This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. Hi, this is Pastor Tom. We are in week one of our look at the book of Isaiah, day four. We're going to look at Isaiah chapter four today. We looked yesterday at the fact that God's vision for change in your life includes the mountain of the Lord, a place of hope, the day of the Lord, a place of judgment. And now we look at it in this chapter, it includes the branch of the Lord. It's the branch that delivers you from the day of the Lord and leads you to the mountain of the Lord. Let me say that again. It's the branch that delivers you from the day of the Lord and leads you to the mountain of the Lord. And as you start to hear this branch described, you might start to hear some familiar words about somebody that you know. In verse two of chapter four, "In that day, the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel. " So this branch will be beautiful. Now, I have to tell you a secret. This branch is not only talked about in these verses, but later in Isaiah. This branch is not only talked about in Isaiah, but later in the Old Testament. And it becomes clearer and clearer and clearer every time you read about the branch that the branch of the Lord is the Messiah, is Jesus Christ. Zachariah talks about the beauty of this branch that Isaiah talks about here in Zachariah 6-12. He says, "Tell him that this is what the Lord Almighty says, 'Here is the man whose name is the branch, and he will branch out from this place, he will build the temple of the Lord. It is he who will build the temple of the Lord. He will be clothed with majesty, he will sit and rule on his throne, and he will be a priest on his throne. '" So here you have the beauty of a priest on a throne, a priest and a king at the same time. Harmony between the two. This never happened in Israel. The priest wasn't the king. The king wasn't the priest. They were two different people. But in Jesus, we have both a priest and a king. In Israel, the priest and the king, they were warring political factions, or the priest were telling the kings about their sin. Here we have the harmony of Jesus Christ as both our priest, the one who gave himself for us, sacrificed for us so our sins can be forgiven, and our king, the one who is the Lord of our lives, who can lead us in our lives. Jesus is beautiful. We sing about it. "Fairest Lord Jesus, beautiful Savior. What a beautiful name it is. He is truly beautiful. " That word in our world often has the idea of the physical beauty that we see in a flower. But when you think of the beauty of Jesus, it's the beauty that unfolds in your life. Who he makes you to be, how he works in your life. So right now, just take a moment to appreciate his beauty. Just like when you look at a flower or whatever is beautiful to you, you spend a second looking at it. Take it in for a moment. The beauty of Jesus is being revealed in your life. That's the branch. He's a beautiful branch. And he's glorious. Jeremiah, later a book in the Old Testament, talks about the glory of the branch of the Lord that Isaiah reminds us of here. In Jeremiah 23, 5 and 6, "The days are coming," declares the Lord, "when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, a king, who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called. The Lord, our righteous Savior. " Jesus is glorious. We sometimes get so caught up in thinking about the needs of our lives that he needs to be meeting that we lose sight of the real glory of it all. He's a glorious Savior. I mean, you take anything we would consider glorious. You take a baby's birth, you put a royal wedding in, add the Grand Canyon, a Pacific sunset, put them all in a box. You add Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with all the cannons. You take the most brightly star-filled sky that you can remember. You put all that in one box, all wrapped up. The contents of that box, they pale. They wouldn't even be seen against the glory of Jesus Christ. The glory of Jesus Christ not only takes your breath away, it started you breathing and it gives you your every breath. That's the glory of Jesus. He's glorious. So, as big as it is, take a moment just now to focus on his glory. And you might do it just by breathing in and out. You're a glorious Savior. So Isaiah describes this branch, beautiful, glorious. And then he begins to talk about the impact of this branch, verses 3 and 4. "Those who are left in Zion, who remain in Jerusalem, will be called holy, all who are recorded among the living in Jerusalem. The Lord will wash away the filth of the women in Zion. He will cleanse the blood strains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire. " The beauty and the glory of Jesus have this impact upon our lives. They will be holy. That's what Jesus does. Because he is glorious, we can be holy. It's not our glory, it's his glory. That's what it means to be holy. It's not our glory, it's his glory. Now I know, and you may know, that the Bible says that we can be holy. But how? How, as followers of Jesus, do we live out this holy character, this holy nature? Our human nature, our American ingenuity, says just try harder. Trying harder can help in a lot of areas. It might help you to make first string in basketball, to get a raise at work, to communicate even better with your wife. But no matter how hard you try, you are not going to try yourself into being holy. It's like those old videos you've seen of the first thing, the first contraptions that they built to try to fly. Some had big wings, some had like these flying flapper things. They tried and they tried and they tried and they tried harder. And you see in those videos, it failed every time. And so a lot of people said if man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings. People are like that with holiness. They see people trying to be good, not doing very well at it sometimes. The Christians flapping their wings at God, trying harder and harder. And so people say holiness is not possible. What we need is what those flyers needed in one way, an entirely new way of thinking. Holiness is not about you and what you do. Holiness is about Jesus and what he did for you, the gift that he wants to give you every day of your life. And then he wants to grow you into that gift moment by moment, day by day. Will you ever be perfect in this world? No. Can you grow to be more and more like Jesus in this world, taking on the character of his holiness? Of course. Of course. How could you not become more like him when you spend time with him? Because he is glorious and that glory is so magnificent, then we can be holy. When his glory is invited to impact our lives, we begin to grow in the holiness that he gifts us with. And then there's this picture of being clean. The fruit of Jesus's beauty and glory is this new, the sparkling cleanness inside of us. So we talked about a few days ago, "Come and let us reason, though your sins are scarlet, they shall be white as snow. " It's interesting in these verses the two expressions for how this cleanness is accomplished. He talks about a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire. A spirit of judgment. Judgment of our actions is necessary if we're going to be cleansed inside. Judgment inevitably involves a verdict, a verdict of guilty. That verdict against your sins, that judgment against your sins, it was pronounced at the cross of Jesus Christ. It is finished. Jesus's words on the cross mean that the judgment against your sins was pronounced and was settled, was satisfied there on the cross. That's the spirit of judgment. You cannot judge yourself into some kind of forgiveness of sins. People try. They just feel more judged. The only way to sense God's cleanness in your life is to recognize Jesus was judged for you on the cross. A spirit of judgment and then a spirit of fire. What is judged as unclean needs to go through a process of purification. There's this spirit of fire that has to happen. If something's going to be purified, it has to go through the fire. And the picture here for you and I as followers of Jesus is the fire of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who purifies our motives, who purifies our attitudes. The judgment was accomplished on the cross. The purification is happening every day through our relationship with the Holy Spirit. Now in verses 5 and 6 he tells us one final impact of this branch. Verse 5, "Then the Lord will create over all of Mount Zion, over all those who assemble there, a cloud of smoke by day and a glow of flaming fire by night. Over everything, the glory will be a canopy. It will be a shelter and a shade from the heat of the day and a refuge in a hiding place from the storm and the rain. " This is the tremendous, the eternal impact of what Jesus Christ wants to bring into your life. The branch wants to bring into your life. He gives us these pictures of what Jesus wants to do in our lives every day. He talks about a new exodus in one sense. You remember what happened in the book of Exodus. When they were set free, when they were released from Egypt heading towards the promised land, they had the smoke by day, they had the fire by night, the pillars that guided them into God's plan for their lives. This is what Israel enjoyed as God led them from Egypt to the promised land. And it's the picture of God's guidance in your life. As they were reminded then that God leads us away but then he also leads us towards, God was leading them away from Egypt but he was also leading them towards the promised land. God wants to remind you and I of the same thing. Through his guidance, through his Spirit in our lives, he's leading you away from some things and towards some things. What's God leading you away from? What's God leading you towards? So he gives us this picture of this new exodus and then he gives us a picture of a new relationship with him. He talks about this canopy that's over everything. The glory of God will be a canopy that's over everything. The picture of a canopy, it's a very interesting picture. To the Jew, a canopy indicated a newlywed. He would get married under a canopy and it was a sign, a symbol of the glory of God in many ways. The glory of God is our canopy. In that marriage ceremony, that was the place where they committed themselves to one another, where the relationship began. Well the picture here is more than just a tent over our heads. It's protecting us from the rain. It's the picture of a new and loving relationship with God that starts with his glory. That's the canopy. It's a relationship that thrives, the verses say here, under the protecting hand of God. This is what God wants to do in your life. He wants to be your shelter. He wants to be your shade, the shade that your soul needs from the heat that's in this world. He wants to be your refuge, your hiding place from the storms, from the rains that come into life. And that all comes from the glory that's in Jesus Christ. That's the branch. That's who Jesus is. That's what he wants to bring into my life and your life today. Let's just thank him. Jesus Christ, we thank you that even beginning back in the book of Isaiah, there's this picture of the beauty that you want to bring into our lives, of the glory that you want to bring into our lives and the daily impact of that. That we can know that you're with us even in the most difficult circumstances of life. They're protecting us. That we can know that you'll guide us even through the greatest difficulties of life. That we can know that your beauty and glory result in a new heart, a new life, a new love for you. And that's what we ask for. Help us to not be so caught up in the things that are around us, the circumstances of this day, that we miss your beauty today. We don't want to miss it. Or we miss your glory today. We don't want to miss it. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow we're going to look together at the song of the vineyard.