The Servant of the Lord

What we behold — what our heart loves and finds beautiful and compelling — will determine how we behave. The goal of this Advent series is to help us behold Jesus. Each week we’re going to look at an aspect of Jesus’ identity, and together these vignettes give us a fuller picture of the One who is worthy of our beholding. 

In today's message, we explore how Jesus is the Servant of the Lord.

Transcript

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The sermon text for today is from Isaiah chapter forty-two, verses one through nine. You can find this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page ten eighty-five. Please listen as I read God's word. Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break. And a smoldering wick, he will not snuff out. In faithfulness, he will bring forth justice. He will not falter or be discouraged until he establishes justice on earth. In his teaching, the islands will put their hope. This is what God the Lord says. The creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to his people, and life to those who walk on it. I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness. I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison, and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord, that is my name. I will not yield my glory to another, or my praise to idols. See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare. Before they spring into being, I announce them to you. Here is the reading.

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I love every new rendition of the Christmas story as it's told by the next generation. That's so fun to uh to hear and to see, and I look forward to that every year, and I hope that you do as well. Uh before we get into the message today, I want to share a couple pieces of good news with you. Uh the first of which is that there is a new member of our Elmwood family. Uh this morning, at like 1.30 in the morning, Elliot Thomas was born to Vera. You may have seen Vera walking around the very pregnant woman last Sunday. Uh little Elliot was born, 6 pounds, 13 ounces, 21 inches. Uh, mom and baby are doing well, so uh we're really excited for uh for him to be welcomed into our church community and excited to meet him in person when they're finally at home and able to uh be here. Uh the second piece of good news I want to share with you is an update on our end-of-the-year stewardship drive. If you have uh been around, you know that one of our speakers died, which is why there's three speakers here instead of four. And uh so we have been uh raising money for the uh replacement of the sound system we have, the speaker system with all the cables and rigging and all the things that go into that. And uh for this year's Be Rich Stewardship Drive, we asked, uh we set out a goal of$25,000 to put towards this new speaker system. And as of this morning, we've raised$21,468. Uh so thank you. That is uh awesome news. It's amazing. We're not even halfway through December yet, and we're already really close to that goal. I know that there are others of you out there who are planning to contribute to this but haven't done so yet. Uh, that is the bucket that our family falls into. We've not yet given to be rich, but we're going to. And so what I want to uh let you know is that any donation that comes in over and above that$25,000 mark is gonna go into our sound and video equipment fund. Uh occasionally there is new equipment we need to purchase or there's outdated equipment that needs to be upgraded. And as we all found out with our sound system, you can't always plan for these things. You can't always budget for things uh like this that happen. And so that's what that sound and video equipment fund for is for, is to help have money on hand for those things as those needs arise. Uh so if you would like to contribute towards be rich, I'm wondering which of you is gonna be the donation that puts us over the 25,000. Wondering which of you that is. Uh if you'd like to give, there are envelopes in the seatback in front of you that look like this. You can put your donation in here and drop it in the offering box in the back of the sanctuary. You can also give online using our online giving platform, and make sure you select be rich from the drop-down donation menu there as well. Uh, but thank you. Thank you to those of you who have contributed to that already. There's been uh smaller gifts that have come in, there have been larger gifts that have come in towards that need, and so uh we and what's important is that it doesn't matter the size of your donation. It's not what's important. What's important is your heart, and what's important is that you give as uh the Lord is asking you and leading you to give, and that's that's really what we what we want is for you to uh be prayerfully and thoughtfully approaching these things. And so thank you to those of you who have given to that, and thank you to those of you who give faithfully and generously here uh into the general fund. Uh it takes resources to do the ministry we do here, and so thank you uh again for that. I'd like to invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to uh this passage of the Bible this morning. God, what a beautiful gift to be able to hear the story of Christmas from the lips of our young ones. Thank you, God, for uh giving us the privilege of hearing that message in a fresh way this morning. Lord, we ask that as we uh are here today and as we go about the rest of this Christmas and Advent season, that you would help us to hear the same story that many of us have heard over and over and over again. Please help us to hear that story in a fresh way. As we look to Jesus this morning, we ask that you would increase our vision of who he is. Help us to see more clearly in new and in fresh ways who he is and what he's done for us. And uh we ask that you would, uh, as we behold him, that you would change us. So help us with that, Spirit. We ask that you would be guiding us this morning during this time. Uh we submit this time to you, and we ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. We have uh over the course of this Advent season leading up to Christmas, we've been in a series of messages that we've titled Behold. And uh what we're doing is we are looking at and exploring the life-shaping practice and really the life-shaping power of fixing our eyes on Jesus. And we've said that the idea behind this series is very simple. What we behold will change how we behave.

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Right?

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The things that we behold, the things that our hearts find compelling and beautiful, and what our hearts love, those things that we behold are going to, whether we think about it this way or not, they are going to change how we behave and how we live. And so we've set out over the course of this Advent series, uh, not to give you like a list of like here's a bunch of stuff you can go do this week, uh, but the idea behind this series and the hope of the series is very simple that we would be able to behold Jesus. So each week we're looking at a different aspect of Jesus' identity, uh, many of which come from the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And uh together these little pictures, these vignettes give us a glimpse of into the fuller picture of Jesus, who's the one who is worthy of our beholding. So, so far in the series, we have seen that Jesus is the one the prophets foretold. We saw last week he is the source of salvation, and this morning we get to look at how he is the servant of the Lord. So we're gonna look at these verses from Isaiah 42, and Isaiah 42 is the first of four what is called servant songs in the book of Isaiah. And as we look at these verses, we're going to learn three things about this servant. And the first thing we learn about the servant is the mission of the servant, what it is that the servant came to do. So these verses give us this global, sort of overarching picture that the servant of the Lord has been commissioned, has been sent to set all things right, to make all things new. That's the picture that's being given to us here. And as we look at these verses in more detail, we can see there's a couple different aspects of this larger mission to set everything right. So in verse one, we read, Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. Then the last part of verse three says, In faithfulness he will bring forth justice. He will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. And so you can hear in just those few short phrases, we're told three different times that the mission of the servant, in part, is to bring and to establish justice. Now, without question, this is referring to legal justice, which is something that every single one of our hearts longs for. Every single one of us, we can look around in our world and see ways that justice is not enacted, and our hearts long for what is good and right and just and fair and true to be enacted, to be embodied and to be accomplished in our human relationships. And that's what the servant is said to do, is to be a bringer of justice. And just notice the scale of this justice, okay? We're told that this servant is not going to be like one judge sitting on one bench administering justice in one place. We're told this servant is going to bring justice to the nations. The servant is going to establish justice on earth. So you see that the global scale of the justice that this servant is going to bring. And that's one aspect of his mission to make all things right, is to bring justice. Then we can look ahead to verse 6, where we read this. God says, I the Lord have called you in righteousness. I will take hold of your hand, I will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles. Now, going all the way back to the promises that God made to Abraham, we know that God's plan to rescue people from their sin, it begins with Israel, that nation, and then extends from them out into the world. In other words, from the very beginning, God's plan has always been to bring his blessing and to bring his flourishing to the nations, to the world. And so this servant is going to accomplish that very thing. The mission of the servant is to embody this covenant relationship that exists between God and his people. The mission of the servant is to bring light to the Gentiles, which is a way of talking about, if you read this in the context of Isaiah, he's talking about the servant bringing light to those non-Jewish nations who are living in the darkness of idolatry, who have given their hearts and their affections to other gods and don't worship the true and living God. And so there's a kind of the servant's going to bring justice, and the servant is always also going to bring about a kind of spiritual revival where the nations are going to come to know who God is. The people of God are going to have this one who embodies the covenant. So the servant's going to bring justice to the nations. He's going to be the means by which people can enter into relationship with God, and he's also going to provide circumstantial deliverance as well. Says, I will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles. Verse 7, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison, and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. Now, obviously, there's a there's a spiritual, bigger sort of component to this, but I don't think that what we're reading here about people being released from prison and things like this, this is not just metaphorical. It's not purely metaphorical. We know that because we can read the rest of the Bible and see that God is depicted as one who can and does change people's circumstances. Sometimes that means miraculous healing, sometimes that means change in our circumstances. We heard that in the psalm reading this morning where it talks about God releasing those from prison and being near to the brokenhearted. And so this is the third aspect of the servant's mission, to restore all things, is to provide a kind of circumstantial deliverance. And so, taken all together, we see this sort of comprehensive picture of what it means that the servant came to set all things right. The second thing that we learn about the servant in these verses is we learn about the manner of the servant. So the mission of the servant is what he came to do. The manner of the servant is, well, how does the servant go about accomplishing that mission in the first place? And we can see very clearly two sides of this. He accomplishes the mission first with unrivaled strength. Listen to verse one where God says, Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. So the servant here, we're told, is going to act in the strength that God provides. And so we see that it is God who upholds the servant. We see that it is God who puts his spirit on the servant to empower the servant for this mission. And notice also in verse 4, it says, He will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. Now, all the commentators point out the significance of that word establish. And what all of them say is what this is telling us is that the the servant has the authority and the power to make justice happen. Justice requires, and enacting that requires both authority and it requires strength and power and it requires wisdom to know all the right things to do in all the right situations. And we're told that the servant has the power to make justice happen on earth. He acts with unrivaled strength. But then on the flip side of this, we also see that the servant is going to act with unrestrained tenderness. Look at verse 2. He will not shout or cry out or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. Notice how this what it says here about him, uh the tenderness with which he's going to act, is sandwiched in between all this talk of his power to bring and establish justice. So he's both of those. He has unrivaled strength, he has unrestrained tenderness. It says that a bruised reed he won't break, a smoldering wick he won't snuff out. If you've ever pinched the stem of a flower, you know that that is now the weakest point on that flower, and it's only a matter of time until the weight of the flower head is gonna pull the thing over and it's gonna bend right at that exact point. Because a bruised reed or a bruised flower stem is it's fragile. It's delicate. And that's that's the point that's being made here about this bruised reed, it's fragile, it's delicate. In the same way, if you've ever tried to start a fire, not using the cheating way of using gasoline and matches, if you try and start a fire using uh like flint or using a ferro rod or something like that, and you're trying to shoot sparks into a little uh pile of tinder, you know how delicate that is. And one of those sparks begins to catch, and and too much air makes the thing just go right out. And it's delicate, and if you're not careful, that ember is going to be snuffed out. And again, that's the point. The smoldering wick is so delicate, it's so tender. The servant of the Lord, we're told here, will not break a bruised reed, and the servant will not snuff out a smoldering wick. He is strong enough, on the one hand, to enact justice on earth globally, and he is tender enough not to crush those who are weak. Do you have anything in your life that makes you feel weak? For some of us, for some of you, that might be your physical body, it might be chronic illness or chronic pain, it might be the effects of old age, it might be cancer or illness or some other thing that you carry with you in your physical body. It makes you feel weak. For some of you, it might be your emotional health, where you you you struggle and wrestle with feelings of discouragement or depression or anxiety or fear. For some of us, it might be a relationship that we just feel totally powerless to fix. It might be that you find yourself at the end of your wisdom, which for some of us doesn't take as long as it takes others. You find yourself looking at your parenting situation like I j just don't know what else to do. Or looking at a workplace situation, or looking at something with your vocation or your relationships, and you're like, I just I'm at the end of knowing what I should, what there is even conceivably to do. It might be a challenging situation that you're facing that you can't seem to find a way out of, circumstances that you can't control. It might be that you're entering into or carrying grief with you into this Christmas season, or loss, or heartache over someone who you lost this year, and there's an empty seat at the table this year. It might be that you just feel, in general, on the edge of falling apart. You feel like you could break at any moment? Every single one of us, we all have these kinds of weaknesses in our lives. We all carry around with us weakness just like this. And so maybe I should rephrase the question. The question is not, do you have anything in your life today that makes you feel weak? The question is, what in your life today, as you sit here in this moment, what in your life today makes you feel weak? The invitation of Isaiah 42 is to behold the servant of the Lord. The invitation is to behold that the servant of the Lord is a savior. He is a rescuer for those who are buckling under the weight of life in a broken world. That's who the servant of the Lord is. So his mission is to make all things right, to make all things new, to set everything right. He goes about that mission with unrivaled strength and unrestrained tenderness. And the last question then is okay, well, who is this servant? What is the identity of this servant? If you come to chapter 42 after having read the first part of the book of Isaiah, you would have just a few verses before chapter 42 read a passage that sounds a whole lot like what we read this morning in chapter 42. So listen to these few verses from Isaiah 41, verses 8 to 10, where God says, But you Israel, my chosen servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, you descendants of Abraham, my friend, I I took you from the ends of the earth, from its farthest corners. I called you. I said, You are my servant. I've chosen you and have not rejected you. So do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my right hand. And as you hear that, there's so much language that's that's almost identical to Isaiah chapter 42, and God directly calls Israel his servant. And so it's obvious that Israel is the servant of the Lord. And as you read the book of Isaiah, you realize that Israel can't be the servant of the Lord. What I mean is that Israel is the lowercase s servant of the Lord, yes. Israel can't be the capital S servant of the Lord. Because we're told in chapter 42 that the servant is going to enact justice. But then you hear what God says about Israel earlier in the book of Isaiah, where in chapter 5, God says this: the vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delights in, and he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed. For righteousness, but he heard cries of distress. So the servant of the Lord is supposed to be a bringer of justice, but the nation of Israel is characterized by injustice. Additionally, the servant of the Lord is supposed to be a light to the nations who are living in the darkness of idolatry, but Israel herself is caught up in that very same idolatry. Israel is also worshipping other gods and giving her heart and her affections to other people and other things and other places. And we read about this in chapter 2 of Isaiah, where he says, You Lord, have abandoned your people, the descendants of Jacob. They are full of superstitions from the east. They practice divination like the Philistines and embrace pagan customs. Verse 8 Their land is full of idols. They bow down to the work of their hands to what their fingers have made. And so Israel is not being a light to those Gentile nations who are caught in the darkness of idolatry. Israel herself is caught up in the very same kind of idolatry that the servant is supposed to bring deliverance from. If this wasn't enough, the servant of the Lord, we're told in Isaiah 42, is supposed to open the eyes of the blind. But later, right after this, just later in chapter 42, God says this to his people. He says, Hear you deaf. This is verse 18. Who is blind but my servant? And deaf like the messenger I send? Who is blind like the one in covenant with me? Blind like the servant of the Lord. So Israel is supposed to be one of the means by which the eyes of the blind are opened, and they themselves are blind. And so all this gives us this comprehensive picture that Israel is not capable of being for the nations and for the world what they need Israel to be for them. Israel can't be the one who accomplishes this mission. One author, I thought, put it helpfully in this way. He says, if Israel is to be found at all in the announcement of chapter 42, verses 1 to 9, it is in the bruised reed and smoldering wick. If anything in the passage you heard read today represents Israel, it's not the power and the strength and the justice and the lights of the nations. It's not that. It's that Israel is weak. It's that Israel is corrupted. It's that the people are like that smoldering wick. They are like the bruised reed. God's people, as you read the book of Isaiah, God's people are not the ones doing the saving. God's people are the ones who themselves need to be saved. They are the ones who need to be rescued. And so who's going to do it? There's this lowercase servant of the Lord, where God says, yes, Israel is going to be a servant. They are going to, in some way, represent me to the nations and to the world. But Israel can't be for the world what the world needs Israel to be for the world. And so I'm going to send a capital S servant. The capital S servant is going to accomplish the mission that Israel was supposed to accomplish but can't accomplish. And who is that servant? The answer is found when we look to the accounts of the New Testament and we see Jesus of Nazareth who is the servant of the Lord. There's too many of these parallels and connections to uh go there with you today. But just uh just think of here in Isaiah 42, God says, You're the one I've chosen, you're the one in whom I delight, with you I'm well pleased, gives the power of the Spirit to his servant. And then you fast forward and you read the account of Jesus' baptism, where it says that there is uh the Spirit of God descended upon him like the form of a dove. So the Spirit of God is resting on Jesus. And then you've got the heavens are open, and there's this voice from God the Father that speaks this word over Jesus and says, This is my son, whom I love, in him I'm well pleased. Like the servant of Isaiah 42, God delights in him. And so you read the New Testament and you see that Jesus is the spirit-empowered chosen servant of the Lord. And it's Jesus who is the one who came to set all things right. Jesus is the one who came to set all things new, and you you begin to see a picture of all throughout his ministry. Jesus is he's healing people, and he's forgiving people of sin, and he's doing all these things, and what is that except the reversal of the effects of sin? It's the undoing of the curse. All those things in our world and in our lives that are broken, Jesus came to undo and to reverse those things. And so Jesus, throughout his ministry, reversed the effects of sin. And all those little instances where a person experienced circumstantial deliverance or they experienced a kind of maybe physical healing, all those things were temporary. All those people who experienced deliverance and experienced healing, all those people also died. It was a temporary kind of thing, but all those little pictures of the deliverance that Jesus provides and the reversal of the effects of sin and the setting of all things right, all those things point forward to the greater deliverance that He would provide on the cross. On the cross, the one who won't break a bruised reed allowed himself to be broken. On the cross, the one who won't snuff out a smoldering wick allowed his life to be snuffed out. And he did so for you. He did that for me, he did that for us. He did that so that we could be set free from the power of sin that it has over us, and so that we could live with hope for the day when he returns to finally and fully set all things right and to make all things new. So this morning, let me invite you to behold Jesus. Behold the one who is strong for you. On the cross, what Jesus was doing was going to war with your greatest enemy. And he won. He was victorious. And through faith, what we're told in the Bible is that his victory over sin and over death and over the evil one now belongs to us through faith. He was strong for you and accomplished for you on the cross what you could never have accomplished for yourself. He was strong for you. He is strong for you now as he stands before the Father and intercedes for you. Maybe you don't think about this very often. He knows every single one of your weaknesses. He knows every single one of your failures. He knows every single one of your limitations. He knows that you like that bruised reed, like that bent over flower stem, you are weak. He knows that you're fragile. He knows that like that little ember that's on the verge of going out, he knows how delicate and how weak you are. And his invitation to you today is come to me, and you can find rest for your soul. Bring your weakness and your brokenness to him and find grace today. Behold the one who is strong for you and tender towards you. As we come to the communion table, I want to allow just a few moments for silence for us to spend in reflection. Might be in confession. But let's take a few moments and sit in silence and reflection, and then we'll come and receive Christ at the communion table.