The Messiah’s Ministry In Deepest Discouragement

There are times in all our lives when we’re driven into the deepest discouragement. Times when everything we could do, we’ve done, where all we could be, we’ve been. We entrust our vulnerability, berthing in the safest harbour, yet find that that port has since been declared unfit for mooring.

The most immense discouragement comes from the places we’re most vulnerable; the places we typically feel safest. Like stricken vessels we list and surge and splutter, and then, on arrival, those moorings we looked to for security, they fail us.

Where is God in the plethora of emotion that recapitulates in discouragement?

He is in the impetus. The energy that shoves us forth into a motive that strives past rest into recovery; a clamouring for the berth’s surface or safety at sea. That’s where He’s at! In the suffering servant’s response. But it’s not a response that placates a worldly soul.

It pleased the Lord to crush our Messiah, and the disease He bore was borne so well.[1] How does the worldly person in us possibly understand?

Whatever we face or are discouraged by He faced. He bore it all. It doesn’t undermine what we face, but it helps us hope in our despair. The Lord knew that the Messiah would obey, and the Messiah knew the Lord’s plan, and it was for love that He obeyed.

It is for love that we can obey, and, because it is possible to obey, obey we should.

I have come to learn this:

I have come to recognise it is good not to be recognised, it is respectable to be of good cheer when I’m not respected, and it is understandable that understanding is so rare. In these things is a Kingdom understanding that defies the world; an understanding recognising and respecting that a lack of recognition, respect and understanding never define us. They may otherwise define the other person/s, but that’s none of the suffering servant’s concern. They’re pleased to simply be in God’s care.

God’s truest reward is saved for the humblest response in deepest discouragement.

If deepest discouragement cannot eat away at our resolve, we quickly find that God is for us most of all when we bear transgressions meekly. And meekness is not a weak thing; it’s full of strength.

And even as deepest discouragement does corrode our resolve at times, we know that in our suffering the strength of meekness we’re approved and highly favoured by His grace.

He is for His servant. May God truly bless you in that richest of heart knowledges,

Steve Wickham.

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[1] See Isaiah 53, particularly verse 10 in this instance.