Isaiah 42:1:
Behold, My servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen, in whom My soul delighteth.
I want to link with that some of the most familiar words from the lips of that Servant, recorded by Matthew in his Gospel, Matthew 11:28-30:
Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.
“Behold, My Servant.”
As we proceed a little further in this matter of servanthood and service, we are going to take a look at this model, representative Servant, and learn, I trust, something of servanthood and service from Him.
By and large, the words which we have read from the Gospel have been mainly used in preaching to the unsaved. I do not think I have ever heard a message on those words otherwise than to the unsaved. They are almost universally and exclusively used as a gospel appeal, as it is called.
And I am not questioning the right of that, but I want to point out that the words were addressed to the people who called themselves the people of God. They were addressed to Israel. They were spoken to the Jews.
Their subject is not salvation. Their subject is service. It is to labourers, burdened down in their time of labour, that the appeal was made.
And the very simple words are the symbols of service: “My yoke.” A yoke is the symbol of service, of labour.
These people were striving to work. They were toiling, labouring, as they intended, for God. It was in relation to God that they were thus burdened.
We know what the burden was. It was the burden of the law. To the leaders of that nation Jesus said, “Ye bind heavy burdens and lay them upon men’s shoulders; they are grievous to be borne.”
And under that overwhelming weight of legal service, they were worn out and found no rest. Jesus, in this appeal, was saying, in other words, “I can teach you how to work to satisfaction, to joy, because all this that you are in, that you are doing, that you are striving after, does not get you anywhere. I can teach you how to work and get somewhere.”
This is achieving nothing. And there is nothing more heartbreaking than to labour and toil and never accomplish anything—never get anywhere, see nothing for it, and have nothing for it.
There is nothing more gratifying, heartening, than to do work—really be in work—and see that it is worthwhile, that it is getting somewhere.
The toil, the labour, that gets there—that is rest, is it not? Real rest is not sitting down doing nothing. Real rest is seeing that all that you do is of value; it is reaching.
And that is exactly what Jesus was saying to these people: “Come to Me, learn of Me, and I will teach you the way of service that is worthwhile and that gets somewhere.”
All service—true service—for God takes its nature from Christ.
Now, what I am saying to you this time may sound simple, but it is drastically testing and discriminating. Let me say at once: there is a vast amount of what is called the work of the Lord, or service for the Lord, which is not getting there and which is not going through to God’s end and achieving His purpose.
And it will be exposed at the end as having missed the way. A vast amount, a great deal, is on a purely mere personal basis. Well, much could be said like that, and there is a great deal going up in smoke.
So do not be deceived, and do not make any mistake: I am not this evening talking about working for the Lord, what is commonly and generally called the Lord’s work or the Lord’s service. I am occupied and concerned with what is true service to God—the real nature of service to God.
Does that need more careful defining? You can have a little child who wants to help mother. I do not know what a little busybody she may be, what a lot of things she is doing—always with a good intention—and seems to be so happy about it all, helping mother.
But poor mother, poor mother! Really, she is making more work than she is doing, making more difficulty than she is clearing up. Presently, when she has gone to bed, mother will have to put all that work straight, clear up all that well-intentioned labour.
That is simple enough business, as it is meant to be service. Mother’s verdict is, “Well, it is meant for me, but it is not really service to me.” There is a difference.
And the Lord may take that attitude with all that is meant for Him: “I recognize how well-intentioned it is, the good motive; but, My word, it is not really service to Me. It is not reaching the end that I have.”
We have got to make that discrimination. These people were doing countless things, as they thought, for God. We have only got to look into their rules and regulations, and all that they were doing in their rites and ceremonies and whatnot for God.
It was all about them. It became a tremendous burden and toil. Yes, for God; but for such Jesus says, “Learn of Me. Learn of Me.”
And I will teach you the way of service that is service to God indeed.
If we are going to learn, we can look at Him—not only listen to what He says, but look at Him. For, I repeat, all true service to God takes its nature from Christ and is all a matter of the knowledge and understanding of the Lord Jesus.
Yes, the knowledge and understanding of Christ is the essential basis of all service.
You have got the contrast of that with the service of Christendom. What do people mean when they say they are going into the Lord’s work?
Well, to go into the Lord’s work, into the Lord’s service—put it how you will—we must go through some institution, some college, some place. We shall take lectures, and study, and read up, and then we shall be qualified to go into the Lord’s work. Is that true?
Now, without for one moment undervaluing instruction—and training has its place—I want to say this emphatically: you may have all that you can get in that way, and still lack the essential for serving the Lord. All that is no guarantee that you have got the essential to serve the Lord.
“Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.” Christ is a spiritual university.
Pardon me if I treat you as little children, reminding you of the very word itself: uni-versity. We are in a universe. People go to a university. What is that?
Well, a course is just a line, is it not? A line. And the versity is so many lines. A university is a place where there are so many, all the lines—every subject.
If you want to know that, there is this line: you read this; you read law; you read this and that. That is the line. And all the lines are in that particular place, just as in the universe all the lines of science are there. It is a unity of all the lines.
Now, when we go to the university, we do not go onto all the lines. We go onto one. We read our subject, our history—that is the line in all the lines of the university.
But mark you, when you come to the Lord Jesus, you come to a universe: a comprehensive, all-inclusive centre where you have to learn a very great many things. There is a vast amount there in Christ, and you are going on for all eternity learning Christ.
Christ is so comprehensive, so many-sided, so universal, so inclusive. There is no exhausting Him.
Those who have been on the way with Him and in His school the longest, for the greatest number of years, and even most concentrated and devoted in their application to know Him—at the end of long years, they know they have hardly started. They have not started; only at the beginning of the knowledge of Christ.
When we begin to learn of Christ, we have come into the university, and we have got to read in every subject.
Now, does that appal you, disconcert you? Well, it need not. It need not. You have got all eternity—the ages of the ages—for it.
And the blessed thing about this is: He takes us a bit at a time. He does not cram. There is no cramming in Christ. Some of you know about cramming, do you not? No cramming here, no forcing.
He takes us a bit at a time. He sees to it that we just know that. It may be a small thing comparatively; it is important. Nothing is unimportant here. He takes us in hand and holds us until we know that.
And it is not an end in itself that we should know it. This is education for vocation. Make no mistake about it: the whole of this life here—not all longer—is a part of our education for eternal vocation.
Probably that is the chief feature about our life here.
Well, one thing becomes very clear before you get very far: the Lord is far, far more concerned about your spiritual education than He is about how much, or how many things, you do for Him.
He is quite prepared to take you out of all the doing to see to it that you are learning. And the Lord makes the doing so often our education.
The doing is not the end. The education is for the vocation that lies ahead. It is unto the ages of the ages.
“Learn of Me.” How great Christ is, you and I will discover more and more as we go along.
In the early stages of our Christian life, we think we know enough to go out. But as we go on, the fact is that we feel we had better get back and learn something, and not go quite so fast. We do not know what we need to know; better to draw back.
What I am saying, if you realize it, is this: this learning for service is not an academic thing, nor is it a mechanical thing. It is by reason of a vital spiritual union with Christ. It is learning a Person.
If you can grasp that and hold it, hold it always, do. It is not learning things. It is not learning doctrines and truths. It is not even learning Scripture. These things have their place, but real service to God is going to come out of learning Christ—knowing Christ.
And that requires living with Him.
Well, that He is the great Servant needs no arguing. It was self-declared: “I am among you,” said He, “as He that serveth.”
He spoke of those who take their seat at the table. He said, “I am not one of those. I am the Servant to wait on you. I am here as a servant.”
Paul, in that classic phrase, says about His condescension from heaven: “He took upon Him the form of a bondslave”—a servant, the Authorized Version calls it.
Well, it was self-declared that that is the capacity in which He was in this world. The garments of glory laid aside, the towel of service girded, water of purification in the basin in hand, down on His knees to perform the service—to teach them how to serve, what a spirit of service is.
So it was here. When we have this afternoon reminded ourselves of all those passages in Isaiah’s prophecy which predict His servanthood, we need not go over again how many there are of those foreshadowings in those prophecies of Him and the Servant.
What we want to do, and must do, is to look at Him, to see the characteristics of the true Servant in whom God has His delight.
And I want to say, first of all, about Him—and therefore about all who will be, or would be, true servants of God in the true servanthood—that He was, first of all, under a divine compulsion.
A divine compulsion. Let it be understood at once—do not take this too hard—there is nothing voluntary about this. There is nothing voluntary about this.
If you do come in and it seems that you are doing it voluntarily, even that must be the result of a compulsion.
He is here described as a bondslave. That is the original term for our English word servant: a bondslave, not a volunteer. A bondslave is not a volunteer at all. There is nothing about this that is optional. There is nothing about it that is casual.
A bondslave is purchased, owned, possessed, and without any rights of his own. That is a bondslave.
A bondslave has his life bound up with his position as a bondslave. He has not got a life of his own. Let one of those bondslaves of old escape and run away: anybody can kill him. He can be killed; his life can be taken, and no question is asked about it. It is a recognized thing.
A bondslave’s life, his own life, is forfeit one way or the other. It is either for his master, or it will be taken from him. This is a tremendous thing, this bondslave idea.
Yes, the bondslave was branded—branded. The brand was not the brand of his own rights to himself; it was the brand of his master, or the authority to which he was given.
Paul said, “I bear branded in my body the marks of the Lord.” In his constant usage of this very term concerning himself—“the bondslave of Jesus Christ”—he would repudiate any suggestion that he had a life of his own, that he had any rights of his own.
“For me to live is Christ.” It is a matter of life or death, this service.
Another difference, is it not, from common ideas of servanthood or Christian service? You can resign if you do not like it. You can change from one place to another if you are not pleased, run away, do anything today without any compunction.
If you are the bondslave of Jesus Christ, if you learn of Him, you will find this to be true. All these things were true of the Lord Jesus.
Need I say that it was not the compulsion of law? It was not the compulsion of labour tribunals directing Him to this service. It was the compulsion of heart, the compulsion of love. It was the captivity of the will.
His will was in the slavery of the Father. How He emphasized that: “I came not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.”
“My meat and My drink, My very subsistence, is to do the will of My Father.” From beginning to end, it was the complete captivation of His will by the will of Another—the compulsion of Another’s will.
Only servanthood really reaches God’s end, serves God’s purpose.
It really is this, dear friends—or has got to be this—a deep-down urge, a sense of destiny.
“Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go.” Something has happened that did not take its rise in us. We did not decide out from ourselves to enter into the Lord’s work, into Christian service.
A deep-down urge. You know what that means?
I remember many years ago, I used to read fiction, interesting books. I was very interested in some books by a writer who perhaps is not known to this generation now, called Jack London. And one of his books was The Call of the Wild.
And it was about a wolf-dog which had become domesticated and attached to a home and a family. But in the blood of this dog, there was always the wild.
Why, when he was lying there on the hearth asleep, he was dreaming and streaming; his whole being was under tension, and his teeth and his lips were moving. Jack London called it “the call of the wild.”
And although here, in these pleasant surroundings and circumstances, that wild to which he belonged by nature was ever pulling, ever calling. He could never, never be wholly here, because he belonged there.
Is that a good illustration?