The Father's Response to the Son | Clip from Servant Song IV

The Messiah Preaching to Himself in Isaiah 49

Now, in verse 5 and following, we find the Messiah preaching to himself. It reminds me of what Lloyd-Jones said, that in difficult times, quit listening to yourself and start preaching to yourself, if you understand what he means.

Don't just kind of let your mind run into fears and doubts and complaints in the soul. Go to scripture, lay hold of facts, take them in hand, and speak to yourself the true things. So listen to verse 5.

And now, says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, so that Israel might be gathered to him. For I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God is my strength.

The Father's Answer to the Son's Complaint

We're going to get to listen now to what the father said to the son when the son poured out his heart to the father, saying, it feels as if what I'm doing is resulting in nothing. It's purposeless. Verse 6, he, the father, says, it is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel.

I will also make you a light of the nations, so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. That's what the father said to the son. And we get to listen to it. So he reminds himself who it is that's speaking to him, God, the one who formed him and called him for the task, the one that sent him to raise up stumbling, fallen Israel.

And he listens to what the father says. And the father says such a wonderful thing. This one phrase, it is too small a thing, too small a thing. You're preaching, you're laboring, and the Jews are rejecting you, and it breaks your heart.

But I want to tell you, the father says to the son, that it is too small a thing for a servant like you to rescue only the remnant from Israel. But I will send you to bring salvation to the nations. You will be the light or the truth to all the world.

You will be their salvation. Later, he says, you will command the prison doors to open and you will call the captives out of their dungeon. Wonderful, quick look at what Isaiah says in chapter 49 about the servant, the one that's the beloved of the father, the faithful servant.

Chapter 49, immediately we see he encounters resistance. He lays his complaint before the father. Why is this so? Is it really for nothing? It's what it feels like. The father answers him. And the son of God, without sin, passes through that trial of faith and triumphs by grabbing hold of the word of his father and living on it.

Now, Christian, two very simple applications. Do you adore the Jesus that really is? We might not ever have thought of Christ in this way. We might have thought that the deity, the godness of the God-man overruled any questions, any agonizing times of prayer.

You say, well, I feel like that and I cry out to the Lord, but I can't imagine Jesus of Nazareth doing that. Well, then you would be wrong. So every time we come to the scripture, we have a chance to adjust our view of Christ to what the scripture says, to let the Bible alter our view of Christ, to make it clearer, more mature, enlarge it, and then we adore him.

But also, now that we have a clearer picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, especially in difficult times, not only do we adore him better, you ought to follow him more closely. Every believer can read Isaiah 49 and recognize the struggle in your own life, whether it's struggles with your own sanctification and what you're reading in the Bible doesn't seem to be matching what you're seeing in your life, or whether it's the struggle of loving people around you and bringing the gospel to them and helping true Christians to grow and being a part of a body, a church, the body of Christ, and all the problems that come with that in this present life.

How do you lay your soul's complaints before God without sin? And how do you take hold of truth and continue in a way that triumphs, that obeys in the midst of so many struggles? So we follow Jesus of Nazareth even there.

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