Tuesday November 11, 2025 - Servant, Servant of God, Man of Sorrows

 Chapter 24: Servant, Servant of God, Man of Sorrows Day 3

Praying the Name:

Isaiah 52:13 - Behold, My Servant shall [a]deal prudently; He shall be exalted and [b]extolled and be very high.

Isaiah 53:2-5 - For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no [a]form or [b]comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no [c]beauty that we should desire Him. 3 He is despised and [d]rejected by men, A Man of [e]sorrows and acquainted with [f]grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. 4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet  we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed. 

Lord, 

    I praise You Father, for lifting up Jesus for us that we might find Him in our hearts so that we have a direction for heaven. He is the gate for His flock once again. The gate to protect and the gate to enter in. I praise You for that love for us. 

    I thank You for the long-suffering love that You had for the unworthy people of this world. That You are the only one that can bring us out and we just keep breaking Your heart but You love us anyway. Thank You for that. 

    Forgive me any pride that I have in my life that keeps me from doing what You desire of me. Keep me able to find the humility inside to be the person that You desire of me. I am standing in You as much as I can and do not wait to find hurtful humility and pain. 

    How oh Lord do we look on Your face on the cross, to see you whipped and beaten and broken for us that we caused all the pain that You went through, how can we look into Your face without wanting to be there instead of You. Would I die for You? 

    

    I will never forget the profound silence that characterized the crowd as we streamed out of the theater after the viewing of the Passion of the Christ, for 126 minutes we had been painfully transfixed by Mel Gibson's graphic depiction of the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ. It left us speechless. What words could we summon to defend ourselves, how could we explain the mitigating circumstances that made us not responsible for everything that happened to Jesus. Words do not exist for such a task. and so we shuffled out in grim silence. It felt as the wretchedness of the whole human race had been glaringly exposed our condition was far worse than I imagined, How else could we explain the magnitude of God's suffering.

    John Calvin believed that human beings cannot obtain a true self-knowledge without first contemplating the face of God, he compared our distorted self perception to an eye that has only been exposed to the color black. When the eye is exposed to a lighter color, even something with a brownish hew, it may mistake it for white, because it does not have a clue what white looks like. In other words we are misshapen human beings surrounded by other misshapen human beings. Some of us might look better than others.  But we are still deeply flawed compared to God, and to the kind of person that He means for us to become.

 Jack Rhoda a pastor and professor of preaching at Calvin theological seminary, comments on John's Gospel saying John wants us to look on the face of Jesus, until the conviction becomes rooted in our hearts, that we are looking into the human face of the living God. Perhaps this face of God comes most into focus when it wears the crown of thorns. 

    As Nicoles Walter Stoff writes it is said of God that no one can behold His face and live, I always thought that this meant no one could see His splendor and live a friend of mine said perhaps it meant no one could see His sorrow and live, or perhaps His sorrow is His splendor. I think Walter Stoff is right God's sorrow is His splendor, His goodness standing as it does His contrast to our sinfulness, enables Him to see with absolute clarity how far human beings have fallen. His sorrow is a gage of His love because it expresses what He was willing to endure in the person of His Son in order to heal our wretchedness. Jesus the man of sorrows, reveals the splendor of God's face to us. 

    Dorthy Raynham writes about the difficulty of facing God when we know that we have done wrong. Adverting the eyes because I am not worthy to see the face of God and live is one kind of response but to run away internally or worse to cease praying for a period of time because I only want to see the Lord smiling at me is self-centered. The only corrective is to look upon the bloody agonized face of Christ crucified and accept in those eyes of pain nether disgust or approval but only salvation and love beyond comprehension. 

    Jesus came to show us God's face, at times it is a face consumed by sorrow. Pray today for the grace to gaze on Jesus see not only what He has suffered but why! Then praise Him for His salvation and His love beyond comprehension.