The Unsuccessful Servant

With a cry, "Woe to me!" he suddenly realises that amongst this magnificence, this holiness, there is something terribly out of place - his sin. He shouldn’t be there.

Now it didn’t enter Isaiah’s mind to simply skulk away - to sneak out of the back door before God notices him. I wonder whether that is our response when God’s holiness reveals our sin. Do we confess as Isaiah did, or do we try to run and hide? Do you see yourself as Isaiah did, or have you managed to persuade yourself that you’re not bad, really.

Instantly Isaiah recognises the implications of his sin. He didn’t have the benefit of Paul’s letter to the Romans, but he would have said a sorrowful ’Amen!’ to Paul’s declaration that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

It may be that at this time Isaiah already had an ability in public speaking. We can see from the book that bears his name that his literary skills were unsurpassed in his day. He had a flair for language and form that even today few possess. Yet at that moment, as he was later to spell out to the nations in chapter 64, he saw that all his righteous acts were as filthy rags. I wonder whether you have confidence in your ability as a Christian? If you ever feel that what you are about to do will be successful because you’ve worked hard at it? Isaiah realised, and we too must realise, that his lips - his biggest asset - were of no value before God. But more than that. It was not just that they were of no value - they were actually unclean.

I once heard about a man who worked with children who lived in sewers - somewhere in South America I think. He used to go into the sewers himself to try and help the children who were living there. Imagine you had been one of those children - virtually blind through living in the darkness underground. Filthy through living in the waste from thousands of homes. Maybe this man offers you a chance to leave. You jump at the opportunity, but has he leads you out, as your eyes become accustomed to the light at the end of the tunnel, you start to see the state that you are in. You start to see the excrement on your clothes and in your hair. And no matter how hard you try to brush it off, the stains will not go away. And of course, the nearer you get to the light coming in from the entrance of the tunnel, the dirtier you appear. Naturally you would shy away from ever coming out of the sewer until you’re fit to be presented to the outside world. The problem of course, is that you cannot be made clean until you come out of the filth of the sewer, and by coming out it’s inevitable that you will be made aware of your own filth.

If we are to see God’s holiness, it is certain that we will recoil at our own sinfulness. We said earlier that perhaps we are unwilling to see God’s holiness. Maybe it would be truer to say that we are unwilling to see our own sinfulness. It is impossible to see one without the other.

Yet the central message to Isaiah’s testimony is not simply that his lips, his speech was filthy, but the miracle is that it was this very thing that God took and used for His glory and purpose. You see although Isaiah had a big vision of God, and therefore a deep awareness of sin, the story does not finish there. Isaiah isn’t ruined and undone. He is saved from ruin because thirdly we see that he has a