The Humble Servant

Our sermon text this morning comes from Isaiah chapter 42.

Isaiah 42 · chapter mention

You will be reading the first nine verses of this passage.

The month of December, the sermon series from the book of Isaiah, promises of hope in the dark.

And we indeed do see light.

We see hope.

Even in the dark days that faced Israel in the eighth century before Christ came.

We've been looking at the coming of the Christ through the eyes of Isaiah the prophet.

Hear the word of God.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.

I have put my spirit upon him.

He will bring forth justice to the nations.

He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

He will faithfully bring forth justice.

He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth, and the coastlands wait for his law.

Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those.

I am the Lord, that is my name.

My glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.

Behold, the former things have come to pass, and the new things I now declare.

Before they spring forth, I this is the reading of God's holy word.

Would you please pray with me?

Sovereign God, we thank you.

Holy one of Israel, we thank you that you not only set your Son to be born, but you sent your Spirit to indwell us.

And so, Spirit of God, lift our eyes to the Son of God this morning in new ways.

May we see his glory, we pray.

In Christ's name.

Amen.

This is the last week in Advent that we look to the coming of Christ the first time.

Again, as we remember, Advent points us to two particular, specific times in the history of the world.

Advent points us to the first time when Christ came at what we call and celebrate his Christmas, but this is not the end.

He's coming again.

He's coming at the end of this world to draw unto himself all of his people from all over the world.

In that glorious day that we've already mentioned this morning, when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and we will be glorified to sin no more.

Think about that.

To struggle no more.

The journey will be over.

We will be with Jesus forever and ever.

And Isaiah speaks to that promise even here in chapter 42.

This morning we're going to think for a few minutes about the humble servant.

We've seen in recent weeks through Isaiah that he is a great king.

Indeed, he is.

But he's also the humblest of all servants.

Think with me this morning about the spirit-filled servant, the humble servant and the conquering servant.

The spirit-filled servant.

Isaiah tells us of that in the very first verses.

Behold, my servant.

God's servants have been his own people, his own nation Israel, my servant Israel.

And it's pretty clear when that's the reference, when he's talking about his servant Israel, the nation.

But then there's other times that God's servants are kings of other nations.

Like, for instance, Cyrus, king of Persia.

If you go back, it'd be a good thing to do, I recommend, is to read in the context, maybe later today, to go back and read what precedes this chapter.

And he's talking about Cyrus the king, he's going to raise up.

And if you've been following the last few weeks, Cyrus is going to be God's servant, whom he uses to punish not Assyria, but Babylon.

And you remember it was Assyria that came first that conquered the northern tribes.

And then it was Babylon who would come to conquer Judah, the southern tribes.

Well, God's not done with his servants.

He says, I'm going to call Cyrus from the north, and he's going to come.

You see, God has all kinds of servants to fulfill his purposes.

But all of these servants that have been mentioned pale by comparison to verse 1.

Behold my servant whom I uphold.

He's not talking about Cyrus.

He's not talking about the nation Israel.

My chosen, in whom my soul delights.

I have put my spirit upon him.

And that makes us think of other passages, doesn't it, in the New Testament?

Where does your mind go as you hear that?

Well, we can go to the Gospels.

We can go to Matthew chapter 3, for instance.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

We can start in verse 16 of Matthew 3.

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him.

And behold, a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.

You see what's going on here.

This is the fulfillment of that prophecy.

As Isaiah prophesied over 700 years before, here we see it in Jesus' baptism.

The Father sends the Holy Spirit, and it said, descended upon him.

It came to rest on him.

And the Spirit would never leave him.

Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit when he came to this earth.

That is what he's speaking of here.

Coming to rest, remained on him, accompanied by the voice, and many of you know this is where we have clear proof once again of the Trinity.

God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

We have the Spirit of God like a dove resting on him.

And then we have the voice of the Father.

This is my Son, the one with whom I delight, in whom I delight, the one with whom I have had unity and harmony and bliss from all eternity.

Here we see the Father pouring out all of his love on his son, filling his son with his spirit.

We don't have time to go into this in depth, but how important this teaching is that Jesus, the Spirit bearer, is also the Spirit giver.

Jesus who receives the Spirit from the Father to equip him, to prepare him for his earthly ministry, one day will give his Spirit, will pour out His Spirit on all of His people.

Now we know that happened at the day of Pentecost.

And it's happened ever since upon God's people.

The scriptures say that we are baptized by the Spirit when we come to Christ for salvation.

But this is the Father taking special delight in his own unique Son, in whom my soul delights.

It's what Isaiah is saying, speaking for the Lord.

Look at my son.

Just look at him.

You know, if you go through Christmas without doing that, you've missed Christmas.

There's a lot of ways to miss Christmas.

I mean, the real meaning of Christmas.

Look, stop and look at my son, how unique he is, how spirit-filled he is.

He's like no other king.

He's the humble servant as well as the spirit-filled servant.

In Isaiah chapter 41, talking about other kings like Cyrus, who, the one, the king who stirred up one from the east, he gives up nations before him so that he tramples kings under foot.

Isaiah 41 · chapter mention

You see, that's how the other kings of the world operate.

They trample, they make others like dust with their swords, like driven stubble with their bows.

Verse 25 of chapter 41.

I stirred up one from the north, and he has come from the rising of the sun, and he shall call upon my name.

He shall trample on rulers as on mortar, as the potter treads clay.

That's not Jesus.

That's Cyrus.

Cyrus represents all virtually all the other kings of the world.

Have there been benevolent?

Yes, thank God.

But there have never been perfect kings.

There have never been truly humble kings.

It's just something about the sinful nature.

Even our best presidents in the past, even our best kings in the history of the world, don't measure up to this one.

This one is utterly unique.

Humiliation by choice.

Let's think about that for a few moments.

Humiliation by choice.

Marshall, excuse me, Bruce Shelley, Christian author, says Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its God.

The incarnation teaches us that God broke into this world through one illiterate Jewish girl.

One world broke into another through her womb.

It's a unique claim, as we well know.

For Judaism and Islam, incarnation is impossible.

God is too great to have ever broken into this world.

It's considered pathetic or demeaning or even blasphemous to suggest that God would stoop to become a baby, to nurse and to wet his diaper.

But think about it.

If a person is too great to get down on a child's level, we don't say he's great.

Christ the Lord stoops to Mary's womb.

If it's necessary to say this because God says it, it's his humility.

It's this humility that captures our hearts like nothing else.

God says, I hate suffering, and the only way I can ultimately destroy it is to experience it myself.

The incarnation means God broke into humanity through his humility to suffer with us.

The incarnation means that we don't have to say when we suffer, suffering is wrong, something is wrong with me.

I must be bad.

The incarnation shows us that it's not the bad who suffer, it's actually the best who suffer.

The incarnation also means that we don't have to say about suffering that God is unfeeling, that God is uncaring, but we can say that God has suffered far worse than we have through the humiliation of the Son.

In Christ, God understands and identifies with our hurt.

As we know, He is the only God with wounds.

This is His humility.

The only God with wounds, and we see His humility reflected in the verses that follow.

He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street.

He will not be like any other king or president calling attention to himself, bragging about their power.

Not like any other king.

He doesn't call attention to himself in some egoistic way.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

You see, the the reason that God can be so close to the broken-hearted, as the psalmist tells us he is, is because he was brokenhearted.

The reason that he can stoop so low, almost so low like he's got his ear to your heart, is because he came all the way down.

This is not the Messiah who calls from a great distance.

This is not the Messiah who calls from way up there, somewhere.

This is the Messiah who came all the way down.

This is the Messiah that knows what brings you down.

This is the Messiah that knows what keeps you up at night.

This is the Messiah who knows what to do with that flickering flame in your heart, in your life, that just seems like it's about to go out with a next with the next wind that blows.

We can get awfully awfully uh faint-hearted.

We can get awfully low in our spirits, can't we, sometimes?

I mean, sometimes it feels like the flame is about to go out.

The one who protects the flame of your life, the one who covers that flame, the one who protects that flame is this one.

This is what Isaiah is saying.

He does not break an already bent reed.

He's thinking about a reed in the marshes, whether it's in the land of Egypt or wherever it might be, the marsh, that reed that a little child could snap, he will not allow that already bent reed to snap, to break.

He knows what to do with your struggle.

He knows what to do with where you're hurting.

He knows what to do with what makes you feel like sometimes you're not sure you can keep going on.

The humble servant, like no other.

But notice, lastly, he's also the conquering servant.

Where do we see that?

He will bring forth justice to the nations.

He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, a bruised reed he will not break, yet a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

He will faithfully, faithfully bring forth justice.

He will not grow faint himself or be discouraged until he is established what?

Justice in the earth, in the nations, the coastlands, wait for his justice.

This is the Hebrew word Mishpat, justice.

Three times.

Three times he mentions that this is the one who, when he comes back one day, will make all wrongs right.

He will correct every injustice.

You see, the message of Christmas is not only that Jesus came to give us eternal life, not only did Jesus come to give us new life, the new birth, which is the most wonderful gift of all, but it's not just that by any means.

He came to reorder this world, he came to rebuild this world, he came to restore justice to this world.

But how does he do it?

How does he conquer?

You remember how Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and Sennacherib of Assyria, we've seen those kings.

How did they conquer?

With brute force, with might.

They came and they conquered because they were stronger.

They were bigger, they had a bigger army.

The contrast that Isaiah gives us of the power of Christ and the power of all other kings could not be more clear.

This king will conquer through love, not power.

This king that he's just told us is so humble, he knows how to protect the most feeble, flickering flame.

What other king could that be said of?

Look, in most other kingdoms of the world, you can't even get close to that kind of power.

That kind of power just doesn't really understand what's going on in your life, no matter how much they say when they're running for office.

Not this king.

He will conquer through love now, from a position of weakness.

But he will restore God's work on all levels of society.

The Messiah will do everything that is necessary to restore God's right order.

That's what Mishpat means.

It doesn't mean justice just in the sense of correcting wrongs, it does.

But the reason that Isaiah uses it three times in this short passage, I believe, is to give us a more expansive understanding of justice.

So when you stand in a court of law and you demand that the judge promote justice and execute justice, that's part of it.

Let me put it like this Isaiah envisions a day when King Jesus, the Messiah, will not only make every wrong right, but he will create a new society in which there will be no wrongs perpetrated.

Can you even imagine that?

That's the fuller comprehension of this Mishpat justice that Isaiah is talking about, the Messiah.

But what that means now, if you're thinking carefully, which you are, right?

But it's so hard because that has not yet come.

And you you would be correct.

And it's still so painful injustice being executed, carried out every day.

Not the plan, but even in the courts of our hearts.

There's just something that is so painful to witness injustice.

Whether it's done against us or whether it's inflicted upon someone close to us.

But you know, you know this, God has created us so that even when we see injustice being perpetrated against people we don't know.

We don't know their names, we don't know their stories, but even when we hear the news, there's just something inside that just like oh.

Because of the promise of Isaiah, the promise that came from God about the Messiah, the humble servant, Mishpat, justice, will be fully, fully unleashed when the king returns, the second advent.

He's coming back.

That he's coming back.

In verse 1, we meet the ultimate servant, forecast by Isaiah, exemplified perfectly in the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who would serve.

He's not going to shout in the streets suggesting that he's some kind of egomaniac.

It indicates he's not going to try to, he's not going to win by domination.

He's going to win by humiliation.

His faithfulness to this mission.

The two sides of the word Mishpat are met with righteousness and faithfulness that come together in justice to affirm the servant's faithfulness in his calling.

Let me close by reading something that John Ortberg, a Christian author, put found through his study of church history and just some very simple yet profound examples of what follows in the wake of this kind of a Messiah who's so humble, powerful, but so humble and so compassionate.

If he knows what to do with a flickering flame, if he knows what to do with an already bent reed, this is what it looks like when he touches this earth.

Six ways that the birth of Jesus changed the world, and these certainly are not the only six, but they are among the ways that his birth changed the world.

When it comes to children, in the ancient world, children were routinely left to die of exposure, particularly if they were girls.

Jesus' treatment of and teachings about children led to the forbidding of such practices.

Jesus' mission to the earth led to the formation of what we call orphans, orphanages.

A Norwegian scholar named Bachy wrote a study of this impact, simply titled When Children Became People, The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity.

A fascinating read.

When children became people, the birth of childhood in early Christianity.

All you have to do is go back, you don't even have to read the Old Testament.

You'll find it in the Old Testament.

But if you read ancient history, you'll see that these represented the attitudes of most of the world about children, particularly girls.

How about the area of education?

The ancient world loved education but tended to reserve it for the elite.

The notion that every child bore God's image helped fuel the move for universal literacy.

Love of learning led to monasteries.

Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus inspired efforts to love God with all of one's mind.

How about the area of compassion?

Jesus' compassion for the poor and the sick led to institutions for lepers, the beginning of modern-day hospitals.

That's why even today hospitals have names like Good Samaritan, Good Shepherd, and on and on it goes.

They were the world's first voluntary charitable institutions.

I mean, let me just pause for a minute.

I mean, it's easy for us to think, well, it's always been like this, right?

No.

No.

It wasn't.

Fourthly, humility.

The ancient world did not value the virtue of humility at all.

They scoffed at Jesus' life washing the feet of his disciples.

The servant would eventually lead to, the servant attitude of Jesus would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue for the first time in history.

Historian John Dixon writes, it is unlikely that any of us would aspire to this virtue were it not for the historical impact of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Go back and read Roman history.

Where do you see a virtue of humility being exalted like this?

Definitely forgiveness.

In the ancient world, virtue meant rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.

An alternative from Galilee.

What is best in life is to love your enemies and to be reconciled to your enemies.

And lastly, humanity formed.

Jesus consistently championed the excluded.

His inclusion of women led to a community to which women flocked in disproportionate numbers.

It was scandalous the way Jesus drew women to himself because it was so radically different.

Slaves as well.

Up to a third of the ancient populations were slaves who might wander into a church, a Christian church fellowship, and have a slave owner wash their feet rather than beat them.

One ancient text instructed bishops to not interrupt worship to greet a wealthy worshiper, but rather to sit on the floor to welcome the poor.

And we could go on and on.

These are the results of this suffering servant, Jesus Christ, who came to demonstrate yes, to teach yes.

How we live these lives.

But friends, we would never be able to do this unless he came first and foremost to suffer for us, to bleed for us, to be crucified for us.

These are not just ideals, these are not moralisms that he says, now go do likewise.

You can't, we can't.

The reason that these all sprung out of the birth of Christianity is there was something utterly unique about Christianity.

It was the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ that makes it possible for people like us to follow his example.

There's a new life in us, there's a new power that's been given to us.

And so what does he say to his followers today?

Go and live likewise.

Do we have that kind of humility about us?

Are we praying for those who have hurt us?

Why are we involved in orphanages?

Why are we involved in hospitals?

Why are we involved in bringing medicine to people who are sick that are living in lands far away from us?

Why are we doing these things?

But to continue in the kingdom of God, in the hidden life of Christ in us.

This is Christmas.

Until we die.

May we invest our lives in such Christian enterprises.

May we die, may we humble ourselves so that Jesus lifts us up.

And in lifting us up through our death, he will lift others up as well through our lives.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we can scarce take in what Isaiah says.

Apart from the work of your spirit filling us, these are things that we simply are not interested in doing.

These are things that we have no power to do.

So, Father, as you filled your own son with your spirit to enable and empower him to do what only he could do on his mission.

You have given us new life in your son, and you've given us your spirit through your son.

Would you continue his work on earth through people like us, churches like ours?

Father, would you use the gospel church in Alexandria and Washington and the country and around this world to lift up the name of Christ?

That Jesus would draw all men to himself.

And Lord, that these deeds of kindness, Father, these attributes of humility and faithfulness will be found in us, even as we look to our Savior.

Oh, Father, we pray that we would point many, many people this Christmas to such a Savior as this.

We ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.