Good morning, and it's great to be in the house of the Lord, worshiping Him. I'd like to ask you to open your Bibles, Isaiah chapter 56, as we continue our study in this wonderful word from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah 56. A lot of you were at the debate that took place over at Purdue University on Friday evening. I saw a number of you there. I know a lot of students were there, but others were there as well. And maybe some of you weren't there but listened online. Certainly, the debate was available there. It was between a couple of different philosophers, Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Alex Rosenberg. Craig's a professor at Talbot School of Theology. He's an ardent defender of the Christian faith. Rosenberg's a professor at Duke University. He's a renowned atheist. And they had quite a debate, two and a half hours worth of debate on whether faith in God is reasonable. And of course, debates between Christians and atheists are always really interesting. Debates between philosophers sometimes are interesting. I'm a little heady, not always easy to follow. Friday night's debate was both. Seems to me a lot of the things that were being discussed there and debated are not necessarily the things that we're dealing with when we talk to people that don't know Christ, when we talk to non-Christians in our daily living. Sometimes these issues are relevant, but more often the case The issue is not whether a person believes that God exists or not. I think most people do believe that God exists. Not all. You run into some atheists, I know you do, but most people believe that He exists. The bigger issue is, so what? What difference does it make if God exists? That's where I think people wrestle. That's where people struggle. Many people have never seen the power and the reality of God in their daily living. And for that kind of person, Christianity simply becomes a list of external things that need to be obeyed and followed, rules and standards, without any real inward transformation, without any power. without any significance in the way things work out for us each and every day. That's a false religion as we understand it. And false religions sometimes can put on a good outward show. And so it seems as though there might be something real there, but it denies its true inner power. Now Friday night's debate I think was an important one for the campus, focusing on whether faith in the existence of God is reasonable. But we do have to understand it was not really a debate about the gospel. Friday night was not, the focus was not the gospel. As I reflected back on the debate after it was over, I realized that there was no mention of sin. In the discussion about the problem of evil and the origin of evil, there was no mention of the holiness of God or the justice of God, just absent completely from the discussion and you really can't lay hold of that without talking about that. The path to reconciliation to God through the atonement was absent in the debate that evening. So there was almost a feeling I think, and if you went, I'd be interested in your opinion on this, but there was almost a feeling at the end of the day that if you believed in the existence of God, that everything was okay. You're okay. Everything eternally will be fine if you just are on that side of the debate. And of course, we know that's not true, don't we? There's much more to it than simply acknowledging the existence of God. In the passages I'm going to read to you, we're going to see that when God brings real salvation, when God brings true righteousness, it is reflected in the holiness of His people. There's a transforming power. that is present in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let me read to you the first eight verses of Isaiah 56, and then we'll take a look at what these things are all about. So, let's listen to God's Word. Isaiah 56, verse 1. Thus says the Lord, Preserve justice and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come, and my righteousness to be revealed. How blessed is the man who does this! and the son of man who takes hold of it, who keeps from profaning the Sabbath, and keeps his hand from doing any evil. Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, The Lord will surely separate me from his people. Nor let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree. For thus says the Lord. To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and choose what pleases me and hold fast my covenant, to them I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name better than that of sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which will not be cut off. Also the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to Him and to love the name of the Lord, to be His servants, everyone who keeps from profaning the Sabbath and holds fast by covenant, even those I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples. The Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel declares, yet others I will gather to them, to those already gathered. Now let's pray. Lord, as always, we count it just an incredible privilege to bow before you as we hear your word. And it is our great desire here this morning, Lord, that you would teach us the scriptures, that you would teach us the meaning of these words, and that you would show these words to be relevant for where we live right now. So, Lord, come now and open our eyes that we may behold wonderful things from thy law. For we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, isn't it true, every generation must face the question of the reality of God and His presence in the world. It was no different in Judah's day when Isaiah was ministering. Now, no one in his day really doubted the existence of God. Atheism was not a particular issue. They wouldn't have had a debate like the one that was at Purdue Friday night. But the power of God's presence among them certainly was questioned. Practical secularism or practical atheism was prevalent. People often lived as though there were no real God. And the result was a lack of justice and a lack of righteousness that he addresses in the first verse. The people of God, they needed to be saved. And so verse one comes as a promise from the mouth of God to bring the very salvation and righteousness that Israel desperately did need. And this promise, if we understand it rightly, we need to see as a promise of Jesus Christ. This is another one of the Isaiah prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. My salvation is about to come. My righteousness to be revealed. These are the words of Christ. These are a description of his prophesied coming. And when he would come, blessing would be restored to the people of God. I want to tell you that we're entering into a new section now in our study of Isaiah. We've been in the last few chapters looking ahead over a hundred years into Isaiah's future to the Babylonian captivity. All of the implications of that in God's promised deliverance. Chapter 56 marks the turn back to contemporary Judah in the day that Isaiah lived, where he's going to address them about God's presence among them. When God brings salvation, it will come with a transforming power that will be seen in several important ways. And that's what's laid out for us, that and another important matter that we'll see this morning. What are these things? How will this salvation be revealed? First of all, it will be seen in our attitude toward God. When true salvation comes, something inside will change. Those who have been truly converted know that when they are converted, it's not just a sudden desire to do things outwardly. Significant change begins within the soul. It begins deep within our heart. There is a love for God and a desire to please Him that spills over into our actions. So the heart is the beginning point, and out of the heart flows the issues of life. Verse 2 speaks of a man taking hold of this. In other words, he incorporates it into his very being. The gospel is received deep within his soul. Verse 3 and verse 6 describe him as having joined himself to the Lord. echoes of union with Christ and our oneness with the Lord in the Gospel. Verse 6 also says that they love the name of the Lord. There's something about the whole attitude that is different when a person has been converted. This language is not used for someone simply seeking to put on an outward appearance. Someone who simply now desires to be outwardly godly or religious in his behavior. These are attitudes of the heart. And I think you know this from your own experience, don't you? If you're a believer, if you've trusted in Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, there's a huge difference between doing something for appearance sake, doing something because people expect you to do it, or someone is telling you to do it, and doing it because you really want to do it. I can think about that in my own experience as a young teenager. I went to church and I went to youth group, not because I wanted to. My parents said, you're going to go. And it forced me to go. And I went, and I often went grumbling and with great reluctance. But once I was converted, my whole desire had changed. Everything within me now longed to be with God and in His presence. I had a desire for Him. And you've experienced that, I trust, as well. The first becomes a weight to us. An obligation. The second brings joy and delight because it's motivated by desire. So that's the first thing we see. When God brings genuine salvation, when righteousness is revealed, when Jesus Christ comes, there's going to be interchange. Secondly, we can see this salvation in our love for worship. In our love for worship. Three times in this passage, and maybe it surprises you to even see it here, the Sabbath is used as a measuring stick for true salvation. And our first inclination might be, well, now wait a minute, we're not saved by our works, we're not saved by obedience to a particular command. And yet we read clearly how blessed is the man who keeps from profaning the Sabbath. Blessing flowing, it says, from the Sabbath. Now, we'll take this up again in greater detail in chapter 58, but here the point is not simply to isolate one commandment. It's not to exalt one commandment above the others. It's not to imply that we are saved by our obedience. But rather, the reason this is here is so that we might understand what lies behind the Sabbath day. What is the Sabbath representing? John Calvin in his commentary on this particular chapter makes it clear that the Sabbath is the most important symbol of the worship of God. So when we think about the Sabbath, lots of things may go through our mind. There may be lots of things that we would first gravitate toward. But the thing above all else that we ought to think about is worship. There's a day set aside to be with God. One day in seven. A day marked by holiness. And what is it that God is bringing when the Lord comes? What is a mark of this true salvation that is about to come and righteousness that is to be revealed? It's holiness. A transforming power that comes from the Gospel. When we grow in holiness, we grow in our longing for holy things. And the Sabbath day is a holy day. Once converted, a Christian naturally begins to long for the temples. of God, or as we would think more rightly about it now, the place of God, the presence of God, the desire to be with Him and among Him. Our greatest growing desire should be that as believers we find our joy and our happiness and our gladness most of all when we're with God and when we're in communion with Him. And so this day, the first day of the week, the day of Christ's resurrection, is the day that the Lord has set aside for us to come into His house, into His presence, to be with His people, to worship Him. And I know many of you are here every week. Week after week you come and you worship God. Many of you are back in the evening to worship again. And I've been particularly encouraged with a number of you that have made new commitments to begin to come both morning and evening to worship the Lord. I simply want to encourage all of us to make this day a special day. God gave us this day not as some form of test, not as some form of punishment, not as some kind of weight to be around our neck. Hardly. God has given it as a gift. He said, listen, I'm going to give you a day where you don't have to work. How great is that? A day where you can rest. A day where you can be with me. where you can be with others who know me and love me. God will use our gathering together each week to change us, to further our own holiness. When we're converted, it will be seen in us as a desire to worship the Lord. Now thirdly, the salvation that the Lord is promising to come in Christ will be seen in our keeping of the covenant. and our keeping of the covenant. Again, you just have to look down and it repeats itself, but you see it in verse 4. You can see it again in verse 6. God describes the fruit of salvation in terms of what happens to us. When we are united with Christ, we will begin to keep the covenant. Now, that may or may not be strange language to you. If you're new to the Christian faith, you may wonder, well, what is this covenant? What is it that is being spoken of here? The covenant is the promise that God has made to save us, essentially. Boil it all away. It is sealed to us through faith. And now in the New Covenant through our baptism. And it carries with it obligations. We don't enter into the covenant by our works. In other words, you can't buy your way into the covenant by what you do. But we demonstrate that we are in the covenant by doing the things that God has laid out here. By preserving righteousness and justice, as verse 1 says. By keeping our hands from evil, as verse 2 says. By choosing to do what God pleases, verse 4. Jesus summarized in the New Testament by saying, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Maybe one of the places that we can begin to see the significance of this is in two different places in the Old Testament. The first is in Exodus chapter 24. This is the period of time when Moses has gone up on the mountain Sinai, and he's met with God, and God has given him the Ten Commandments. And he's been going up and down the mountain at various times, and bringing the word of the Lord to them, bringing the command to them. And in Exodus chapter 24, Moses comes down, and he makes a blood sacrifice. And he puts some of the blood in a bowl. And he sprinkles the blood, representing, of course, the coming blood of Christ. They don't see it in that kind of fullness. But sprinkles the blood on the people. And then he opens the book of the covenant, as it says in that chapter. And he tells the people, here's what God wants you to do. And he lays out for them the law of God. So here are the laws. Here are the things that they must do. And the people respond enthusiastically. They say, we're going to keep the covenant. We're going to be faithful to the covenant. We're going to obey God. Of course, very quickly we find that they're unable to do that. And they fail. They fail over and over and over again. They break the covenant. And as the history of the Old Testament unfolds, the unfaithfulness of God's people becomes more and more evident. And eventually we begin to recognize that they're not capable of keeping the covenant. They're not able to do this. There's nothing within them that they can muster up that will make them righteous and holy in the eyes of God. For they fail every day. It gets to the point then when the captivity is upon them, God's greatest judgment in the Old Testament is about to befall them. And it's at this point that Jeremiah does exactly what Isaiah is doing here. He points ahead. He says, what you need is you need a real salvation. You need to be delivered. You need righteousness that will be given to you from God. Jeremiah speaks about this in terms of the covenant in chapter 31 of Jeremiah. Again, he's speaking now of the covenant. We see this second unfolding of it. Listen to Jeremiah 31, 31. Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. But this is the new covenant. This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them and on their hearts. I will write it and I will be their God and they shall be my people. Keith was talking about writing on the hearts. This is exactly what the new covenant does. See, God writes holiness. He writes His law. He writes righteousness upon us. Why? How? Through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ comes and He abides within us. And He clothes us with His very righteousness. Now, none of this should be new to you if you're a Christian. But this is Christian basics. This is Christian 101. When you believe in Jesus Christ, When you look at what He did on the cross, and you know that He died for your sins, and that He had lived a perfect life, and you turn away from your sin, and you trust and believe in Jesus Christ, things will change in your life. If there is no change, there is no conversion. Once converted, your new life will be revealed in a new attitude toward God where you love Him from the heart. It will be revealed in a new desire to worship God. You will want to be in the place of God. It will be revealed in a new faithful life of obedience where you keep covenant with God because of the power of God that lives within you. Not to earn His favor, but to demonstrate that you love Him and that He indeed has saved you. So these are the promises of the coming of this salvation to be revealed in Jesus Christ. Now there's a couple of really other interesting things in this passage that unfolded even further. When God saves us, what does He save us from? What does He deliver us from? Verse 2 indicates that we will be blessed. The idea there is to be happy. We will be happy about our new station in life. But how so? Well, to help us understand this, Isaiah, in this chapter, in this passage, uses a couple of illustrations to help us see further what he brings to us. He uses the illustration of the foreigner, and he uses the illustration of the eunuch. The eunuch and the foreigner, representing to us two things that we fear, even today. Look at verse 3, they're summarized there. Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely separate me from his people. Nor let the eunuch say, behold, I am a dry tree. What do we fear? We fear a life of meaninglessness, a life of fruitlessness. Secondly, we fear rejection. And in these two illustrations, we find the fullness of the happiness and the blessing that God promises us in Christ. First, he overcomes the fear of meaninglessness. Let not the eunuch say, behold, I am a dry tree. What was the greatest fear of a eunuch? The greatest fear of a eunuch was that he would, of course, bear no fruit. That he would live his life without purpose, without significance, without any kind of true meaning. His inability to have children, his inability to leave a legacy behind to preserve his name for the next generation might cause the eunuch to wonder, do I have any real reason to live? Do I have any real purpose for being here? Is there really any significance to my being? According to Deuteronomy 23 verse 1, the eunuch was not allowed to enter into the assembly of the Lord. The eunuch was excluded from the temple, from anyone who had these kind of physical defects. In fact, in the Old Testament, God was demonstrating His absolute holiness by drawing attention often to the defects of animals and of people. You couldn't have a defective animal and use it in sacrifice. Why? Because God is holy. Defective people, physically defective, were not allowed to come into the temple of God. Why? Because there was the abode of a holy God. They could not participate in the sacrifices to God. So it's really significant then to understand and to see the promise that God makes for those who come to Jesus Christ. Look at verse 5. To them, speaking of the eunuchs, I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name better than that of sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which will not be cut off. What is God promising these eunuchs? He's promising them a place in His house. The very place where they've been excluded. He's promising them a better name than given to Him by sons or daughters. He's promising them a position with God that will not be cut off. This is a great promise of the gospel. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you are welcome to God. In Him, you will find fruitfulness. In Christ, you will find significance. In Christ, you will find meaning, no matter what might have been in your past. No matter what sins you might have been involved in. No matter what distance there might have been between you and God. What indifference you might have shown to Him. What fruitless pursuits you might have given yourself to. If you come to Jesus Christ, He will give you something better. He will give you His name. You will be welcome into His presence. You will bear fruit for His kingdom. I think one of the things that was evident at the debate Friday night was that without the reality and the existence of God, there really is, at the end of the day, no meaning in life. There's really no purpose. Why would we live? To what end do we live? When everything is reduced to science, soul is gone, passion is taken away, love and purpose for living, You can't find it? It's not to be found? The gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ is where there's the promise of meaning. It's in Him that we're promised great purpose and fruitfulness. So God deals with this fear that many people in our world today struggle with, and perhaps you do as well. What is the purpose of my life? Is there a reason for me to be here? Jesus Christ, you can find that reason. Secondly, coming of salvation in Christ deals with the fear of rejection, deals with the fear of rejection. How many people today struggle with rejection? How many people long to be loved, long to be a part of something, long to know that they're cared for? You see the fear in verse three, let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely separate me from his people. There's fear in those words, deep concern. Have you ever known what it's like to be part of a group, but feel like you don't belong, you really. are there, you do belong, maybe the new kid at school, it's your school now, you're enrolled there, you rightly belong there, you go to classes there, but somehow you're not accepted, you're not loved, you can't break in to any of the groups. Certain parts of the country have that reputation. I've never been up to Maine and the Northeast, but I hear it's a little bit like that. If you go move up there, You know, maybe you own a house and maybe you have a job and maybe you shop at the same places. Sometimes you always feel like an outsider. Sometimes I've wondered if the Reformed Presbyterian Church might be a little bit like that. generationally involved in the RP Church, do you really belong? And I don't think we struggle with that too much in this congregation, because there are not too many of you that have those kind of roots. But in the bigger church, I've heard people talk about, go to the international conference and, you know, I just wish my name was Mick Long. Maybe I'd feel more a part. I don't know if that's as true today as maybe it was 20 or 30 years ago. But those kind of things can happen. We belong. But we wonder, do I really belong? That was the fear of the Gentiles in the Old Testament. You could be converted. You could truly believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You could be circumcised, the sign of the covenant put upon you, and be part of the people of God. But here it is, the fear. Oh, let me not be cut off. Will the Lord, in the end, one day decide that I don't belong? The Lord has a promise for them, verse 7, even those I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar for my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples. There are no second class citizens in the church. There are no second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. If you belong to Jesus Christ, if you have joined yourself to His people, to His church, then you belong. You're no different than anyone else in this church. Everyone whom God saves fully belongs to Him. We are part of His family, and we will never be cut off. Jesus made those promises clear to us. That once He began a good work in us, He will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. There's no one that will snatch us out of His hand. We belong to Him for eternity. And the most intimate place in the universe is the house of God. That is the throne room of heaven. The place of God's presence. The holy mountain as it's described here. And who belongs there? Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart. Those who have been purified by Jesus Christ. Those who by faith have been saved from their sins. If you're a Christian, your place is in the very presence of God. And you are welcome there. It's no wonder Jesus was so zealous about the temple when he turned over the tables of the money changers and whipped and beat and drove out all of those who were profaning it. He quoted this very verse. This house is a house of prayer. Jesus was passionate about protecting the very place of God. It's at this place that Christ made his sacrifice for us, and if we have trusted in him, then our burnt offerings and our sacrifices will be accepted because they're not ultimately ours. They're the offering and the sacrifice of Jesus who gave up his life for you. In Him and Him alone is your security. Now, we know that we're invited to enter this place through the finished work of Christ. And because of all that he has done, we do not have to fear rejection. There are a lot of illustrations in the scriptures about this, of course. Rahab was an outsider who was brought into the people of God because of her faith or hiding of the spies. Ruth was a Moabitess, and she was brought into the house of God by faith and became the grand mother of David. Cornelius in the New Testament was not a Jew, and yet he believed. And God used that one incident to begin to open the eyes of the church to the fact that the Gospel was for all men and women in all places. That anyone who would bow their knee to Jesus Christ would be saved. Listen, I don't know if you've ever struggled with assurance of salvation or not. Many Christians do. But I can tell you this, if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you know that He died for your sins, and if you will trust Him, He will take away your sins and you don't need to be afraid. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to live with this question on your lips. Will the Lord separate me from His people? The answer is no. You are safe in His hands. Gospel salvation that is promised here in verse 1 is our only real hope. I can't point you to any place else to find security. There's no other place you can go to find a place where your sins can be taken away. I want to finish this morning by reading to you from the New Testament. I want to read to you from Ephesians chapter 2. In this chapter we have a beautiful description of basically what we've seen here in Isaiah chapter 56. Look at what Jesus has done for you. This is Ephesians 2, beginning in verse 11. Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles of the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision which is performed in the flesh by human hands, Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ. You were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel. Strangers to the covenants of promise. Having no hope. And without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who formerly were far off, have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in his flesh the enmity, which is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in himself he might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens. But you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God's household, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit." What a great passage. This is your passage if you're a Christian. This is your reality. You have come near to God because He has drawn near to you. He has brought you salvation. I'll say this as well. If you're not a Christian, this is a promise to you. And this is an offer to you. You don't have to remain far off from God. You don't have to live life in this world without God. You can be at peace with God. But only if you too will come to Jesus Christ, only if you will acknowledge his death on the cross as the only means of justice to take away your sins and to give you new life. So we're one in the same in that sense. We all have the same need. We have the need of Christ. We have the same offer from a heavenly father. That which is far off has been brought near to us. Will you come to Christ? Will you bow your knee today and every day, as long as you're here in this world, to Jesus, the Savior of the world? Let's pray. Father in heaven, how thankful we are for the promise that you have given to us that salvation, your salvation, is to be revealed and in fact has now been revealed in and through Jesus Christ. Lord, even as that debate Friday night brought to us a reminder that there are many people in the world who either don't know that you exist, deny that you exist, or have never experienced the power of the transforming work of Jesus Christ through the Gospel. Lord, how we long for that hope to go forth. Lord, and we pray that you'd use us as instruments in your hand to tell other people of Christ But Lord, we pray that it would come from within a pure and a sincere heart within us. That our lives, that we would lay hold of Jesus Christ. That we would love the name of the Lord. That we would keep from profaning the Sabbath. That we would love to worship You. That Lord, we would lay hold of the covenant. That we would desire and seek to obey You. Because of what You've done for us. that you have set us free, free to be slaves of Christ. So, Lord, receive our worship now, draw our hearts and minds to you, we pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, it's saying in response, if you turn to Psalm 138B,