Well, it was the summer of 1741 that a German born composer, George Frederick Handel, sat down in his house in Brook street in Mayfair, and in a burst of furious activity just 24 days, he composed what has become the most frequently performed oratorio, Messiah today. You can go to the British Library and see the manuscript. Not that Handel was writing a historical monument. It said that after he composed the Hallelujah Chorus, he emerged from his room, tears streaming down his face and said, I did think I saw heaven opened and the great God before me. And I guess many of us have had an experience similar to that if we’ve heard Messiah performed or perhaps sung in it ourselves. As Handel weaves together texts from the Old and New Testament, setting out God’s plan of salvation to a world in rebellion against him. All these words that we’ve just heard, comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, says your God, are the first words of that great oratorio. I wonder if you’ve got them open in front of you. Isaiah, chapter 40, page 724. You’ll find it a help if you do. And those who are sharing in the service online, have a Bible open on your lap if you can, and we’ll look at these words together. I wonder where you look for comfort yourself, where you turn when you need encouragement. It seems that wherever we look at the moment, the news is very depressing and could get us down on the international scale in our own country and in the church as well. So I came across the other day a little book on Amazon, the book site online, the Little Book of Comfort. Helpful Tips and Soothing Words for Strength and Support in Uncertain Times by Lucy Lane. The book is a collection of inspiring quotations from such thinkers as the Roman poet Ovid and 50s film star heartthrob James Dean. And one reviewer on Amazon, Nicola Said, not an extensive read, but the quotes are good for reflection. I think that sums it up. Well, probably emotional chicken soup, I call it. What do you do? Where do you look for comfort? Maybe you turn off the news sometimes that’s not a bad thing to do now and again. Maybe you look for comfort elsewhere. Maybe it’s a glass of wine at the end of the day. Maybe it’s the scented candles or the essential oils or some Black Friday retail therapy, I don’t know. Well, our Advent passage for today, this first Sunday in Advent, is a passage about comfort. Chapter 40 of Isaiah begins what some people have called the book of comfort or the consolation of Israel. When Isaiah the prophet began his Preaching Ministry in 739 BC the tiny kingdom of Judah was in a desperate situation. It was, we might say, an apostate church, a godless society that had turned away from the Lord, had stopped waiting for the promised Messiah. The reforms such as there had been had just been superficial, but no heart change. And the words of verse 2 sum up what the Lord promised would happen to them. Hard service. Babylon would attack her. Jerusalem’s walls would be smashed, the temple would be ransacked, the people would be taken off hundreds of miles away to Babylon in exile for 70 years. Hard service. That’s how chapter 39 really finishes. It hadn’t happened at this point, but it was coming over the horizon. The Lord promises. And then we turn a page and chapter 40, the little book of comfort, begins. Yes, exile is coming. Judgement is coming. But out of them will come restoration, new life, forgiveness, hope. Hard service completed. Sin paid for. God will send his son into this world and through the suffering servant, his death and resurrection. Forgiveness and new life will flood into this world. It’s not chicken soup for the soul on a Sunday morning. God himself is pledging that he will come and fix our broken world. Well, no wonder these words have been loved, not just by Judah, but by Christians down the ages. Speaking of this wonderful forgiveness, a message aimed at our hearts. Hard service will come to an end. Sin paid for. So it’s a message of comfort. And as we look at it this morning, I’d like us to hear three voices in this passage. Maybe you noticed them as we read it together. Here’s the first voice, and we find it in verse three. It’s a voice of a noun, announcement, preparing for Christ’s coming. Look down at verse three. It says, a voice of one calling in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. When we lived in central London, I was walking home one afternoon and I could hear the sound of whistles, police whistles getting closer and closer. And soon I could hear not only the whistles, but the sound of half a dozen motorbikes growling towards me. They were police outriders. As they got closer, I could see that with one hand they were riding the bikes. With another hand they were holding back the traffic. And then at the road junction ahead, no one was allowed to get through. The Range Rovers swept by with their dark glass and behind them the police cars. And eventually the royal car carrying Prince William himself. And it was something like that that Isaiah is talking about in verse three. A voice announcing, prepare the way for Christ’s coming. Whose Voice John, chapter 1, verse 23. John the Baptist claims that voice as his own. He says, I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness. Make straight the way for our Lord. John the Baptist, the outrider sent by God to prepare the way for the coming king. God is coming into this world. So that’s the first voice, the voice of announcement, preparing for Christ’s coming. And it is an amazing thought, isn’t it, that God himself stepped into this world that we inhabit, that God himself set his feet on this planet. It’s not that as a race we drew near to him. It’s not that over the centuries we gradually got better, morally, spiritually, until he felt able to come and be with us. It’s not that a single individual had some great flash of insight, who went ahead of us and made some great discovery about God. None of that. Into a world of darkness, a world that is broken, a world without hope. God made his own journey here. Prepare the way for the Lord. He is coming to rescue us. God has prepared a salvation highway, we might say, to reach this world. And he had been preparing it for a very long time. How important he must be that it took centuries to prepare. So John the Baptist, the human bulldozer in the wilderness, prepares the way, calling the nation to turn from sin, to get ready for God’s coming. And God is building this highway today into the lives of men and women throughout the world. He’s forging a track, a highway of salvation along which Jesus Christ comes to save. I wonder if he has built that highway into your life yet. For many of us, he has. Maybe there is one or two here. God is building that highway to you. He invites you to join him, to meet him on it. All the troubles of this world, all the problems that we see and we hear about day by day, we have to believe through them all. God is building a salvation highway. Two weeks ago, at our evening service, we had a visit from a Christian man from the Yemen. John, perhaps you heard his story. He told how it was when he was on his pilgrimage as a Muslim in Mecca, as he was walking around the Kaaba, that great black box cube in the centre, with tens of thousands of others, that suddenly dawned on him that all this was wrong. He didn’t become a Christian then. He went back to Yemen. Three years later, having fled Yemen and living in a refugee camp in Greece, somebody gave him a Bible. He read it and he was amazed. He heard about the love of Christ. And John is only one of hundreds of people in that situation for whom These processing centres and refugee camps on the edge of Europe have become incubators of new life in Christ. People are helped to Christ and then, like others like John, are granted asylum and become missionaries to Muslim people groups within Europe. Very hard for us to take the gospel to those countries. But through all these troubles, Christ is building a salvation highway and bringing the gospel to this world. Often it’s not dramatic, it’s that conversation over the garden fence, it’s the invitation to the carol service or to a Christmas event. It’s the promise to pray for someone when they share that they’re going through a hard time. God is building his highway and that’s part of it. We can be part of it. His helpers. And Christ travels along it. He does it in the lives of individual after individual and perhaps he’s doing it in yours. So that’s our first voice, the voice of announcement, preparing for Christ’s coming. Here’s a second voice I hear. It’s in verse 6, the voice of assurance guaranteeing Christ’s salvation. Verse 6 says, A voice says, cry out. And I said, what shall I cry? Do your words carry a lot of weight? I find at bedtime in my house, my words don’t carry very much weight at all. It’s half past seven, children. Time to have a bath and go to bed. Deafness. Well, here’s another voice. And when this voice speaks, it is as good as done. It’s not the voice of John the Baptist this time, it’s the voice of the Lord as he sends his prophet Isaiah. Exile is coming, he says, after that salvation, that promise, it’s indestructible, it’s irrefutable, it’s as good as done when the Lord says something but Judah doesn’t want to know. Judah doesn’t want to submit to discipline and judgement. Judah, if you remember, tries to make deals, alliances with the nations around to escape God’s judgement. First with Assyria, then with Egypt. And the Lord’s voice comes through the prophet Isaiah, warning them, don’t. Don’t try and save yourself. You are leaning on a rotten stick. Don’t try and work it out for yourself. We find ourselves trying to do that, I’m sure, from time to time, whatever problems we’re in, trying to solve them ourselves, trying to work things out for ourselves, relying on our own wisdom and our own strength in whatever mess we find ourselves in. Or as a country, trying to rely on our own exhaust, exhausted resources when only Christ is big enough to fix it. Listen to how the Lord Describes it in verse 6. All people are like grass. All their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Verse 8. But the word of our God endures forever. Yes, people flourish. Think of those who’ve died in the last year. O.J. simpson, Michael Mosley, Alex Salmond, Maggie Smith, Quincy Jones, John Prescott, many others. They had their moment. They were at the top of their game. Masters of their fields. They caught the public eye. They had their moment, their day. But it was just a day. The wind blows over them and they’re gone. And yesterday’s heroes are quickly forgotten. So the Lord says, don’t rely on other people. Don’t think they can save you. The power of man, when it appears for salvation, is not to be trusted. How about the Church? How about us? As Christians today? Do we fear the loss of our voice in the public square that we once had? Do we mourn that? The collapse of Christendom. Are we surprised at Friday’s vote in Parliament? Well, not surprised, but saddened, but no. God’s power has never been in any of those things. Christendom, the public square, places of influence. God’s power is found in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is how societies are changed, individual by individual, and the laws follow. Well, perhaps all that sounded too good to be true. Comfort, exile completed, hard service done, sins paid for. Judah was loaded down with guilt, estranged from God. And very soon it would leave behind Jerusalem as a smoking ruin. Even to think of forgiveness and restoration must have sounded too good to be true. And maybe you think the same. Maybe as you look at your own life, you think my issues are way too big. Forgiveness, new life, restoration, hope, a future. I daren’t share them with anybody, Father. People around me this morning knew what I was really like, what I’ve done in the past. If the Lord only knew, well, he wouldn’t have want nothing to do with me. But he does. He does know. He knows all the things that we try and hide from ourselves, the things we hide from one another. He knows them all. And he says, that is why I am building a salvation highway to reach you. Because I love you and I want to forgive you. And I will meet you at the cross and forgive you there. Judgement and salvation will go together there and there only. So let’s allow our communion service to preach to us this morning of his forgiveness. Three voices then. That’s our first two. The voice of announcement, preparing Christ’s coming. The voice of assurance guaranteeing Christ’s salvation. Here’s the third and final one, the voice of evangelism preaching Christ’s love. You who bring good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain. This is verse nine. You who bring good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout. Lift it up. Do not be afraid. Say to the towns of Judah, here is your God. Who first preached Christ’s love to you? Probably not a preacher. Perhaps it was your mom and dad, maybe somebody at church, maybe a Sunday school teacher many years ago. Perhaps it was a friend at college or a work colleague. Or maybe it was a situation in your life, a circumstance, a difficult time in life that got you searching and you found your way to church. And just gradually, slowly, the voice carrying the gospel seeped in. Isaiah says that yes, Judah’s exile will bring her to her knees, but she will be the first to hear the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. And as we see it in the New Testament, from Jerusalem, the gospel will ring out. Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, as Isaiah prophesied. And we are part of it too. As we head towards Christmas with invitations in our hands, we are part of that salvation highway that God is building to the ends of the world. Verse 10. See the sovereign Lord. He comes with power. He rules with a mighty arm. But see how he rules and what he does with his power. You see, we are suspicious of people with power, aren’t we, in a political system? In democracies, we put cheques and balances in place to limit those with power from exercising their power for their own advantage. We expect better in the church, but sadly, recent events have shown that that isn’t always the case. Those in positions of power have not always used their power to care for the weak, to protect the vulnerable, but sometimes to prevent things coming to light. When that happens, we should lament that sorry state of affairs which is so far from the message of the Gospel, so far from the Lord Jesus Christ. Because what does he do with his power? How does he rule with his mighty arm? Have a look. See, his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young. God uses his power to love and save. What is the reward that he brings with him in verse 10? Well, it’s you and me. It’s you and me. His reward from his sufferings and death at the cross. We are the reward given to him. It’s the cross that’s in view, the fruit of his victory, the spoils of war that he won at the cross. It’s us, his people, who he carries close to his heart. You see it with parents. We saw it this morning at 9:30 as the service began and a small child tripped over, bang, Head on the floor. We all shuddered and the mother swept in and gathered this child up into her arms. Is that how you understand God? The mighty arm that rules the universe is the arm that scoops us up and saves us and gathers us close to his heart. It’s Christ’s love, the message of his love. Years ago, I met a young man from Iran, in his own country. He’d witnessed the beating of a classmate by the religious police there. When he came to London, somebody from the church I belonged to got to know him and would visit him in his shop. One day they gave him a Bible in his own language. And he read it. And he could hardly believe what he read. He told me, he said, jesus welcomes people in my country. He said, prostitutes are beheaded, but Jesus accepts them. He couldn’t get enough of the Bible because the God he met there was so wonderful. The message of Christ’s love was so magnificent. More than he could ever have imagined. And he gave his life to Christ. The good news of Christ’s love. God is bigger than all our problems. He’s better than we could ever imagine. Yes, our world is in a mess, more unstable than it’s been for decades. We’re told the church is confused and divided. Society is morally and spiritually lost. And maybe in our own lives too, we feel a sense of lostness, of being cut off from God, perhaps of hopelessness sometimes. What is the answer? Where do we find comfort? Three voices combined to bring us that answer. The voice of announcement preparing Christ’s coming. The voice of assurance guaranteeing Christ’s salvation. And the voice of evangelism preaching Christ’s love. God hasn’t given up on this world. He is building a salvation highway and Christ is travelling along it to save you and me and all those we love. Amen.