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Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: December 13, 2015 | 10:00am
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SERMON SERIES:
The Weary World Rejoices
Throughout this Advent Season, we have been reflecting upon a single line of lyric from the beloved Christmas Carol O, Holy Night. It’s a lyric that goes like this: The thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices. Nowhere else in the Bible does this tension between weariness and hope come through more clearly than in the writings of the prophets.
The first Sunday we looked at Jeremiah’s choice to invest in the promise that Yahweh would restore his people. From his prison cell, Jeremiah actually buys a plot of real estate in the ravaged and decimated Judean countryside. His choice to lean into hope was an act of defiant faith, a protest to the persecution his countrymen faced. Hope gives you the courage and strength to believe the future is going to get better, because God is with us.
Last week, we asked the question: “From where does genuine comfort come, in our world today?” When the prophet Isaiah speaks, he ends nearly two hundred years of silence from Yahweh with these words: “Comfort” – take strength – Israel. Weariness is not something that is foreign to us. We all get weary sometimes, hopefully not during the sermon. What is the comfort that comes to which the weary world can finally stand up and rejoice? It’s Jesus.
At Christmas, Jesus comes into the world and he comes into our lives. And the image that the Bible writers use time and again, both in the Old and the New Testament, is the image of a shepherd. This was familiar to the people. Being an agrarian society, there would have been a shepherd and his flock on every hill and every field—for us, not so much.
This morning, I’m going to spend some time with you looking at the hope that our weary world has, and that you can have: that Jesus is a good shepherd who cares for his sheep. The image of a shepherd who cares for his sheep does not originate in the New Testament.
Download the entire transcript here: Ezekiel 34 11-16 The Good Shepherd and the Weary Flock
