Jeff Parrott
speaker
1,309 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6d ago
Jeff Parrott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
The connection is rooted in a massive messianic promise from Isaiah 11, verse 1, which describes a future ruler who will reign as the ultimate expression of Israel's king.
Isaiah says this, "...there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit."
This is awesome.
I love this.
In Isaiah's day, it seemed like the hope of a faithful king was completely broken.
It was like the promise of a good and righteous king had become like this tree that was cut down and left as a lifeless stump in the rubble.
But Isaiah says that from this rubble, from this stump, there will come a branch, a branch that will bear the fruit of new life.
Somehow this promise of a future king would survive through the unexpected presence of a branch.
Now here's the kicker.
Here's where it lands with our passage today.
The word for branch in Isaiah 11 is the Hebrew word neser, which sounds a lot like Nazareth.
In the totality of God's story, Jesus' hometown of Nazareth is not an accident of history.
the branch of Isaiah 11, the Messiah, the Nesser, would come from the unexpected place of obscurity, from Nazareth, from the unlikely stump in the rubble.
like the ultimate cosmic version of the survivor tree.
Jesus is the one branch of life, the one sliver of hope that makes all the difference.
He is the branch that extends through the death and through the decay and says to you and to me and to people in Isaiah's day and to people in Matthew's day, I still have life.
You can have life in me.
Now all of us experience the pain, the loss, and the ache of a world that is not the way it's supposed to be.
The rubble of sin and death and evil surrounds us.
And yet here in Matthew 2, we are given a preview of what Jesus will accomplish in the rest of this gospel account.
Showing 201–220 of 1,309 · page 11 of 66
← Previous
Next →