From Victims To Victors

Isaiah 61:1-11

At junior school I was the prefect responsible for standing at the school gate and taking down the names of any pupils who were late.

I also had to make a note of the reasons they gave.

I missed the bus.

I overslept.

My mum couldn’t get the car started.

I couldn’t find my tie, or my lunch, my satchel or my dinner money.

Nearly every one had an excuse for being late.

They weren’t doing anything wrong, it wasn’t deliberate – they were just victims of circumstance.

Or so they tried to tell me.

So often this is the point where God chooses to meet us.

At the point of our victimisation, our excuse making or just our plain wrong doing.

He meets us in these unpromising situations and unleashes his Spirit upon us.

This is the hope of Advent and its given further substance for us in that wonderful reading from Isaiah

It suggests that Advent is about making a journey in the company of the Spirit of the Lord in which we will be transformed from victims to victors.

All through salvation history there is a common theme about the way God reaches into the lives of his people.

He does it when their spirits are at their lowest – at the point where all hope is gone.

“What have I done to deserve this”.

Isaiah tells us to expect the Spirit of the Lord  to come upon us  when we are afflicted, broken hearted, imprisoned, in mourning, feeling faint hearted, ruined and devastated.

In those situation where there appears to be no escape from a prefect’s detention – he comes with hope and love and light.

Jesus made many women and men into great people, but as he wove his way into their lives, he did not do so by recognising their strengths and gifts. He did so by making himself known in their weakness and excuse making.

He turns victims into victors and calls them disciples.

The man who sat beside the pool for 34 years and could never get to it first when the healing water bubbled – a victim

Zaccheaus, a man so small of stature and so disliked because of his tax collecting ways, and is shouted down when he wants to see Jesus – a victim.

Amidst fishermen with empty nets, a wedding party run out of wine, and thousands in the wilderness without a crust between them – victims all,  he comes into lives and transforms them.

Those who responded to the call of John to go into the wilderness, to receive his teaching of repentance and be baptised, did so because they knew something was missing in their lives. They knew they were down at heel. They knew their need of God.

But here’s the rub!

The spirit of the Lord has always worked through God’s people.

Our task is not to just sit and pray for transformation for ourselves but rather that we might be used as channels of his transforming grace into the lives of other people.

Isaiah reminds us that believers are to be anointed for the task of bringing freedom to others – even at the expense of their own freedom – and it was so for John who led many out of their victimised state only to fall into it himself with a painful death at the hands of the king.

The body of Christ upon the cross knows the reality of being a victim on behalf of others before ever he knew the reality of victory.

We cannot stand by noting the deficiencies of others like prefects at the school gate – we may have to take those failings to ourselves, and know them for our own, if we are as serious about the transformation of the world as Isaiah was.

RH 14.12.08