Focused On One Thing

TOO BUSY TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING

How many of you have ever had a day where you had so much to do, that you just couldn’t get anything done? As soon as you’d start a task, something else – just as essential – would grab your attention, and then just as you got the ball rolling, a third thing would pop up out of nowhere. Sometimes our day can be a little like spinning plates or like that perennial carnival favorite – whack-a-mole. Anyone else ever play that arcade game where little mechanical moles pop up out of holes in the board and you hit them with a big rubber mallet, as they get faster and faster and faster? That used to be my jam when I was a kid at Chuck-E-Cheese. It definitely helps if you have a buddy, but some days, there are just too many moles. And if you string enough of those days together, that becomes your life.

It can make each day daunting, can’t it? To the point that you wake up, realize you have a ton to do, so you just procrastinate because the task seems too impossible to tackle. Has anyone ever been there? But that doesn’t help, does it? We get so worried about all the things that need to get done, maybe even important things, that we forget to focus on, to feed and refresh ourselves, with the one thing that truly matters.

A SOOTHING WORD TO AN ANXIOUS PEOPLE

Our passage this morning concerns itself with a people full of anxieties, full of distractions. It forms part of a thematic collection, made up of chs. 56-66 in the book of Isaiah, that scholars often call Third Isaiah. And it’s meant to give hope to a people – a future people, from the prophet Isaiah’s own perspective – who have been through a lot: invasion and exile and the almost annihilation of everything they held dear. And their God, our God, always promised to bring them home. But that prospect brought with it a whole host of new worries. What would happen when God would finally call them back home, to their own land? How would they defend themselves? How would they feed their children? How would they rebuild what had been destroyed? And in such a brutal, violent world, what if they had no future at all?

It’s to these anxious people God speaks through Isaiah, when he opens with these words in v. 1, “Thus says the Lord:

Maintain justice, and do what is right,

for soon my salvation will come,

and my deliverance be revealed.”

Now at first glance, this can almost sound like God is telling the people they need to be worthy of receiving His salvation, His deliverance, doesn’t it? But as Scripture makes plain all over its pages, we do not “maintain justice, and do what is right” to earn any standing with God. Instead, we do these things as an expression of expectant hope, and of trust, that our Salvation has been revealed in Christ our deliverer, and will be revealed again.

Indeed, the presence of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus has sent us to help us is evident most in our lives when we allow Christ’s grace, communicated by that same Spirit, to shape us, heal us, and restore His image within us; an image characterized by the very justice and righteousness described by the prophets’ words in our passage this morning. Holiness on the part of God’s people – marked by obedience and the pursuit of right living in relation to God, one another, and even creation itself – isn’t the cause of grace, it’s the result.

This is why God continues in v. 2 with these words,

“Happy is the mortal who does this,

the one who holds it fast,

who keeps the sabbath, not profaning it,

and refrains from doing any evil.”

When our lives are invigorated by grace, we find our rest in the One who created us to enjoy Him. He is our Sabbath. This is why we celebrate each week on the Day He rose from the dead, bringing new life to what was once dead and without hope. The Lord proclaims that when we rest in Him and draw from His strength to do what is right, to treat others justly, to welcome the foreigner and the outcast, we begin to learn the true meaning of worship.

DISTRACTED FROM WHAT REALLY MATTERS

This isn’t easy, is it? If it were something we were already inclined to do, God wouldn’t have to remind us of this truth again and again, would He? Most of our energies each day are spent focused on our own needs and wants – food, shelter, water, comfort, belonging, and distraction. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these. Although, if a significant amount of our time is spent on distraction, we may need to ask ourselves: What is it about ourselves and our world we are trying to escape? What truth about our lives confronts us that we are trying to avoid?