Do You Understand the Unlikely Gift of the Suffering Servant?
Good Morning Friends,
Last week one of the devotionals was on Servant Leadership with text from Mark 10 and today’s scripture from Isaiah really connects with that theme. The beauty and glory of it is that Jesus fills the typical image of suffering and serving with new meaning. He shows us that he enjoys dominion because he is a servant, glory because he is capable of taking the world’s definitions of success and substituting his own, kingship because he is fully prepared to die so others might live. By his passion and death, he takes the lowest place, attains the heights of heaven in service, and bestows this upon all who would believe that God has taken on the burden of our sins. Here we learn that outside of Jesus’ return their can be no reconciliation between a worldly understanding of power and the humble service which must characterize authority for the Christian. According to Jesus’ teaching and example ambition is incompatible with the calling of Christian discipleship. If you want honor, success, fame and worldly triumphs, you desire something that is irreconcilable with the logic of Christ crucified. Instead, the harmony connects in the mystery between Jesus, the man of sorrows, and our suffering. Do You Understand the Unlikely Gift of the Suffering Servant?
Scripture: And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7 (NRSV)
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
Isaiah 53:2-5 (NRSV)
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
Isaiah 53:10-11 (NRSV)
Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
Matthew 27:54 (NRSV)
But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?
Romans 10:14 (NRSV)
Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’
Matthew 9:13 (NRSV)
Message: Isaiah wrote today’s scripture reading 700 years before Christ was born with great precision as to what would happen to Jesus when He came to earth to save mankind. It foretells how God was to take a nothing child known as the son of a carpenter and peasant girl, known as a child cradled in a manger, known as a man hung on the cross and transforms this into a relationship that hopefully is known to you as the Savior of the world. This young plant, this sprout from the stump of Jesse and King David was to be rejected even before He was born. There was no room for Him in the Inn, no place for Him to rest His head during his life and yet he suffered and died in this spiritually starved world so we might be fed, we might find a place prepared for us in a heavenly kingdom. Indeed the true understanding and magnitude of Jesus’ gift, of God’s gift of great love, comes not in His birth but in the power of believing that His death on the cross was not in vain, that our suffering is not in vain. No greater gift exists. And He gives this unlikely gift to the likes of an Innkeeper at his birth and to the centurion at his death but even to us now. Here this suffering servant Jesus becomes a magnificent gift. How surprising and sublime is this most unlikely gift imaginable. Here this prophecy of the suffering Servant’s humiliation and His submission to the Father’s will should be instrumental in the way we live a life that is more of love than of suffering.
Pray we have room in our hearts for Jesus to come and change everything. Pray that all the troubles and trials of this life will pass into nothingness when we see the face of Jesus. Pray we are anointed with His gift. Pray that when the Spirit gets done with us that God will be so big inside of us that the King of Kings and the Lords of Lords….even the suffering servant will show through. Pray we know the Suffering Savior who becomes the rewarded redeemer… the paradox of the death that brings life.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 