3rd Sunday of Advent: A Humble Servant

TRANSCRIPT (Edited)

James Cain
Welcome to episode three of our Advent series, Songs of the Servant. I'm Jamie Cain. In these four episodes, we're reading the servant songs of Isaiah as a way of thinking through Advent's themes. We're visiting with Dr. Doug Beacham, Presiding Bishop of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in a kind of virtual visit to the pastor's study. How do you keep your head up when you've been shamed or disgraced? This week as we read the third song, in Isaiah 50, verses four through nine, we'll see how the Servant dealt with disgrace and shame; see how listening and servanthood go hand in hand; how Jesus who is the servant, understands every humiliation that we experience. And we'll also see how a familiar--maybe even your favorite--passage in the book of Romans echoes Isaiah's promise of God's presence in our trials. So again, open your Bible, or your Bible app, and join us in Isaiah 50, as the faithful servant speaks a word to the weary. Here's my conversation with Dr. Beacham.

Well, Dr. Beacham, we're back for our third servant song. Where are we headed today?

Doug Beacham
We are going to look in Isaiah chapter 50. We're going to look at verses four through nine. Some commentators run it through seven. I think for our purposes today, it will make a lot of sense to go through verse nine. So Isaiah chapter 50, beginning at verse four, and the reading is from the New King James. Hear the word of the Lord. "The Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary. He awakens me morning by morning; he awakens my ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, nor did I turn away. I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those plucked out the beard. I did not have my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord God will help me, therefore I will not be disgraced. Therefore, I've set my face like a flint, and I know that I will not be ashamed. He is near who justifies me. Who will contend with me? Let us stand together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near me. Surely the Lord God will help me. Who is he who will condemn me? Indeed, they will all grow old like a garment; the moth will eat them up." The Lord bless His word for us on this third Sunday of Advent.

James Cain
We've been talking about this connection with the life and ministry of Jesus. I can hear some echoes right away.

Doug Beacham
Oh, yeah.

James Cain
And we were talking before we started recording about this phrase, "the tongue of the learned."

Doug Beacham
Yeah.

James Cain
Talk about that a little bit as to how it relates to Jesus.

Doug Beacham
You know, I thought this was very interesting. We know that Hebrews five eight tells us that Jesus learned suffering--or learned obedience, rather, through what He suffered. I think it's really important to recognize the the full humanity of Jesus. He was sinless. The Bible's very clear about that--in fact, that's part of the whole meaning of the Incarnation. But he did not, you know, have some type of a computer chip in Him, you know, he had automatic downloads of a pre-Google kind of experience. He learned as a child. One might can argue that because he was sinless, even though he was tempted-- and that's an important distinction. Hebrews is really clear in talking about the humanity of Jesus. He was tempted like we are yet without sin. So he had to make decisions in the face of temptation.

If you don't have to decide something, it's not a temptation. There are some things that don't tempt me. I don't have to make a decision about them. They have no appeal, no interest whatsoever. There are other things that do tempt me. I'm not going to talk about it here. But they require a decision, and sometimes those can be laborious kinds of decisions. So the reality that Jesus was tempted means that he experienced the full weight of the psychological, spiritual, emotional, physical reality of whatever dimension of temptation is a reality in the fullness of human experience. And to work through a temptation, and not succumb to it, has its own suffering to it. It's a temptation because you want to do that. Something about you, that's in you, wants to do that. And to have the grace of a discipline, the grace of people who you can turn to, as Apostle Paul puts it, is the way of escape, in a temptation. To have that grace, to be able to say, "I'm not going to take this path." And often we need others with us to help us not take that path.

So, the suffering is not simply what Jesus suffered on the cross, as is sort of revealed a little bit later in the passages: the shame, the abuse he took before actually being nailed to the cross. There's a suffering dynamic that comes from the discipline of being taught, of learning how to be quiet and to listen before we speak, which is part of what's in here and reflected in some of Paul's admonitions. And so this reality that Jesus learned obedience--that tells us something about the role of his mother, Mary, about the role--even though his father's role is really not spoken of hardly beyond the Matthew account of the birth--that they had a role in helping Jesus learn what it was to hear the Father's voice. Jesus in the Gospel of John talks about "I say what I hear my Father saying, I do what I see my Father doing." Jesus had this ability in the spirit realm, to discern, "Okay, what is the Father's will in heaven, let it be done here on Earth"--to walk in the fullness of that. So he had to learn how to discern that. And the fullness of that learning manifests itself when he's 30 years of age. His ministry unfolds in all of that. So this first set of verses, verses four and five, are really important because they set the stage really on this third Sunday of Advent, particularly working out of these servant hymns, what's going to become a focus in the last Sunday of Advent, out of the end of Isaiah 52 and Isaiah 53. He says, "The Lord has given me the tongue of the learned."

That's an interesting phrase. I'm embarrassed to think how many times I've had the tongue of the unlearned. Spoken before I knew what the real picture was. And to be a learner, is to have a teachable spirit. It's to be someone who has actually a humility about them. I'll have to admit, there have been times in my life I have been slow to learn. And I'm not talking about cognitive, although there's been plenty of that--particularly in math and science, but that's a whole different story! But I'm talking about almost an unwillingness to submit myself to a new experience. And in growing in life, I began to sort of identify the reasons I didn't want to do that. It was because I was afraid. I was afraid of having to expose that I don't know something. The shame, the self-shame that's associated with that. And this acknowledgment that we have to live our lives constantly being taught. That there's a humility in that. It attacks our pride. And again, I think so often our pride is actually more of an up front of other inadequacies that it takes time in life. And here is the Servant Song. This is the servant of the Lord, the Son of God, saying that "God's given me this, my Father has given me the tongue of the learned." But there's a reason for it. It's not to become, you know, a PhD or whatever, although there's nothing wrong with that. We don't need any anti- intellectualism. But there's a specific reason: "That I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary." This is for the sake of others. And a "word in season" is timing. If someone is not ready to hear, if I'm not ready to hear, the word may not bear at least immediate fruit. And I'm more inclined to not listen to it at all, to not remember it. But in those environments where the timing is right, it seems there's always God's timing and God's place, where we hear. And that word--Jesus says it--that word in season to those who are weary. Those who are about to give up.

You know, here we are, we're at the end of 2020. This is a wearisome year. It's a historic year. It's, we're still in--I mentioned, maybe last week, we're still in DC, during COVID. And there's a great weariness. I think there's been a weariness in the United States about the political situation. And this knowledge that God has a word for this season. That's a word of hope for us. And it puts us in a posture of listening. He says, "He awakens me morning by morning; he awakens my ear to hear as the learned." To speak as the learned, to hear as the learned, that's this whole theme of attentiveness, of what it is to listen. I suspect all of us, either when we were children, or when we were in school, or in our marriages--somebody close to us has said, "You're not listening to me." And it's one thing for the ear to hear it. It's another thing for the attention to be given. And we're all guilty of that. Everything distracts us.

Not only attention deficit disorder effects on a child or someone who's trying to learn something. It affects everything we do. It affects our relationships, and it affects our walk with the Lord.

James Cain
That call to attention. That's something we don't think much about. There's some churches that periodically in their service, they say "Wisdom, let us attend. Let us pay attention."

Doug Beacham
That's right. Let's pay attention. And in the birth narratives, you find that over and over again. You find that Joseph had to go to sleep to pay attention. That is. God speaks to him in dreams, in Matthew 1. And then later in Matthew 2. And with Mary. And I think about Zachariah.

James Cain
It took a little bit for him to get it.

Doug Beacham
Yeah, it did! Nine months, in fact. You know, someone sent me a nice Advent devotional book that I'm reading through daily. And I think it was Henri Nouwen's selection that I was reading yesterday or day before yesterday, and he makes the comment about Zachariah that he's told "Your old wife, your elderly wife, is going to have this child." And, you know, he asked a question about it. And it's like the angel of the Lord says, "You're asking stupid questions. I'm going to protect you, and keep you from asking stupid questions. You don't have the tongue of the learned."

James Cain
There you go.

Doug Beacham
And it keeps him quiet for nine months. And only when the child is born, and he says this is going to be his name. He has to write it down. Then he can speak again. When I read that, I thought to myself, "I wonder how many times I've had nine months or longer, and didn't realize it, of being mute." I talked, I went about everything else. But as far as really what God wanted to do through me. I asked the wrong questions.

And contrast that with Mary, who, when she hears the angelic message, she does ask "How will this be, since I do not know a man?" and the angelic message is, "the Holy Spirit will overshadow you." And he continues that and she says, "Let it be to me according to your word. Whatever your word is, I say amen to it." And she's able to continue on. Elizabeth is not mute.

James Cain
Right.

Doug Beacham
They are both in a an attentive, waiting, listening period. And it's out of that--it's quite interesting that the end of verse five, continues that theme and then starts to make the shift to the point you were making a moment ago: "The Lord God has opened my ear." Maybe that says something. In the beginning of this "The Lord gave me," and now "the Lord God has opened." That real listening to God is a gift. It's not something we can create on our own. We can we can be intentional about setting time aside. But I think probably most people who are listening to this conversation right now would say, "If I try to put aside five minutes for God, my brain's running a million miles an hour."

James Cain
Right. Well, one of the Psalms says, the phrase in Hebrew is, "ears you have dug for me." Like we have to really cut through.

Doug Beacham
We have to cut through. That's exactly right. And you know, how to learn some of these spiritual lessons of listening for the Lord, of waiting on the Lord. It's an ongoing challenge in the busyness, even the busyness of ministry. We can be so busy, you know, doing, "the Lord's work," that we can't hear the Lord's word. And it's an ongoing challenge. Here, in this passage, "the Lord has opened my ear," he says, "I was not rebellious. Nor did I turn away from what was getting ready to happen to me." The whole purpose of his mission, of Jesus' mission, is oriented towards the Cross. And that's where then this thing begins to shift.

Yeah. So we turn from this humility and teachable nature to humiliation in this passage.

Yeah, it really is. And that may be one of the reasons we choose not to listen. Because God may be choosing the path we don't want to take. And to take a path of the way of the cross is not an easy path. It's not an easy path at any time, in any culture, because it requires a willingness to genuinely say, "not my will, but Thy will be done." And we are so pressured by society, we're pressured by success syndromes. We have our own stuff we're dealing with. Jesus was able to hear what his Father was saying to Him. And that is, He knew, we don't know when, the text tells us, but He knew where He was ultimately headed. I find it comforting, actually, that even in the garden of Gethsemane, He has to pray, "Lord, if this cup can pass from me...," you know, "Can we work out something here?" And yet He still has to come back and pray the prayer, "Your will not Mine." And there's a great lesson in that. These themes that come out of this--listen to the language. I gave my back to those who struck me." Well, we know you're reading out of the gospel records. "I gave my cheeks to those who plucked out my beard." I've never really grown a beard. You've got a little bit of a beard.

James Cain
I've got a little bit of one right now.

Doug Beacham
I bet that would hurt for somebody to pull it, for one. But to pull it out?

James Cain
Right. My children when they were small, and I had a beard, they would pull on it, on my face, but not pull it out. That would feel excruciating.

Doug Beacham
Oh, it would be incredibly painful. And this is a messianic prophecy. But then he says, "I did not hide my face." That's where the beard is. I didn't hide my face from shame and spitting. The gospels tell us they spat on Him. There aren't many more humiliating things that can be done to a person than to spit on them. In any culture, that's total disdain. And the shame and the humiliation of being crucified as a common criminal. His rights have been violated. He's been betrayed. Not only by one of his own disciples, he's been denied by another one. He's been abandoned by almost all of them except John. The only people who tend to stay close to him are the women, who who are not ashamed of Him. The Jews consider him a blasphemer. The Romans are caught up in this political drama that Pilate doesn't really want to be a part of, but can't get out of because of competing loyalties. And this shame that Jesus does not hide from--he accepts shame. I don't know many people willing to do that. I'm not willing to do that.

James Cain
No. Well, and you wouldn't be unless you start thinking about what Hebrews says about him. Right? Yeah. "For the joy set before Him."

Doug Beacham
The joy set before him. Yeah.

James Cain
Like the mission that we talked about last week. This large mission of bringing the Gentiles in. And the joy that comes from a kingdom realized.

Doug Beacham
Yeah. I think of the issue of shame and the great heritage of Christian martyrs through the centuries, and in the modern world today. I read somewhere that the 20th century was known as the greatest century of Christian martyrs in history. Well, we know today that in parts of Nigeria, Christians are being martyred and slaughtered. We know in other parts of the world--we know iphc pastors in India have been martyred. And the shame, the humiliation, that they are called to go through by those who will ultimately kill them. They accept that shame. Again, realizing there's no shame in dying for the name of Jesus, or suffering for the name of Jesus. I think, in our world today, whether it's in the West or whether it's in the non Western world, there may be times when the church needs to recognize the world is going to look at us and try to shame us because of some of the positions that we hold, or that we hold the exclusivity that Jesus is the only way, truth, and life. And the world wants to shame us for holding that.

This passage continues and you can almost hear the Lord speaking: "for the Lord God will help me, therefore I will not be disgraced." And He says "I've set my face like a flint; I know that I will not be ashamed." I couldn't help but think of Isaiah 54. You know, the identity passages for the IPHC are based out of verses two and three of Isaiah 54: place of hope, people of promise. And when you turn to that--turn over a chapter or a couple of pages. And at the end of that, beginning at verse four, the Lord says, "Do not fear for you will not be ashamed, neither be disgraced, for you're not going to be put to shame. For you will forget the shame of your youth, and will not remember the reproach of your widowhood anymore." And it continues with that. Notice this shame element that God is addressing to these people who were in Babylonian captivity, when these passages are being heard. And the Lord is saying, You're not going to stay in this place of disgrace and shame. That he's not, he's not fully abandoned you. And he continues there in verse eight. Again, this is messianic. "He is near who justifies me. Who will contend with me? Let us stand together. Who's my adversary? Let Him come near me. The Lord is going to help me who's he who will condemn me?" I can't help but think of Romans eight. The end of Romans eight has very similar language. Romans eight, by the way, really sort of ties into this issue. It begins with "There's no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. And that invitation: "those who walk by the Spirit." And then he goes and he's dealing with suffering. "I consider that the sufferings of this present time," verse 18, "are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed to us." He is talking about "the entire creation is in birth pains waiting for the revealing of the sons of God." He says, "The Spirit helps us in our weaknesses," verse 26, "we don't know what we should pray, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us." There are times the only way to really listen to what the Spirit is doing is to pray in the Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit, when we're praying in the Spirit, is praying according to the will of God. Sometimes I can't get it up here. I don't have the words, I don't have the understanding. But the Spirit, who knows all things and reveals all things--spirit, praying to spirit.

And he then goes and says, as out of this, that "we know all things work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purposes." And he continues on there with powerful theological themes of predestination, of justification, glorification. And then listen where he ends with this. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God's elect? It's God who justifies you." That language echoes right out of Isaiah 50. "Who is He Who condemns?" That's exactly what the servant was asking earlier. "It's Christ who died, and furthermore, is also risen, who's even at the right hand of God, also making intercession for us." And the passage just continues there about the ultimate triumph of the love of God. And so on this third Sunday of Advent, out of this servant song, we have this call for us to listen to the Lord, for us to listen to and be willing to hear him calling us on a path, perhaps, we would rather not take. But it's a path that is for His glory. And as a path for the ultimate fulfillment of what our purposes are, to be born in such a time as this.

James Cain
Seems like a good time to pray.

Doug Beacham
Yeah. Lord, thank you. Thank you for the promise you gave to your Son in this prophecy, that you would give Him the tongue of the learned. You give Him an ear. Teach us what it is to hear you in this busy holiday season, and in this year, that's just been perhaps one of the most difficult years that many have lived through. And even as the nations of the world have lived through in the last 100 years. But Lord, that You will, in the midst of all of this enable us to learn what it means to listen to You. And teach us what it means to be Your people, who will walk in your paths, who will not be ashamed of Your name. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

James Cain
Thank you, Dr. Beacham.

Doug Beacham
Thanks.