1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple
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5 "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
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8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"
And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah6:1-8
Selwyn Hughes quotes John White in this chapter:
"It is a terrible thing to live as a Christian and yet to live independently of the life offered to us in Christ, to relegate God to irrelevance."
Craig Groeschel (now the pastor of one of the most dynamic church movements in the world) wrote a whole book about discovering that he was living as a "Christian Atheist." He called himself a Christian and worked as a pastor but he was functionally an atheist. Fortunately things have changed in his life.
Selwyn Hughes says that we need an "earthquake of the soul"
It happened to Isaiah:
Disillusioned and frightened by the Socio-Political situation of the day, he went to the temple and got much more than he bargained for:
1. A God who was bigger, holier and closer than his preconceptions. The God he met in the temple was on the throne, was attended by angelic powers and emanated glorious dazzling awe-inspiring Holiness: Pure unadulterated goodness.
2. Isaiah recognised his own smallness. He realised the inadequacy of his own schemes, credentials and plans. He was struck with his failure to come close to what God had made him to be and his complicity in the brokenness of society.
3. He made himself whole-heartedly available to do God's work.
Unusually this "call" of Isaiah does not come in ch.1 but ch.6 and while it may be retrospective, it does give one a feel that maybe this is not a once-off but an ongoing thing.
His soul-quake(s) gave the Old Testament some of the most beautiful promises.
Quake-proof buildings are a good thing - quake-proof souls are not.
Hope you have a soul-quake sometime this weekend!
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
