Enjoy Life, Enjoy God

SUFFERING SERVANT

November 19, 2010

One of the challenges of being a Christian in our culture is we are so hurried, we take little time to be reflective, to think about what it is we're doing, seeing, etc. Even this devotional: we resist thinking about it. We want it spelled out and told to us. "I don't have time to think about it."

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain....He was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering...
- Isaiah 53:2-4 TNIV

Hundreds of years before Christ, people heard these words of Isaiah for the first time. They became known as the Suffering Servant passages. The people of God missed it. The church early on knew these passages spoke of Jesus the Christ. Yet they knew the truth--the Christ, God's Suffering Servant would not be big news, hardly recognized, not the "in thing," in fact, ridiculed and mocked.

It's still that way. We want the big thing, that which commands our attention, the buzz, "A new Harry Potter movie," yet all the while we run past the things of God, even in the church. Truth is, he still takes up our pain, and bears our suffering, even in our craziness, even in our harried lives.
Joyfully,

Dale Patterson