A Perfect Christmas - Part 1 Series

One of America's favorite holiday songs this time of year is the classic, I'll Be Home for Christmas. The song was originally written during WW II to honor soldiers who longed to be home for the holidays. It's been sung by the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Kelly Clarkson, and most recently, Pentatonix. The lyrics of the song make this promise:

I'll be home for Christmas

You can plan on me

Please have snow and mistletoe

And presents by the tree.

Promises – so easy to make, but so hard to keep.

The world's two most famous promises are promises that are never kept. Do you know what they are? (1) The check is in the mail and … (2) I'll love you in the morning.

Do you know the old saying "Promises were meant to be broken"? The reason why Christmas is "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" is because God keeps His promise.

Each Sunday in the month of December, we are looking at a passage from Isaiah, an Old Testament prophet that makes numerous predictions concerning the coming Messiah. I want to look at three great predictions from the prophet Isaiah. In fact, one Bible scholar calls these "the great trilogy of Messianic predictions," which simply means predictions about the Messiah.

Isaiah 7 predicts how the Messiah is to be born.

Isaiah 9 predicts how the Messiah will bless.

Isaiah 11 predicts how the Messiah will rule.

"Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: 11 "Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven." 12 But Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test." 13 And he said, "Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 15 He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. 16 For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted. 17 The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria" (Isaiah 7:10-17)!

Throughout this series, I want you to listen for these words: Promise made, promise kept. Say these words with me: Promise made, promise kept. When you hear these words, you can draw an arch from the Old Testament to the New Testament. For the Old Testament is the promise made, and the New Testament is the promise kept. You see, when you hear the words of Isaiah, the prophet, you get a sense of a detailed and accurate forecasting of the Coming One.

1. See The Future

I want to introduce biblical prophecy, or biblical predictions, to some of you. One of the biggest predictions is from the prophet Isaiah: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14). Isaiah is not alone in clearly and explicitly proclaiming the Messiah ("anointed One") for Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Joel, Micah, Zechariah, and Malachi also make predictions about the

It's a difficult thing to predict the future. I did some digging around in those whose job it is to look into "the crystal ball" in several fields, sports, economics, and politics. And here's what I found. Only two Sports Illustrated experts out of 11 predicted the Dallas Cowboys would make the NFL playoffs this year (they have the best record in the NFL). In the field of American Presidential politics, few people foresaw the election of Donald Trump even days before the election. Economists have failed to accurately predict when interest rates will rise repeatedly. Yes, the practice of forecasting the future is daunting. Who could have predicted in 1940 that a then-unknown colonel in the United States Army, Dwight Eisenhower, would be elected President in 1952? And wouldn't you have loved to be able to predict his future just before he asked you to marry him?

1.1 The Good Judgment Project

In an interesting experiment during the 1990s, Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania professor, gathered two distinct groups of people together: hundreds of experts on one hand and "ordinary" people, though extremely well-read people on the other. He asked them to try to predict global questions of significance: What will happen to the stock market in the next year? What kind of impact of Middle Eastern politics on oil prices are we going to see in the next six months? What will happen in North Korean politics? Known as the "Good Judgment Project," this experiment showed the predictions of "ordinary" people have often performed better than "the experts." Sometimes these "ordinary but well-read people" were better than intelligence officers who have access to classified data. Yes, it is difficult to predict the future.