Sunday Sermon

 

Good Servant

Isaiah 53:11

“After his soul suffers many things, he will see life and be satisfied. My good servant will make many people right with God; he will carry away their sins.

When I talk with people that don’t believe in God about my faith in God one of the first things that come up is how prohibitive God is. And the fact is that they are right about that point. God does speak about a lot of things we are not to do. From the very start God keeps Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of “The Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The Ten Commandments are basically a bunch of things not to do. My answer to that is that is a good thing and I am grateful that God does call us to a constrained life. Our God knows what is good for us and so He gives us His wisdom about how life is to be lived. There is nothing that says that God has to teach us about how to live but our God loves us and wants the best for us so God tells us about the things that can hurt us. Look at Adam and Eve when they eat the fruit. Eating the fruit it does not help them all it does is bring pain to them. Over the course of all of history one of the greatest gifts from God is His willingness to share the wisdom that we so desperately need. Faith in God is not about just believing in God but also acting on that belief. God calls us to a life style not a religion and so we need what God has to say to learn to be the people God wants us to be. The things that God prohibits are not some random lists but it is a list of things that will bring harm to us and so God gives us the guidance we need for our lives. Think of it as if we are children. When my children were small, I prohibited them from doing some things not because I hated my kids but because I loved them and wanted them to be safe. Holding my kids hands in a parking lot was not to force them to keep from doing things they wanted but it was to keep them safe from dangers they did not understand. This is what God does for us. In the last few years I have really become enamored with the time God and the Israelite people made a covenant. Before the Israelites agreed to anything God listed all the blessing and corresponding curses that the agreement would entail. This is done because God wants people to know what they are getting into. That list basically makes the point that living like God says brings blessing and ignoring God brings curses. What God is doing here is telling people that when we live by what God says there is real power and when we don’t we find life is just not what it should be. Yes, God is prohibitive but that is a good thing and living by the wisdom of God makes our lives better not worse. I thank God that He teaches each and every one of us how to live lives filled with hope and peace. The wisdom of God has been proven to be right over millennia and it will continue to be right and true right into eternity because it is part of who God is and we trust in that God.

In the late eighties and early nineties several major corporations developed corporate rules that allowed their companies to take off both financially and as a great place to work. Very quickly people began to ask what these companies were doing and the response was to share the ideas they had adopted. The ideas they were using just seemed to make sense but what they did not understand is that they were using Biblical concepts as the underpinning of all they did. Because they used Biblical concepts even though they did not know that they were doing so a blessing of peace and goodness filled the companies. Humans have both a physical and a spiritual side to them and what happened in these companies is they followed the wisdom of God is they also benefitted their people spiritually. A reason God calls to us and gives us the wisdom about how to live our lives is that God understands there is a spiritual effect from following the concepts, ideas and principles God teaches. We as believers do not just obey because we are told to or we will go to hell but we obey what God teaches us because from that flows blessings to our spirit that cannot be found in any other way. The reason this blessing happens is that by living as God teaches us is we connect to the God who is truth and life. When we are living in the light of the living God we become better people and we live with more hope and peace than other people. Trusting in the living God by doing what He says then begins the process of trusting in God because God is the one who is right and good. All of this springs from knowing what God says and then living by it. Obedience to rules does not save us but it does teach us about the God who does save us and so living by God’s ideas is a good thing.

An issue that centers my faith is the idea that humans are fundamentally broken by our sin and there is nothing we can do to fix the problem. God is clear on this point and for some this might be an unhappy thing but for me it makes things clear about who I am and my faith. We are not called sinners by God to condemn us because our sin has already condemned us. The idea that God calls us sinners it to alert us that we have a problem and we need to know we are in trouble. For a lot of people knowing what to do about our sin is a problem and it is hard to find the right way forward. That is why the life of Jesus is such a big part of the redemptive process. Jesus becomes human not to just die on the cross and rise again but too also to tell us what a life of faith looks like. The verse we are considering not only gives us a glimpse into the spiritual realities of sin and salvation but also points us to the concept of Jesus being human and suffering the same things every human deal with. It is a fact that by the time Jesus is a grown man Joseph is no longer in the picture. For me this tells me that Jesus suffered loss like all humans do and that gives me hope. At the end of Jesus’s forty day fast the enemy comes and tries Jesus. There are two things here that are remarkable. First is that Jesus understands temptation. Every human struggles with temptation and knowing that Jesus has dealt with temptation gives us hope. Second is that Jesus does not turn the enemy away with some superpower but with words from scripture. Do we really grasp what this means? We have the same power that Jesus has to face temptation and to turn the enemy away. Knowing how powerful scripture is should start us looking into knowing it better. Just these few things about Jesus tells us about how our lives can be. God is not confused by our pain and God has given us the answers we need to get through life and Jesus proves that. We are told that Jesus obeyed all things which points us to another concept that we need to see clearly. Obedience is a part of our connection to God. Yes, we are saved by our faith and trust in the living God but if we reject obedience can we say we are what God wants us to be. Our verse makes this idea certain that Jesus is both God in the flesh and an obedient servant of God and we should seek to emulate how Jesus lived. If Jesus can submit to being a servant of God we can also learn to be servants. The fact is we were made to serve God so when we do that we draw closer to the God who loves us and seeks to teach us how to live with hope and peace.

In this verse we find both the mundane of the flesh and the supernatural of the spirit all in one place. Jesus is the perfect mix of both showing us how to both live in the flesh we have and to be reborn in the spirit. God in no place rejects the issues and struggles that come with being in the flesh because Jesus has all those too. The whole concept of the commands God gives is that He knows we are both flesh and spirit and that we have to cope with both. In our verse it says that “After his soul suffers many things” and right after that it says “he will see life.” The idea is that our souls and our lives in the flesh are linked and one can only work with the other is such a great thing. In the commands of God the idea is that we are both flesh and spirit and one works with the other. As we obey the commands of God we become the spiritual people God wants us to be while our spirit longs to be right with God so we live by the commands to satisfy our souls. We have to connect the two parts of our lives and both have to be submitted to the authority of God. Part of Jesus becoming human was to help us get a grasp of the meaning of our lives. Jesus as a human was a servant of God and from that we can see how to live our own lives in service of God. Our verse calls Jesus the good servant because Jesus was willing to do the will of God even when it meant dying. Thinking about our faith in relationship to Jesus calls us to consider how willing are we to obey the will of God and live by what God teaches. Faith in God is going to cost us something and this verse tells us that. Both Jesus and each of us are called to follow God. Scripture tells us that God understands our struggle so the question to us is do we have the faith to trust that God knows what He is doing because Jesus did. Let us learn to be servants of God by learning from Jesus and how He lived as both a human and as God because nothing else counts in life. Following God is the greatest thing we can do and it will change us into what God longs for us to be.

In the book of John chapter fourteen verse six Jesus says He is the way, the truth and the life and I am not certain that we realize how powerful that phrase is to us. Jesus is the way of life and the way to life and what is true and real. Our verse points us to Jesus as the one who has the answers for how we should live and what should be important to us. Learning from Jesus about life and about God is so central to what our faith is all about. Jesus Himself is the solution to so much of what troubles us. Our faith is in Jesus but we also can learn much about our faith by watching how Jesus lived as a man of God. Being servants of the living God is hard to do but we have a perfect example of how to live that we can learn from. God knows what we need and what is broken in us and part of what Jesus does is teach us that God feels what it is like to live as humans and wants to give us the answers we need to make it through each day of our lives.