Isaiah 40:1-2 Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins.

1. John the Baptist preaches against:

a. the comfort of ____________;

a. the comfort of ____________.

2. These false comforts look ____________, but are ____________.

3. Only the Word of the Lord lasts ____________ and brings true ____________.

Scripture Readings
Isaiah 40:1-11
James 5:7-11
Matthew 11:2-15

Take It With You!

Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.

All our righteousness and uprightness, however much it may seem like flower and verdure before the world is nothing but perishable grass... This means: Flower, grass, flesh, and people will fall and sink to ruin. Do you want to remain and not be dried up? Then cling to the Word that will stand forever.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Isaiah

[The] works of the law are used as a defense against the very unconditionality of the gift of grace. A human word, no matter how good, is deadly sin because it in actual fact entices us away from "naked trust in the mercy of God" to a trust in self. The symptoms of such deadly sin can be detected, therefore, in the very midst of our piety when complaint is unthinkingly launched against the "cheapness" of grace, or the fear that it leads too readily to moral laxity, permissiveness, and so forth. These are words that bespeak trust in the apparent goodness of human works and distrust in the power of divine grace. Thus they cut the sinner off from God-deadly sin! In actual fact we fall very easily into calling evil good and good evil!

This means, consequently, that we must be very careful about how we regard even those works God does in us. Deadly sin lurks in the most pious places.

Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross