What kind of year has it been? What have you learned? How have your challenges shaped you? How have you grown and changed? How would you personally rate the year 2025 on a scale of 1-10?
For me, this year has been one of new experiences and new learning. I have been enlightened and inspired by my roles as General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council, and as a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving God here at North Rocks.
In ecumenical life, I have learned that, while the Western Church celebrated the birth of Christ on 25 December, along with the Eastern Churches that follow the Gregorian calendar, those Churches that continue to use the old Julian calendar celebrate Christmas Day on our January 7, with the exception of the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of our Council’s member Churches, which celebrates the Nativity and the Epiphany together on January 6.
In Uniting Church life, a key learning for me has been the tradition of the Lectionary, and preaching based on its structure and emphases. As the calendar year draws to a close, I can affirm that the Church Year actually ended the week before the First Sunday in Advent, and this last Sunday of the calendar year is the fifth Sunday of the new Church Year. Such is life.
All that by way of introduction: my sermon this morning reflects on today’s assigned Lectionary reading from the Hebrew Bible: Isaiah 63:7-9, and I have titled it, “Carried by grace.”
These final chapters of Isaiah’s prophecy display familiar and enduring qualities that we come to expect from Israel’s prophets. There is a grand vision of Zion’s future glory (60:1f), a reference to a longed-for “year of the Lord’s favour” and the prospect of a coming “day of [divine] vengeance” (61:1-11). There’s an image of the righteousness of Zion, the city of God, shining out like the first rays of dawn for the blessing of all nations (62:1f).
Then, in 63:7-9 comes a prayer of intercession in Isaiah’s voice, and a meditation on the ways in which the Spirit of God has faithfully led Israel for centuries. This is followed by a further prayer of confession and supplication, culminating in the agonised cry of people feeling abandoned by God: “If only you would tear the heavens open and come down” (64:1). What they overlook in their existential grief is that all along, year by year, century by century, they have been carried by grace.
Our text today acknowledges the sheer goodness of God. The people have rebelled against God, and grieved the Spirit of God (vv. 7-9), inflaming enmity with God (v. 10), yet God in grace carries them. Biblical scholar Barry Webb comments: “The days of old were days of immense grace on the Lord’s part, and immense ingratitude on the part of his people. They were days of unrequited love.”[1]
Perhaps 2025 has been a difficult year for you. Perhaps it’s hard to find a silver lining in the billowing, encircling storm clouds. Perhaps it’s difficult to pray with clarity, purpose and integrity. Where others have experienced joy and fulfilment, you feel hollow, stretched, or exhausted. You know that God is there, but God seems distant or deaf to your prayers. You’re aware that God is love, yet you feel nothing. You believe what the Scriptures teach, but there are lingering doubts.
The people of God do pass through such experiences from time to time. We do feel these negative emotions, and wrestle with doubt. We are only human.
But in this holy moment, at the end of another year, it’s good to pause, take a deep breath, and remind ourselves, to faithfully confess, that in every moment we are carried by grace whether we feel it or not. In our best moments too, it is vital to pause and reflect on the fact that we are carried by grace, by the kindness of God, by divine beneficence – and not by our own ingenuity or merit.
God constantly expresses active, generous goodness toward his people. It is God’s nature. It is more than kindness in principle: it is love expressed in concrete care, protection, forgiveness, provision and guidance. God delights to bless, to heal what is broken, to lift the burdened, and to draw his people into deeper fellowship with himself.
God’s beneficence flows freely from his character. We can never earn it. Divine beneficence is all around us; it’s woven into our biographies, and it is supremely revealed in Jesus.
It is a truism to say that “God is love,” partly because there are so many ways to develop the theme of the love of God, and so many examples in Scripture and history to illustrate the truth of the claim. But one significant way in which we all grow to hold a conscious belief in the reality of the love of God for us is through experiencing and recognising and acknowledging his goodness.
If God is love, and loves in perfect freedom, then God also demonstrates goodness in perfect freedom, because God is also utterly good. The goodness of God is most eloquently and personally expressed to us in the person of Jesus Christ, who is God’s gracious gift to us. In the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus, we see the goodness of God so wonderfully expressed.
The cross of Christ especially discloses “God’s face turned toward us as Love.”[2] It is this knowledge, and the experience of this knowledge, that allows Christians to read Isaiah 63:7-9 in a particular way, especially as the year draws to its end, and offers the opportunity to reflect on what has been, recalling its highs and lows. Through it all, we confess that, every day, we have been carried by grace.
The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth observes that, beyond the love and goodness that God shows to creation generally, grace “is always God’s turning to those who not only do not deserve this favour, but have deserved the very opposite … [In fact,] grace itself is mercy.”[3]
In Isaiah 63, the prophet calls his people to remember God’s faithful love, his praiseworthy acts, the many good things he has done for them, and the abundance of his faithful love (v. 7). The Lord became their Saviour (v. 8). He suffered, he redeemed them, and the motivation for this salvation is “because of his love and compassion” (v. 9).
And our text concludes at the end of verse 9 by saying that God “lifted them up and carried them all the days of the past.” Isaiah has especially in mind the salvation achieved by God’s action through what we know as the Exodus from Egypt.
And, while the ancient people of God rebelled against God again and again God continued to act with grace, and carried them by grace year by year, and from generation to generation: he did not abandon them.
This characteristic of God is also evident in church history: “Across the centuries, time after time, when a merely human interpretation would have said that the church had finally gone beyond the point of no return … [a] Francis of Assisi appears, or a Bernard of Clairvaux, or a Martin Luther, or a Count von Zinzendorf, or a John Wesley.”[4]
God does precisely the same in your life and mine: he transforms us by his love, surprises us by his goodness, and carries us by his grace. And because God is love, and because God is good, and because God is absolutely trustworthy, God will continue to do so tomorrow, and the next day, and on throughout 2026.
I want to close this sermon, and conclude our excellent year of worship and teaching here at North Rocks, by quoting the words of a hymn by Nonconformist theologian Philip Doddridge (1702-1751):
Grace! ’Tis a charming sound
Harmonious to my ear;
Heaven with the echo shall resound,
And all the earth shall hear.
’Twas grace that wrote my name
In life’s eternal book;
’Twas grace that gave me to the Lamb,
Who all my sorrows took.
Grace taught my wandering feet
To tread the heavenly road;
And new supplies each hour I meet,
While pressing on to God.
O let thy grace inspire
My soul with strength divine;
’Tis grace has kept me to this day,
And will not let me go.
Grace all the works shall crown,
Through everlasting days;
It lays in heaven the topmost stone,
And well deserves the praise.
Sermon 842 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 28 December 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] Barry Webb, Isaiah (Leicester: IVP, 1996), 242 (my emphasis).
[2] David Tracy, quoted in Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 266.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 2.1.356, 369, quoted in Horton, The Christian Faith, 268.
[4] John N. Oswalt, Isaiah (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 666.
Image source: Christianity.com
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