Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 7, 2019 | Can I Help? - My Substitute

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April 7, 2019 | Can I Help? - My Substitute · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everyone.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: How are you today on this beautiful Sunday?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Jason.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to hear that.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're in an Isaiah challenge.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is the next to last, the penultimate week of the Isaiah Challenge.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're joining me in this, then uh this coming week, you will read 62 through 70.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you are going to finish the book with me?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are you going to do that?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Judah, are you behind?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: The final five chapters, the final five devotionals will be up this week.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I promise.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And ah, this has been such a blessing for me.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also a blessing when I hear from you that you've uh that you're doing it, or even that you're using these devotions, that they've helped you.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is just a super, super, super blessing.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And my title this morning, by the way, is my substitute.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I get to preach.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm scared to preach.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm honored to preach.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: The single greatest passage in the entire Old Testament.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm humbled by it.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It has brought me to tears as I have studied.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It makes me a little scared.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like lightning would come down and zap me if I don't honor this amazing passage.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you have the Bible open to Isaiah chapter 53.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 53.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you first on a doorway into the passage, is I want to talk to you about feeling or being underestimated, overlooked, taken for granted.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Starts when you're young, when your great aunt grabs a hunk of your upper cheek and shakes it.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: You'd like her to treat you a little older.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: But you know that she sort of underestimates you.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're just a little kid.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it gets worse when you're in junior high in high school.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: You'll be talking with someone in the hallway at school.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You listen to them.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's your turn to talk.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: You start talking.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: The moment you start talking, you see their eyes, and they're not looking at you.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking behind you, they're looking around, they're looking at looking for someone else, they're looking for someone cool, you know.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you can tell they're not listening to you.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care about what you're talking about.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you feel overlooked.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You have that hollow feeling inside.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, you go to a party, maybe a dinner party, but afterwards they say, hey, let's play card game, or let's play charades or something.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Divide into teams.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then you hear some shouting.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want uh I want Kelly on my team.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I want, sorry, Kelly, sorry, it's the first name that came out.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want Jason on my team, whatever.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so everybody's going, they sort of divided up teams, and then they look around and they realize nobody called out your name.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're the only one left.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, Oh, sorry about that.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: You go on this team over here.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you know that since the teams are now five to four, you really don't matter.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: They know that you can't place your eights or something like that, right?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: You feel taken for granted.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Night before last, I was at a dinner party down in Arkansas.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just seven of us, really nice dinner.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: We were either faculty members or board members in my case at John Brown University.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Great dinner.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're going around, we're each sharing part of our story.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Laughter, you know, just it's just it's just cool.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some really interesting people.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Six of us have shared.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: One person's left.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: She's a first-year teacher.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Her husband's not with her.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: She's short, she's quiet.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: She hasn't smoking that much.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, before she shares, someone cries out, man, this has been great.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's run out to the kitchen and get some dessert.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at her, she's to my left.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I see this look cross her face.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what the look was like.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, okay, I've been overlooked.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that went right, but that's what happens.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it just happens, doesn't it?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what it's like.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of us knows what it's like to feel underestimated, overlooked, taken for granted, because even the best of us are that way.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: 110 years ago, 1900, the science world was writing, there was an article in uh Nature magazine back in 1900 that all of the great scientific discoveries had already been now been made.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: All we needed to do was wrap it up with a small one.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Take the world of physics.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: They thought everything had been discovered, but everything had been discovered was something visible.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was macro in the macro world, stuff you could look at it with a telescope.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had gotten into the micro world.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2005, a series of articles was published in a German magazine on physics.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: The articles were written by a nobody, by uh uh an examiner third class in a Swiss patent office who had no access to a university or a major library or a laboratory, but it started pinning articles.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Albert Einstein.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the three articles are still regarded as three of the are the greatest articles ever written in the realm of physics.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: The first one explained the importance of light, talking about its speed.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: The second proved that atoms actually existed.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was in some doubt.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the third one simply changed the world.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was on something called the special theory of relativity.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: The moment it didn't include the famous uh E equals MC squared, but it didn't include a lot of things.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: There was no math in it, no footnotes, nobody even named.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was like somebody as a scientist later says like he was sitting in a chair and just was thinking.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the truth is that he was in a patent office, examiner third class, having recently been turned down to be examiner second class, and simply looking out the window, and a theory of the universe that would change everything.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: A theory that said that energy is simply another word for mass, that is your body or the stage or the pew you're in, is simply that mass is simply energy waiting to get out.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And energy is simply mass or matter that has been liberated.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the factor between them is C squared, that is the speed of light squared, which is such a huge number that get this, no matter how big or how small you are.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you're an average-sized adult, for instance, wives, your husband has the power and the energy of 30 rather large hydrogen bombs, if you could simply convert him to that.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this afternoon when he's eating Doritos on the couch, you can't see any energy at all.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: But that was the formula.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact of the matter is, young Albert had always been overlooked, underestimated, taken for granted, because he was born in a small Jewish family in southern Germany, and his older sister Maria called him uh the doofus, or you know, something like that in German.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Deperte, the dopey one, because he didn't learn how to talk until he was three years old, and he didn't learn how to write until he was seven years old, and he went to high school where he was sort of an average student, and he and he didn't make it into college the first time he applied.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And when he went to this college or institute, which spat out physics teachers, he couldn't get hired as a physics teacher, even in elementary school later.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: So from 2000, 2001, 2002, he was like an assistant, finally got a job as an examiner third class in a patent office, but he started thinking about physics.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And these papers were totally ignored because what scientist around the world is going to pay attention to a bureaucrat in a patent office?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It took 15 years and the end of World War I for him to be discovered.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was that overlooked.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But listen very carefully.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: 1900 years before that, another Jewish boy was overlooked.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: A Jewish boy who also was underestimated by his own family, was rejected and ignored, overlooked and underestimated by all of the people around him.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until after he died that people began to finally understand the great person he was.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking yesterday as I was driving back, there's a sort of an appreciation gap or a recognition gap for each of us.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is how we should be recognized or appreciated, and the lower number, which is how we are appreciated, because we're often overlooked.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, admittedly, there's movie stars and other people, and after a while, if you ever get to know one or spend time around one, you'll go, you know, their appreciation gap is way too high.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you ever got to know them, you know, they can't add two plus three.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: But sorry, that wasn't nice.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: But but I'd say the average gap for you and me is about the size of about the height of this stage, about two feet.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we should be honored or appreciated or recognized a little more than we are.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But for Einstein, I think it would be the height of this building, about 50 feet or 100 feet, right?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: But for the Lord Jesus Christ, the gap between his appreciation, how he was appreciated and recognized, and how he should have been glorified, appreciated, and recognized is as large as the universe, which we know because of Einstein's theory and others, is continue in Hubble, is continually expanding and now encompasses no less than 180 billion galaxies.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the gap between how Jesus should be appreciated and how he is appreciated is from right here to the very edge of the universe.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to show that to you in our passage today because that's a big part of the theme of Isaiah chapter 53.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 53 appears right in the middle of the second half of Isaiah, all right?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there are prophecies all through the second part.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the first nine chapters, the prophet Isaiah is predicting a hundred plus years ahead of time, he's telling the Jewish people that they're going to be liberated from Babylon.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's incredible, okay?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And God's continually saying in these nine chapters, do you know any other gods who can predict the future?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't any.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in these nine chapters, and we're right in the middle, in the heart of them, when we get to Isaiah 52, 13 through Isaiah 53, 12, okay?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: We have distant prophecies where Isaiah the prophet is looking 700 plus years into the future and talking about a servant, a special individual servant who's going to save the world not from Babylon, but from sin, far more important.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Next week, in my final message in this series, I'll take a chapter from the last section because it's perfect for Palm Sunday, because it's all predictions of the future when Jesus returns as our glorious king, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Rides into the city of Jerusalem.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: But this morning we have the greatest passage.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's up there with Genesis 1, Psalm 23, and so forth in the entire Bible.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's the fourth of the four servant songs.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you have these four famous servant prophecies or servant songs in the last half of the book that predict, talk about what we would say, Jesus or Yeshua.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: The first one tells us that he's going to be successful at achieving God's plan.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: The second one tells us that halfway through his ministry, he told his father that he felt like a failure, and God said, Hey, I'm going to give you a bigger job to win the whole world.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 50, two weeks ago, is where he told, uh where the servant spoke up and he said, Wow, I have learned how to comfort the needy because I have suffered.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And now we get to the greatest suffering of all in Isaiah 53.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in these nine verses right in the middle, verses one through three are going to tell us he was overlooked.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Four through six gonna tell us that he's our substitute, seven through nine, that he was submissive.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: A week ago I thought I was gonna preach on all 15 verses.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday morning I thought I can only preach on the middle nine, the middle three stanzas.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And last night I decided I don't think there's any way I can get beyond the first six.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna hit stanzas two and three.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is so interesting, okay?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Follow along here because you have a strange beginning.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 1, who has believed?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Your translation may say our report, but the people talking here didn't make the report.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: They heard the report.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Who's believed the report we heard?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Answer none of us.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Very few people believed the rumors we heard about Yeshua.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, who's believed the report and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: The key question in this section is who's the we?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Who's speaking here?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is one you won't believe.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is that Isaiah's looking down through history and he basically sees, shall we say, a couple of disciples, a couple of converts to Christianity who weren't converts before the resurrection, but maybe they heard Peter's sermon in Acts 2.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they're talking to each other and they're going, like, who knew?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: We participated in crucifying him.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: We rejected him.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: We overlooked him.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: We took him for granted.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, how are we supposed to know?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: In verses 1 through 3, they're gonna talk about how come they overlooked him, and basically they're gonna say, hey, we admit it.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: We blew it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: We blew it.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't recognize Jesus.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly shouldn't have underestimated him and certainly not crucified him.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Notice how they say it.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: So in verse one, uh, we're gonna have them say, Who has believed the report we heard?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Who believed the rumor?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And they're gonna say, basically, nobody.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: The common people, you know, were saying, hey, he's a miracle worker.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, we think he might be the Messiah.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they talk to each other, they go, you know what, we we were like national leaders.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, since when would that guy be the Messiah?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what was there to kind of prove to us that Jesus was the Messiah?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: We had every reason to think he wasn't.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Common people, who can trust them?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And even the common people were so fickle that last week of Jesus' life.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they'd scream for him when he came in the doors and shout, crucify him five days later.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So why should we believe them?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And why would we ever believe that the arm of the Lord was him?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've been waiting for the arm of the Lord.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: The arm of the Lord has been promised to save us.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 52 of Isaiah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you realize this, but if you were to talk to God about his arm and say, Do you really have an arm?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: God would say, Well, have you ever read Psalm 8?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've got fingers.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're we're we're we're where the Lord says, uh, where in Psalm 8, he says, um, um, Lord, hasn't thy name and all the earth, set the glory above the heavens, out of the mouths of babe and sickness and didn't shrink because I didn't still the end of the.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: When I consider thy heavens, sorry about that, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which God has ordained, if you talk to God, God say, Um, yeah, yeah, those 180 billion galaxies, and you're gonna discover another 20 billion galaxies, you know, pretty soon here.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Child's play.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Finger work, no problem.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Just flick those babies out into space.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of them has a hundred billion stars.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, no problem.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Just like marbles, no problem.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, Well, when it comes to saving us, and God says, Whoa, hold it, that was a lot harder.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fingers wouldn't work for that.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had to flex my arm, I had to pull up my sleeve, I had to go for it.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, so you got these two guys going, you know, how were what in the world told us that that this Yeshua was the mighty arm of the Lord?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: For after all, verse two, he, meaning the servant, grew up before him, meaning Father God, like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: His back background, in other words, was unimpressive.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Unimpressive.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, all he was was this little uh, and the word here is not really even young plant, it's a sucker plant.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: You have you ever tried to pull these things out?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you grow tomatoes, you know what those little sucker plants are.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: They you gotta pull them off, or your tomatoes won't be any good.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: For me, we got all these trees around our place, and I got all these sucker plants growing up.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, oh, those are so pretty.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, they're not.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go in there around every one of my hundred trees, and you gotta clip all of these suckers off.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they call them sucker plants, you know, because they take energy away from the tree.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the and the and the Jews are going, you know what?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: If Jesus had been a hero, if he'd been Thor, if he'd been Superman or whatever, he's supposed to be a tree, not a sucker plant after all.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, blessed is the man that walks not in the council of the ungodly.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: He should be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Heroes, leaders, God's people are trees.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're not sucker plants.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeshua bore no resemblance to a tree, not to the apple tree and song of Solomon, not to the fig tree or the olive, not to the oak tree.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was, I mean, he looked at him.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: He looked like a sucker plant that sucks energy away from the trees.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why in the world should we follow him?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was a root out of dry ground.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: A root out of dry ground, born in a cave.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't, you know, he's not a tree born by moist water.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Since when is when is a hero born in a cave?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Since when does he grow up in Nazareth, Texas?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Population 300.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: What good can come out of Nazareth?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's a nobody.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: His father's a carpenter.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Are we gonna listen to him?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, he wasn't born in Rome, he wasn't born in Jerusalem, he didn't have any blue blood.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's a he's basically the kind of a person you ignore.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's working an examiner level number three at a Swiss patent office.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why in the world should we listen to him or pay any attention to him?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what they're saying to each other.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: We overlooked him for good reason.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, nor appearance that we should desire him.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody voted him best-looking boy in class.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and the thing is they would say, look at our heroes, King David.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It says that David, using the same words, had form and he had majesty.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you look what it says about Joseph in the book of Genesis.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: It says he had form, he had majesty.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe he wasn't a movie star, but I mean he had a look about him.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus didn't have a look about him.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: He he not only didn't come from an impressive background, his appearance was entirely ordinary.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Quick little confession here.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: This is a little bit of an embarrassing story.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: In my third year of seminary, three of us guys who were buddies, Bruce, Bob, and I, decided that we would go live off campus.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: We decided we'd rent a house.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we found a little house.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're uh we drove up, we've rented the house, and now we're gonna move our stuff into the house.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there happened to be a single woman uh living next door.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she sees me carrying stuff up, and she comes out and she asks if I'll come over and check something underneath her sink, and I'm so naive.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And anyway, so I'm in her house, and you know, she and and she's being real friendly and all that.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then she straightens up as I'm under the sink or whatever, and there's nothing wrong, I don't think, but she looks out the window and she sees Bruce.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: You need to understand that Bruce, my best friend, had worked his way through high school in Southern California as a male model.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So she sees him, she takes the name of the Lord our God in vain and leaves immediately, making a beeline for him.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that fall I happened to be studying in Hebrew, advanced Hebrew, I'm studying this half of Isaiah.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: I get to this passage.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling I'm admitting my sin, but I said, I'm more like Jesus than Bruce.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Although the truth is that's the only way in which I was more like Jesus than Bruce was.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought, you know, compared to Bruce, I have an entirely ordinary appearance.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: But but Jesus, you know, and now down through the years, people have tried to draw Jesus.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they've tried, art has tried to represent him.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the earliest art that we have of Jesus, hundreds of years later, were these Byzantine icons, and they pictured him as a homely person, much more like Isaiah.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the better looking, by the way, icons, Greek Orthodox icons that you can find, but still you can tell it's not somebody you're gonna scream, and you know, groupies aren't gonna go hear him sing a rock concert or anything.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, so uh over the years, of course, though, every culture has come up with their own picture of Christ.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a Chinese Christ, a Haitian Christ, and so forth and so on.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, sometime back, a long time ago, a guy named Warner Solman, something like that, came up with the famous head of Christ, which has been reproduced a half million times or this morning, makes it a half million and three.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: But uh anyway, so uh all of a sudden, this is what our kids grow up.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: With and he's a little taller than the rest of the disciples, and he's good looking, and he has pretty long hair and he sort of glows.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm really not criticizing because confession, full confession, I carried that picture in my wallet for 20 years until it fell apart.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because I had uh I'd promised a guy loaned me his brand new car in Pennsylvania to deliver books one time on the condition, wouldn't cost me a thing, but I had to carry this picture of Jesus in my wallet till it fell apart.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was halfway through my ministry here that I could finally take the pieces out of my wallet.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, all I'm why am I going there?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: All I'm saying is I'm not critical of this.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: All I'm saying is that we need to remember that Jesus was not a rock star in appearance.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't somebody who had that it, that magnetism factor, you know, that charisma that just radiated that would cause people to yell from across the street, you know, and point at them.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's Jordan Spieth, you know, nothing like that.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: So uh because he really had, he came from an ordinary background, he had an ordinary appearance, therefore he was easy to overlook.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 3 continues, he was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew sickness.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the point here is that people sort of looked away from Jesus because he had so many of his own problems.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you know what this is like because let's say in high school you had a really bad acne problem, or maybe in your life you've had a disability for some period of time, or had to wear really thick glasses, and sometimes you catch people sort of staring at you, and you look at them, then they look away.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how we're a little embarrassed around people who are sick or who have a disability or something like that, mental or physical?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the point being made here.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was like someone people turned away from.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't value him.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because he was just that average or a little under-average, the C minus guy, and so we underestimated him, we overlooked him, but I mean, who knew?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Who knew?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's verses one through three.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we didn't believe in him before we heard Peter preach and he rose from the dead?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why did Israel reject him?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: You go, well, we we frankly we overlooked him because he didn't look like royalty.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why John says he came to his own and his own received him not.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we say home is where when you go there they have to take you in, but that wasn't true of the Lord Jesus, was it?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because he went to his home and they didn't take him in.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: They overlooked him, they underestimated him, they took him for granted.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end, taking him for granted, they rejected and killed him.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: But why did he die?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, why, if this was God's purpose, why did he die?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: In 2004, Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ came out, and the question, why did he die, actually, as a result, made it under the front cover of Time magazine and Newsweek and so forth.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: The single most important question that anyone can ever ask in their life is why did Jesus die?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: A book was written, by the way, right after the movie: 50 Reasons Why Jesus Died, making the argument that that was the most important question of the 21st century.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know whether it's the most important question of the century, but it's probably the most important question that's ever been asked.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: And verses four through six explain or answer the question of why he died, beginning with the words yet, he himself bore.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: The picture there is carrying a heavy load.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you've ever injured a rib, say, and you can't carry a suitcase or a box, you're asking somebody else to carry it for you.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so our sicknesses, our pains were a heavy load, and he bore them.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, isn't it interesting?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't start off with sins, he starts off by talking about sicknesses and pains.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, what he's talking about there are the consequences of sin.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sin has led to pain in life.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: What a friend we have in Jesus.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: All our what?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sins and griefs to bear.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's where this comes from, that sins and pains are related.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And one day, sin and pain and grief and death one day will eventually go.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Forever.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: When God heals miraculously today, as he sometimes does, of sickness, yes, that's because of the atonement.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: But there's no guarantee that we'll all live forever right now, that we'll never die, or that we'll never get sick, or we'll never have grief.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a guarantee that one day that will happen.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it all can be traced back to what the Lord Jesus did.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: He bore our sin and our grief and carried our pains the way that the sheep in the Old Testament on the Day of Atonement carried the sins, you could say, and the pains out of town.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: He took our pain.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's verse four.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Verse five will be he took our punishment, verse six will be he took our place.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: He took our pain.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: And throughout verses four through six, you may want to underline almost every line has the word our in it or we.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, notice the contrast, but we in turn regarded him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: He we now know he was carrying our pain, but back then what we thought was that God was judging him justly for his sin, because the Old Testament tells us that God blesses us when we are righteous and he causes us pain.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: When we're unrighteous, therefore, when he bled and when he suffered, and when he was on the cross, which is a place of cursing, we assumed that was all part of God's doing, and so we chipped in.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We helped hammer the nails because we thought God was judging him.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: We thought he was empowered by the devil.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: We jumped to conclusions, we blew it, we admit, but we regarded him as being punished by God.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, by the way, Jews still feel this way, right?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Jewish people still overlook Yeshua.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: As a whole, Jewish people do.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's revivals going on like crazy, both in the Muslim and the Jewish world today.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in Jews for Jesus, we had Avi last week, it was wonderful.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: When I joined Jews for Jesus on the board at the year 2000, our smallest branch in the world was Israel with one missionary, and it is now our largest branch with almost 40 Israeli-born converts to Jesus Christ, young people on fire to share the gospel.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: God's doing wonderful things, but still, Jewish people overlook, misunderstand, underestimate, and take Yeshua for granted, thinking that he died because God was punishing him and he couldn't be the Messiah.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 5, but he was pierced because of our rebellion.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was crushed because of our iniquities.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: He took the punishment that we deserved.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Pierced through, crushed.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's Isaiah 53, 5A and B goes, punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason he did this that had a positive purpose, because the plan of God was to give us peace, or shalom is the word.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is whole well-being, right?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: And healing.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's God's intent.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: It may have seemed like an accident, it may have seemed like a mistake, but we now realize too that God's plan was behind all this.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to the John 3.16 of the Old Testament.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's Isaiah 53.6.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: We all, like sheep, have gone astray.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sheep wander.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Amen, right?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sheep wander.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: We all have turned to our own way.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sheep are independent, even though they're super weak.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: They just have their own mind.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're like a little toddler who just wanders out into traffic.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like that.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're like sheep who've gone astray.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've turned to our own way.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we all, and the first word of the verse in Hebrew, by the way, is all, and the last word of the verse is all.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: We all were foolish, independent, and guilty.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's just who we were.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, we were headed for hell.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're headed for an eternity apart from God.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's a way that seems right to a man or a sheep, but its end is the way to death.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: And only God could come up with a solution, and he did.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: He laid on his servant the iniquity of us all.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Laid sounds like laying a carpet on a bed or laying dishes in a you know cupboard.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: But and admittedly, this word is only used once, but it there's no doubt that this is more than laid.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a strong word.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's related to an Arabic word and it and it means struck, like striking an image into a coin or branding a sheep.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord struck into Jesus the iniquity of us all.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: He was hanging on the cross, and God took your sin and he took my sin.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: He took all of our griefs and pains and he took them all and he branded Jesus with his.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: He tattooed them on Jesus' soul.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: He struck them into him, and as a result, in that moment, God the Father could not, a holy God could not continue his intimate fellowship, which had existed from eternity past and will exist to eternity future with his son.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Best friends, beloved son, and yet in that moment he had to cut off intimacy, causing the son to scream out on the cross, Eloy, Eloy, Lama Sabactani.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: A scream that you should scream, that I should have screamed if Jesus Yeshua had not taken that scream, if he had not taken the whippings, the nails, the beatings, the crown of thorns, if he had not taken our griefs and our pains and our sin and our iniquities, if he had not taken our place, we would be screaming that for eternity.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: He took our pain.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: He took our punishment.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: He took our place.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty years ago, Jonesboro, Arkansas, the story still chills your heart about these two boys with guns who were shooting kids as they came out of the elementary school.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ended up killing, uh, as I recall, four children and one teacher, wounding five, six others.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: The teacher died because she jumped, shielding with her body a sixth-grade boy that was about to be shot.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: She substituted her body for his.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: She took his bullet.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord Jesus Christ on the cross substituted for you and for me.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: He took the bullets, he took the death that was ours.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: He stole our death.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody wrote a book with that title.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: He stole our death.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that when President Eisenhower was dying and he asked them to call Billy Graham to his bedside, and Billy Graham came, he said to Billy Graham, Can an old sinner like me go to heaven?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Billy Graham said, Old sinner, young sinner, big sinner, small sinner, all sinners can go to heaven because Jesus died in our place if you will believe in him.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Dwight David Eisenhower did.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: He probably had already.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: Philip P.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Bliss wrote a song called Hallelujah, What a Savior.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And before his death, he went down to Jackson, Mississippi, to sing that song, which he had written based on Isaiah 53.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they say that he never sang his song better than that day in that prison.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: The words went like this man of sorrows, what a name for the Son of God who came.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Ruined sinners to reclaim.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: What a savior.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: Bearing shame and scoffing rude in my place, condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: What a savior.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Guilty, vile, and helpless we, spotless Lamb of God, was he, full atonement.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can it be?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: What a savior.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Lifted up was he to die.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is finished, was his cry.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now in heaven, exalted high.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: What a savior.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you or a friend of yours ever wonder how you can be sure that he died in your place and you can go to heaven, well, you need to think no further than just these two stanzas of Isaiah 53.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: You need to move from this place of overlooking, underestimating, and taking for granted the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and move to the place where you see him as taking your pain, taking your punishment, and taking your place on the cross.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: In a sense, you enter into the front door of verse 6 and out the back door.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Both doors are labeled all, L A L L.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: All we like sheep have gone astray.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: You bend down because that door is low, it requires some humility to confess to God that you need him, that you're a sinner.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: You crouch down low when you enter into verse six by that door.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then as he takes your death, as he takes your place, then you can stand, stand up tall and walk out the back door all, knowing that you have eternal life.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Join me in a word of prayer, and then let's do what's perfectly appropriate now, which is to take the bread and the cup and remember Jesus' death.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, I pray for all here who are unsure, unsure, that they have followed you down the Isaiah 53 path, that you've died in their place.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Would you assure them of that this morning?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: As they believe your report, as they see the arm of the Lord revealed in your life, in their lives.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as we uh take the bread, your body, drink the cup, your blood, help us not, those of us who've taken this a thousand times, not to overlook you, not to take this for granted, but as your son said, to remember his death in a special way this morning, thanking you for your plan and your son for substituting for our death.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.