Please open to Isaiah 42. Isaiah 42, we're gonna conclude with some things that the prophet records the voice of the Lord in Isaiah chapter 42. And in the first five verses, the Lord God speaks of his son he speaks about his son and then after that he speaks to his son but there's something that I want us to consider. And the first thing comes out of verse 1, Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights. And so this is God's declaration of his love for his Son, and in his love he is going to fulfill the work of his Son.
And if you go down now to verse 4, and the first part of verse 4 is what I want to leave you with here. He will not fail nor be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth and the coastlands shall wait for his law. You know, latch on to these words. He will not fail. God is going to God is going to sanctify his church.
God is going to spread the gospel throughout the world. He has a vanquishing plan to bring many sons to glory. Nothing is stopping God. Nothing is going to stop the work of the Church of Jesus Christ. Not you, not your deacons, not anybody in the church.
This is an unstoppable, unbreakable covenant that God has made. He will not fail. And you know the Lord Jesus Christ made this very clear in the Gospels when he said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. We must not forget that God has made an irrevocable covenant to preserve his church in the world And we often look at the the smoke and the fire, the difficulty, our weaknesses, our errors, our mistakes, the people around us, their errors, their mistakes, their worldliness, and we think all is lost. That's just not true.
Here God Almighty says of His Son, He will not fail nor be discouraged. Now, the second part of that I think is also important. We should not be discouraged about the work that's happening, the difficulty, the trials, the reversals, don't be discouraged. There's no point in it, it does no good to be discouraged about the work. It only hampers the work when we're discouraged and we fall into self-pity and various other manifestations of self-centeredness and self-exaltation.
And so, but the truth is this will not fail, Jesus will not fail, and we should have his same spirit in our work as elders and deacons. We should not be discouraged. We don't have any reason to be. He is reigning. He's doing his will.
Nothing can stand in his way. He does what he wishes among all the kings of the earth and all the nations of the earth and all the churches of the earth. God's going to use your weaknesses, he's going to use your mistakes to glorify himself. Don't obsess about your weaknesses and your mistakes. You have them.
Everybody can see them, but if you want to waste your life, you know, pining away about all these things, then you just need to recognize that this is really not the spirit of Jesus. The spirit of Jesus is he's not discouraged in his work. Why? I love this statement that we read in John 15 verse 9 where the Lord says, Lord Jesus says, as the Father loved me, I also have loved you abide in my love if you keep my commandments You will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. So we have his love.
We have the love of Jesus Christ. God the Father loved his son and his son loves his sons. And the love that was infused into the Son of God is also mediated to the sons of God who abide in his love. Now the whole, we began this gathering speaking about the fact that the primary work of elders is the sanctification of the people of God. And it's for this that we labor and we strive that Jesus Christ would be formed in the people that are around us.
This is what we want. We do not want them to be formed by us, of us. We want them to be formed by Jesus Christ and of his word. This is our greatest responsibility to infuse the Church of Jesus Christ with the words of God is the greatest work that an elder ever does. He has many failings but he has the Word of God.
It was some months ago a young man came to me who was in seminary and he had to interview a pastor, some pastors that had been in the ministry for a while, and I'd been in the ministry for a while so I was there, and one of the questions he asked me is what has been the greatest comfort that you've known as a pastor and I didn't have to think about it for a nanosecond it's that it's that I have this It's that I have an eternal testimony that's always right. I might not be right. I might not feel right. I might have some weakness bearing upon my soul, but this is right. And my greatest comfort in the world is to have this and I know that it's sharper than any two-edged sword I know that it always does what it is designed to do it never ever returns void and I have this I don't have myself my personality my intellectual prowess is nothing.
It's ridiculous. It's insane to even think that there would be any value in it. But here's where the value is right here. And elders who fix their congregations on the Word of God do them a favor. And there's so many rabbit trails that you can get into as a pastor so many movements and so many hip things that are washing over the church and I'm old enough to have seen many movements wash over the church what the church needs more than anything is the voice of Jesus Christ.
It's sufficient. It's all we need. And it really ought to be all we have. And that should be our greatest comfort that we have an eternal, perfect testimony that never fails. And it will succeed in the purpose for which God planned it so I pray that we would go out of here encouraged by God encouraged by the fact that his plan is incontrovertible, and that he's going to use us in the process.
He doesn't need us, but he puts us in the way and he gives us commands so that we'd follow them. We'll follow them imperfectly, that's what's going to happen. The older you get, the more you're going to see of your flaws, but the truth is God is true and his word is enduring and I pray that God would really raise up mighty Expositors of the Word of God in churches. I pray that you all are will be one of those if you're men. And I'm so grateful that there are so many young people in this room, and I pray that God lights a fire in your soul to preach the word of God to your dead, and that you would make that deposit.
It's an eternal deposit that will not disappoint.