Suffering Servant (Part 2 of 2)

There are so many characteristics of Jesus that we can admire, things we strive to imitate, things like his compassion, his grace and humility. But today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg reveals another trait of Christ's personality, something we might not be immediately drawn to. Jesus was a suffering servant.

Alistair is teaching today from Mark chapter 14. Jesus, you will remember when he was asked concerning prayer, had given a pattern of prayer to those who were his listeners and his followers. And in the course of that prayer, it is common for us to pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And what Jesus encouraged his followers to pray, we now discover him putting into practice. And in this little scenario here, that is for us in Mark, and again, as I say to you in Luke, I want us to try and navigate our way through it by employing three simple verbs, the importance of looking, listening, and learning. Well, first of all, we're going to look. We have these passages in the Bible in order that in the reading of them, we may conjure up in our minds some sense of what is taking place.

It is there for us that we might do so. So let us then look at what we're told. I want to suggest that we look carefully at what we're told, for this is a picture of a distressed Christ. This is a picture of a distressed Christ.

What now is happening to Jesus? That he is so deeply distressed. Well, he says and explains to them in verse 34, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

All of the pent up emotion that presumably is represented in his life as he has been moving now over a period of weeks steadfastly towards the cross. What you have here is the innocent about to suffer at the hands of God. What you have here is the sinless about to bear the wrath of God in himself for sin. What you have here is the prospect of the perfect one being nailed on a cross on a garbage heap outside Jerusalem between two thieves, abused and disabused.

And why? Paul tells us, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. The atonement, the death of Jesus on the cross for sinners is not a theory.

It's not a mathematical equation. It's a flesh and blood reality. And there was nothing, there was nothing in Christ's humanity to blunt his emotions or to anesthetize his sensitivity. Did you hear that? There was nothing in Christ's humanity to blunt his emotions or anesthetize his sensitivity. Have you ever pondered what was going on when they offered him a branch with a sponge on the end of it and it was wine mingled with gall? It was an anesthetic potion. And it says in the scriptures, and they offered him wine mingled with gall, but he refused to drink it. He refused to drink it.

Why? In order that he might experience suffering in all of its unmitigated dimensions. He suffered at a level that no one has ever suffered.

He endured everything for the sake of his own. What an amazing thing it is and what a stupidity it is that 21st century Western Christianity offers itself to the world as a panacea for all ills. We are the people who've got it all together, you see. Why not come and join us? And then these interested agnostics begin to read their Bibles and say, how did you get here from here? What is this fellowship of suffering that the Apostle Paul was on? What was he talking about when he said, I want to know Christ?

We stop. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. That'll be enough for us. Finish the verse right there. There is no power of his resurrection except as it is experienced in the fellowship of his sufferings. It is only through his sufferings in Calvary that there is the reality of the resurrection.

The same, my friends, is true for you and me. Every attempt to deny that is known by our own hearts as fraudulent, is condemned by the Scriptures clearly, and every well-thinking, cynical, agnostic friend that I have says, you're full of absolute bunk. You know what? If I were to suggest that that was the essence of Christianity, they would be absolutely right. Some of you are stumbling over my words, and I know why it is. Because you, like me, are very concerned to safeguard the divinity of Christ. Any notion of a weakened divinity is abhorrent to us because we know that it is contrary to the Bible, right?

Liberal theology throughout the ages has always been weak on the divinity of Jesus. Fundamentalism, conservatism, evangelicalism has distanced itself from that danger. What I want to suggest to you flirts with the opposite danger, not now of a diminished divinity, but a diminished humanity. So now we have a less than human Jesus because we are so concerned to make sure that we have an absolutely divine Jesus. Now, we are not to be surprised by that because the early centuries fought through all these issues. And late in the fourth and fifth century, the church had to deal with a man called Apollinarius, and you can Google him.

I don't know what Apollinarius would think about it, but anyway, if you Google him, you will find out that Apollinarius was a problem in the late fourth and fifth century because he was diminishing the humanity of Jesus. And so the councils got together and affirmed, just as in Christ, there was complete and perfect Godhead, so there was complete and perfect manhood. Nothing that was necessary to humanness was lacking in him.

Look for yourselves. Look, secondly, listen, listen. My soul was overwhelmed to the sorrow, to the point of death, he said. And going a little further, he fell to the ground.

He fell to the ground. All our pictures, all those Christian pictures, I think they ought to all be taken out and thrown away, the most of them. Because we have all these pictures of Jesus, as it were, before the cross. He's just so yes, oh yes. No, no, no, no. You can't have deeply distressed, you can't have troubled, you can't have overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, and then no, you've got everything is everywhere. And if you doubt that, listen to his words. Abba, intimacy, Father, Father, everything's possible for you.

Sovereignty. If you're willing, we're in Luke now, inquiry, take this cup from me. You could say that is the intensity of his expression. You could actually say that is the integrity of his expression. I have to be honest, Father, he says right now where I am here, I wish that you would take this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will. Now at that point, Luke tells us that an angel was dispatched.

Angels are fascinating and we have no time to think about it. But I have this picture of like, if you play golf a lot and you play nice golf courses, they always have good caddies for you. And there's a place, there's a wall where the caddies lean, at least in St. Andrews at the old course, or there's a little box in which they stay out of the rain, a little shack, and they're all there. And they wait until the caddy master calls them up. Hey, Billy, I got a bag for you. And off they come, out they come.

The Scottish ones, big red noses like this because of what they spend their money on after they finished. They glow in the dark. You see them through the mist. Anyway, and Billy comes out and somehow or another in the angelic host has to be like that. Like the chairman of the angelic band says, hey, hey, I need you to go somewhere for me. I know you went to Bethlehem.

I'm sure you remember that. Well, if you remember that, I want you to go now down to Gethsemane. And an angel came. An angel came to strengthen him. And we may have assumed that the angel would have fixed things. Here we go, angelic visitation.

It's kind of a new age idea, isn't it? You know, big angel came, everything was nice after that. Angel comes and then it says, being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly. So an angelic visitation never took care of the thing for him. And as he prays to his father, he prays as an expression of his humility. He bows beneath the father's will because he recognizes that father knows best. And you will notice that it is not that he is somehow or another relying on prayer here. Don't misunderstand me when I say this, but there is no power in prayer. All of the power is in God. He's not trying to employ the power of prayer in order to rectify a situation.

He is bowing before his father and he is acknowledging as he speaks to him in prayer, father, you have power over all of heaven and all of earth. You can do anything you choose. From eternity, we determine together with the Holy Spirit that this was the plan. You planned it.

I would procure it. The Holy Spirit will come behind me and apply it. Oh, father. Because you see, Jesus knows that he is about to enter the one experience in life for which he has no preparation. When the father turns his face away, he has never lived absent the communion that he enjoys within the Trinity. Father, son, and Holy Spirit coming up, if you like, in the wonder of their wisdom with this great plan of redemption.

And now we're at the point. It is God who works in response to prayer. It is not prayer that works. And this incidentally and parenthetically is the answer to all the prayer stuff that you can read in Newsweek magazine and everything else, the Cleveland Clinic and MIT and Boston hospitals and UCLA and everyone else.

They're all very interested now. Let's get all in and talk about the healing powers of prayer. They tell them, no, there is no healing power in prayer. The only person who can heal is God Almighty. They say, well, no, we don't want that. That's not the program we're looking for. Yeah, well, the only person who can heal is the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We'd love to come and tell the whole Cleveland Clinic about how they can come to know the living God through Jesus.

No, get out of here. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the power of prayer. There is no power in prayer. Look, listen, learn.

Our time is gone, and so I will only make one point of application. And that is not in terms of prayer itself, but in terms of Christ's humanity and His passion. The Word, remember, we're told became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus comes into humanity.

He is not detached. He was in touch with the religious establishment. In fact, He was opposed by the religious establishment. When He added Matthew to His disciple band, and they had that big party at the house of Levi, nobody was more annoyed about it than the religious folks of His day. Apparently, He's gone to eat with sinners and to attend a party with them. And Jesus came out and said, yeah, that's exactly right.

I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Jesus in His humanity lived among sin. He lived where He could hear swearing, where He heard blasphemy, where He observed and confronted disease and mortality and sadness and squalor.

That's where Christ lived. That's the nature of the incarnation. He did not come into our time-space capsule and live at the top of a high hill in a large palace behind gates, inured from the experiences of a common person. This is not the Buddha. This is not somebody who is in a rarefied environment. This is someone who is down now. He says, foxes of holes and birds of nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. And in the midst of all of that, He finds Himself. Let me just say to you, I am so challenged by this.

The challenge is obvious. How can we effectively impact a world we're not in? How many non-Christian friends do you have? How many non-Christian friends have you cultivated having? And when you go with them, I hope that we don't just give them a bunch of sanctimonious, cliche-ridden stuff.

Nice is good. Do you understand that? That there is something attractive about the Gospel? That in Greek, there is agathos, which is intrinsically good, like a good apple, and there is kalos, which is agathos plus attractively good, intrinsically and attractively good. It is not enough for us to be intrinsically righteous.

We are supposed to be attractively righteous, and our attraction does not lie in our willingness to play the game of those who don't agree with us, to join in their jokes, to affirm their nonsense, but it's just to be like Jesus. Three imperatives and we're done. Be real. Be real. Be real. Everybody's asking about everybody the same question. Is this guy a phony?

And every time you stand up and preach, I guarantee you, you ever asked one of them and said, I don't know about him. Look at him there. Wore the same jacket every day, filthy character. What's his problem? He had no clothes or something. I don't know what's wrong with a guy.

No, I wear this jacket every day because it's my favorite jacket, and my son bought it for me for my birthday, and I feel close to him when I wear his jacket. Be real. Be done.

Be done with what? With superficial triumphalism. It's not true to human experience. It's not true to the Bible, and it only attracts silly people, and it does not answer to the cries of the sick and the sad.

Be real. Be done, and be sure that Christ stands beside us when we are emotionally overwhelmed. You see, this little section in Gethsemane gives place to the Christian experience of distress, of being overwhelmed, and some of us with a significant dose of the Pharisee in us who have never really been distressed or overwhelmed. We have nothing to say to our Christian friends, brothers and sisters, when they're distressed and overwhelmed. They said, would you stop being distressed and overwhelmed?

You're annoying me. Or worse still, if you were really a Christian, if you really had faith in the God, the risen Jesus, I don't see you'd be distressed at all. I don't understand why you would be overwhelmed. What do you mean you're overwhelmed?

You want to curl up in a ball and pull the blankets over your head and stay there till the week from next Friday. Well, this is fantastic, isn't it? Because now I've found somebody who understands. Now I'm introduced to the ultimate counselor. Now I'm introduced to the one who was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. So in my distress and in my fearfulness and in my quiet desperation, Jesus knows all about my struggles, socially, emotionally, physically. I can never go beyond his pain.

My darkness, no matter how deep, is never more intense than his. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with us in our sufferings. Know, look, listen, learn. You're listening to the weekend edition of Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Please keep listening. We have set aside time on today's program to conclude with prayer. In recent weeks, Alistair has guided us through a survey of Jesus' many roles. In the process, we've learned that Jesus is a humble servant, a compassionate shepherd, a personal evangelist, and today a suffering servant. These messages are part of a nine-part series called To Know Christ. You're welcome to download the entire series from our website for free, or you can purchase the CDs at our cost without any markup. Search for the title To Know Christ when you go online to truthforlife.org. Or as an alternative, keep in mind you can listen to the entire archive of Alistair's messages through our mobile app.

It's free when you download it from your app store. In addition to imitating Jesus, God has given his people a great cloud of witnesses for us to follow as well. There are men and women of faith who focused their entire life on Christ, who were fully devoted to living for God's glory. Christians are indebted, for instance, to the Puritans who, through their writings and their sacrificial lives, taught us how to remain faithful to God even when life was extremely difficult. At Truth for Life, we've come across a wonderful new documentary called Puritan, All Life to the Glory of God.

Maybe you've wondered who the Puritans were and how their devotion to God set them apart. This film tells their story in a way that will captivate the entire family. It's on a set of two DVDs, one that contains the main documentary and a second DVD that offers special features. There's even a link provided in the event that you'd prefer to stream the documentary.

This is a beautiful film. It includes sweeping views of Europe, and it sheds new light on the legacy of the Puritans and their influence on Christianity today. Along the way, the filmmakers speak with current scholars who add their insights as well, Bible teachers like Sinclair Ferguson, the late J. I. Packer, and Dr. Al Mohler.

To find out how you can request your copy of this educational documentary on the Puritans, go online to truthforlife.org. And now here's Alistair to lead us in prayer. Father, write your word in our hearts, all that is helpful and true. May it be stored up for the evil day if it hasn't as yet come upon us, that which is unhelpful or untrue, which is distinctly possible for my lips.

May it be banished from our recollection. Grant that none of us may walk away without settling the issue of what it means to be in Christ. And may none of us evade the challenge nor miss the immense privilege of becoming increasingly like Christ in His humility, in His compassion, in His zeal for the souls of others, and yes, even in His experience of suffering. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest and remain with all who believe, now and until Jesus comes or calls us to Himself, and then forevermore. Amen. Next weekend, our attention turns from Jesus, the suffering servant, to Jesus, our great high priest. We hope you'll join us for this joyful discovery of Christ's role in presenting us blameless before God the Father. I'm Bob Lapeen. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.