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Our reading this morning is taken from Isaiah, chapter 61. This can be found on page seven, five, one in the church Bibles. Isaiah 61.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. All he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour and the day of vengeance of our God. To comfort all who mourn, to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins. They shall raise up the former devastations.

They shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.

Strangers shall stand and tend your flocks. Foreigners shall be your ploughmen and vine dressers. But you shall be called the priests of the Lord. They shall speak of you as the ministers of our God. You shall eat the wealth of the nations, and in their glory you shall boast instead of your shame.

There shall be a double portion. Instead of dishonour. They shall rejoice in their lot, therefore in their lands they shall possess a double portion. They shall have everlasting joy. For I, the Lord, love justice, I hate robbery and wrong.

I will faithfully give them their recompense. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Their offspring shall be known among the nations and their descendants in the midst of the peoples. All who see them shall acknowledge them, that they are an offspring the Lord has blessed. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord.

My soul shall exalt in my God. For he has clothed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress. And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all the nations.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

As we come before God's word this morning, let's begin with a moment of prayer. Father, this is a powerful passage with so many great truths, one worthy of a series of sermons rather than just one. So let's bring to mind, Father, those really important things from this passage for us today. I know there are many, but let's take away at least some. Amen.

I really do feel that I'm going to recommend that Isaiah 61 has a sermon series. At some point, I shall see if I can use my influence. Anyway, my friends have a nice word for me. They call me a bit of a nerd and being a bit nerdy, one of the things I like to do each November is buy this publication. So this is the economist, and it's called the world in 2024.

Guess what it was called last year. And it predicts, it gets all the kind of political writers, economic writers, writers about culture, and they try and say, right by the end of 2024, this will have happened. That will have happened. And it's kind of prediction thing. You can, of course, at this time of year, get another document called Old Moore's Almanack, which I would suggest is a little less scientific than this.

But what's really important about this document is there's a page towards the end where they say, and we got this wrong last year. So if you were to base your life on either old Moore's ormanac, which is just pure astrology and nonsense, or a little bit more research, a little bit more scientific, the world in 2024, for the Economist, you really wouldn't understand the world you lived in, because this is flawed. That is flawed, but God's word isn't. So this is a type of prophecy, a looking to the future. But biblical prophecy is bigger, better, larger, and more helpful than any human predicting the future.

Biblical prophecy works in three tenses as well. So it's about the moment when it was given. What do the people need to hear? What do they need to be challenged about? It's about the moments to come, and it's about the moments right at the end.

So for us as christians, yes, when we read Isaiah 61, we will read, perhaps, and understand a lot of it in terms of Jesus' own coming. After all, the very first time Jesus gets up and is reported to give a public speech in the synagogue, he reads this passage, the beginning of this passage, and says, today this has been fulfilled. Today this has been fulfilled. There was definitely a meaning for the people of the time of Isaiah, an encouragement and a challenge to live in a certain way, for those way back in the history of God. Then there was definitely the challenge of Jesus in his incarnation, the first advent, when he made a clear connection between that and who he was and what was going to happen.

And there is a connection for us as people who live between the first advent and the second advent. We are the people who live in the gap between Christ's coming and Christ's returning. Now, how do you live when you live as people in that gap? Well, you could be very, very holy and go to every prayer meeting going and just pray that the kingdom comes a bit quicker. That is commendable and certainly one of the things I'd like to recommend to you, but that wouldn't be enough.

This passage is full of challenge for us as well. So I'm going to concentrate on the challenges for us. Yes, this is ultimately a passage that is talking about Christ. It is also talking about how Christ's people should live. So firstly, there is a call to freedom, to liberty.

Now, one of the great advantages I've discovered of being retired is that you can slip off to the cinema in the middle of the afternoon. So this week I went to see the film Napoleon. It's not for the faint hearted, I warn you. So if you don't like your battle scenes, very realistic, I don't recommend it at all. Now, Napoleon at one point was seen, after all, Beethoven wrote one of his symphonies saying, this is the great man of liberty who's brought liberty to France and is a great example of liberty to the rest of the world.

Well, as you see in the film, and as history will tell you, the great person of liberty actually ended up a tyrant. He ended up a dictator.

That there was a flaw in Napoleon's personality that basically led him down that way. But each of us can make those mistakes, too, that we can look like we're trying to help people be free and to be the people they should be in Christ. But we can be not being that person. So we are called to liberty. We are called to bring good news to the poor and to heal the brokenhearted.

A lot of this language is very like the beatitudes, isn't it? The poor, the mourning. And I'm sure Jesus has that in mind when he's giving the beatitudes in Matthew. There's a link back to Isaiah 61, who are the poor for you? Yes, they are the materially poor.

So, yes, if you see a sign that challenges you, say in sainsbury's, you could give to a food bank here. Perhaps we should be responding to that more often. And yes, if you are in the situation where you could help run that, then perhaps that's one of God's calling. So it is for the materially poor. It is also for the spiritually poor, those who do not know God's love.

It is for those who are in some way broken, physically, mentally, spiritually. This is good news for the poor, and that always isn't the experience of many people in our world. Where is that good news for the poor and the broken? It is right here. There will be a time of consummation when all things are put right, when all of the evil and injustice of this world is literally rolled up like a scroll and God deals with it.

God is dealing with it now. God is dealing with it through us. We should be the people who are helping to make sure that the broken hearted are helped, that the poor are helped, that those who mourn and are sad have somewhere to go. That is our calling. That was his calling.

It is our calling, too.

We have a call to rebuild.

There's a lot in this passage about rebuilding cities, rebuilding Zion. We live in a broken society. There are too many broken lives. There are too many broken homes, broken schools, broken offices, broken churches. There is too much brokenness.

And the gospel calls us to rebuild and to heal. And we do that not because we have any great wisdom or power in ourselves. We do that in the power of the spirit. We seek God's power to restore what is broken. We are broken people, ourselves.

So we can never come at this with a perfectionist. I know how to put all this stuff right. We need to daily repent and come to our lord to be given that spirit and listen to some of those things that the great christians of the past and the humble christians of the past have done. Elizabeth Fry going into prisons, improving the situation there from her christian faith. William Wilberforce and others campaigning for the end of slavery from their christian belief in the dignity of all human beings.

But it's not just them, and it's not just long ago. One of the men I found most impressive when I've encountered him is a guy called Bob Holman. Bob Holman used to be the professor of sociology at the University of Sussex. He became one of Britain's biggest academic experts on poverty. He was in line, perhaps, for a professorship at either Oxford or Cambridge.

He was becoming very, very exalted in his field, and Bob would give advice to governments about the care of the poor. Bob was a believing christian. And one day he was sitting in his office and he said to himself, what I really know about the poor?

And he said to his wife, we're going to move. We're going to move to Easter House in Glasgow. One of the roughest, toughest areas of Scotland. And he said, if I'm going to be true to the God who helps the poor, I'm going to live with the poor. And he became a social worker right in the middle of the most difficult area of Glasgow.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we all move to Glasgow. I'm not suggesting that we all take that challenge. But where are the broken people around you and how can you give time to help restore them? You need to be restored daily, and hopefully you do that by coming in repentance to God and asking for his spirit. But there are so many broken people out there.

What are you doing about it? Now, that will be different for each of us. So for some of us that will be getting involved in a food bank, it will be just spending time with our neighbour, it will be spending time with somebody who's in difficulty. It will cost. It may cost you financially, it will probably cost you your time, but we know that we have to do that, for that is our calling.

That is the calling of the gospel. This passage also calls us to justice. The great Tim Keller wrote this. The church is a royal nation, a new society in which family life, business, practises race relations and interpersonal relationships are changed. We are a pilot plant of the future kingdom of God, a place for the world to get a partial glimpse of what humanity will look like under Jesus' kingship and justice.

What a passage. That must have been quite some sermon when he preached that. But think in particular about those last few words. We are a partial glimpse of what humanity will look like under Jesus' kingship and justice. It isn't fulfilled yet.

There is still a battle. We are in that part, as one theologian put, we're in that part between the end of D Day, when the invasion has come, but the liberation of Europe is still several months off. We're in that gap. So if you take the cross and the resurrection as being like D Day and the culmination as being like the end of the Second World War, we're in that gap. So there are genuine difficulties, there will be genuine defeats and things that we will find as christians along the way, but the victory is ultimately assured.

It will happen. Now, in that gap, we live as people, showing that kingdom that is to come. What a challenge, eh?

And the last thing I want to say from this passage is right at the end and it's about praise.

The Psalmist says, let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Now, you might think what I've just said about living with justice, promoting God's freedom, et cetera, doesn't have anything to do with praise. It has absolutely, essentially to do with praise and worship. People who do not worship and praise a mighty, holy, loving and just God on a regular basis will replace that with their sense of holiness and justice and love, which I'm afraid ends up in broken relation, even more broken relationships. If we are seeking to follow the God who is all of those things, whose spirit within us can help us bring in even a partial bit of that kingdom, now then, that is dynamite.

Praise is not something separate to the rest of our lives. We don't live justly unless we live in the praise of God. We can't bring freedom to other people or to ourselves unless we praise. C. H.

Spurgeon said, this praise is the rehearsal of our eternal song. By grace we learn to sing, and in glory we continue to sing. What will some of you do when you get to heaven? If you go on grumbling all the way? Do not hope to get to heaven in that style, but now begin to bless the name of the Lord.

What a fantastic thing that is as well, isn't it? Praise is the rehearsal of our eternal song when we come to church each Sunday. It's a rehearsal. Sorry to keep using that word. It's probably bringing terror to poor Chris for rehearsals at the moment, but it's a rehearsal for what will come.

But praise, too, isn't just us in this church on a Sunday. It is us on our knees Monday to Saturday when we don't meet necessarily with other christians. It is us explaining the gospel clearly to those around. It is us living as free people who know the power of God in our lives. It is us trying to help God in the rebuilding of broken lives.

It is us making sure that we live justly and that others are shown respect. None of these calls to bring freedom, to rebuild, to bring justice, to live in praise is something that we can do by ourselves.

There are two senses in this passage. There's a capital letters sense because most of this is summed up in Jesus and what he does. And there's a small letter sense which is about us as we respond to what he calls us to be. So I've set all of us our homework for the week.

It starts in prayer. It starts in acknowledging we need his spirit to help us to understand his word so that we can live to his glory for his world. Let us pray.

Father, we thank and praise you for the power of this passage.

We pray for those, our christian brothers who are not experiencing literal political freedom. We pray for their release. We pray for those around us who do not enjoy the freedom of knowing you, and we pray for them to come to you. We pray for those who do not feel restored. But do you feel broken?

Help us to be people who bring wholeness in your power. We pray for those who lack justice, that they may find it. And above all, we pray today that we, as a people of God, might be people filled with your spirit to bring your eternal praise. Amen.