Comfort

Isaiah 40:1-5,  Isaiah 9:6-7, Malachi 3:1-5

What we need in our present day situation is comfort, not to be comfortable.  Isaiah's function is to deliver God's message to God's people.  The message is that your sins have been forgiven which is a message of comfort.  That is true today.  When we are forgiven we experience comfort.  Forgiveness requires repentance and forsaking of sin.

• Patience and Waiting:
  Isaiah's message is one that points to Christmas and requires waiting.  Advent requires waiting, amazing patience.  There should be a word besides patience when the waiting is 14 generations.

• The Coming Messiah:
  In  Isaiah 9:6-7, he starts out with the birth of a child, a baby, and quickly proceeds to his name characteristics and end with a kingship that will bring peace, justice, and righteousness, and will last forever.  So how do you think of God's son?  Do you think of him as a baby that needs to be fed and carried, or as the one who feeds the five thousand and calms the sea with just his words?  There needs to be both.  He is Jesus who is fully human and experiences what we experience.  He is Christ who is fully divine and God with us; the creator of the universe.  There must be the acknowledgement of both.  See I John 4:1-6.  Look especially at verse 2.
  
  We give a special term to Jesus Christ that describes him as being perfectly human and perfectly divine.  That term is known as the Hypostatic Union.

• The Heart of Jesus' Ministry:
  "Jesus, God in the flesh, lived here as a man and mostly accepted the limits of humanity and had no halo.  He was both mighty God and human heir to David's throne.  The heart of his ministry was justice and righteousness from that time on and forevermore."  Again, we are still waiting for coming time of justice and righteousness.  Malachi 3:1-5.  Verse 5 gives us insight into what God's see as justice.