Pastor Cal Lord's Recent Sermons
God’s Stunt Man
Isaiah 53:4-6 October 19,2003
Over my many years here at church I have been blessed to meet many wonderful, thoughtful
men and women. One of those women was named Lucy Schoepfer. Lucy was in her eighties
when I arrived here in 1985 and she was still going strong. She was also the wife of one of our
former pastors and so naturally, I would go to her for advice on occasion. After all, she had lived
the life and knew the people.
I spent many afternoons in her living room and mornings here in Bible Studies listening to her
stories about ministry. One of the things that I’ll always remember from her stories was
something she said about her husband, Walter. You see Walter was a short man but he had a
powerful way in the pulpit. He was a good preacher and he knew the scriptures. Lucy told me
one day that some of the finest sermons he ever preached, ones that he felt really were from the
Lord, came he spoke about the blood of the lamb and one of his favorite hymns was the one we
just sang, “Are you washed in the Blood of the lamb?”
Now you may not even know what that refers to because it comes out of classical
theology, something that Walter Schoepfer was schooled in, something that our hymn arose out
of. We tend to think of blood as gory, but when the theologians and preachers speak of the blood
of the lamb, they are talking about the healing, cleansing power of Jesus, the lamb of God. They
are talking about the very reason that Jesus came and walked this earth as son of man, son of
God.
Jesus has been called many things including, the good shepherd, mighty counselor,
prince of peace, but none of these titles describe the ultimate purpose in his coming as well as the
Lamb of God. And so for the next few minutes, I am going to look at this passage from the
prophet Isaiah and examine what he has to tell us about the Lamb who came to take away the
sins of the world.
You, know people today think that they don’t need Jesus because they are good enough and
don’t need a savior. Everything has become relative and the things we do or the way we behave
is ok, if it feels right to us. Either that or society has brainwashed them into thinking that they
can follow the path of their choosing to heaven. Any spiritual guide can lead them to the
promised land and that includes Buddha, Mohammad, Confucius, Darwin, and a host of others.
But none of these others can do what Jesus did.
Another reason Jesus has lost some appeal to the masses is that we live in an age of reason
and a time of relativism and people are questioning everything. People today look at Jesus and
they wonder, “If He was the Son of God, why did He die like He did?” They have a hard time
believing that a loving God would allow His one and only Son suffer and die. So they reject the
whole thing and look for something else that is more tasteful to believe in. Mood rocks, incense
and inward spiritual journeys are much nicer, cleaner and soothing to the minds eye than pain,
gore and suffering.
In case you are confused too or simply wondering about this, I am going to set the record
straight and talk about why God allowed His one and only Son suffer and die on the cross and
how he actually stepped in and took our place.
You could say that Jesus was God’s stunt man. There is a story told by actor Kevin Bacon.
He share that when his 6-year-old son saw his movie Footloose for the first time: the boy said,
"Hey, Dad, you know that thing in the movie where you swing from the rafters of that building?
That’s really cool, how did you do that?" Bacon said, "Well, I didn’t do that part--it was a stunt
man." "What’s a stunt man?" the boy asked. "That’s someone who dresses like me and does
things I can’t do."
"Oh," he replied and walked out of the room looking a little confused. A little later he said, "Hey,
Dad, you know that thing in the movie where you spin around on that gym bar and land on your
feet? How did you do that?" Again Bacon said, "Well, I didn’t do that either. It was a gymnastics
double, another stunt man." "What’s a gymnastics double?" he asked. "That’s a guy who dresses
in my clothes and does things I can’t do." Bacon said there was silence from his son, then the
boy asked in a concerned voice, "Dad, then just what did you do?"
"I got all the glory," Bacon sheepishly replied.
That’s the grace of God in our lives. Jesus took our sin upon himself and did what we couldn’t
do. He stepped in as our double, God’s stunt man of sorts and did the hard work. And know we
stand forgiven and bask sheepishly triumphant in Jesus’ glory.
In the Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus chapter 16, we hear about the scapegoat. In
our day a scapegoat is someone who takes the blame or the fall for something they did not do.
But that symbol finds its roots in religious tradition.
For our Jewish forebears, on the Day of Atonement (the day that the sins of the people
were forgiven) two goats were taken to the priest, one was chosen to be slain as a sin offering.
When this one was slain, the blood of the goat was sprinkled on objects to cleanse to alter
cleanse the altar, the sanctuary, and the tent of meeting from defilements of the past year.
The second goat was said to be “the scapegoat.” By laying his hands on the goat’s head, the
priest transferred the sins of the people to it and then had the goat led away into the desert,
picturing the removal of the sins.
If you don’t like the stuntman image, then try looking at Jesus as our scapegoat. Jesus had
our sins placed on Him so that we could be made right with God and have eternal life. That is
why he had to suffer and die on the cross.
But there is even more to the story and Isaiah lays it out for us in his prophesies. In verses 3 and
4 Isaiah, writing 700 years before Jesus was born, tells us that when the Messiah suffers, people
would turn their backs on Him because they believed that He had to have done something to
deserve the punishment that He was receiving.
This is part of the reason that verse 3 says that He was despised. People could justify His
treatment because they thought He deserved it. Bad things just didn’t happen to good people.
And that’s why some people today still have a hard time with this.
The only way that people could be so cruel to Jesus was to write Him off as a sinner as
depicted in Matthew 27:39-44.
The Jews of the day were very black and white, not unlike many people today. In their
thinking if you are being punished, you must be guilty. Seeing Jesus hanging on the cross made
many of them forget all the great things that Jesus had done over the course of His ministry.
But Isaiah and the rest of the Scriptures tell us the real reason that Jesus suffered.
Isaiah says that one of the reasons that Jesus suffered was so that He could bear our griefs.
The word for grief means sickness, disease, anxiety, and affliction. In other words, it means that
he was so afflicted, that he seemed to have taken upon himself the sicknesses and sorrows of the
world; and taking them upon himself he would bear them away. The good news is that Jesus is
ready to stand in and take our place when it comes to sickness and suffering. He came to bring
healing to those who believe in him.
The word “bore” that he removes a burden from our shoulders and places it on his own.
Jesus wants to lift your sickness from you, and place it on His shoulders so that He can carry it
for you.
Isaiah the second reason that Jesus suffered was so He could carry our sorrows (4)
Perhaps the proper difference between this word and the word translated griefs is, that this
refers to pains of the mind. Sorrows point to anxiety doubt, depression and worry. It is trouble
of the soul; Many of us are fighting worries about many things, Jesus wants to carry those for
you. We are tempted, pushed, frightened, threatened and sometimes the pressure seems
overwhelming. And that is what Jesus came to take from you. He took it all on at the cross. In
Hebrews it says
HEB 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses,
but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
Jesus knows all about our troubles and he wants to lift them from upon our shoulders.
Third, He was pierced through for our transgressions. (5) Jesus did not suffer for His own sins
but for ours..
Look at some of the verses in the New Testament.
• MAT 20:28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life
a ransom for many."
ROM 3:25 whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to
demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins
previously committed;
ROM 5:6-8 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one
will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even
to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ
died for us.
Jesus was pierced or wounded by thorns, nails and a spear for our sins. It should have been
us who suffered there but Jesus took our place, sent from God to stand in for us. He did all the
hard work and he makes us look clean and pure and even holy before God.
You and I know It was our sin that sent Jesus to the cross. I was not only the Sadaam
Husseins and Osama bin Ladins of the world that sent Jesus to the cross, but it was also the sins
of every person ever created, especially you and me.
1PE 2:24 and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin
and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.
In that healing we find peace and hope in God. The truth is that because Jesus died we now
have peace with God through Him.
The contemporary Christian music artist Carmen has a song called “This bloods for you.”
While Jesus was being mocked and beaten, while He was dying an agonizing death on the cross,
He was thinking about you.
So have you been washed by his blood? Have you accepted what Jesus did when he went
to the cross? Have you decided to let him step into your life and take away the sin and the
anxiety, the pain and sorrow? Today we all have a choice to make, are we going to live our lives
like we believe there is a God in heaven who sent His Son to die for us so that we could have
peace with God and eternal life? Or are we going to try and do it ourselves?
The choice is yours today, just as Joshua said in Joshua 24:15, choose for yourselves this
day whom you will serve. You don’t have to do a thing, you can come as you are. It all begins
by realizing that you are a sinner in need of Jesus grace.
I hope you will come to realize how much God loves you and how much He wants to be
center of your life. Then let him in to be your stunt double and watch what god will do for you.
Isaiah 53:4-6 October 19,2003
Over my many years here at church I have been blessed to meet many wonderful, thoughtful
men and women. One of those women was named Lucy Schoepfer. Lucy was in her eighties
when I arrived here in 1985 and she was still going strong. She was also the wife of one of our
former pastors and so naturally, I would go to her for advice on occasion. After all, she had lived
the life and knew the people.
I spent many afternoons in her living room and mornings here in Bible Studies listening to her
stories about ministry. One of the things that I’ll always remember from her stories was
something she said about her husband, Walter. You see Walter was a short man but he had a
powerful way in the pulpit. He was a good preacher and he knew the scriptures. Lucy told me
one day that some of the finest sermons he ever preached, ones that he felt really were from the
Lord, came he spoke about the blood of the lamb and one of his favorite hymns was the one we
just sang, “Are you washed in the Blood of the lamb?”
Now you may not even know what that refers to because it comes out of classical
theology, something that Walter Schoepfer was schooled in, something that our hymn arose out
of. We tend to think of blood as gory, but when the theologians and preachers speak of the blood
of the lamb, they are talking about the healing, cleansing power of Jesus, the lamb of God. They
are talking about the very reason that Jesus came and walked this earth as son of man, son of
God.
Jesus has been called many things including, the good shepherd, mighty counselor,
prince of peace, but none of these titles describe the ultimate purpose in his coming as well as the
Lamb of God. And so for the next few minutes, I am going to look at this passage from the
prophet Isaiah and examine what he has to tell us about the Lamb who came to take away the
sins of the world.
You, know people today think that they don’t need Jesus because they are good enough and
don’t need a savior. Everything has become relative and the things we do or the way we behave
is ok, if it feels right to us. Either that or society has brainwashed them into thinking that they
can follow the path of their choosing to heaven. Any spiritual guide can lead them to the
promised land and that includes Buddha, Mohammad, Confucius, Darwin, and a host of others.
But none of these others can do what Jesus did.
Another reason Jesus has lost some appeal to the masses is that we live in an age of reason
and a time of relativism and people are questioning everything. People today look at Jesus and
they wonder, “If He was the Son of God, why did He die like He did?” They have a hard time
believing that a loving God would allow His one and only Son suffer and die. So they reject the
whole thing and look for something else that is more tasteful to believe in. Mood rocks, incense
and inward spiritual journeys are much nicer, cleaner and soothing to the minds eye than pain,
gore and suffering.
In case you are confused too or simply wondering about this, I am going to set the record
straight and talk about why God allowed His one and only Son suffer and die on the cross and
how he actually stepped in and took our place.
You could say that Jesus was God’s stunt man. There is a story told by actor Kevin Bacon.
He share that when his 6-year-old son saw his movie Footloose for the first time: the boy said,
"Hey, Dad, you know that thing in the movie where you swing from the rafters of that building?
That’s really cool, how did you do that?" Bacon said, "Well, I didn’t do that part--it was a stunt
man." "What’s a stunt man?" the boy asked. "That’s someone who dresses like me and does
things I can’t do."
"Oh," he replied and walked out of the room looking a little confused. A little later he said, "Hey,
Dad, you know that thing in the movie where you spin around on that gym bar and land on your
feet? How did you do that?" Again Bacon said, "Well, I didn’t do that either. It was a gymnastics
double, another stunt man." "What’s a gymnastics double?" he asked. "That’s a guy who dresses
in my clothes and does things I can’t do." Bacon said there was silence from his son, then the
boy asked in a concerned voice, "Dad, then just what did you do?"
"I got all the glory," Bacon sheepishly replied.
That’s the grace of God in our lives. Jesus took our sin upon himself and did what we couldn’t
do. He stepped in as our double, God’s stunt man of sorts and did the hard work. And know we
stand forgiven and bask sheepishly triumphant in Jesus’ glory.
In the Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus chapter 16, we hear about the scapegoat. In
our day a scapegoat is someone who takes the blame or the fall for something they did not do.
But that symbol finds its roots in religious tradition.
For our Jewish forebears, on the Day of Atonement (the day that the sins of the people
were forgiven) two goats were taken to the priest, one was chosen to be slain as a sin offering.
When this one was slain, the blood of the goat was sprinkled on objects to cleanse to alter
cleanse the altar, the sanctuary, and the tent of meeting from defilements of the past year.
The second goat was said to be “the scapegoat.” By laying his hands on the goat’s head, the
priest transferred the sins of the people to it and then had the goat led away into the desert,
picturing the removal of the sins.
If you don’t like the stuntman image, then try looking at Jesus as our scapegoat. Jesus had
our sins placed on Him so that we could be made right with God and have eternal life. That is
why he had to suffer and die on the cross.
But there is even more to the story and Isaiah lays it out for us in his prophesies. In verses 3 and
4 Isaiah, writing 700 years before Jesus was born, tells us that when the Messiah suffers, people
would turn their backs on Him because they believed that He had to have done something to
deserve the punishment that He was receiving.
This is part of the reason that verse 3 says that He was despised. People could justify His
treatment because they thought He deserved it. Bad things just didn’t happen to good people.
And that’s why some people today still have a hard time with this.
The only way that people could be so cruel to Jesus was to write Him off as a sinner as
depicted in Matthew 27:39-44.
The Jews of the day were very black and white, not unlike many people today. In their
thinking if you are being punished, you must be guilty. Seeing Jesus hanging on the cross made
many of them forget all the great things that Jesus had done over the course of His ministry.
But Isaiah and the rest of the Scriptures tell us the real reason that Jesus suffered.
Isaiah says that one of the reasons that Jesus suffered was so that He could bear our griefs.
The word for grief means sickness, disease, anxiety, and affliction. In other words, it means that
he was so afflicted, that he seemed to have taken upon himself the sicknesses and sorrows of the
world; and taking them upon himself he would bear them away. The good news is that Jesus is
ready to stand in and take our place when it comes to sickness and suffering. He came to bring
healing to those who believe in him.
The word “bore” that he removes a burden from our shoulders and places it on his own.
Jesus wants to lift your sickness from you, and place it on His shoulders so that He can carry it
for you.
Isaiah the second reason that Jesus suffered was so He could carry our sorrows (4)
Perhaps the proper difference between this word and the word translated griefs is, that this
refers to pains of the mind. Sorrows point to anxiety doubt, depression and worry. It is trouble
of the soul; Many of us are fighting worries about many things, Jesus wants to carry those for
you. We are tempted, pushed, frightened, threatened and sometimes the pressure seems
overwhelming. And that is what Jesus came to take from you. He took it all on at the cross. In
Hebrews it says
HEB 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses,
but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
Jesus knows all about our troubles and he wants to lift them from upon our shoulders.
Third, He was pierced through for our transgressions. (5) Jesus did not suffer for His own sins
but for ours..
Look at some of the verses in the New Testament.
• MAT 20:28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life
a ransom for many."
ROM 3:25 whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to
demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins
previously committed;
ROM 5:6-8 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one
will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even
to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ
died for us.
Jesus was pierced or wounded by thorns, nails and a spear for our sins. It should have been
us who suffered there but Jesus took our place, sent from God to stand in for us. He did all the
hard work and he makes us look clean and pure and even holy before God.
You and I know It was our sin that sent Jesus to the cross. I was not only the Sadaam
Husseins and Osama bin Ladins of the world that sent Jesus to the cross, but it was also the sins
of every person ever created, especially you and me.
1PE 2:24 and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin
and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.
In that healing we find peace and hope in God. The truth is that because Jesus died we now
have peace with God through Him.
The contemporary Christian music artist Carmen has a song called “This bloods for you.”
While Jesus was being mocked and beaten, while He was dying an agonizing death on the cross,
He was thinking about you.
So have you been washed by his blood? Have you accepted what Jesus did when he went
to the cross? Have you decided to let him step into your life and take away the sin and the
anxiety, the pain and sorrow? Today we all have a choice to make, are we going to live our lives
like we believe there is a God in heaven who sent His Son to die for us so that we could have
peace with God and eternal life? Or are we going to try and do it ourselves?
The choice is yours today, just as Joshua said in Joshua 24:15, choose for yourselves this
day whom you will serve. You don’t have to do a thing, you can come as you are. It all begins
by realizing that you are a sinner in need of Jesus grace.
I hope you will come to realize how much God loves you and how much He wants to be
center of your life. Then let him in to be your stunt double and watch what god will do for you.
| Welcome to the First Baptist Church of Norwich 239 West Main Street Norwich, Connecticut Phone: 860-889-0369 |
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