Our reading today comes from Isaiah 52. It starts with chapter 52, and we go on to chapter 53 as well. So from Isaiah 52:13. Behold, my servant shall act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted.
As many were astonished at you, his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of children of mankind, so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told them, they see. That which they have not heard, they understand. Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
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 and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds, we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, Like a lamb that was led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that, before his shearers, is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgement, he was taken away. And as for his generation, he considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him.
He has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied.
By his knowledge, shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors. Yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. It's gonna be really useful for you to keep your Bibles open there. We're gonna be walking through that passage extensively.
I must admit this was our Christmas sermon, so we're gonna have to just continue Christmasing together, I think. Are we up for continuing to Christmas? Yeah. Good. Alright.
Good. Well, to start you off, I wanna tell you a story, honestly, that I don't really want to share. Don't wanna share this one because it's embarrassing, and it's painful for me, and I honestly wish it had never happened. Now you guys can laugh at it. That's okay.
Maybe encouragement takes some of the awkwardness out of it for me. If I laugh, it's because of nervous energy. This is a hard moment for me. Few years ago, I kicked a child twice quite hard, and then I punched another one in the nose, and his nose bled. Yeah.
A little bit of context. We were going to karate. It was our first time. I thought, let's take my boys, father and his sons. We'll take them along to karate, and we'll try and learn that out.
We're a few weeks in, and there was a time of sparring. And I don't know what it was about karate, but I think I'd always looked at karate growing up as some magical thing that people did, and it transformed them into these fighting machines or something. And I remember watching kids come out, like, I was a very young adult out of a karate place wearing their belts and all this kind of stuff and practicing moves, and I'd go, man. Well, that looks scary. I wonder if they could take me.
Like, I don't know. I just thought that it bestowed gifts on you of fighting like Bruce Lee or something like that. And so I kinda entered karate with that attitude, and we were told to spar with each other. And I honestly thought I was taking it really easy. I really thought I was, but look at my legs compared to the legs of a youngish child.
Even when I take it easy, it's a bit hard, and I went a bit hard. So after kicking the first girl twice and finding that a bit hard, they said, well, move on to somebody else. And I thought, right. I'm not even gonna touch this kid. So you're supposed to do all these moves, and I did sort of a punch, and I just stopped there, like, two inches short of his face.
And he was still sorta flinched a bit, and then he turned around and pushed his nose into my hand. I swear, I didn't do anything. And his nose just went like that, and blood just came out of it for no reason whatsoever. Now I've got some nervous laughter because I honestly don't like talking about it even now. I hold the burden of that memory.
It's painful, and I don't think it will go away, that memory or that burden, even if I outlived everybody else on earth. Just don't think that would go away. I bear a painful emotional burden from that day that will die with me. See, the problem isn't that those people think poorly of me. That's not why I'm feeling like this because I'll probably never see them again.
Hopefully, I'll never see them again. Maybe there's a little part of that. But the real problem is that I know something about myself after that event. I know that I can make mistakes like that, that I can make such poor choices. I live with a shameful burden because I learned something about myself and who I am.
And we can laugh a bit, and I'm glad you did a little bit. My family still laughs at me from time to time and teases me about it even though I really wish they wouldn't. We can laugh about it because in the end, it really wasn't that serious. Some kids said, ow. Another one cried, admittedly.
But it wasn't that serious. They got better. But there are times when we've hurt other people. Now maybe that's physically. I hope not.
But I think more frequently, we hurt each other emotionally or financially or maybe even by breaking the trust that's between us. We do that, don't we? We break trust with each other. There are times we've taken advantage of people. Maybe they're strangers, maybe they're friends, maybe they're family.
There's times when we've seen the greed and the selfishness in our own hearts, or maybe it's anger and vitriol and hatred even towards others that we see in here. There are parts of my heart, and there are memories of mine that I won't share with you. And I won't share them with my wife and definitely not my kids. It's part of us. It's part of me.
And the question that we're asking today is what do we do with the burden of guilt? What do we do with it? People do all sorts of things. Some people journal their guilt. I don't know if you know anyone who's journaled their guilt in the past.
They write it down in a book, and once they've finished writing everything down, they throw it in the river or something, and it goes away. Or they throw it in a fire, and it's burned up, and it is no more. Some people volunteer somewhere in order to make up for their guilt, or they practice random acts of kindness. Increasingly, we go to a therapist about our guilt, and they tell us that that's a normal part of human life, and we need to forgive ourselves. That's happening a lot more, isn't it?
Self forgiveness. And I'm not sure about you. You might be a very different person to me. I can do those things, but it just doesn't seem to shift the burden for me. And burden can be the right word in my experience.
Sometimes it feels like a physical weight on our shoulders. And then we don't always feel it. I mean, we've grown used to carrying it. Maybe we've strengthened those muscles a little bit, but sometimes it feels so incredibly real. And maybe those strategies I just talked about, I think maybe they're well meaning strategies, but they just don't quite hit the target.
And I think the reason for that is because the biblical view of these things is that the reason for all of our pain that we cause each other and the root of the problems in our very selves, the root cause of all of those things is that we've walked away from God, and we've turned away from listening to Him, and we've turned away from loving Him, and we've turned away from living in ways that care for His world and its people. And the effects of that turning away, the outworking of turning away from God are these symptoms that we're talking about, the symptoms of hurt, the symptoms of the pain that we inflict on each other, the symptoms of damage that we place on each other, and the symptom of the burden of guilt from it. And a truly good God who loves His wonderful creation and who has a strong sense of justice when He sees us damaging each other's lives. A truly good God is going to find our behaviour abhorrent. Now we just read a few verses of chapter 1 of this book that we're in.
And maybe it's a bit like when we read those verses, turning away from our father. You know, the ox knows its master. The donkey knows the one who cares for him. My child, Israel, does not. They're a child who's turned away.
Really, God is describing a son, an adult son, who is walking up to his father, his loving father, who has provided for him and given him everything in his life. He's loved him and led him and challenged him and grown him and all these different things. And this adult son walks to his father, and he walks up to Him on a daily basis and takes His hand and gives Him a full arm slap to the face. That's the picture of Isaiah 1, a son slapping his father in the face, and he does it every week. We're doing it every week to God.
And it's not only wrong, it's not only unjust for the son who has received all that he has from the father's hand to do this. It's not really wrong to do this, but understandably, it destroys the relationship between the son and the father, between us and God. And we can turn talk, and we do talk, don't we, in terms of mistakes. Right? Boo boos, slip ups, or abnormal behaviour.
That just wasn't me. But I think if one of my kids were to do this to me, would slap me in the face like that, and you witnessed it, or if that was your child and I witnessed it, I think we would be you would be very upset on my behalf, wouldn't you? Rightly so. You'd be angry to see that happening, to see someone treated like that. And if that's where we're at with God, if that's an accurate picture, then no amount of journaling, no amount of counselling or self forgiveness is going to repair the damage.
It's torn down the relationship. I don't know if you'd noticed, but it hurts us too. Right? Hurts us. Psychologists call this moral injury.
Don't know if you've heard that phrase before. But, really, it's saying, who can slap their father in the face week after week and not be harmed and changed in themselves in the process. It damages us. What do we do with this burden of guilt? I ask this question because if I spend any time in deep thought about my burden, I either become depressed and guilt laden, or I have to stop thinking about it.
What do we do with this burden of guilt? That's the position God's people are in in this book. Generation after generation, century after century, it hasn't worked. They can't seem to get right with God. They keep slapping Him.
They keep turning from their creator, rebelling against their father. And so this chapter that we've read, chapter and a bit that we've read, is wonderful news. It's wonderful news. And it's wonderful news not just to them, but to us as well. Because five hundred years before Christmas, God is promising to send Jesus, His servant.
These 15 verses that we've just read are looking forward with so much hope. The people have looked at their past and gone, we don't want this. We want to be out from this burden. They're looking for something, and God has promised restoration for the son who has slapped the father. Forgiveness, hope, peace with God.
Restoration through the one who can do what we could not. Give away the ending. Jesus is going to carry the burden for us, making us free. Our first thing that we're gonna talk about is that the servant comes because alone, we're beyond hope. The servant comes, Jesus comes, because alone, we're beyond hope.
See, Israel, God's people, were always called God's servant, not just Jesus. Israel was called God's servant. They were called God's chosen ones and their shepherd, and it's affectionate terminology. But as far as servants go, you don't really want the ones who slap you in the face. Right?
When you're looking for a servant, that's not the type you're looking for, but that's being the servant that they are. And God, as I said earlier, has done everything to equip His people to turn back to Him. He's loved them and forgiven them. Over generations, He's pled with them, and He's guided them with His prophets and His kings, and He's led them, and He's disciplined, and He's even commanded them. But it hasn't worked.
In verse six, we see that we all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way. This servant, this nation is not working as a servant. A new servant is needed, one who won't turn from God to do his own thing. And if you're looking for the perfect servant, which God is, if you're promising a perfect servant, you can't choose from one of us, can't choose from one of you.
The very best of their kings, the very best of their rulers have done terrible things. The only one with the heart of God that's capable of following God is the Son of God Himself. God sends His servant, His son, born in the Near East to poor parents. It says He wasn't much to look at. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.
And, honestly, we thought very little of Him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, He was despised, and we held Him in low esteem. What's His life like? He suffers.
He suffers like we suffer. He's familiar with pain. He knows the struggle of life. He knows that sense of gnawing, of hunger. He knows the sense of fatigue that sets into the body.
And yet the first verse that Phil read was that the servant acts wisely. He's the one to live in step with God, the first and the only to live as we were all supposed to. But He's here. I don't know if you've seen this show Undercover Boss. Anybody seen Undercover Boss?
It's stopped now, I think. And maybe when we think of Jesus coming to live with us, we think of Undercover Boss. Right? He's coming down to visit with the plebs a little bit, to hang out with His employees, and see which one's good and which one's not and to show them how it's supposed to be done. But that's not what He was all about.
Jesus is here with a job to do. It's a great job. I'm glad He took it up. He's on mission to take the burden off our shoulders. That's His mission.
Take the burden off our shoulders. See, the servant takes the burden of the justice of God. I don't know if you noticed this Phil read. In verse 1, we hear about the arm of the Lord. The arm of the Lord.
This phrase has been used a bit in the last couple of chapters that we didn't read. In fact, a few sentences before, Phil read, it talks about God bearing His arm. He's rolling up His sleeves. He's uncovering His arms. Why?
Because He's about to do something. He's about to act. What's the action? Well, it's the sending of God's champion, His servant, to take up our pain and suffering. God's looked at the burden of this world, and He's taken action.
And the action is for the son to look at the pain and the anger of a deeply insulted God and to look at a dishonoured father, to look at the reasonable and just anger of God, and willingly step in front of it. This is the good news. He's gonna take it all in the chest. He takes our pain and our suffering and is stricken by God on our behalf. This is the action of God.
This is the plan that God the Father and God the Son have promised five hundred years before Jesus appears. God's justice cannot be ignored. The rebellion of humanity must be paid for, but God's love is just as strong as His justice. You can almost hear God crying out, they can't do it. You can hear Him say, they can't fix it.
My beloved children, God says, are deserving of punishment, but I love them so much. I love them so much. I will take the blows Myself. Jesus steps in front of the justice of God purposefully to be afflicted, to be crushed, to be punished for our sin. We shy away, I think, from the word sin or the other words that this passage uses, iniquity, transgression.
I think we hate the word sin because we hate the idea that it might actually be correct. It might be the right term for us, that it might be more than a whoopsie and a slip up and something to be forgiven by ourselves, that it might be something serious. But God uses the word sin. But instead of pointing the finger of guilt you've had someone point at you. Doesn't feel good when I do it, does it? Instead of pointing the finger of guilt at us, God points it at His Son.
And the son, Jesus, takes it all in the chest, willingly places Himself in the path of the justice of God. I don't know if you guys ever played basketball. I was tall, so when I was young, they said, Phil, play basketball. They didn't realise my predominant feature was uncoordination, so they made me play. And so every now and then, when I was playing, I was so unco, I would get fouled.
And if you get fouled as you're taking a shot, you get a couple of free shots. Right? And it's an opportunity. No one else can interfere. It's an opportunity if you get a few extra points.
Go on. Maybe it will influence the game. And if you when you have failed, you get injured in the failing process, you can go off to the sidelines and sub someone else back in to take the shots for you, and, usually, you'd get the best shot in the game, right, to sub in for you and take the shots that maybe you can't take because you're injured. That's what Jesus is doing for us. He's subbing in.
He's subbing in for something that we can't do. He's taking the shots that we could never take, and He's making the shots that we could never make. What are we singing earlier? I was trying to remember what we sung earlier. God, the just, was satisfied to look on Him and pardon me.
That's what's happening here. God is satisfied to pour our sin on the shoulders of the sinless one, and that man takes our burdens, takes the rejection of God by mankind. Here's the thing. Because I would be upset if I was having to do that. Right?
Like a lamb before His shearers is silent, He doesn't open His mouth. Jesus doesn't protest or try to wriggle out of it. He has chosen to bear our burdens. What a man. He does this willingly and purposefully, and His life is made an offering for our rebellion.
He takes the consequences of our sin. Now some of the language in our passage might not be very familiar to us as Australians. It's sort of Jewish language for a failed life. It's all the bad things that can happen to someone. It's language for talking about a person who's cursed, someone who's punished by God, stricken by Him, someone who's cut off from the land of the living, someone who's being punished for the transgression of the people, and someone who goes to the grave along with everybody else in spite of His innocence.
See, the reality is this is describing Jesus, that most of the world, both then and now, have seen Jesus as a weak figure. They've seen Him as cursed by God, where life didn't pan out. Just some baby in a manger. Right? Just another guy on the cross.
But that's not God's perspective, and it shouldn't be the perspective of any Christian. See, the servant emerges victorious with His people in tow. Victorious with His people in tow. See, in verse 10 onwards, we see that it was the Lord's will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer. Well, that seems odd, doesn't it?
But what it's saying is this was the plan. It was God's plan to crush Jesus and cause Him to suffer. Jesus came, well, He did what He came to do. He's successful at this point. It doesn't look it, but He has been victorious in what everybody else thought was shameful and cursed.
And though the Lord makes His life an offering for sin, it's Jewish code for the opposite. Right? He will see His offspring. He will see His offspring and prolong His days. The will of the Lord will prosper in His hand.
He will see the light of life and be satisfied, and God's gonna give Him a portion among the great, and He is going to divide the spoils of victory with the strong. These phrases are Jewish code again for the blessing of a successful life. They're all the good things happening to someone. God is saying here, it might have looked like defeat to others, but it wasn't. Victory has happened.
What victory? The victory is in the successful bearing of our burdens. The successful bearing of our burdens. Verse 12, the end of verse 12 says, for He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors. The burden of our transgression or our sin or our iniquity has been taken off our shoulders.
They've been placed onto Jesus, and He has poured out His life unto death. He bore our burdens and has disposed of them. If you're a believer and you're struggling with guilt, it's because you're remembering an old burden that's no longer yours. It's been given to Jesus. He's taken it willingly, and He's disposed of it completely.
We talked at the start about our burden of guilt causing a breakdown between the relationship with the father and us. With that burden gone, that relationship is restored. Jesus has been victorious. One of the blessings was He will, where was it? He will see His offspring.
We are His offspring. Jesus has rescued a people. He stepped out of the grave with a new family, us, and you too if you will have Him. God the Father is overjoyed at this victory. His justice has been satisfied.
He has a son again. He has a people again, us. And so there's a celebration of Jesus near the end of our passage. He's given the blessing of God. It says He's restored to His rightful place in heaven, high and lifted up.
That was in our first verse. He has the blessing of many offspring, us, and His days prosper. He has a portion among the great, and He distributes the spoils of victory among His purchased people, us. Jesus was the servant who was able to do all the servant was supposed to do. Israel, the nation has been trying for centuries, and haven't we too?
Haven't we too? But we've failed, but Jesus has succeeded. Now I wonder at this point whether it's worth asking the question, are we calloused to it all? I got pastor's hands now. They've got no calluses on them whatsoever.
But I used to be a tradie, and you have soft hands that can feel every sensation at the start. But then as you work with them, your hands get used to the labour every day, and they build up slabs of dead gross skin. Right? That protect our hands from feeling what maybe we should feel. Do we turn our own way so often we don't think about our sin anymore?
Is that you? Is Christmas only the baby and not the victorious Christ? It's who He is, the victorious Christ. And a question for you if you're not a believer. Maybe someone's dragged you along here today.
Can I get you to go home with the question? Am I really broken? Is sin real? Do I need the servant? We believe that the loving father has sent a true son to lift a burden we cannot.
Has Jesus lifted your burden? Because it's great news. Was He punished for you? Has He borne your iniquities? Has He justified you?
We all need it. Has He done it for you? There are a couple of appropriate quest emotions at Christmas. There should be a space for sadness and mourning and regret over the cost of our sin. Have you understood that the Lord crushed Jesus for you, that His life was made an offering for your sin?
There's room for that emotion, but I wonder if Hallmark's actually got it a little bit right this time. Like, everybody hates on Hallmark. Right? But I wonder if they've got it right because joy should be the dominant emotion. Joy should be the dominant approach to Christmas.
And I'm not talking about that superficial serotonin hit that we are probably just getting over now after all the good food and the good family and the Merry Christmases and the presents from people that we love, like we ride that high for a little bit. Right? It's gone by now. Yeah? Can you remember what you got for Christmas?
Maybe. But deep joy, joy that God loved us so much that He would send His son to take our burdens and restore us to relationship with Himself. Joy that we have a saviour willing to be crushed out of His love for us. See, it was worth it. Jesus decided it was worth it to rescue you and me and all the others.
There is joy in Christmas because we know the pain and suffering. We know the crushing of the father, and because we know the victory He has brought, which has lifted the burdens off our shoulders. I wonder if we can pray together. Lord God, we thank You for the Christmas period that we've just celebrated. We thank You that Christmas has been an event that You have instigated.
It's an event of rescue, this baby coming into the world. You've sent Your son. You've sent Your servant who could do what we cannot, and we thank You so much for Him. And, Lord, for those of us who might still be feeling the remnants of guilt even though we trust and love in our saviour. We pray that You would take that guilt away from us.
Pray that we would know that it is gone. We would understand that we are rescued from it and that it is disposed of. And, Lord, for anyone in this room or for others who we might know and love who are not yet believers, we pray that You would bring Christmas to them, that Your servant would come for them, and that Jesus would take the burdens off their shoulders as well. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.