Bellion to thee, may we be blessable today
because our hearts are meek and humble and
open to thy word.
For Jesus' sake, Amen.
We invite you to turn to the 49th
chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter
49.
This is the chapter from which Pastor Dewey
read to us earlier in the service this
morning.
It's a chapter which is full of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
There is language here which cannot possibly have
its complete fulfilment except in him.
For instance, in the sixth verse we read,
I will also give thee for a light
to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my
salvation unto the end of the earth.
And in the eighth verse, I will preserve
thee and give thee for a covenant of
the people to establish the earth, to cause
to inherit the desolate heritage, that thou mayest
say to the prisoners, go forth, and to
them that are in darkness, show yourselves.
They shall feed in the ways, and their
pasture shall be in all high places.
They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall
the heat nor sun smite them.
For he that hath mercy on them shall
lead them even by the springs of water
shall he guide them.
Those words could not possibly be fulfilled in
any other save in our Saviour.
But this chapter is spoken primarily to the
Jew.
Now, if you ask me how it can
be spoken to the Jew and to our
Lord Jesus at the same time, I would
just remind you that when the Jew for
the second time failed in the purpose of
their captivity and returned from Babylon and ultimately
became just a race religiously of Pharisees and
legalists with no love and compassion for others,
the Lord Jesus took over the responsibilities which
they had evaded.
And he fulfilled the purpose which they failed
to fulfill by the gospel he taught and
by the church which he formed.
And in the mission of Christ, the heart
of Judea, the heart of Judaism, unfolded itself.
He was the perfect fulfillment of all that
they had failed to be.
But this is not only a chapter which
has to do with our Lord and which
has to do with the Jew.
For my purpose this morning, it has to
do with your heart and with mine.
I want therefore to maintain our consistency as
we've gone through this second part of Isaiah
and consider this message in its relation to
our own personal life.
Therefore, for a moment, will you just fasten
your mind and attention on the 16th verse
of this chapter where our Lord says, Behold,
I have graven thee upon the palms of
my hands.
Thy walls are continually before me.
These words in their context are the assurance
of God to his people's complaint that he
had forgotten them.
The 14th verse reads, Zion said, The Lord
hath forsaken me and my Lord hath forgotten
me.
Humanly speaking, of course, they had every reason
to think that that would be so.
For this chapter anticipates a time when they
had languished for nearly 70 years in the
bondage and captivity of Babylon and being crushed
and overwhelmed by the power of that great
empire.
And between them and home and hope and
joy in Jerusalem were deserts and mountains, apparently
insurmountable obstacles, and they seemed to be completely
trapped.
In any case, they'd only got bitter memories
of a home that lay in ruins, for
Jerusalem was in waste, a mass of debris.
You recall that when Nehemiah visited the scene
a few years later, so terrible was the
destruction of the city that the animal upon
which he rode couldn't pass over it, and
his determination to rebuild the wall was scorned.
Oh yes, there was many a reason for
his people to say, The Lord hath forsaken
me.
Whenever you look at God through circumstances, you're
inclined to think like that.
But when God enables us to look at
circumstances through him, we think differently.
And this is exactly what the Lord seeks
to do in this tremendous passage of scripture
today.
How can I, he says, bring this people
to a new hope, to a new confidence,
to a new courage, to a new step
of faith, to a new obedience and commitment?
How can I bring them to see that
there's a way through from their captivity?
I have no new plan.
It can only be if they understand the
depths of my love.
And so he brings to them in this
chapter the assurance of a love that cannot
fail, that will never let go.
And he says to them, I have graven
thee upon the palms of my hands.
Thy walls are continually before me.
I am thinking as I bring this word
this morning from my heart to your heart
in his name, of some people perhaps here
in church and others listening by radio who
feel just like those people felt.
God's forgotten me.
God's forsaken me.
Perhaps you're comfortless or sorrowing or afflicted.
Perhaps even worse than that.
As a Christian, you may have felt that
you've grieved the Holy Spirit so seriously that
you feel yourself outside any possibility of recovery.
You listened last Sunday morning to the word
that came to you, I trust, with the
authority of his Spirit, which commanded you to
an exodus, go ye forth out of spiritual
captivity, a complete deliverance from the bondage of
self and sin.
And perhaps during the days of this week
you made a feeble effort, but by the
time Wednesday came, you are back in the
same bondage all over again, and you've come
to think the situation is hopeless.
Perhaps there are some listening to me today
whose lives are so full of obstacles and
difficulties and impossible contradictions that it just doesn't
seem the tangle could ever be straightened out.
You've tried, you've made the attempt, but just
as often you've failed, and it seems you're
doomed to fail.
What is God's message to such a heart?
He's no new plan, but I believe he
does want you to understand, as you've never
understood before, the meaning of his love.
And as I seek to open up this
forest this morning, I pray that the Spirit
of God may talk to you at depth
about this love of Jesus.
I bring to you one or two thoughts
about it from this chapter.
In the first place, from the eleventh verse,
God says, I will make all my mountains
away.
And that leads me to suggest to you
that the love of God is invincible in
its purpose.
Invincible in its purpose.
I will make all my mountains away.
Though there be great mountains and unsurpassable obstacles
between Babylon and Jerusalem, what does God do
about them?
He won't remove them, but he will make
these mountains, which seem to this people to
be obstacles, he will make them actually contribute
to their deliverance.
There isn't anybody here this morning but who
has some mountain in their life somewhere, something
that threatens to bar their spiritual progress, something
that frustrates your every hope, something that's brought
you back to a sense of failure and
collapse, a daily cross, a thorn in the
flesh, a sin.
Oh, if only these were removed, you say,
how much holier a life I could live,
how much more satisfactory a Christian I could
be.
We say that and then we pray, oh
Lord, remove these things.
For example, Lord, give me patience.
And please remove this awful thing that tests
me beyond endurance.
Beloved, you have supposed that the obstacle which
you try to avoid and to escape is
the biggest hindrance in your life.
If only it would go, how patient you
would be.
But if it went, that would only remove
the temptation to be impatient.
That wouldn't make you patient.
Patience only comes through the trial that God
puts there, for his word tells us that
tribulation worketh patience.
And sometimes the very thing that I try
and avoid, and the situation which I try
to escape from, and the circumstances which I
beat away from me, are the very things
in the hand of God to sanctify me
and make me like the Lord Jesus.
The very things I dread are the things
that God uses to make his mountains away.
You notice what he says, I will make
all my mountains away.
There's no exception to that great but that
little word, all.
Nothing in life, no obstacle, no loneliness, no
trial, no sorrow, which may not be a
way into God's richest blessing, no situation of
entanglement, nothing, nothing that you can possibly conceive,
but this can be part of God's way
to make his mountains a way of deliverance.
You notice the pronoun, I will make my
mountains away.
Yes, they're his.
He put them there.
He will make them away.
And in the distance, and in front, if
I can only see a mountain when I
reach the foot of it, I'll discover there's
a path.
What's the secret of this, therefore, discovering that
the love of God is invincible in its
purpose?
It's just this.
It's the commitment of your life to Jesus
Christ without reservation.
And it's then to meet this mountain and
meet this obstacle in Jesus.
Not to meet it outside of him, but
to meet it in Christ.
For if I do that, then, then the
mountain between myself and God's land of blessing
becomes the way into it.
Do I speak to someone in whose life
today you're just confronted with nothing but mountains,
and they seem to be in front of
you on all sides, and you face them,
and you wonder, and you almost despair.
Friend, have you ever taken a moment to
look back?
What do you find there?
If you find surrounding you in front and
on all sides, nothing but mountains that seem
to be absolutely insurmountable, look back a moment.
Is there a mountain?
Not one.
Every mountain that you confronted has all been
leveled out flat, and you look back, and
everything's a plane in front of you.
All is mountains.
Surely the God who has removed every mountain
thus far will remove the one that confronts
you right now.
Face it, therefore, friend.
Face that mountain, that obstacle, that impossibility, whatever
it is.
Face it in Jesus, and watch him make
it away.
The love of God is invincible in its
purpose.
But look at the 15th verse of this
chapter, and let me suggest to you that
the love of God is absolutely impassable in
its preciousness.
Can a woman forget her child?
Yea, they may forget.
Yet will I not forget thee?
And here the Holy Spirit uses the illustration
to encourage this despondent people to believe.
He uses the illustration of the love of
a mother, a mother's love that bends over
a little child, that perhaps soothes it in
times of suffering, that watches it, and sometime
maybe even watches that little life flickering out,
that comes to it constantly ready to surrender
food, sleep, anything, anything for the sake of
that little one.
The love of a mother, a love that
follows us through all of life.
Often we don't understand it, often we resent
it, often we rebel against it, often it's
misunderstood.
But is there any love that quite replaces
that, the love of a mother who prays
from childhood and at the first simons of
distress she's there?
It would be a love that would stand
by us even if one day we became
a prisoner in a dock.
That love would stand there, it would hunt
us through the foulest sodom anywhere in the
face of the earth.
That's the love of a mother.
But the Holy Spirit says it's only a
simple ray of the love of God.
There's much more than a mother's love in
the love of Jesus.
You see, she, says the scripture, may forget,
he never can.
We may fall so far down and get
in such an appalling mess and muddle and
catastrophe that the dearest and nearest to us
may just forget and forsake.
We may have been so far away from
God and far away from righteousness and truth
that perhaps someone who put a candle in
their window hoping one day we'd come back
has given up hope.
Maybe the fire on every altar of every
human heart of love for you has just
died down till nobody cares.
But my Bible says when my father and
mother forsake me the Lord will take me
up.
It says I have loved thee with an
everlasting love.
It tells me that the Lord Jesus loved
his disciples and having loved his own he
loved them unto the end.
A love that's absolutely impassable in its preciousness.
And that love never gives up and never
lets go.
And to the person here today who feels
so utterly bereft and utterly God forsaken, I
can but point you to that love and
ask you, though you may never understand it,
to believe in it and rest in it
and rejoice in it even now.
There's a little children's chorus that I used
to sing, perhaps you did too.
Love, wonderful love, the love of God to
me.
Love, wonderful love, so great, so rich, so
free.
Wide, wide as the ocean, deep as the
deepest sea.
High, as high as the heavens above, his
love to me.
Dare I believe that today, dare you?
But look, I find something else about the
love of God here that's even more amazing.
Look for a moment at this verse which
I've chosen as our text.
It tells me that God's love is absolutely
indelible in its penetration.
I have graven thee upon the palms of
my hands.
The hand of God, the hand of power,
the hand of authority, the hand by which
he upholds all things with his strength.
But something more than this, the hand of
love, the hand of God.
One day the Lord Jesus stepped into a
room when he'd risen from the dead, and
he showed to his disciples his hand and
his side.
I have graven thee upon the palms of
my hands.
He doesn't say, I have tattooed thee, for
a tattoo mark could come off.
But I have graven thee, and he shows
to us his hands, and that with which
our names are graven there, was a sword,
and a spear, and a nail that drove
holes into his hands, and into his side,
and into his feet.
I have graven thee on the palms of
my hands.
Never are you out of the sight of
God, never out of his thoughts.
Our names, our very lives are photographed, photographed
in a place where God always sees them.
He could never forget them.
They can never be obliterated.
Do you remember that tremendous verse in the
book of Revelation, where John is given a
vision of glory?
This is what he says, I beheld in
the midst of the throne a lamb as
it had been slain.
And throughout all eternity there's one from whom
the marks of suffering are never removed, and
the constant, constant source of joy of all
who cry in the glory worthy of thou,
for thou hast redeemed us to God by
thy blood, the constant source of it all
is that they're gazing, we shall gaze all
the time upon hands that have been marked
with nails and driven to a cross.
A love that's absolutely indelible.
I have graven thee upon the palms of
my hands, and to some person here today
who feels so utterly, completely hopeless, I want
you today not to look at things and
then try and look at God, but I
want you to look at the throne and
the nail-pierced hands of Jesus and his
side, and that's where God has put you.
Look what the verse goes on to say,
thy walls are continually before me.
From the people's point of view, all they
could see was ruin, destruction, debris.
Their memory was of a city that was
flattened out, where the walls had been destroyed,
the whole thing lay in ruins, but God
speaks to them at this moment of their
captivity, and he says to them, thy walls,
not your ruins, not your past failure, not
your breakdown, not your sin, but thy walls,
the thing that I purpose for you, that
which I intend you to be, thy walls
are continually before thee.
Oh brother, today, if I speak to someone
who just feels in their heart the situation
is hopeless, may I say, you look at
the ruins of life, God looks at the
walls.
You look at what you've been, and you're
conscious of such awful failure, but bless the
Lord, he sees us in Christ.
He sees us as what he intends us
to be.
He sees us as what we long to
be in our best moments.
He sees us as what we will be
when the grace of God has finished the
task.
We look back upon failure and frustration and
disappointment and breakdown.
I bid you today in his name, look
away beyond all this.
Look right up to the Lord today, for
before him, what do I read in his
word?
I saw, I saw, new Jerusalem, descending out
of heaven from God, having the glory of
God, adorned as a bride for her husband.
Thy, thy names are graven on the palms
of his hands, and thy walls are continually
before me.
Oh, how good to me, in my heart,
to know that God looks at me in
Jesus Christ.
He doesn't see that which is gone.
It's all buried in the depths of the
sea, and he sees me as he intends
to make me.
Thy walls, the task finished, the task complete,
and he sees me complete in the Lord
Jesus.
A love that's absolutely indelible in its penetration.
But let's look a little further into this
chapter and see something else.
He is a love that's infinite in its
powerfulness.
Look at verse 24 a moment, will you?
Verse 24.
What do I find there?
I find here the language of someone who's
disconsolate.
The language of this people who feel it
so hopeless.
And this is what they say, shall the
prey be taken from the mighty or the
lawful captive delivered?
A helpless captivity in the heart of a
mighty empire.
And perhaps today in your soul a helpless
captive to the devil.
Just helpless, just weak.
And you tried this week to break through
and make your exodus, and no sooner had
you started than you broke down and you're
back again.
And here's the word, I'm just a captive.
Shall the prey be taken from the mighty
or the lawful captive delivered?
How can it ever be?
But the Lord God has calculated his resources.
Beloved, don't let the difficulties or the seeming
impossibility of deliverance absorb you, nor brood over
the past, the failure of the sin and
the breakdown.
Look away from all this to Jesus and
read in the verse 25, thus saith the
Lord, even the captives of the mighty shall
be taken away, and the prey of the
terrible shall be delivered, for I will contend
with him that contendeth with thee, and I
will save thy children.
Jesus is stronger than Satan and sin.
Satan to Jesus must bow.
But there's one other thing here, perhaps most
precious of all.
I have to look at the first verse
of the next chapter to find it actually,
but it completes the picture.
For it tells me that God's love is
inexhaustible in its patience.
Thus saith the Lord, where is the bill
of your mother's divorcement whom I have put
away?
Or which of my creditors is it to
whom I have sold you?
You understand the picture?
When the Jew put away his wife, he
gave her a bill of divorcement.
Without that, the divorce would not be complete.
And in Israel now in exile, they are
imagining themselves like a divorced wife, forgotten and
forsaken of God.
But the Lord interrupts this kind of thinking
and breaks into it and challenges his people
this and says, where's the bill of divorcement?
Produce it.
Produce the bill and show me where I
divorced you and cut you off.
But she can't do it.
Of course she can't.
Can't find it because he'd never given it
to her.
God cannot divorce those whom he has taken
into covenant relationship with himself.
Backslidden, perhaps.
Rebellious, maybe.
Faithless for a while, perhaps.
They may be all that, but still they
belong to him.
You can search the universe.
You can search everywhere.
You can ransack the whole place.
But if you're a child of God, you
will never, never find a bill of divorcement
from God.
Even the devil can't produce it and show
it to you.
Oh, no.
Satan would love to do that.
Would love to come to some disconsolate Christian
today who's absolutely beaten and hopeless and produce
to you proof that God has cut you
off, but he cannot do it.
Oh, then someone says to me, that means
there's a license for sin somewhere in the
gospel.
Oh, no, there isn't.
Oh, no.
If I am truly the Lord's, then his
love will mend my heart this morning and
I will respond to it and I will
recognize that this amazing love of God that
will never let me go is that upon
which I can rest everything and count upon
him to take me out into victory.
But if I am not his, then that
love and its story will openly harden my
heart and one day will prove to be
the basis of my judgment.
For light has come into the world, but
men prefer darkness to light because their deeds
are evil.
So, beloved, the call comes again this morning.
Go ye out from that spiritual Babylon.
Flee from it.
And what's the motive?
Listen to the words of Hebrews chapter 13,
where I read in the 12th verse, the
Lord Jesus, that he might sanctify his people
through his blood, suffered without the gate.
Wherefore, let us go forth therefore unto him
without the camp bearing his reproach.
He's calling to his church.
He's calling to you, to me, to a
great exodus, to a great deliverance, to an
escape while there's yet time from the life
of self, from the life of the world.
But listen, you only meet God outside the
camp.
There was a deliverance which Pharaoh offered these
people at one time, which suggested they might
worship the Lord in the land.
But you remember, Moses' answer was, no, there
shall not be a hoof left behind.
We cannot worship God in the land.
And there's no place where I can meet
Jesus, meet God, save at the cross, which
is outside of city wall.
It's the place where I willingly and gladly,
like the prodigal, I say, I will arise
and I go to my father and say
to him, I've sinned and I'm no more
worthy to be called my son.
And I don't only say that, I arise
and go.
And when I do, I discover the reality
of the love of God in Jesus Christ,
a love that's absolutely invincible.
I will make my mountains away.
A love that nothing ever can pass.
He will never forget thee.
A love that he can never wipe out
because he's graven you in the very palms
of his hands and thy walls are before
him.
A love that's absolutely infinite in its power.
No matter how strong the enemy, he is
stronger.
A love that's inexhaustible, completely inexhaustible.
He will never write the bill of divorce.
Beloved, if I respond to that love this
morning, then I find the way of deliverance.
If I don't respond to it, I merely
testify that I am not his.
Oh God, help us today to look right
off to Jesus and his love at Calvary.
May we bow together in prayer.
One moment of quiet prayer.
The love of God, so rich, so free.
The love of God revealed to us at
the cross.
The love that will not let me go.
I rest my weary soul in thee.
Lord Jesus, how we thank thee today.
There is a place of calm retreat.
There's a place of rest and quiet near
to the heart of God.
We praise thee this morning that there we
may come and find in the very heart
of Jesus, in the very wounds that sin
inflicted, we can find there our salvation and
our deliverance.
Jesus, keep me near the cross, there my
glory ever.
Oh, may there be that response from our
hearts which will just demonstrate that our grand
desire is that we might know thee and
live for thee.
Grant, O Lord, there may be in our
heart an exodus from a spiritual Babylon which
would captivate our lives.
We ask it for the glory of the
Lord Jesus.
Amen.