In Isaiah 50 verse 4, the Lord God,
speaking of the Lord Jesus here, hath given
me the tongue of the learned, that I
should know how to speak a word in
season to them that are weary.
He wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine
ear to hear as the learned.
But you know, beloved, once you get eaten
up with discouragement and unbelief, it takes an
awful lot of shaking you out of it.
Those two things are the master strokes of
Satan.
Let a Christian keep praising God and rejoicing
in the Lord always, and he's invincible.
But let the devil get him discouraged, and
that poor man is really going to get
knocked around.
And so today we have a word in
this chapter to the person who's discouraged, to
the person who's downhearted, to a person who
thinks, well, what's the use anyway?
For notwithstanding the promises of deliverance from exile
and the summons to depart, the Israelite could
not bring himself to believe that he could
ever be any use again.
He remembered the wastes of the past life
in Jerusalem, remembered the broken-down walls, and
felt the case to be hopeless.
But I am so glad this morning that
I know a Savior who restores to us
the years that the canker worm hath eaten.
And I am so glad that I know
a God, and when I know him, I
do know with all of my heart, it's
never too late to begin again.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
And so the call of God comes to
us afresh this morning in what I have
called retrospect and prospect.
A subheading might be a word for the
downhearted.
And God brings his people to recognize their
position and to speak to them here in
this 51st chapter by asking them to look
back at the past, to look on at
the future, and in the recognition of the
past and in the assurance of the future,
to stand their ground today.
Three times in these verses that were read
to us, you have the voice of God
saying, hearken to me, in verse 1, in
verse 4, and in verse 7.
Now, says the Lord, you've listened to about
every other voice you can.
You've listened to the Job's comforters.
You've listened to the inward whisper of the
devil saying it's useless.
You've listened to people who've told you, well,
the situation's too bad, you might as well
give up.
You've listened to that.
Now then, stop it, says the Lord, and
hearken to me.
It's possible to listen to a sermon but
never to hear it.
Now, I'm concerned this morning that you listen
and you hear.
There's always a precious orderliness in everything that
God says.
He never speaks out of order.
He never puts first things last or last
things first.
And in the first verse of this chapter,
he says, hearken to me, who?
You that follow after righteousness and seek the
Lord.
Verse 4, he says, hearken unto me, my
people.
And in verse 7, he says, hearken unto
me, ye that know my righteousness, in whose
heart is my law.
What a wonderful sequence.
If I follow after righteousness, this is an
indication that God has put a hunger for
himself in my heart and I am his.
And because I am his, therefore I will
know his righteousness and his law will be
in my heart.
God is always orderly.
What does he say then to those who
follow after righteousness?
To those who, because they follow, indicate by
so doing that they are his and they
will know his righteousness, what does he say
to them?
Remember, if you're discouraged today, just one minute,
says the Lord, just stop a moment, just
stop a moment and look back.
Verse 1, look unto the rock whence you
are hewn and to the hole of the
pit whence ye are digged.
A nation reduced at this time to a
mere little remnant, a handful, under the tyranny
of a power that seemed to be utterly
overwhelming, to whom rescue from that situation seemed
impossible, that God could ever do another thing
with them.
God says to them, now before you take
that attitude, you go right back to the
beginning and look to the rock from which
I pulled you out and the pit from
which I dug you.
Remember the lowliness and the obscurity of your
origin.
It's good for you and me to do
that.
It deepens our humility.
It magnifies the grace of God.
I pray always that God will show to
me all the possibilities in my heart because,
believe me, they are all in the downward
direction.
There are very strong ties to the pit
from which we were dug and very often
the Christian is ashamed of his likeness to
the family from which God has sent him.
It's good to look back and if we
do, none of us will boast that we're
here today, nor will we boast of any
transformation in our lives because if there be
a difference, God has done it all.
And if you look back at the origin
and at the beginning, if he has done
so much, then bless the Lord, he will
complete what he has done.
He never leaves a task half finished.
If the stone has been hewn out of
the rock, it can be polished.
If he has justified us, then he can
sanctify us.
If when we were enemies, we were reconciled
to God by his death, how much more
will we be saved by his life.
And so, it was for their encouragement that
Israel was directed to the backward look.
And even though they're only a handful now,
they're more than what God began with.
He began with one man.
Oh, but they say to him, yes, but
the pruning, the pruning and the cutting down
are so merciless and the disciplines have been
so hard to take and the punishment so
desperately difficult to bear and quite frankly, the
flesh groans under it all.
But, says God, wait.
Look how I dealt with Abraham.
You're following me, aren't you, in your Bible?
Look unto Abraham, your father, and to Sarah,
who bear you.
Just look.
God called Abraham alone, says the scripture.
Yes, alone.
In the process of that call, his father,
Tira, died.
His nephew, Lot, dropped out by the wayside.
Pace was too hot for him.
His wife's plan, that Abraham should have a
child by another woman, in order to hasten
the promise of God, fell apart.
Isaac, the child of promise, was laid on
the altar and Abraham's faith was tried almost
beyond endurance.
Twenty-five years went past between the time
that God promised him a child and the
child was born.
By that time, natural force was spent.
And then, when the child was born, there
came may I say it reverently, the ridiculous
command, looking at it from the human angle,
the ridiculous command to slay the child of
promise.
As if God gave him the thing that
he'd promised him and then immediately was about
to take it away.
To teach Abraham that he must be all
in all.
And this man who was to be the
father of this great nation and in whom
all families of the world should be blessed,
should be a man who had been stripped
of every bit of confidence in the flesh,
that he might die to all of that.
And there came a day, when you will
recall, the writer to the Hebrew epistle said
of him this, Thy faith Abraham, when he
was tried, when he was tested, offered up
Isaac and he that received the promises offered
up his only begotten son of whom it
was said that in Isaac shall thy seed
be called, accounting that God was able to
raise him up even from the dead.
Now, says the Lord to his discouraged people,
after all these years of testing and trial,
look back a moment, look back to the
way in which I began with you.
Like that.
And beloved, to some discouraged, disheartened Christian today,
God is asking you to do this very
thing.
For the way in which God dealt with
Abraham is exactly the way in which he
deals with you and with me.
It's typical.
As he takes his child to be his
own and as we're born again of the
spirit he begins from that moment and he
cuts down to the very roots of myself
until he strips us of reputation and prestige,
nothing of this to hinder our progress, but
that there might be a destruction of every
bit of confidence in that life that I
might wait upon him for the abounding inflow
of his grace and power.
God hasn't any taste for big battalions or
great big regiments.
He chooses an Abraham, a Gideon, a Luther,
a Livingston, a Carey, a Wesley, a Judson,
a Brainerd, a D.L. Moody.
And through one man, just through one man
who's followed and accepted the principles of God's
dealing and who's stood, as it were, under
the pruning knife.
Through that man, God in history has brought
whole nations to the feet of the Lord
Jesus, clothed and in the right mind.
Well, Abed, are you feeling the hopelessness of
your case today?
Are you feeling under a cloud?
Do you feel it's just hopeless to continue?
Well then, for a moment, remember the pit.
Consider the grace of God.
Are you but a little tiny channel for
his blessing and think you don't count why
the whole ocean of his fullness can be
poured into your life?
The question is not what you can do
or what you can't do at this point,
but what are you willing for God to
do?
And the only condition of accomplishment is his
presence in your heart.
And therefore today, something happens to a Christian
who recognizes this.
I'll show it to you.
Look at verse 3 in this chapter.
What a verse it is.
Isaiah 51 and verse 3.
The Lord shall comfort Zion.
He will comfort all her waste places.
He will make her wilderness like Eden and
her desert like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving
and the voice of melody.
Fasten a moment upon words here.
Listen.
Waste places, wilderness, desert.
Does that describe you?
Is that your life?
Honestly?
Before God?
Just a waste place?
Just a wilderness?
Just a desert?
But here's God's promise to the man who's
utterly discouraged.
It's this.
The Lord will comfort Zion.
He will make the wilderness like Eden and
the desert like the garden of the Lord.
He asks you therefore today, if you're discouraged
as a Christian and on the point of
giving up, to look back to the pit
from which he digged you.
But he asks you to do something else.
He asks you to look on to future
glory.
Look at the next word.
Hearken unto me, my people.
Give ear unto me, my nation.
Verse 5.
My righteousness is near.
My salvation is gone forth and mine arms
shall judge the people.
The isles shall wait upon me and on
mine arms shall they trust.
Lift up your eyes to the heavens and
look upon the earth beneath.
For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke
and the earth shall wax old like a
garment and they that dwell therein shall die
in like manner.
But my salvation shall be forever and my
righteousness shall not be abolished.
My salvation shall be forever.
My righteousness shall not be abolished.
What is God saying?
Now he says look up to the heavens
and look down to the earth in the
midst of your testing and your discouragements and
so on.
The things that make you feel it so
hopeless.
You've taken a good look back at the
pit.
Now look on.
Look up to the heavens and look down
to the earth.
Well, they seem solid enough.
No change can come to them.
Oh yes, it can.
And indeed it will.
For one day my Bible tells me there
will be a new heavens and a new
earth and these shall wax old like a
garment.
And amidst all the wreck and all the
judgment that comes one day God's salvation, he
says, remains.
We don't know how long the world will
continue as it is.
We don't know how long before the unveiling
of the Lord.
We don't know how long before the King
shall come.
We don't know how long before the judgment
of the great throne of God.
We don't know how long before the resurrection
of the living and of the dead.
I don't know.
We don't know how long before all the
elements shall burn up, as Peter himself tells
us.
But this thing we do know, that God
and Jesus and God's people endure through it
all.
They're accepted in the Lord.
They're washed in his blood.
They're members of his body and of one
another.
They're the bride of Christ and they're absolutely
indestructible no matter what may happen all around
us.
God sees us through.
So he says to his people who are
discouraged, look on.
You see, friend, when you and I partake
of Jesus and when he comes into our
lives, I have acquired someone in my heart
who is permanent and who defies time and
change and circumstance, whatever it may be.
He's come to stay.
It isn't what I possess that's going to
stay.
It's what I am that's going to stay.
And he has come by his Spirit to
root in my heart to produce that life
in me that can never be destroyed.
What is that life?
Oh, it's the love of God shed abroad
in our hearts by the Spirit.
And it's our love for one another.
It's the patience and strength and courage and
faith which are acquired in the midst of
the furnace of trial.
These things don't vanish in a puff of
smoke.
If they did, if they did, what would
be the use of God's painstaking care over
his people?
You and I are at school today.
That's what we are.
And we'll continue in school till we get
to heaven.
The school may vanish.
The school may crash around us.
But that which I have learned and acquired
into my heart and into my life while
I have been at school will remain forever.
Christian, don't complain and murmur at God's slow
process in educating his children.
Don't complain at that.
Don't complain at the care that God takes
over his people to be sure that we
master each lesson.
Have you noticed how the Lord takes us
back and back again over the same ground
until we almost scream and we say, but
Lord, I've learned that lesson.
I'm through with that, but he'll bring us
back again to it and over and over
again.
He'll take us back to the same place
until we've learned the lesson.
You see, beloved, the Lord is not a
university professor teaching us for fifty years.
He's God eternal who's training us for eternity.
Got that?
Therefore I say, I say, don't complain at
the care that he takes.
He's working with an eternal purpose in view.
And a man's life does not consist of
that which he possesses but it consists of
meekness, faith, devotion, love, consecration, dedication, Christlikeness.
And believe me, my dear brother and sister,
many a man has forfeited everything of the
material that he might find in his life,
the reality of the spiritual.
I count all things but lust, says the
apostle Paul in Philippians 3, for the excellency
of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord,
for whom I have suffered the loss of
all things and count them but refuse that
I might be found in Christ, not having
mine own righteousness which of the law but
that which is of God through faith that
I may know him and the fellowship of
his sufferings and the power of his resurrection
and be conformed unto his death.
Ah yes, I'm at school today and so
are you, so are you.
And in the midst of discouragement and disappointment
the Lord says, now look back but look
on and all that you can see is
the immediate, is the immediate test, the immediate
trial, the immediate thing which almost you'd give
anything to get out from under.
But God says, look on, look on, be
patient, I'm not training you for a little
while down here, I'm training you to be
with me forever in glory and that takes
a while.
And I'm going to take you back and
back and back and back to the kindergarten,
to the first grade and I'm going to
go over and over and over the ground
until when you come to see me face
to face, I know you've learned the lesson,
school.
Well then beloved if this be true hearken
unto me says the Lord, look at the
pit.
Hearken unto me, look at the glory.
Hearken unto me, stand your ground.
Verse seven, he that know righteousness the people
in whose heart is my law fear ye
not the reproach of men, neither be ye
afraid of their revilings.
Now at first sight that may sound very
unusual to link together men in whose law,
in whose heart is the law of God
and in the next breath men men who
are filled with reviling on their account.
But stop a moment and check this with
your own experience and let me do the
same.
A man in whose heart is the law
of God, that is to say a man
who's born again of the Spirit and because
he's born again of the Spirit he's living
a different life.
He's had a new power imparted to him
and a new principle.
He's remembered the pit, he's looked forward to
the glory he's going through the school and
he's bearing the testings and the trials, he
sees them in a new significance now for
he sees that God has him in his
hand polishing the shaft, the stone as it
were, sanctifying the Christian, the man who's been
justified to present him one day faultless and
this man's going through school and he sees
all this and because of this, because of
this he's living his life on this new
principle.
Now listen, inevitably that man clashes with the
ungodly or shall I put it this way,
inevitably the ungodly clash with him.
When I say ungodly I don't mean somebody
who's immoral, I just simply mean what the
word says, ungodly, without God without God.
And immediately any man who lives, who lives
in the power of God's Spirit, who has
the law of God not in his head
but in his heart and who's living out
this principle of the Christian life in the
power of his indwelling with eternity in view,
immediately that man is hit head on by
every ungodly man he meets.
Of course.
Because you see, the ungodly react in self
-defense.
Either they're right and we're wrong, or we're
right and they're wrong and they're not prepared
to admit they're wrong.
And so in self-defense and in order
to establish their position and justify the stand
they take and to destroy every evidence of
spiritual value, they will come into a head
-on collision with the man who is godly.
Let me say something very quietly but very
firmly.
If that isn't happening in your life as
a believer, you're not a child of God.
If you want me to justify that statement
from the book, I'll do it for you,
if you come and talk to me about
it.
The godly man in whose life is the
law of God and the man who's living
along that principle is such a rebuke to
the ungodly that the moment the ungodly see
him and recognize the principles on which he's
living and the new standards of his life,
they begin to revile in order to justify
their position.
Now, hearken unto me.
Ye that know righteousness, fear ye not their
approach of men, neither be ye afraid of
their abiding.
For if I am related by grace to
the living God, I'm not afraid of a
dying man.
Matthew chapter 5 and verse 11 says this
to me, and I turn it over in
my mind and in my heart, and I
just chew it over with such a sense
of thrill.
Blessed, blessed, happy are ye when men when
men do all manner say all manner of
evil falsely against you for my sake.
Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is
your reward in heaven.
Let me just put in a word of
caution.
If you suffer because you're a mean sort
of Christian, don't try and shelter under that
text, will you?
If you suffer because you're mean and because
you're always going around ramming a tract into
somebody's face and saying, brother, are you saved?
Well, you'll get what you expect, and you
deserve it.
Now, of course, I'm all for giving somebody
a tract.
I think it's a very good thing, but
I think in doing it, you've got to
be very sure that you are revealing the
grace and the loveliness and the sweetness of
Jesus Christ in your approach.
And if there's something about your Christianity that
is unattractive, and if it's repulsive, then don't
complain if people are constantly reviling you.
Ah, but if you are living with the
law of God in your heart, and this
law has gripped your life, and you're living
on this principle, and you're obeying him, then
blessed are they when men say all manner
of evil falsely, for great is your reward
in heaven.
You know, isn't it amazing?
Folks are always trying to wear out the
saints, but they haven't got a hope, because
you see, the saint is fed from the
nature of God, from the throne in heaven,
and that nature is everlasting.
My salvation is near.
I think I've learned in life by now,
beloved, I'm a slow learner, but I think
I've learned this much, that the clouds may
hide the sun sometimes, but the clouds don't
stop the sun's progress, it just goes on.
And the clouds may hide Jesus.
Sometimes, sometimes the vision may grow dim, sometimes
my heart may be in the depths of
despair, but you remember the chorus?
Do you?
God is still on the throne, and he
will remember his own.
Though trials may press us and burdens distress
us, he never will leave us alone.
God is still on the throne, and he
will remember his own.
His promise is true, he will not forget
you.
God is still on the throne.
Hearken unto me, think of the pit, think
of the glory, stand fast in the liberty
wherewith Christ hath set you free, and say
hallelujah anyway.
Let's pray.
Dear Lord Jesus, may these truths sink deep
into our hearts and lift us up from
discouragement and despair, that we may recognize thou
art working with us and in us and
through us, not for time, but for eternity.
And enable us today, as the law of
God is in our hearts, and as men
would revile us and accuse us falsely, enable
us to stand in the liberty of the
risen Lord.
Oh, may we not only listen, but hear
thy word this day for Jesus' sake.
Amen.