We Worship

Isaiah 12

Worship is a life transforming activity.  And because Scripture tells us that we become like what we worship, we must be deliberate and attentive to whom and what we worship.  If we are careful and honest when we search out the things we worship, we may discover the answer is not as clear as we would like.  Our attentions are usually divided among many things and people each vying for our attention and worship; each doing its part to turn us into copies of itself.

The worship of idols and false gods diminishes and shrivels our souls and turns us into shadowy reflections of lifeless things while the worship of the Beautiful Creator is part of the process of being transformed into the image of the Son.  As Paul puts it, when God does the work of transformation we are changed from glory to glory.

In this chapter Isaiah erupts in a psalm of worship. He not only reminds us of our great God and all he has done, he engages us in worship.  Here we catch a glimpse of what full-blooded worship feels like.  We hear the voices of the people of God lift up the God they adore.  Here we engage with Isaiah and the throngs of thousands upon thousands of the redeemed.  And we begin by giving thanks.

The role and power of thanksgiving cannot be underemphasized in the life of the disciple.  In fact, a thankless disciple is a person who simply has not come in contact with their God.  At the very least, the habit of thanksgiving turns us out of ourselves and puts our minds and hearts on the great things of God.  When we are most consumed with ourselves – either through pride or anxiety – is when our hearts are darkest.  Thanksgiving is light.  It is the eternal light of a Savior who is always great and good.

The thing Isaiah hears the people of God giving thanks for is the triumph of God’s grace.  They are fully aware that God was angry at their sin and rebellion and they deserved his wrath.  Consequently, they are overjoyed that this same God turned away from wrath and toward comfort.  It turns out that in my sin I deserve the full weight of God’s wrath, but in his grace the full force of his anger fell on my Substitute instead.  The saved are eternally grateful for the exchange of wrath for comfort at the cross.

The worshiper knows the difference between trust and fear.  In fear there is no stability or strength, but in trust the Lord is known as both strength and song.  Those who trust in the Lord alone experience his power and care in unique ways, and their worship overflows in song.  The disciple should never devalue the benefit of singing praises to God!  Music touches us mind, soul, and body, and is an activity of eternity (Rev 5).  Could it be that when we sing praises to our Lord there is a taste of heaven on our lips?

And worship helps transform us into people who glorify and proclaim.  We lift him up because he is worthy to be praised – in all seasons of life and all circumstances I face, God remains great.  And though our praises do not make him greater than he already is, for God cannot be made greater, our praises and lives of worship may make him greater in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Engage in worship of the one and only God, and you will begin to find the joy of people who live in the kingdom of the great and glorious One.

A Great God Saves Sinners

Isaiah 1:1-9

God sends us prophets so we can see things from his point of view.  This is more important than we might realize as we tend to get wrapped up in the ways we view things.  It is easy for us to understand our times through what is trendy to believe, what our favorite columnists or political pundits believe, or what the wind blows in under the guise of conventional wisdom.  In short, we tend not to see things through God’s eyes.  So he sends us prophets.  Their words are God’s words to us in our times so we can have our eyes opened to the way things really are.  And the view from there is not always pretty.

Isaiah begins with a lament.  “Ah,” he says, “sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity.” It is true that prophets were not always the most popular of people.  They were curmudgeons.  You typically did not want to hear what they had to say, but the more we hear the words of the prophets, the more we hear the sound of weeping.  The rebellion of God’s people broke their hearts.  They said the things they said, not because they were spiteful nags, but because they were compelled by the word of God and their love for their people.  I have no doubt that Isaiah would have said something different if the truth about God’s people was different.  But as it as it stood, they needed to hear some difficult things.

They were like a body broken out with disease from head to toe.  The boils were obvious, their heart was weak, and the wounds were raw.  Their sins were no longer hidden or hideable – they were out there for everyone to see.  A disease under the skin might be masked for a while, but once the boils begin to grow and the wounds begin to fester, the problem becomes clear to anyone who has eyes.  Except, it seems, to the diseased.

God’s people have not bandaged their wounds, lanced the boils or applied ointment: “they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil” (vs. 6).  In short, they are riddled with disease and have refused the treatment – they are full of sin but have forsaken the God who heals them.  They are a beaten and bruised boxer who thinks he is victorious.  They are covered with festering boils and believe they are healthy.  Their lives have become ugly and they believe they are beautiful.

This is the most powerful deception of sin.  We begin to consider sin itself to be righteousness, we take disease to be health, we begin to believe that wrong is actually right.  And in the end, we will begin to refuse the category or sin altogether.  Sin’s greatest magic trick is its disappearing act.  It does its damage; it ravages the soul, and convinces us that it was never really here.

The people of God need to see these things.  We cannot progress into a meaningful understanding of God or relationship with him until we understand what sin does to our souls.  Once we grasp this reality, we have the option of leaving the wounds open and festering, or turning to a great and gracious God.  Isaiah tells us that God has left us a remnant; fur us, it is an opportunity.  God’s grace has left a way of forgiveness and healing where we deserved to be destroyed.  We deserve what Sodom and Gomorrah got.  Their sin and rebellion led to utter destruction.  Will ours?

God decided to save sinners, so he has extended his healing grace.  May we see what God sees, and may we have the wisdom and humility to let him bandage the wounds of our sins and bring the healing only he can give.

A God Greater Than Sin

1 John 3:4-5

Like all the early Christians, John’s first readers were facing false teaching that threatened to separate them from their relationship with each other and with Christ.  While there are times when John tells us exactly what the false teachers were saying, there are times when we are required to infer the false teaching from the correction John gives.  We learn the disease by reading the prescription labels.  It seems to be the case that John’s congregation was being tempted to take sin too lightly, to view it with a frightening level of indifference, to see sin as inconsequential to their lives with Christ.

To be sure, this is one way of dealing with the unremitting reality of our own brokenness.  If we are able to deny sin itself, justify any behavior we want, or even claim a certain kind of perfection, we are able (we think) to side-step the problem sin presents.  But this is not John’s solution.  His is radically different from the temptation to suppress the sinfulness of sin.  Instead, the closer we look at the depth and power of sin and all of its consequences in our lives the more we learn that God as greater than all of that.  The God who forgives does not forgive small and inconsequential things, He forgives the very thing that becomes our ruination.  Disciples of Jesus Christ do not live forgiven lives because they have diminished sin, but because God has done something about all their sin.

To remedy the false teaching John tells his readers that all “sin is lawlessness.”  Everything that is contrary to the will and character of God is a breaking of His law.  John does not make distinctions between the large, visible sins and the small or private sins implying that only the ‘big’ acts of rebellion are lawless while the others are not.  All that goes against God’s law is sin and all sin is lawlessness – every inclination, every action.

John, however, does not leave us there.  Christ “appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.”  John knows our lives are riddled with brokenness and that Christ came to fix that problem.  In fact, knowing the extent of sin is our doorway into understanding why Christ came.  If John’ s readers were denying their sinfulness, were they changing the reason why Christ came?  If I have decided that I no longer suffer the ravages of sin, who then does Christ become?  It is a short path from the softening of sin to Christ being reduced from a Savior to a moral example or a great human teacher.  Changing my need changes my savior.

But, if John’s congregation holds to the teaching they have heard from the beginning about their need and their true Savior, then both the problem is rightly understood and the remedy is rightly accepted.  Jesus Christ came to take away sins, not to be listed among some of the greatest philosophers or teachers in history.  And the only way to get to that saving God is to take sin seriously.

The lighter we take sin the smaller and more unnecessary God becomes to us.  But if we look unflinchingly at the power and ubiquity of sin and turn to the only One who can cure us, God becomes Lord and Savior of our lives.

A Whale-Sized Grace

Jonah 1:17

When we think about the story of Jonah, we usually think of one thing – a big fish. In all of our children’s Bibles, for example, the story is told through the lens of the fish. And even though Jonah’s story is short, in actuality, the fish only has three verses dedicated to it. There is much more to Jonah’s struggle with God than a whale’s gullet, but his three days and nights in that submarine gastronomic miracle focused the prophet. When we pay attention to the role of the fish in Jonah’s life, we learn quickly what it really is – the grace of God.

“And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (1:17)

God did this to Jonah. It wasn’t a strange or lucky coincidence; it was a deliberate action on God’s behalf. God “appointed” -- or called, or arranged, or caused -- this fish to show up at this place at this time to have his prophet for breakfast. Jonah even sees this pitch-black stomach for what it is, “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me” (vs. 3). It was God’s doing, and Jonah is OK with that.

God put Jonah in the fish’s belly to get him back on the right track – to restore a right relationship between himself and his rebellious child. The fish was God’s means of getting hold of his prophet’s heart and mind again, and because it is Jonah’s way back to God, it is God’s grace. It is dark and dank and putrid, but it is God’s grace. It is odd and unique (Jonah must have uttered that common prayer, “Why me?” while sliding down the throat), but it is God’s grace. It is literally the darkest, deepest, and loneliest pit a human could be in, but it is God’s grace. It strips Jonah (literally and figuratively) of every earthly thing that distracts him from his God, but it is God’s grace.

Any act of God that is intended to bring me back to him is an act of grace and mercy. Even this is God’s love. When we think about receiving the goodness and grace of God, we normally think about, and certainly want, the nice stuff. We long for and seek for God’s niceness to us. And to be sure, there are seasons of life full of blessedness in our lives with God and with others. But there are other seasons when God does different kinds of things with his people.

When we look for the grace of God, are we ready for it to swallow us?

When it does, we can now turn to a formerly rebellious prophet who prays with the faithful who have travelled this path before him. We now learn from Jonah a positive lesson we have yet to learn – what it means to live with God in the darkest places in our lives.

“When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple....But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” (vs. 7, 9)

When the darkness closes in and when our life faints away, we can now look to and pray with Jonah. “Lord, I thank you! I will sacrifice everything for you, and give you everything I am and everything I have. Salvation belongs to my Lord!”

Restore! Gal 6:1-5

Galatians 6:1-5

It has been said that people in our world love Jesus but can’t stand the church. Several books have been dedicated to this recently, including such titles as, “I Love Jesus: I Hate the Church,” and “Damage Control: How to Stop Making Jesus Look Bad.” When people read about or hear about Jesus, they recognize something there that they find attractive and even beautiful. True, the deeper their understanding of Jesus goes, the more they should understand their need for repentance, but there is something beautiful about Jesus nonetheless. On the other hand, their interactions with Christians have turned them off to Church and commitment to Christ. They like what they see in Jesus, but they know too many Christians.

In all reality, we will never be perfect. The church is not a collection of jewels of perfection, it is a collection of people healing and growing in Christ. But we are too often guilty of eating our young and killing our wounded. Paul goes to great lengths at the end of Galatians to describe a different kind of life that is available to the believer. God’s kind of life at work in his people is more healing than it is wounding, it puts together more than it tears apart, it restores more than it destroys.

Paul begins this application of God’s life by describing someone in one of the most vulnerable positions possible.

“Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” (vs. 1)

What was once private has become public. What someone has tried hard to conceal has become known. In many ways, this person is now at the mercy of those who know their secret. Thus, Paul calls on the most mature among us. He wants those who are literally “spirit-led” to oversee the management of this brother or sister. And what he says next should come as a kind of thunder clap.

Our natural inclination when someone falls is to mock or shun. Whether to their face of behind it, we are accustomed to looking down on someone, or proclaiming that we are too smart for their too-obvious and atrocious error. We are more likely to gossip about them and build fictional scenarios of their past and evil path that led them to their exposure. We are even more likely to take our new-found position of moral power to control and manipulate. So the thunderous command from Paul is, Restore!

And we do so gently, even meekly. We are to keep diligent regarding our own potential failures and our own brokenness. If we think more of ourselves – if we consider ourselves above the fray or morally superior – we deceive ourselves. If we are not clear about our own frailty, we are lying to ourselves. If, however, I have an honest assessment of how much I need God’s constant forgiveness and grace, we will react in a Christ-like way when a brother or sister is caught. Instead of derision we will react in humility before God and grace toward the fallen.

What do you see when you see a broken soul—any broken soul? What do you see when you see a brother or sister in Christ caught in sin? What do you see when you watch the world tumble along caught in its own sin? Do you see junk? Do you see a wasteland of useless humanity? Do you see a member of your congregation that needs to go?

To be sure, restoration requires that the restored recognize their sin and need for forgiveness. But my job is to give the grace God gave me. My job is to give the kind of forgiveness that requires God’s life at work within me. If you have the opportunity to reach out to a broken and fallen human, restore!