For God so loved the world,
I will start today by reading from the book of Isaiah, 6:1-8
(Read Isaiah 6:1-8)
Isaiah has an remarkable experience! He gets to see the King, the Lord Almighty!
Isaiah sees straight into the throne room of God. He is confronted with the Holy One, with God himself.
No man can see what he did and not be afraid to die, because the Old Testament says that no one can see God, and live.
Therefore Isaiah cries out “Woe to me! I’m ruined!”
What makes Isaiah cry out like that? Is it because he realizes that he is so small and God is to great? NO it is not.
Isaiah cries out id despair because he understand his own sinfulness is a bad contrast to the holiness of God.
“For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”
The lips is a symbol not only for his speech but for his whole life as well as the life of the whole people. In Mathew 12:36 Jesus says: “For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.”
What we say, is nothing more than a mirror of what we have in our hearts.
When you leave here today, do you talk with your Christian brothers and sisters about what happened in today’s service, or do you chat about the latest sport results or the latest news broadcast?
“our of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” Jesus says.
Isaiah suddenly understood the total absence of the divine in both his life as well as in the life of the people. He realizes that neither he nor the people lived according to the will of God. Their lips were not only used in praising the Lord, they were also used to praise other gods and to a number of other things that displeased God. Their lives did not please God.
Suddenly, Isaiah saw his own transgressions and the transgressions of his people and that made him cry out as he did.
The story of how Isaiah met God doesn’t end with Isaiah understands that he is lost. God, our good God, intervenes. Isaiah needed to have his guilt taken away and he needed his sins atoned for. God does this. Isaiah hadn’t earned it, but reconciliation was brought by God himself. Isaiah hadn’t even asked for mercy, nor did he give solemn promises so that God would save him. No, as far as Isaiah was concerned, his situation was hopeless since he had seen The Lord Sebaoth.
Still, out of the smoke a seraph came carrying a cleansing coal taken from the altar. With that coal the seraph touched the lips of Isaiah and thereby his guilt was taken away and his sin was atoned for. Isaiah was reconciled with God, instead of being destroyed in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.
Now, when Isaiah was reconciled, God speaks for the first time.
“Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
It is almost as if Isaiah hadn’t been ready to hear God’s voice until now. God is asking his questions right after the sins of Isaiah had been atoned for. This shows the close connection between reconciliation and discipleship and Ministry. If our experience of the Grace of God doesn’t take some kind of expression in our life, like worship and ministry, that experience will turn on itself and rotten.
But for Isaiah, after experiencing the forgiveness of sins right at the same moment he had expected his own death, there was nothing else he could do, but to cry out, “Here I am, Send me!”
Isaiah didn’t responded like this just out of plain obedience. No, it was a response coming from the depth of his heart due to the overwhelming experience of the mercy and grace of God.
There and then, God accepted Isaiah’s offer. God acts instantly when Isaiah offers is live in service. God I sending as His prophet to His people. And right at the outset of his prophetic “career” Isaiah gets to bear the burden of his Ministry. God says that Isaiah shall go and speak what the Lord commands him to speak, but that no-one will listen to the voice of the Lord. It is already too late for that.
From this story about how Isaiah got his life long mission as the Lord’s prophet, we can find three basic principles for a true servant of the Lord.
1. Experiencing your need for salvation
The first step towards becoming a true servant of the Lord is to experince one’s total need for forgiveness, purification and atonement.
The thing is, God can only act with those who see their total need of forgiveness and reconciliation. He can’t save those who when they meet His holiness don’t feel their need of forgiveness and reconciliation. Most of us here today have at one point in our life felt that need. That was when we came to faith in Jesus Christ. We too, have stood before God and seen our lives in His light. When we do that, we too understand that we need to be saved by the grace of God. We can’t do it ourselves.
“Woe to me! I’m ruined!” “For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”
The meaning of these words, all believers have cried out at some point. All believers have experienced their total lack of goodness and their total need of salvation.
2. Experience true forgiveness
We, Christian believers, who wants to server God and to tell others about him, we must have experienced the divine forgiveness personally. The forgiveness of our sins must be a holy experience for us, not only something we say we have experienced and believe in.
True forgiveness is a holy experience that mark us for life, in a positive sense. Why? Because God has in his great mercy saved us. Something we did not deserve at all.
Our sin is great. Every human beings sin is great. So great that it shuts him or her out from the eternal life with God. That sin which we at one point saw in all its ugliness, Jesus took from us and forgave it. He always does that when we face our sin and humbly pray, “Jesus, please forgive me”. That is a prayer that always is answered with a big YES from heaven!
This second step to become a true servant of the Lord, all believers have experienced, otherwise we wouldn’t be believers. And if you haven’t experienced it yet, I urge to come to Jesus with your sin and your burdens. He loves you and accepts you as you are. No sin is too great for Jesus to forgive.
3. To dedicate your whole life to the Lord.
The third and last step towards becoming a true servant of the Lord is to give your whole life to the Lord.
This third and lest step is the most difficult one. How come that we, after understanding the ugliness of our sin when we meet a holy God, and after receiving unconditional love and grace and forgiveness, still have such a hard time give all that we have and is back to the Lord?
We have all fallen short of fulfilling this third step. Perhaps we have missed what is the force behind it all? Or have we just heard about serving God too often?
What is the deepest force behind our Christian life?
For me it is obvious, in theory! Jesus sums it up admirably in John 3:16.
We know this words, back and forth. We have probably heard them in church hundreds of times. Some of us have heard them over and over again since we were children. We have heard them so often that they do no longer touch us the way they should!
“For God S O loved the world” meditate on those words for a moment. “For God S O loved the world”.
He who made heaven and earth, the whole universe with all its stars and planets and wonderful mysterious objects. It is HIM who loves! He loves so deeply that He takes what is most precious to him, His only Son. He sends Him to this earth to die instead of you and me. “For God S O loved the world.”
If you and I had understood just 1 % of this great drama of love, I think our lives would be very different! “For God S O loved the world.”
When our lives are deeply marked by this fact, we give everything to the Lord even though we have nothing of your own to give. He has already done it all for us! He has loved us from before the dawn of time, he has taken our guild away and atoned for our sins, He has given us eternal life as a gift.
Can we do anything else but to respond in the same way Isaiah did, “Here I am, send me!”
My prayer for all God’s people is that this miracle, “For God S O loved the world” would mark us deeply in our hearts for life. I pray that those wonderful words would be One with our minds and thoughts and bare rich fruit in our life. When that happens people around us would see Jesus as soon as they meet us.
