know that repentance, a turning away from a life of sin, is a grace-related word? It is only by God's grace that anyone would desire to turn from his sin to the Lord Jesus. The date and some themes of the book About 18 years into the reign of Cyrus, he allowed a remnant of Israel to return to the land in about 520 BC, in the second year of Darius, according to chapter 1 verse 1. If you have your Bibles open there to the book of Zechariah, we're going to be looking, Lord willing, at the first six verses. Zechariah's book was possibly written in two parts at two different times, with chapters 9 through 14 being written later, in possibly 518 BC. But I don't think the writing of the book took more than two years to complete. So it may have been started, his writing, in 520, and he may have finished it up. by 518 BC. Zechariah may have preached, written, and ministered over a period of as many as 50 years. That's counting his entire ministry time. But I think he probably wrote the book in about two years time. This was after the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 538 BC. That allowed the people of Israel to return to the land of Israel. The first group of Jews returning to Jerusalem under Zerubbabel, the governor, and Joshua, the high priest, they're both also Jews. This included both Haggai and Zechariah. The book of Zechariah was written as the remnant of Israel had returned to Jerusalem and were beginning the tremendous task of rebuilding their temple. The central truths of the prophecy are that Jerusalem will be built and that the kingdom is coming for God's people. God will be faithful to keep his promises to them. In Zechariah, God has much comfort and encouragement for his people. It's a book of comfort And what other Old Testament large prophetic book is a big book of comfort but Isaiah? And there's, we're gonna see a verse or two that kind of connects Isaiah and Zechariah. God will be faithful to keep his promises to his people. In Zechariah, God has much comfort and encouragement for his people as it is a book full of prophecies of both the first and second comings of Christ. Other prominent themes found in the book include repentance, certainly in chapter 1 verses 1-6, but also in chapters 8, 9, and 10. God's faithfulness to his promises, the first and second comings of Messiah, and the Temple all receive great emphasis. The purpose of the book is to proclaim that Yahweh remembers his covenant with Israel and will fulfill it through the Messiah. Some historical background as we have time. The decree of the Persian King Cyrus in about 538 BC allowed all who desired to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. About 50,000 people sought to return to Israel. They laid the new foundation of the temple in 536 BC. Levitical sacrifices were possibly the first thing to be reinstituted by the remnant. Now that's putting your priorities straight. The first thing they did when they got organized at all in Jerusalem was to restart those Levitical sacrifices and then beginning with the foundation of the temple build that before building anything else. Zechariah wrote it possibly in two different time periods based on some changes in the style of the text as well as the subject matter. The book of Zechariah basically breaks down into two parts and we'll define those chapters possibly next time. Soon after the building project had begun, Samaritans soon opposed it. See, the Samaritans were right there in the neighborhood of Jerusalem. We understand from Ezra chapter 4, verse 5. And they discouraged the people. So the work ceased for about 16 years. But this was overcome by the preaching of both Haggai and Zechariah. It is so encouraging in the ministry to not be doing it alone. So we praise the Lord that we have Pastor Johnny here, and we have Pastor Paul back at church, and I'm also helping with the pastoral load. And it's just easier done by a multiple of elders or pastors. So they're able to encourage one another and encourage the people in the work by their preaching, speaking of the coming Messiah. Through the comfort and encouragements of both Haggai and Zechariah, the temple building project was finally completed in 516 BC, just a few years after it had begun. I think we'll Pick up in the narrative at this point the next time we are with you. Let's close in a word of prayer and then I'll hand it over to Johnny again. Dear Lord, I thank you for this introduction we've had into the book of Zechariah. I thank you for so many good verses there are. about your great grace to us. And I pray that you'd continue to open our understanding, that we might understand many good things that you have for us. In the book of Zechariah, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.