Are your efforts in VAIN?

He said to me, “You are my servant,
    Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.”
⁴ But I said, “I have labored in vain;
    I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,
    and my reward is with my God.”  Isaiah 49:3-4 NIV

This is a messianic passage about the servant whom God will choose to help Jacob. There are two parallel tracks running in this passage.  Isaiah may perhaps believes that he is the servant that God desires to display His splendor.  But the circumstances look as if he had failed.  He preached that they should repent or judgment would come. They did not repent and now they had been taken from their country.

Israel was given the choice to obey God and be fully devoted to Him, but they refused.  And they refused repeatedly.  What good come ever come through judgment?  Many lost their lives immediately.  They were separated from their children.  Isaiah knew this and felt like a failure.

Even the imagery in the passage includes one of the most emotional expressions of our human existence.  Carrying a child for 9 months and the labor and delivery.  Only those who have lost a child at this point understand the pain accompanied by the death of the child and the grief of the parents.  Can you feel the full extent of failure that Isaiah feels?  He was looking for transformation, for new birth, for a God inspired outcome.  But it was not to be.

The second track is experienced by Jesus our Messiah.  He read the scriptures.  The Holy Spirit breathed on the Hebrew Scriptures and resonated in Jesus heart that He truly was the Messiah.  He had a mission to accomplish. 

Follow the Messiah to the last night before His death.  He was about to be betrayed to His death by one of his own disciples.  By one that He had chosen to eat, laugh, and minister miracles with, Judas.   Earlier that week the crowd had shouted over and over that He, Jesus, was king.  But now He knew he would die.

The imagery in the garden of Gethsemane captures the emotion of this passage.  His closest friends could not even stay awake to stand with him in his darkest moment of labor, pain, delivery.  He was alone.  Even God was silent…not absent…just quiet.  Jesus was feeling our human pain of failure.  The pain of work that ends with no profit…nothing to point to for success…no person that represents the struggle as fruit of His obedience.

Yet there remains hope in God.  The outcome is in HIS hand.  The plan has yet to be fully revealed.  And when it comes forth, all can see the wisdom of God’s actions and the righteousness of His ways.

Israel would be restored and Jesus would rise again from His death.  The full payment for sin would be accomplished on the cross through the shedding of His innocent blood on our behalf.

We are not promised to be exempt from the pain of failure of efforts in our work for the Lord.  Our charge is to follow in obedience.  God orchestrates the outcome.  Don’t stop and focus on one picture of experience demanding that God explain His purpose.  God’s timing is a moving picture, a video.  His plans and ways are yet to be revealed in the next scene.  Then we see how our obedience and failure is grafted into God’s plan for His Kingdom.  Even our disobedience, like Israel, works its way into God’s purpose for our lives.

It is important to verbalize our trust in our pain.  “My reward is with my God.”  Even when we do not see the reward or even have a glimpse of what that reward would be…say it again and again.  “My reward is with my God”

May the winter in your life give way to the beauty of spring.