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Text: Isaiah 53:4-5
Date: March 5, 2026
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213, 920-856-6420
This sermon was preached as part of our Lent Midweek service.
Transcript
Today we are continuing our series on the Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah—one of the most beautiful and clearest prophecies regarding our Messiah, the Savior Jesus Christ, and his passion and death for our sakes. Today we are taking up the theme that he, as the Suffering Servant, is the one who has borne our griefs.
The Inevitability of Grief
The book of Job, in the fourteenth chapter, tells us, “Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble.” Notice what Job said. He made this very universal statement: no matter who we are, we will have troubles, we will have griefs, we will have sorrows. It’s not a question of whether we will have them or not.
We will have them—whether we are non-Christian or Christian, unbeliever or believer. We will have griefs. We will have sorrows. The question becomes: what kind of griefs, what kind of sorrows? Because we’re going to look at this in just a few minutes.
The Apostle Paul tells us that there are two kinds of grief and sorrow: the kind that leads to repentance and therefore to hope of eternal life, and on the other hand, the kind that leads to death.
Humanity’s Attempts to Escape Grief
Even though it should be obvious to us that we can’t escape grief and sorrow in this world, it doesn’t keep people from trying. And there are all kinds of ways that people try to escape grief and sorrow in this world, and they establish patterns. The Bible is clear: you can’t do it. We have examples of this—we just read from Job.
Some of the best examples come from the life of Solomon. We’re going to be talking about a number of these in the wisdom literature. Solomon was a man who accomplished many things. One of the things he accomplished was the accumulation of great wealth and riches. He was Solomon the man who owned gold mines. After all, he could literally pull money from the ground. That’s who Solomon was.
And with this wealth and riches he built palaces, maintained huge retinues of people to serve his every need.
And yet in the book of Ecclesiastes, when Solomon—I think roughly in midlife, having his midlife crisis—looks back on all this accumulation of goods and accumulation of money, he says, maybe it wasn’t all that I thought it was.
It says in Ecclesiastes chapter 5, “The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.” He goes day to day exerting himself out in the fields or on building projects or whatever it is that he puts his hand to. The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not let him sleep.
Solomon is taking stock of his wealth and his riches and he realizes, you know what? This is filling me with anxiety. People think they can escape grief and sorrow on account of accumulating riches. It brings all kinds of other sorrows as well—anxiety: Am I going to get sued? Are people going to come after me for the wealth that I have accumulated? Are the friends around me really my friends, or are they here just for what I have?
Paul says in 1 Timothy, those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare which drowns men in destruction and perdition.
Escaping Through Pleasure
Others seek relief from pain and misery and sorrow and grief through pleasure: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” The old saying, right? And so they pursue worldly pleasures. They pursue perhaps fast and loose living. They seek to drown their sorrows—drown their griefs—in alcohol or perhaps drugs. And it’s a very common thing. We talk about how a lot of drug abuse is on account of trying to avoid one’s demons and to find release from pain and grief.
And Solomon too, it seems, was one who pursued pleasure in various forms. But in the book of Proverbs he says this, in the fourteenth chapter: “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”
I’m sure a lot of us can relate—laughing on the outside and feeling grief on the inside, or pursuing a few moments of forgetfulness in alcohol, but after that mirth comes the heaviness of regret. No, you can’t escape grief and sorrow with pleasure.
Escaping Through Accomplishment
Others seek to escape grief and sorrow by means of accomplishment. And certainly Solomon was a man who sought to escape grief and sorrow by means of accomplishment—various accomplishments: a man of great building projects, a man who had some measure of military success, a man who was able to do so much that his kingdom was the awe and envy of other kingdoms all around him.
And yet Solomon looks around at these things and says, in Ecclesiastes 2, “Then I looked at all the works that my hands had wrought and on the labor that I had labored to do, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind.”
Solomon realized that ultimately these things had a great deal of trouble entailed in them, and even the greatest projects in time will crumble.
Escaping Through Knowledge and Wisdom
Still others look to escape grief and sorrow through knowledge. They think, if only I can dial in through knowledge and through the discipline of applying that knowledge a particular way of life, or if only I can apply certain principles to my life, then I’ll be able to avoid grief and I’ll be able to avoid sorrow and I’ll be happy and joyful.
Solomon was a man of great wisdom—in fact, the Scriptures say the wisest man to live. And let’s not make any mistake about it: wisdom is a good gift of God. We ought to pursue wisdom. God commended Solomon for seeking wisdom when God appeared to him and Solomon asked for wisdom so that he could rule over the kingdom well. And God commended him and said, yes, I’ll give you wisdom, and I’ll also give you other things that you haven’t asked for—many things that we’ve talked about, such as fame and riches and so on. Accomplishment. Wisdom’s a good thing.
But an escape or a release from sorrow? Oh, Solomon says, “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
The Biblical Reality: Grief Is Unavoidable
We keep trying to avoid sorrow. We keep trying to avoid grief. We think that we can outrun it. We think that we can outmaneuver it. But we ought to know that it’s unavoidable. We ought to know that it is a fact of life. We ought to know this from our own experience, looking around the world, and we ought to know this as well from the Holy Scriptures.
And the Holy Scriptures are clear about this: you cannot avoid it. But there are two kinds of grief and sorrow.
Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7, “Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”
So the question isn’t “Will I have grief and sorrow or not?” The question is, “What kind of grief and sorrow will I have? Will I have the kind of grief and sorrow that leads to repentance and salvation and a clear conscience, or will I have the kind that leads to despair and doubt and lack of faith?”
Godly Grief: A Gift from God
That’s the question. And notice how Paul describes the good kind of grief. It is godly grief. Do you know what that means? That means that this is a grief that we can’t get for ourselves. It is a grief that is a gift when God transforms it. And that’s why people keep running out of their own will and out of their own abilities trying to outrun grief and trying to outrun sorrow.
But the answer is that we can’t do it.
But we need God to transform it for us. And that’s precisely what Jesus did—the man of sorrows, the man acquainted with grief. That is precisely what Jesus did for us, because he took upon himself that second kind of grief. He took upon himself that grief that produces death, because he took upon himself the grief that is entailed with regret and shame, the grief that comes from sin and doubt and faithlessness.
Now he had no sin and he had no doubt and he was certainly faithful, but he took all of that upon himself on the cross. And by this means—this is what Jesus did—by this means Jesus closed the gate of death to us when he died for our sakes.
But in turn, through this work, he opened the gates of heaven and eternal life to all of us who trust him—that trust itself a gift of God by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the word of God. Through that gift—not anything that we could do, but only something that God can do—the Lord has transformed our hearts so that, freed from the regret and grief of sin, therefore the sorrows and griefs of this world are transformed.
Because these lead to repentance—yes, sorrow for the sins that we have committed, but above all, trust in Christ. And where we have that trust, we know that while grief and sorrow is there with us today, we know that it is limited and we know that it has its end, and we know that in the world to come we will have unending bliss and unending joy, and therefore we have hope.
Conclusion: Hope in the Man of Sorrows
And that’s how Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows, the man acquainted with grief, transforms our grief into something which is not always looking back at what has gone wrong in the past and not looking down in sorrow, but rather looking forward to the release, the relief, and the joy and the dignity and the holiness and the glories of eternal life.
And all praise and honor and glory be to Jesus, the man of sorrows.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.