-Transcript-
00:25 Glory to God. Welcome to the program. Welcome to the Cafe.
00:29 This is Pastor Clark Covington, Heartland Community Baptist Church out of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, wishing you a happy holiday season. By the time you hear this, maybe the holidays will be in the rear view mirror a little bit, but we’re still kind of in the thick of the holiday season. Hopefully you’ve been doing well.
00:48 Amen. Hopefully you’ve been getting all of your shopping done and spending time with family and not being too stressed out. And I’m willing to guess that when you go to the Christmas service, the preacher may bring up Jesus Christ because that is the reason for the season.
01:10 We used to have a yard sign at our old house. We’d stick in the yard. It said, keep Christ in Christmas.
01:15 Well, that’s the whole reason for Christmas. Amen. And we don’t make any bones about it.
01:20 Amen. Amen. We’re not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
01:27 And in that message that the preacher may preach or will preach, he might bring up Isaiah53, which describes the person of Jesus Christ in the old Testament. You know, it is prophecy. Isaiah was a prophet.
01:44 What is prophecy? It is history told before it happens. I know that sounds a little silly, oxymoronic maybe, that it is future history. But we can say that in the scope of time that Isaiah, many years before it happened, said that Christ would come to atone for our sins.
02:05 And Isaiah 53 is a beautiful chapter. And we’re just going to spend the next three episodes going through Isaiah 53 a little bit deeper. I believe the Lord wants me to do this because, again, I believe Isaiah 53 or a like chapter might be mentioned in church on Sunday or on Wednesday or at a Sunday school lesson or wherever.
02:26 And you may be thinking about it, and maybe the Lord wants you to think about it a little bit more. So let’s dive right in here. Looking at Isaiah 53, again, this was written well before the time of Jesus.
02:37 Amen. Well before. And I wish I could go with my looking glass and tell you exactly how long before.
02:46 But centuries, hundreds of years before Christ, Isaiah accurately depicts Jesus Christ, not just as the person and not just as God in the flesh, but as the one that atoned for our sins.
03:01 And the book of Isaiah, as I understand it, is the most quoted Old Testament book in Scripture beyond Psalms. In the New Testament, I said, Scripture in the New Testament.
03:12 And so you have that as well, the fact that it’s referenced over and over again. And oftentimes it’s not saying, oh, as Isaiah said, and it may just say, as it is written and it’ll be directly from Isaiah.
03:22 In fact, I was preaching a message out of Romans 10 last week for our church, and I was referencing a scripture that referenced in the New Testament that referenced Isaiah.
03:36 So I’ve just been familiar with it myself. And so it’s a very popular chapter because it is even known as a gospel almost because it describes Jesus. So let’s dive in here.
03:45 Isaiah 53:1, who hath believed our report and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? So what we see here is even in the book of Isaiah, even in those many hundreds of years before Christ had come, the prophets giving that future history weren’t believed.
04:05 There was rank unbelief then. You know, I’ll tell you this, today, many Bible preaching, Bible teaching people will tell you that there is rank unbelief today.
04:12 And just as the time of Isaiah, when Isaiah was telling people, look, God showed me, God told me this is going to happen, and they didn’t believe, even though we have proof that it came to fruition.
04:30 And you say, Brother Clark, how do we have proof? Well, number one, the prophecy points to it. And number two, we have secular historians that point to what Isaiah is writing about.
04:40 Flavius Josephus, who lived during the time of Christ, and look him up. I’ve gotten on my to-do list to watch a documentary about him and read more about him because oftentimes he’s mentioned as a secular historian that helps to back up Bible truths that are written about and these prophecies that came to life. And so we know that they actually did happen.
05:01 And what Isaiah was prophesying actually did happen. And yet people didn’t believe then, just as now people don’t believe now, when the preacher says, hey, you know what?
05:11 The world is going to be judged for their sinful behavior and their rejection of Jesus Christ. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
05:21 You know, God understands and knows the heart of man, and it takes God opening the heart of man for man to be saved.
05:29 I will tell you a personal story. Being born the youngest in our family, I was always just kind of tender-hearted, if you will, amen. My older brother was more kind of rough and rugged.
05:44 Growing up, I was more of a mama’s boy. And growing up, I always had a desire to know God, even though I didn’t know him, even though I was born into sin, amen.
05:56 Even though I would look at the Bible, I remember being 10 or so years old, looking at the Bible saying, what on earth is this? There was all these words in there, these big words I didn’t understand, and they bothered me.
06:07 They were frustrating to me. All that uncomfortable clothes I had to wear to church. I was just a typical kid.
06:13 But even then, I remember being in high school, being maybe a junior or senior, hanging out with my friends and arguing with them for the causes of Christ and what’s important to the Lord, even though at that time I wasn’t saved. Now, what is that?
06:26 I would say that’s the root of God opening my understanding, and that’s only the mystery of God, but it’s something in it. And then later on, I get saved, and I was like practically running down the aisle to get saved.
06:38 I wasn’t reluctant to get saved. I wanted to be saved. I felt like it was a long time coming.
06:46 I had gone to church for years, even on my own. That’s another example, going to church on my own in Ohio, going to college. I was 400 or 500 miles away from either parent of mine, and going to college, I’d have a friend, Katie Yates.
06:59 I’d say, Katie Yates, I don’t think she was a Baptist, but I’d say, Katie, come on, we gotta go to church. And she also had a desire to go to church, so we’d go to the Baptist church or we’d go to her church.
07:11 We would just go to church, amen. And the preacher there, when I graduated college, told me, you’re not even a member, and you come more than our members.
07:20 He gave me a certificate, amen. Pastor Tim Chesser, and I thank God for that, amen? I thank God for that church and for that pastor, and he was very loving to me while I was still lost in the world, amen.
07:29 Why am I going there? Why am I feeling the need to go there? And then finally, I get saved. Look, my wife has a similar story. She remembers going into the Dollar Tree and looking for a New Testament when she was in high school, and she wasn’t saved, and then she ends up getting saved.
07:40 Look, God is the one that opens our understanding. Now, the Bible also says, in Romans 10, I believe, without a preacher, how will they hear, right? Without the word, how will they know?
07:50 Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. We need to preach the word.
07:56 We need to share the word, like so many preachers influenced me and shared the word with me, as you too, I’m sure. So the point is that God is the one, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed, right? It is God that reveals. It is God that takes away.
08:10 It is God that gives sight. It’s God that blinds, amen. Saul, before he became Paul, was on the road to Damascus, amen. He was blinded, and the Lord told him, it’s not easy to kick up against the pricks, amen.
08:22 He blinded Saul so that he could then become Paul, and then he spends three years in the wilderness of Arabia with Jesus Christ and learns all these doctrines that he ends up sharing to everyone that will listen, and he becomes the apostle to the Gentiles.
08:39 All of this because God opened his understanding, and we read, I was reading this morning in the book of Ezekiel in my time with the Lord about how God is saying, look, I am, for this time period, you’re being judged.
08:58 The Israelites are being judged, and you’re not going to be able to see me, amen? And then you have these wicked people that God was using to bring judgment on the Israelites, but God is mentioning that he is going to then judge them, amen.
09:04 And he obviously hadn’t opened their eyes to who he was or else they would have never done that because they would have feared him. And so we see that there is a rank unbelief now as there was then,
09:15 and that there are many people that will not believe our report, but there are some that will because just like there was a clerk and just like there was a sue and just like there was all these other people out there that God had convicted to come to know him, amen,
09:26 there are people now that the Lord is convicting, working on them, amen, to come to know him, and we have to still give that report, the good news, the gospel message. Second verse here, for he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground.
09:43 He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. So the second verse goes right along with the first verse, and the idea here is this willful ignorance,
09:55 understanding there is a God in the mind but hardening the heart. And so you can imagine someone saying, okay, God, you’re real, prove it to me, right? Show me some big sign, amen.
10:05 Give me a huge miracle, you know, just go ahead and drop a million trillion dollars out of the sky and then I’ll believe on you, right? And God says in his wisdom and his glory and his marvelous poetic plan, he’ll grow up as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground.
10:24 He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. The idea is that while we desired Christ to come on a big gold chariot with flames and angels and all this, God says, no, no, no, no, he’s gonna be a root out of dry ground.
10:43 Think of this, there was no big momentum, there was no big Christian movement, everyone wasn’t sitting there saying, he’s coming soon, he’s coming soon, amen.
10:53 They’re going about their business just like in the time of Lot, just like in Sodom there, just like in the time of Noah, buying and selling, getting married and giving themselves to marriage and all these things, just living life.
11:04 And so here comes someone that’s of no good report, as in nothing special, I don’t think he was hideous by any means, he was just an average Joe, amen? He was just a regular guy, he was from Nazareth, I think it was Nathaniel that said, what good can come from Nazareth?
11:18 I live in Kings Mountain, I love Kings Mountain, but you know someone could say, hey, what could come from Kings Mountain or Gastonia or Shelby or where, you know, or Bessarabia or wherever it may be.
11:28 And again, I’ve learned to really love it here, but we’re, you know, we’re just these little rural towns, and so if Christ were born here, someone would say, hey, what could come from here?
11:36 That’s the idea, God says, you’re looking for this marvelous, incredible Messiah, and I’m going to give you the most ordinary, average individual that you would never think is the Messiah.
11:48 Now, why would the Lord do that? Why would he do that? Because we are, I mean, there’s so many layers to this, but one, I believe, is that, you know, we look on the outside, we all do, we’re trained to do that.
12:03 I told someone once that, I don’t remember what I was doing, it was some kind of podcast or something, and I was emailing a professor or something, but it was the idea of our biases, you know, and we’re always biased towards what looks good on the outside.
12:18 You know, if you have twins and they have the same personality, and one is beautiful and one is less beautiful, people will gravitate to the beautiful one, even though they have the same personality or whatever it is, okay, I’m giving a simple
12:29 example, you know, this has been a narrative in history for a long time, you’ve got the ugly duckling, or you’ve got the black sheep, or whatever it is, right, people always reference this idea that we’re drawn to outward beauty, and if you say, Brother Clark, that’s not true, humans are more sophisticated than that,
12:47 well, look at Hollywood, I mean, look at who Hollywood lifts up, and look at those individuals that Hollywood lifts up as they get older, and the curse, the sin curse starts to take its toll on their bodies and their health and their life,
13:02 look at how much they fight for that youthful image and for a certain look, when God’s saying, I’m gonna bring someone that may not knock you over with his looks, but if you got to know him, you’d be blown away,
13:14 if you took time to believe that he is who he says he is, you’d be absolutely stunned, if you really understood my plan, you would be floored, if you saw his miracle working power,
13:24 you would be speechless, if you listened to his teaching and understanding of the word, you would never want to go anywhere but be with him, amen, that is the idea, that we must be drawn to someone deeper than just an appearance, amen,
13:40 anybody can appear a certain way for a given time, but Christ, his majesty reigns for an eternity, and it started as that tender plant, as that root out of dry ground, oh, I love the Lord Jesus Christ,
13:53 I thank God for his loving mercy and his kindness, and I just want you to think here today as we wrap up and we’ll get to more of Isaiah 53 in the next episode,
14:04 just think about how lovely Jesus is, just think about how Christmas, whatever it is, just, you know, tune all the other stuff out and just think on Jesus and how lovely he is
14:13 and how wonderful he is and how deep his love is, just think on him today, praise his name today, tune in next time so we can continue praising his name, but praise his name today, amen,
14:22 and next episode we’ll start back at Isaiah 53 verse 2 and we’ll start recapping more and getting more into the chapter, tune in then,
14:30 thank you so much, take care, God bless, amen.