Pastor Tim Patoka
Advent With Isaiah 2019 Midweek Advent Services A Holy Highway: God’s Kingdom Comes With Joy Isaiah 35:1-10 1) God’s Coming Brings Us Joy 2) We Joyfully Come To God’s Heavenly Kingdom
I’ve spend a lot of time on the highway. Growing up, my extended family lived at least a 16 hour car drive away which we drove almost every summer. These long distances haven’t gotten any shorter. My wife’s and my immediate families are spread out across Nebraska, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Virginia. And we’ve driven to all those places in the last five years. As one of your pastors at our Grace multi-site church, I travel between our four sites often enough. Whenever I make all these trips, my first option for travel is the highway. As I reflect on how much the highway has been and will continue to be a part of my life, I’ve realized how useful it is when going a long distance. Highways provide convenience by allowing you to quickly go where you want and without too many turns. They provide ease with clearly marked exits and consistent cell phone reception. They provide safety with pavement that’s graded to withstand normal weather patterns and top priority when clean-up crews need to get out. Like many Americans, I too have come to greatly rely on and appreciate highways. America is relatively unique in how much we rely on and appreciate highways due to its car culture. People have always appreciated them wherever and whenever highways have been around. That was the case with the prophet Isaiah. In his day, most roads were little more than well-worn footpaths. Traveling was fraught with weather delays and danger from bandits and wild animals. But in the few places where highways were, cities flourished and people gathered. As we continue our midweek worship series “Advent with Isaiah”, we see how he uses a holy highway to poetically illustrate the joy we have with God’s coming. Not only will we look at Isaiah’s highway, but we’ll take in what’s happening around the highway and who’s on it to learn that God’s coming brings us joy and, therefore, we joyfully come to God’s eternal kingdom. 1) God’s Coming Brings Us Joy One of the things that makes Isaiah’s words both memorable and challenging for us is because he writes in a poetic manner. It has figurative language, geographical comparisons, and a non-linear train of thought. What Isaiah says here isn’t new to the Bible. Rather he’s using the vocabulary of his day to illustrate our already-known joy at God’s coming. This chief theme is found in the middle of his first section where he writes, “Look! Your God will come with vengeance. With God’s own retribution, he will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4) There’s a lot of things happening to show us how joyful God’s coming will be on 1