Isaiah 6
Amen. Please turn in your copy
of the scripture to Isaiah six. Uh, tonight we’ll look at, uh,
the whole of the chapter. I believe it’s 13 verses. I read
something this week, uh, that said very often the only bits
and pieces we know about Isaiah are, uh, the suffering servant,
uh, and the coming Messiah and, this sixth chapter where Isaiah
saw into heaven, met the Lord and had his lips singed with
the coals. And maybe that’s true, but I
think this is one of the most glorious chapters of scripture. So let’s give our attention now
to it. Isaiah six. beginning at verse one, in the
year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne
high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple.
Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings, with two
he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and
with two he flew. And one called to another and
said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth
is full of his glory. And the foundations of the thresholds
shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled
with smoke. And I said, woe is me, for I
am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then one of the seraphim
flew to me having in his hands a burning coal that he had taken
with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said,
behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away
and your sin atoned for. And I heard the voice of the
Lord saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then
I said, here am I, send me. And he said, go and say to this
people, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing,
but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people
dull and their ears heavy and blind their eyes, lest they see
with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with
their hearts and turn and be healed. Then I said, how long,
O Lord? And he said, until cities lie
waste, without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the
land is a desolate waste. And the Lord removes people far
away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the
land. And though a tenth remain in
it, it will be burned again like a terebinth or an oak, whose
stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump. Amen. The word of the living
God. So over the last many weeks in Sunday school, we’ve been
thinking about church. We’ve been thinking about worship.
We’ve been thinking about discipleship, community, mercy, and stewardship. And if we were to tell others
about us, we, we, talked about this a little bit this morning.
If we were to tell others about us, about ourselves, would we
mention first our building? Would we say something about
our finances? Would we speak of the missionaries we support
or the ministries local and in the rest of our country that
we maybe support or pray for? Would we talk about our occasional
Sunday lunches or summer ice cream socials? Or perhaps we’d
speak about Christian education. Would we talk about the people,
those we go to church with, or, and all those are well and good,
would we talk about the God whom we worship? A few years after
coming here, we had a similar set of discussions. This would
have been about 2017, maybe 2018, a similar set of discussions
about the life of the church. And y’all get lots of credit
because this go round, it’s gone really well. You folks are, well,
the Spirit’s at work in you, the Bible’s been getting into
your minds and hearts. But I mentioned this very same
question, oh, about six, seven years ago, and got a little pushback,
actually not a little pushback, got some pretty heavy pushback,
when I asked this question, do you ask people, instead of where
you go to church, where you worship? People say, that’s not the right
question. People want to know where you go to church. And we
talked about that this morning, where you go to church doesn’t
necessarily mean you go worship. It might mean you’re on seven
committees, right? It might mean you go to youth
group or women’s thing or men’s thing or something like that.
But a ultimate question, a really big, high, overarching question,
where do you worship? gets to one of life’s ultimate
question. Not everybody goes to church,
but guess what? Everybody worships. They may
worship at the altar of self. They may worship, as they say,
on the golf course. I can meet God out on the golf
course just as well as I can in church. Everybody worships. The apostle Paul shows us this
when he’s in Athens and he’s troubled because he looks around
the Is it the Areopagus? And he sees this idol, and this
statue, and that idol, and that statue. And finally, his eyes
land, as his heart is troubled, as upset in his spirit, his eyes
land on, well, a blank space. And just in case they’ve missed
a god, just in case their pantheon is one short, They have an altar
to the unknown God. And so Paul, in his wisdom and
in his smarts that God had given him, he says, I know this unknown
God. Let me tell you about him. This
is the God who made the heaven and the earth. This is the God
that made the earth and the fullness thereof. And it’s in him that
we live and we move and we have our being. Let me tell you about
this God. And so perhaps one of the best
questions we can ask, the best things we can say to begin with
when we are meeting with people in this post Christian world,
this post church going world, let me tell you about the God
whom I worship. Let me tell you about him. And
perhaps you’ll come with me one Sunday and you can meet him.
I can introduce you to him and you think through. the order
of our service of worship and how it’s designed to be a dialogue
between God and man. The beginning of the service
begins with a greeting, grace to you and peace from God, our
father and the Lord Jesus Christ through the fellowship of the
spirit. There’s a call to worship where God himself through the
word says, you are my people. You are my, uh, Royal subjects
come now into my presence and into my courts. Give me the praise
that is due me. And as we read a psalm or hear
a call to worship, it usually gives reasons. The Lord is good. The Lord is our shepherd. The
Lord has saved us. The Lord has redeemed us. And so more about
God is revealed. And so we sing a hymn of adoration. We sing a psalm of adoration. We recite a creed that tells
us who God is, what he’s done, what he’s like, the benefits
of redemption for us. We sing a Trinitarian song like
we just did from Romans 11, 33 to 36, from him and to him, through
him and all those great words are all things, all glory is
to God. And then there’s a sense in our
service where we slam on the brakes. And it’s because we’ve
run into God. We’ve run into his holiness.
We’ve run into his greatness. We’ve run into his otherness.
And all the profane things that we have dealt with in the world,
all the profane things perhaps that we’ve thought or felt or
said sort of come rushing up to our mind and our heart as
we bump into God and we hit the brakes and we confess our sins. We confess our sins corporately
because worship is covenant renewal and covenant renewal is with
the whole covenant people of God. But then we take some moments,
some time of silence to each confess our own sin before God. And we get to say to him, I’m
not what I ought to be. I haven’t lived in the ways that
I should. And so we confess our sin, but
gloriously and wonderfully God responds and he assures us of
our pardon. We always say, brothers and sisters
in Jesus Christ, who’ve trusted in Christ, who’ve received him
by faith and rest in him alone for salvation, hear now God’s
words of assurance of pardon. We always read some gospel assurance,
sometimes from the Old Testament, sometimes from the New Testament.
And then what do saved people do? They sing. They sing of their
Redeemer. They sing of their redemption.
They sing of their desire to live for God. And then confident
people, they pray. They go before their great high
priest and they carry before him their needs and their desires. And then the children of the
king always listen to the king’s speech, to the words of the king,
to the scripture of the king. And we come to this passage tonight
with that in mind, how we introduce people to God, how that is best
done through church. And you say, well, that seems
strange to them. Well, shouldn’t it? In fact, it should seem very
strange to them because what’s out there is profane and what
takes place in here is holy. And we get an encounter with
God that ought to reverberate in us as we understand that Isaiah
was a real man, a real minister in real history. In fact, it’s
in the year that King Uzziah died that Isaiah meets with the
exalted Lord, with the Holy One of Israel. In the year that King
Uzziah died, we remember our church history, our Old Testament
history. He died of leprosy. He got leprosy
because, well, like Saul and others, he decided to take on
priestly duties. You know, he put in a phone call
from the palace. Hey, priest, I need you to get
to the temple and do something for me. Offer some incense, offer
something burnt. Well, the phone called it and
go through or the priest never showed up. And so Uzziah did
what Saul and some others did. Well, I’ll just, I’ll just be
the priest. I’m the king. Why not be the priest? And it
angered God. It upset God. It, it brought
judgment on Uzziah who lived in exile with, with leprosy. He became an outcast. I’m sure
the leprosy of a reminder, you break God’s law. and there’s
consequences. You break God’s commandments
and there are things that may last the rest of our lifetime
because of our sin. Well, he lived a separate and
exiled life and then he died. And in the year King Uzziah died,
the earthly king, Isaiah met the king of kings. He met the
Lord of lords. He met the Holy one of Israel
and he is, perhaps we best understand it, that he’s in the temple at
Jerusalem. He’s in the Lord’s house on the Sabbath. And God
in his grace shows him the presence of God. He shows him Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. He shows him the throne. He shows
them the train of the majestic robes of God Almighty. You know,
in my lifetime, there’s been a lot of royal activity. Now, I’m not old enough, like
some of you, to remember when Queen Elizabeth was enthroned. I suppose a few of y’all can
remember that. But I was a little kid when Diana
married Charles. I can remember the royal wedding
of the 1980s. I think it was back in 2010 we
watched Kate marry William. We all skipped the other one,
the Meghan whatever, and we keep skipping that whole thing. But
recently we saw the death of the queen, the monarch. We watched
the royal funeral. About a year ago, we saw the
coronation of Charles. And I suppose in my lifetime,
I’ll get to see William arise to the throne or perhaps his
son, George. I think he’s the next to the throne. But when
the royals do something, they do it big. It’s majestic. It’s in that hallowed Westminster
Hall. It’s in that grand room where
the voices echo, the trumpet sound, the taps of the footsteps,
and all the pageantry show us majesty. And I think there’s
something about that. Yes, it is earthly pomp, and
it will always fade away, but doesn’t it give us a taste of
what the the royal throne of God must be like, the royal majesty
of God. We come into church these days
and we slide in our pews with our coffee cup and we hadn’t
really thought a whole lot about what we’re about to do. But maybe you get invited to
a coronation. You get invited to the White
House. You get invited to a state dinner. You get invited, you
know, we’d brush our teeth. I hope we’d probably get a new
suit. And if not, get our good one
pressed. You know, we might even go to the barbershop. We might
even trim our nose hairs and our ear hairs. And we might do
all the things, you know, that are necessary for entering the
presence of majesty. But what about when we enter
the presence of God on Sunday? Do we ease down on Saturday?
Do we begin to tune out the noise of the world and the busy schedule? Do we read through the Psalms
and the hymns and the The scriptures, do we hum through the songs that
we’ll sing? Do we prepare our hearts? I’m
going to meet with the Lord. I’m going to meet with the king.
I’m going to meet with the majestic one. Well, here Isaiah goes into
the temple and perhaps he had done all the day of preparation
and he had done all the things a good religious man would have
done in those days. And he meets the Lord. He sees
the Lord. He meets with the glorious Jesus, the eternal son of God. Isn’t that something that would
be compelling for us to say to a friend, a neighbor, a loved
one, come to the majestic meeting that God’s people have with their
King. You know, if our worship isn’t trite, if our church service
has something meaningful about it, something other worldly,
shouldn’t we be so excited to tell people, hey, brush your
hair, you know, put on your Sunday best. I’m going to pick you up
30 minutes early. I’m going to take you to meet
with God’s people in God’s house on God’s day. And you’ll hear
the voice of God himself. And we can begin that, that,
that, that call that invitation with our family, with our, our
children, our grandchildren, but work our way out to our neighbors.
And show them that when we come to church, it’s serious business.
We meet with the Holy One of Israel. We get to come into the
presence of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Present
at church is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Present
at church is the triune God. Present at church are the angels
and all their festal gathering. Present at church are the saints
who’ve gone before us, their spirits made perfect in the heavenly
places. and president church of the holy
ones we gather with locally. And we get to see a glimpse of
all that God is. We get to see a snippet of what
he is, what he’s done and what he will do in his promises. And
we ought to have a sense of all. And I think that’s why it’s definitely
important for us to be heart ready, mind ready for church.
But it’s also important for us as a church that when we do what
we do, we give a sense of seriousness. It’s not coats and jokes. It’s
not the comedy hour. It’s not Saturday night live.
It’s not. Stand up time. It’s not concert time. It’s time
for us to meet with the Holy God. There ought to be a sense
of reverence and awe. I love what Job says. It’s about
midway through that torturous book that tells about what he
went through that Satan did to him. And now how he’s beginning
to wrestle through the purposes of God. And he’s also got those
three meathead friends who can’t seem to say anything good to
him. But Job about midway through, I think it’s in chapter 26, a
little more than midway through, he says something of great importance,
a little phrase that stuck in my mind for quite a bit. He says, we have only seen the
outskirts of God’s ways. That’s something to think about,
isn’t it? When we come to church and we get a glimpse of the glory
of God, we get a glimpse of the reverence and the awe and the
stunning nature of who God is. It’s only but the outskirts of
his ways. Or as Job goes on to say, oh,
how small a whisper we hear of him. We can’t in our minds, we
can’t even with our ears or with our eyes or with our hearts begin
to understand all that God is, all that God does and all that
God will do. We can’t begin to fathom it and
process it and to take it all in. We have only seen the outskirts
of God and it overwhelms us. We have only begun to hear a
small whisper of him. Job goes on to say, the thunder
of his power, who can understand? Well, God, by his spirit and
by his word, reveals to us these things about who God is and what
God has done. And Paul will tell us in Corinthians,
what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard and what no heart
has imagined, God has prepared for us. prepared for those of
us who love him. We look for his appearing, we
look for his heavenly glory. And here Isaiah gets a glimpse
of it. We get a little glimpse of it. He got an eyeful. If you need encouragement, if
this world has you down, if you begin to think, oh, this culture
is too dark, this world is too rotten, this culture, this society
is unchurched, unchristian, unbelieving, not worshiping, Well, it is worshiping
just the wrong things, but this suppressing the truth of God
culture has got you down. Or perhaps you’re Isaiah headed
into a really rough ministry. Or you’re John on the Isle of
Patmos. Or perhaps you’re Saul. in the midst of a world that
hates him, his Jewish fathers and brothers, but the Roman world
to whom he goes and preach. They hate him, they chase him,
they stone him, they pursue him, they beat him, they revile him,
they reject him. Well, God gives these a glimpse
of his glory. He gives these a glimpse of his
goodness and his grace and a glimpse of God And for us, it happens
every Sunday. It happens every Lord’s Day.
For them, they got caught up into the heavens or they saw
a vision or they saw into the end times. John on the Isle of
Patmos, Isaiah here in Jerusalem at the temple, Elijah in the
cleft of the rock, Moses on the mountain of the Lord, Saul on
the road to Damascus and Paul. somewhere some way is it gets
caught up into heaven. They see the throne of God. They
see the beauty of God. They see the authority of God.
They see all that God is, does, and will do. And they see the
revelation of the triune God and it encourages them. And like
Job says, though, they’ve seen, but the outskirts they’ve seen
or heard, but a whisper of all that he is, but doesn’t it encourage
us? Doesn’t it fortify us? Doesn’t
it give us the strength to carry on in hardship when we get a
glimpse of God, his glory, his power, his majesty, and we get
a glimpse into the heavenlies of the reality that’s true. Yeah,
we get the realities on this earth. It’s bad news. It’s not
good. This world is passing away. This
world is fading away. This world is, under the curses
of sin and death and Satan and hardship. But we get a glimpse
into heaven where everything is perfect. Everything is glorious. Everything is good, right, true,
straight, tried, true, tested, can never fail. And we do get
to go there one day, but we can be overwhelmed by this world.
And when God reveals himself, And when he reveals his holiness,
and there’s plenty of scripture to tell us about these things,
Revelation four, Revelation five, many other places we can go to,
and we can catch a glimpse of, but the outskirts of God. Well,
notice in Isaiah six, when Isaiah is in the throne room of God,
there’s these, These beings, these angels, and they’ve got
six wings. With two, they fly. With two, they cover their feet.
And with two, they cover their eyes. And it seemed to say they
had, at least one of them has a hand to go get the tongs and
to get the hot coal off the altar to touch Isaiah’s lips. But these
covered beings can’t handle the overwhelming presence of God.
They cover their eyes. They cover their feet. perhaps
so they don’t see and have their eyes burned out of their sockets
or so. Their body is not shocked to
death or something of that nature because of the awesome majesty
and holiness of God. And it’s interesting too, we
would probably look at these creatures and make much of them,
but what’s really made most of it’s God himself. It’s the presence
and power of God. Have you ever been to church
and walked out and said, you know, we sang a little too much
about God today. I wish we had sung about ourselves. Wish we had sung about felt needs.
Wish we had sung about my emotions, my feelings, my sorrows. I wish
we had sung about my hurts. You know, we sang about God and
he’s boring. That’s what gives us fuel and
energy and strength because we look for God. He is ultimate.
He is everything. And our feelings, our fads and
all those things will fade away and they will not get us through
life. But what will get us through life is a grand picture of God. And our passage tells us that
the whole earth, not just the temple, but the whole earth is
full of his glory. We’ve been talking on Wednesday
night about the tabernacle. We’ve been talking about how
it’s the place where God comes down and dwells with his people.
And he’s already on earth in, you know, it’s all around us.
The Psalm 19 tells us the heavens above declare the glory of God.
The sky above proclaims his handiwork. All creation sort of hollers
out and preaches. There is a God, there is a God,
there’s a God. Look and see, you can see what he’s like. But ultimately in Jesus, The
Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And you can’t run,
you can’t escape, you can’t hide from the presence of God. And notice what these creatures
do. They sing. They sing, holy, holy, holy is
the Lord God Almighty who was and is. He’s the Holy One of
Israel. And you know, we live in a world
that displays God, his character and his actions, his qualities,
all through creation and people by nature, they suppress that
knowledge. They say, nope, he doesn’t exist.
Even this week with the wonderful eclipse. Nah, that’s just an
act of nature. That’s just the alignment of
the stars. That’s just the world spinning and the planets doing
their thing. Well, who made them? Who does the turning? Who purposed
these lights? And so people’s view, because
of their sin, their view of God is obscured. They love darkness. They love their sin nature and
they put away the knowledge of God. But by faith, we who believe,
we turn to the scriptures. We turn to knowing God and delighting
in God. Though we don’t love him as we
ought, we don’t know him as we ought, Struggle with making idols. We struggle with fashioning a
God to our liking. But thank the Lord that over
time he sharpens us, he cleans us up and we see God and we want
to know him more and more. We want to think, as John Piper
would say, we want to go hard after him. We want to not prefer
darkness and ignorance, but we want to prefer the knowledge
and worship of God. Go back to what we were thinking
about in worship. We bump into God’s holiness. We who are unholy,
we bump into God’s holiness and it utterly humiliates us. It
takes us down, not just a notch or two, it takes us down to our
knees. We have a clear picture of who
God is, but we also have an x-ray into our heart. Something I read
this week said that anytime you see the people of God and the
presence of God, it’s almost like they’re in an x-ray machine.
They’re in an MRI machine. Their head is being scanned.
Their heart is being scanned. And you know, you go in the doctor’s
office and they can put it up on the TV screen. This is what’s
wrong with you. This is what’s wrong with your
head. This is what’s wrong with your heart. And anytime we come
into the presence of God, particularly we get under the word of God,
which is sharper than a two-edged sword, Hebrews tells us, it gets
down into the joints. It gets down into the mirror
and nobody can hide what they are from God. He’s going to show
you your sin. He’s going to convict you of
your sin. He’s going to lead you to greener pastures, but
it cuts and it hurts and it’s painful. Or in this passage,
it burns. And we ought to be like the tax
collector, not the publican who says, God, you’re lucky to have
me, but we ought to be like the tax collector who stands far
off and beats his chest. God be merciful to me, a sinner. You know, we have remaining sin
in us. We have the flesh in us and we’re God to let it loose
in his providence. Were we to be unguarded and neglect
our habits of grace, we could have an outbreak of sin in our
lives like David did. And like Peter, we could deny
our Lord. We could, wreak havoc in our
kingdom and in our lives. And notice Isaiah’s words, I
am undone. Woe to me, I’m undone. He has
one of those dark nights of the soul moments where he, before
the beauty and majesty and holiness of God, sees what he is. That
sense of dread comes over him, that sense of woe comes over
him. And you know what God says in this passage that I think
is so wonderful? That’s the person I can use. That’s the person
I can send. We think about Jesus as our great
high priest, as one who can sympathize us because he’s like us in every
way. And perhaps you’ve been through some hard things in the
Christian life. You’re the one God can use because you’ve been
brought low. You’ve been humbled. You’ve seen
your sin. You’ve seen what the flesh and remaining sin and what
giving in can do. But you’ve tasted God’s mercy,
his kindness and his grace. And that’s who God can use. You
know, Wednesday night, we’ve been thinking through the tabernacle.
We’ve been thinking through the altars and the basins and the
utensils. And well, here they are. It’s
the day of atonement. Isaiah is in the temple. He’s
in the presence of God. And when he pronounces this woe
on himself, this curse on himself, I’m undone. He’s seen the x-ray
into his life. He’s had the MRI of his heart.
and he pronounces his own sin, God provides atonement. The angel
takes the tongs, he takes a hot coal that would have been on
the altar on the day of atonement, and he comes and he singes the
very part of his body that he says is unclean, it’s my lips.
And it’s the very thing God will use as he prepares to call Isaiah
into ministry. He’s going to atone for his lips’
sin. He’ll atone for the rest of his
sin, of course, but that sin will be covered You can imagine
Isaiah as he speaks in the rest of his ministry, you know, he
needs chapstick, right? He needs a little Vaseline because
that skin is burnt. He needs an aloe plant, you know,
like you keep in your kitchen, you get burned on the hot stove
or you touch a pan coming out of the oven, you get a little
aloe and rub it on. And isn’t it often when we are
smarting from our sin, we’re the most useful to God. It’s
when we’re in prosperity that we’re most useless. Hey, look
at me. I’ve got the world by the tail.
I’m living it up. The wind is in my sails. We need
God to humble us. And that’s why we come to church
and get a glimpse of God. Well, his need is met and God
issues a call. Who will go for me? Who will
go and speak on behalf? And he says, here I am, send
me. You know, it’s wonderful that
we see gifted even extraordinarily gifted people in this world.
We got our TV preachers we love. We got our theologians we love.
You know, we have some of our own heroes in the reformed faith
who, you know, they produce these videos and we watch them. We
go to their conferences. We love to hear what they have
to say. And our world needs to be careful, our church world,
because we can get caught up in extraordinary gifts. But what
about the quiet little church in a quiet corner of the world
where God’s raised up, well, somebody like David, a little
ruddy guy, who has a heart for the Lord, and that’s Isaiah. He’s called and sent. When I
was in college, well, Christian school, there were a lot of people
who thought they were gonna be missionaries, and it was really exciting. You
know, you grow up in church, you love Jesus, you go to youth
group, and what does every good Christian do? Well, they don’t
go into business, because that’s secular, right? Maybe you go
into teaching, because that’s a servant profession, but every
good Christian, I’m sort of speaking tongue-in-cheek, needs to go
on the mission field. They need to do something for
Jesus. They have a very low view of the doctrine of vocation.
Maybe they should read a little Martin Luther, but their eyes get bright. They get a twinkle in their eye
and they say, you know, if I can just go on the mission field, if I
can just do this, this and this, and they said, Christian ministry,
woo hoo, that’s going to be so fun. Well, I can remember when
I got accepted to seminary and then when I got out of seminary
and graduated and was called and ordained, I think every last
person in my family shed tears because it’s not easy. And we
see that with Isaiah here. You go tell people about me. They’re going to hear, but they’re
not going to understand. They’re going to see, but they’re
not going to perceive. They’re going to have calloused hearts. Boy,
what fun Christian ministry is now. They’re going to have dull
ears. They’re going to have closed
eyes and they will hear the gospel, but they will not turn. They
will refuse to be healed. Unlike Isaiah, who before the
majesty and presence of God says, I’m unclean, I’m a sinner. You
know, and it’s, it’s hard today to be a minister. It’s hard today
to be a Christian. I was talking with another minister
several years ago and he left a small town for a bigger town.
And I said, why’d you leave the small town? and come to a bigger
town, to a bigger church with headaches. And I was looking
for something godly and something spiritual, like, well, I sense
the burden to come and speak to these people, preach to these
people. And you know what he said, which was rather sad? He
said, I couldn’t get good coffee and bagel in the small town I
lived in. It was almost like he was saying, I wanna live near
a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. And very sadly, that’s the sense
you get from people today who are in ministry. But do they
have a heart for the darkness? Do they have a heart for the
scales that are over people’s eyes? Do they have a heart for
those that need to be reached for the sake of the gospel? Isaiah
is going to speak here in the last part of chapter six of a
coming destruction. We all know it’s Babylon. We
all know that Israel is going to fall apart and they’re going
to be hauled off, carried off. The city burned, the gates destroyed.
You know, we’ve studied Ezra and Nehemiah, how it all got
rebuilt a little while later. But he’s going to speak about
how, after all the trees are cut down, there’s going to be
a stump. The Bible tells us the stump of the shoot of Jesse.
And from that stump will come the Messiah. Back at Christmas,
my neighbors had their bushes trimmed and they were my back
privacy to block the headlights from the traffic behind our house.
They were also privacy where, you know, the kids could play
basketball without any, you know, body looking at them. Well, they
cut all the bushes back and they were just these stalks. And I
knew in my heart, I believed it, I had faith. And I fertilized
my neighbor’s bushes in the night. I really did. I’ve done it twice. With spring coming, guess what?
There’s little green shoots coming out of these old, dark, ugly
stalks. and with the word and with the
spirit and with an awakening and with reformation and being
a small, strong, serious, simple, God-centered, Christ-honoring
church. We can, I think, begin to see
through scripture and theology and the work of the spirit, we
can begin to see the majesty of God, or as Job says, the outskirts
of his ways, sneaking out of our building through the windows
of light, or from the steeple that rises into the spire, and
even from every one of us as God is at work in our lives.
And that ought to give us really great hope. As the majesty of
God, the realities of heaven become real to us, and maybe
in some small way, it becomes evident to the watching world.
Let’s put our faith there, and let’s put our eggs in that basket
and see what God will do. Pray with me. Lord, we give you
thanks that the reality of who you are, what you’ve done, what
you’ve promised to do, the reality of the firm and fixed things
in heaven, the final things of history, we know them, and we
put our faith, our hope, our trust in you and in these things,
because you’ve said they are so, you’ve said they will come
true, and this gives us great confidence, great strength, and
great energy to be your servants, to be your children, upside down
world, a topsy turvy culture. Help us never to lose sight of
what is good, right and true, what is straight, what is pure
and help us to live with quick footsteps in this
world, marching to heaven, not getting lured and enticed and
trapped and tricked into the things of vanity fair, but help
us to keep our eyes on heaven’s gate, our eyes on Jesus, our
savior, and to keep our feet on that straight path that goes
through the narrow gate, but help us to be of some good to
others, because we’ve seen the risen Christ, we worship the
risen Christ, and we want to speak of him often. Hear us,
help us, and bless us as we go in your grace. We pray in Jesus’
name, amen.