Thank you. The prophet Isaiah sang songs about God's servant, and today on Truth for Life,

Alistair Begg connects the dots between the servant in Isaiah's Old Testament songs

and the baby and the Christmas nativity scene.

We'll learn about the Messiah's character and mission

and why it's significant for us today.

Our gracious God, we thank you now for the Lord Jesus Christ.

We thank you, Lord Jesus, that you came not to be served but to serve and to give your life as a ransom for sin.

And we pray that as we turn to the Bible now, that we might meet you there, and that in seeing you we might bow before you as Lord and King and Savior and friend, and that this Christmas

time may be filled with a genuine celebration of all that you are to those who believe.

And this is our humble prayer and earnest cry, in Jesus' name, amen.

And we resume our study from last time in what is the first of four servant songs that are fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have noted that the people of Isaiah's day were guilty of creating heart-level substitutes for God.

They were essentially going to false gods for false salvation.

And instead of finding fulfillment along this route, they discovered that their lives were

deprived of meaning and of freedom and of enjoyment. And we noted then, and we reintroduced the

thought now, that in much the same way, we sin by making someone or something other than God the object of our

devotion and the source of our satisfaction. When the Bible says that Jesus came, and his name was

Jesus, because he would save his people from their sins,

we might be tempted to think immediately about sin in terms of killing and stealing and the breaking

of the Ten Commandments in some of the more graphic elements of those commandments. And that,

of course, is the case. However, I think we're

tempted to overlook the way in which it all begins. You shall have no other gods before me.

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