What’s Wrong?
Read: Luke 15:1-7 All we like sheep have gone astray. (v. 6) The prayer of confession for the morning service in the Book of Common Prayer teaches us to pray like this: “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices […]
The Suffering Savior
Read: Isaiah 53:4-5 With his wounds we are healed. (v. 5) The Apostles’ Creed, the most ancient summary of Christian belief, describes the entire earthly life of Jesus between his birth and death with just one word: he suffered. When the Creed speaks of the suffering of Christ, it is referring above all to his […]
Jesus Is Accursed!
Read: 1 Corinthians 12:1-3 Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God. (Isa. 53:4) Imagine that you are part of a gathering for worship at a Jewish synagogue in a typical first-century Greek city—let’s say Corinth—in AD 50, give or take a year or two. The preacher, Saul of Tarsus, tells the story of Jesus’s […]
A Man of Sorrows
Read: John 11:32-43 . . . a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. (Isa. 53:3) Some people are spared much of the pain and sorrow of life. For them the sun always seems to be shining. They live and love and work and play and are scarcely touched by trouble or loss. But Jesus […]
Rejected
Read: Isaiah 53:3 He was despised and rejected by men. (v. 3) Of all the pains life can hold, among the bitterest is the pain and hurt of rejection. Some of us have tasted that and the effects still linger. To be told that you’re not wanted, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t […]
The Anonymous Messiah
Read: Acts 8:26-39 Who is the prophet talking about? (v. 34 NIV) When the Messiah would come into the world, says Isaiah, he wouldn’t “fit the profile.” He wouldn’t stand head and shoulders above the crowd like King Saul. He wouldn’t chase out the Romans and set up the kingdom of Greater Israel. As far […]
The Ugliness of Jesus
Read: Isaiah 52:13-53:2 He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (v. 2 NIV) Isaiah is sometimes called the fifth gospel. Though written centuries before, the portrait of the suffering servant of God—especially in chapter 53—describes in remarkable detail the actual experience of […]
Dying with Christ, Living with Christ
Read: Romans 6:1-11 If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him. (2 Tim. 2:11-12) You are likely familiar with talk about Jesus’s death on the cross. Christ died for us, for our sins. But for Christians, there is another way to think […]
Working Out Our Salvation
Read: Philippians 2:12-13 Be holy, because I am holy. (1 Peter 1:16 NIV) Martin Luther described the dynamics of the Christian life this way: “This life is not health but healing; not being but becoming; not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing towards it . . […]