THE SERVICE OF THE LORD JESUS TO US
We began the prayer meeting yesterday evening with Hymn 271, which has the lines:
‘Thou weariest not, most gracious Lord,
Though we may weary grow’.
The thought that there is no wearying with the Lord came into the meeting. Reference was made to the ceaseless service of the Lord Jesus in giving efficacy to the prayers of the saints at the golden altar (Rev.8:3), a scripture that is often mentioned in the prayer meeting. That is a ceaseless and unwearying service on the part of the Lord Jesus. As our brother has said in prayer, He is the One who we can rely on. I desire to bring in a simple word of comfort and encouragement to each one of us, that this blessed and glorious One does not become tired, He does not weary.
There was a time when the Lord Jesus here, as a Man in His condition of flesh and blood, was “wearied with the way he had come”, John 4:6. How approachable He was; how near us He became in His grace. He knew weariness in the condition which He took up as a Man here, in a bondman’s form (Phil.2:7). He is still a Man; the Lord Jesus remains a real Man. He is not in the condition of flesh and blood now, the condition in which He could feel weariness – wonderful divine grace and sympathy – but having now taken up a different condition, He remains the same blessed Man. He is of the same order, although He is in a new condition now, a glorious and heavenly condition. But He has been in a condition where He could feel weariness, and He therefore has sympathy with you and me, because He understands what it is for the human frame to feel weariness. He also understands about sorrow and discouragement which might come into our hearts from time to time, having come into touch Himself with such things here. But He does not weary; He is a real Man in a glorious condition and place where He always lives to intercede. That is an aspect of His service for His own. Those of us sitting here are among His own, and the Lord in His grace is tireless in His service to us.
The scripture in Chapter 40 of Isaiah brings that in. The prophet refers to “the everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth”. That is a reference to God, but includes the One that we know as the Lord Jesus. It was by Him that the worlds were made (Col.1:16), and He upholds “all things by the word of his power” (Heb.1:2,3). He “fainteth not nor tireth”. There is always with Him the energy to maintain everything according to the divine standard with no change. That struck me in the hymn that we have just sung, ‘Thou art the Same!’ (Hymn 29). The Lord is always the same in His grace and in His sympathy, and also in His power, in the greatness and perfection of everything that He does. It is a tremendously reassuring matter that there is no change with Him, and He “fainteth not nor tireth”. The Lord Jesus has taken up all that is due to God, and He sets Himself to maintain it. He has put His hand to that, there is no change, no fainting or tiring with that blessed One. It is one of His myriad and varied glories.
Then it says, “There is no searching of his understanding”. What wisdom there is in that One, wisdom that is available to us. He is “made to us wisdom”, 1 Cor.1:30. A tireless Source of wisdom and an unfathomable depth of resource is available to the believer, and is always available. We might grow weary, as the hymn says, but that One who is the Source of everything that we need is always the Same and never wearies. There could never be a time when we go to the Lord in prayer and find that He is not available to us. He is always available. He does not weary, He does not faint and He does not tire. Blessed Man; what a wonderful Person to know!
The scripture in Isaiah 40 goes on to speak of what He is to us as believers who love Him. “He giveth power to the faint; and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength”, and then “they that wait upon Jehovah shall renew their strength”. The Lord Himself does not weary, and He gives resource to us so that we also might not weary. That is another glory of the Lord, that He imparts freshness, power, energy and strength as it is needed to those that wait upon Jehovah, or as footnote ‘e’ says, to those that ‘look for Jehovah’. To those who feel their dependence upon Him, He provides refreshment, He provides energy and strength. It is not natural. The natural things are spoken about in verse 30. It speaks of youths fainting and tiring, young men stumbling and falling. Even what is the best of nature, the most vigorous of what is natural, can tire. Young people do not usually feel tired, they can keep going in their natural energy, and directed in right paths, of course, that is a good thing. But eventually the natural energy even of the strongest person is depleted and tiredness comes in. You cannot say of what is natural that it does not faint or tire, it is only what morally and spiritually has its source in the Lord Himself. Those that “wait upon Jehovah” shall renew their strength.
We know something of that, we can see it in dear brethren that we know and love. They might become physically weak, but morally and spiritually they renew their strength because they look for the Lord. They “shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not tire; they shall walk, and not faint”. There is a spiritual vigour and energy that we can draw from the Lord Jesus. It is not derived from a natural source. If it was, it would become tired, it would become depleted, but what is from Him is fresh, vigorous and energetic. The Lord is the Source of that; He is the Source of what is living, of life according to God. Those who wait upon Him can draw upon that life, and be maintained here in a scene that would tend to drag us down. In the face of sorrows and difficulties that might cause us to faint or to tire, He is the Source of a continual supply of life. Now, we could also speak of the Holy Spirit in that way as the source of vigour, that “fountain of water, springing up into eternal life” (John 4:14), because the service of the Lord and the service of the Holy Spirit in many ways run together. But I am thinking particularly of the Lord as the blessed Man who neither faints nor tires, and He imparts that same spirit to those that wait upon Him, or look for Him.
That thought is carried forward into chapter 50. It is a very familiar passage. These passages of Isaiah that speak prophetically of the Lord are precious, they are beautiful, incomparable, and here it is clear that the prophet speaks prophetically about the Lord. You wonder what Isaiah knew about that blessed One, about how much was made known to him. He saw the glory of the Lord and spoke of Him (John 12:41). There was something given to Isaiah as to knowledge of the Lord that seems to be special, and yet we know that One as Isaiah never knew Him. We know Him as the One who has been revealed, the blessed Man of whom these prophetic scriptures speak. Isaiah looked forward in faith to the coming in of the Messiah, when his prophecy and many other prophecies would be fulfilled. We know it as a matter of fact that the Lord has come in and fulfilled all that the prophets spoke concerning Himself. Verses 5 and 6 speak of His blessed manhood in the face of opposition and oppression, and scorn and physical abuse. He did not change. His attitude was one of grace, of forgiveness, and of absolute devotion to the will of the Father. It says of Him further on in verse 7 that He set His face as a flint, or “stedfastly...to go to Jerusalem”, Luke 9:51. The Lord knew what awaited Him there, but He never wearied in doing the will of the Father. It says in our hymn that every footstep gave the Father fresh delight (Hymn 119), and even in the face of the most awful opposition from those who smote Him and plucked off the hair and spat upon Him, the Lord continued in His steadfastness in dependence.
I particularly wanted to draw attention to verse 4, that as One who was instructed of the Father, He knew “how to succour by a word him that is weary”. How often you find that in the gospels; the Lord would speak a word in a situation that might have seemed hopeless, in which people were weary, with no strength to meet a situation themselves. Of course, He was able to use His unique power to transform circumstances, but He changed people by speaking a word to succour those that were weary. We too know what it is, when we are weary, to be succoured. Just one word from Him makes all the difference. It strengthens the heart and the soul of the believer, of those that seek Jehovah, those that appreciate this kind of Man who is spoken about in chapter 50 of Isaiah. There was nothing of the flesh about Him at all. What men saw, and what we see in the Lord Jesus, is God’s ideal Man, a Man who was entirely in the Spirit, full of the Spirit. It is a wonderful matter.
As we contemplate Him, and desire to speak to Him and receive His communications to us, we would receive a word that succours us when we are weary. The Christian waits for that, desires it; a word from the Lord makes all the difference. You might be feeling a bit down, and a word from the Lord transforms everything. It does! When He speaks to the soul, your mind, heart and soul are freshly affected by the power, majesty and glory of the Person. The word itself that He speaks might be a simple word, but because it is from Him, it strengthens and succours those who are weary.
May these things be for our encouragement, for His name’s sake.
Word in a meeting for ministry, Grangemouth
4 July 2017
A.M. Brown