Where Do You Look in Dark Spiritual Times?
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The servants songs are so sweet in part because of their dark context. They are in a time of great judgement. They are in the midst of a dark night of the soul. But they are told to look at Christ. The same is true for us. Where do we look in those dark times of our lives? We must obey this command to look at Christ.
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- And we are in our second of a number of episodes where we're going to be looking at Isaiah's great servant songs.
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- Isaiah chapter 42, 49, 50, and 53, in which we have this gentle unfolding, a progressive revealing of the glorious person and work of Jesus Christ in our rescue.
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- It's like standing back a people who once sat in great darkness and we're watching the sunrise creep over the horizon.
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- And with each minute, you know, as you watch the sun come up, it's amazing all that we can see.
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- The land is now filled with light and the Christian life, you know, just opens up before us as we see it in light of Christ.
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- Today, we're going to try to answer a question that will help us to really benefit from these four songs.
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- So we're actually not getting to the songs yet. My question is this, where do you look when you find yourself in particularly dark spiritual times?
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- You know, not the kind that where you would say, well, you know, that was a pretty rough day, but that was a pretty rough week, month, you know, year, where there seems to be an encroaching sense of spiritual despair.
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- And even though you've searched your soul before the Lord with an open Bible and asked him, you know, is there sin that I'm protecting from you?
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- You know, you've laid your pleas before him and it still seems that things just get darker.
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- Where do you look? And of course, the right answer is that you look to him.
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- I look to God. Particularly, I look at the one God sent to save me.
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- Isaiah 45, verse 22, Look unto me, all you ends of the earth, and be saved, for I am
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- God and there is none else. And that's a true answer. And the songs open with this.
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- Do you remember in chapter 40, verse 9, the big picture of the magnitude of this
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- God that's coming to save us. In verse 9, it says, Behold your God. Look at your
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- God. Here he comes. In chapter 42, the first song, the first verse says this,
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- Behold my servant. The final song in Isaiah chapter 53, which actually begins in chapter 52, verse 12 of our
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- English Bibles. It says, Behold my servant. So when we come to these songs, we want to make it very clear.
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- There are bookends. There are commands. And the command is the same.