Oh beloved, will you please turn with me in your Bibles this morning to Isaiah 42. Isaiah 42, we're gonna read Isaiah 42 verse 18 to Isaiah 43 verse 7. You can find that on page 603 in the Pew Bibles in front of you. as a bit of context to where this sermon came about. Just a couple weeks ago, back at Trinity, we had the privilege of receiving an entire family into the church. They came from a broad evangelical Baptist background, and they had two children, so we got to witness a reaffirmation of faith, and also the baptism of their two children, a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and in seeking to encourage them in their profession that they made, we focused our hearts on God's glorious promises made to His church in Isaiah 43. And so we will focus there this morning as well as we hear the Lord's encouragement to us in this life of faith. Isaiah 42, starting at verse 18. Hear you deaf and look you blind that you may see. Who is blind but my servant or deaf as my messenger whom I send? Who is blind as my dedicated one or blind as the servant of the Lord? He sees many things but does not observe them. His ears are open but he does not hear. The Lord was pleased for his righteousness sake to magnify his law and make it glorious. But this is a people plundered and looted. They are, all of them, trampled in holes and hidden in prisons. They have become plunder with none to rescue, spoil with none to, say, restore. Who among you will give ear to this will attend and listen for the time to come. Who gave up Jacob to the looter and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the Lord against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk, in whose law they would not obey? So he poured on them the heat of his anger and the might of battle. It set him on fire all around, but he did not understand. It burned him up, but he did not take it to heart. And here begins our focus. But now, thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flames shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored and I love you. I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the North, give up, and to the South, do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth. Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." This is the word of our God. Well, beloved in the Lord, we all make commitments and some of those commitments are much more significant than others. For instance, I made a commitment not to own a dog, but at a school auction that we had just a few weeks ago, I almost broke that commitment. because there was this gorgeous black lab puppy that was in the auction and no one was bidding on her. So they kept on lowering the price, trying to get someone to bite, and as it got lower and lower and lower, it got to about $100. And that's when my resolve began to dissolve, and I started texting my wife that we should get a dog. Two things prevented me from getting that dog. One was my wife reminding me of the commitments that I had made not to get a dog. And the second was a friend of mine who also had made commitments not to get a dog, forgetting his commitments and bidding on it first. So he walks away with a dog and I did not. This is one of those less serious commitments in life. But there's more serious commitments in life, aren't there? More important ones. And one of those is the one to live a life shaped and formed by our God-given purpose. In our professions of faith, we make a commitment to live a life as we have been created and redeemed to live in Jesus Christ. But we often run into problems, into challenges with this commitment. And that's because we can so easily and so quickly run into problems and forget about this commitment. We can so easily be distracted from it by so many other things. And when this happens, the default answers to this question that already live within our hearts, they take over and they start directing our lives. You see, it's impossible for us to live without a purpose. And if our purpose is not purposefully and intentionally shaped by the one that God gives us, then some other purpose is going to take over. The simple fact of the matter is, loved ones, that the pilot seat of our hearts will not remain empty. It will be filled. And whatever fills it will not be in line, but in fact will be in opposition to God. And it will steer our hearts away from what we have been created and what we have been redeemed in Christ to live for. But thanks be to God, we have a God who helps us in this struggle. And he does that by reminding us again and again what our purpose here on earth is. He comes to us in the busyness and in the fullness of our lives and he helps us to see that not a single moment of our existence is meaningless. Not a single spare second is without purpose. No loved ones, he shows us the bigger picture of what he has done and what he is doing in Jesus Christ and in so doing. He encourages us to lay hold of our purpose in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what we're gonna focus our hearts on this morning with the help of Isaiah chapter 43. We're gonna look at this in three points. First we're gonna see a tender encouragement, then we're gonna see a matter of identity, and then a glorious purpose. A tender encouragement, a matter of identity, and a glorious purpose. Well, the first thing that we need to see here, loved ones, is the repeated encouragement from our God to fear not. And sometimes I think we find that a hard command, don't we? If we are honest with ourselves, we sometimes even find it a bit of a harsh command. What do you mean to fear not? We think that way because there's so much to fear in our lives. There's so much that causes us anxiety and worry and sleepless nights. There's so much that is out there that threatens to undo us. There's so much in our hearts that causes us this fear and uncertainty. And our God certainly gives us a vivid description of fearful things through Isaiah here, doesn't he? He says, when you pass through the waters and the rivers, when you walk through fire and the flame, now we hardly think about them so much anymore because we've got bridges to go anywhere that we need to go. But before all these bridges were here, rivers were significant obstacles. My family and I, we live about 15 minutes away from the Niagara River. It's the one where the Niagara Falls is on, which is one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world. And that's because the river is a massive river. Its current is incredibly strong. I've been fishing just downstream of the falls, right where the river comes out and it widens out and it shallows out after being squeezed through what's known as the Niagara Gorge. And the volume and the power of the water that passes through there is so intense that these whirlpools that are at least 25, if not more feet across, they form right underneath of your boat and start spinning you around. And it's a little unsettling if you're not used to it. Now imagine trying to have to cross a river like that. Imagine you had to get to the other side of such raw power without the modern conveniences of powerful boats and bridges. That would cause you some fear. Or what about fire? Have you ever been near a forest fire, near enough to see the flames, to hear the crackles and the roars, or to feel the intense heat of a wall of fire? There's a movie that came out a number of years ago about a number of firefighters who lost their lives to a forest fire called Only the Brave. And in watching that movie, we get a taste, a sense, appreciation of the raw power of fire. I think it was another firefighting movie that described it in words, and it says the fire is described as a living thing. It eats, it breathes, and it hates. When you're close up to a raging fire, you can hear that hunger. You can feel it breathing, and it's a humbling thing. It's a terrifying thing. So we have fire and we have water, two extreme pictures of terrifying and overwhelming situations. But only that, pictures of the many things that make us afraid of the trials and the challenges that we face that make us uneasy, that beat us down and that are outside of our control. I'm sure we could come up with our own list, couldn't we, of things that make us fearful? Because the future makes us fearful. The cultural climate in which we live makes us fearful. The economy makes us fearful. I don't know if you get Amber alerts around here, it's when your phone just warns you of an abduction of a child or something like that, and they pop up every once in a while. Those things can make us fearful. Violence and the crime, the blatant disregard for life that we see all around us, the pressures against the church, the world in which our children will have to live, all these things make us fearful. And if that's not enough, our own consistent failures in the Christian life make us fearful. Our giving in to that same sin again and again makes us fearful. Our lack of progress in the Christian life makes us fearful. Those dark, impure thoughts make us fearful. There's so much in life that makes us fearful, and they become a loud noise, like the rushing of the wind around a large fire, so loud it becomes this deafening roar in our lives. And yet, loved ones, into this very deafening roar, the voice of God rings out, and he says, do not fear. Do not fear. You have no need to fear. And how can he say that, though? How can he make such a claim? Well, he makes it for two reasons here. First, because nothing, nothing that you or I experience in this life is an accident. Nothing in this life comes into your life by pure coincidence. There's no mistakes, there are no uncontrolled fate, there's no accidents of history. And we know that because of who these words are originally for. They're for the people who are off in captivity. They're off in Babylon. That's why we read from chapter 42 because there we learned that God's people had neglected the word of God. They had wandered away from him. They had forgotten their purpose in life and they started living however they wanted. They rebelled against God. And so the fire of captivity that they were facing was the fire of God's anger. Verse 25 tells us, so he poured on him the heat of his anger. The situation that God's people were in was the discipline of the Lord. It was meant to help them see the error of their hearts, to identify the misdirection of their love and to drive them back to their God. And this reminds us, loved ones, that there's no mistakes in life. There are no accidents. Where we find ourselves today is right where God has placed us. And where he has placed us is for a purpose. I think it was one of my seminary professors, Dr. Alan Strange, who said that the hardships of life are meant to draw us to Christ in dependence, and the good things of life are meant to draw us to God in thanksgiving. And so in the good or in the bad, in the easy or in the hard, we are drawn again and again and again to our God. And that's a comfort, loved ones, because it reminds us that we are in the hands of a good and loving Father, one who is working something good rather than in the hands of some blind fate that blows wherever and does whatever it wants. It saves us from living a life that is meaningless, Rather, it reminds us we're living a meaningful life, one where God is drawing us back to himself, one in which God is sovereignly in control. That's only the first reason. The second is given to us in verse 5 when the Lord says, fear not, for I am with you. I am with you. In other words, loved ones, no matter the situation that you find yourself in, whether it is a pleasant one or it is an unpleasant one, you do not go through it alone. I am with you. I do not know if you've ever walked through a forest in the middle of the night all by yourself. I had it once where I was at the far back of a field till well past dark. The trip out there, of course, was an easy trip. I had no problems. There was no uncertainty, no misgivings when the sun was up. But on the way out, when I couldn't see five feet in front of me, every sudden rustling of the leaves was startling. And then I started to hear coyotes howling. And they sounded pretty close. I had no idea because I couldn't see them, but it sure sounded close. And then more of them started howling, because that's how it works. One starts and the rest join. I started thinking about how coyotes are scared of human beings, that they usually run away from us. But when you're in the middle of a dark field all by yourself, surrounded by them, that's not super encouraging. In a situation like that, you suddenly feel alone. You feel uncertain and vulnerable. But it changes completely when you're with someone else. When you're not alone, then it's not so overwhelming. Instead of just your own two eyes and ears, you now have a whole other set. Even one other person is comforting in situations like that. The loved ones in Christ, we have so much more comfort every single moment of every single day. Because that's because we have his presence in every single situation. There's never a moment in our lives where we are alone. Hear the words of God to you when you are afraid. He says, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. Notice how his presence here brings with it protection. His presence doesn't save us from unpleasant situations in this life. That's never promised in scripture. But he does promise to be with us and to protect us in those moments. They will not overwhelm you or burn you or consume you, all because you are in the hands of our loving God. And so God says to you and to me this morning, he says, do not be afraid. You have no need to be afraid, rather focus your hearts on the loving care and protection that is yours in Jesus Christ. He says, I am with you and I will not leave you. This drives us secondly to ask the question, why? Because if we follow the flow of chapter 42 into chapter 43, what we would expect is God to bring judgment down on his rebellious people. But what we find instead is a response of grace. That opening line of chapter 43, but now thus says the Lord, leads us not to a statement of judgment as we would expect, but to a surprising statement of grace. And the reason why, secondly, is a matter of identity. In fact, it has to do with two identities. It has to do with who God is, and then it has to do with who we are now in Jesus Christ. First, it's about who God is. In verse three, God tells us that I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. He is the Lord. He is Yahweh, the great I am, the one who reveals himself in a burning bush, who is self-existent, who needs no one, who relies on nothing. He's also the Holy One, the One like no other, the One who alone is perfect and complete, who is without sin or blemish, who is set apart from everything else that exists. So holy is He. He is transcendent, He is powerful, He is glorious, and He is mighty. But notice something here. Notice how each of these names that capture something of the divine otherness of God that focuses on how transcendent and glorious and beyond us He is, are names that are all connected with His people. I am the Lord, your God. I am the Holy One of Israel. I am your Savior. And this reminds us that this high and mighty and transcendent God is the one who has purposefully and graciously made himself known to his people. He is your God, meaning not that God's people chose him, but that he chose a people for himself. He is the one who has drawn near to us. He's the God who has made it even possible for sinful people to be brought near to him, this sinless God. And that's the wonder of the cross, isn't it? This is why he is also the savior. Because in saving his people, he purifies those people so that they can now enter into his sinless presence. He is a God who reaches out for and draws near to sinful people like you and me, and like our assurance of pardon this morning, proclaims to us that there's no condemnation in Jesus Christ. This is who our God is. And that brings us secondly to see who we now are in Christ. Because who we are are the people that God has created and formed. Verse two tells us that, thus says the Lord, who created you, O Jacob, who formed you, O Israel. What God is referring back to here is how he took the descendants of Jacob and he made them into a nation Israel. He's the one who took and enslaved people in Egypt, who rescued them and then made them into a nation. This is why in verse three he says, I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you. Cush and Seba are areas that surround Egypt and they're included here in a poetic way to describe the whole area. What God is saying is that I have chosen you instead of them. Though you were stronger, they were more stronger, more powerful, I chose you and I rescued you. I am your Savior. I am the one who has redeemed you. I have called you by name and I have made you mine. Loved ones, this is what God does for you and for me in Jesus Christ. He chooses us. He calls us. He redeems us. He makes us his own special people. And that's what the cross is all about. On the cross, he ransoms us with the blood of Christ. He is rescuing us from the kingdom of darkness and bringing us into the kingdom of light. And in so doing, he's making us his own special people. This is our new identity. We are those who belong now to Jesus Christ. We are those who are now united inseparably to him. We are those who now bear his name. Heidelberg Catechism, question and answer one, summarizes this for us beautifully, doesn't it? I am not my own. but I belong body and soul and life and in death to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ. I'm not my own, we are Christ's and in Christ we are those who are redeemed from our sin, who are chosen by God, called by him, we are his precious people. And this is our new identity in Jesus Christ, we belong to him. Notice that it is all of grace. Notice how it has nothing to do with what we've done. Notice the pattern of this whole section. Is God doing this and God doing that? I have redeemed. I have called. I will be with. I give you. I am with. God moves towards us. It's about what God does for you and for me. It's all of grace. And the reason why it is all of grace is because you are precious in my eyes and honored and I love you. The reason that a holy and transcendent God would stoop to lavish his grace on undeserving people like you and me is because of his love. The reason God never leaves you or forsakes you in the waters and the fires of this life is because you are precious to him. The reason why he allows difficult situations into your life meant to draw you back to him is because he loves you and he wants what is best for you. The reason why you need not fear is because you belong to the sovereign and holy God. Loved ones, you are loved by God and Jesus Christ. You are his beloved. This is who you are. We're prone to forget that. But this is who we are, and there's nothing more important about you in all of the world. One writer puts it like this, he says, what matters most about you is not what you deserve, but whose you are. We get so stuck on that in our own hearts, don't we? We get stuck on what we think we deserve. And when we go down that road, we then think that there's no way that God will forgive me. There's no way that I can live in the joy of forgiveness. We keep dragging up all our past sins again and again and again. Or we go in the opposite direction. We think that we deserve the life that we dream of because we're so good and such lovely people. But God says it's not about what you deserve at all, but about whose you are. You are mine. It's about what I have done for you and what I have made you to be in Jesus Christ. And it is this glorious identity, this glorious new reality, this glorious love that helps us go through life. What helps us get up every morning and face a new day is the fact, the unchanging fact, That we belong to God and we are endlessly loved by Him in Jesus Christ. It's because we know that our loving Father will continue to lavish His love on us. Because that's what He says here in verses 5 and 6. He says, I will bring your offspring from the east, I will gather you, or from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up, and to the south, do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name." Notice how this is much further and much more widespread than their captivity in just Babylon. This is worldwide. This is much farther. This is far beyond just being taken captive to one location. And yet even then, says the Lord, no matter how far you may be scattered on this earth, no matter how distant you may be sent, I will gather every single one of my sons and my daughters into me. No matter how deep or how far you are in captivity, no matter how intense the fire or overwhelming the waters, I will rescue you and be with you, so deep is my love for you. So certain, loved ones, is the love of God that we need not fear what the future may hold. Because that future is a future in which you will still be loved by Almighty God. What grounds the grace of our God is the fact that he is a God who loves and that we are a people who are loved. That is who he is and that is who we are in him. But God brings us even deeper yet. Because we can go deeper into the heart of our God. And that deeper has to do with why God would even create a people to love so deeply and to lavish his grace upon. And so thirdly, it's about the purpose of God to create a people to call his own and to love. And that purpose is given to us in verse seven when God describes his people as those whom I created for my glory, whom I have formed and made. And here, love, we see the divine goal of God in creating anything. It's the purpose of the entire creation. All of this creation is for the praise and the glory of God. It's to show forth his wonder and his splendor. And in particular, God has created a people for this glorious purpose. He has redeemed a people to realign them to this very purpose. That's why the Westminster Shorter Catechism begins with the chief and the primary purpose of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And this is merely, of course, a summary of what God teaches us in his word. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5, let your light so shine among men that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father in heaven. The Apostle Paul affirms it for us in 1 Corinthians 6. You were bought at a price, so glorify God in your body. Or chapter 10, same book, when he says, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. What sin does is it pulls us from this glorious purpose. It distracts us from our God-given purpose. Instead of focusing on God, we focus on ourselves. We become the center. We become the thing that we think we need to glorify. What Christ does in creating a special people for God by redeeming us is he realigns our hearts to the purpose that we have been created for. This is what God has been doing since the very beginning. And we've gotta think about this for a moment because it's easy for us to get a little confused about what this actually means. Because in glorifying God, we do not add to his glory at all. We are not making him more beautiful than he already is because we can't do that. We cannot add to God's glory. There's no more glory that God can receive because he is already perfectly glorious in himself. His glory is full and complete and it is whole already. But what we do when we glorify God, loved ones, is we reflect His glory. How God is glorified is when other people see what we do and hear what we say, they see something of God Himself. They see Him in how He graciously saves undeserving people like you and me. I see it in how we live moment to moment when we live according to God's word. This is why we have been reclaimed by God as his people so that we will display his glory. And the way that we display his glory, loved ones, is by living and loving as he tells us to do so. This is the significance of the Ten Commandments we read this morning. They show us how to display the glory of God. We display the glory of God when our character aligns with his character. When our lives are marked by love for God and love for our neighbors. And the Ten Commandments show us how to mirror the love of God. And seeing this, Jesus tells us what happens. He says, the world may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father in heaven. What Jesus is saying is that when our lives are characterized by godliness, it displays the goodness of God and it draws praise to Him. And this, loved ones, is our great purpose. This is why Christ has redeemed us. He's done it to redirect our purpose to God's purposes. And in case we forget, which we are prone to do, in case we forget, our God is worthy of all praise. So our call to worship reminded us of this morning. Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. God is perfect and He is complete. He is glorious and He is majestic. As David says in First Chronicles 19, he says, yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. And this is our God. It's our distinct privilege, loved ones, as children of this God, to reflect His glory in all that we say and all that we do, to tell of that glory and how we have received His sacrificial love, and to proclaim that glory in the message of the gospel. I think it was John Piper who said that our destiny is to be a living advertisement of how good God is to people who deserve the opposite. We are to be living advertisements of the goodness of God so that he will be praised. That is our God-given purpose. So beloved of the Lord, remember the depth of the love and the wonder of the grace that you have received in Jesus Christ. You are loved by all mighty God. You have nothing to fear in him. And secondly, in that love and out of that love, may you more and more grow into the image of Christ, and therefore reflect the glory and the goodness of God in all that you think and all that you say and all that you do, all that God may be glorified in you. Loved ones, let us recommit ourselves, recommit ourselves, each and every day anew to this great and glorious purpose. Let's pray. Our gracious and our eternal Father, we acknowledge to you that we are a forgetful people. Though we are the church of Jesus Christ, we forget that our purpose is to give you glory, to give you praise in everything that we do. We acknowledge that our hearts get distracted. We acknowledge and confess that so often we make this life about us, about our dreams, about our purposes, and about our glory. And so we thank you that you are God who comes to us and reminds us that our purpose here on this earth is your glory. Our purpose here on this earth is your kingdom. Thank you, Father, for bringing us to you in Jesus Christ, for realigning our hearts again and again to this glorious purpose. And we pray, Heavenly Father, that we would be a church, that we would be individuals that would shine brightly of the glory of Jesus Christ, that people would ask us, they would stop us in the streets even and ask, what is the hope that is in you? And that we would be able to give an answer, and that answer is Jesus Christ. Father, we thank you for reminding us of this glorious vision. We thank you for reminding us of how glorious and deserving and awesome you are, that we never lose sight of that. In this we ask in Jesus Christ, amen.