“You are My servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” (Is. 49: 3.)

We have already seen that the expression, “servant of the Lord,” is used in three senses in the book of Isaiah. The first has reference to Israel, the second to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the third to the individual believer. Israel, having failed to meet the conditions of His high commission, Christ took His place as the Father’s Servant, and has transferred to us, the members of His body, the fellowship of service. It is in this latter sense that we are to consider the expression at this time. We find very much in this prophetic book about service.

I. The names given to the Lord’s servants.

1. Servant. This is the first term applied to us. It is used throughout the Scriptures in the strong sense, not merely of an employee, but of a bond slave. The Bible servant is the property of his master. The very principle of Christian service is that we first belong to Him ourselves and then we give Him our service just as in a royal palace every vessel bears the monogram of the king. He will not use any vessel that is not exclusively his own. So the Lord wants us to bear His monogram before He employs us on His commissions. The watchword of the true servant of the Lord is, “Whose I am and Whom I serve.” This is the source of constant weakness and failure in Christian work: the attempt to do things for the cause of Christ by people who do not themselves belong to Christ. This is all untempered mortar and worthless work. “Whose pocketbook is that?” was asked of a Christian gentleman. “Why, mine of course.” “To whom do you belong?” “I belong to the Lord.” “Ah, you belong to the Lord and the pocketbook belongs to you.” That is about the measure of average Christian service.

Paul gloried in calling himself the bond slave of Jesus Christ. Oh, that we might better learn his message to the Corinthians: “You are not your own; you are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body which is God’s.” (1 Cor. 6: 19, 20.)

Beloved, are you a true servant of God? Have you ceased to own yourself? Are you His property and do you recognize yourself and all you own as absolutely at His disposal, and are you letting Him shape your plans, direct your will and control your life? This is to be a servant of the Lord. “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service.”

2. Priests and ministers of God (Is. 61: 6.) The word “minister” also means a servant, but not in the extreme sense of the slave. It represents rather an official servant, one who holds an office in the public service. In this passage the two expressions “priests and ministers,” undoubtedly refer to the two official classes among the ancient Hebrews, namely, the priests and Levites. These together comprised the official servants of Jehovah, but they were quite different in their functions. The priests represented the idea of worship, the Levites, work. The first ministered directly to God; the second, to their brethren. The business of the priests was to offer sacrifice and incense in the holy place. The business of the Levites was to set up the tabernacle, to take it down, to carry it on its wilderness journeys, to teach the people to perform the manual duties connected with the camp and the service of the sanctuary.

In the Christian Church there are not any longer two classes of servants, but the two kinds of service are combined in the life of each of us. We are to be both priests and Levites. One part of our ministry is to worship God, to love Him, to pray to Him, to praise Him, to pour forth continually the sacrifice of a loving, reverent heart in praise, communion and prayer as an “odor of a sweet smelling savor.” The other part is to be active, useful, helpful, practical, to serve one another by love, to work for the cause of Christ, to build up His Church, to seek and save the lost, to supply the means by which His work is carried on, to be teachers of His people and the active promoters of His work in every proper way. We are to blend the fervor of Mary with the hands of Martha. We are to be at once busy and devout, faithful in every earthly trust, yet “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.”

Beloved, are we thus ministering in His Church, a holy priesthood, true ministers of the sanctuary which God has built and not man?

3. Witnesses. (Is. 43: 10.) “You are My witnesses says the Lord.” A witness is one who bears personal testimony of what he knows. We are to know God so that we can make Him real to men. We are to know Christ and be able to communicate Him to others. This we are to do not only by what we say, but our whole life should be an object-lesson of witness-bearing for God. Is it truly so? Do we constantly reflect Him? Do we make Him real to the people who know us and see us from day to day? Do we make Him attractive to them so that they are hungry for the Christ that we have found? Do we always act as though we were on the witness stand for Him? Do we bring credit and honor to His name? Or are we sometimes like the man who had forgotten his sacred trust and although a prominent member of the Church of Christ, had allowed himself to be drawn into compromising friendships, fellowships and amusements, and was often found in the company of the ungodly, countenancing things which God could not approve. One of his truest friends had long tried to draw him away from this false life, but failed to impress him. One day he sent a card in to him as he sat at a worldly entertainment with a lot of godless companions, and on the other side of the card were these simple words, “You are my witnesses, says the Lord.” As he read it, he flushed crimson. He looked at the friends around him. He realized how out of keeping the whole surroundings were with his high calling as a witness for God, and he soon excused himself on the plea of an emergency call and left the forbidden world in which he had been betraying his Master, never to return again.

Beloved friend, are you a witness for Christ or against Him?

II. The qualifications of the servants of the Lord.

1. The fire-touched lips (Is. 6: 7.) It was thus that Isaiah’s own service for God had begun. It is thus that all true Christian service must begin, in the baptism of the Holy Ghost and the cleansing of heart and tongue by God’s consuming fire. Then his ears were opened to hear the voices of heaven. Then his eyes were opened to see the needs of the world. Then the message was understood, “Whom shall I send, and who will go?” and the answer came springing from his lips, “Here I am, send me.”

Beloved, it is not your natural abilities that can equip you for the service of the Lord. You must receive the definite baptism of the Holy Ghost. Have you received Him? If you have, the first place where it will be evident will be your tongue. It will show its reality and power by what you say, and still more by what you do not say. Oh, has it burned up the frivolousness, the flippancy, the folly of unholy speech, and burned in God’s messages to your trembling lips as in the days of old?

2. Opened ears. (Is. 50: 4). “The Lord has given me the tongue of one that has learned, that I may know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. He awakens my ear morning by morning that I may hear as one that has been instructed.” We must first hear our own messages from His lips before others can hear them from ours with any profit. The true servant of the Lord has a quickened ear. He knows the voice of his Master. “He hears the word at His mouth.” His messages are not merely reasoned out and gathered up from the newspapers and the current religious literature of the time, but they are echoes of a heavenly voice, and back of them the speaker and the hearer recognize, “This says the Lord.”

Fellow workers, do you know His voice? Do you wait for His messages and do you speak as one that has been instructed a “word in season to him that is weary”? It is not a great many words that help. It is not a whole sermon or talk. It is one single word that falls into one heart and another message into another. This is God’s way of warning, quickening, convicting, comforting and inspiring His people.

Those who can thus hear God’s voice and bring His message are the true prophets of every age. God give to us the prophetic spirit and the God-touched ears and tongues of Pentecost.

3. Eyes blinded to all else but His work. (Is. 42: 19.) “Who is blind but My servant? or deaf, as My messenger that I sent? Who is blind as he that is perfect and blind as the Lord’s servant?”

God’s true servants have to be blind to everything else but their business for Him. Like a driving horse, whose eyes are shaded from all side views and can only look straight on, so God would have us go with eyes concentrated on His work and will. How many things there are by which the adversary would side-track us or distract us. The world’s attractions, the people about us, the things they say about us or do not say about us: all these we must be blind to and our watchword be, “This one thing I do.”

4. Swift and willing feet to run His errands. (Is. 52: 7.) “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings.” The Lord’s servant must not only know, but he must go. His work will call him to the mountains, the hard place of service, but his feet will be “shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace,” and he will leave behind him a shining track of beauty and of light.

There is another fine passage about consecrated feet in Isaiah 32: 20. “Blessed are you that sow beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass.” Sowing beside all waters has reference to the irrigated valleys of the Orient and the planting of our seed where the waters have prepared the soil. We are to follow the Holy Ghost as He opens our way and prepares the hearts of men. “The feet of the ox and the ass” are very suggestive of true Christian service. The ox is the toiling beast, the ass, the burden-bearer. The one works, the other suffers. Both suggest the fine symbol used by the Baptist Missionary Society as its trademark: an ox standing between a plough on the one hand and an altar on the other with the inscription over him, “Ready for either or both.” The true servant of the Lord is ready for service or suffering as the Lord may call for the plough or the altar. This is finely worked out in the Gospel of Mark, which is a picture of Jesus Christ as the Father’s servant. There we see Him as the toiling Christ first and then as the suffering Christ.

Beloved, are our feet following His footprints, going forth beside all waters in ministries of loving service and patient suffering.

5. One more qualification for the true servant is found in our context. “He has made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand has He hid me and made me a polished shaft; in His quiver has He hid me.” It is to be hidden in the shadow of His hand, while His hand alone is seen, and we are out of sight. The bane of much service is the blaze of publicity, the blowing of the trumpet of the worker and the bid that is so often made for popular sensation, applause and admiration. God only can use His hidden workers. The seraphim used four of their six wings to cover their faces and their feet and the true servant of the Lord will always seek to be out of sight himself that Jesus may be glorified.

Beloved, are we thus divinely equipped and consecrated for the service of our Lord?

III. The ministries of true service.

1. To give the light of the gospel to the world. In Isaiah 42: 6-7, we have the commission of the Master which has been passed on to His servants. “I will give You for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles to open the blind eyes and to bring out the prisoners from the prison and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.” This is our supreme service; to give the light of His gospel to the world and set free the prisoners of sin and Satan. Are we doing this? Is the chief business of our lives to spread the Gospel and save our fellow men?

2. “To speak a word in season to him that is weary.” (Is. 50: 4.) This is for the comfort and edification of His people. It is just as important that we minister to Christians as that we save sinners. God’s people need much comfort, quickening and spiritual help. They are often weary. Hearts are fainting all around us and we do not at all seem to care. Oh, for the men and women, that are ready to speak a word in season! If you are much with your Master, your lives will drop the oil of joy for mourning, and your hands will bring balm for broken hearts. The social call, the chance meeting on the street, the journey on the railway train, the call of some burdened business man for counsel and advice: all these will give you opportunities quite as valuable as the inquiry room, the Sunday school class and the religious meeting to speak such words for Christ and the comfort of your fellows. God help us, beloved, to be true to this wayside ministry.

3. We are called to work for the age to come. There is a very sublime passage in Isaiah 51: 16 which appeals to the highest feelings of the earnest Christian. “I have put My words in your mouth and I have covered you in the shadow of My hand that I may plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth and say unto Zion, you are My people.” What a superb figure! “Plant the heavens.” “Lay the foundations of the earth.” The trees of righteousness and the amaranthine flowers that are filling the paradise of God are planted by our hands. Oh, some day to find in your home above innumerable souls that have been brought there through your instrumentality to be your joy and crown of righteousness forever. Thus we may “plant the heavens”and we may “lay the foundations of the earth.” That is the future millennial earth. The work we are doing in calling out a people for His name, in evangelizing the world and in preparing for His coming. Truly this is laying the foundations of that new earth where Christ shall reign and we shall sit with Him upon His throne.

Beloved, is there any earthly ambition that can compare with this? Is there any sort of hope that shines with so bright a luster? Is every recompense that earth can offer you worthy of comparison? Oh, turn from the tinsel baubles of a vain and passing world and begin to lay up treasure beyond. Come into that splendid partnership with Him where we receive our wages now, but our dividends bye and bye and the dividend shall be the whole inheritance. “He that reaps receives wages and gathers fruit unto life eternal.” Shall we “plant the heavens” and “lay the foundations of the earth,” and invest our lives in the age to come?

4. We are called to restore the things that have been lost by a faithless church. Here is a fine description of the ministry to which God is calling many today. Isaiah 58: 12: “They that shall be of you shall build the old waste places: you shall raise up the foundations of many generations and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.” How much has been lost since Pentecostal days! How much has been missed from the full heritage of His will! Thank God, His faithful servants today are being used to repair the breaches; to restore the old paths and show us that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

5. The supreme business of the servant is to glorify His Master. “Oh, Israel, you are My servant in whom I will be glorified.” (Isa. 49: 3.) Are we glorifying Him? Is it our supreme aim to do so? At a railway station an officer of the company was very strictly carrying out the instructions of his chief and excluding many from the gates. All sorts of devices were used by the knowing ones to get through but he was inexorably firm both to flatteries and frowns. At last one man said to him, “You seem to be absolutely indifferent to what anybody thinks of you in this crowd.” “Well,” said he, “my one business and my only ambition is to please the man that employs me, and he is the only man I am trying to please.” Oh, that loyalty to Christ might be as true! Are we glorifying Him?

IV. Promises to the servants of the Lord.

1. Upholding. (Is. 42: 6.) “I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness and will hold your hand and will keep you.” The servant of the Lord is held and upheld by Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand.

2. All necessary resources. (Is. 45: 2, 3). “I will go before you and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass and cut in sunder the bars of iron. and I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places.” His mighty providence will go before us and prepare our way. His infinite riches will open to us the treasures of darkness and He will supply the means and resources we require as we go forward and trust Him for His work.

3. Protection. (Is. 54: 17.) “No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their righteousness is of Me, says the Lord.” It is not because of our righteousness that He does this, but because He gives us His righteousness and guards us for His own name’s sake that our reputation is safe in His keeping and our lives are immortal until our work is done.

4. Efficiency and success. (Is. 55: 11.) “My word shall not return unto Me void; but it shall accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” The fruit may tarry long, the work may seem in vain, but nothing that His Spirit has prompted can ever fall to the ground.

5. Compensation for seeming failure. (Is. 49: 2-6.) “Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord. It is a light thing that you should be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give you for a light to the Gentiles that you may be My salvation unto the end of the earth.” Our work may seem to fail as the great Servant’s did in one direction, but we shall still be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and as He promised Christ, so to us He will also give a new and larger ministry in some other direction and make glorious compensation for every hard place and seeming failure.

6. The recompense of joy. (Is. 65: 13,14.) Here are some of the recompenses of the sorrowing and toiling servant. “Behold, My servants shall eat, but you shall be hungry; behold, My servants shall drink, but you shall be thirsty, behold, My servants shall rejoice, but you shall be ashamed; behold, My servants shall sing for joy of heart, but you shall cry for sorrow of heart and shall howl for vexation of spirit.” Such is the joy of true service. Such is the recompense the Master holds for all that follow Him. He is a good Master. Let us be true and faithful servants. He was the great Servant Himself. Let us follow in His footsteps and count it our highest honor to say, “I serve.” Shall He have our lives? Shall He have them wholly, gladly and forevermore?

“Give me a faithful heart,
Likeness to Thee,
That each departing day
Henceforth may see
Some work of love begun,
Some deed of kindness done.
Some wanderer sought and won
Something for Thee.”

“As many were astonished at You; his visage was so marred, more than the sons of men; so shall he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at Him: for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard shall they consider.
“He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied; by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities.” (Is. 52: 14-15; 53: 11.)

The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah should begin with our first text, including the last paragraph of the fifty-second chapter. It is all one combined picture of the suffering Messiah.

Jewish writers have tried hard to apply it to Israel as a nation and to show that it demands no other fulfillment in the life of an individual sufferer, but after the utmost strain of the natural force of language, such a construction utterly fails to carry conviction to an unprejudiced reader, and we are constrained to recognize this marred face of suffering, this Man of sorrows, this victim of sacrifice, this Conqueror of Satan and sin as no less a person than the Man of Galilee and the Man of Calvary who in the fulness of time appeared on earth and fulfilled every one of these minute predictions in His own person and in His passion and death.

The prophet commences the fifty-third chapter with a wail of complaint against the indifference and unbelief that rejected his momentous message and refused to recognize the arm of the Lord. He gives a picture of the sufferings of the Saviour and the fruits that grow from the blood-stained soil of Calvary.

I. The Sufferer.

Many details make up this tragic picture.

1. The first is His lowly birth. “He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness and when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” (Is. 53: 2.) This great sufferer began His career amid circumstances of the deepest humiliation. He was born of a maiden mother with a cloud of reproach upon His name. His lot was that of poverty. His cradle was a manger. His home was Nazareth, whose very name stood for all that was despicable and was a play upon the words of the text, for “Natsar,” just means a dry sprout, “a root out of a dry ground.” There seems to have been no natural attractiveness about the person of Jesus Christ in a purely human way. He was a contradiction of the ideals of the flesh, and a disappointment to every form of human pride.

2. His rejection by His own people. “He is despised and rejected of men; we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised and we esteemed Him not.” (Is. 53: 3.)

What a bitter trial it was to Moses to come to his nation with high enthusiasm and patriotic devotion, prepared to stand up for them against their oppressors and then to find that they refused to appreciate His services and failed to understand His mission. “Jesus came unto His own and His own received Him not.” It must have been one of the great sorrows of His life to be conscious of the intense love which was sacrificing itself for His people and their utter inability to understand Him, appreciate Him or let Him save them.

3. The privations and sorrows of His earthly life. All the elements which constitute man’s cup of sorrow filled His bitter draught of earthly pain. He was poor and had to toil for His own livelihood and that of His mother. He was lonely and felt Himself a stranger in a strange world. His life was one of constant self-denial, repression and intense toil, walking on foot again and again over all the land and working incessantly and often with wearied frame from dawn until darkness, teaching, healing, helping His fellow-men. And suffering was so strange to Him. He had never known sorrow before. It was a new world of experience. He was like a land bird far at sea and out of its element. He was like a naked man fighting his way through thickets of thorns. His whole being was open to a thousand sensitive sufferings that our coarser natures know nothing of, and He was indeed “acquainted with grief.” Others left Him, His disciples forsook Him, but sorrow never left His side.

4. Perhaps the keenest element in His sorrow was His sacrificial sufferings. “He was made sin for us who knew no sin.” “You shall make His soul an offering for sin.” (Is. 53: 10.) “He bare the sins of many.” (Is. 53: 12). The terrible sting of sin entered His soul. We know something of what it is to be crushed with a single sin and perhaps agonize and pray for hours, before we rise above it and find forgiveness and victory; but on Him there rested all the sins of all the world. They were imputed to Him and counted as His own, and He had to bear their penalty and their poison.

A great writer has said that there are three things in the story of Jesus that are utterly above all human experience. The first is that an innocent Man suffered as no one else suffered before. The second is that an Almighty One was crushed, defeated, destroyed by forces that He could easily have overcome, and the third is that through this very paradox He has won His victory and accomplished His great purpose of the world’s redemption.

The question is often asked, “Is it right for an innocent person to suffer for the guilt of sinners ?” In answer we may say first that God has so permitted and therefore, it must be right. Secondly, vicarious suffering is the law of the universe. The vegetable world lives by absorbing the mineral. The animal world lives by absorbing the vegetable. The lower animals sacrifice themselves that the higher may live, and even the human race suffers and dies that it may give place to and propagate the next generation. Thirdly, He was voluntary in thus suffering vicariously for others. It would be wrong to compel an innocent person to suffer for the wrong of others, but if he chooses to be a substitute on the higher plane of heroism we have no right to prevent it. Fourthly, the One who suffered for us was not a stranger, but really One of our own race, its federal Head and entitled to represent us. And finally, it was on this principle that the human race fell through the sin of one man, Adam, our federal head. It is therefore in keeping that the race should be redeemed by their new head, Jesus Christ.

There is no doubt that Isaiah’s picture of the Savior’s sufferings represents them as vicarious. “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Is. 53: 6.) What a picture of concentrated suffering. It is as though one man were suddenly compelled to stand for all the debts of all the people in the world and from every quarter they came in upon him until he was swamped, bankrupt and crushed. It is as though a shepherd had gone out alone to stand between the flock and the wolves, and they all set upon him until they had torn him to pieces and he fell bleeding and dying, but the sheep were saved. It is as though all the burning rays of yonder sun at its torrid noon were converged in a great burning glass into one single point of flame and one sensitive heart was placed beneath that fiery focus and burned to cinders. All our guilt and all the penalty it deserved met upon Him and He sank beneath the awful load, but not until He had met the claim, had canceled the debt and had saved the world.

5. His trial and judgment. “He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who shall declare His generation, for He was cut off out of the land of the living.” (Is. 53: 8.) What a pathetic story the trial of Jesus was. Worn with a sleepless night, His clothing damp with the bloody sweat of the garden, His heart sore with the betrayal of Judas, He is hurried before the council of the Jews and there He has to face the cruel denial of Peter, His own disciple, and the false accusations of His bitter foes. Again He is hustled to the court of Pilate, dismissed to the judgment seat of Herod, marched back again amid the mockeries of the soldiers to Pilate’s court once more, and there insulted, belied, stripped and scourged with cruel lashes loaded with nails, until the flesh hangs bleeding from His bones, and even Pilate, moved with a strange sympathy, points to Him as a spectacle of compassion and cries, “Behold the man!” Then amid a hideous carnival of cruelty and scorn, He is condemned and compelled to carry His heavy cross to the hill of Calvary where they crucify Him. Well might He say in the prophetic words of Jeremiah, “Behold, and see all you that pass by if there be any sorrow like unto My Sorrow.”

6. His death and burial. “He poured out His soul unto death. He made His grave with the wicked, but He was with the rich in His death.” (Is. 53: 12, 9.)

Death to Him must have had a touch more terrible than to less sensitive natures, but He gave Himself up to it as an offering and a willing sacrifice. He literally poured out His very life unto death, and the one extenuating feature in it all was that instead of being buried with the wicked, He was with the rich in His death and the tomb of Joseph was offered as the resting place of His lifeless form.

7. But the bitterest dregs of His cup of sorrow were yet to come. These were caused by the Father’s stroke. “It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; you have put Him to grief.” For that dreadful moment He stood in the place of guilty men and it was their day of judgment. Therefore upon His single head there fell the judgment stroke which the guilty world deserved. He bore our hell and in that awful moment for an instant His heart was crushed. When our dark hours come to us, we can bear anything if we have His presence. But when death was creeping over Him, and demons were tormenting Him and men were torturing Him, He reached out for His Father’s hand, He looked up for His Father’s smile and all was darkness and wrath, and He uttered that bitter cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” “He was made sin for us who knew no sin.”

“Jehovah lifted up His rod,
O Christ, it fell on Thee;
Thou wast sore stricken of Thy God.
Thy bruising healeth me;
A victim led, my Savior bled,
Now there’s no curse for me.”

8. The travail of His soul. Christ’s deepest anguish was inward. He was going through a great soul conflict of responsibility, desire and intense prayer for the salvation of men. The whole weight of the world’s redemption was resting upon His heart. It was the birth hour of heaven. Had He failed, hope would have died for every human soul and heaven been draped in mourning. That awful weight was upon Him. All His life long He bore it, but in the last and crisis hour it absorbed His being with the anguish of a travailing woman. The twenty-second psalm gives a little picture of that conflict. There is a strange expression there, “Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.” Who was His darling? It was His beloved Bride. It was the Church that He was holding in His arms from the fearful attack of her foe, and His one last thought was “To save others though Himself He could not save.” He did, but oh, the awful cost; what tongue can tell!

II. The fruit of His sorrow.

First as it affects us:

1. It brings us deliverance from sickness. “Surely He has borne our sicknesses.”

2. It brings us victory over sorrow. “He carried our sorrows.”

3. It brings us the forgiveness of our transgressions. “He was wounded for our transgressions.”

4. It brings us salvation from the power of sin. “He was bruised for our iniquity,” the power of indwelling sin.

5. It brings us peace. “The chastisement of our peace was upon Him.”

6. It brings us justification. “By His knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many.”

7. It brings us His intercession. “He made intercession for the transgressors.”

8. It brings salvation for the nations. “So shall He sprinkle many nations.”

What a rich and glorious salvation is thus provided, covering all our temporal and spiritual needs, and large as the world itself in its boundless fulness.

Second, as it affects Him:

1. “He shall prolong His days.” This refers to His resurrection, ascension and “the power of an endless life” which has been given Him.

2. “He shall see His seed.” This refers to His spiritual offspring. There are two races in the world today, the Adam race and the Christ race. The Adam race is doomed. The Christ race is redeemed. Christians are the seed of Jesus, born of His very being and partners of His own life.

3. “The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.” This refers to the great mediatorial work given Him by the Father which is the reward of His sufferings and which He is carrying on with victorious power until His Kingdom shall have been established in all the world.

4. The spoils of victory. “You shall divide Him a portion with the great and He shall divide the spoil with the strong because He has poured out His soul unto death.” As the reward of His conflict and suffering, He is to share the spoils of victory over Satan and all His foes. Among them are the restitution of this lost world which Satan had captured for a time and claimed to rule as its lord. Christ has overcome him by the cross and is finishing His triumph through the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit, and the vision of prophecy has revealed to us the final triumph when the enemy shall be forever imprisoned in the lake of fire and all the things that he has wrecked shall be restored in “the days of the restitution of all things.” Then shall that sublime vision of the Apocalypse be fulfilled, “I saw heaven opened and, behold, a white horse and He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns, and He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, and His name is called the Word of God, and, He has on His vesture and on His thigh a name written, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

5. “He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied.” Tell me how much would satisfy your heart for this sin-cursed world, and then I will tell you something of what would satisfy the heart of Jesus. But you could tell me nothing if you were to talk for a thousand years that would even faintly approximate all the joy, the victory, the glory which these words imply for earth and heaven, for our ransomed race and our Redeemer’s heart of love. All this He saw as He hung that day on Calvary and the prospect took away the bitterness of the cross.

“He could see the ransomed throng,
He could hear their rapturous song
Rolling through the ages long;
He could see His glorious Bride
Saved and seated by His side,
And His soul was satisfied.”

Shall we help to satisfy His soul?

“Why are you red in your apparel, and your garments like him that treads in the wine vat? I have trodden the winepress alone.” (Isa. 63: 2-3).

Three pictures of the Lord Jesus are given in this splendid poetic vision.

I. The Conqueror. It is a picture of the hero warrior coming back from the conflict with Edom, Israel’s traditional foe. It is a picture of the conqueror, not the warrior, that we see. The battle is over. The carnage, the struggle, the horrors of the battlefield are all behind Him. It is only as a victor that He appears, marching in splendid majesty, “glorious in His apparel, traveling in the greatness of His strength.”

The picture is true to the whole analogy of prophecy and the whole story of redemption. It is all one long battle from Edom to Armageddon. The first promise of redemption is the prophecy of a battle between the seed of the woman and the serpent, the emissary of Satan. The conflict between Moses and Pharaoh, Israel and Amalek, Joshua and the Canaanites, David and his enemies, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah and the kings of Judah: all these were but types of that greater battle raging in the heavenly places and leading on to the final triumph of the Son of God and the setting up of His millennial throne. The life of every Christian is but a section of this great conflict. It is renewed from generation to generation and age to age and every Christian must be a soldier as well as a saint.

But the point of the whole prophetic picture is not so much the conflict as the Conqueror. The figure that stands in the front is the victorious Christ, the battle fought, the triumph won and the enemy destroyed. The lesson for us is that the battle is not ours, but God’s, and that the battle has been won for us already by Him and we go into every conflict with the prestige of victory assured. Just as David met Goliath single-handed, and as the champion of Israel defeated the army of the Philistines by defeating their leader, so the Son of God has won for us the great victory of redemption, and it is our privilege to enter into His victory and go into every conflict saying, “Thanks be unto God who always causes us to triumph in Christ Jesus.”

Are we thus taking His victory and entering into the triumph of His cross? It is our glorious privilege so to do. Then we need never know defeat or doubt or fear, but shall meet Satan as a conquered foe and ourselves be “more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”

The prominence of Edom in this conflict is very significant. Edom stands for the flesh, our greatest spiritual foe. In this connection there is a remarkable passage in the seventeenth chapter of Exodus describing Israel’s first conflict with the race of Edom, Amalek. This was typical of the battle which God has ever been waging against the flesh and the power of sin. This battle was not won by human valor, but by divine power. Only while Moses held up his hands did Israel prevail, and when his hands grew heavy and fell down, then Amalek prevailed. It was to teach us that we are to overcome our spiritual adversaries not by our energy, but by the uplifted hands of faith, claiming the supernatural power of God. This battle was to be permanent. “The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation,” and we find this true in every stage of our Christian career.

But in the marginal reading of this verse there is a striking expression which confirms the teaching that we have just been giving. “Because the hand is upon the throne of the Amalek from generation to generation.” The hand upon the throne of the Lord represents the hand of faith taking God Himself for the victory, and when this is the case and our hand is there, then the Lord fights our battle and comes from Edom evermore “traveling in the greatness of His strength,” “mighty to save.”

Shall we learn the lesson of His victory? Shall we follow the Captain of our salvation, and “in all these things be more than conquerors through Him that loved us”?

II. The Savior.

“I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.” (Is. 63: 1.) This is not a selfish conflict like most human wars, for personal ambition and earthly power and renown. Oh, how human blood has flowed and human hearts have ached that some selfish hero might be called earth’s greatest conqueror. There are some wars that have been undertaken, not for ambition, but for the deliverance of an oppressed and captive people. Such is the great conflict of redemption. Our mighty Captain has come forth to fight the battle of a lost world and to rescue us from the powers of darkness, and He conquers only that He may save. He is the Champion of the oppressed and it is written of Him, “He shall save the children of the needy and shall break in pieces the oppressor; He shall deliver the needy when he cries, the poor also and him that has no helper.”

The prophet tells us four things about His great salvation.

1. He is a righteous Savior. He does not override the claims of justice, but He is “a just God and a Savior.” He has recognized the claims of God’s law against sinful men and has fully met them. He has paid the penalty of sin in His own person and by His death upon the cross. He has fulfilled for us a broken law and presented to God a perfect righteousness in our stead and the salvation He gives to us is not merely the obliterating of the record against us but a complete settlement of every claim which justifies us in the sight of God and enables us to say, “Who is he that condemns; who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?”

2. He is a mighty Savior. He has overcome all the obstacles that interposed and there is no case too hard for His power. He saves us from the guilt of sin and the wrath of God against it. He saves us from the fear of punishment. He saves us from the defiling power of sin in our hearts and purifies and cleanses our nature. He saves us from the physical effects of sin and is the Healer of the body as well as the Redeemer of the soul. He saves us from the consequences of our sin and restores to us “the years the locust has eaten,” and the opportunities that our folly threw away. He saves us from the fear of death and raises us to a higher glory than we could have ever known if sin had not come. He is “able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.” He is able to save from the uttermost, too. There is no soul too lost, there is no heart too hard for Him to conquer. He can save our loved ones and rescue the captives of the mighty from the very jaws of the destroyer.

3. He is the only Savior. “I looked and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me and my fury, it upheld me.” (Is. 63: 5.)

4. There is a strange blending here of salvation with destruction. “The day of vengeance is in mine heart and the year of my redeemed is come.” (Is. 63: 4.) This is really one of the underlying principles of the plan of redemption. It is a salvation through destruction. This is the very significance of the cross. It is life through death, victory through seeming defeat, and joy through sorrow. It was thus that the antediluvian world was saved “by water,” that is, through the destruction of the sin that was engulfing it. It was thus that Israel was saved from Egypt by the death stroke that smote the first born. It was thus that humanity was saved on the cross by the death of Christ, and all our sinful nature with Him, and it is thus that each of us is saved by going through death to life through the power of His grace. So finally the material world is to be saved by fire and the destruction of the present economy is to usher in “the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwells righteousness.”

III. The Sufferer.

But this was a costly victory. This Conqueror has not easily won His splendid triumph and saved His captive people. “Why are you red in your apparel and your garments like him that treads in the wine vat? I have trodden the winepress alone.” (Is. 63: 2, 3.) While a severe exegesis might insist upon the application of this figure wholly to the sufferings of His foes, yet the beautiful Christian sentiment that has always associated it with the sufferings of the Redeemer cannot be set aside, and His grateful and ransomed people will always associate this pathetic verse with the agony of the garden and the cross.

The peculiar feature, however, of Christ’s sufferings emphasized in this passage, is their solitariness. “I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with Me.” (Is. 63: 3.) The very greatness of Christ and the loftiness of His nature separated Him inevitably from others both in His sufferings and in His deepest life. His lofty nature made Him peculiarly sensitive to things that we would not so deeply feel. To Him the world of sin and sorrow was wholly strange and new. On his finer sensitiveness, the rudeness, coarseness and wrongness of every earthly thing must have grated with a strange pain. Above all, the presence of sin and His identification with it, must have been a hideous agony to the holy nature of the Son of God. To be treated as a malefactor, to be counted worthy of the shame that the vilest sinner deserved, “to be made sin for us who knew no sin,” to be judged by His Father as an accursed one and to go down for a little while into the very realms of Hades, and touch for a moment our very hell; all these were elements in the peculiar sufferings of the Son of God which human hearts can never comprehend. Then, besides, He was left in utter desolation in His darkest hour. His disciples forsook Him and fled. Peter denied Him. Judas betrayed Him, and even His Father covered His face with a cloud and for a little while poured upon His head the judgment that sinners deserved. Truly He was treading “the winepress alone.”

Surely it is fitting that those who love Him should often go apart and gaze upon that spectacle of sorrow while they hear Him saying, “All you that pass by look and see if there is any sorrow like My sorrow wherewith the Lord has afflicted Me in the day of His fierce anger.”

The very design of the Lord’s Supper is to keep alive the tender recollection of His passion and to do this in remembrance of Him.

There are two practical lessons for us in connection with this subject.

1. The place of suffering in our life. The greatest mystery about the gospel is that Jesus, that most innocent of beings, was the greatest sufferer, and His suffering is His supreme glory. It is equally true of us that suffering must be part of our discipline and our glory too. While there were sufferings which He had to bear alone, there are others which He shares with us. We can have no part in that sacrificial offering by which He once for all redeemed us and saved us, but we can have a part in the travail of His soul which, as our great High Priest, He is forever bearing in the conflict of the ages and the accomplishment of redemption. On yonder heavenly throne He is still suffering in sympathy with His people and in prayer for the completion of His redemption. That is the burden which we may share with Him. It was of this Paul said, “I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind in all the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body’s sake, which is the church.” Every soul that is converted, every victory that is won for the cause of Christ costs Him the travail of His soul, and we, His body, can bear that travail with Him. This is the meaning of the ministry of prayer. This is the meaning of the burden of suffering which He lays upon the hearts that are willing to watch and weep with Him. Shall we enter into this holy ministry and thus be partakers of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that shall follow?

2. The solitariness of our life. The Master was alone in the deepest tragedy of His life and every true follower of Jesus must also learn to be often alone. There are sufferings that will come to us that no other can share. There are experiences that no other can understand. There are confidences between us and our Lord that no human soul can share. Shall we go with Him along the solitary way? Many of us are there now. Let us not be discouraged, but remember the lone Master who went before us, saying, “Yet I am not alone for My Father is with Me.”

“Ah, be not sad although thy lot be cast
Far from the fold, and in a boundless waste
No shepherd’s tents within thy view appear;
But the chief Shepherd even there is near.
Thy tender sorrow and thy plaintive strain
Flow in a foreign land, but not in vain
Thy tears all issue from a source divine,
And every drop bespeaks a Savior thine.”

“Ho, every one that thirsts, come to the waters, and he that has no money; come, buy and eat; yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not? Hearken diligently unto me and eat that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear and come unto Me: hear and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.” (Isa. 55: 1-3.)

The fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah naturally follows the fifty-third as the proclamation of the Gospel follows the cross of Calvary and the completed atonement.

The chapter opens with a business note, in fact, it is like an announcement from an Oriental bargain counter. The Jews had already begun to learn from their relation with the Babylonians those commercial lessons which have made them ever since the great traders of the world. Like an Eastern merchant offering his wares to the passerby, the prophet cries, “Ho, everyone that thirsts, come to the waters, come buy and eat without money and without price.” It is indeed a great bargain that He is offering — everything for nothing.

I. What He offers. In a word, it is the gospel in all the fulness of its blessings.

1. The waters represent the more ordinary and essential blessings of the gospel; its cleansing and satisfying streams of life and salvation.

2. Wine represents rather the cordials and comforts and the special provisions which Christ has made for the sick, the suffering and the feeble. “Give wine to him that is ready to perish,” is the prescription of the Hebrew sage. And so wine represents the richer, choicer things which the Holy Spirit gives to the hearts that are prepared.

3. Milk. This is food for babes. This is the gospel’s provision for the little children. This is the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus whose salvation is adapted alike to the humblest child and the loftiest sage.

4. The feast of fat things. “Eat that which is good and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” The gospel has the choicest blessings, the supreme joys, and, best of all, the power to quicken our being so that we can take in these higher blessings and our capacity for enjoyment is immeasurably enlarged as well as the means to satisfy it.

5. Life in all its deep and everlasting meaning. “Hear and your soul shall live.” (Is. 55: 3.) Life for the soul, life for the spirit, life more abundantly, life forever more, eternal life “begun on earth and perfect in the skies.”

6. Forgiveness of sins, mercy and pardon. “He will have mercy upon him.” “He will abundantly pardon.” (Is. 55: 7.)

7. The covenanted life. “I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.” (Is. 55: 3.) The ungodly has no security for the future. The sinner knows not what a day may bring forth. Life has nothing guaranteed and eternity is still more uncertain and unsafe. The unsaved man is adrift upon a shoreless ocean, at the mercy of every wind and tide. But the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ has a covenanted life. His future is guaranteed and he knows that all is well. Of the one it is said, “Aliens from the commonwealth of Israel; strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph. 2: 12.) And of the other it is true, “I am persuaded that neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8: 38, 39.) “For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose.” (Rom. 8: 28.)

8. Joy and Peace. “For you shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break before you into singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” (Is. 55: 12.) This is the life of triumph. The mountains stand for difficulties; the trees for the fruits of our lives. Everything shall fall in line with the triumphant future of the children of God and earth and heaven claim their “abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

9. Victory over trial and suffering. “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree and instead of the briar the myrtle tree.” (Is. 55: 13.) This is the promise of the transformation of evil into good and the curse into a blessing. The thorn and the briar represent the bitter present ills of life, but these shall be so overruled and so counteracted that we shall meet them in the land beyond as palms of victory and myrtles of beauty and the very trees that shall adorn our home in paradise shall be made out of the thorns and briars of our earthly wilderness.

Oh, what a gospel this is that can turn the world upside down and transmute the darkest, saddest things into memorials of blessing and voices of everlasting praise.

II. The persons to whom this offer is made.

1. The thirsty. “Ho, everyone that thirsts.” (Is. 55: 1.) These are the souls that have grown weary of this vain and empty world and found its promises and even its pleasures “vanity of vanities and vexation of spirit.” How unsatisfying are all earthly things. Their chief enjoyment consists in their pursuit. Their attainment leaves us sated, tired and ready for some new excitement. How pathetic the cry of that weary heart that had gone from flower to flower in her reckless pursuit of pleasure and yet was compelled to cry, “Lord, give me to drink of this water that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.”

2. The poor. “He that has no money, come.” (Is. 55: 1.) This means the poor in spirit, the people that have nothing to give in return for the mercy of God. He asks nothing but our poverty, our helplessness and the opportunity of saving us, blessing us and making our lives happy and receiving back the recompense of our joy and our praise. You are not really ready to come until you find your poverty and are willing to say:

“Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Your cross I cling;
Naked, come to You for dress,
Helpless, look to You for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly,
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”

3. The deceived. “Why spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which satisfies not?” (Is. 55: 2.) You have been fooled by the tempter. You have sought, in the broken cisterns of earth, to quench your thirst and they have all disappointed you. Perhaps you have been more cruelly deceived by wicked men, unprincipled women and a false and selfish world. Come to Him. He will never deceive you. Why should you pay so much and get so little when He has all to give and nothing to ask but your trust and love?

4. The sinner. “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.” (Is. 55: 7.) Human societies are looking out for the people that have references and can show their good standing. Christ is looking out for people that have no standing. Here is one place you are welcome in proportion to your unworthiness. It is passing strange indeed, but wonderful and divine. “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Are you unworthy? Are you conscious of wrong? Are you tired of sinning? There is welcome for you.

III. The terms and conditions on which we are invited.

1. It is all free. There is nothing to pay. Even our future life of love and service is not a recompense but a grateful and loving return. We are not accepted and saved because we are going to be good, but because we are utterly bad and our goodness is but the offering up of our grateful love. It is grace, grace alone; love for the unlovely; help for the helpless and everything for nothing.

2. The first step to God is to hearken. “Hear, and your soul shall live; hearken diligently unto Me.” (Is. 55: 3, 2). The greatest hindrances to true life are inattention, insensibility, indifference and hardness of heart. Our ears are deafened by the voices of the world. Our minds are absorbed by the vanities of earth. We do not really give attention to the things of God. The round of fashion; the routine of daily duty; the rush of life drive us along like a great torrent and we come to the end of life before we really awake to its solemn meaning. Therefore God calls us aloud: “Ho, hearken, incline your ear, hear and your soul shall live,” and the Holy Spirit waits, “Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”

3. The first thing we are invited to do is to come. This is an approach to God, a move toward Him. Anything that brings us nearer is coming: the putting forth of desire; the stretching out a hand; the kneeling in prayer of a penitent and a suppliant; the movement forward to the altar of the inquirer or better than all, the lifting up of the heart to God and the reaching out of the soul in earnest prayer. Come any way at all, but come, and “He that comes unto Me I will in no wise cast out.”

4. Buy. This means to appropriate; to make it your own; to put your name in it; to claim it. The things you purchase are yours. So we must take Christ and His salvation. We must not only ask for it, but we must say, “It is mine,” and we must begin to act and think as though it were ours. You don’t have to pay for it, and yet you buy it. The price has been paid by another, and it becomes yours, not as a charity but as a redemption right, and you can look in the face of a just and holy God and claim it and know that He cannot refuse to give it to you not only as a matter of grace, but as a matter of justice and right inasmuch as it has been purchased for you by the precious blood of His only begotten Son.

5. Eat. This is more than buying. This is beginning to enjoy your purchase. This is getting the good of it and taking into your life the comfort, the strength, the joy which you have claimed by faith, and it is your privilege to know by actual experience as well.

6. “Seek the Lord.” This is for the souls that are far away. They may not find Him at once, but they are to continue to seek, to press their suit and to wait upon Him until they receive the fulness of His blessing. He is not far from the earnest seeker. “Seek the Lord while He may be found,” and found He shall surely be.

7. “Call upon Him.” This represents prayer. It is thus that we shall find Him, on our knees and at the throne of grace. Anybody can call. It is the cry of distress. It needs no science or education, but a deep sense of need and a simple confidence that there is some One sure to hear and answer. “Call upon Him while He is near.”

8. Turn from sin to God. “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him turn to the Lord.” This is repentance. There must be an actual forsaking of sin. There must be an honest turning to God. There must be an uncompromising “No” to the devil and the world and the flesh and the voice of sin and temptation; and there must be an everlasting “Yes” to God in all His good and holy will. Without this our own conscience and sense of right forbid us to expect an answer or a blessing; but acting thus no past transgression, no record of sin, no imperfection of your faith or your prayer, no possible barrier can keep you back from His mercy and His blessing. “He will have mercy upon you; He will abundantly pardon.”

IV. God’s appeal.

1. The waste of life. “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfies not?” (Is. 55: 2.) He pleads with us to give up the foolish waste of life on things that do not profit and to take the things that alone are worth living for. Oh, how cheaply we sell our souls! It is said that Rowland Hill, while preaching in the open air one day, was attracted by the passing of Lady Erskine, a distinguished duchess. Suddenly he stopped in his discourse and striking the pose of an auctioneer, he said, “Lady Erskine’s soul is for sale. Who will have it? Ah, Satan, you are bidding. You will give the world, pleasure, honor; every earthly attraction. But I hear another voice. It is the voice of the Lord Jesus. `I have given My life for her, and I will give to her eternal life.’ Lady Erskine, who shall have your soul?” And the duchess cried out, “Mr. Hill, the Lord Jesus shall have my soul, for He has paid the greater price and offers the richer boon.”

Oh, shall we waste our real treasures and throw ourselves away for the tinsel of a passing world?

2. He appeals by His own great love. “My thoughts are not your thoughts nor your ways My ways.” We may not be able to understand how God can give away so much for so little. It may seem too good to be true, but it is not. It is just like Him, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

“How Thou canst think so well of us
And be the God Thou art
Is darkness to my intellect,
But sunshine to my heart”

3. His unfailing Word. “My Word shall not return unto Me void,” He says. We can trust this promise. We can take Him at His Word and He will never, never fail us. Shall we do so? Shall we put our names in these great promises? Shall we claim this rich inheritance? Shall we accept the gospel of Isaiah which is the precious gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not? Hearken diligently unto me and eat that which is good and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” (Is. 55: 2.)

This passage tells us of misdirected effort and wasted strength. There is a coarse and brutal way in which multitudes are thus spending their “money for that which is not bread,” and their “labor for that which satisfies not,”in sensual indulgence and degrading vice. But there are also more refined and respectable ways in which multitudes are throwing away their lives and getting nothing at last but the empty shells.

One is reminded of the story told by Lord Dufferin about his Irish estate. There was a fine old castle on the land which was exposed to neglect and depredation through lack of a protecting wall. The old ruin was of great value and the noble lord desired to preserve it at a heavy cost. So before leaving for India, he gave instructions to his steward to have a fine substantial wall erected all around it. On his return from India he went to see the estate and inspect the old castle, but found to his dismay that the castle had entirely disappeared and there was just a great modern wall of solid masonry enclosing nothing but the site of the old ruin. He called the steward and asked him what he had done with the castle that he valued so highly. “Och !” said he, “that ould thing. I just pulled it down and used the materials to build the wall.”

The gifted lord used often to tell the humorous story and find in it a fine illustration of the way in which so many people were destroying the real treasures of life and putting their strength and energy into that which was but a mere shell to hold something else which had been overlooked and neglected. Not unlike the thoughtlessness of the steward was the conduct of a little girl in England who got a half crown given her by a friend and immediately went and spent it to buy a purse to hold the money in. When she got home she found a purse but nothing to put in it.

So multitudes are spending life with its infinite possibilities in merely providing the outward forms of things to discover at last that the real values have been quite forgotten. How often we find higher culture and education simply providing a lot of empty shells, qualities which have no practical value either in producing happiness or power. How often we see money spent lavishly in accumulating the mere materials of life; houses, lands, equipage, income and the whole machinery of life; but when it is all accomplished, it is hollow at heart. There are houses, but they are not homes, for there is not love to hallow them. There are the means of gratification, but there is no pleasure, for selfishness has destroyed the secret of true happiness.

Saddest of all is the waste of religious effort. What is ceremony and form without real devotion and love! How empty the pageant of a splendid ritual when behind it is the skeleton of a dead church and a Christless soul! Not more cold and cheerless are the marble monuments in the cemetery and the gilded spires on the cathedral above the worshipper’s head. It is all like the vision of the valley of dry bones: the forms of men, but there is no life in them.

Dear friend, are you spending your life in simply building walls with nothing to enclose; in buying purses that only hide their own emptiness; in making picture frames while the picture itself is absent, and in spending existence in one endless round of busy toil and anxious pursuit of happiness and success, to find at last, like the preacher in Ecclesiastes, that your vision has faded like a dream, that your life is but a scaffolding and the building has not yet even been begun and that there is nothing left but to sit in the chill winter of despair, and cry, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit ?”

What then, is the real object of life? What is there that is worth living for and expending our strength to realize and accomplish?

I. The first object of life is to find God and to be rightly adjusted to Him. As the flower needs the sun; as the birdling needs its mother; as the infant perishes without a parent’s love and care, so the human soul was made for God and never can rest until it rests in Him. The worlds of space all circle round their proper suns. There is a center of gravitation for everything and when any planet loses this bond, it becomes a wandering star and drifts into darkness and destruction.

God is our center and our sun. Faith is the great bond that holds us to our orbit and without that we are “wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” The object of the gospel is to bring man back to God; to restore the bond of confidence and bring us into our true place of trust and obedience to Him. Then we truly begin to live. Then our hearts find the source of its happiness and God pours into us that fulness of love and blessing which we were made to receive.

This must all begin by that simple trust that blots out our sin and brings us into fellowship and confidence with Him. Then the Holy Spirit reestablishes the vital bond of love and union and God fills us with His own nature and we blossom and bud and bear fruit like the vine that has found its congenial soil and reached the fountains from which it draws its vital support.

Until this comes to pass, everything in life is vain. Our efforts are misdirected; our toil is wasted; our struggles are vain. We are but marking time like the soldier who stands on a pivot while the army centers round him. We are making no progress, or to adopt the figure of the text, we are “spending our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which satisfies not.”

Oh, wandering hearts, come home to God. Accept His reconciling love. Become His children. Receive His Spirit and return to your true place of rest and satisfaction. God needs you to receive His fulness, and you need Him to fill the void which no created thing can ever fill.

II. The second thing in life is to find yourself and rise to your true ideal of character and power.

When we find God, then we also find ourselves. How many people have never yet discovered the treasure of their own existence. It is buried like a jewel in the refuse of a filthy room. How true it is, “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things that he possesses.” The prodigal sought for happiness in dissipation, but he only lost himself and the first step in his restoration was when it could be said of him, “He came to himself.” How many have lost themselves like him in earthly pleasure, sensual indulgence, the greed of gain, the whirl of fashion, the wild race for earthly success! Vainly too, you seek for your true self in mere intellectual culture. You will not find a true man and woman there. The intellect is but the lamp that lights the chambers of the soul, but the guest is deeper and further than this. It is that immortal spirit that came from God, that belongs to eternity and that can only be filled with the infinite and everlasting. Sometimes men get a flash of the glory of the true nature which is hidden within them. How finely Victor Hugo used to say, “The winter of age is upon my head, but eternal springtime is in my heart. I feel within my soul the symphonies of the age to come. My work is only beginning. I feel in myself a future life. Heaven lights me with the sunshine of unseen worlds. I am rising, I know, toward the sky.”

Beloved, have you found that glorious life? Have you brought it into contact with Him and have you truly begun to live in the highest sense?

John Newton tells of a night that he lay in his hammock on the Adriatic Sea after a fearful spell of wild debauchery. In a lurid dream, he saw himself throwing away his soul into the sea like a precious jewel at the daring of Satan, and as it sank beneath the waves, a fiendish shout went up from the pit and a flash of angry fire seemed to light up the mountain tops along the shore. His spirit sank within him and he felt that he had lost his soul, buried forever a treasure more precious than all the world.

Then, in his dream, his Savior seemed to stand before him and asked him if he wished to have that jewel recovered once more. He threw himself at His feet and earnestly pleaded for Him to save it if He could. Then the Redeemer leaped into the flood, battled with the waves, sank beneath the surges and at last, wearied and panting, rose and reached the deck, holding in His hand the precious gem. Eagerly the sailor reached out his hand to grasp it, but the Master held him back and said, “No, I will keep it now for you. If I gave it to you, you would but sacrifice it again and when life is done I will have it for you at the gates of heaven safe forevermore.”

And from that vision that drunken sailor went forth to become the sweetest of the saints of God, to write the hallowed hymns that have been singing men and women to glory for a century, and to leave behind him the luster of a life more precious than earth’s fairest gems.

Oh, men and women, each of you has such a treasure. Have you truly found it and are you letting God keep it, polish it and prepare it for the highest possibilities of earth and the richest glories of heaven?

There is nothing on earth worth half so much as men. After Christ Himself, the things we value most are human souls. We would give the world for one of them. How beautiful are they to God; as precious as the blood He shed for them, and sometime to become as glorious as He in the coming age. Each of us is such a treasure. God help us to know ourselves, to find our true value and to be God’s best.

III. The third object of life is to find our work and be occupied with the best and highest things. Man was made for activity and the powers of the human mind surpass all possible conception.

The Master’s great business was to finish His work. The apostle’s supreme motive was “that I may finish my course with joy and the ministry which I received of the Lord Jesus to testify of the Gospel of the grace of God.” Have we found our calling? Are we pouring out our life into other lives? Are we leaving behind us fruits that shall remain and work into which shall be crystalized the best that we could be and do?

Mother: Perhaps your work is to leave one child, the blossom of your being, to accomplish in years to come mightier things than you could even dream. So the holy Monica loved, suffered, waited, prayed, until her one boy, Augustine, became the blossom of her life and she passed away, leaving him to speak for her, to live for her and to live out her life on earth. So the century plant spends one hundred years preparing for one supreme effort and at last produces a single flower, gorgeous beyond description, and blossoms and dies.

Wife: Are you living out your life meekly, gently, unselfishly by love, by help, by prayer in the man to whom God has linked you as the helpmeet of his great struggle? Can there be a nobler ambition than to be the power behind the scenes, the vital force, the inspiring impulse of a life which is but the expression of your silence, your suffering and your love?

Christian Worker: Has your being been poured out in some great and noble work which God has given you and which you are leaving behind you to bless humanity when you yourself shall have passed from earthly view? Some time ago there passed through New York an old man on his way to China, who for forty years had lived but for one thing: to plant the Gospel in the unopened provinces of that vast empire, and from this faith and love had sprung the China Inland Mission, with its hundreds of missionaries and its thousands of converts. His last desire was to end his days in China and on his way across the Atlantic, a traveling companion has told how he used to talk every day with exulting joy of the delusions that had taken possession of his failing mind, namely, that all the passengers and crew upon the steamer were missionaries to China, and he would laugh aloud in his joy that so many hundreds of new missionaries were about to be added to the force in that land. The ruling passion was strong in death and with this sublime enthusiasm overbalancing his weakened mind he passed on to interior China and in its furthest province, where his glorious spirit went up to be with God. He had found his life work and he has left it as a memorial more lasting than the monuments of Egypt.

God help us to find our Savior, to find ourselves, and to find our work,

“And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints which perhaps another
Traveling o’er life’s solemn main,
Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, may take heart again.”

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” (Is. 53: 5.)

I. Salvation.

The first picture of Isaiah begins with sin and salvation. What an indictment against the sinner is contained in the opening appeal, “ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. Why should you be stricken any more? You will revolt more and more; the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.” (Is. 1: 4-6.) But what a message of mercy and salvation, “Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool.” (Is. 1: 18.)

Again, what a glorious gospel of salvation is contained in Isaiah 53: 5, 6. “But He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isa. 53: 5, 6.) How many it has brought to lay their sins upon Him and to come back to the Shepherd and the fold.

Where shall we find a more complete and attractive gospel invitation than Isaiah 55: 1, 2, 6, 7. “Ho, every one that thirsts, come to the waters, and he that has no money; come, buy, and eat; yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not? Hearken diligently unto me, and eat that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

How rich the metaphors under which the gospel is presented, water, wine and milk! How fine the figures of buying without money because someone else has paid the price, and eating until our soul delights itself in fatness! How infinite the grace that calls the wicked to forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and to return unto the Lord who will abundantly pardon!

How the call of the Jubilee rings through that splendid passage in Isaiah 61: 1, 2: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” This was the very text from which our Lord Himself preached His first sermon at Nazareth and it is the commission of every minister of the Gospel.

And finally, how stirring and awakening is the call in Isaiah 45: 22: “Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.” How it takes us back to the serpent in the wilderness and the third chapter of the Gospel of John, and how many eyes have turned at the call of this heavenly summons to “look and live.” Surely, Isaiah is the gospel for the sinner as well as for the saint.

II. Sanctification.

The call of the prophet recorded in the sixth chapter of Isaiah is a testimony of sanctification. It began with a vision of God, and, as the result, a vision of himself in all the depths of his sinfulness as it stood revealed in the white light of the throne. Then came the cry, “woe is me, for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips: for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” And then came the baptism of fire, the live coal upon his lips, which even the seraphim could not touch with their hands, and the glorious announcement, “lo, this has touched your lips, and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged.” Then with sanctified ears and lips and feet he was ready to hear and obey the great commission that sent him forth to his long and glorious ministry. God must have holy ears and lips and feet to carry His messages and represent Him to the world.

The same high standard of holiness is required from all the servants of the Lord. The Bible contains no finer portrait of the righteous man than Isaiah 33: 15-17: “He that walks righteously, and speaks uprightly; he that despises the gain of oppressions, that shakes his hands from holding of bribes, that stops his ears from hearing of blood, and shuts his eyes from seeing evil; he shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure. Your eyes shall see the King in His beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.” This man who “walks righteously and speaks uprightly” and who not only avoids evil himself but shuts his eyes and ears from seeing and hearing evil, he shall enter in to the beatific vision, which so sublimely anticipates the parallel promise of the sermon on the mount, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

How finely the highway of holiness is described in Isaiah 35: 8, 9: “And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those; the way-faring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.” How suggestively the figure of the highway, not the broad way, not the ordinary way, trodden even by the ordinary pilgrim, but the narrow path where the separated ones walk alone with Jesus. How simple their life. They do not need to be wise or strong. They are wayfaring men and often counted fools by the world, but they have learned the secret of the skies and they walk in safety with the ransomed to their everlasting home.

There is a fine passage in Isaiah 41: 10, which suggests three progressive stages of our deeper life. The first is expressed by the promise, “I will strengthen you,” the second by the clause, “yes, I will help you,” but the third reaches a higher plane where God’s strength and help are not sufficient, but, where, ceasing altogether from ourselves we fall helpless into His almighty arms and He just “upholds us with the right hand of His righteousness,” that is, carries us altogether in His own everlasting arms.

There is a still finer passage in Isaiah 44: 3-5: “For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my Spirit upon your seed, and my blessing upon your offspring: And they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the water courses. One shall say, I am the Lord’s; and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob; and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord, and surname himself by the name of Israel.” Here there are two types of spiritual life distinctly contrasted. The first are those who say “I am the Lord’s” and “call themselves by the name of Jacob.” This represents the experience of conversion, the Jacob life. These people are undoubtedly God’s people, but they have not yet reached their Peniel. The second class, however, have passed with Jacob through the gates of Peniel and come forth into the higher place of victory and entire consecration, “another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord and call himself by the name of Israel.” All through this book of Isaiah we can trace these two types. How differently he speaks of them. Notice for example his striking words, “the Lord has redeemed Jacob and glorified Himself in Israel.” Poor Jacob is not forgotten or discarded because he has not got further on. The Lord goes with His people even through the wilderness. But “He has glorified Himself in Israel,” the life that is wholly surrendered and transformed, and showing forth “the excellencies of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.”

These passages are sufficient to show the deep insight of the prophet’s vision and the high and holy plane on which he himself walked and which he ever recognized as God’s true pattern for all His children.

III. Divine Healing.

There is no lack of material for the gospel of healing in the great Messianic prophet Isaiah. The foundation passage is, of course, Isaiah 53: 4, 5; “Surely He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.” This is the only verse in the chapter prefixed by the word “surely.” This is God’s great Amen to the truth proclaimed in this passage. The Holy Spirit emphasized it because He knew it was the truth that was to be questioned by the belief of later generations. There is no doubt about the literal reference of this passage to the redemption of our bodies. The word translated “griefs” literally means sicknesses and is so translated in scores of parallel passages in the Old Testament. The word “borne” is the same as that used in the twelfth verse of this chapter with reference to Christ’s atonement for sin, “He bare the sin of many.” In Matt. 8: 17, this passage is translated “Himself took our sicknesses and bare our infirmities.” The fifth verse gives a catalogue of the blessings of redemption, “He was wounded for our transgressions,” that is our acts of sin, “He was bruised for our iniquities,” that is our heart of sin, “the chastisement of our peace was upon Him,” that is the spiritual blessings which His death has purchased, and, finally, “by His stripes we are healed,” that is the physical effects of His redemption. Here then we have the fulness of Christ’s atonement. To say that the last clause respecting healing means spiritual healing would be to make the sentence a barren repetition of what he had already said in the first part of the verse.

In Isaiah 57: 18, 19, we have another reference to the Lord’s healing. “I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners. I create the fruit of the lips: Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, says the Lord; and I will heal him.” Here it is evident that the sickness had been caused by sin and that God had been dealing with the transgressor in chastening, “for the iniquity of his covetousness was I wroth and smote him.” But repentance has come and the erring one has learned his lesson and returned to God and now God’s promise is “I have seen his ways and will heal him.” His healing is followed by deeper spiritual experiences, “I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and unto his mourners. I create the fruit of the lips: Peace, peace to him that is far off and to him that is near.” This, in turn, is followed by further healing, “and I will heal him.” As we know God more deeply through the teaching of the Holy Spirit we come into a profounder experience of His healing touch and power. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death.”

There is another passage in Isaiah 58: 8-11, which leads us into the deeper experiences of the Lord’s life for the body. “Your health shall spring forth speedily,” is a fine figure of the springing life that comes to us through union and communion with the Lord Jesus. “The Lord shall make fat your bones and you shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not;” This represents that inner nourishment which the indwelling Christ supplies to all our vital being, making fat our bones, not in the sense of mere physical flesh and increased weight and muscular strength, but that inner freshness and fulness of life which lifts us above exhaustion and disease and renews our youth like the eagles’.

IV. The Lord’s Coming in Isaiah.

Isaiah xi. 1-16 is a picture of Messiah’s reign in the millennial age, the restoration of Israel and the transformation of the material world and the whole system of nature. Righteousness, peace and universal blessedness shall pervade the world and the “knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.”

Isaiah 32: 1-3, is a similar picture of the millennial earth when “a king shall reign in righteousness and princes shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”

Isaiah 24: 20-23, is strikingly parallel to the closing chapters of Revelation and the vision of the coming of the Son of Man. “The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth. And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited. Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before His ancients gloriously.” How vividly this describes the shaking of the powers of heaven at the coming of the Lord and the appearance of Christ in His glory!

Then comes in Isaiah 25: 7-9, His appearing to Israel and the removing of the veil that has been upon the face of all people. Then in Isaiah 26: 19, comes the vision of the resurrection, “your dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, you that dwell in dust: for your dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead,” followed by the rapture of His saints as they are got away from the great tribulation which is coming upon the earth. “Come, my people, enter into your chambers, and shut your doors about you: hide yourself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. For, behold, the Lord comes out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.”

Isaiah has given us a striking object lesson of divine healing in the story of Hezekiah, and his remarkable healing as described in Isaiah 38. In considering this let us notice:

1. That Hezekiah’s sickness was a fatal one. It is foolish to talk about his being healed through a mere poultice of figs of a disease that was declared by God Himself to be unto death.

2. In describing this event in the book of Chronicles, the record states (margin) that God wrought a miracle and healed him. If it was a miracle it was not a case of healing by remedies. A miracle is something performed by Almighty power when the case is an impossible one.

3. The figs were merely a sign to help his faith to rise from the natural to the supernatural, just as the oil of anointing is a sign of the touch of the Holy Spirit, but has not in itself any inherent healing power. It is mentioned in verses 21, 22, as a “sign.”

4. We have an interesting account of Hezekiah’s states of mind during the time that he was waiting under the Lord’s hand for the message of healing. At first he completely sank in dejection and despair, and the prayer which the Spirit has recorded is a very weak and miserable failure, not unlike some of our wretched wailing when trouble comes to us. Listen to this, “I reckoned until morning, that, as a lion, so will he break all my bones; from day even to night you will make an end of me. Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: my eyes fail with looking upward.” How it reminds us of some of our chattering and mourning, but at last he reaches a turn in the dark road of doubt and fear and suddenly exclaims, “Lord, I am oppressed, undertake for me.” No sooner has this gasp of honest prayer reached the heart of God than a marvelous revelation comes to him and we hear him exclaim, “what shall I say? He has both spoken to me and Himself has done it.” He has heard the voice of God and his faith has answered back and lo! the night is passed and dawn has broken upon his despair.

5. How tender, subdued and inspiring is his note of praise. “The living, the living, he shall praise You, I shall go softly all my days, my years.”

6. But, at last Hezekiah forgot God’s great mercy and “rendered not again according to the benefit received,” and in later years God’s chastening hand fell upon him once more because of vainglory and sinful pride.

Oh, how sacred a trust the Lord’s healing is! Let us not forget that the life He has redeemed belongs to Him and must be given back in humble, loving and devoted service.

Finally, in Isaiah 27: 1, we have the binding of Satan, described so vividly in Rev. 20: 1-3: “In that day the Lord with His sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan, the piercing serpent, even leviathan, that crooked serpent: and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” Then comes the reign of Israel through the millennial years, Isaiah 27: 6: “He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.” In the later chapters of Isaiah very many of the visions concerning Judah and Jerusalem belong to the millennial age. Isaiah 35: 10, is one of these. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” So is Isaiah 59: 20: “And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, says the Lord.” The whole of the sixtieth chapter belongs to this glorious time. So also Isaiah 65: 17-25: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying. There shall be no more then an infant of days, nor an old man that has not filled his days; for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed. And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and my elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them. And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer: and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” And Isaiah 66: 18-23: “For I know their works and their thoughts: it shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and see my glory. And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those that escape of them unto the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, that draw the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles. And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the Lord out of all nations upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord. And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, says the Lord. For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, says the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, says the Lord.”

Only the fulfillment of these glorious passages can bring their full interpretation. We can complete the broken links in Isaiah’s imperfect chain from the writings of Daniel and John, and the prophetic messages from the Master Himself. No other key will solve Isaiah’s vision but the coming of the Lord, the restoration of Israel, the millennial reign of Christ and the glorious realities of the blessed hope which has grown so much clearer and nearer in the light of the New Testament and the events in the days in which we live. When that glorious day shall come Isaiah’s splendid songs and visions of glory shall have a significance and a grandeur, which even he but dimly comprehended when he wrote as the apostle expresses it “searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ, which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.”

This little message “fear not” is almost one of the keynotes of Isaiah. The chord of his later messages was struck in the opening of the fortieth chapter by the words, “Comfort, comfort My people,” and in keeping with this message He again and again reassures His troubled people in these words of comfort and encouragement, “Fear not.”

We find the phrase in five passages and repeated several times in some of them.

I. Isaiah 41: 10-14. “Fear not; for I am with you, be not dismayed; for I am your God: I will strengthen you; yes, I will help you; yes, I will uphold you with the right hand of My righteousness.

“Behold, all they that were incensed against you shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with you shall perish.

“You shall seek them and shall not find them, even them that contended with you: they that war against you shall be as nothing and as a thing of nought.

“For I the Lord your God will hold your right hand, saying unto you, Fear not; I will help you.”

“Fear not, you worm Jacob and you men of Israel; I will help you, says the Lord, and your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.”

Three times the words “fear not” are repeated in this passage and five reasons are given why we should not fear.

1. The first is God’s presence with us: “Fear not for I am with you.” His companionship under all circumstances and in all places guarantees our safety and may well charm away our fears.

2. God’s relation to us as our God: “Be not dismayed, for I am your God.” He gives Himself to us. He gives us the right to use Him against every possible need in His infinite resources. What need we fear with such a God?

3. The strength He promises to give us. “I will strengthen you.” That is actual imparted strength to us. This comes in connection with the reassurance, “Fear not, you worm Jacob, and you feeble men of Israel.” It stands over against their unworthiness and weakness. Jacob was indeed a worm and Israel was weak, but God says, “I will strengthen you.”

4. His promise of help. “Yes, I will help you.” Not only does He give us actual strength but He adds His strength to us. This is very much more.

5. His upholding. “Yes, I will uphold you with the right hand of My righteousness.” This is more than strength, more than help. It is God undertaking the entire responsibility of our case. Our strength will fail; even His help will be insufficient for when God only helps us and we stand in front responsible for the conflict, we shall not be sufficient. But there comes a time when we completely fail and fall into His almighty hand and then He takes us up bodily and carries us altogether and it is no longer a man doing his best and God helping him, but God all in all and the man letting Him be all.

In this paragraph there is a beautiful reassurance: “I will hold your right hand, saying to you,” or more literally, “I will keep saying to you.” It is not enough for Him to say it once. We need to hear it over and over again and He never tires saying it to His troubled children until He has cheered away all our fears and sorrows.

II. Isaiah 43: 1-7. “But now this says the Lord that created you, O Jacob, and He that formed you, O Israel, fear not; for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are Mine.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you: when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon you.

“For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior: I gave Egypt for your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for you.

“Since you were precious in My sight, you have been honorable and I have loved you: therefore will I give men for you and people for your life.

“Fear not: for I am with you: I will bring your seed from the east and gather you from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring My sons from far, and My daughters from the ends of the earth; even everyone that is called by My name: for I have created him for My glory, I have formed him; yes, I have made him.”

Here is a new group of fear nots and new reasons for our confidence.

1. “I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are Mine.” The fact that He has purchased us with the precious blood of Christ should be enough to guarantee every other blessing we need. “He that spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things.” After Calvary, anything. Then He says, “You are Mine.” We are His property and He will take care of His property. It is His interest even more than ours to guard and bless us.

2. He promises to go with us through the waters and the fires. It is in the dark hour that we know His consolations. That hour will surely come and come often; but it will give us cause to say, “You have known my soul in adversities.” Indeed, we are often most truly happy in such trying hours, for God’s consolation more than outweighs the pressure of our troubles.

3. God’s love to us and sacrifices for us. “Since you were precious in My eyes, you have been honorable and I have loved you; therefore will I give men for you and people for your life.” There is something inexpressibly tender about these words. God loves us with a jealous love that puts everything aside that would hurt us or hinder us. There is a suggestion here of the infinite pains and trouble that He has had with us, and after all this, He is not likely to fail us. Therefore we should not fear, for nothing can work against His will.

4. He promises spiritual fruit. Whatever our troubles may be, it is an infinite comfort if they are overruled for His glory and the good of men. He tells us here that He will bring our seed to the north and south and east and west and that the fruit of our life shall not be permitted to fail. The seed we sow may seem to perish, but we shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing our sheaves with us!

III. Isaiah 44: 1-5. “Yet now hear, O Jacob My servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen: This says the Lord that made you and formed you from the womb, which will help you; Fear not, O Jacob, My servant: and you, Jesurun, whom I have chosen.

“For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour My Spirit upon your seed, and My blessing upon your offspring; and they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the water courses.

“One shall say, I am the Lord’s; and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob; and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord, and surname himself by the name of Israel.” Here He comforts His troubled children by the promise of a great spiritual blessing and a widespread and lasting revival. He will pour out His Spirit upon the thirsty and floods upon the dry ground. He will revive His languishing cause and make the drooping plants of grace to spring up like grass and like willows by the water courses. He will send the comforting power of His grace so that here and there one shall say, “I am the Lord’s” and another shall confess His name and unite himself with his people, and the third shall rise to high blessing and enter into deeper covenant with God and call himself by the higher name of Israel.

The Holy Spirit is the best antidote to our fears and when He comes all the interests of His good cause are safe and all fears are turned to rejoicing and thanksgiving.

IV. Isaiah 51: 12, 13. “I, even I, am He that comforts you: who are you that you should be afraid of a man that shall die and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; and forget the Lord your Maker, that has stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth; and have feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor, as if he were ready to destroy? And where is the fury of the oppressor?”

This passage shows us the sin of fear. It is an act of unbelief. It leads us to forget the Lord, our Maker. It comes from not remembering His power and faithfulness. All our depressions and discouragements are direct reflections upon Him who has always loved and cared for us. We are also reminded in this passage of the folly of our fears. “Who are you that you shall be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass and has feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor, and where is the fury of the oppressor?” How very empty are all our anxious cares. How many things we allow to worry us that really never come to pass. How sad and needless the waste of life through such foolish frets and fears.

V. Isaiah 54: 4-17.

Four great reasons are given in this splendid passage why God’s trusting children should not fear.

1. His tender personal relation to them. “Your Maker is your Husband: the Lord of hosts is His name, the God of the whole earth shall He be called.” This figure of the marriage relation was familiar in all ancient religions, but it was polluted by the grossest abuses. God purifies it and lifts it up to the highest spiritual meaning. There is no suggestion of physical coarseness. It is merely the love of the husband to the wife and the love of the bride that are expressed in the divine marriage. But there is such a love, intense, tender and peculiar which God recognizes in His more intimate relations to His consecrated people and that fellowship and that love guarantee all possible blessings and safeguards. The husband cherishes his wife even at the cost of his own life and the love of a true wife is stronger than death. How infinitely condescending it is on the part of God to stoop to such a fellowship with mortal and sinful beings and with such a love how little cause have we to fear.

2. His covenant and oath. “I have sworn,” He says, “that I will not be wroth with you nor rebuke you.” There is a reference here to the covenant made with Noah of which the rainbow was the symbol and the seal, and God tells us with equal certainty that He has sworn to His eternal love to Israel. But these great promises are not exclusively the property of Israel any more than the epistles to the Ephesians and Galatians belong exclusively to those churches. God spoke through His ancient people to every heart in every language, that can still appropriate His promises, and this is true for you and me if we will claim it and live up to it. Many Christians are constantly under the law and they look to God as though they ever expected a frown and a blow. Rather, we should live in such perfect love that we could not even imagine His failing or forgetting us. There are some human friendships that have never had a cloud upon them. It is very beautiful to have a love that never was shaken. This is the love that God wants us to have to Him. There is a suggestion here of a time when there was a cloud. “In a little wrath I hid My face from you; for a small moment have I forsaken you.” But this is all over now since Christ has died for us and God is ever striving by His great love to make us forget that there ever was such a thing as sin between His heart and ours. Beloved, have we been wholly delivered from the law and are we living in His perfect love that casts out fear?

3. He promises us His protecting care. “No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn.” There shall be enemies. There shall be temptations and trials, but God will protect us, preserve and vindicate us and we need fear no foe if we are trusting in Him. “Who is he that will harm you if you be followers of that which is good?”

4. Finally He promises us His own righteousness. He does not vindicate us and protect us because we are worthy. Let us not flatter ourselves with any self-righteousness. “Their righteousness is of Me, says the Lord.” This is the mystery of His love; that He treats us as if we were faultless although we are full of blame. He accepts us in Jesus Christ, His beloved Son, clothes us with His imputed righteousness and treats us and loves us as if we were as perfect and faultless as He. What need we fear with such a defense? “If God be for us, who can be against us? Who is he that condemns? It is Christ that died, yes, rather that is risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifies.”

Such are some of the “fear nots” of Isaiah. Let us add one or two concluding considerations to save us from our fears.

I. It will help us to remember that the devil’s fears are always falsehoods. If fear comes from Satan, then we may invariably conclude that there is nothing to fear, because his suggestions are always lies, and if lies, they cannot harm.

2. Fear is dangerous. It turns into fact the things we fear. It creates the evil just as faith creates the good. “I feared a fear and it came upon me,” is the solemn warning of Job. Let us therefore be afraid of our fears lest they should become our worst foes.

3. The remedy for fear is faith and love. “What time I am afraid I will trust in You.” “Perfect love casts out fear.” “Herein is our love made perfect that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we also in this world.”

Beloved, let us no longer dishonor Him by our doubts and fears but trust Him and honor Him by our confidence, even when everything is most dark and trying. Very beautiful was the answer of that grand old sea captain, who so long commanded a stately ship on the coast line service of the Atlantic. In a violent storm off Hatteras, a trembling woman hastened up to him on the rocking deck and the spray-swept bridge and asked, “Is there any fear, captain?” “No,” he replied ; “no fear, but there is considerable danger.” There was peril, but no doubt or anxious care; and when he came through that danger through the providence of God, he could witness that God was able to keep in perfect peace.

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Are You not He that has cut Rahab and wounded the dragons?” (Is. 51: 9.)

This sublime passage is a call from Jerusalem to Jehovah to awake as in the might of ancient days for her defense. and deliverance. It seemed to her that He must be asleep, so long had He appeared to be deaf to her cries and silent to her prayers.

So the disciples thought the Master cared not for them, as He lay “in the hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow,” but the heart that was unmoved by the raging of the storm instantly responded to the faintest cry of their distress and woke to rebuke the storm and speak their hearts to peace.

And so God was not asleep. It was but the suppressed strength of His waiting and longsuffering love, and it grew by waiting, and would at length burst forth as “the cry of a travailing woman,” rending the heavens, making the mountains to flow down at His command and overcoming all His people’s foes.

I. “Awake, awake, stand up, oh Jerusalem, which has drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury; you have drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out.” (Isaiah 51: 17).

The second passage quoted above is in answer to the first call. It is a summons from Jehovah to Jerusalem to wake. He turns her own question back upon her and cries out, “Awake, awake, oh Jerusalem.” Like the disciples in the garden, she has been “sleeping for sorrow.”

Yes, it is true that the heart can be drugged by grief and anguish until the fiber of our being is poisoned and paralyzed with sorrow.

Not always is suffering sanctifying. Suffering without faith, love and hope corrodes every fiber of the soul, depresses, discourages and destroys. There is nothing on earth so tragic as the case of those who weep life’s bitterest tears in unavailing grief, who get nothing out of their distress but bitterness, despair and at last self-destruction; turning first against God and man and then at last, like the scorpion that stings itself to death, against themselves. Thousands of people are going wrong and going down just through heart break and discouragement. They say “there is no hope,” and they go on from worse to worse. Oh, if you are sunk in the stupor or sleep of hopeless sorrow, hear the voice of God calling “Awake, awake.” Rise up above the hideous nightmare of your gloom, throw off the spell of Satan’s hate and go forth into the clear light of truth and God, and lo! you will find that it was but a nightmare of your heart and brain and the sun is shining around you in the heavens, the birds are singing in the branches and there is still left to you the love of God, the sweetness of life and the hope of a bright tomorrow. Awake, awake — from the sleep of despairing sorrow. God lives. Christ loves and there is a whole heaven waiting for every heart that can receive it.

III. “Awake, awake; put on your strength, oh Zion; put on your beautiful garments, oh Jerusalem, the holy city; shake yourself from the dust; arise, and sit down, oh Jerusalem; loose yourself from the bands of your neck, oh captive daughter of Zion.” (Isa. 52: 1, 2).

The third passage in our series is another call to Zion to wake, this time not from sorrow. There is a hideous sight that we sometimes behold in our great cities: a wretched woman who has fallen in the streets under the power of drunkenness and vice. Her hair is matted; her garments are dishevelled and spattered with the mire of the street and her whole frame is bound by the fearful fetters of long habits of sin. Once she was innocent and beautiful and happy, but oh, how degraded now — and as you gaze upon her with compassion, you summon her to awake, to put on her strength, to change her garments, to shake herself from the dust and then to loose herself from the bands of sin and rise and sit down once more in her womanly dignity and glory.

Thank God, many a fallen one has thus risen and is “sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” There are several clauses here:

1. “Awake.”

The figure of slumber is often used, not only for the sinner, but for the Christian and the church. The condition of sleep is one in which we are blind to the conditions around us. The flames may be creeping through our home, the burglar may be stealing our treasures, the frowning cliff may be yawning just beneath our feet, but we are asleep and we see it not. The fact that you are indifferent or unconcerned about your soul is no evidence that you are safe, but rather that you are asleep.

Then again, the sleeper lives in an unreal world. The thoughts that come to him are vain dreams and false visions of unreal things while the world is going on around him, and he knows nothing about it. Thousands of people are living as in a dream, passionately striving for the vain things of this little day which will soon vanish and be forgotten, while the great realities of time and eternity are to them as dreams.

Oh, you that are living in a false world and for the perishing things of time, awake, awake!

Again, sleep is a condition of idleness and ease. Your girdle is laid down. Your work is put aside and you are doing nothing in the activities of life. Thousands of God’s children are idle because they are asleep. The cause of the Master needs them. The claims of the work need them. The great interests of eternity need them, but they are asleep.

The sleeper is defenseless and exposed to the attacks of the enemy. It is when you sleep that the thief comes to steal your property. It was “while men slept the enemy sowed tares in the field.” It was while he slept that Bunyan’s pilgrim lost his roll and had to go back afterwards and spend long and weary hours in recovering what he had lost.

How many opportunities have been lost by sleep? How pathetic the appeal of Christ to His three disciples, “Tarry and watch with Me,” and how touching His reproach afterwards when He found them sleeping. “What, could you not watch with Me one hour?” And how unspeakably mournful His final words to them as He came back at last, spent with agony and treading the winepress alone, and said, “Sleep on now and take your rest.” It is too late to help Me. You have lost your opportunity. “The Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”

Oh, children of God, how much you are missing! Souls are perishing. Opportunities are going by. Eternal recompense is being lost while you sleep on in your dull and stupid insensibility. Awake, awake!

When a Roman sentinel slept at his post, he lost his uniform and was publicly dishonored and disgraced. It is to this the Master refers when He says, “Blessed is he that watches and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame.” (Rev. 16: 15.)

God’s awakening call is a very loud and repeated one. Not gently does the summons come when it is necessary that we shall be wakened. This is the meaning of the alarms that have been rung in your heart and your life, the blows that have struck you in your home, your business and your own person. God is calling you. Oh, awake, before He shall have to call so loudly that you will never forget the shock!

2. “Put on your strength.”

Sometimes we go to sleep from weakness and weariness. God is calling us to rise and let Him clothe us with His strength. This is not inherent strength of our own. It is a strength that we put on. It is the robe of fire with which the Holy Ghost is waiting to endue every willing, consecrated soul. Oh, the weakness of Christians, afraid of their own voices, afraid of the faces of men, conscious of their impotence and inefficiency, unable to speak to a soul, unable to pray a prevailing prayer, unfruitful and passing on to judgment with “nothing but leaves” to bring before the Master.

God has provided for our strength. The Spirit of Pentecost is waiting to come upon every willing heart. He will give you power to pray, power to witness, power to live, power to bring things to pass for His cause and the world’s need. God wants no imbeciles or invalids in His army. You have no business to be a baby. “Awake, awake, put on your strength.” Receive the Holy Ghost.

3. “Put on your beautiful garments.”

This refers to the robes of purity and practical righteousness. The Holy Ghost is given us, not merely for power, but for all the help we need to live pure, sweet victorious lives. We have no more business to be wicked than we have to be weak. We have no business to go on sinning and failing. We have no business to go into the wedding feast, not having the wedding garment on. It is all provided, and we have but to be willing to wear His robes of purity and He will put them on us. The question is: will you choose to be sweet, to be kind, to be holy, instead of indulging yourself in your temper, your irritation, your hasty word of retaliation. The Holy Spirit will give you all the grace, all the love, all the patience you are willing to wear. You must take it by faith and then wait to put it on and prove it in the real tests of actual life and in the hard places where your human nature will break down and His divine grace will come to triumph.

This expression covers more than a mere ordinary experience of holiness. These beautiful garments include the finer touches of grace, the finishing touches of holy character, the beautiful array which the bride is to wear in order to be ready for the coming of her Lord.

Shall we awake and put on our strength and our beautiful garments?

4. “Shake yourself from the dust.”

Every woman knows how to shake the dust from her robes when she has been sitting in an open car or by some dusty highway. The dust here refers to the entanglements with the world into which the children of God so often fall. John Bunyan describes it by the picture of a muck rake with which the miserable worldling was raking together all the dust and grime of the roadside for the sake of the little bits of shining gold he found among it, while at the same time he was refusing a golden crown which the hand of an angel was holding out to him from above.

Yes, “the thick clay,” as Job expresses it, is all over us. Go into a fashionable church and angel eyes can see it upon the clothes of the vain and frivolous women, who are thinking much more about their array than about the Word of God. Or, look a little deeper behind the waistcoats of the men and you will see hearts filled with the plans of the week’s business and the cares of this sordid world, and all higher thoughts shut out by mammon.

God calls us to shake ourselves from all these things; to be separated from the world and only to use it as a servant and instrument for His glory, counting all our means and possessions as His property and spending them as stewards for His service and glory. The only way to be saved from the world is to give everything to Christ and then to administer the trust as His servants and stewards.

5. “Loose yourself from the bands of your neck.” We are fettered. We are bound. Sometimes it is by the fear of men; sometimes it is by the power of evil habits; sometimes it is by the restraining hand of sickness; but God bids us claim our freedom and stand forth in the glorious liberty of the children of God. We must loose ourselves. He has set us free. We have but to assert our liberty and we shall be free.

6. “Sit down.”

This speaks of rest and quietness and peace. She is first to rise from her prostrate and helpless condition and then sit down as a queen on her royal seat. Our place is to “sit with Christ in the heavenlies,” in the “peace that passes all understanding,” and the rest which quiets every anxious care and fits us to bless and help the troubled hearts around us.

Have we entered into His rest? Have we “sat down under His shadow with great delight”? Have we taken our place of blessing and privilege and “entered into rest”?

IV. “Arise, shine; for your light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.” (Is. 60: 1.)

The splendid figure here is that of one sleeping after sunrise. The sun is up, the light is come, the glory of the Lord has risen, but we are still sleeping as if it were night and His voice bids us rise, step out into the light that is filling all the earth and heaven and shine in its radiance for His glory.

This applies to the people that are waiting for salvation instead of rising and claiming the salvation which has come and is awaiting their acceptance. This applies also to the people that are waiting for the Holy Ghost instead of recognizing the fact that the Spirit has come and that it is ours to receive Him, count upon Him and to go forth and act in dependence upon His presence and victorious power.

And this applies to all who are living below their privileges; who are waiting for some great thing to come to them instead of recognizing that God has given us everything and that He is waiting for us to step out and enter into our full inheritance. This word “glory” stands for the highest and the best that God has for His children. It is more than the ordinary grace which saves us. It is “the life more abundantly,” it is the “joy unspeakable which is full of glory,” it is “the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” It is for us here and now. “The glory that You have given Me I have given them that they may be one even as we are.”

God is waiting to come into your life with a touch of sublimity that will transfigure the common things into the sunlit mountain tops of a celestial vision. It does not mean that our lives shall be on some high plane of circumstances and earthly conditions. Just as the sun can light up a little bit of glass till it glows like a diamond; just as the windows of yonder village sometimes blaze like celestial palaces when the rays of the setting sun fall upon them at a distance, so the commonest trials and duties of life grow elevated when touched by the grace of God and the victory of faith and love.

The other day Mrs. Alexander told in Albert Hall how a few nights before, as she talked with a besotted woman and told her of the love of God, that wretched being asked her if she loved her well enough to kiss her. For a moment she shrank from the new experience, but there came such a tide of God’s love into her heart that she leaned over and kissed those foul lips and said, “Yes, I will kiss you, because God loves you,” and then she told how that woman, begrimed and defiled with every kind of sin, broke down and gave her life to God, and is now working in the meetings, bringing others to the Savior. What a touch of glory that little thing shed upon a very simple act.

And sometimes we have seen God come to some quiet Christian in the hour of overwhelming sorrow when others were crushed in despair, and yet this child of faith was enabled to rise up with face illumined and eyes that refused to weep and lips that could only praise until all that watched wondered at the glory of His grace.

Yes, and sometimes, too, we have seen a modest, quiet Christian, after a life unmarked by religious emotion or any great experience, but filled up with simple duties, patient suffering and faithful service, — we have seen such a life pass down into the dark valley, and we have wondered perhaps if there was a deep enough experience for that last great test; and lo! the heavens have opened, the glory of God has shone upon that dying bed and those lips have been opened to utter words of inspiration and revelation, words of peace, words of triumph, words of unutterable joy, words of sweet and solemn warning to the living, words of power in the Holy Ghost and that chamber of mourning has become like a mount of transfiguration, and we have said, “Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“Is that a deathbed where a Christian dies?
Yes, but not his; ’tis Death himself that dies.”

Beloved, this glory is for you and for me; oceans of it, ages of it are waiting for us yonder, but God will anticipate the eternal years and give us an earnest of it now. Shall we take it? Shall we rise and shine, for our light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon us?

“Shine on, shine on,
You children of the light, shine on;
Shine as the beacon light,
Shine as the sunrise bright,
Shine as the children of the light, shine on, shine on.”

What does Isaiah teach us about prayer?

I. That God is the Hearer and Answerer of prayer. “Then you will call and the Lord will answer; you will cry and He will say: Here I am.” (Isa. 58: 9). “And it will come to pass that before they call, I will answer: and while they are yet speaking I will hear.” (Is. 65: 24.)

These verses assure us that our God is no isolated despot, indifferent to the needs and conditions of His creatures, but a loving Father, sensitive to every want and sorrow of His suffering children. How beautiful these promises of prayer! First He says He will answer. Then not only will He answer, but He will come. “He Will say, Here I am.” Next, “Before they call I will answer,” He tells us, and “while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” Not only will He wait and listen to our appeal, but He will anticipate our need and put the prayer Himself upon our hearts or send the blessing before we ask it. How beautifully this is illustrated in the Savior’s thoughtful love towards Simon Peter. Fretting about their taxes which Peter had not the means to pay, we are told that the Lord “prevented him” and sent him down to the sea to find the fish with the golden coin in its mouth and then to bring it and pay the claim for Him and them. He did not wait for Peter to ask for it. He did not allow him to be embarrassed, but His loving forethought anticipated the need. So He is ever loving and caring for us, and as the Psalmist expresses it, “You prevent us with the blessings of goodness.”

The last of these promises, “While they are yet speaking, I will hear,” finds a striking illustration in the message of God to Daniel during his long fast and prayer. “At the beginning of your message and supplication,” the angel says, “the commandment came forth.” God does not wait until we have teased or coaxed Him into compliance with our wishes, but the answer comes with the prayer, and it is our privilege to believe that when we ask we do receive the things for which we pray. Indeed, prayer is as much a receiving as an asking, and in the very exercise of our communion with heaven, our hearts are comforted and filled and the blessing comes while we wait.

II. Isaiah teaches us that prayer has its hindrances as well as its encouragements. The first of these is sin. “Behold the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have separated between you and your God and your sins have hid His face from you that He will not hear. God cannot recognize sin or hear us if we regard iniquity in our hearts. A willful indulgence in and tolerance of sin destroys every feeling of confidence and renders it impossible for us truly to pray. Let us see to it that every forbidden and doubtful thing is put aside, and “if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.”

Indolence is also a hindrance to prayer. “And there is none that calls upon Your name, that stirs up himself to take hold of You: for You have hid Your face from us and have consumed us because of our iniquities.” Prayer is recognized here as an intense and active energy of the soul. It is called in James “the effectual fervent prayer,” which has real force in it. Many of us are too easy, too self-complacent and contented to know much of the power of prayer. It means the waking up of all our being and the intense earnestness of our spirit in pressing through difficulties to God and fighting the good fight of faith with perseverance and power. We often misinterpret the incident of Jacob at Peniel as though the wrestling were all by the angel. It is true that the angel was wrestling with Jacob, to break down his self-sufficiency and subdue his carnal strength, but Jacob was wrestling with the angel, too, and crying out, “I will not let you go except you bless me.” Both experiences are true. Each has its place and the truth lies between the two extremes of passive waiting for God and active taking hold of God and stirring up ourselves in the victorious conflict of prevailing prayer. There is no such intense exercise of soul as real prayer, and it wakes up every dormant faculty of our being and puts us in the place where God can pour His life into us and use us as the instruments of His power.

III. The great object-lesson of prayer.

Isaiah gives a picture of the great Intercessor, the Lord Jesus Christ. “And He saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore His arm brought salvation unto Him and His righteousness, it sustained Him.” Here we find our great High Priest entering upon His mighty ministry of intercession and a little later, in Isaiah 62:1, we hear Him devoting Himself to the long conflict which was not to cease until Zion’s deliverance was complete. “For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burns.” Have we duly considered that the supreme ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ is prayer? He spent three and one-half years in active work and suffering, but He has spent nineteen hundred years in intercession for His people. What a significance, what a majesty, what a power, this gives to the ministry of prayer! The reason is that the spiritual creation is not like the natural. The worlds of space are made by the hand of God, but the church is born of His heart. He had but to put forth a single command and the sun and stars sprang into being, but before a soul can be restored to His image and the work of redemption be consummated, His own heart has to travail in birth in agonies of love, and one by one each of us has to come forth from His very being born of love travail and pain. This is the ministry that Christ is carrying on. Therefore, it comes to pass that prayer is the secret force of everything in the spiritual kingdom. This great ministry of prayer begins in the bosom of Jesus, but is by Him transferred through the Holy Ghost to the heart of His church and carried on by us in the ministry of prayer on earth.

IV. This brings us to the conflict of prayer.

“I have set watchmen upon your walls O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: you that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence; and give Him no rest until He establishes and until He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.” (Isa. 62: 6, 7.) Here we find the same language employed by Christ in the first verse reechoed by His people. His prayer is passed on to us and by us passed back to Him. Like His, our conflict is to be deep and long. We are to “keep not silence and give Him no rest until He establishes and makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.”

Why this unceasing prayer? Why cannot we ask and then believe it has come and change our prayer to praise? Because it is through the very agency of prayer that the forces are set in motion which accomplish the answer. Natural science tells us that all the effects of light, heat and sound are produced by constant motion in the atoms and elements of matter. The ether is in intense vibration, and forth from this come the blue sky of heaven, the tinted clouds, the glorious sunshine, the harmonies of music, the waves of heat. Look through a microscope at a drop of water and you will behold every particle and atom in constant circulation moving and moving evermore, and as it moves, developing into new forms of life, the very movement is the process of each new development. So it is in spiritual activity that God works. The stagnant heart is like a corpse or a cemetery. It is the active, intense cooperating spirit through whom He works and moves. Prayer, therefore, is that spiritual law of the fitness of things which puts our spirit in touch with the activities of the Holy Ghost. Prayer, therefore, is an actual force in the spiritual world. It not only moves God, but it moves things.

Science tells us how a single chord of music prolonged without cessation will crumble to dust a stone wall. The old myth of the fiddler fiddling down the bridge is not a fancy. There are musical chords which, if sustained, will break to pieces the strongest material forms. Therefore, passing through the Alps, every voice is hushed, a single sound would dislodge the avalanche and hurl it upon the traveler’s head.

So in the spiritual world prayer is a potency that shakes the foundations of the kingdoms of darkness, that moves the hearts of men and that works out the will of God.

Oh, praying ones, ring out the bells, prolong the notes, let the trumpets resound around the walls of Jericho and they will surely fall. This is the prayer of which the Master speaks when he says, “Knock and it shall be opened.” If we let Him teach us this mystery and ministry of spiritual power, then indeed shall the weapons of our warfare be mighty, pulling down strongholds and fulfilling God’s majestic promise, “Call unto Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you knew not.”

V. The confidence of prayer. “This says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker; ask Me of things to come concerning my sons and concerning the work of my hands command you Me.” Prayer is here connected with the vision of God’s plan for His people and His work. First we are to ask of things concerning His sons. We are to look to Him for a revelation of His purpose for His work and the world. God does give such visions of faith to waking souls. He does forecast the things He is waiting to do for us and then He bids us claim its actual fulfillment, and adds this mighty command: “Concerning the work of My hands, command you Me.” In the name of Jesus we are to not only ask, but claim and pass in the orders of faith to the bank of heaven. The Master Himself has said, “If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, you shall ask what you will,” or, as one has translated it, “You shall ask what you command,” “and it shall be done unto you.”

This is a very high place to give to prayer, but we may take it in fellowship with Jesus.

“Fear not to take your place with Jesus on the throne,
And bid the powers of earth and hell His sovereign scepter own;
Your full redemption rights with holy boldness claim,
And to His utmost fulness prove the power of Jesus’ name.”

VI. The communion of prayer.

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.” (Isa. 40: 31.)

This is not the prayer that asks for things, but silently receives from Him His life and strength until the spirit soars with eagle’s wings and then goes forth “to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint.” This is the kind of prayer that comforts the sorrowing, rests the weary, refreshes the thirsty soul and brings heaven down to fill our hearts here below. It is the fellowship of prayer; the silence of prayer; the secret place of the Most High. Happy they who have found the key and learned the secret and whose life is “hid with Christ in God.”

VII. The sinner’s prayer. “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near: let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the Lord and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

This is the only prayer which the sinner may offer. All other prayers are useless until we begin here. God does not want your worship, your ceremonies, your many prayers. There is but one prayer for you, and that is, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near.” Bring the prayer of the penitent sinner, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” Until you offer that, all your other prayers are vain. Not until you accept the Savior and come to God in His name can you worship Him acceptably and pray effectually.

Come, therefore, in penitence for mercy and salvation and enter in through the door, and then you shall have access to the Father’s house and all the privileges and promises of the throne of grace. But come now, while He is near. Seek Him at once, while He may be found. Do not put aside the gentle hand that is touching your shoulder. Do not refuse to grasp the silken cord that is dropped down to you from heaven, and if you seize it, has power to lift you to the skies. Do not trifle with the impressions that God has given you, for impressions are solemn things, but meet the touch that is drawing you to Him; answer to the call which is breathing on your heart; pray the prayer which He has prescribed for such as you and you will find that “He will have mercy upon you and abundantly pardon,” and He will lead you on to those higher ministries of prayer which will enable you to give to others the blessing that has made God so real to you.

“Lord, teach us to pray.”