The Trauma Of Holiness

Turn with me this morning to the glorious book of Isaiah, chapter six.

Again Isaiah, chapter six, and let us read again, in God's presence, this precious, incredible account of Isaiah's encounter with the Holy One of Israel.

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

Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings.

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

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

The whole earth is full of his glory, and the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.

And I said Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

And then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning cold that he had taken with tongues from the altar, and he touched my mouth and said Behold, this has touched your lips.

Your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for, verse eight.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying Whom shall I send and who will go for us?

Then I said Here am I send me, father, this morning, we have sensed your holy presence throughout this service And now, as we dig into this portion, we pray for your anointing on the word and anointing on the text and your spirit to take these words and reveal to us the Holy One And how you would have us to respond to that vision.

We pray for your people this morning.

We ask you to oversee our hearts and help us to receive this not as the word of men, but as it is, in truth, the word of God that effectually works in those who believe.

We ask it in Jesus' name and everyone said Amen.

Well, i was thinking about it and I don't know where I was.

I don't even know when.

it was when I first realized that I have this incredible gift.

There was a day when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had this incredible ability.

Some of you are probably looking at me and rightfully saying Why is he arrogant?

Let me tell you what gift I'm referring to.

One day it hit me.

Clearly, i'm not referring to the gift of teaching.

One day it hit me clearly that I have this incredible gift of being able to see clearly and prolifically everyone else's sins and faults, while remaining totally oblivious to my own.

And I know why you're laughing You have this gift also.

I not only have this gift, i am incredibly good at it, and I do I'm kidding, but you're laughing because you discovered as I spoke that you have it as well.

Undoubtedly there are husbands in this room right now that are thinking to themselves if only my wife would get it together, we could have a good marriage.

There's probably wives sitting here thinking if my husband would ever get it together, we'd have an incredible marriage.

Maybe there's some church members sitting here this morning saying If I only had a different pastor, i would be a different kind of Christian.

And, by the way, on that count, you may have some truth.

But all of us have this in common and will you acknowledge it this morning?

All of us share this in common We have a deep aversion an aversion bordering, bordering on fanaticism to being exposed.

We resist to the death having the light of God turned on us so that who we are is really revealed.

I think we're like those creatures.

If you've ever turned a rock over in the woods in the bright sunshine of a summer day and suddenly all of those creatures, it sends chills up my spine when I think about it.

I hate that.

And they all, suddenly thousands of creatures, run and scurry away because they're afraid of the light.

Well, if that's you this morning, don't worry, because you're not alone, you're in good company.

The holiest prophet in the entire Old Testament era, the prophet Isaiah, was able with pinpoint accuracy to uncover and indict the sins of his people, judah.

Some one has once said I read it years ago it's the best description of an Old Testament prophet.

He said Old Testament prophets were really prosecuting attorneys And that's a good description of what they were called to do.

In the first five chapters of Isaiah, isaiah denounces the sin of his people with uncanny accuracy and preciseness And in fact his prophecies are some of the clearest in the entire word of God in nailing the sin of his people, judah, and their capital, jerusalem.

And it culminates in chapter five.

After denouncing his people for four chapters, it comes to chapter five where the prophet uses that prophetic denunciatory word woe.

And over and over through chapter five he repeats it again and again.

Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field.

Woe to those who rise early in the morning that they may run after strong drink.

Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood.

Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight.

These woes were prophetic denunciations that pinpointed every area of Judean society Their wealth, their entertainment life, their political life, their social structure.

Isaiah prophesies one huge woe and says in all of it, you have forgotten the Lord.

But after five chapters, when we come to chapter six, folks, there's another woe, one the prophet himself was not expecting.

Isaiah was so focused on delivering God's denunciation against his people, judah, that he undoubtedly was not prepared for his own encounter with God that would lead him to cry out whoa is me.

The same man who, with pinpoint accuracy, denounces the sin of his people and saw it clearly, now has a revelation of his own condition before God, and all he can do and utter in the presence of the Holy One of Israel is to pronounce a woe upon himself.

Now, if you're with us for the first time or second time, we are in a series, right now, of messages called a God worth knowing, in which we are attempting to study together the nature and attributes of the God we have come to love in Jesus Christ.

We saw last week when we began Isaiah 6, that Isaiah had three visions, or perhaps it's fair to say one vision with three components.

The first one we called the upward vision, and we stayed there all of last week.

In the message, isaiah was given a vision of the exalted Lord in his sovereign holiness, and Isaiah sees these fantastic creatures around the throne, seraphim, who do nothing day and night but sing that song that we recited ourselves a moment ago Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory And we saw last week that these angels are singing about.

More than that, god is morally pure.

Holy gives the impression to the modern churchgoer that holiness has to do with purity, and I made the point last week as saying it does, but only in a secondary way Behind the word holy, even though it does have moral implications.

That's not the prominent meaning of the term.

The best way to describe it, we said, is separate.

They almost could be saying separate, separate.

Separate is the Lord of hosts.

It's the idea of something other, something that is in a class of itself.

It doesn't even relate to anything else.

It's other, it's above, it's separate.

But in this message this morning, i have this question And really we're not talking about another attribute of God, we're continuing to talk about holiness.

I've entitled this message the trauma of holiness Because we really need to ask this question And I've been praying for us as a people that not only would we ask it, but we would experience it.

What happens to a man, even a prophet of God, when he looks upon God in his awful holiness?

How does he react?

Well, that brings us to the second vision that Isaiah had.

We called it the inward vision.

What we see in the text is the upward vision.

When the veil is torn and Isaiah sees the holy one of Israel, it leads him to a second vision, which has rightly been called the inward vision.

And, in a word, the inward vision is simply this Really, make sure and get this.

It's critical.

When you see God as he really is, it always and immediately leads us to see ourselves as we really are.

Now the prophet is seeing something beyond all the mirrors and all the sham.

He now glimpses his true condition before God and folks.

It ain't pretty.

In fact, it so terrifies him that the prophet of woe, who nailed everybody else, now has the light turned on him, and the holiest prophet the man, by the way, in Judaism, who is considered the golden-tongued orator and the holiest prophet in the entire prophetic period he now can only pronounce that woe, not on the others he has so faithfully skewed, but he turns it now on himself.

And the reason is clear Isaiah is now measuring himself with a new measurement, not the measurement of men, which we typically do, but the measurement of how he stands before the Holy One of Israel.

And what is interesting is the very thing he is famous for, what we would call his strong point, his strength, his ability.

And again, if you don't have the ability to do this, most of us and I don't even have the ability anymore to do it, though I could before if you could read the Hebrew, you'd find out that Isaiah was educated way beyond other prophets who spoke.

Some of the prophets were rugged shepherds and people from the desert.

Isaiah was educated He's college grad material and his book shows it But the very thing he is hailed for, the golden-tongued orator, the impeccable prophet who speaks the word of God Isn't it interesting that the very thing that he has considered to be the strongest is in the presence of the Holy One he now sees as weakness and he trembles before God because his lips are unclean.

Do you notice?

he didn't say woe is me, i misspoke last week, which is the extent that most of us go Woe is me, i said something unkind to my wife.

He didn't say that.

He said woe is me, i am ruined.

Martin Luther translated that I love it.

In the Vulgate or the German, he said I am dissolved, i'm melted, i'm lost as the ESV.

Whatever you translate it, it's not pretty.

And he doesn't say I'm lost because I misspoke.

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

What you are glimpsing, church, is true repentance, not merely a confession of what one has done, though we are to confess those things.

But you're looking at a man who has a revelation of who he really is.

Someone has accurately said that repentance is not an awareness of what I've done only, but the recognition that, apart from the grace of God, i am capable of anything.

Now there may be some here this morning who think this is an Old Testament phenomena.

God used to scare people with his holiness in the Old Testament, but we came into the new and he's happy, happy, happy.

It's all good.

It's all good, but take this into consideration.

Jesus is teaching by the sea of Galilee.

The crowd is pressing upon him so much.

He tells Peter, let me borrow one of your boats.

He goes and tells Peter to push out from shore.

Jesus is now sitting in Peter's boat teaching the multitudes.

This is Luke 5.

Don't turn there.

You can check me out later.

I'm giving you all the details.

And when he's done teaching, he says to Peter Peter, let's go out into the deep and put down your nets for a catch.

And Peter says because he's been fishing all night Before Jesus came on the scene.

What we don't know until Peter speaks is they were fishing all night and it was bad fishing.

Nothing happened.

And he tells the Lord Lord, we fished all night and we caught nothing.

But Peter's at a point with his relationship with Jesus where he knows enough to know you better.

Do what he says, because something might happen.

So he says you know, lord, you ought to stick to preaching.

I'll stick to fishing and trust me, we've been out all night.

There's nothing happening, but nevertheless, at your word, i'll do it.

And Peter and his boys pushed out, let down their nets and the rest is history.

The catch was huge, so much so they had to signal to another boat to help them and share the load.

That's, by the way, that's a picture of revival.

When so many people are getting saved, you call the neighboring church.

Instead of competing with them, they said will you take 50 people?

That's revival.

And you would think I don't want to be unkind here, but Peter's Jewish you would think that he would be elated about the business prospects.

This is great, jesus.

Will you go out with us every week and show us where to put down the nets?

But the furthest thing from Peter's mind in this account is monetary profit.

The next scene of Peter he is in the boat on his hands and knees, trembling, saying depart from me, lord, for I am a sinful man.

The overwhelming emotion for Peter was not the profits that were to be had or what this means to his business.

He was overwhelmed because he knew he was in the presence of holiness.

God incarnate was in the boat and his holiness was manifested.

It wasn't even about the miracle and getting excited about a miracle.

He trembled because he stood in the presence of holiness.

And when men and women encounter holiness, that is the only legitimate response And what we learned from Peter and Isaiah.

and I could take you to Revelation.

When John, who used to recline on the bosom of Jesus, falls on his face like a dead man and over and over.

And what we learned from these encounters is this and you may not want to hear this, but I am duty bound to give you the truth It is that the pathway to true knowledge of God will always, inevitably lead us to face ourselves, to come to terms with our true condition as members of a fallen race, and that reality of our condition.

If you are shallow there, understand that you are shallow when it comes to understanding and being transformed by the gospel.

That's because the chief aim of the gospel is not to make you and I respectable, not to make you good church members who look like you're in good standing because you've checked yourself out And, by the standard of the house, i'm not doing too bad When I match up to everybody else.

I'm living the Christian life.

But it's when God in awful holiness is seen that the gospel does its work, because the goal of the gospel is not to clean us up so we look nice.

It's to transform us at the heart level.

And if we want to be transformed at the heart level, the gospel always first leads us to a proper assessment of our own condition.

I was reading an article and the author said why is it in the church that people are not transformed by the gospel?

And he answered the question because they don't really feel they need it.

Telling yourself, going to a lecture that's interesting but you have no dog in the fight.

It's a lecture on HIV, aids, and you go to the lecture and you learn some interesting things you didn't know about AIDS, but it's sort of just information.

That's the difference between a lecture telling you about AIDS And going to a doctor who then says I'm sorry, sir or ma'am, i have to tell you you're HIV positive.

Big difference, isn't there?

One of the reasons the gospel doesn't transform people in the church today is we really don't think we need it.

We're not that bad.

So we've grown up under a gospel that focuses on behavior Don't smoke, don't drink, don't have premarital sex, go to church, live right, and that's the Christian life.

So we are in the practice of helping people in their lifelong pursuit of moralism, trying to be good for Jesus, and those people are, much like Isaiah among them.

I told the group I think it was Wednesday night.

This may offend you I hope it doesn't But I think the low point in the Western church in America was when our face to the world was the moral majority.

Now I'm not saying that, listen.

I understand that America is a cesspool and abortion and adultery, and it is.

It's a cesspool, but does that the face we want to present to the world?

Hello, come and be with us.

We're the moral majority.

The truth is, we're just as distorted as them.

Apart from the grace of God, There is no difference.

And, like Isaiah, when you grow up in moralism which masquerades as the gospel, we're quick to condemn all the evils of society around us.

Every one of us has done this and we continue to do it because we're living in a wicked age.

True, but if you don't go from that to the next statement, which is that famous statement from Pogo who said we have discovered the enemy and lo, it is us, the problem is not political in America.

The problem is in moralism.

The problem in America is people don't know the gospel and the problem with the church is we don't know the gospel because we still think it's about behavior modification, as was the case with another guy in the Bible named Saul of Tarsus, who, as far as he's concerned, was impeccable by the standards of his day.

He tells us in Philippians 3, this was a text that I used in our debate this week and I love it where he says whatever was gained to me, and he lists all of his gains I'm good, i came from the right stock, i come from the right tribe, i speak Hebrew, i'm a Pharisee and nobody in Phariseeism can put a finger on me.

I'm blameless.

And he says all of that, and he does use this word I'm going to clean it up because we're in church.

He says it's all horse manure, the very thing that many of us pursue in church life.

He calls it horse manure that I might not.

And he goes on to say that I might have a righteousness, not of my own, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God, which is by faith.

And when I argued for that this weekend, it drove some people nuts.

Paul wasn't making pious statements.

He knew.

He knew how bad he really was.

How about you this morning.

You know, the man I just referred to called himself, in one of the epistles he wrote, the chief, the very chief, of sinners.

Can you say that about yourself this morning?

I'm bad.

Okay, i'm not that bad.

Can you say that about yourself?

If you can't, the reason is you might have spent your whole Christian life looking at the crowd and comparing yourself to men.

We do that, don't we?

Instead of the place you should draw your identity from, the question is not how do I stack up with Trinity Chapel and the prevailing moral code?

that is acceptable.

The real question is how do I stand before the Holy One of Israel?

If you compare yourself to others, the Bible says it's stupid and you will be deceived.

But if you assess yourself and if I assess myself in the presence of God, we will have a revelation of our true condition.

And it ain't pretty, but we need to see it.

Why do we need to see it?

Isaiah, the man who's groveling before the Holy One saying all the woes that I've uttered against others, they're against me.

And then it happens.

Listen, this is incredible.

As he's agonizing over his condition, suddenly one of the seraphs takes a blood-grenched, drenched coal from the altar with a pair of tongs and applies it to Isaiah's lips, and Isaiah hears the sweetest words a human being could ever hear on earth Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.

This is the power of the gospel being applied in a visionary way, in a multi-color, technical vision for us, but it's the gospel.

Knowing how deeply terrorized Isaiah was at the revelation of his true condition, think about the power of that announcement to a prophet who's groveling before God and saying my career's over, i'm woe is me, there's no hope.

And the gospel comes, touches his lips And this man who was terrorized hears those sweet words.

And with those words did you notice there's no word of probation, it's not.

I'll forgive you if you'll do something for me.

It's just the gracious announcement by God himself that I have removed your iniquity.

And, by the way, do you now understand that the deeper Isaiah goes in the awareness of his own sinfulness, the sweeter the announcement.

The worse he is, the more power and glory the announcement has.

And it brings us to the things that I've been saying through all of our summer series and again and again through this series, that the power of the gospel, always the gospel train, moves on two tracks.

Everybody's tired of the two tracks?

I'm not.

I'm going to keep doing it, because there's always new people that haven't heard it.

And how many know we need to hear it again and again, and that is if you're going to live the Christian life.

The train proceeds on two tracks.

Here's the tracks.

You can't have one without the other.

Both are gospel truths and both will propel you through the Christian life.

Here's the tracks Number one and trust me on this, isaiah is showing us this, Paul does, and I have a little experience of this.

You and I are far worse than we ever imagined.

But here's the other track.

You and I, because of the grace of God, are far more loved than we ever imagined.

The gospel is the only answer.

If you, like Isaiah or Peter or John or Paul, are convinced of how deeply flawed, scarred from by sin, you and I are, not until we are made to feel the depth of our sinfulness.

And I'm not commending to you some introspective way.

Somebody asked me how do I get that?

Just by looking at God, not walking around introspectively and trying to find God.

I don't know what.

There's a spot right there where my mic goes off.

Maybe it's God covering me because I say something unscriptural there.

The gospel is only powerful to the degree that we realize the terrible plight we're in and that it's the only answer.

In these words of David, one of my favorite, that are quoted in the Roman Epistle and, by the way, you can still come out We're in the book of Romans, about to enter the end of the second chapter.

Wednesday nights at seven o'clock, we're going through Romans.

It's been wonderful Seven o'clock to eight o'clock And we're going to come to these words that Paul quotes David in Psalm 32.

And he says blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven and whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and whose spirit there is no deceit.

It's a blessedness.

David can only say that the man to whom God says not guilty is blessed beyond words.

But it doesn't stop there.

There's a third vision.

I'm just going to go through it quickly.

You might call what happened to Isaiah conviction, cleansing and now calling.

Because did you notice that Isaiah in his broken state and you're seeing here in Isaiah 6, the brokenness of a man who's seen his sin before God and now in that broken state, he doesn't hear God say Isaiah, i am calling you.

He doesn't hear that.

He overhears a conversation.

Whom shall I send?

And, by the way, remember our Trinity message.

Whom shall I send?

Who will go for us?

God's not consulting with the angels, trust me, the triune God is saying who will go for us?

And Isaiah, in the most broken state he's ever been in, overhears this and jumps up.

God's saying I have a mission, who can I send?

And in the brokenness of his soul, with no hesitation, here am I, the Hebrew word Henany.

Here am I send me.

And I have this question How can Isaiah, in that brokenness, respond so quickly and readily to a mission?

How do we account for this?

In his commentary on these verses, oswald Chambers, in his devotional, said this it's not a question of God singling out a man and saying now you go.

God did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah.

Rather, isaiah was in the presence of God and he overheard the call and realized there was nothing else for him but to say unconscious freedom.

Here am I send me.

Get out of your mind the idea of expecting God to come with compulsion and pleadings.

If we let the spirit of God listen, if we let the spirit of God bring us face to face with God, we too shall hear something akin to what Isaiah heard the still small voice of God and in perfect freedom, we will say here am I.

Send me.

This, my friends, is God's way of getting people to serve.

We don't do that in the church.

We think we have to show people need and we have videos of all the need and we try to get people to feel bad So they'll respond please volunteer for God.

He doesn't have many.

Could you help him?

I have it in my heart to rid our church of the word volunteer, not our beloved football team.

I like the word service because if you're a Christian, service is not optional And God doesn't get people to serve him by begging people.

Rather, he takes them in the upward vision, he shows them the inward vision and then they are safe.

With the third final vision It's been called the outward vision, the vision to look out and see that God now wants me to cooperate with him on mission.

And the reason Isaiah is now qualified is one thing, brothers and sisters, a truth we've forgotten in the last 20 years He's broken.

He's a broken man And if you want servants of God, people have to see God, they have to see their condition so that they're broken.

They're pride, they're self-reliance, their self-will.

All of this has to be broken, so then they are usable.

God doesn't use prideful, arrogant, self-sufficient, self-reliant men and women.

He uses broken.

He'd rather have non-talented people who are broken than talented people who are proud, arrogant, self-willed and self-reliant.

And these are the men and women who respond this way, hineni, which you could almost translate I'm right where you want me Groveling on the floor, because I've seen your holiness and my true plight.

Now I'm ready to go And, by the way, it's a good thing.

God didn't tell Isaiah his assignment before he made the statement.

Who will go for me?

How's like this assignment?

Great, glad you signed up.

Keep on saying.

Here's your message.

Go to the people and say, keep on saying, but don't say keep on hearing, but don't hear.

Great, thank you.

That was the commission.

We're not going to go into that tonight.

It doesn't matter what the assignment is When you and I are broken before the Holy One.

That's where we're usable.

Now here's the thing.

Sadly, there are men and women in the body of Christ who still aren't broken after 40 years.

They still think it's about people being against them, organizations being against them things.

And there are people in organizations against you, i mean it happens, but that's not going to lead you to brokenness when you're angry with everybody around you.

I pray this morning that many of us this morning will have that light, have the ability or gumption to say Lord, shine your light on me.

So we're going to continue on this series.

We're going to look at other aspects of God, but it doesn't matter what it is.

When you see God in the upward vision, it will always produce the inward vision And that, my friends, is God's way of changing men and women.

Amen.