Hope For The New Year

John 6:66-68 (NIV)

Peter and the others recognized their helplessness. Like the others, they knew that there was absolutely nothing that they could do on their own to deal with the sin in their lives. But unlike the others, rather than running away, they chose to stick with the one who could do something about that sin. In that sense, they were a lot like Isaiah. And that leads us to the third principle. Once I see God’s holiness and sense my own helplessness, then I need to…

3. Submit my heart

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Our response to God’s holiness and our helplessness is the key to having hope. Unfortunately, a lot of people make the wrong decision at this point. Some get scared and run away from God. We saw in our passage in John that many of Jesus’ followers had taken that path. Some try to work their way back to God by their own efforts. By that can’t ever work, because we’ve already seen that no matter how good we are, we can never measure up to God’s holiness. Some people just try to ignore God and go on living their lives. But once we’ve been exposed to God’s holiness, it’s impossible to go back to the way we were.

So there is really only one thing that we can do – the very thing that Isaiah did. He submitted his heart to God. There were really two aspects to his submission.

The first thing he did was to humble himself before God and allow God to deal with the sin in his life. He had to allow God to come and cleanse him from his sin, as the seraph came and touched his lips with the hot coal. That seems pretty painful to me and fortunately for us, that’s not the way God normally chooses to cleanse us from our sins. God does that when we humble ourselves before him, confess our sin and trust in his grace. Here’s how Paul describe the process in his letter to the church at Ephesus:

God saved you by his special favor when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.

Ephesians 2:8, 9 (NLT)

Notice that it’s all God’s work. But our part is to humble ourselves before God and trust totally and completely in the work He did on our behalf when His son, the Lord Jesus Christ, died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.

Like Isaiah, we must first deal with the sin that is revealed to us once we see God’s holiness. We do that by submitting our hearts to God and making Jesus Christ our Forgiver. But there is a second aspect of submitting our hearts to God. As soon as Isaiah is cleansed by God, he immediately turns the control of his life over to God. He basically says to God, “Here I am. Send me wherever you want to send me and use me however you choose to use me. In other words, he makes God the Lord, or Master, of his life. His life is no longer his own – it belongs to God now.

That’s essentially what Paul says in the verse that immediately follows the ones we just looked at in Ephesians:

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.