Do You See a Gap Between Scripture and Your Life? | Servant Song IV: Isaiah 49

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Now, while these are pictures of Christ, I want to encourage you again not to get ahead.

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There is a very clear progression in these things that are said in 42, prepare us for 49, and those for 50, and that for 53.

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Isaiah 53, as wonderful as it is, will carry so much more weight with you, will be a much greater benefit to your soul if you understand 42, 49, and 50 that preceded it.

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But the temptation for all of us is, because we know this is speaking of Christ, and we know our

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New Testaments, we want to jump right in, in the middle of the prophet teaching us. So in 42 or 49, you know, as soon as we recognize descriptions, foreshadowings of Christ, we want to raise our hand like children in Sunday school and say, oh, oh, oh,

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I know who that's referring to, and immediately we take what we know of Christ, and we inject it into the passage.

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The problem with that is you don't really learn anything new about your Lord. You just really repeat what you already know, and you become the teacher instead of the prophet

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Isaiah, and no matter how good a teacher you are, I think that's a bad trade. I would much rather have

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Isaiah teach John Snyder than John Snyder teach John Snyder. Well, in Isaiah 49, we see for the first time one of the really rare benefits of these songs, and that is that we're allowed to enter into the interiority of the human struggles of Jesus of Nazareth, truly

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God, truly man, sinless man, but not effortless human life.

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We're going to see how the Messiah speaks to the Father and the trial and the triumph of his faith when everything around him in his ministry seems not to match up with what the scripture said it would be.

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Sometimes people say to the Christian, I'm sure that your faith is a great comfort to you. They say that to us in difficult times, like a funeral or when you lose a job, and they mean well, but they don't really understand faith.

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For one thing, faith isn't the great comfort to the Christian. It's the great realities that faith lays hold of.

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And faith is just the empty hand that takes hold of God's realities as he's revealed them in scripture.

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It's not hopefulness that we live on. It's facts, but facts lived upon by faith.

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But there are times in the Christian life, many times, where what we believe breaks our heart.

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And so, like the psalmist in Psalm 77, we read this in verse 3 and 5 and 10.

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He says, when I remember God, then I am disturbed. When I sigh, then my spirit grows faint.

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I have considered the days of old, the years of long ago. Then I said, it is my grief that the right hand of the

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Most High has changed. Perhaps you recognize that kind of struggle. When I go back and I open my

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Bible and I remember the great things about God, and I remember the things that he did in times past for his people, and then

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I look at today, then I feel it's as if God's strong right arm has changed.

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Now we know that's not true, but because we believe that's not true, it bothers us that what we're seeing and how we're living and what's happening in our marriages, in our homes, our churches, and what we see when we look in the spiritual mirror, it seems so distant from what

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I'm reading in the Bible. I read what God has provided for the believer in the new covenant. I read what

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Paul says about not being in the realm of the law and under the curse of the law and the dominion of sin, but being in a realm of grace and graciously ruled by this

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King of grace and no longer a slave of sin. And yet when I look in the mirror, I don't know how to justify the gap.

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How do you respond when what you believe breaks your heart, when there's an apparent gap between what you're reading in scripture and what you're living?

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For the unbeliever, of course, it's easy because the unbeliever doesn't believe the Bible. And so it doesn't bother an unbeliever to hear a sermon about the

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Christian life and then to look in the mirror and say, well, there's no connection between what I'm doing and what I'm hearing.

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I think to a misguided believer, oftentimes this doesn't bother them as well because they say, well,

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I have been taught that I'm supposed to accept these New Testament statements as fact, but I'm not to expect the experience of these.

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So Ephesians one and two, I believe them. Ephesians three, and especially the end of Ephesians three, as well as the end of Ephesians one, where Paul prays for the experiential understanding of these things.

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Well, that's not really for us. And it's almost as if faith is simply accepting religious words without expecting to live and experience them.

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But I think the healthy believer is bothered when what we experience, how we're living and what we're seeing, especially in God's people and in ourselves, seems to be so distant from what the scripture says.

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So what do you do with that? Well, the best pattern is our Lord, how he lived on what the father said to him as a man, when it didn't appear to match up with what he was experiencing.

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Well, thank you for watching the clip. We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.