-Transcript-
00:26 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:30 Welcome to the cafe. Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe. Are you excited? I’m excited.
00:38 Amen. Oh, man, this is a good time of year. It’s a holiday season.
00:45 Amen. It’s beautiful outside. It gets so dark around here at night out here in the foothills of the mountains that it’s so dark and you got these lights on.
00:50 It’s absolutely beautiful. Just a great time of year, the holiday season. But let’s be honest, at this time of year, it’s very easy to get caught up in the busyness of it all.
00:59 Amen. Our business is so busy right now with service, different customers and stuff with lots of items, all this stuff that we sell stuff online to help pay for the ministry and all of it, I guess, just everybody wants to get it this time of year. Running around to the post office, dropping stuff off, working, working, working, ministry, you know, Christmas dinners and all.
01:22 Not a lot of stuff, but still just very busy comparatively speaking. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’ve been very busy lately.
01:31 And let’s be honest, it’s hard to dive in and say, okay, God, I just want to have some quiet time with you. Well, you could desire that, but there’s so many little distractions. And how about that phone, buzzing, zinging, this, that, and the other.
01:52 Social media. I don’t have any personal social media, but I remember when I did, I’d be scrolling, oh, so-and-so went to the farm and got a Christmas picture. Oh, we never did that.
01:57 And you have that fear of missing out feeling and all these things happening, or, oh, look at this on social media. This store has got a sale. We all need to go here.
02:05 You know, all this stuff, it never ends. So let’s just take a deep breath and let’s just focus on the Lord for a little bit here. We’re in Isaiah 53, which you may hear Isaiah 53 mentioned in a Christmas service.
02:18 It’s a beautiful chapter. It deserves to be mentioned year round. And Isaiah 53 is the prophet Isaiah referencing the coming Messiah hundreds of years before Jesus came to earth.
02:32 And yet it’s a beautifully written chapter that doesn’t just reference, oh, hey, guess what? Jesus is coming. You better be ready. It’s very deep in its painting a picture of why Jesus came, how he came, what it means for them and what it still means for us here today.
02:50 And so we’re in Isaiah 53, we’re on verse, wrapping up verse two, but I’ll just start from the beginning. Say it’s only one verse up, Isaiah 53, verse one, who has believed our report to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed.
03:02 And in the last episode, we spoke about that rank unbelief that was there then and is there now that God must open the heart, that actions tell a story that’s not flattering toward God or indicative of a belief in a living God.
03:13 Because you know what? Many people, they’ve just gone astray, right? They’re all onto their own thing and they’re not seeking the Lord. As I mentioned, in this sinful broken world, it is incredibly easy to go astray. The idea of, you know, imagine, yes, being at a water park, you’re going down a slide, a big slide.
03:34 My kids love the water park. They’re very brave now as they hit, you know, they get past the five-year mark of life. They’re like, yeah, that’s like a three-curl slide or three, you know, turn slide and it’s all the way in the air.
03:46 And you’re like, yeah, I’ll go down that. Dad, you want to come? And I’m like, number one, I don’t know if I fit on that slide. Number two, I don’t want to go down that slide.
03:52 But you think of that slide and you’re flying down that slide, right? That’s what life is like living carnally, living in the world. It’s so just gravity is bringing you that way. Yet living for the Lord is kind of like swimming upstream.
04:05 I don’t know if it’s as hard as climbing up that slide per se, but it can get pretty challenging. Maybe like climbing up a slippery path.
04:14 There’s a South Mountain Park is not too far from our house and we go hiking there sometimes, not a whole lot, amen.
04:20 But, you know, every once in a while we’ll go there. And there’s, when it rains, man, there are some really slippery trails out there and it is really just muddy and slippery and that’s kind of what it’s like living for God. We’re going upstream.
04:33 We are living against the grain. We are not here for an eternity. We are here for a season.
04:40 We’re going to be with the Lord for eternity and we’re going to be living in the new heaven and on the new earth and we’re going to have a resurrected body and all the sin will be gone. Amen. Those that are saved, those that believe in Jesus Christ.
04:55 And so we see here that people are living with willful ignorance. They’re understanding there’s a God in their mind, but they’re hardening their heart and they’re just going with the flow because that’s like just going down that water slide. It’s just easy to do.
05:07 And every time we seem to try to serve, maybe you here today listening, is it every time that you try to serve God, something bad happens? Like there’s a challenge, there’s a problem.
05:17 Have you ever noticed that? You know, we try to serve the Lord. You know, I know I need to get to this next verse, but I remember last year, this time of year, we were trying to do something as a church, big, you know, for the Lord.
05:39 And man, I got, I had an awful, probably one of the worst allergy attacks I’ve ever had. Literally the day we were trying to do this big thing for God, I said, Lord, oh my goodness. That’s just an example.
05:44 I don’t know how to describe it other than to say, you will face opposition. You will have a proving time when you live for God.
05:48 And just as Isaiah’s time, when prophet Isaiah said, who have believed our report to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed, many won’t believe, many will not believe.
05:58 Verse two, for he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, this is Jesus Christ, and as a root out of a dry ground, he has no form nor comeliness. And when we shall see him, there’s no beauty that we should desire him.
06:12 Well, Isaiah 53 verse two is telling us that the Lord came from dry ground and we could go so many different ways with that.
06:21 But the idea, there wasn’t a lot of momentum for the Messiah to come, amen. In the sense that, you know, people weren’t living all holy and departing from sin. There wasn’t great revival in the land, quite the opposite.
06:31 And yet he came up out of that dry ground. He was born of a virgin. He was born in the manger.
06:39 There was no room in the inn, amen. He wasn’t born in a upper class family. And I know I was going to say royalty, but he is from the royal line.
06:48 He is from the line of David. We can trace that back in the Bible. But he wasn’t born in that light, amen.
06:55 An example I gave to our congregation was like Prince, I think it’s Prince Henry, when he had a child, amen. And the whole world was wrapped and the whole world wanted to know, you know, who, what was happening, what’s the child’s name and, you know, all of these things, right?
07:13 You’ve got Prince Henry, Prince Harry, I don’t know which it is, but you know, if you’re keeping up with that, you know, the child of the royal child, amen, the royal child, I was trying to look it up on my computer, but look, everybody was paying attention. Everybody was saying that child is royalty.
07:36 There’s the golden spoon, there’s the, you know, there’s all of the embroidery and there’s all of the, you know, the ornaments and all the pageantry and all. Jesus was born in a manger, amen. He was born in a barn, it probably smelled like animals and you know what, amen.
07:45 Christ came from this ordinary place. And by the way, he was not a superstar. He was born the son of a carpenter.
07:54 You know, there was no beauty that we should desire in him. God wasn’t going to appeal to the shallowest emotion in us. He wasn’t going to appeal to our carnal nature, to desire, amen, like remember when the angels were in Sodom and all of the people of Sodom desired those angels, amen.
08:09 I won’t go into detail, but if you’ve read Sodom and Gomorrah, you know what I’m talking about, that scripture in the Bible, that passage in the Bible, they all desired those angels. Christ didn’t come in that way. He came as an ordinary person.
08:21 Verse three, he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him and he was despised and we esteemed him not.
08:32 So we see here that the result of him not being, you know, outed as the son of God and him being just the ordinary average person and him not having some kind of big family riches or any kind of massive chariot and army and all these things, guess what?
08:54 People were able to kind of show their true colors, weren’t they? And he was despised and rejected of men. Jesus Christ came to this earth and he lived a perfect, sinless life, 33 and a half years, and he was despised and rejected of men.
09:08 People didn’t want anything to do with him. I think of the time he healed the maniac of Gadara, right, and this guy is absolutely going nuts. He’s got no clothes on.
09:18 He’s in the graveyard. I mean, you can imagine an individual like that that’s just tortured day in and day out. I’ve seen it in my own family.
09:25 Mental illness on that regard is no joke. I mean, my brother, I’ve told him before, it was like the family member that I’m talking about was like, I said, it’s like demon possession.
09:35 And he told me he was a psychology major in college, whatever that means, and he told me that’s, you know, some of them actually think that, you know, and I’ve never come, no one’s ever really convinced me otherwise.
09:47 I mean, it’s just absolutely horrific to be possessed. And what does Jesus do? He goes there. He heals the maniac of Gadara.
09:55 He’s dressed well now. He’s doing fine. Amen.
10:00 It’s an absolute miracle. All the swine jump off the cliff. That’s where the demons go.
10:05 And guess what? Everybody in the town says, get out of here. Will you please leave? You’re disrupting us. We don’t want anything to do with you.
10:10 You’re messing with our livestock. You’re messing with how things were. We were just fine without you.
10:16 Isn’t that how people are today? Isn’t Jesus Christ truly, I mean, if you really read the Bible, the person of Christ that is biblically accurate, not this Jesus that is preached in the New Age church or thrown around in these books or whatever,
10:28 but the true, real Jesus Christ, the one that preached the Beatitudes, the one that lived this life that we read about in the Bible, is he not despised and rejected of men still?
10:42 And here in Isaiah, it says in verse three of chapter 53, it says, he’s a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Now Jesus Christ is the son of God. He did not come here.
10:55 As a matter of fact, I believe it’s John 3:17. He didn’t come here to condemn, he came here to save. And so he’s looking at these lost people, living like lost people, rejecting him because he doesn’t have the pedigree or the background or the look or whatever it would be to be accepted by them.
11:17 Rejecting him because he’s preaching the truth about sin, about how man can’t keep the law and on and on. And guess what happens?
11:24 He’s sorrowful because he sees their state, he sees their destination, amen, and he’s sorry for that. He’s sorry for that.
11:32 You know, as a parent, and we look at God the Father, right, so we look in that light. As a parent, sometimes we can feel sorrowful for our children if they are going to have to go through a very difficult time, amen.
11:43 And we look at our kids and we say, I wouldn’t want them to have to go through that.
11:48 You know, CJ, my youngest, he’s five, you know, he’s almost six, but he’s five. He tells me, I mean, he debates with me like he’s 30.
11:56 But anyways, he, you know, he had to go to the dentist and I know the dentist is going to be hard because they want to pull a tooth and I’m looking at him like, man,
12:06 this is not going to be good for him and, you know, it’s good for him, but it’s not going to, you know, be enjoyable.
12:16 And that’s a simple example, but I know what’s ahead, amen. Well that’s just a tooth and he’ll be fine and, you know, he talked the dentist out of it pretty much anyways. That’s my son, amen.
12:21 But for the lost people of that time, Christ is looking at them, seeing them headed for devil’s hell and he’s sorrowful. You know, as a preacher of God’s word, oh, how it’s grieved me, you know, in the business world I did okay, amen,
12:37 doing in the business world. My wife will tell you it’s not good enough, but hey, I’ve been all right, been all right, amen.
12:46 In school I did okay, you know, sports did okay. You know, Lord has really blessed me and I’m like, hey, I’m expecting good things. God’s calling me in the ministry, okay, all right.
12:52 I’m going to preach his word straight. I’m going to pray over every message. I’m going to study his word and I’m studying his word and I’m praying over these messages.
12:57 Lord’s laying on my heart, preach about sin, preach about sin, preach about sin. I’m preaching about sin. I’m preaching what the Lord’s given me and no one’s really showing up.
13:05 No one’s really tuning in. Nobody’s really, this isn’t, the success is not here, amen. People are not loving it.
13:16 There’s a great movie called Selfie Dad. If you haven’t watched it, you got to watch it. It’s on Pure Flix.
13:24 Man, you got Netflix, cancel Netflix and get you some Pure Flix. That’s what I did. That’s what we did for our family years ago.
13:31 We’re thankful for that. And I know not everything on Pure Flix is great and I know all this, but look, let’s just get rid of the real bad stuff on Netflix to start. But on Pure Flix, Selfie Dad, there’s a, he’s a comedian.
13:41 He’s doing these YouTube videos. He’s gaining esteem and then all of a sudden he preaches about God a little bit.
13:45 He shares his testimony and all the sponsors want to cancel him and everybody unsubscribes from his channel and he’s like, oh, we got to fix this.
13:53 We got to fix this. We got to fix this. This is bad.
13:57 And he actually has like a youth pastor come over to try to fix his computer to delete the video. It’s a really funny scene. And when you think about it, what’s funny but not funny in a way is the fact that this is true.
14:10 That’s true life. You know, when you live for the Lord, you suffer and not just suffering, but you suffer in a way that’s like you see people that are going astray in a very real way as Christ saw those that were going astray. I wish I had more time.
14:20 My time is actually up. I can’t believe it. But tune in next time as we get deeper into Isaiah 53.
14:26 I thank you so much for listening. Take care. God bless and amen.