Last week we looked at how Jesus recharged the batteries of His disciples as their walk with Him was becoming longer and more wearisome. We saw that after the taxing events of Mark Chapter 8, He took them up a mountain and showed them His glory. This was the glory He had possessed in eternity past and possesses in eternity future, but had just laid it aside for a time to come and willingly lay down His life for us. Not only did these men bask in the revealed glory of Jesus, but they also had a reassured understanding of who Jesus truly was — His true authority, and His absolute trustworthiness because He was God in the flesh. They also saw that the Law of Moses and all the writings of the Prophets pointed to Jesus as well. This is how Jesus encouraged His disciples for the difficult journey ahead that would ultimately lead to Him dying on Calvary within the next year. It was an amazing time on the mountain that day and I’m sure all of them (especially Peter) wished they could stay there forever. However, you can’t stay on the mountain tops with Jesus when there is work to be done in the valley. As followers of Jesus, we learned how we can be recharged as well. We saw how we can use God’s Word as well as songs of praise to stand in awe of the glory and majesty of Jesus. We also looked at how we can see that all the events in our lives point to Jesus and can be encouraged. If you remember I also said that last week's sermon wasn’t over, but will continue it this week and we will do just that. Last week we learned how Jesus encourages us through His presence, majesty, and glory. This week we are going to see how those encounters should motivate us before we come off the mountain and get to work. For the first part of this sermon we looked at the first handful of verses of Mark 9. While we will reference that text again this morning, I want to spend the majority of our time looking at someone else's interaction with the Glory of God and how it motivated them and see how it should motivate us as well. If you have your Bibles, turn with me to the Old Testament book of Isaiah and we will be in the first part of chapter 6 this morning. We will start by briefly revisiting the glory of God revealed to us.
The Glory of God Awakens Us. - Isaiah 6:1-4
It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple. Attending him were mighty seraphim, each having six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. They were calling out to each other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies! The whole earth is filled with his glory!” Their voices shook the Temple to its foundations, and the entire building was filled with smoke.
King Uzziah was a very special king to Judah. He was a King that had sought the Lord when He took the throne at the age of 16 and reigned for 52 years, being the longest ruling King in Judah’s history. As long as he sought the Lord the Lord blessed Judah. Through his reign the military grew in might, the safety of Judah grew, agriculture flourished, and technology grew. He was a visionary, a strategist, and an administrator who saw much success, but with his success came pride and that pride led to his downfall. Nevertheless, the nation was now in peril because there was uncertainty in their leaders, for their stability was gone, and historically transitions of leadership in Judah brought all sorts of other problems with it. It would have been a very difficult time in the life of Israel and in the life of Isaiah as well. Instead of looking at the circumstances that surrounded him — God had Isaiah look up at Him. Despite the nation's king leaving his throne, God was still on His. He was still seated there above all others. He had not slipped off, and no one had overthrown Him. Heaven’s viewpoint had not changed. Isaiah paints us a magnificent picture of what he saw around the throne of God. This picture shows us God’s unrivaled authority and His supremacy. I want to briefly mention just a few things about what Isaiah describes here before we move on. First the Seraphim that attended to God had to cover themselves in His presence. We really don’t know what these creatures are. The entire word “Seraphim” is only used here in all of Scripture. They could be a type of angel. They could be other creatures, or something we have never experienced or been told about. We may not know all the details, but what we do know is that they were chosen by God to minister and serve Him. As incredible as these Seraphim were, they still had to cover themselves to hide from the direct glory of God. These creatures around the throne give us a wonderful reminder about the One who sits on the throne. In his book, "Knowledge of the Holy”, A. W. Tozer said, “We must not think of God as the highest in an ascending order of beings, starting with the single cell, and going on up from the fish to the bird to the animal to man to angel to cherub to God. God is as high above an archangel as above a caterpillar, for the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is but finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite.” So no matter what these creatures are they are still created beings and the Creator is infinitely greater than them. I also want you to see because they have seen the glory of God, they encourage each other to worship, this is the same thing we see the psalmist say in Psalm 34:3, “Come, let us tell of the Lord’s greatness; let us exalt His name together.” We should be encouraging each other as we have a renewed experience and sense of the glory and the majesty of Jesus Christ as well. Also notice Seraphim's choice of song. They could have sung anything about God and sung it in truth. They could have flown around singing, “Love, Love, Love”, “Justice, Justice, Justice”, or “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”. They could have come up with a setlist that shuffled through all the hits for all eternity, but because of their exposure to the glory of God they sang one thing, “Holy, Holy, Holy”. While we don’t have time to dive deep into that at this time, I just want to mention it because it will help to set the groundwork for what happens next in this passage. The last thing I want you to notice is in the Seraphims song they are proclaiming the truth that, “the whole earth is filled with God’s glory”. This is the same thing that Paul said about the earth in Romans 1:20. In Paul’s writings, by the time he gets to verse 25, he tells us that people are not always moved by the glory of God. They exchange the truth of what creation reveals in creation for a lie and they worship the creation instead of the creator. That’s not what happened to Isaiah. Isaiah let the glory of God not only recharge him in a moment of national and personal sorrow, but he lets it motivate him to action. This motivation probably does not start the way you think it might.
The Glory of God Undoes Us. - Isaiah 6:5-7
Then I said, “It’s all over! I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among people with filthy lips. Yet I have seen the King, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.” Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, “See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven.”
For whatever reason there are just some songs in our culture that cause everyone just to stop what they are doing and sing along. I’m sure you have probably experienced this at a sporting event when the likes of “Sweet Caroline” comes over the loudspeaker and everyone shouts “Ba-Ba-Ba”. There are just some songs that you can’t help but sing along to. That wasn’t the case with Isaiah in the throne room. He didn’t join in singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy”. Instead he did quite the opposite. He sang another song all together, “Unworthy, Unworthy, Unworthy”. This is what having a renewed understanding and experience of the glory of God will do to us. It exposes the darkness of our sins, because the light of His holiness has revealed them to us. John 3:20-21 tells us that “All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed.” That is what happened to Isaiah here and something that has to happen to us. We can’t hide from the light of God, for we desperately need it to be recharged for our mission ahead. When we do come into the light to be recharged we have to deal with what it exposes. A true vision of God’s holiness is not just an experience that feels good. It always results in a personal conviction of our sins. This is why Isaiah keeps using the pronoun “I”. He is not trying to sidestep the issue that God’s glory brought to light or blame someone else. He knows it is him and him alone that sinned and he is convicted of those sins. Not only is it a personal conviction of sin but it’s also a specific conviction. Isaiah proclaims that “I have filthy lips” after he confesses he is a sinner in general. Jesus said in Matthew 12:34-35 that a filthy mouth comes from a filthy heart. Isaiah evidently knew that was his specific sin he was struggling with — I’m sure among others. It’s not a coincidence that he was tempted with what he would struggle with most. Our enemy knows our weaknesses better than we do and loves to exploit them. For Saul it was disobedience, for David it was lust, for Peter it was self-confidence, and for Martha it was misplaced priorities. That list could go on and on but we need to understand that Satan knew every one of them and laid out temptations for them to fall into. If he knew those heroes of the faith's weaknesses and used them to cause them to stumble, you better believe he knows yours as well and will attack. We have to continually come into the presence of God and let His glory illuminate our sin. We need the Holy Spirit to call it out so we can deal with it properly. Malachi 3:2a asks “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears? For he will be like a blazing fire that refines metal”. The Psalmist in Psalm 24:2-3 answers “Who shall stand in his holy place? He hath clean hands and a pure heart”. Isaiah knew this and that he should not be standing there because his impure lips were caused from an impure heart. At his confession, God intervened and through the fire on the altar his sin was forgiven and he was cleansed. As followers of Jesus we have the same promise as well. 1 John 1:9 tells us “But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” When we have a renewed understanding of the glory and majesty of Jesus we will have a conviction of our sins. When we are convicted of our sins, we must confess them and repent of them. When we confess sins to Jesus we are cleaned and forgiven. It’s at this point that we are now prepared to be moved to action.
The Glory of God Moves Us. - Isaiah 6:8
Then I heard the Lord asking, “Whom should I send as a messenger to these people? Who will go for us?” I said, “Here I am. Send me.”
We have spoken often of the mission of our Master as followers of Jesus. It is to make disciples of Jesus who make other disciples as given to us by Jesus in Matthew 28, but the specifics of that call can look very different. For example, a follower of Jesus who works on the streets in downtown Chicago to make disciples will have a very different ministry than someone who does children's programming in a studio. The mission is always the same but the method can vary. Sometimes we can get a little selfish and too picky when it comes to carrying out our mission. It’s got to be just right before we even consider volunteering or starting a ministry that is needed. Here Isaiah shows us that’s not the right attitude to have. The Lord speaks and I don't want to focus on what He said, but rather I want to focus on what He didn’t say. When God gave a call He didn’t give any details on what would be involved. He didn’t give a destination that the messenger would reach. He didn’t give a duration for the ministry. He gave no promise of success and He gave no guarantee of safety while it was being carried out. All the Lord said was “Whom should I send?”. Isaiah spoke up immediately, and he didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t need more information, for all he knew was that there was a need that the Lord needed to fill and instead of coming up with an excuse to why he couldn’t do it, he simply thought, “Why not me?”. What an attitude! can you imagine what would happen if we had more people like this? When it comes to being a follower of Jesus, when it comes to the attitude that Isaiah had versus the ones we struggle with, we will see that most of the time when we follow Him, we are not truly following Him with the zeal that is required. We are rather following our own selfish preferences with Jesus as a background character. How does one fix this? We have to go through the process we see Isaiah go through here. We have to understand and have a new view of the glory of God. As we bask in His glory we are going to have to let His light shine into all the dark corners of our lives — of our minds, of our habits, of our boxes that we have compartmentalized in our lives and expose the sin that is found there in. When we experience conviction of those sins, we have to confess them to God and repent of them, we then have to be willing to say, “I’m a follower of Jesus, wherever he leads I will follow, even if it leads me to the valley of death”. This goes back to Jesus' call to all who want to follow Him, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me”. Once we are willing to do what is required of us, we will be ready to come off the mountain and get to work. Isaiah was ready and the disciples were also ready too for some very difficult work for the Kingdom all because of how they had been prepared and recharged for it. Jesus is still calling us to go and make disciples. How many of us are ready to truly say, “Here I am Lord, send me!”
