“The Lord’s Message”

Scripture: Isaiah 42:10-17

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been considering the Lord’s call on his people – the call to carry His word to others throughout the earth. We saw that this mission is far more than just talking about Jesus with like-minded people – that it is also for those who are radically different than we are. For Israel, it was to be a blessing to the Gentiles, which they were extremely reluctant to do. It was to live our lives in God’s way which might very well go against the conventional societal, and even ecclesial, wisdom.
We considered the thought of what it means to be a Christian – a follower of the way that Jesus traveled and proclaimed. It means that we live and celebrate a life lived in Godly justice and peace, and not in those attributes that the world thinks are right. We discovered that there is a drastic difference between the world’s “right and wrong” and the Lord’s “righteousness and sinfulness”. Christ was never hemmed in by convention, and we, too, are not to let the “four walls” that we have built up around our faith restrict our mission of being messengers of the gospel. The message of salvation that others are in desperate need of is in our court, and we must never be negligent in carrying out our responsibility to Jesus.

Today, we consider just what this message is that the Lord wants us to carry to the “gentiles” of our lives.

Read Isaiah 42:10-13

The prophet tells us that a “new song” is in the making, and that this is the praise that we are to share. The same old songs of rhetoric and ritual and self-reliance no longer harmonize! The same old places where the songs were once glorified are no longer sufficient! The same old outreach to people who we are comfortable with is no longer our call.

Isaiah tells us that the Church must begin to step out of our old places and into ones that we have never visited before – places that extend throughout creation. Go to the sea, he says, go to the islands and the desert and the towns to proclaim God’s praise. We are to go to the villages where “Kedar” lives. And by the way, Kedar was the second oldest son of Ishmael, the illegitimate son of Abraham – the father of the Arab nations! (Genesis 25:12-18) Consider who our “Kedar” might be. Who is the one we detest or fear the most? That is the very one we are to be a witness for!
These verses are also reminiscent of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ demand that his disciples stop singing praise to him - he replied that if these men were silent, the stones would begin crying out! (Luke 19:37-40) While the stones and the desert and the seas might sing mighty songs of praise to our God, none of us should ever be content to let our silence be the means of their singing! That would not go well for us!

All too often, we see the people who are outside of the Church as unworthy to receive the blessings of Almighty God, and therefore we hesitate to give them the opportunity to know and praise the Lord. Remember that there was no one who Jesus refused to welcome into his present – even those dastardly “tax collectors and sinners”! (Mark 2:15-17) He wanted everyone to know of his gift of salvation – are we as generous with the Lord’s gifts as Jesus was? Are we, by our silent hesitation, withholding the glory of God from those who we decide aren’t worthy of our time or effort?

Isn’t it time to start singing our “new song” wherever we go, to whomever we meet, and in whatever place the Lord calls us to? Remember that we will never go alone – that the Lord is always with us, teaching us new song after new song as we go!
The last verse of this passage says that the Lord will go out like a “mighty warrior”. Note that the word is “like”, not “as”. The noun “warrior” is more reflective of one who conquers, one who becomes the victor. And who or what will this warrior be victorious over? His enemies. And who or what is the enemy of God? Evil. And how does God vanquish this enemy? By Christ’s atoning act at Calvary. The victorious God does not accomplish his victory over evil as a Warrior – he does it as a Servant.

And he calls us to sing his “new song”, and to carry his message of salvation to the Kedars and the arid hearts of this world – not in might and power, not as conquers, not as destroyers, but as humble servants of the Most High God.

Read Isaiah 42:14-17

The Lord is still speaking, and He tells us that he has been holding back – that He has remained quiet for eons of time, but that the time of judgment is nearly here, and the image that we receive is that of childbirth. There are more than a few Mom’s I know, when, in their last month of pregnancy, said “I wish this baby would finish growing and get out here!” (Can I get an “AMEN” from the women!)
During those 9 months of development, a child grows, and twists and turns, and bumps, and causes all kinds of changes, not only to him or herself, but to the Mom! But the one thing that the baby doesn’t do is make sound. But on the day of birth, there are all kinds of sounds – cries of pain, shouts of joy, groans and strains and weeping – and all are given in praise of the emergence of this new life.

The prophet tells us that on the day of the Lord’s Newness, everything is going to change. Those things that we have always seen as beautiful will pass away, making way for the glory that is close behind. (Revelation 21:1-22:6) All too often, we don’t like the change that is on the way, usually because we have little or no control of what is yet to be. A good example is the uproar over our new President.
Personally, I doubt that anyone knows for certain what will be coming during the next 4 years, but a lot of folks think they know. Supporters of President Trump believe that the change will be everything that they have ever hoped for, and believe that everyone of them is truly possible through the new President and his administration.
On the other hand, those who oppose the President believe that the change that they anticipate will be the downfall of the entire world, and quite honestly, they too believe that this calamity is, in every way, possible through the new President and his cabinet.
The truth is that neither faction truly knows – they only suspect what will come, and are reacting to their own suppositions! I believe that our new President will do some things that many will like, but also will do some things that, in retrospect, will not be so good. We’ll have to see.

The point of this is that even though we have scripture to read and study and discuss, and try mightily to understand it, we will never get all the details right. Oh, we might achieve a broad understanding as to what the Lord wants us to know, but there is so much that we don’t know, and don’t need to know. So we tend to create our own answers to fill in the blanks. But the Lord would have us know that He has already given us all that we need to be his servant-messengers, and that this should be enough!

And that is OK. Our task isn’t to completely understand the Lord – his nature, his works, his attitudes and reasons – we are to simply share what we do know with the world. For this message is one of hope and life, and it is the only message that has any purpose and truth for the people of earth. And without it in our lives, all will be lost, and this life will have been lived in vain.


Reach out into the world, for our time of silence is over! Sing that New Song of Jesus Christ, and invite others to sing along with you. Carry that song to places beyond where you have always walked, and sing it to a whole new community of people who have yet to learn that the enemy Evil has been defeated, and the victor is the Lord Jesus Christ. Tell them how God came to earth to pay the price for our sin. Tell them of his sacrifice on Calvary, and how the prophets had proclaimed it thousands of years before. Tell them how He has changed your life and made it better. Tell them about the beauty that is on its way, and how it will not only dazzle our eyes, but will boggle our minds.

Don’t wait for the stones and trees and lakes and deserts to proclaim the Lord and His goodness – He would much rather that we do it!