Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Isaiah 53:1-12

N:

Welcome

Welcome.

Merry Christmas.

Thanks praise band and choir.

Announcements

Wayne retirement party tonight at 5:30 in Miller Hall.

Presentation to Wayne.

Christmas Eve Service Friday night at 6 pm.

Finishing our series on God With Us that night.

I need help with next Sunday’s sermon.

I need your testimonies of God’s faithfulness in your life and in the life of Eastern Hills that you have seen this last year.

I’ll be doing a one-shot message next Sunday morning called “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Year of God’s Faithfulness.”

QR code for form.

Window for form will close on Thursday night.

You can email me as well.

LMCO ($30,840) GOAL ACHIEVED!

But there’s no reason to quit giving to help fund our missionaries all around the world who are sharing the message of the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Since the start of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, Southern Baptists have given over $5 BILLION to international mission work through it.

Here is a snapshot of what God did through last year’s offering: 422 new missionaries sent into the field; 18,380 new churches planted; 769,494 Gospel presentations, with 144,322 souls being saved, and 86,587 people baptized!

The entire IMB goal for this year is $185 million.

I’m not saying we cover the whole thing…

Opening

Now on to our message this morning… Remember that we’re seeing a concept called progressive revelation as we walk through these messianic prophecies in Isaiah, meaning we’re building a picture kind of like a puzzle: we’re adding pieces and as we add pieces, we begin to make out the image.

There’s a LOT of messianic prophecy in Isaiah, and we’re only looking at 5 in this series.

We’ve seen the announcement of Messiah, Immanuel, “God with us,” in Isaiah 7. Then we expanded our understanding when we considered the arrival of Immanuel from Isaiah 9, where we saw that His arrival on the scene of history would bring light and victory, because His arrival would mean that “With Us (is) God”.

Last week, we got to open the door a little wider as we considered His work of reconciliation: the bringing of peace for His people, peace between enemies, and peace for the nations from Isaiah 11, making “Us with God” possible.

This morning, we will see in Isaiah 53 the work of Messiah that makes it possible for us to declare that indeed, “with God (is) us.”

Let’s stand in honor of the Word of God as we read our focal passage together this morning.

PRAYER

When I preach, I am convicted that what the Bible says needs to take center stage and get our focus and attention, because in the Scriptures we have God’s revelation of Himself to mankind.

And since I want the Bible to be the center of attention, I am also convicted that the central figure, the hero of the Scriptures if you will, is not us.

God Almighty is the hero and central figure of Scripture, one eternal God in three eternal Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, always existing from before time and on through to forever.

He is the central and most important figure, and we in our weakness, faithlessness, and frailty are certainly not central and most important.

In fact, sometimes we fall so short of being the protagonist of Scripture that we actually come across as the antagonists, standing firmly against God and His will.

So I don’t want us to walk away from a message in this church with the idea that we are the central figures of Scripture.

Can we agree on this?

With that being said, our focal passage this morning still clearly exhibits the Lord as both the central and heroic figure in the divine narrative, but in it we see an incredible reversal: The central Person of Scripture is taking steps to reveal Himself—God with Us—in such a way and because of His love is taking action so as to deliver those who would be the antagonists from their deserved fate.

We see throughout this passage and throughout Scripture that the Messiah, God the Son, did what He did for those who didn’t deserve it, couldn’t deserve it, and wouldn’t deserve it, and in a way which boggles the mind.

Isaiah even starts this passage with two questions to this end:

Have you ever started a story with “You’re not going to believe this, but...” This first question: “Who has believed what we have heard?” is kind of along the same lines.

Isaiah isn’t saying that the person hearing it would not believe it, but that they will be astonished at the reality of what is being said.

Similarly, the second question is the identity of those who know: those to whom the arm of the Lord has been revealed.

These two questions both point well to a part of the Christmas narrative in Luke:

The angels revealed the work of God—the arm of the Lord—to the shepherds.

After they had seen Him, they basically went around saying, “You’re not going to believe this, but...” And people were astounded by what they said.

But now, who has believed the message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

To US, those who have trusted in Christ.

So we have a responsibility, a calling, an imperative to testify to what God has done—to be those ministers of reconciliation as we saw last week, and to share the message of the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we have opportunity.

That message is that Messiah was born for us, that Messiah suffered for us, that Messiah died for us, and that Messiah redeems us from our brokenness, sin, and death.

Those are our four points this morning:

1) Messiah was born for us.

I don’t think it would be right to go through the Christmas season this year without reading the narrative of the first Christmas from the Gospel of Luke together, because it is there that we find that this is statement is true.

Messiah was born for us, just as the angel said to the shepherds on that silent night over 2000 years ago:

"Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you...” Isaiah said something along the same lines in what we looked at two weeks ago in chapter 9:

Isaiah 9:6a (CSB)

6 For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us...

Do we grasp what it means that the baby Savior of Luke was born, as Isaiah agreed, “for us?”

There would have been no reason for Jesus to come if we—broken, fallen humanity—hadn’t needed Him to.

He was born FOR US.

He was born as any other man would be born, and grew as any other man would grow.

About 700 years before His arrival, Isaiah spoke the words in our focal passage from the Lord:

Leave this verse up

Many commentators see in the language here in verse 2 a point of connection to what we looked at last week in Isaiah chapter 11: that the young plant is the shoot from the stump of Jesse (11:1), the root is the root of Jesse (11:10).

Just as the shoot and branch of Jesse in chapter 11 come from a place that seems completely lifeless (a stump), so this young plant and root would grow up out of lifeless, dry ground.

Jesus came when the “ground” of the hopes of Israel was “dry”: Israel was not even a kingdom any more, they were leaderless, and they were under Roman occupation.

The nation didn’t have much going for it.

So there weren’t many who were looking for life to spring up from the stump, from the dry ground.

And the life that did grow up was even more unexpected from a human standpoint:

“He didn’t have an impressive form”

While many take this to mean that Jesus was unattractive, I don’t think that Isaiah was saying that twice (we’ll look at the other one in a moment).

This Hebrew word for form can refer to something’s “kind or class.”

So I take this to say that Jesus didn’t come from the upper crust of Hebrew society.

People want to follow the wealthy.

Look at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

People talk about them and listen to them because they have vast wealth.

Even though as God He is the owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, Messiah didn’t come with a bunch of money.

We see this in the narrative in Luke 2.

When Joseph and Mary went to present Jesus at the Temple to redeem Him as the firstborn male according to the Law according to Exodus 13 , and for Mary to make her offering for purification according to Leviticus 12, we see that the offering that they make for Mary is the one prescribed in Leviticus for those who had limited means:

Put Isaiah 53:2 back up.

Also, Isaiah prophesied that as Messiah grew, He would have no… “majesty that we should look at Him.” Jesus came with no royal or political power.

People want to follow those with political clout.

How much time do we spend talking about politics and the people behind them, and how much of an impact do they have in our lives?

Even though He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the descendant of David and the heir to His throne, Jesus was born into the family of an unknown carpenter from a place that was a byword in Israel, Nazareth:

Put Isaiah 53:2 back up.

Jesus had “no appearance that we should desire Him.”

This word for appearance specifically refers to sight.

As Jesus grew up, He wasn’t particularly special to look at.

This shouldn’t be taken to mean that He was ugly.

He was just… ordinary to the eye.

People want to follow those who look beautiful by society’s standards.

Consider that in the top 20 most-followed accounts on Twitter, more than half of them are people known to some extent for their looks.

Even though He was the bright morning star of Revelation 22, before His ascension, Jesus looked like a regular guy.

Like one of us.

But without His miraculously normal birth for us, He couldn’t have suffered for us.

2) Messiah suffered for us.

Yes, Jesus was fully human, like us.

But thankfully, He was also NOT like us.