Many of you in this room remember exactly where you were and what you were doing the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And for many people that day was not just the end of the presidency and the life of John F. Kennedy, it was also the day that hope died. The young, energetic president and his administration which was often referred to as “Camelot” ceased to exist. The entire nation mourned and was in despair.
Today, over 30 years later, our country seems to be in a similar condition. We face a new enemy – one without a country or uniforms, an enemy that is committed to destroying our country and our way of life. Our borders have been overrun by people who don’t share the values of our country or have any desire to be assimilated into our culture. Our politicians fight and call each other names. And in spite of scientific advances heart disease, cancer, AIDS, the West Nile virus, the bird flu and other deadly diseases continue to spread sickness and death.
As a country, we’ve lost our moral compass. Actors and actresses live together and have children and then decide whether to get married later – and then if they do wed, it’s only a matter of time until they find another partner and divorce. Our sports heroes make millions of dollars and then act like spoiled little children. We’re told that we need to tolerate behavior that the Bible calls sinful and yet we can’t even say “Merry Christmas” to someone else because that might offend him or her. We’ve taken God out of every area of our lives.
It’s no wonder that our culture is full of people who are without hope. But as we enter into a new year, I’d like for us to take some time this morning to renew our hope. We’re going to go back to a passage that’s probably quite familiar to many of us. If you have your Bibles go ahead and turn to Isaiah Chapter 6.
For Isaiah and his people, this was also a time of lost hope. King Uzziah had died, and much like the death of John F. Kennedy, his death meant the loss of hope for his people and for Isaiah, in particular. King Uzziah was the 11th king of Judah. His reign began when he was only 16 years old and it had continued for 52 years. Although he had his shortcomings, Uzziah was the greatest king since King David. Under his reign, Judah, the southern kingdom had prospered greatly. We can find the story of King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26, but this one verse sums up his reign pretty well:
He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father Amaziah had done.
2 Chronicles 26:4 (NIV)
Uzziah was not only Isaiah’s king, he was his friend. So Isaiah was particularly devastated by the death of the king. But Isaiah has an encounter with God that allows him to renew his hope and to go on to a life that produces much fruit for the kingdom of God. So my prayer this morning is that as we get ready for the new year, we can take and apply some of the same principles that Isaiah applied in order to renew our hope for this coming year.
Read Isaiah 6
This morning I want us to see 5 principles that we can apply in our own lives so that we can have hope in the new year.
HOW TO HAVE HOPE FOR THE NEW YEAR
1. See God’s holiness
When we lose hope, we tend to turn to many different people, places and activities to try to regain that hope. Some turn to family members and friends. Some turn to some hobby or activity. Some turn to food. Some unfortunately turn to alcohol or drugs. And I suppose that in some way all those things can appear to restore our hope, at least in the short run. But we soon find out that none of those things can really give us lasting hope.
When Isaiah had lost his hope, he went to the one place where he knew he could find lasting relief – he went to meet God. Before the death of Uzziah, Isaiah knew God. He was already a prophet and he undoubtedly spent time with God. But this time, God allowed Isaiah to see Him like he had never seen Him before. And although Isaiah probably learned several things about the nature of God in the vision he had that day, the primary thing he was exposed to was God’s holiness. As Isaiah sees God seated on His throne I the Temple, the seraphim are singing praises to God for his holiness:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory."
That’s almost exactly the same thing that John sees in his vision of God over 800 years later.
Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come."
Revelation 4:8 (NIV)
God has many attributes. We use fancy words like “omnipotent”, “omniscient” and “omnipresent” to describe His character. We also use more familiar terms like goodness, love, faithfulness, justice, mercy and sovereignty to try to get a handle on what God is like. But in Scripture, it seems that when we are given an extraordinary look into the nature of God, it is His holiness that is on display.
I think the reason for the focus on God’s holiness is that, in a sense, it best describes who God is. Unfortunately, however, our normal understanding of holiness falls far short of what God’s holiness is like. For instance, when I go to the dictionary, I find definitions for holy like these:
• consecrated: dedicated or set apart for religious purposes
• saintly: devoted to the service of God, a god, or a goddess
• sacred: relating to, belonging to, or coming from a divine being or power
• having a spiritually pure quality
While all those definitions can tell us something about God’s holiness, they all fall far short of a complete and accurate explanation. That’s why I really like how A.W. Tozer describes God’s holiness in his book, Knowledge of the Holy:
We cannot grasp the meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it…Only the Spirit of the Holy One can impart to the human spirit the knowledge of the holy.
Tozer goes on to very clearly point out that the Holy Spirit reveals the holiness of God to us as we spend time in His Word, quoting Romans 8:17:
Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
And then toward the end of his book, Tozer sums up the holiness of God like this:
Holy is the way God is. To be holy, He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard.
In other words, God’s holiness is what makes Him God. It is what makes Him completely different than any of us. It is what separates Him from all of His creation.
This year, I want to encourage you to discover, or maybe re-discover the holiness of God. I’m going to challenge you to do two things this year with God’s Word that will enhance your ability to see the holiness of God:
• First, I’m going to challenge all of us to read through the Bible together this year. In your bulletin is a reading plan that I’d like all of us to use together. The thing I like about this plan compared to just sitting down and trying to read the Bible from beginning to end is that it allows us to spend some time each week in different sections of the Bible: Law, History Poetry, Psalms, Prophets, Gospels and Epistles. It will take most people about 15-20 minutes each day to complete the reading for the day. It seems to me that’s a small price to pay in order to help us see the holiness of God.
• The second challenge is a lot harder. In fact, I’ll be real honest. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to complete this one, but I promise to give it my best. Starting next week, I’m going to begin a series of messages from the Book of Ephesians. This is going to be an in-depth study that will probably only take us through a few verses each week. And what we’re going to try to do together is to memorize the Book of Ephesians as we study through the book. I know that’s asking a lot. Most of us, and I include myself in that group, hate to memorize, probably because we’re not very good at it. But let’s give it a try and see how far we can get.
Each week I’ll be providing you with a card that has 2-4 verses to memorize for the week. Take that card and keep it with you or put it somewhere you’ll see it throughout the day as you work on memorizing the verses. We’ll talk a little more about that next week, but your first card is in your bulletin so you can take it home and start working on it this week.
So the first thing Isaiah did was to see God’s holiness. And that leads directly to the second principle. Once I see God’s holiness, I need to…
2. Sense my helplessness
Isaiah’s immediate reaction startles us a bit at first. When I think about what it will be like to see God face to face some day, I wonder what my reaction will be. I think that most of us can relate to the words of the song “I Can Only Imagine” by Mercy Me:
Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel
Will I dance for You Jesus or in awe of You be still
Will I stand in Your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all
I can only imagine
Although any and all those emotions are certainly possible, I’m convinced that we’ll all be pretty much like Isaiah. Once we see God in all His glory, we’re going to recognize just how far we fall short of that glory. And we’re also going to realize that we can’t do anything about it on our own. Like Isaiah, we’ll be completely helpless before God. Like him, the first words out of our mouths are likely to be:
"Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
But it’s not just in the future that I’ll have to deal with my helplessness. As God reveals Himself to me day by day and I come face to face with His holiness, I realize just how helpless I am before Him right now. I realize that I can’t come even close to measuring up to God’s holiness and I also realize that there is absolutely nothing I can do on my own to even begin to close that gap.
When Jesus was here on this earth and His followers spent time with Him, they, too, experienced the holiness of God. Jesus took on a human body, but since he was God, He was also holy. And when some of His followers began to see that and recognize the lack of holiness in their own lives, most of them ran away. John records for us one of those encounters:
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. "You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
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.
Ephesians 2:10 (NLT)
When we submit our hearts to God and make Jesus our Forgiver, we must also submit our lives to Him and make Jesus our Master. We are to do good things, but notice that they are not the good things that we choose to do, they are the good things that God chooses for us to do.
Notice that for Isaiah the act of submitting his heart wasn’t an either/or proposition. He had to both submit his sin to God so God could deal with it and submit his life to God so that God could use it. If we want to have hope in the new year, then we must be willing to do the same.
Some of you here this morning have never done that. You’ve never made Jesus your Forgiver and your Master. In just a few minutes we’re going to give you an opportunity to do that. And there is no more important decision you could make to be ready for the new year. But for the rest of us, there is a sense in which we constantly have to continue to submit our hearts to God on a daily basis. We have to submit our sin to him by confessing it to Him and we have to submit our lives to him by being obedient to Him.
But seeing God’s holiness, sensing my helplessness and submitting my heart is really just the beginning. I also need to…
4. Strive during hardship
Once Isaiah submits his life to God, God makes it clear to Isaiah that living for God is not always going to be easy. He makes it clear that as Isaiah takes God’s message to the people, the people aren’t’ going to listen to him or take heed of his words. In fact, the news is so discouraging that Isaiah asks God how long this is going to go on. And God’s answer is basically that it’s going to last as long as Isaiah’s ministry lasts.
Throughout the Bible we read the stories of faithful men and women of God who never got to see the fruits of their ministry. Many of those lives are described in the faith “hall of fame” in Hebrews 11, where we read these words:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.
Hebrews 11:13 (NIV)
That was certainly going to be true of Isaiah’s life. Isaiah was probably God’s greatest prophet. He was certainly the most prolific writer among the prophets at a minimum. And yet, he never really got to see the fruit of his prophecies.
Serving God is often like that. We never get to see the fruits of our labor, at least not in this lifetime. But fortunately, as the writer of Hebrews points out, we’re just aliens and strangers here on this earth. Even though we won’t see all our rewards this side of heaven, we need to continue to persevere like the heroes of the faith did.
On March 4, 1993, Jim Valvano received the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award at the ESPY Awards. Even though his body was ravaged by cancer and he would die a little over a month later. Jimmy V, as he was affectionately known to his friends, gave one of the finest motivational speeches of all times. During that acceptance speech he said these words.
Never give up! Failure and rejection are only the first step to succeeding.
And then near the end of his speech, he uttered these now famous words that have become his legacy:
Don’t give up, don’t ever give up."
I have no idea whether or not Jim Valvano was a believer, but we would all do well to take his advice and refuse to give up, even when the going gets tough. And the reason that we can do that leads us directly to our last principle. I need to…
5. Sustain my hope
God is honest with Isaiah. He lets him know that he can expect hardship and misery. But in his encounter with God, God leaves Isaiah with hope. Even though God’s people are going to ignore His words and God will bring judgment on them, God will not leave His people without hope. God will leave a stump, a remnant. And out of this small remnant the “holy seed” will come.
This is obviously a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah. And God wants to reassure Isaiah and reaffirm His plan that is woven throughout the Bible from beginning to end. When the time is right, God is going to bring a Messiah, a Redeemer, a Savior to His people.
Since we’re on the other side of the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus now, we can see the fruit of God’s promise to Isaiah. We can see that God is faithful and that He is true to His word. And that sustains our hope for the future.
Yes, we live in the kind of culture we talked about at the beginning of the message this morning – one that is in danger of being overrun both by enemies from without and enemies from within. One that is full of blatant immorality and one that is increasingly hostile to God. But God has promised that Jesus will come back to this earth again one day to take us home to be with Him. And if we endure to the end, God will reward us in eternity for our faithfulness and service to Him.
When Isaiah faced a life without hope, he went to the place where he knew he could find that hope – he went to God. And when he did, he:
• Saw God’s holiness
• Sensed his own helplessness
• Submitted his heart to God
• Strived during hardship
• Sustained his hope
It’s no wonder that he would later write these encouraging words that still give us hope today:
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40:28-31 (NIV)
As we enter 2007, I invite you to have that same kind of encounter with God in your own life. If you’ve never made Jesus your Forgiver and Master, we invite you to take that first step this morning. And for the rest of us who have already made that decision, I pray this morning that you’ll commit to making this a year of hope – hope that’s fueled by a growing relationship with God that is deeply rooted in His Word.
