You may know someone who has done this, and maybe you yourself have done this, but, if not, can you imagine running a marathon? Running a marathon means running over 26 miles – at one time! I enjoy exercising, but something like that is way beyond my comprehension and far beyond my ability. All I can say is I have a tremendous respect for people who have done this or who have tried to do it.
This may also seem beyond our comprehension – and without our Lord Jesus it would be far beyond our ability to accomplish – but every single one of us here this morning is running another kind of marathon – a marathon we could call the marathon of life. You may remember that a number of times the Bible compares our lives to running a race -- giving us the encouragement, for example, to finish the race as we fight the good fight of faith and to run with perseverance the race marked out for us as we fix our eyes on Jesus at the finish line.
But you and I aren’t at the finish line yet, are we? No matter our age, whether we are younger or older, that finish line can come at any time, but we aren’t there yet. And what we need to do to keep running this race of life the way God wants us to be running the race of life is the same thing marathon runners need at various points along their twenty-six mile route – water stations. Stations where race assistants have set up tables with bottles or cups filled with water that those runners can pick up along the way to avoid becoming weak or drowsy or dehydrated, as they continue on their way toward the finish line.
This world needs more water stations – more people drinking water themselves and sharing water with others so that they and the people they are helping can continue on toward the finish line and avoid getting spiritually weak and spiritually drowsy and spiritually dehydrated. This world needs more people who know they need what verse 10 of our Old Testament Lesson from Isaiah 49 so dearly wants all people of this world to have and to experience: “They will not hunger, and they will not thirst, and neither scorching wind nor sun will strike them, because the one who shows them mercy will lead them. He will guide them besides springs of water.” Brothers and sisters of Water of Life, this is what I pray Water of Life will be for you and for anyone who comes through these doors – A Water Station on the Marathon of Life.
The best way you can be a life-saving water station at Water of Life is to remember who ran the most important marathon possible – your Lord Jesus. In fact, the opening verse of our Lesson is talking about Jesus when it says this, “This is what the Lord says. In the time of my favor, I will answer you. In the day of salvation, I will help you. I will guard you, and I will appoint you to be a covenant for the people.” You really can’t tell just from these words that they are talking about Jesus, but right before these words the prophet Isaiah was telling the people about the coming Messiah – still some seven hundred years off in the distance – calling him “the Servant of the Lord.” In those earlier words Isaiah tells us that as the Messiah would go about his work he would say this: “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.” This is also beyond our comprehension, but we know how, when Jesus came to earth, he struggled and agonized as the Son of Man, even asking in the Garden of Gethsemane if he could be spared what he knew as the Son of God that night was going to lead to – though he added, “But not my will, heavenly Father, but yours be done.”
In other words, the words I read are words of the Heavenly Father to his one and only Son. “I will answer you. I will help you. I will guard you. I will appoint you to be a covenant for the people.” So what was God the Father being to God the Son? He was being a water station on the marathon of life as Jesus faced his death for the sins of the entire world, giving him the confidence that there would be something afterwards – his resurrection from the grave which would prove all had been accomplished – and to be able to know that all he had done as our Savior would allow him to be what his Father in heaven called “a covenant for the people” – a promise sealed with his own blood that everything God has said to us will be so.
And that’s when the prophet Isaiah goes on in the next verses to talk about what are the blessings of being people like you and me – people of the covenant – people who believe that what Jesus has done for the world, he has done for me: picturing those blessings as prisoners being freed from their bondage, people in darkness seeing the light, hungry people looking for food finding food, and people getting out of the scorching sun and finding springs of water at the water station on the marathon of life.
Do you need God’s covenant promise that Jesus is your water station as you run your race? We’re tempted to think we don’t need it, right? Sometimes that temptation comes because things are going so well in our lives, and we kind of take the water of God’s Word for granted, or maybe sometimes we don’t think about it very much at all. And then all of a sudden when things stop going so well in our lives, we wonder why we feel off kilter spiritually or why we may seem so dizzy and disoriented -- because we haven’t been filling ourselves with what God wants to know about him and learn from him along the way. Or sometimes the temptation is to think the opposite – that we don’t have God’s promise about the water of life when things are going so poorly. The devil may try to get us to think that it may sound good to say the Lord will never forsake his people, but he certainly seems to have forgotten me – so maybe I’m not one of his people… The devil does not want us to drink from the springs of God’s Word at the water station of life, and he will do everything he can to keep others from doing the very same thing.
What a blessing it is that God keeps speaking to us in his Word -- correcting us when we disobey him or ignore him, comforting us when we cry with sadness over something in our life or with regret because of our constant sinning against him and the people he has placed into our lives, and compelling us ever so gently to keep living for the good of others, for the sake of others, in the best interests of others, so it can maybe make it easier for others to keep going to the water station of life where they will see Jesus, because of how they can see Jesus when they see us.
And God promises in his covenant with us that there will be others who will join us in seeing Jesus -- people who will know they need something more to have meaning in life or that they need something more to get through the rigors of life or that they need something more to hang onto when they close their eyes at the end of their life. The last verse – verse 12 – tells us to look at – and rejoice at -- what is still to come. “Look, some will come from the north and the west, and some from the land of Sinim.” We don’t know for sure what is meant by the land of Sinim, but the point seems to be that it is some place far away.
You and I are part of the fulfillment of this promise. God had no reason whatsoever to pick us to be his own in this faraway place of Wisconsin other than his simple, but unfathomable, love and grace. And that love and grace of our God to us is what leads us to want to look even farther into our families and our friends and our neighborhoods for others. There are thirsty people out there, who either don’t even know they are thirsty, or they know it, but they don’t know where they can find a water station, or they are drinking from fountains that will only make them thirsty again. You and I are like the people on the twenty-six mile marathon handing out cups of water to people who are running the race – the same race that you and I are actually running at the very same time – with other people, like our fellow members and teachers and staff minister and pastors handing us the same water cup – the covenant promise that Jesus Christ ran the marathon of life for us, that Jesus Christ won the victory of the marathon of life for us, that because of Jesus Christ, no sin we have ever committed will keep us from the finish line, that because of Jesus Christ nothing that happens in our life, no matter how horrible it may truly seem to be, can ever separate us from his love, and that because of Jesus Christ we have every reason to be Jesus Christ and to live Jesus Christ and to share Jesus Christ with people who need Jesus Christ every bit as much as we needed him – and still do.
Brothers and sisters, you are – and you have – the Water of Life. So, have a great race as a new, yet old congregation, because through Jesus Christ this is a marathon every single one of us can run! Amen.