“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, because He has visited and redeemed His people.“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people;Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; For he hath visited and wrought redemption for his people,
3 sermons cite this verse
… and you keep reading further down this same chapter. You hear Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, talking about Jesus, and he prays this prayer, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David. Are you seeing this? The Lord himself has come, visited the world to redeem his people, all who trust in his redeeming love, and he has raised up a what? A horn of what? salvation in the house of who? King David. This is the greatest news in the world. Number 19, God is the king who has come for you and me. God, the rock who rules the world, has come to save you from your sin and me from my sin. And his name is Jesus. he is the Messiah he is the Christ and you want to talk about a horn raised up of one whose mouth derides its enemies Jesus has lived the life you and I could not live a life of no sin, a life of victory over all of Satan's temptations and then even though he had no sin for which to die, he chose to die on a cross to pay the price for sinners like you and me He took the judgment we deserve in our sin for us, paid the price of sin, death, and three days later, he rose from the grave, horn exalted in glory, …
… And his father, Zechariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. …
… We're going to talk about those just briefly today. So I want to remind you of the very, well, it's not the first one, but Luke chapter 1, verses 67 through 79. This is John the Baptist's father, Zechariah. And John has just been born, and he utters this beautiful prophetic psalm. And you get to the very end of it. It starts with, it's called the Benedictus because it starts with the word bless. And these canticles were all, the names come from the Latin. So Benedictus means to bless. And he begins, bless the Lord, God of Israel. But when you get to the end, it's one of my favorite verses in all the Gospels, actually in all the New Testament. It says this, because of our God's deep compassion, the dawn from heaven will break upon us to give light to those who are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death to guide us on the path of peace. And Jesus is that dawn from heaven that will break upon us to give us the light and to lead us in the path of peace. …