By His Wounds We Are Healed

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.

For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

It seems fairly clear to me that all of this requires some kind of response. I know this, because as an atheist when I first heard the gospel, it was clear to me that I had to give some kind of response. And that response involved a choice.

And that choice was to either reject the gift of God's grace, to reject in its entirety gospel that I had heard, or to have a very different response.

And I believe because God had been working in my life for many months before I first heard the gospel, I choose to say Yes.

Yes to the Love of God. Yes to the grace of God. Yes to the power of God at work through Jesus on the cross.

And also, something that I began to struggle with almost right away, I was choosing to say yes to a very different way of viewing myself.

No longer would I live as though my life does not matter. No longer would I have to question the meaning of life, which had long been a frustrating preoccupation for me.

No longer would I have to trudge through what I truly had come to believe was an objectively meaningless life.

No longer would I try in vain to save myself from the hazardous, chaotic waters of life.

Instead, all my yeses to God in response to his unmerited favour in my life have resulted in a completely different life than I would’ve had.

Not an easy life. If anyone’s ever suggested to you that being a Christian is easy, they are not being honest with you.

Every good thing that is in my life as a direct result of Jesus working to turn my heart of stone into a heart of flesh, working in me to believe and continue believing.

All of this was God’s will. It was God’s plan, for Jesus to bear my sins, to stand in my place in judgment.

Today we’ve been looking at Jesus in the Old Testament, and in particular Jesus in prophecy.

I hope that as we’ve explored this together, even over these past weeks, we’ve been able to grasp how big and how wide God’s love is,

and the extent to which God has gone to reveal Himself, reveal His glory and love, even as He has revealed the activity and place of Jesus the Christ in the Old Testament. This is the poorly hidden secret in the book of Isaiah about the Messiah.

God loves you. He HAS loved you forever. His heart is for you, and he wants you to be complete in him.

He knows your struggles, he knows them better than you do, and he knows your weaknesses as he knows your strengths.

He loves you because he is love. It’s his love that corrects you and challenges you to be better.

It’s his love that suffers long as each of us here, in our own way, and in our own time discover within ourselves, the truth of our belovedness, and as each of us, here in this room works out our salvation in fear and trembling.

May we embrace the God who draws near to us in Jesus Christ, Who whispers to us that He has the power to deliver us from whatever bondages we face, and from the slavery to sin that so robs us of all the joy God intends for us.