Sermon Tone Analysis

Walk in His Steps

Approximately 2,016 years ago, God couldn’t walk.

He had to be carried everywhere, like most babies.

2,015 years ago, God took some staggering first steps, fell, and scraped his knee.

He cried, and his mother wiped away his tears and told him to try again.

Or maybe he still crawled everywhere.

Some toddlers are late bloomers.

2,010 years ago, God ran across the street in a small town with the other kids, perhaps playing a version of soccer.

He might not have been very good at it.

2,000 years ago, God walked across the dirt floor of a carpenter’s shop and probably got a splinter stuck in his big toe.

1,986 years ago, God hoofed it all over the countryside, talking to people and healing them of diseases.

He more than likely stepped in sheep dung at least once and had to wipe his sandals on the grass.

1,983 years ago, God walked the streets of Jerusalem, bloodied and beaten, carrying a rough-hewn beam of wood on his back.

His feet failed him, and someone stronger had to carry the cross for him.

We easily forget that Jesus Christ was one with the Father, he was God.

Through his life he showed us how to live here on earth, and through his death and resurrection he secured our salvation.

Through an entire sinless life—even in the unwritten mundane ways—Jesus placed before us both a standard and a directive.

We are to walk in his steps, through his strength, for God’s glory.

We worship a God who has walked in our shoes, and our highest hope and assurance is that we may walk in his.

THE KINGLY SERVANT

53:2 “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”

1. Jesus was an obscure outwardly unimpressive person in a failed culture.

PEOPLE TODAY STILL FIND JESUS UNIMPRESSIVE!

v. 4 “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”

2. Jesus would show the consequences that sin brings to fallen Humanity.

GOD WOULD BE THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF JESUS SUFFERING

v.5 “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

3. Jesus suffering and death is on our hands.

v.6 “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned - every one - to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

4. Jesus was uniquely qualified to bear the sins of the world.

v7 “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

5. Jesus was the innocent, submissive, uncomplaining Lamb of God.

v. 8 “ By oppression and judgement he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?

6. Jesus was wrongly condemned

v.9 “And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.”

7. Jesus was condemned as a criminal and buried as a rich man.

v.10

v.10 “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he was has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

8. Jesus suffered not just in his body but in his deepest inner self.

v.11

9. Jesus fulfills His priestly work on behalf of those he represents, securing their acceptance before God.