The Beauty and Holiness of the Lord - Leaders' Talks

You don't have to know too much.

I think that's a step of faith.

In my case, it was an intellectual battle.

Some people have an emotional battle.

Some people have a thin battle.

Whatever your battle is if you don't know Christ, that small step of faith, which makes it total sense just like telling us to put our minds on height of it.

That the beauty of God has helped me find it.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message.

Thank you for this uh opportunity to uh actually to Steve to ask me to fill his pulpit.

I mean, that's a a really a big job to do.

And I, like Isaiah, I said, here I am, Lord, so let's go.

I'm going to be talking about the beauty and the holiness of God.

The beauty of God you heard talk, Steve talk about a couple of weeks ago, that really resonated with me because three decades before, it was actually the beauty of God that brought me to him.

It wasn't a preacher, it wasn't a radio sermon, it wasn't another Christian, it wasn't a pamphlet, it wasn't anything.

It was a direct connection with his beauty, and I'm going to tell you about that today.

But beyond the beauty, there is the holiness of God.

That was my next stage, but it was the beauty of God that connected with me.

It was December 28th, 1978, Harbor Freeway, Los Angeles.

I'm sure some of you can imagine your mind driving into downtown LA in those days with this 2,000-foot layer.

I see all the head shaking of smog hanging over the city.

And right above it, though, was the San Gabriel Mountains, crystal clear, azure blue sky, just beautiful.

That picture framed what was going on in my life at this point in time.

Because there were hundreds of thousands of us driving through the smog, getting to where we needed to go, which was really important in our lives.

And yet, right above is this peace and calm and beauty of God.

I had decided by that time, I was searching for years actually in my reading and so forth for meaning and purpose in life.

By that time I had finally decided the world is a lie.

That was a shock.

I mean, the world is all there is, as far as I knew.

There wasn't anything else.

I was not a Christian.

In fact, I was basically hostile in a way to Christianity.

But the world's a lie, and millions like me are pursuing it.

Why are we pursuing a lie?

What else could there possibly be?

That moment in December, though, started seven months before on a job one morning.

Again, it was the beauty of God.

It was the beauty of the crystal blue sky when I looked up.

Because seven months before I had figured out for years of study what the purpose, what the meaning of life was.

Can you imagine?

I had figured it out.

I'll show it to you what it was: fame and fortune, status and leadership, power and security.

I am serious.

All my reading, all my reflection, and so forth came down to a mantra that I would use to direct my life.

I liked to read avant-god readers at the time.

Ayn Rand was one of them.

Atlas Shrugged, you know, who was John Galt, you might have remembered that.

Maxwell Maltz and Psycho Cybernetics.

But my mantra was working too.

I had success.

I mean, so why do I feel so strangely alien?

I mean, what's missing?

And now that I know that the world is a lie, it has no meaning and purpose.

Why am I pursuing it?

I was in trouble.

I needed an answer.

And I'm one of those kind of people that need an answer before I can do anything.

So I'm out jogging this May morning, seeing the sky, and I look up and I say, Oh yeah, God.

What a thought.

God.

Well, maybe I'll cover my bases and add him to my list.

That's how I thought about it.

I mean, there had to be holes in my fame and fortune, status, leaf shirt, and so forth.

So I'll add God to the list and now all what little did I know you don't add God to the bottom of any list without consequences.

Well, to my utter shock, over the next few months, my life started falling apart.

I didn't necessarily put all that together at that point in time.

I remember the next day my secretary lost a deposit check to make payroll that that Friday.

My major customer canceled a big contract and wanted his deposit back.

And worst of all, my Jaguar was stolen.

Can you imagine?

I was uh relating this story to a business executive with whom I'm having a meal, and uh he was a Christian.

I had no idea.

I didn't even know there were Christian business executives.

I mean, that's how naive I was about this whole whole thing.

I thought they were another.

My father-in-law used to say we belonged to a cult uh in California, so I thought Christians were like that.

I was leery of anything, anything Christian, but he was a different.

I mean, not only was an excellent businessman, he was also philosophical and liked to talk about meaning, deeper things in life, and so forth.

And he talked uh to me about uh a book, a Christian philosopher by the name of Francis Schaefer.

The book was the God who was there.

He said, Um, have you ever read Francis Schaefer?

I said, No, uh I necessarily wouldn't.

He wouldn't be on my reading list at all.

And he he said, Well, he might be able to introduce you to this God you said you added to your list.

Ah, caught my attention.

All right.

Well, I'm certainly open to uh understanding uh some other person's perspectives.

So I started reading this book.

Schaefer connected with me right away, philosophically.

He talked about nothing makes sense without truth, absolute truth, absolute goodness, and absolute beauty.

Truth, goodness, and beauty.

Otherwise, nothing makes sense.

Because otherwise, everything is equally valid, all beauty is equally valid, all values are equally valued.

If everything is equally valid, then nothing's valid.

No wonder the world's a lie, no wonder the world's a mess.

No wonder there's total confusion all the time.

There has to be something outside the system.

If there's nothing outside the system, then there's no anchor, there's no place to start.

So this started helping me with my the world is a lie problem.

Schaefer connected with me on science.

I'm a science type of guy.

I like that kind of evidence and truth and so forth.

Well, I knew that something can't come from nothing.

Um, even Julie Andrews knows that.

Something.

Something can't come from nothing, yet it's here.

So it had to have a cause.

It can't have a cause from within itself.

Nothing can cause itself.

I mean, that's obvious to anybody.

So there had to be a cause.

Where Schaeffer hooked me was he called it the upper story.

It wasn't an evangelical type of normal Christian talk to me.

It was appealing to my logical basis.

He said, there has to be an upper story, and that's what he called the upper story.

We live in the lower story, and there has to be an upper story.

So that freeway moment in December, when I saw the smog line above hovering along Los Angeles and so forth, and the San Gabriel Mountains, that was a perfect story for me.

We live in that lower level, in that smog line.

And we're recklessly pursuing everything there, but just looking up into the upper story in this infinite, infinite blue sky, just sent chills all over me.

I didn't know what to do with it.

Because I knew by this time that absolute truth, goodness, and beauty had to exist and could clean up everything if we could acknowledge it.

So that beauty in the upper story really got to me.

But how do I get there?

I mean, what's this upper story all about?

Schaeffer again.

That's where God exists.

God created the lower story and then enters into his creation.

He enters into the lower story.

And he does it through Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is God's agent.

Never heard talk like that before.

I mean, I always heard religious talk.

I thought Jesus was a religious leader.

I never talked, heard him talk in terms of being a creator and entering human history and being a God man and so forth.

That was totally foreign to me.

But uh he made total sense.

And uh how do I get there though?

I have to accept this whole new paradigm of thinking by faith.

Well, that's scary.

I mean, I'm not going to be religious.

You know, I kept on telling myself, I'm not gonna be religious.

This is scary, but total the whole thing made sense to me.

It requires a step of faith.

Then I realized that it wasn't that hard a step of faith because I knew the world was a lie.

So what do I do?

Spend the rest of my life, you know, pursuing a lie?

Or do I take a small step of faith to find out if the dream is true or not?

And I sheepishly, as that picture unfolded, and I saw that infinite blue sky, and I saw the smog line, and I sheepishly put up my hand to try to grab the upper story.

And guess what?

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

I mean, no angels, no hallelujah chorus, no.

But on another level, something amazing happened.

All of a sudden I had this peace that I was doing the right thing and everything was going to be okay.

I later discovered that Jesus grabbed me at that time.

Hold on.

And I have never, never let go since and never will.

You don't have to know too much to take that step of faith.

In my case, it was an intellectual battle.

Some people have an emotional battle, some people have a sin battle.

Whatever your battle is, if you don't know Christ, that small step of faith, which makes total sense.

He's not telling us to put our minds on idol.

That beauty of God, help me find him.

Well, you remember last month uh Pastor Steve's message on cultivating a passion for the beauty of God.

I got so excited about that because this is what I've been waiting for: church experience where I can connect my testimony to a university at a course and so forth.

He said, let's cultivate a passionate for beauty, a new outlook, a passion.

And we have three ways that the pastor is doing this worshiper warriors.

The men are out in nature.

You can't but all in wonder of nature.

And the men are there right now as worshipper warriors.

The best Psalms in the Bible are written by worshipper warriors.

They're not written by little angels on harps and whatever.

They're written by warriors.

And he's connecting the men to that.

The worship leaders.

He's encouraging worship leaders and artists, the creative artists in the church here to express themselves, to create pieces that glorify God.

And he's encouraging us as teachers in Outlier University, each one of us now is challenged to develop course to help us understand God's truth, goodness, and beauty.

Let me take a moment to encourage you to be a student of the Road University.

This is distinctive.

This doesn't happen in most churches, to provide this kind of in-depth training and integrated Christian thinking specifically designed for this congregation to raise the tide of spiritual maturity.

And for everybody, no matter what level you are and where you're coming from, if you're coming from loving God with your heart and soul, your mind and strength, your neighbors, yourself, and servant, that's your personality.

There's a course in there for you.

Our goal is to produce Christians who are passionate, all in, wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

And through this education process, we think that's what will happen.

We are developing extraordinary Christians here.

Outliers.

That's why we're outliers.

Extraordinary Christians.

And our goal is to have, as even said, at least half of you attending classes.

Now, today is registration Sunday.

When you go out after the service, you will see the big outlier sign on the back wall, several tables, all us teachers will be back there to talk to you about what course might fit for you.

They'll start on September 16th, but come back and talk to us and register.

Nine terrific courses, four different themes, uh, four different times, I should say.

So there's, in fact, one of them we're going to uh try to do on a remote basis, on an online basis, and the teachers will be there to talk to you.

Now, here's the best part of the sermon.

Turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 6 and keep yourself there.

Isaiah 6, chapter 6.

I want to go over Isaiah's testimony.

His is much better than mine.

Isaiah chapter 6.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

We know that second major attribute of God after truth is goodness, what the Bible calls holiness.

But what in the world is holiness?

Whereas beauty is the physical manifestation of God's perfection, holiness is his moral manifestation, his moral perfection, morally perfect, absolutely pure, set apart from anything that isn't pure, which we call sin.

When we focus on God's holiness and his beauty, just like what happened in my life, the pressures just start disappearing.

That muck and so forth starts going away because we're focusing on something much grander, much more uh comprehensive, much more absolute.

This will happen for you too.

Let's read Isaiah's encounter with the Lord, his testimony.

We're going to read uh Isaiah chapter six, verses one through five first.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Above it stood Seraphim.

Each one had six wings.

With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.

And one cried to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And the posts of the doors were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.

So I said, Woe is me, for I am undone.

I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of people of unclean lips.

But my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

Just imagine seeing the creator.

Even if it's in your mind's eye, seeing the creator, the king of the universe, sitting on a throne, angelic beings, seraphim, surrounding him and leading worship.

And they rock.

I mean, so much so the doorposts are rocking, it says.

James and Anna, maybe you guys ought to consider growing some wings.

That would really add to add to our worship team.

The temple is completely filled with God's Holy Spirit, represented by the smoke.

The whole thing, just imagine, the whole thing is filled with smoke.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is filled with your glory.

That's all he can say.

That praise also makes him acutely aware of these unattainable heights that God is at and dramatically impacts him of how small and incapable he is.

All he can do, which is where God wants us, is confess.

Agree.

You are holy, I am not.

You are God, I am not.

Woe is me, he says.

I am lost.

I am just a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in a nation of unclean lips.

This is 700 BC.

This sounds like 2018 to me.

Sounds like every generation to me.

In other words, we are totally sinful, unable to do anything except confess.

Does that mean we're terrible?

No.

We're just incapable of achieving the heights that God wants us to do.

All he wants us to do, however, is elevate ourselves by confessing our sins and looking to him, elevating him.

God initiates, but he initiates after cleansing.

Look, you and I will always be short of God's moral perfection.

To him, we're always going to be sinful in most of our actions.

And worse, in our own strength, we're incapable of the situation.

But he can.

Let's go on.

Verses six and seven.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having his hand, in his hand, a live coal, which he had taken from with the tongues from the altar, and he touched my mouth with it and said, Behold, this has touched your lips, your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is purged.

See, for Isaiah to be useful to God, and really to himself, too, he first had to be cleansed.

So the coal represents the purification process, the hot coal.

Isaiah was going to be a prophet.

He was going to speak for God.

He has to speak for God with clean lips.

They have to be purified first.

And that coal represents that.

So in those days, God provided ways of purification.

Today we have Jesus Christ.

We are his blood is what purifies us today.

So before you and I are capable of serving the Lord in the power of the Spirit, not in the power of the flesh, we can always do stuff in the power of the flesh, and it's always going to come up short.

But if we do things in the power of the Spirit, we first have to be and be his agent that way, we first have to be purified.

Today purification is through Christ.

And by accepting Christ and His work on the cross, God forgives our sins, then prepares us for ministry.

Let's look at verse 8.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send?

Who will go for us?

Then I said, Here I am, send me.

This was the most impactful part of preparation because I had never thought about this before.

God does not commission Isaiah.

He always says that God's, this is Isaiah's commission.

Isaiah commissions himself.

He didn't say, Isaiah, now you're ready.

Go on out and do your thing.

Instead, he says, Somebody, who will it be?

Who will go out and speak for me?

He wants Isaiah to raise his hand and volunteer.

He wants Isaiah to go and see what needs to be done and what God wants to be done and volunteer for it.

He wants Isaiah to have that kind of humility and total dependence on him and not on Isaiah's own strength.

Isaiah could have blown his commission right then, assuming he was being selected for his own abilities.

We do that quite a bit, don't we?

I know I do.

I'm selected for my own abilities.

No.

The Lord wanted Isaiah to humbly volunteer.

Here I am, Lord, send me.

How many times do we Desire to be commissioned for a ministry and think that we're talented enough, smart enough, good looking enough, pure enough, whatever, Christian enough, knowledgeable enough, ready for this.

But it doesn't happen that way.

God wants us to serve, but in his way and in his timing.

See, character is more important to God than ability and giftedness.

Character.

Our character might not be ready.

It still needs to be molded, it still needs to be developed.

Maybe there's unconfessed sin in our lives that we can keep it quiet.

Nobody knows about it.

He does.

So he waits.

He'll send things into your life and allow things into your life that might nudge you a little bit.

I gotta deal with that one of these days.

Deal with it now.

Well, now we're ready to serve.

Now he's ready to serve.

And not quite yet.

He has to say, Here I am, Lord, send me.

Now let's finish this one section up in verses 9 and 10.

Isaiah 9 and 10.

And he said, Go, now he gets his marching orders, go and tell this people, keep on hearing and do not understand.

Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.

Make the heart of this people dull and their eyes heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return and be healed.

Go and tell this people some really, really tough news.

You've been rebellious far too long.

This is 740 BC.

So we've been hundreds of years now in rebellion against God.

The prophets are sent, the prophets say the same thing.

Repent, follow God, trust Him.

You have occasionally a good king for a while.

Even those good kings fall, your rebellion is far too long.

Either you repent now, or there will be a time of judgment.

Here's what he's basically saying.

You have heard my words.

This is what God's saying.

You have heard my words, but you don't listen to them.

You have seen me in action, but you've refused to see.

Your hearts have become hardened, and unless you return to me and be healed, there are going to be serious consequences.

Now, those consequences are in the next several verses, 11 through 13.

I'm going to let you read those on your own, but I'm going to summarize the rest of the story for you.

We can reject doing it God's way only for so long before there are consequences.

Personally and for a nation.

In these verses, 11 through 13, you will catch and watch what happens to Israel and Judah, what they're about to face.

Cities and houses will be devastated.

The land will become utterly desolate.

God's people will be taken into captivity by a foreign power.

And this would be executed over an extended timeline.

This wasn't just a quick war and it's over.

Isaiah's commissioning is around 740, but the rest of history goes something like this for the nation of Israel.

By 722, the entire northern kingdom, which is the ten tribes of Israel in the north that make up Israel, they're devastated by Assyria.

And worse, the people are carried off to captivity, and worse yet, the Assyrians interbreed with the Jews.

So they're no longer Jews.

This was so bad, they would never recover from this.

You know, by Jesus' time, the northern kingdom is Samaria, and the Samaritans were hated because they were half-breeds.

Now, two of the kingdoms, two of the tribes, Judah and Benjamin in the south, where Jerusalem is, becomes God's remnant.

So they're not devastated yet.

They're spared annihilation at the time, and they remain God's remnant.

It's important to know, God, we all, there's always a remnant for the next 800 years until Messiah comes.

The fullness of time is when Messiah comes, right?

That's when God's plan for salvation is finally consummated in the coming of Jesus Christ.

That's the remnant is held in place until that time.

Jesus is born, and within a generation, the rest of Israel is obliterated.

70 AD, the Romans come in and annihilate it.

Sounds like a bad message, doesn't it?

Well, it is and it isn't.

And here's the good part.

Look at verse 13.

Look at the first part of verse 13.

Yet there will be a tenth portion in the land.

God will always have and always protect the faithful remnant.

It's going to be a small portion, maybe 10%.

That's not his choosing, that's the people's choosing.

Either we follow God or we don't follow God.

If we follow God, then we're part of the remnant.

If we don't follow God, then we're part of the 90%.

So which segment are you in?

God deals with each segment differently.

As our nation and Christian church continue to decline in America, we need to focus, especially here, right at the road, on being the faithful remnant and let God worry about the 90%.

We're going to close in prayer.

Lord, I pray for those here that are in rebellion, the prodigals.

Beware.

Your heart, like Israel, is becoming hardened.

Know that you're in a no-win situation.

Repent.

Let the Lord heal you.

You can't do it by yourself.

Don't allow yourself to become part of the 90%ers.

But for the majority of those here today who love you with all their heart, soul, mind, strength, and their neighbors themselves, let God bless you with a ministry of his choice.

Well, you might ask, well, how do I know what his choice is?

Follow Isaiah's example in this chapter.

First come before the Lord to see him in his glory.

Worship him in his triune nature, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Holy, holy, holy.

See him in his absolute moral perfection.

See yourself in your fallen state.

Acknowledge your sin and acknowledge you are incapable of dealing with it and this problem by yourself.

Ask God to purify you.

For Isaiah, it was the burning coal.

For us, today, it's the blood of Jesus.

Wait on the Lord for your calling, but be actively listening.

It may come in a small, still voice.

And don't tell God what you're going to do for him.

Let him tell you.

And then respond, here I am, Lord, send me.

Don't go it alone.

Let Jesus take you there and do it in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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