When We Pray | The Throne Room, The Coal, and The Dirt

It's an honor to be here with all of you.

I want to thank Josh for giving me the opportunity to preach one

last Sunday. It's wonderful to be here with

all of you today and worship the King of King and Lord of Lords

with you one final time. We'll get in today's text, but

before we do, please join me in a brief moment of prayer.

Heavenly Father, you are holy. We shout the same words of Moses

from the Exodus. Who among the gods is like you?

Lord, who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome and glory,

working wonders? Oh God, who among the gods is

like you? Let us be reminded of that

today, that there was no one like you in the heavens or on

the earth. May you give us a holy

imagination of who you are, a refreshed reminder of Your grace

towards your people, and a bold faithfulness towards the call

that You have given us, even when it makes no sense.

Lord, you are faithful and true, and there is no one like you.

It is in your Son's holy and precious name that we pray.

Amen. The the 2000's pop band The

Script opens their song Break even with the line.

I'm still alive, but I'm barely breathing, just praying to a God

that I don't believe in. And it's a heartbreak song, but

there's something raw and honest in that lyric.

In a moment of deep pain, the singer turns to prayer, even to

a God he claims that he doesn't believe in.

I think that taps into something bigger.

In our culture, when life slips out of our control, we grasp for

something, anything, that might give us control back.

And for a lot of us, prayer can drift into that category.

We put God in our back pocket for when times get tough.

We treat prayer like a tool to soothe our emotions, vent our

frustrations, or, if we're honest, manifest what we want to

happen. I've been doing hot yoga over

the past few months and before each class we set an intention

which often sounds something like you are the main character.

Visualize what you want. Manifest good energy, and the

universe will make it happen. Now I can get on board with

positive thinking, but if I'm not careful, the manifest

mindset can just slip right into my prayer life.

Suddenly prayer turns from what was a place of communion with

God into a place of manifesting what I want.

Running late? God, give me a good parking

spot. Or while I was in the seminary

and failed to to find the time to study.

God help me pass the test that I didn't study for.

Or a throwback to misses Rosa's third period Spanish class.

God make sure Nikki Richter wants to go to prom with me.

Spoiler alert, she did not. And sometimes the answer is not

to pray harder. It's to leave early and get

there on time, to find the parking spot, to create time to

study, or to just work on being less awkward around Nikki.

And don't get me wrong, God does care about the small things.

I think in Mark chapter 10 when Jesus asks the blind man, what

Mark 10 · chapter mention

do you want me to do for you? He cares about our desires.

But if we only ever approach him as a divine therapist or cosmic

genie, we've missed something essential.

Because in scripture, prayer isn't safe.

It's not about leveraging God for what we want.

It's about encountering the Holy sovereign, ever creating King of

the universe, and Isaiah learns in his moment of crisis.

Seeing God for who he is doesn't just soothe us, it undoes us, it

remakes us, and it sends us out for the sake of others.

Our chapter begins with a timestamp.

It's like when the movie Gladiator opens with the screen.

In the winter of 180 AD, Emperor Marcus Aurelius 12 year campaign

against the barbarian tribes in Germania was drawing near to an

end. They are setting the context for

which the story of Gladiator will be told.

In the same way when Isaiah starts his chapter with in the

year that King Uzziah died, he's giving context to what is going

on around him. And be frank, is not good.

The Lord is about to send Israel into exile.

He's going to use the great empires of Assyria and Babylon

to judge the people of Israel as they persist in their idolatry

and oppression of the poor. And it was in the very moment of

crisis that the Lord revealed himself to Isaiah.

High and exalted, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.

The whole earth is full of His glory.

The Angel shouting holy, holy, holy is not mere repetition, but

it's rather exponential, each time emphasizing that He is more

holy than the previous breath. He is separated from everything

else in all of creation. God's holiness is not just about

morality, but it's about transcendence, it's about

otherness, and it's about His glory.

Isaiah cannot find the language to describe how magnificent,

wonderful, glorious, majestic and resplendent that God truly

is. And it was seeing God in all of

his splendor in his throne room that I made Isaiah realize how

broken he really is. Woe to me, I am ruined.

I'm a man of unclean lips. And it was see, in a radical

encounter with the living God leads to radical self-awareness.

There's no comparison to those around us.

It's an inward look of seeing how holy God is and how unholy

we are. See, God's holiness is not just

something to admire, it is something to be encountered.

And the good news is, God meets Isaiah in the very place of his

unclean cleanliness. The cold touches Isaiah's lips

not to harm, but to heal. The place of greatest brokenness

becomes a place of greatest calling.

There's a philosophy in Japanese art called I'm going to butcher

the pronunciation, so I apologize, but Kintuji.

And it's the art of repairing broken pottery with gold,

highlighting the cracks and breaks instead of hiding them.

It's this philosophy that embraces imperfection and sees

beauty in the scars of life. See, God does not discard broken

vessels. He heals them and fills them

with his glory to use. The very place where we feel the

most unclean becomes a vessel for beauty and calling.

It is exactly why Paul says to boast in your weakness, because

our own willpower will fall short.

But when we come to God, humbly confessing our sin and letting

Him cleanse us, those very weaknesses become the places

when resurrection power shows up.

That is when hell starts to shake.

Because when the weak rise up in mercy and power, death begins to

lose its grip. It is exactly from this posture

that we get to ask, Oh death, where is your sting?

Oh, death, where is your victory?

And it's that posture that we also get to hear the call from

God that Isaiah heard and say, here I am, send me.

It is from this place of complete and total surrender

where God does not smite Isaiah, nor does he leave him, but he

heals him and he calls him. But it's not a calling that we

might expect. It's a challenging call, and it

is deeply painful for Isaiah. God is going to send the people

of Israel into exile because of their disobedience, idolatry,

and forgetting the covenant with the Lord.

Sounds a little bit something like this.

OK, Isaiah, here's your mission. You're going to go preach my

word. But it's going to have this

strange effect. The more you speak, the less

they'll actually hear you. The clearer you make it, the

more they'll resist it and the eyes will glaze over it and

hearts will harden. It's not going to wake them up.

It's going to expose how far gone they already are.

And this is judgement through the word itself.

It's not God, it's not that God wants people to be blind and

deaf. I think if you look all

throughout Scriptures, quite the opposite, but it's when the

truth confronts stubborn idolatrous hearts.

It's like sunset sunlight on wet clay.

The same light that can soften can also harden depending on the

condition of the heart. And Isaiah understandably asks,

how long is this going to go on in in God's answer in verses 11

and 12 is heavy until the cities are empty, the land is

devastated, and the people are carried away.

In other words, so until the consequences of the rebellion

have run their course. So this is one of those places

where we see the paradox of God's word.

It's life to the humble, but it's a stumbling block to the

proud. Isaiah's role is to speak

faithfully even when it looks like nothing is working.

Because God's Word is not just about changing people, it's

about revealing people. Something what's already in the

heart. I think this can be really hard

for those of us who are swimming in the waters of 21st century

America. I don't just mean out there in

the secular world. I'm talking about in here in the

church. So much of the American church

has quietly swapped, quietly swapped Jesus.

Favorite way of talking about the Kingdom?

A seed in the dirt for a spreadsheet and a quarterly

report. We've basically rebranded the

Kingdom of God as a Fortune 500 company.

The goal? Growth charts up and to the

right, neat blueprints, predictable timelines, and the

highest possible return on investment.

And if you think I'm exaggerating on this mindset,

God is basically the CEO and the consultants down the street at

Bain are telling him you should really cut the dead weight and

move on. It's exactly the logic Judas had

when Mary pours the expensive oil all over Jesus and Judas

asks why this waste and Jesus? Jesus responses.

In my Kingdom, nothing is wasted.

In other words, you're running the wrong mental model because

the Kingdom is not a boardroom, it's a garden.

Gardens are slow and they're messy.

And yes, the farmer makes a plan and yes, seeds are scattered and

growth will happen, But the kind of growth, the form it will

take, the way that it all comes together, it's not something

that we can put on a schedule or a Google Calendar.

It's Genesis 1 all over again. God brings life out of the dirt

in ways that we can't control. It's the mystery of grace at

work in the soil. That's the entire through line

of scripture. Even in the book of Isaiah where

the message that he is going to proclaim is exile, is this very

book that describes God Creator as creator more than anywhere

else in all of scripture. Because that is exactly what God

does. He creates.

Even in the broken, messy world that we live in now, He's still

creating all around us. Around the same time that I

began my residency here at Garden, I also started working

at Greystone, which if you're unfamiliar, it's just a cafe

down the street. And I very much so viewed it as

a way to live out missionally and, and live my faith with live

out my faith and, and extend the love of Jesus to those who are

in our community that we gather every day or every Sunday.

And so over time, I got to know a lot of the regulars and I was

getting more and more comfortable with them.

And I was able to, you know, feel, feel like I could have

more spiritual conversations more, make some more invitations

to these people. And there was one in particular.

It was on Good Friday. It was a girl.

She'd been coming quite often. She just asked me what I was

doing that weekend. It's Easter weekend, so I was

celebrating Easter. I returned the question, what

are you doing this weekend? And she said, well celebrating

Easter, but I'm doing it at Hunter's and celebrating Sunday

Fun day in Southie. And it was this opportunity was

put on a silver platter. It was a pitch grooved right

down the middle. I could have invited her to this

place that I not only worship, but I work for them to come and

experience the radical love of Jesus through the resurrection.

Instead, I handed her iced coffee, said have a great

weekend and I'll see you Monday. My heart, it still breaks

knowing that I had this opportunity to extend the love

of Jesus to a person and I didn't.

I chose self preservation over an awkward moment.

And it probably would have been awkward and it would have been

far more awkward than it would have been amazing.

But it would have been Jesus if I just extended that love.

And it was in this moment that I felt the loving kindness through

rebuke of Jesus because so often I would pray on the train and I

would say, Jesus, give me an opportunity to share your love

today. And there was 1 morning when I

just heard him say, beloved you, you are the opportunity.

And it was in this in, in this moment.

And then I just, I was able to shift my mind.

And honestly, there was such a freedom in that.

I think I noticed the way that I showed up even more open and

engaged, really having a heart for working with excellence and

love. Well, I never saw anyone come to

faith in Jesus and no one ever accepted my invitation to join a

Sunday gathering. I can confidently say that I

lived intentionally trying to love them more than the world

does. There was actually one couple

that came regularly that I got close to when we got dinner a

couple times and they just spoke such kind words and we're so

grateful for my time at Greystone.

And I don't say that to say, hey, look how good I am at

making friends, rather the opposite.

Before I had that encounter about being faithful, I would

have never had that impact. It was simply by surrendering to

Jesus that I was able to enter into these people lives, get to

know them and have some really good conversations.

Actually, I grabbed breakfast with the the gentleman from the

couple yesterday, just doing my round of goodbyes before leaving

and he asked me something which I I would never have thought I

would have been asked this question, but here we are.

And he just said, how are you so hopeful?

It's not a word I would describe myself, but my answer was

simple. Has nothing to do with me.

Simply because of Jesus and His grace.

See, grace is a celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all

the non celebrants in the world. It's floating cosmic bash

shouting its way through the streets of the universe,

flinging the sweetness of his causations to every window,

pounding at every door in hilarity beyond all liking and

happening. Until the prodigal's come out at

last and dance and the elder brothers finally take their

fingers out of their ears. That was Robert for our Capone,

and while they didn't come to faith after our conversations or

enter the throne room like Isaiah did, maybe they will in a

few years. Maybe the Lord was using me as a

seed or as a stump that will blossom into a beautiful flower

of faith. Because along the way, other

faithful people will be able to have a similar relationship with

them and continue to love them more than the world does.

Because at the end of the day, that is what living a life with

Jesus is all about. It is about receiving a love

from Him like no other and then giving that love to those people

around you. The most impactful thing you can

do for the Kingdom of God is to love the person that is closest

to you. And by closest, I mean

geographically, the person that is closest to you on the street

and the office in your neighborhood.

More than the world loves them. Spreading a word that is about

how much more the Lord God Almighty who is holy, holy, holy

loves them. And it may not yield the results

that we want or long for, but God is not asking you and I to

be a people who produces outcomes, but rather a people

that is obedient. You see Jesus actually quotes

this passage from Isaiah in John chapter 12.

John 12 · chapter mention

So after he enters Jerusalem it through the cries of Hosanna.

Even after Jesus had performed these so many signs, they still

would not believe. And then John will quote Isaiah

6 after he writes and then say Isaiah said this because he saw

Jesus's glory. This means that the throne room

encounter that Isaiah had was Jesus on the throne.

The glory that filled the temple was his, the voice that called

Whom shall I send? It's his.

And when Jesus is lifted up, it's not in the temple, but it's

on a cross. And the throne is wood, the

crown is thorns, and the robe is blood soaked.

And that's where glory lives. There's a there's a theory in

economics, the greater fool theory.

And essentially what it is, it's like hot potato.

There's this product that no one thinks is valuable, but they

think there's someone out there, fuller, more foolish to buy it.

So I'm going to buy it and wait for the fool to come and buy at

a higher price. And I think when thinking about

the Kingdom of God, that is who God is, God is the greatest

fool. There's this this beautiful

thing, the church, like I said, it's messy and it can can it

feel times really painful and really hard.

But God's not passing the buck. It stops with him and he absorbs

the cost, which I think is the most foolish thing in the world.

But as Isaiah will go on to say later in his chapters, his ways

are higher and our ways are foolish.

See, Jesus dealt with the same difficulty that both you, myself

and Isaiah are dealing with. This is going off of the back of

him raising a dead guy back to life.

They still didn't believe, and the message is always going to

be hard. Yet through faith and obedience,

Jesus models that this isn't about yielding results.

It's about being obedient to the very end.

And that is the same thing that you and I are called to.

You and I are being called to something that might seem

foolish. It might seem like it's

wasteful, but in God's economy, there is no waste.

It's from here that we are called to trust God to the seas

we scatter. He will do the growing.

So this week I invite you to pick a place, whether it be your

office, your local coffee shop, or the park where you take your

kids. And imagine what it would be

like if we went with a refreshed vision of God and said, before

going here I am, send me. And went and offered that vision

of God to our neighbors, our friends, and even the people

that we don't particularly like and proclaim and demonstrate

that the God of the universe is relentlessly pursuing them with

his love. And are we willing to do it even

if it falls on deaf ears and hearts remain hardened?

Do we trust Him enough to go even when we don't see the

fruit? Do we trust Him enough to pray

bold prayers even if they feel foolish?

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are

perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of

God.