“Surely our griefs He Himself bore,” Isaiah 53:4 NASBS
Beloved of God, how thankful we should be that we have been enlightened to understand that the Lord Jesus Christ was touched by our infirmities.
Yes, He understood the struggles of temptation, yet he was sinless. He was no stranger to rejection, but rather He was trampled under the feet of his own creation. Such love will never again be known to man as this, that He, who was divine, took to Himself flesh to bear away our iniquities upon the cross.
Jesus, “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 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. 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.”
Because of His death, resurrection, and the miracle of salivation, God has imputed to everyone who has come to Jesus in faith His perfect righteousness. So the prophecy of Ezekiel has been fulfilled in the lives of Christians, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
John, thousands of years later, affirms this as well, “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”
John isn’t stating that we are free from the struggles of sin, but he is teaching us the practice of righteousness is an evidence of a transformed life. In other words, our deepest affections, which are in the citadel of our heart, longs for the holiness of God. So we should express our feelings toward worldly temptations as Paul did when he wrote Romans seven, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Lord Jesus, “God of the highest heavens, Occupy the throne of my heart, take full possession and reign supreme, lay low every rebel lust, let no vile passion resist thy holy war; manifest thy mighty power, and make me thine for ever. Thou art worthy to be praised with my every breath, loved with my every faculty of soul, served with my every act of life. Thou hast loved me, espoused me, received me, purchased, washed, favoured, clothed, adorned me, when I was worthless, vile, soiled, polluted.”