His Stripes. Our Healing.
Notes
Transcript
Anybody here need healing? (Some of y’all are like, “I didn’t know this was that kind of church!”) We do believe in healing. We believe that God heals. We just believe that He usually does it in quiet rooms filled with the prayers of God’s people and not big buildings with the limelight on a person. But that’s not the point.
Because even though I don’t know what your life situation is today, I’m willing to bet that many of you intensely feel your need for healing. You’re here, and you’re sick—sick from eating too much on Christmas maybe—but some of you are really sick, physically sick, and you feel that need to get better. Or you’re getting older, and with every new ache and pain, you feel that need to turn back the clock, to go back in time and do some things differently. I’m getting closer and closer to 50, and I’m just beginning to feel some of those things, but with every new twinge, I’m reminded of the temporary nature of this shell that God has given me. I’m reminded of my need for eternal healing.
So there’s the need that we recognize for physical healing, but what about the need for healing that you may not feel physically, but man, you feel it emotionally. You feel it mentally. You feel it spiritually. You feel it in your depression or your fear, in the things that you do that you really, really don’t want to do, but can’t seem to stop.
You feel it in your temper, in the words and actions that fly out of you when you’re frustrated. You feel it in the temptations that you don’t want to give into, but still you find yourself doing—over and over and over again. You feel your brokenness.
You got started into something that you thought you could handle, but real quickly, you found out you couldn’t. Now you’re hooked, and, with every relapse, you feel—intensely feel—the brokenness of your soul.
You need healing. But the truth is, even if you don’t feel it, you still need it. We all do. The Bible tells us that we were all born broken and sick in our sin, our rebellion against God. Even if you don’t believe the Bible, which I hope you do, but even if you don’t, you know this is true. You want to be good. You try to be good, but, while you may perceive yourself to be better than others, if you were to honestly evaluate your motives in all the “good” things that you do, you’d find that you’re really not that good at all.
Let me challenge you to do something. If feel like you’re all good and you don’t need God, let me challenge you to pray a very honest prayer. I’ll warn you; this is going to hurt. Pray and ask God to help you to see yourself the way that He sees you. Because, here’s the thing; God loves you, but, without Jesus Christ, you and God are not in a good place. You are estranged from Him. There’s a breach in the relationship, just like breach that happens when someone wrongs you in a horrible way. Your relationship with God needs healing. Pray, and ask God to show you that.
And as God shows you that, and as your heart begins to break over your sin, turn to this passage in Isaiah—Isaiah 53. Because, here’s the thing. Christmas means blessing and Christmas means light, but Christmas also means healing.
So, this is where we are. Isaiah 53. We read this together earlier, and this passage, was written about 700 years before the angel appeared to Mary and Joseph just like all of these Christmas passages that we’ve been reading from the book of Isaiah, 700 years before the wise men, and some 730 years before Jesus went to the cross.
And, even at Christmas, it’s important for us to look at a passage like this, because here we have the most complete, most accurate description of the nature and the purpose of the death of Jesus.
This is an incredible chapter, and I really encourage you to read it all. I even give you permission to read the whole thing right now while I’m preaching. What you’ll be amazed by is the accuracy of these words, again, written hundreds of years before crucifixion was even a thing. But this morning, we're really just going to focus our attention on the three verses that we read together earlier verses 4,5, and 6.
These three verses here are so important—so powerful, meaningful and compelling—these three verses are so huge that we just have to take time to zoom in closer and approach them with great precision. So that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
And so, the question many people ask this time of year is, “Why did Jesus come? Why is Christmas such a big deal?” And the short answer is, Jesus came to heal us. That’s the message of this prophecy. The Messiah is coming to heal us. But what does it mean to walk in that healing?
If you’re already a follower of Jesus this morning, I hope that these words will be an encouragement to you, a reminder of what your relationship with God means. But if you’re not yet a Christian, I hope that Isaiah’s words here will show you what you get to look forward to when you stop fighting and surrender to the call of God on your life.
So, let’s look at it again together. Read verse 4 with me:
However, it was our sicknesses that He Himself bore, And our pains that He carried; Yet we ourselves assumed that He had been afflicted, Struck down by God, and humiliated.
Isaiah looks, again, 700 years into the future and said, "Surely our griefs he bore, our sorrows he carried."
And, you see, when Jesus was on the cross, that's exactly what he did. But in order for us to really understand what he did, you have to go back to something that was deeply engrained in the Jewish religious system in Isaiah’s day, this weird thing they were instructed to do year after year in the law on this day that they celebrated about as big as we celebrate Christmas, but this day was called The Day of Atonement.
And here’s how they celebrated this day, Instead of sitting around a tree and trading gifts, they would get two goats. One goat was to be sacrificed as an offering. The blood of that offering was then be sprinkled on an altar, there in a part of the Temple known as “the most holy place,”
And the reason for this is because it was a picture of the fact that the price, the payment of sin has been doled out. Death has occurred, and the picture is that the people's sins are covered by the blood of the sacrifice. And then, after they sacrifice this goat, then they come out to another goat, another goat that's alive.
And the high priest, the main religious leader, puts his hands on the head of this goat, and then confesses the sins of the people of God over this goat? And as he did it, what we see is a picture of the sins of the people passing over to what became known as the scapegoat. And then the goat would be taken out to a solitary place in the wilderness to be gone forever. A picture, a symbol that God gave before his people year, after year, after year. Your sins passed onto the head of this goat and taken away, carried away, never to be seen again.
And here Isaiah ties it together in verse 4, 700 years before it actually happens. Jesus, the Suffering Servant, bears our griefs. Carries our sorrows. He owns them. He receives them. He lifts them from our shoulders. That's exactly what Jesus did on the cross at Calvary. Jesus lifted our burden.
And that’s the first fact I want us to remember this morning. What does it mean to walk in the healing that Jesus gives us? First it means that…
Our burden is lifted.
Our burden is lifted.
That means He’ll lift your burden, if you’ll open your life up to Him. Again, I’m not talking about your financial load or your stress load, or your worry load, necessarily, or some other load you might be carrying. No, the load that I’m talking about and that Isaiah is talking about is your sin load.
Whether you know it or not, you are completely stacked up with sin. You are. You are guilty. Maybe you haven’t broken any civic laws, but I don’t care who you are, I know that you’ve broken God’s law. You have, I have; we all have. We have this burden of sin, this debt of sin—that we are carrying. We are guilty of breaching God’s authority, of breaking His commands. We’re guilty.
But Jesus (praise God, Jesus!), instead of keeping us burdened with our debt, He took our sin upon Himself and carried it away. He took our burden, and as He hung on that cross until He died, He carried it away.
Our burden is lifted
But that's not all.
Let’s keep reading. Look at verse 5:
But He was pierced for our offenses, He was crushed for our wrongdoings; The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed.
Pierced for our sins. There's language there of crucifixion before anybody even knew about crucifixion in that part of the world. But hear the intensity there. Pierced through. Crushed. Chastened, punished, scourged. Intense.
And these things were done for our transgressions, our iniquities, our wellbeing—despite all our sin. They were done for our healing. That's how seriously God takes our sin. We want to make light of our "shortcomings," we want to explain away our "mistakes." But that's not how God looks at it.
When we persist in our thing—give ourselves over to our lusts, our desires, our anger, our worry, our bitterness, instead of surrendering everything to God, we find ourselves broken, consumed, empty and dead inside.
And unless we can find someone, some authority outside ourselves to forgive us, we will find ourselves hopelessly corrupted and guilty.
But someone has been found. Someone has taken on Himself the results of our rebellion. Someone has welcomed us into the presence of God, if we are willing to enter.
His name is Jesus, and He was delivered for our sins that we might be delivered from our sins.
Jesus shifted our punishment onto Himself.
And that’s the next fact I want us to take home today. In Jesus, our burden is lifted, and second, in Jesus…
Our punishment is shifted.
Our punishment is shifted.
That’s why Jesus came. He came to lift our burden and shift our punishment to Himself. The big theological word for that is “substitutionary atonement.” Jesus substituted Himself for our atonement, our forgiveness.
Have you ever had anyone do that for you? Maybe it was a parent who paid off a speeding ticket for you, or a friend who took the fall for you when they knew it would cost you. That’s a shadow of what Jesus did for you.
And Isaiah saw it coming when He looked ahead and saw our healing.
Look at the last of these three verses here, verse 6:
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all To fall on Him.
So, right now, if you look at events taking place in the world, there are some parts of the world where you’ll see a powerful, totalitarian regime push down a rebellion. Because, after all, totalitarian regimes don't like rebellions. They don't like it when people go against the powers that be. They don't like it when people step out of line, when people do their own thing. They don't like it because it’s a threat to their power.
And that’s why, when we watch the news, we see totalitarian regimes commit human atrocities and say things like, "We're going to put this thing down. We're going to put this rebellion down. We're going to crush this thing. We're going to crush these rebels." That's the tendency, that's the human desire of people in power. Crush the rebels.
But God—listen to this—God is different. Our God is good and loving and kind. He is faithful and just and righteous. He is kind to His people. He is patient toward His subjects.
But still we rebel. We rebel against Him. What He says do, we do the opposite. "Don't lie. Don't lust. Don't steal. Don't kill." We lie, we lust, we steal and we kill (at least in our hearts). He says forgive; we hold on to bitterness. He says, "Trust," and we say, "No, I think I'll worry."
We are rebels. All of us. It's in our nature.
But God, God is not like the governments of man. He doesn't stop rebellion with a display of His power. He could certainly do that. Wipe us off the map, yeah, He could do that. And he doesn't need our weapons, our instruments of war. He could wipe us out with one swipe of His hand. He's done it once with a flood, and He could certainly do something like that again.
But He doesn't. Our God does not crush us for our rebellion. No, instead, he crushes Himself.
Listen to the end of verse 6 again:
“… the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all To fall on Him.”
All of our iniquity. All of our rebellion. All of our sin. On Him.
And with that, our guilt is gone. Gone. “As far,” the Bible says, “as the east is from the west.” Our guilt is consumed, swallowed up, never to be regurgitated, not because of anything we’ve. It’s a gift, an unimaginably generous gift, available for us to receive.
And that brings us to our third and final fact that I want you to remember today. That’s why they rhyme. I want you to memorize this, meditate on this as we face this new year.
In our healing, our burden is lifted, our punishment is shifted, and third…
Our salvation is gifted.
Our salvation is gifted.
You say, “But I still feel guilty.” Dear friend, if you have turned your life over to Jesus Christ, it’s time to let that guilt go. And if you haven’t, the good news is, you can be forgiven of all your guilt today.
It’s not automatic, though. You have to receive these things.
“By HIS wounds, we are healed.” Not anybody else’s wounds—His wounds. Jesus’ wounds. And those wounds, Jesus received those wounds for you. He lifted your burden! He transferred your punishment! He consumed your guilt! He did all of that when He healed you.
If you know Jesus, because you know Jesus, you are healed. Don’t take that for granted. Walk in that. Own that this Christmas. This healing is incredibly good news. It is an incredible gift, but it’s good news that has to be received.
So, let me ask you. Have his wounds healed you? Has he lifted your burden? Has he transferred your punishment? Has he swallowed up your guilt? He will, if you ask Him. He’ll even do that this morning.
Right now, we’re going to transition to a thing we do to acknowledge and remember everything Jesus has done to secure that gift. The bread represents His body that endured the cross for us. The cup represents His blood that was shed on that cross for us. If you know Jesus and walk with Jesus, we invite you to participate with us. If not, we ask you to prayerfully abstain, but as we receive this, consider what it would be to walk with and know Jesus.
Deacons, let’s prepare the Lord’s Supper.
