Isaiah 53:4-6 (NLT)
“Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.”
This servant of God that we have been reading about, this man of sorrows — turns out it’s not his own sorrows he is worrying about. He was weighed down by the sorrows that own us, the sin that plagues us all and is destroying the world. From an earthly perspective, if we viewed Jesus as just a man who ended up getting killed for making a whole bunch of sacrilegious claims, then it would seem that his trouble was brought on himself. You could even assert that God had punished him for trying to claim glory that was not his. Yet we see here that it was quite the opposite.
If you think you are a pretty good person, you are sadly mistaken. We are bunch of stupid, smelly sheep who can barely think for ourselves. We think with the crowd, we compromise, we can barely remember God’s ways nevermind follow them. And God does not disdain us. He does not despise us. He loves us so incredibly that he was willing to be beaten and killed to make us whole.
You don’t have to try harder, be better, figure it out, or clean yourself up. Look around you and simply admit that your own mess smells bad. If you have gotten comfortable with your own brand of stench, try spending time with people who have a different kind of B.O. than you. Go to God together and ask him to clean you all up. He wants to make you whole. It cost him a lot to make that possible. He’s willing… are you?