Almost nobody wakes up one morning and decides to drift away from God. That's not how it works. Instead, we add, we supplement. We keep praying. We keep attending. We keep using all the right words. But somewhere along the way, we quietly open up other accounts. A little security here. a backup plan there. We're not rejecting God. We're just diversifying, hedging our bets. And before long, we've assembled an entire collection of fallback options. And we can barely notice that our functional trust has shifted from the living God to a portfolio of substitutes that we've carefully constructed with our own hands.
That is the situation that Isaiah confronts in chapter 57 today. And what God says to his people there is more terrifying and also more comforting than we might expect. He exposes but then he offers himself. He warns but then he stoops.
The Text: Isaiah 57:13-15
So let's read our text for this morning and you can follow along in your Bibles on your devices again. Isaiah 57:es 13- 15. And it reads like this.
"When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you. The wind will carry them all off. A breath will take them away. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain. And it shall be said, 'Build up, build up, prepare the way. Remove every obstruction for my people's way.' For thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite."
This is God's word.
What does it look like when God's people have not abandoned him outright, but have simply just again supplemented him? When the language of faith remains intact, but the heart has quietly diversified.
This section in in Isaiah is particularly difficult to comprehend because there are at least three different audiences being written to here. The first is the audience that God himself tells Isaiah earlier in chapter 6 prior to the Babylonian exile that will not listen to him. And because this is a prophetic work, the second audience are those who returning from that exile between 50 to 70 years later or those few who had been left behind. A physical remnant who were leaving a pagan culture and who are already beginning to fall into the same kind of compromises that their grandparents and their great-grandparents did. More on them in a moment. And of course, the third audience is God's covenant people, including us. those of us who struggle with the same kind of struggles that have plagued us since the fall in the garden. So, one text and three audiences. It's a little strange and so it might help us to get some perspective so that we can try to see what God has for us here.
So, we'll do a little bit of history. Isaiah 57 belongs to the later portion of Isaiah's prophecy spoken into a moment of deep covenant confusion in Judah. Isaiah's ministry of encouragement in the latter part of the book was focused on the remnant who would survive the exile. Verses 13- 15 come from the last section of Isaiah chapters 56- 66 which scholars sometimes call the third Isaiah based on the thematic shifts. Though I here affirm that Isaiah is the author of this text and writing prophetically under the Spirit's inspiration to audiences whom he would never meet in his lifetime.
The future audience that Isaiah was prophetically writing to are the Jewish exiles returning to Judah after 70 years in Babylon who had come home to utter devastation. The land had been abandoned and neglected for nearly three generations. Vineyards were dead, olive groves gone, the terracing systems destroyed, the basic infrastructure like walls and gates and roads that were necessary for life all lay in ruins. And so most returnees were poor and the wealthy Jews who had prospered in Babylon stayed there. For those who those who came back faced immediate survival challenges. how to grow food in exhausted land. How to defend themselves without military protection, how to pay crushing Persian taxes that drove families to mortgage their fields and even sell their children into slavery at times just to survive. They were a frontier society trying to rebuild civilization, surrounded by hostile neighbors who actively sabotaged their efforts and a Persian empire that extracted a heavy tribute. So recovery in other words for these people would take generations not just years.
So into this context of economic desperation and social vulnerability Isaiah's words would have landed with tremendous force when God promises in verse 14 to build up build up prepare the road remove the obstacles. These just weren't metaphors, although they were certainly that. They were also literal and urgent needs. The returning exiles faced overwhelming physical obstacles. Rubble to clear, walls to rebuild, hostile opposition to overcome. And you can read more about this in Ezra and Nehemiah in much more detail.
But more than their external circumstances, their greatest need was what verse 15 promises. That the high and exalted one who lives forever would dwell with those who are contrite and lowly in spirit. Exile had crushed their national pride and left them dependent and broken and humbled. And in their poverty and in their weakness, they discovered they needed not just an economic restoration, but they needed God himself dwelling among them, reviving the spirit of the lowly and giving life to the contrite heart.
So this nation still stood l under the looming shadow of judgment, returning from exile, and the spiritual conditions that led them there were still a danger even to this people. Isaiah's original audience, their grandparents from two or three generations previous rejected God again and again. And like we saw in our study um in Exodus with Pharaoh and the people of Egypt, the people of Israel and Judah had had hardened their hearts toward God over and over again were then hardened by God so that they would not and they could not listen and so they went into exile.
The grandchildren returning from exile faced a different but related danger. The exile had cured them of their grandparents blatant idolatry. They would not bow to Baal or sacrifice their children to Molech. But the subtler temptation remained for them to trust in alliances to rely on ritual performance to hedge their bets with quiet compromises. The outward guy idols were gone, but the inward drift toward self-reliance was still there. So Isaiah writing prophetically holds up a mirror of their ancestors sins as a warning to them and to us. This is where a divided loyalty leads. The false shepherds and the careless watchmen condemned earlier in the chapter had failed this previous generation. Would this generation learn that lesson?
By the time we reach verse 13 in our text, the Lord addresses people who still cry out in distress. But the question hanging over them is whether their hearts will be wholly his or whether they too will quietly reorient toward substitutes. And yet this chapter does not end with abandonment. It ends with God declaring where he chooses to dwell. The same God who announces that idols will fail also announces that he himself remains a refuge. The same God who exposes pride also prepares a way back for his people. And the same God who inhabits eternity stoops to revive the contrite.
And so that's the situation Isaiah is writing into and writing to us through a people who still pray and who still gather and still use the language of faith, but whose hearts have quietly diversified. They haven't abandoned God, but they are beginning to supplement him. And God is about to expose what that looks like and where it leads.
So look with me in your text at verse 13. This is a warning and it's sharper than you might expect. It says, "When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you. The wind will carry them off. A breath will take them away."
The passage does not say here, if you look carefully, if you cry out, he says when you cry out. So here, God's people are still praying to the living God. They're still calling for help, but God is dis exposing the divided heart behind the prayer. And the word here in Hebrew for collection is devastating. It is not a single false god replacing the Lord. It is a carefully assembled set of alternatives. These idols are like insurance policies for the soul. God's people first in Israel and then later here in Judah had accumulated spiritual backup plans, alliances with Egypt, fertility rituals borrowed from Canaan, personal shrines along temple worship.
So the judgment is devastatingly simple that when crisis comes, these collected securities will prove absolutely worthless. The wind will carry them off. A breath will take them away. what they had accumulated to protect them could not even protect itself.
This warning would go unheeded in the pre-exilic Judah as I Isaiah had predicted and it proved to be true. Consider for a moment how quickly for those people, the pre-exilic people, how quickly all of their idols failed them and how quickly it all collapsed. For over a century after the northern kingdom fell to Assyria, Judah had survived. When Sinakarb's army surrounded Jerusalem in 701 BC, God delivered them miraculously. 185,000 Assyrian soldiers dead in a single night. And that deliverance calcified into Judah as presumption. The people began to believe that Jerusalem was indestructible, that the temple guaranteed their security, and that God would never allow his city to fall. Even though Jeremiah warned them for 40 years, they dismissed him as a traitor. They had their temple and their rituals and their religious confidence.
And then Babylon came. The Babylonian siege lasted well over a year. But when the walls were finally breached in the summer of 586 BC, the end came to Judah with terrifying speed. Within weeks, the temple that had stood for nearly 400 years was now a smoking ruin. The king watched his sons executed before him before his eyes were gouged out, the last thing that he would ever see. The city's leading citizens were marched off in chains and everything had accumulated that they had accumulated rather to secure themselves. Political alliances and military defenses and religious presumption had all been scattered now like chaff. The wind carried it off. A breath took it away.
Um Jeremiah 21:13 speaks about this. He says, "My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me. the fountain of living waters and hewed out sistns for themselves, broken sistns that can hold no water." It's the same pattern. It's not an outright rejection, but supplementation that becomes abandonment. And Jesus himself later in Matthew 6:24 would say, "No one can serve two masters." So Jesus applies this principle to money, but it's the same principle. Divided allegiance is an impossible allegiance.
And you might ask how this applies to us because most of us here in this audience are reformed evangelicals and we're not bowing to bail or refusing or or or visiting shrine prostitutes like Judah. But the pattern of accumulated spiritual insurance is alive and well among doctrinally sound Christians.
Some examples in the age of unprecedented access to information for us. We have planning tools and life optimization systems and AI. And the temptation is for us to pray to God while trusting in our systems to save us. We ask for God's guidance on the one hand and then we follow the algorithm on the other. We request his provision and then anxiously monitor our portfolios and our calendars. Prayer becomes ceremonial for us very often. The device is what becomes the trusted thing.
I once knew a missionary family that had s served in uh posts Soviet Romania after the fall of the Iron police protection, public services in general could not be counted on at all. And so this family particularly the children of an otherwise western parents grew up praying for basic everyday things. And when they came to the US for furlow, one of the children remarked to their parents about our well functioning nation and they said this. The child said to their parents, "It's kind of sad here. everything just works and nobody really seems to need to pray for their everyday needs." Because of this outsider perspective, they saw what we tend to forget that we are surrounded by conveniences that constantly threaten to pull us toward mixed confidence.
Also, when anxiety arises or conviction presses, we reach for the phone, the almighty phone, the magic box. The doom scroll becomes a refuge instead of scripture. Instead of prayer, our entertainment provides an anesthetic for us to forget our troubles for a few minutes or for a few hours. We often do not formally reject God. we just simply have other places to run when he feels too demanding to us or maybe too silent.
Um 2024 2025 to give another example was was a year when the evangelical church felt the gravitational pull of hoping that the right election outcome might help us to secure our collective futures. It's very easy for us to confess Christ's lordship while at the same time functionally placing our confidence in a political victory as important as those are. So the question is not whether we should vote or whether we should engage but whether we have collected political security alongside or in place of our security in Christ and his lordship alone.
One other danger for us uh we here at Sunrise are again largely reformed evangelicals and we are under very good teaching and so we can face a unique danger in this. We can collect doctrines in the same way that Judah had collected idols not as substitutes for God but rather as supplements to give us a sense of security of being right. right answers can become their own kind of false refuge and a very sneaky one if they do not drive us to the living God himself.
Um, let me just take a personal moment uh and make this personal because I'm not pointing fingers at you from a safe distance because I've struggled with every one of these particularly in the last few years as probably many of you have. you. Like you, I have seen the geopolitical landscape shift and I've watched economic realities change. I've watched social and political ground move beneath my feet. Sometimes daily, it seems like, especially if you're paying attention to your phone. I often feel the weight of the roles that God has given me. I'm a husband of a beautiful wife and father to an adolescent son and now the last year an elder to this church, a leader in my job. I'm a disciple of Christ. The pressures compound and the uncertainties can multiply. And in seasons like that, um I've often found myself reaching for my own collection of idols. So I feel this. The AI tools and the calendars and the organizers that promise control and the phone that offers an escape. The political outcome that whispers security. The theological precision that often makes me feel right even when my heart has slowly started to grow colder and colder. And so I'm just confessing. I've often drifted and I've often supplemented. I've needed to come back and repent of this over and over again. And that's not failure. That's kind of the Christian life. But it only works if we see when we've wandered.
And church, when our aisles have idols have failed us, when they have failed us, not if they leave us exposed and afraid. But let's look at the second half of verse 13 back in our text. Because God does not his abandon his people to this fear. Watch for the word in verse 13. But that little word is the hinge of the whole passage. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain.
So the same God who exposes our idols offers himself not just as the alternative but as the only remedy for them. And what he offers is not a strategy, not five easy steps to spiritual security. It's refuge in him in our savior Jesus Christ.
So verses 13b and 14 say, "But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain." And it and it shall be said, "Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people's path, for my people's way."
So the contrast here is stark. The wind scatters our idols, scattered Judah's idols, but he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land. So the Hebrew, the Hebrew word for refuge here also appears throughout the Psalms as a technical term for covenant trust. Fleeing to God as one flees to a fortified city. The word refuge assumes danger. It assumes you'll be weak. It assumes weakness. It assumes that something must be fled from. Pride never seeks a refuge. Only humility does. The one who takes refuge admits, "I cannot protect myself. My accumulated resources and tools are insufficient. I need shelter that only another can provide. I need what only Christ can offer."
Look again at verse 14. The tone now turns decisively towards mercy. Build up, build up, prepare the way. God does not merely warn his people. He clears the path for their return, for our return. The image echoes Isaiah 40:3. It's the same language that will later describe John the Baptist preparation for Christ. And it reads, "A voice cries in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
God clears the road not only to display his power but to bring his wandering children home. And notice in this verse, he offers himself as the destination. Like Proverbs 18:10 says, the name of the Lord as a strong tower. The righteous man runs into it and is safe. See that verb runs. Refuge is not passive. It requires active urgent movement away from the idols that can't save you and the tools that can't save you and towards the only one who can.
And then notice the tender phrase at the end of verse 14, my people. Despite the rebuke and despite the exposure, God has not disowned these people. He has not disowned us. He is removing obstacles from my people's way. So church, the same is true of us right here and right now. God has not disowned you or turned away from you if you are truly in him. He runs to the sinner. He calls the sinner to run to him. And the same God says in Psalm 46 verse1, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Same vocabulary in the same exclusive claim. We find it in the New Testament as well in Hebrews 6:18. We who have fled for refuge have might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. The New Testament applies this refuge language directly to our hope in Christ.
So if you find yourself this morning at the end of this year exhausted, worn down by years of cultural conflict and economic insecurity and information overload like I am. That exhaustion may be grace. Is it possible that that this exhaustion exposes the limits of your own resources and drives you towards a refuge that you can't manufacture for yourself? Or maybe you finally uh you find yourself quietly hedging your bets, trusting God, but quietly maintaining a plan B. So this call to exclusive refuge confronts you. Will you trust him alone? Or will you run to him for refuge without any backup plans? Maybe you've drifted and fear the road back is too long for you. So if so, hear me out. God does not say find your way home. He says, "I will clear to the way."
But here's the question that verse 14 leaves hanging. Why? Why would the God of heaven bother with rebels who have spent decades chasing their idols? Why would he run toward a people who ran away from him? And verse 15 answers that question. Look at it. The answer might either offend you or undo you. Maybe it will do both.
Verse 15 doesn't just tell us what God does. It tell us who God is and where he has choose chosen to make his home. It says verse 15, for thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
So before God tells us uh where he dwells, he reminds us who he is. Four titles establish his transcendence. Look at the text first.
- High and lifted up. This echoes Isaiah chapter 6 where the serum hide their faces and the temple shakes. This is the God before whom Isaiah earlier cries, "Woe is me. I am undone."
- The second is who inhabits eternity. He does not merely exist forever, but he fills all of time as his dwelling place. He is not bound by time that constrains us.
- Third, whose name is holy. His essential character is set apart and utterly pure and categorically different from everything that he has created.
- And fourth, he says, I dwell in a high and holy place. This natural habitat is unapproachable glory.
And then the term, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, not instead of, but also with. God does not lower his holiness to dwell with the humble. As Jesus Christ, as the God man, he brings his holiness with him. And instead of destroying the contrite, he revives them. He revives us.
The Hebrew word for contrite means crushed, broken, pulverized. The word for lowly means low, humble, brought down, meek. And these are not impressive qualities. These are broken conditions. And God says that is where I make my home. The purpose of his dwelling is not judgment but revival and restoration to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. The text says revival is not just encouragement although it is certainly that. But it is life returning where it seemed to be gone, strength returning where it was spent.
Try to sum up in your imagination just for a moment that what this would have meant for the Judeian reader returning to uh from from exile between 60 to 70 years in Babylon. Their parents and grandparents had lost everything because of their hard-hearted refusal to listen to God and to repent of their incredible wickedness. They would return to a ruined land that was a shadow of what it had been for their ancestors. and their people were scattered and broken and compromised because of their sin. And yet here is God comforting these people, not condemning them. As one Isaiah commentary I researched puts it, "None among the gods resembles Jehovah. None can be compared to him. Jehovah is the only God among the nations who saves."
So back to us, those who are under good reformed teaching can inadvertently develop a kind of theological competence that feels like qualification. We know all the right doctrines. We can articulate the gospel. We've read the right books. But verse 15 insists that God's dwelling place is not with the impressive, but with the broken. knowledge does not that does not produce contrition has missed the whole point.
And so there's good news for you who are struggling here in 2025 for the spiritually depleted. If that's you, if the last few years or or if Christmas, the Christmas season has crushed your spirit. If you have failed more than you have succeeded, if your prayers feel hollow or your devotions feel cold, hear what God says about where he makes his home. He does not dwell with the impressive. He dwells with the contrite. Your brokenness is not a barrier to God's presence. Your broken, humble, and contrite heart is the address where Jesus Christ makes his residence.
Many believers live with a lowgrade fear. A fear of death or fear of loss, fear of man's opinions, fear of the future. What might that hold? What does 2026 hold for us? Verse 15 speaks to every one of these. The one who inhabits eternity holds your life, holds your death, holds your future, holds your past. The one whose name is holy defines your worth. The one who revives the heart promises restoration through every loss.
Fear is not conquered by denial. You can't doom scroll your way out of it. You can't eat your way out or drink or drug your way out of it. It is conquered by nearness to God and our mediator. an intercessor, the friend of sinners, Jesus Christ our Lord.
And so verse 15 tells us where God dwells with the contrite and the lowly. But it raises an urgent and practical question. What is contrition? And perhaps more importantly, can I just manufacture this for myself? Because if contrition is the address where God takes up residence, some of us are immediately tempted to try to produce it for ourselves to work ourselves up into a right emotional state to perform brokenness so that God will show up. But that would just be a disaster. That would turn the gospel back into law. And so before we move to how to apply this, we need to understand the posture that receives this revival. what it is and what it is not.
So what is contrition not? What isn't? What isn't it?
- Contrition is not self-loathing. The goal is not to hate yourself, but rather to be honest before God. Self-hatred is still just a form of pride. It's a form of self-focus. Contrition turns the eyes upward.
- It's not despair because despair says there is no hope. But contrition says there is hope. There is no hope in me, but there is hope in Jesus Christ. The contrite heart does not sink into hopelessness, but rather as we see in the text, it flees to refuge.
- Contrition is not performance. We cannot manufacture a broken heart. It is not a technique for unlocking spiritual benefits. Rather, it is a condition that comes when we stop pretending and stop positioning and stand honestly before God.
So what is it? Contrition. Humility is truthfulness. At least it is agreeing with God about our sin and our need and our insufficiency. It is the end of spinning. It's dependence. It is a posture that says, "I bring nothing except sin. I deserve nothing except wrath and I depend entirely upon mercy." It's open-handedness. It's releasing the grip of our collected securities and our tools and our devices and our plans and holding out empty hands to receive what only God can provide to us.
So examine your collection is the first application. Ask the Lord to show you, to show us what we have been accumulating besides him. It's not to produce guilt, but it's to produce clarity. The goal here is not to make you feel worse about yourself. It's to help yourself, to help you to see yourself clearly so that you can flee to this refuge.
Ask yourself honestly here today. If this is the first time this year where you've asked yourself this question honestly, where is my real and functional trust? Where is it really? Not your theological trust. We may know the right answers. A lot of us do in this room. But where is your functional trust when the rubber meets the road? The thing that you actually lean upon when the ground starts to shift underneath you.
- What do you reach for when anxiety rises? When you can't sleep at 2 am? Where does your mind go? Does it go to prayer or does it go to desperate planning and ruminating? To the promises of God or to your cell phone?
- When the news cycle spins up and the world feels unstable, what settles you? Christ's lordship over history or hoping for that right political outcome.
Here's another diagnostic question that may sting. What would devastate you more? The loss of some earthly security or the loss of of your communion with Christ if your portfolio collapsed tomorrow or if your health failed you or if the election went the other way, which it might. If your reputation takes a hit, if you lost your job again, would these losses grieve you more than a cold and distant prayer life already does?
I'm not asking these questions to condemn you again. I'm asking you because I've had to ask them of myself. And the answers often this year revealed a collection that I didn't know that I had been assembling that you may be assembling even now. The wind will carry them all off. A breath will take them away if you're not careful. It's better to see it now and to run to refuge than discover it when the crisis comes. And the crisis will come.
So number two, stop polishing your prayers. Don't we do this? We come before God and we clean ourselves up first and we often use this religious language and we use the right phrases and we project this version of ourselves that we wish that we were the attentive disciple or the grateful believer the spiritually mature Christian and then we wonder why our prayers prayers often feel hollow.
So real humility is cultivated when we bring our actual selves before the Lord in prayer. Not the selves that we wish that we were, but who we really are. Doubting, distracted, divided in that moment. Perhaps God already knows. He's not fooled by all the polish that we put on these prayers. The question is whether we will be honest about what he already sees in us.
The Psalms give us language for this. David didn't come to God with tidy prayers. Read them. He said in Psalm 139:23, "Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts." Notice that David doesn't claim to already know his own heart. He just asks God to search it because he knows that he's capable of infinite selfdeception. and so are we.
And so pray the unpolished prayer and tell God, admit that you're distracted or you're confused or you're discouraged. Tell him you're not sure you believe what you're saying. Tell him you're going through the motions and you don't know how to stop. Admit it. Tell him you don't believe in his word. You don't trust these words are his and that they're real and they're inspired. Tell him about your idol that you reach for this week when you should have reached for him. Admit it. Confess it. That kind of honesty does not disqualify you from his presence, but rather it is a door into it.
So remember, he dwells with the humble. He dwells with the contrite and the lowly. And you cannot be contrite and lowly about your sin sins. If you're still pretending that you don't commit them, if you've been distant or cold or drifting this year, do not wait until you feel worthy to return. God is clearing the path for you. The obstacles are being removed. The father is running to meet the prodigal. Come home. Run to Christ. If he's running to you, run to him. Don't run away from him.
And if you're broken, truly broken, take heart. You are not disqualified from God's presence. You are precisely where he has chosen to dwell. The high and holy one has stooped to revive you. And so, ex, let's examine our collections and pray honest prayer. Let's receive the cleared path and rest in God's dwelling.
But underneath all of this, underneath the warning, underneath the refuge, underneath the dwelling, there is a deeper question. Why does any of this work? Why can the idoltor find refuge? Why does the holy God revive the crushed instead of consuming them in wrath?
And the answer is not just in Isaiah 57. The answer is also at Calvary at the cross. Christ is the fulfillment of this passage. He was high and lifted up but on a cross. He who inhabited eternity entered time. He whose name is holy bore our sins for us. And though his death and and through his death and his resurrection, he has made a way for the contrite and the humble and the lowly to dwell with God forever.
This God who inhabits eternity stooped all the way down. Not just to the advent, not just at Christmas, but also to the cross. He was crushed so that we the crushed could be revived.
Um John Newton, famous psalmist and pastor, understood this. The former slave trader had he become a pastor. A man who had seen the depths of human cruelty and his own participation in it said near the end of his life. "My memory is nearly gone but I remember two things that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior." And that's the sum of it. Great sinner, great savior.
So if you are here this morning and you have never come to Christ, if your refuge has been everywhere but him, hear this invitation this morning. Hear the text invite you. Hear Christ invite you this morning. The wind will scatter all the things that you put your trust and security in. Your house is built on the sand that will be washed away in death and in disaster. But he who takes refuge in the Lord will inherit his holy mountain. He will inherit Christ himself.
So if you are a believer and you've been drifting, maybe that the end of this year you found yourself drifting and this text has wakened something in your in your heart. You're supplementing God with substitutes and you're maintaining all the correct religious forms while your heart has been cooling and cooling. Hear both the warning this morning and the welcome. The path is cleared. Come home.
If you are broken or crushed or low, hear the covenant promises that are found only in Christ. Run to Christ this morning. Run to Christ this year. The Holy One of Israel makes his home with you. Not to condemn you, but to revive you.
Where does God dwell? In the high and holy place, yes, but also with the contrite, with the lowly, with you and with me.
Church, let's pray.
