HIS Encouragement #21

Good morning, and welcome to His Encouragement Thursday! I don’t know about you, but Thursdays are my struggle day of the week. By Thursday, I have already been working hard at school and at home, and I just wish it would hurry up and be Friday already. LOL! I definitely need a little extra Jesus time on Thursdays.

Trisha, my blogger friend at Joy of Reading, and I decided on calling this post “His Encouragement” because our real source of peace, strength, and security can only come from Jesus Christ. He, and He alone, is our constant! We pray and hope that these Thursday posts become a real encouragement to you and help you end your week strong in God’s love and purpose for you. God bless!

Today’s Thursday Encouragement comes from:

Isaiah 53:3 (ESV)

He was despised and rejected by me, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

I love the book of Isaiah. It may be one of my most favorite texts in the entire Bible. The imagery is superb, the wording is so beautiful, and the prophecy is eye-opening! Often I get God-bumps (goose-bumps, but BIGGER) just reading through the passages.

This particular verse, Isaiah 53:3, speaks deeply to me. My favorite aspect is the phrase, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” My heart bleeds at the fact that my sins are what caused Jesus to feel sadness and grief. I don’t actually like that Jesus felt these rough feelings, and wish that He never had to. But, what I love is that HE felt them. It’s a point of relation that we mortal humans share with our immortal, beloved, all-powerful God. It’s seems typical today to hear people refer to God, especially when they talk about the Old Testament, with words like “violent,” “unfeeling,” and “removed.” God is the exact opposite. As Jesus, God felt everything: the sting of a scrape on His knee as a little boy, sadness when a loved one died, joy during the Feast Days when He got to celebrate with His family (both earthly and heavenly), exhaustion after a hard day’s labor, anger when He saw His Father’s house treated like a market place, etc. These are things that I have personally felt, too!

To know that my God knows exactly what I feel is quite humbling, and it makes me love and trust Him even more. God didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to work hard, suffer, and die for me. He did though because He wanted to for me (and you)! What a loving and amazing God we serve!