Inspiration in Isaiah: Mission Statement for the Messiah

Series: Inspiration in Isaiah, #20

Advent, #1

December 3, 2006

MISSION STATEMENT FOR THE MESSIAH

Isaiah 61:1-3

I. Mission Statements Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:16-21

Corporate mission statements are all the rage these days. You walk into Macy’s or Sears and you see a picture of the store manager along with the corporate mission statement. Wal-Mart’s mission is “to improve the quality of life for everyday people around the world.” “Colorado Christian University cultivates knowledge and love of God in a Christ-centered community of learners and scholars.” We have a mission statement for Faith Church that you see on this banner here: We want to be balanced and growing in these three priorities: to exalt the Son, to edify the Body, and to evangelize the world. That’s why we exist.

Christians sometimes wonder why the Jews didn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. It all seems so clear to us, we don’t know why everyone doesn’t see it. One of the reasons for that is because there are two different mission statements for the Messiah in the Old Testament. One says He will be a king, who will deliver His people from slavery and oppression. The original prophecies about a Messiah were in terms of a son of David, who would rule on David’s throne forever. This image fit perfectly with the history of Israel for centuries, all the way back to the time of the judges when strong men and women would lead the people to resist their oppressors. This was also the way of the world around them, that a strong national leader would occasionally rise up and lead their subjugated people to freedom. Living as they did under the oppressive rule of the Romans, the Jews naturally focused on this mission statement for the Messiah. And Jesus didn’t seem to fit that.

Those passages were accurate descriptions of Jesus, alright, but they most closely described His second coming, not His first. He is going to come as a king, He will deliver His people from all oppression and rule on the earth. But in His first appearance on earth, He fulfilled the other mission statements for the Messiah that presented a softer side. Our passage this morning in Isaiah 61 is a case in point. It lays out very clearly what kind of person he would be, and what kind of ministry He would have.

Isaiah 61:1-3

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

[2] to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor

and the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all who mourn,

[3] and provide for those who grieve in Zion--

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,

a planting of the Lord

for the display of his splendor.

As we begin the Advent season today, I think it is appropriate for us to look carefully at who Jesus was, and why He came. It is significant that when Jesus began His public ministry, this is the passage He chose to explain His mission. Luke 4:16-21, “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. [17] The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written… (and then He quoted this passage from Isaiah 61.) [20] Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, [expecting Him to teach them what this passage meant. It was just like we do it here: Scripture reading, followed by exposition and commentary. But they were in for a surprise.] [21] and he began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’”

Wow! It’s not every day you see biblical prophecies fulfilled right before your eyes. As far as the people of Israel were concerned, it had been 400 years since there had been a true prophet of the Lord in their midst. But now here comes Jesus into the synagogue in the town where He grew up, He finds a particular passage in Isaiah, reads it, and says, This is talking about Me! This is the mission statement for my ministry. I am the Messiah!

So what does it tell us about the Mission of the Messiah?

II. The Mission of the Messiah

A. Anointed Isaiah 61:1

Isaiah 61:1 says, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me.” The word for anointed in Hebrew is “Messiah”, and in Greek it is “Christ”. Jesus was the long awaited, prophesied Anointed One. Anointing was a ceremony performed typically with oil, to designate someone as set apart for God’s use as a prophet, priest, or king, or some other important role. The anointing also meant that they were thereby equipped by God for the task to which they had been called, often by the power of the Holy Spirit. We remember that at the beginning of His ministry, Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, and at that time, the Holy Spirit was seen coming down from heaven to rest on Jesus.

B. The people He came for

Notice the kinds of people Jesus came to minister to: poor, brokenhearted, captives, prisoners, those who mourn, the oppressed. Are those the kind of people you would like to have in our church? Most pastors in America are very happy to have well-to-do middle and upper-middle class, well educated, prosperous people who have their act together, but why would you focus on people like this? But these are the people who Jesus primarily has in His sights. It’s not that He rejected the wealthy, and there were a few in the upper class who followed Him. It’s just that He sees the desperate needs of the vast majority of humanity, and His great compassion moves Him to reach out and minister to them.

C. Preach good news to the poor Isaiah 61:3

Specifically, He came to preach good news to the poor. The good news was that God loves them and wants them to be a part of His kingdom. The good news was that Jesus came to die for their sins so they could be in fellowship with Almighty God. The good news was that even though they were excluded from the fancy palaces of the rich, they would one day walk on streets of gold.

The poor have always been the most receptive to the gospel, in every place Christian missionaries have gone. I think that’s because they are most aware of their need. Wealth insulates us from our spiritual needs; we try to fill up the God-shaped vacuum in our lives with material things and exciting experiences, and we don’t even realize that we need God. But the poor know they are missing something. They know they need help to get through life. So wherever the gospel has gone, it has been welcomed first and most eagerly by the poor.

So although God loves rich people, and they need a Savior just as much as anyone else, if we were thinking strategically, we’d have to say that the smart thing to do would be to work hardest on taking the gospel to the poor. That’s what Jesus did, and that’s what the church in every age has done. It’s not glamorous; it has very little material rewards. The poor don’t tithe much—they don’t generally fund large building programs or remodeling projects. But they are often much more receptive to the good news that God loves them.

I believe that’s what God wants us to do here at Faith Church. We have been spinning our wheels, trying to take the gospel to relatively wealthy people like us who don’t want it because they don’t think they need it. But if we would follow Jesus’ example and take it to the poor, we might find a much more receptive audience. We have the Interfaith Hospitality Network folks coming to our church the week of December 10. I am thrilled to see that almost all the slots have been filled already. It’s a great opportunity for us to serve homeless families in our community in the name of Christ. But as we learn that the mission of the Messiah was to preach good news to the poor, we need to remember that with that opportunity for service to the homeless comes an opportunity to share, to engage them in conversation over a meal, to see where they are spiritually, to point them to Christ. If you signed up to provide a meal, or to stay overnight, don’t just stay to yourself or your small group; reach out to these people who may be very aware of their spiritual needs as well as their material needs. It’s Christmas, after all, and it should be easy to talk to them about the true meaning of the season.

We don’t have to re-invent the wheel here. There are a number of organizations in our community that are already reaching out to the poor, and we can join their efforts in the name of Christ. You might consider volunteering at the House of Neighborly Service (by the way, thanks so much for the almost 1,700 pounds of food you donated in October!). Alternatives to Violence ministers to women in abusive relationships. Head Start provides quality preschool education for low income families. Meals on Wheels brings hot meals to people who are confined to their homes. Habitat for Humanity builds homes for low income residents. The Lions and Rotary clubs have programs to benefit disadvantaged people. I’m sure I’ve left many out, but you get the picture. If we have the eyes of the Messiah this Christmas, we will see more opportunities to serve the poor as He did, and in the process, to bring them the best news ever.

The next part of the Messiah’s mission statement says He was to bind up the brokenhearted.

D. Bind up the brokenhearted Isaiah 61:1

The image that comes to mind here is of someone who has been hurt deeply carrying their broken heart around, looking for someone to heal it, but no one can. They try doctors, nurses, counselors, ministers, but no one can help. Finally, this wounded one comes to Jesus, and hands Him their heart, and says, “Lord, help me. No one else can heal my heart. Can you?” And Jesus gently takes that broken, cracked, wounded heart in His hands, and tenderly rubs ointment into it, then wraps it with the bandages of His love, and hands it back to them.

There are a lot of wounded people in our world today. I am constantly amazed at the hurts that people carry around—it is almost beyond belief that they can still function with such deep wounds. And some do not. Their brokenness interferes almost every day in some way with their normal life. It robs them of joy; it distorts relationships; it corrupts their motives; it causes them to act in self-destructive ways. It’s just devastating. As a pastor, I hear more of these stories than I want, and sometimes I am just overwhelmed by it all. God! There is so much pain in our world! And I live in beautiful, middle class, prosperous, peaceful, Loveland, not Iraq or Gaza or Lebanon or Afghanistan or Sudan! But this is why Jesus came: to bind up the brokenhearted.

Could that be you today? Is your heart broken by the circumstances life has dealt you? Have you been wounded by someone else, perhaps so deeply that you don’t know if you can go on? Are you crushed by your own failures and sin? Listen: the mission statement of the Messiah says that He came for you. Why don’t we stop right now and just come to Him with our pain? Hold out your broken heart for Him to bind up, and ask Him to heal you.

But now let’s turn this around. If you had suffered with a debilitating illness for many years and then found relief through a treatment prescribed by a specialist, wouldn’t you want to share that good news with others? If you met people who had that same disease, wouldn’t you just light up and be thrilled to share with them the good news that there is hope, there is healing, and you’d direct them to the doctor who helped you. If Jesus the Messiah has bound up our broken hearts, if we have begun to experience His healing in our lives, if He is in the process of making us whole, then we surely want to share that good news with others who may be suffering the same way we were.

The Christmas season is a difficult time for many people. We set ourselves up for what a wonderful time it’s going to be, with family all united around the tree, sharing gifts of love, enjoying happy fellowship at parties and such, watching the bright eyes of the children as they anticipate the big day. It is all so highly romanticized that almost no one’s reality lives up to the ideal. And that is a huge let-down for many. It’s a season of shorter days and longer nights and many people struggle through the holidays with great bouts of depression, discouragement, fear, disappointment, frustration, etc. Their hearts are breaking.

But Jesus came to bind up the broken hearted. We can tell them about Him. We know how good He is, and what a wonderful great physician He has been to us. So we point them to Him, the one who loves them more than anyone on earth, and share with them how they can get their hearts healed, too. It’s probably easier to talk about Christ at Christmas than at any other time of the year, both because the holiday is ostensibly about Him, and because people’s needs are so much more acute at this season. It’s easy to ask, “What’s the most meaningful part about Christmas for you?” and see where God takes it. So let’s be on the lookout for folks God puts in our path who may need a word of encouragement, a reference from one recovering patient to another sick person, to run to Jesus, the healer of hearts.

Another part of the Messiah’s mission was to

E. Proclaim freedom for the prisoners Isaiah 61:1; Romans 6:7,16-18,22

…to release the oppressed. If you know anything about the life and ministry of Jesus, you know that He did not go around emptying the local jails. Evidently, that isn’t what this means. The prison He had in mind was the bondage and oppression of sin. Paul says in Romans 6 that we are slaves to whatever it is we choose to obey. If we choose to obey the sinful impulses in us, then we become slaves to sin. But the good news of the gospel is that it is now possible for us to break out of that imprisonment, that slavery, and live as free men and women. Christ has set us free. We are free from the penalty of sin, so that we will live forever in God’s joyful presence. And we are free from the power of sin, so that we don’t have to sin any more. It doesn’t control us like it used to. We can choose to do the right, rather than the wrong.

Think about some sin that you habitually fall into. Most of us have such things, ranging from lust to gossip to hatred to greed to selfishness to a foul mouth, lying, pornography, alcohol abuse, etc. You’ve probably tried many times to break out of that habit, but have failed again and again. Wouldn’t you like to be free from the power of that? Jesus the Messiah has come to set you free. You don’t have to live there. Without His power, you are trapped, imprisoned, stuck. But with Him on your side, it is possible for you to choose the right, every time. Don’t let the past failures convince you that it can’t be done. Don’t believe the lie from the pit that you will never change, or that God has rejected you because of your sin. Jesus came for this express purpose: to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to release the oppressed. Call on Him. You’ve done that? Call on Him again, this time in faith, knowing that this is one of the very reasons He came. This was His mission: to set you free.

Along with that, Jesus came to

F. Proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor Isaiah 61:2

He doesn’t mean just one year of 365 days, but an extended season of time. That period lasted not only while Jesus was here on earth, but continues today, as we, His servants, take up His mission and tell everybody we can that God is predisposed to show favor to them. The biblical term for it is grace: undeserved, unmerited, unconditional favor from God.

o John 1:17, “The law came through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

o 2 Cor. 8:9, “ For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

o Ephes. 2:8, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—“

Grace is undeserved favor from God. You can’t qualify for it or earn it in any way. It’s just something unbelievably good that God gives us. Simply because He loves us. You know, that’s the way our gift-giving is supposed to be at Christmas, but all too often, we muddy it up. We give because we feel guilty about having ignored people all year; we give because we know they are going to give something to us and we’ll feel bad if we don’t reciprocate; we give gifts we can’t afford because we are trying to keep up with the in-laws; we give in an attempt to buy their love. God doesn’t play any of those games. He gives us eternal life in a relationship with Himself just because He loves us. Period.

I don’t care what you are hoping to get for Christmas; there is no greater gift than a relationship with God. If you were to receive His grace for the first time, and accept the gift He is offering you today, your Christmas 2006 will be unlike any Christmas you have ever experienced. You’ve seen people wearing those little buttons, or you’ve seen it on a billboard somewhere: “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Don’t write that off as just a trite little slogan; that’s the truth. The reason the world celebrates Christmas is because it marks the birth of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah. And His mission in life was to bring God’s grace to the world.

Most people have one of two misconceptions about how a relationship with God works.

1. God doesn’t grade on a curve

Some people think God grades on a curve. We were talking in the office this past week, and Monica Kopp told how in one of her college classes she wasn’t doing so well, but at the end, she got an A in the class because the prof graded on a curve. So no matter what her actual score was, she was compared with all the other students, and if she was doing better than they were, then she got the A. Many people think this is how God grades us, and would you believe it?—most people think they are better than the average person! Almost nobody thinks they are worse than average. But it really doesn’t matter whether you are better than anyone else or not; God doesn’t grade on a curve. You could be better than everyone on earth, and still not qualify for a relationship with a holy God.

2. God doesn’t grade on a scale

The other misconception people have is that God uses a scale to compare our good deeds with our bad deeds. Every action, word, and thought is assigned a moral value depending on how good or how bad it is, and it goes on the scale into one side or the other. In this scheme, a few really good deeds can outweigh a lot of not so bad ones, and where you spend eternity is based on which way the scale tips when you die. If your good deeds outweigh your bad ones, you get to go to heaven; if not, you go to the other place.

But again, this is a misconception. God doesn’t use a scale. The Bible says, James 2:10 (NLT), “the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as the person who has broken all of God's laws.” It also says of God, Habakkuk 1:13, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.” So even if you only did one bad thing in your whole life (and which of us could say that?) you still would not qualify for a relationship with the holy God.

It all sounds so hopeless—until we hear this good news from the Messiah: this is the year of God’s favor, now is the time to receive His grace. Because of what the Messiah did on the cross, it is possible for God to forgive us, to welcome us into His fellowship, to save us for all eternity, and all we have to do is to accept that.

If you compare the passage in Isaiah 61 that we’ve been looking at this morning with the quotation by Jesus in Luke 4, you’ll notice an interesting thing. Isaiah’s mission statement for the Messiah includes the phrase, “…to proclaim…the day of vengeance for our God,” but Jesus stopped in the middle of the sentence and did not quote that part. Because that part of the mission applies to His second coming, not His first. This first time around, He was here to announce the season of God’s grace.

And now is the time to take advantage of that, friends. Some people think they’ll put this decision off until later, until after they’ve had some fun, sown their wild oats, etc. But now is the time to do it. 2 Cor. 6:2, “…I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation.” Hebrews 3:15, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…." Don’t harden your heart toward God; open up to Him. Accept the free gift of salvation and eternal life that He is offering you. Reach out to Him and take it, as you would take a gift from a friend. But don’t wait. Do it now. You can do it while we pray.