God’s Call to Be Real – Isaiah 1 — A Christian Growth Message

Transcript

Morning everybody, I wonder if you would turn back in the Bible to the first reading, which is on children’s message through the interview, through the prayers. I feel as though the sermon this morning is going to be underlining a lot of these great things, but one of the things that Harrison did say is that he listened to me once and it didn’t help him at all. So we might look to the scriptures, ask the Lord to help.

So I have comforting news for you this morning everybody, the future of our country is in the very safe, wise and wonderful hands of God. One of the proofs that this is true, if you will believe it, is that there was a very famous vision given to Isaiah, which basically affected him completely.

And caused him to write his book completely and to impact the world completely, and that is that God gave him a vision of God on his throne, and once Isaiah had seen the greatness of God, everything in the world looked small.

And he spoke with a new fearlessness about the Holy One of Israel.

Winston Churchill was once asked what makes a good politician, and he said it is the ability to predict what will happen tomorrow, what will happen next week, next month and next year, and then to explain satisfactorily why none of it happened.

Now the prophets were much better than that by the grace of God. They not only spoke about the world in which they lived, but they also told what was coming in the future and they got their predictions right.

And Isaiah is perhaps one of the greatest of the prophets, perhaps the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, he’s been called the prince of prophets. His ministry lasted for probably 60 years. His book is the longest, 66 chapters, and there are at least 66 quotes of Isaiah in the New Testament.

So he’s a very great man for us to consider.

Hope 103.2 is proudly supported by

Now I want to ask you this question and um some of you will know the answer and some of you won’t I suspect, but why did the prophets appear in the days of the kings? Why was it that when a David came and then Solomon and all the kings that followed, there was a great succession of prophets, and the answer of course is that the kings had very great power – and if the kings were ungodly, the people became ungodly so often.

Who is going to stand up to a king and tell him to be godly?

Well it’s going to have to be somebody who God raises up a prophet with very great courage, and so the prophets were like watchdogs who barked, when the people had begun to drift from God, and of course if they were warning people about drifting from God, it was because they cared for people.

Those of you who’ve been down to Bondi Beach will know that the boys in blue drive up and down in their little jeeps, barking at people to get back into the flags, and they do it, we presume, because they want people to be safe. And so it was for the prophets. Now they were very courageous as well because a king could punish a prophet very seriously.

A tradition tells us that Isaiah for his ministry was cut in half…

There’s a reference to it in Hebrews 11, but according to tradition he was sawn in half. So God raised up very great and courageous prophets.

The first half of the book of Isaiah is mostly warning, but there’s a lot of comfort. And the second half is mostly comfort, but there’s a bit of warning.

Someone has said that the church gets particularly feeble when it only does one of the two.

So if you want this church to be unbalanced, just ask the preacher to be warning all the time, that will wear us out. Or ask the preacher to be comforting all the time, that will probably make us quite bland.

Now here’s a crucial thing to remember, and I hope you’ll remember this whenever you read the prophets of the Old Testament, they were not yelling at the world.

Isaiah was yelling at the church, his ministry was to the people of God to be the people of God. The people of Israel, now just Judah in the south because the top half had been wiped out, the people of God in the South, in Judah with Jerusalem their capital, was tiny. But Isaiah had seen the God who runs the universe.

And therefore he wasn’t having for a moment the idea that the people of God were finished or pathetic or useless.

We’re going to follow a number of passages over a number of weeks.

And today of course is chapter 1 verses 1 to 20 on page 1019, and I have two simple points. The first is what I’m going to call a sick church, verses 1 to 9, and the second is a strong medicine, which is 10 to 20.

First of all, a sick church.

We can work out from the book of Isaiah, look at chapter 1 verse 1, that he worked for quite a long time. See, his life and ministry span 4 kings. In fact, he prophesized from 740 BC to 680 BC, which is 60 years, that’s a long ministry. And in the first verses, Isaiah verse 2 calls God’s people to come to court.

It’s almost like he’s summoning them to God’s courtroom, and he first of all has two witnesses who are going to stand for the truth.

The first one is called Heaven.

And the second one is called Earth.

Isaiah is basically saying to God’s people, I have two fixed witnesses who are going to remind you that you have drifted. So heaven and earth were going to be like signposts showing how much the people had drifted.

And then you see in verse 2.

Isaiah says, speaking for God: God says, I raised up my people like children but they have rebelled against me.

He goes on to say, look, an ox knows its master, and a donkey knows where it belongs, but my people do not.

And you see here in this verse that God understands what millions of parents understand, which is that children can bring you great delight, and they can leave you completely gutted as well.

God understands the delight of children. And the pain.

Notice the words that God uses for his people in these early verses, he calls them my children, he calls them my people, he calls them a nation, and he calls them a brood, they are all hugely privileged, he has loved them, saved them, carried them, provided for them, put them into the promised land, and now they’re turning their backs on him.

Now we may not feel the weight of this because we live in a world that has turned its back on God and we easily turn our backs on God, but God feels this enormously. He stands outside the sin… we tend to swim in it.

And it really shocks him, not only does God suffer grief when God’s people are disobedient, but God’s people suffer as well. We discover in Isaiah in these early verses that they had become sick, weak, feeble.

And it seems that the nations around them were now in a perfect position to bully them and do whatever they wanted.

It’s hard to work out from verses 7 and 8 whether this is a description, you are being pestered by the nations, or whether it’s a prediction you will be pestered by the nations, but I want to remind you this morning that there is a link between sin, turning your back on God and decline.

We can see it in the world.

As somebody has said, if you throw the teacher out of the classroom, you just must expect some chaos.

The Lord Jesus is not wanted in the classroom of our country. And there’s a lot of chaos. But there’s a short link between in the Old Testament, sin and decline.

And Isaiah says, do you realise that you’ve turned your back on God and you’ve become weak? And the nations around you have become much stronger.

Please know that when you turn your back on God and reject his Word, and reject his way, your faith and your joy will decline. And your witness will probably dry up as well. Your soul will get sick. And various powers will start to overcome you.

This is one of the most profound lessons to learn in scripture, that the secret of peace and strength and security in the Christian life is not found by escaping God and finding an alternative, but it’s found in God himself. Show me the person who has decided to bow down before God and say to him, I’m gonna trust you and I’m going to obey you and I’ll show you somebody who has received a great peace and security.

Now just look at verse 9 because in the middle of the outrage of God against his people, there is this beautiful verse 9 of God’s grace. He says unless the Lord had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom and Gomorrah. Here are God’s people, you see, they’ve jumped in the bus, they’ve decided to travel as fast as they can and as far as they can, and God has stepped in and removed the petrol from the petrol tank.

Because he loves them and he doesn’t want them to go too far.

So the church, that’s God’s people in Isaiah’s day, were sick. Of course, as we know, the world rejects God, but what do we do when the church rejects God? The answer is that God takes loving initiative and raises up his voice. The prophets come in the Old Testament, the apostles come in the New Testament, the preachers come through the history of the world.

To get God’s people to come back, why?

Well, because he wants them to be joyful, and he wants to be joyful.

If you read the letters of the New Testament, you’ll know that most of the letters of the New Testament are also calling God’s people to come back to him and not fall into error or evil.

So that, my friends, is the 1st 9 verses, what we might call the sick church.

Now secondly, strong medicine.

This is where we come to a very confronting passage where God can see through the fakery of the church.

I remember once watching a prank on television which went like this:

They found some naval officers who were on leave. And they gave them bicycles. And they covered their tyres with paint. And they ask the naval officers to ride their bikes across canvases. Criss-crossing backwards and forwards, different colours. They then framed all the canvases, all the pictures. They rented an art gallery in Mayfair in London. They got an actor to come and pretend to be an art expert and a host who would show them around. They provided the champagne. Lots of guests came to see the exhibition, and this very clever actor-host walked around talking to the guests about how this has been the blue period. And this has been the yellow period and this has been the dark period and everybody was nodding and saying how wonderful this was, and the whole thing was a fake.

It was a complete fraud, and the guests who’d been invited and the whole thing was filmed, ended up being very, very angry at the way they had been tricked.

Now Isaiah tells us from chapter 1 verse 10, that religion, a display in the temple, masses of sacrifices being offered, could be completely empty.

If you had visited the temple in Isaiah’s day, you would have said something like this, wow, business is booming. These people are very religious. This is incredible. Such success in the temple.

And look at what the Lord says verse 11. You need to know it’s false.

Verse 11, this means nothing to me, says the Lord. Verse 11, it gives me no pleasure at all. In fact, verse 13, I detest it. Verse 13, it’s worthless. Verse 14, I hate it.

Shocking, isn’t it?

A big and busy church, and the Lord looks and says, there’s nothing. There’s nothing.

You see that God has emotions. But his emotions never lead him to be sinful. That’s the greatness of God. He feels grief, but he doesn’t sin.

And you can imagine people saying to Isaiah when Isaiah said these words, Isaiah, you must be crazy. I mean what are you talking about? We’re doing exactly what God asked to do. We’re putting the sacrifices on the altar, we’re doing all that we’ve been told to do, day after day, day after day, the place is booming along, you must be insane to be critical.

But Isaiah is right.

And the people who criticise would be wrong. The religion at the temple in Isaiah’s day was largely false. Jesus would say later in Mark chapter 7, these people honour me outwardly, but their hearts are a long way away.

And God knows.

So my friends I want to remind you this morning with this first opening salvo from Isaiah chapter one, that religion or church can be very wonderful. But it can also be very empty.

It’s not necessarily wrong to meet and sing and pray and hear and fellowship. But if it’s hollow, empty, false, fake, God sees right through it. And he dislikes it. Please don’t think that I’m speaking to you as if I get this right. I think clergy are in the most danger of being just professionals. Hearts far from what they’re doing and saying.

But what I’m saying to all of you is, that if you have much piety outwardly, but actually, there is a pretence, as far as God is concerned, it’s putrid.

Piety plus pretence = is putrid to God.

Jesus told us didn’t he, God’s looking for people who worship him in spirit and truth.

In other words, there must be a reality and there must be a sincerity.

To put it in another way to be pious and disobedient at the same time – stinks…

How did Isaiah know that God’s people were a long way from God vertically? Because he could see that they were neglecting one another horizontally. You see in these verses where he talks about neglecting his people, that they were basically horizontally careless, and so Isaiah says you’re vertically faulty.

In chapter 1 verse 17, we discovered that the love and care for God’s people had largely disappeared.

And we need to learn this as well, my friends, because you can talk of loving Jesus, but if you’re neglectful of his people, if you’re nasty to his people, it just doesn’t wash with God at all. You can speak very big pious things, you can post wonderful things online, but if you’re proud, bitter, it nauseates God. We can sing our hymns loftily and may God help us to do that well, but if we’re vengeful at the same time, it’s just a hypocrisy as far as God is concerned.

As one writer has said, you can see that God has a spine, a spine – He’s not a sweet meringue pie, I mean we might invent God in our brains to be just all sweet. But actually He’s the full Bible God.

And he says in verse 15, even when you offer prayers to me but you’re refusing to do my will, I’m not listening to your prayers.

To keep talking to God while determined to ignore his word is like a child saying to his parents, please give me some money, I want to buy a gun. It’s just not going to happen.

What’s being said and what’s being wanted, it needs to be under the will and the Word of God.

But just as chapter 1 verse 9 reminded us of the grace of God, you can see from verse 16 that God has an answer to this whole disaster, and the steps go like this, verse 16, I want you to wash yourself, says God, I want you to stop and I want you to learn.

Now of course we might say this to a non-Christian. We might say to a non-Christian, do you know anything about Christianity?

And we’ve had a wonderful example of that, listening to somebody who’s not been a Christian for very long but who’s obviously been absorbing and grasping sections of scripture. But of course every believer who’s here this morning, standing or sitting, who has already stopped walking away from God and has been washed and has begun to learn the word of God. We’ll find even as a believer that there are times where we must stop what we’re doing and we must go back for fresh washing, and we must go back for new learning as well.

So we need to wash in order to enter God’s family and we need to wash to renew our place in God’s family. We need to stop as we would say, walking away in order to enter God’s family, we often need to stop as a believer in God’s family.

We need to learn to love God and to love his people.

My friends, church is not a supermarket. You can’t just drop in and get your carrots. And say, well, that’s it, that’s all I wanted. The church is a family.

The very beautiful and famous words in chapter 1 verse 18, God says, dear friends, I invite you to come, let’s restore things. Though your sins are like scarlet, they’ll be as white as snow. Though your sins are like crimson, they’ll be as white as wool. We sing this, don’t we? What will wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is where we begin the Christian life and this is where we grow in the Christian life. The prophet Isaiah very simply presents the problem and the solution.

I want to close this morning with a remarkable account that I’ve just read in the last few days of somebody who faced their sickness and then took hold of the strong medicine of Christ. This is a lady called Joy Davidman, some of you will know her name. She eventually married CS Lewis. Joy Davidman was an American, she was an atheist, she was a communist, she was brilliant, she was feisty, she was utterly opposed to all talk of weakness or failure. And then her husband was continually unfaithful. And so much of her life was falling apart. And one evening she says, and she wrote this down, this famous sentence, my walls came down – and God came in. She said she was suddenly aware of the blinding presence of God. And her own, what she described as black and smudgy self.

And this is what really struck me.

She said, I got down on my knees and I admitted my arrogance. My intolerance, my prejudices, my vindictiveness, things that would have taken years to discover in good psychoanalysis. She began to read her Bible, she began to read CS Lewis, and as she read the Bible, she says the Redeemer made Himself known to me – Jesus. She then wrote to CS Lewis, she then visited CS Lewis, and she eventually married CS Lewis for too short a time before she died, but she faced the sickness of her soul and the strong medicine of Christ.

Well, Isaiah preached this in Old Testament language, and we of course read it in New Testament language, our hearts, my friends, are capable of great hardness.

My old boss in the UK said every morning I wake up I’m in spiritual reverse. And we need to remember that we have a very great saviour called the Lord Jesus who is able to wash us, so that we enter the kingdom and then wash us again and again as we walk with him.

And also we have in him someone who can change our heart. And make us real. And make us love him, and make us love his people, and love the lost.

Let’s Pray

Our dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for giving to us in this world people who speak your truth.

Prophets, apostles, pastors, evangelists, teachers, messengers, friends, witnesses, loved ones.

We thank you for what you have revealed in this portion of your Word. We pray that as a church here and across this country and across the world, you’d be pleased to help us, to turn away from all that is false, and to take hold of all that is true and wonderful. Please help us for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Subscribe to the ‘Christian Growth’ Podcast

Feature image: Canva