God's Voice In Images | Isaiah 8:18 | Larry Ray

Good morning, everybody.

Happy Thanksgiving and yay for Christmas is coming.

And uh because of my wife's nagging and my love for her, I got the Christmas tree up this weekend, so or this past weekend, so that was a good deal for her.

Uh good godly people wait till after Thanksgiving, so we celebrate thanks, but no, we uh anyway, it's up, so praise the Lord.

Nice to see y'all, and it's nice to be here uh in your midst and in the midst of our Lord.

Uh I'm really happy to be here.

Um, you know, there's an old saying, y'all all know it, that a picture is worth a thousand words.

And I think what that's saying is that there are some ideas that words are inadequate to describe or convey or communicate.

You can't get it through a person's words.

You gotta see it.

And when you see it, you go, oh, I get that.

I want you to think just for a second about something in your life, a person, a relationship, an experience that is really, really valuable.

It means the world to you.

I want you to try to put into words why that person or that experience is so valuable.

Just in your mind.

Try to communicate why that experience, that person, is so valuable to you.

Hard to do, especially in a short amount of time.

It's not easy to describe the indescribable.

Right?

That was the challenge of the Bible writers.

They were given the task by God to write about the indescribable, to describe the indescribable, to express that which you can't express.

It was their job to communicate that in words.

Pretty daunting task.

Uh, y'all all know that I have uh the most precious, wonderful grandson on the planet, and uh he and I spend a lot of time together for which I am I will be eternally grateful.

And he over the last ten years has asked me hundreds and hundreds of questions about everything from passing gas and dogs to God.

I remember one time we were driving down the road, and it was a big deal to me, still is, that he understand.

I didn't come from a family that emphasized this.

In fact, they emphasized the opposite.

And so it was a big deal to me that my grandson grew up knowing that men and women are equal, they have equal value, equal significance.

That God sees them and loves them and calls them equally to do amazing things, and we always treat them with equality.

Ladies, with equality.

Always.

We never see anybody less than.

He'd listen, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir.

But I also spent time teaching him because I that being a gentleman, being chivalrous, is very important.

You open the door for ladies when you go into the store.

You you let them go first.

You you honor women.

And people that don't do that, well, I won't say what I taught him, how I see them, they're no good.

And that's the nicest way I could describe it.

Um, and yes, sir, yes, sir.

And one day we're done their own, and he said, Lad, you said that men and women are equal, but that we're supposed to put women on a on a pedestal and put them first and give them greater honor.

That doesn't work for me.

How does that work?

I drove down the road a little further and I said, you know, I don't know, I don't know how that works.

I just know that both of those are true and right and good and important.

That satisfied him for then.

Um one quick more, one more, just real quickly.

I always have taught him tell the truth.

Win, lose, or draw, tell the truth.

Tell the truth, tell the truth.

Always to everybody, especially your mom and dad, tell the truth, even if it's costly.

Yes, sir, yes, sir.

But when we get out in these ditches, these concrete culverts down in uh at Overdon Park, he and I wind up doing a lot of things that most of you parents, especially those of you parents that think that cleanliness is a big deal and that germs are bad.

Um uh we would get involved in things we didn't even know we were going to do.

We didn't mean to, but we got involved in stuff.

And then as we were climbing out to head home, we'd be covered in who knows what.

And I would always say, Ted, remember, you don't have to tell your parents all you know.

He's heard me say that hundreds of times.

You don't have to tell your mom and dad all you know.

Again, Nalad, you told me that I'm supposed to always tell the truth, but I'm also not supposed to tell my parents all I know.

I got I they're both true.

They both are true.

We just gotta learn to embrace them both.

Um sometimes it's hard to explain with words things that are very true and very important.

Therefore, God, in my opinion, seems to agree with that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words.

God, from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible, continually chooses to use signs, symbols, pictures to really convey his most significant, most important ideas and messages.

In the Old Testament, this the give you some examples.

Trees.

You read through your Old Testament, which you should do.

Trees, anytime you see a tree, it's a big deal.

Trees are significant, they communicate much.

That picture of a tree in Genesis 1, in Psalm 1, all the way to the last, very last thing in the Bible in Revelation you said the tree, the tree of life.

Trees are a big deal.

Rainbows, circumcision, plagues, Passover, the splitting of the Red Sea, the tabernacle, the priest in his garments, the Ark of the Covenant.

These are symbols, they're pictures, their signs that God sovereignly chose to place in front of people to communicate that which is very difficult to communicate with words.

The words lack, the words fail to communicate what these pictures can.

In the New Testament, baptism, bread, wine, marriage, the New Testament writers declared these are symbols, their signs, their pictures that speak louder and more powerfully and more clearly than words.

But if you read your Bible carefully and thoroughly, completely, what you wind up discovering is that God's favorite signs, God's favorite symbols, God's favorite pictures were people.

God loved in the Bible to use the lives of people to communicate his most important messages.

In fact, he reserved the most important messages at the deepest parts of his heart.

He reserved those messages to be conveyed through the lives of people.

Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samson, Ruth, David, Gomer, Jonah.

Not their messages, but their lives.

Do you want to know what's important to God?

Do you want to know what's really true, really important?

Watch the lives of these people, and you will learn that which is dearest to the heart of God.

It wasn't so much for most of these people that I just mentioned and countless others.

It wasn't what they said.

It was their love, their lives were the message.

And this is what I'm teaching you today is never so clearly seen as in the lives of the Old Testament prophets.

You're like, oh gosh, who, you know, it's tough reading.

I just finished Ezekiel.

Not my favorite book.

But as I was reading Ezekiel this time, what I'm sharing with you today just jumped out at me like never before.

I've never seen it before.

And I've read Ezekiel a zillion times.

Um as I was reading Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, I saw something that made those books come alive to me.

Let me give you a few examples.

In Isaiah chapter 8, verse 18.

Isaiah 8:18

I think you might have that verse up there, Colin.

I don't know if you do or you don't.

Isaiah 8:18.

Isaiah 8:18

Isaiah makes this declaration.

He was a prophet of God, and he said, Here am I, and the children that the Lord has given me.

We are signs and symbols in Israel.

Man, I read that verse and that jumped out at me like a, I can't even tell you, Isaiah understood something about his life and his family that most people in the Bible never understood, and I would suggest we don't either.

And that is that his life, not his words, but my life, my here am I, and here are my children that you gave me.

Our lives are signs and symbols among the people.

What that looked like practically, Isaiah had a number of children.

One of the children, he actually had two children right in a row, and God said to Isaiah, Isaiah, I want you to name these kids very unusual Hebrew names.

Because I want them to grow up, and every time mama calls them for supper, tells them it's time for bath, tell them to go to school, to do their chores, go to the store and buy some whatever they were buying, they're gonna call out their name.

And the people are gonna hear their names.

One of their names, God told Isaiah to name one of his children, destruction is coming.

Now think about naming your kids.

Y'all get these books and go through there and looking for names, you know, to name your kids.

I bet you in all those name books you young women have got, destruction is coming, is not in there.

And yet that's exactly what God told Isaiah to name one of his children.

The message being, he wanted, God wanted his people to hear in their everyday life if y'all don't repent, if y'all don't turn back to me, if y'all don't walk away from your lives of sin, destruction is coming.

Because you know it begged people to ask them, why'd you name your kid?

Destruction is coming.

That's an odd name.

It was a picture, it was a sign, it was a symbol.

Another one of Isaiah's kids, God told him to name that child, the remnant will return.

After the destruction, there's hope.

In fact, there's the hope candle.

There's hope.

After the destruction, God is gonna raise up a remnant and return them.

There's, if y'all don't turn, it's not gonna go well.

But after all of that sorrow and suffering, there's hope.

There's hope.

God asked Isaiah, I think, for about three and a half years, to wander around Israel bucknecked, not a stitch of clothes on.

Now think about that as a job description of calling of God.

And I'm not I don't have the time today to go into all the meanings of these.

If you'll read Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, you'll see these and it'll talk to you about it.

But that one being that God wanted the people of Israel to see this man of God walking in shame, in barrenness, in uh that he had lost everything.

He had nothing to communicate to him.

If you don't repent, the Babylonians are coming, and they're gonna make everybody in the nation walk around in nakedness and marching them back to Babylon.

Jeremiah, I don't have time today, but he made Jeremiah wear a loincloth, which if you don't even know what a loincloth is, if you ever see a picture or a painting of Jesus on the cross, he's always wearing a loincloth.

He most probably did not wear a loincloth when he was really on the cross, but they, for modesty's sake, they put a loincloth on him.

Well, uh God told Jeremiah, wear a loincloth for a while, then take it and hide it in some rocks on the side of a mountain for a number of years, and then go back and dig it up and bring it back in front of the people.

And the the message there, the symbol, the sign, the picture was this thing that covered the most intimate, private, precious part of a man, it's going to be defiled and molded and rotting and unwearable.

And if y'all don't turn back to God, you're the what God's communicating is that the his people are his loincloth.

Here, they are the very thing that covers his most private, precious, intimate, valuable part of his life.

But there came a day when they were so defiled, so filthy, so disgusting, so rotted away, they were unwearable.

And there's dozens more of these.

Um, God told Isaiah to buy a very valuable, expensive pot, uh a piece of porcelain, and go in front of all the people and throw it on the ground and break it.

Why the waste?

Why would you destroy something so valuable?

Why would you make it unusable?

Where it's not enjoyable, it's not beneficial, why would you do that, Isaiah?

And I think what God was communicating is, why would you do that?

Why would you waste your lives?

Why would you ruin your lives?

Why would you destroy that which has immeasurable benefit and beauty?

Why would you do that?

How stupid to break an expensive vase.

No, how stupid to throw away your precious, valuable life.

And I can there's so many more.

Did he mention him?

Godly, God-fearing, God-serving, God-proclaiming man who loved and served the Lord.

He was lonely.

God, I want a wife.

God said, Okay, I'll give you a wife.

Go down to the red light district of Israel.

There's a prostitute down there named Gomer.

I want you to marry her.

What'd you say, Lord?

I want you to go and then marry this prostitute woman.

I want you to bring her into your home, clean her up, give her this wonderful life, give her a home and clothes and food and jewelry and uh a beautiful family.

It is your job.

Bless her.

Bless her, bless her, bless her, bless her.

From the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed, every day of her life, bless her, till she can't even remember the terribleness of her past.

Hosea does it.

And then God says, Gomer, uh, Hosea.

Believe it or not, this woman that you have blessed so much has decided to go back into her old life of harlotry in the red light district.

She chose to go back to all of that horribleness, that vileness.

And Hosea was heartbroken, furious.

She left her husband, her home, her children, everything.

And God said, Hosea, go get her.

Pay off for her gambling debts, drug debts, whatever kind of debt she's got.

She's racked up a bunch of debt, pay off all of her debt, bring her back home and start over again.

God, how could you ask somebody to do that?

That's unreasonable, that's unfair.

Nobody would do that.

And what God told Hosea is tell my people, I do it every day.

Every day.

My people turn away from my blessings.

All that I've done for them, go back to lives that are indescribably horrible.

And you know what I do?

I get mad and stomp my feet and pitch a fit and turn away and walk away from them.

To heck with you.

I'm done with you.

No.

I keep going back.

Come on back, let's start over again.

You see these pictures.

Ezekiel.

Oh my goodness, I wish I could tell you all the pictures of Ezekiel.

The one that I'll I will, there's dozens and dozens of these pictures in here.

And God's trying to communicate messages.

The one that's crazy for me is in chapter 24.

Ezekiel loves the Lord, but he also loves his wife.

The Bible says that the way Ezekiel describes his wife, she is my beloved.

She is my beloved.

They raised a family together, built a home together, served the Lord together.

One day God appears to Ezekiel and says, Ezekiel, tomorrow your wife's gonna die.

And you cannot mourn for her.

You can't shed a tear, you can't be sad, you need to go right on as if nothing happened.

Who would ask somebody that loves their wife and she dies, you cannot mourn, you cannot grieve.

Why, God?

Because I want you to be a picture, a sign, a symbol to the people of Israel that if they don't repent and turn back to the Lord, they're gonna experience such pain themselves that when their loved ones pass away, they're so full of their full of their own personal grief they can't even grieve for their loved ones that die.

God loves to use the lives of people to reveal his most important messages, values, plans, and attributes.

You might say, well, how do you know that's his that's his most important way?

Well, because he had that same plan for his son.

Jesus' life was God's ultimate sign and symbol.

His life was God's tool to reveal who God is.

If you want to know who God is, just read the four gospels.

Read about the life of Christ, and as you read about the life of Christ, you're reading about the life of God.

John 1, 18 says, no one has ever seen God but the Son.

And he is God, and He has revealed God to us.

First John 4, God expressed his love to us by sending his only Son so that we might experience life.

Jesus said, I came to fulfill God's law and prophets, to fill them to the full.

And what Jesus was saying there is, I came and lived a certain kind of life to flesh out the message of the Old Testament.

If you want to know what this big, daunting, complicated, confusing book is really talking about and communicating and emphasizing, look at the life of Jesus.

Jesus explains, not Jesus' words necessarily, but his life explains, it reveals the truth of the Old Testament.

That's what Jesus said in John 14, guys, don't you know who I am?

If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

And in chapter 10 of John, Jesus said, You reject me because I claim to be God's Son.

Don't believe me unless I do the works of my dad.

But if I behave like my dad, even if you don't believe my words, believe my life.

Jesus came to show us who and what God is like, how God feels about things, how God acts, how he treats people, how he values people.

If you want to know how God feels about you, read the life of Jesus in the Gospels.

You know, I went to Bible college, I went to seminary.

I was taught numerous times that the very first job that God gave people was to tend his garden.

That's not right.

That was a second job.

You know the number, the first job God gave human beings after he created them?

The job of image-bearing.

God created them in his image.

In his image, he created them.

God created us for the purpose.

Now think about this.

God created humans, and that includes most of you.

God created humans for the purpose of making visible what is invisible.

That's what our purpose.

We get up in the morning, what am I supposed to do today?

God created you with the purpose of making visible in front of others things that they cannot see otherwise.

1 Peter chapter 2, verse 9.

1 Peter 2:9

You are not like people who refuse to believe and obey our Savior, for you are a chosen people, you are royal priest, a holy nation, God's own possession.

Why?

To show others the goodness of God.

I watched the news, listened to my neighbors, went to lunch at war, ate in the lunchroom with a bunch of my co-workers.

I'm hearing pretty consistently God's not good.

Either he doesn't exist, or if he does, he's halfway mad.

That's the message that people are telling one another.

God says, that's a lie.

I'm not mad.

I love you and I'm good.

And I'm committed to showing you my goodness.

But I need you to reveal in front of people that goodness.

Matthew chapter 5, Jesus says that you and I are God's light and God's salt to reveal to the world what is true and lasting and life-giving.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

James said in chapter one of his little epistle, we have a special role in God's plan to show the rest of God's creation, his goodness, and his love.

Some of you might have heard of this lady during World War II.

Her name was Cory Tin Boom.

She was a little Dutch lady.

During the war, she was a girl.

She and her sister and her mom and dad lived in Holland, and they were, they were just they were Christians, devout Christians.

But around them, Jewish people were being hunted down by the Nazis.

And they began to hide the Jews from the Nazis.

One day the Nazis found out what they were doing and sent the family to a concentration to several different concentration camps.

Split them up, sent them to different concentration camps.

And in those camps, her mom and dad died.

Her sister ultimately died.

Corey survived.

But in that time in the camp, Corey and her sister experienced and endured indescribable horrors.

They were treated by the soldiers, the guards, in terrible ways.

Finally, the Allied forces rescued Corey and the people in her camp after her family had all died.

And several years later, Corey was speaking at a church in Europe.

And just so happened, she was a very popular speaker.

And just so happened that on that day when she was speaking in this church, she spoke on forgiveness.

And at the end of the service, this man walked up to her.

And when she looked up into his face, she immediately realized this was one of the soldiers, one of the guards in her camp that had done indescribable horrors to her and her sister.

And her heart, she said, was filled with fear and rage and you know every understandable emotion.

And um the man walked up after hearing Corey's sermon on forgiveness, and he looked her in the face and he said, ma'am, I know what I did to you.

I I I there's nothing I can do to undo it.

I've become a Christian.

And I uh I want you to forgive me.

And he stuck out his hand.

When he stuck out his hand, she said in her book, hiding place, all I wanted to do was jerk, just run away, get away.

There's no way I could forgive him for what he had done to my family and to me.

But at that second, the Spirit of God said, Gory, either this forgiveness is real or it's not.

And she reached out and took his hand.

And when she did, she says that the power of God flooded into her hand and up her arm and into her heart and filled her life.

And here's what the guard said.

He said, ma'am, I've heard you speak about forgiveness, but I need to see it.

I need to see it.

I I've I'm I'm hearing your words.

I need to see this forgiveness that you've been talking about.

What time is it?

Well, I I'll just tell you real quickly, I was going to tell you more about this, but when I was in my mid-20s, Shirley and I were already married, and we were living up, I don't even know where we were living, Shirley, but we were living somewhere together, having a blast.

And uh I wasn't at home.

And during that uh time, you know, I wasn't there, Susan was there, my sister's here, and uh she was at home.

There was this lady that my mom and this lady were really, they became very, very close friends.

Depending on who you talk to, you'll you'll hear different stories about this lady and who she was and what kind of person she was, but for a number of reasons, some of them maybe her bad, some of it was my dad's insecurity and fear and passion to be a control freak.

Um he grew to a point, he didn't want my mom and this lady to be friends.

He what I say, he didn't want her, he wasn't making a suggestion.

He was giving a royal Nebuchadnezzar Julius Caesar edict.

And my mom would not embrace that.

And again, I'm not throwing stones at anybody in this whole thing, but at the end of the story, the point of it is this my dad grew to hate this woman.

With a blood curdling hatred, he hated her.

And if he heard her name or he saw her in a restaurant across the room or at a store, he would fly into a rage.

And my some of y'all think you grew up in homes where people could have rage.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Uh I he well, I'm telling you, it was bad news bears.

And uh I'm gone.

So I didn't really see all this, but I would hear about it from phone calls and things.

A number of years later, my dad becomes a Christian.

And Jesus really came to live in his life.

And uh he uh at some point um felt like God was telling him to go find this lady.

They had you know party company and all that, and uh, find this lady and make things right with her.

Tell her that he wanted to forgive her and ask for her forgiveness.

And he did.

And I was going, I was on a, I was with my dad one day and he was telling me about this.

And he said, Larry, for many reasons, I didn't like this woman.

I didn't want to ask forgiveness, I didn't want to make things right.

I I did not, I was very happy her being in Australia and me being in you know Brazil.

That that was a good thing, I didn't want to have anything to do with her, just leave it alone.

You live your life, you I'll live mine, you live in your world, I'll live in mine.

But God told him he needed to go and make things right with her.

And he went to her.

And for those of you that didn't know about it, for him to do that, it was impossible.

It was it was impossible for him to feel like he was hearing God tell him to do something that he did not want to do and had no nice feelings to go and do.

But he went and he made things right with her, and he was telling me about this.

And my the only thing I want you to know is this.

I spent 18 years in my dad's house, and he told me thousands of things.

I don't remember almost any of them.

I don't remember almost anything my dad told me.

This is good, this is bad, this is true, this is false, do this, I don't remember any of that stuff.

But I'll tell you something that I do remember.

When my dad felt like God was telling him to do something that he did not want to do, he obeyed.

My dad created a picture for me that I will never forget, and that is that people that have God's presence in their lives have to obey him when he tells them what to do, even if they don't want to, even if it's scary, even if it's unpleasant, you obey the Spirit of God when the Spirit of God tells you to do something.

1 John 4 says, No one has seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made visible.

People cannot see the invisible qualities of God.

Are we aware of that?

People cannot see the invisible qualities of God.

We can't see his forgiveness, his grace, his patience, his wisdom, his sacrifice, the fact that God is no respecter of person, the fact that God is a truth teller, that God always moves toward people, never away from them.

God is always moving toward people, never away from them.

You and I can't see God do that, those things.

And so God created a very special group of people called his image bearers, and he gave us the task of making visible that which is invisible.

Does my life make God's attributes, his passions, his priorities, his values, his character, does my life make God and his ways more clear and desirable or more confusing and repulsive?

Two things and I'm done.

Here's uh application for all of us.

December starts tomorrow.

We have thirty-one days, really twenty-five, but we'll give it thirty one.

December is a very unique month.

There's not another month of the year where people are more sensitive, more uh open, more contemplative.

There's something about the month of December that makes people's hearts softer and more open.

And God is sending you and me into grocery stores, department stores, and parties and meals and conversations.

And it's God's plan and it's God's calling upon me and you to make his invisible qualities visible.

Not my views and opinions on family members' lifestyles, not my views on politics, crime, society, morality, or secondary B-team, marginal doctrines and beliefs.

But to go into these conversations and relationships and places of gathering and make God's invisible qualities visible.

The things that matter to him most, that he wants these people we're around to see most clearly.

Will I embrace that?

Will you embrace that?

And the second thing I wanted to say is to you, as a parent or a grandparent.

We're all nervous.

Parents and grandparents, we're all nervous that our kids aren't turning out the way we want.

Oh, they're gonna see something or believe something wrong or do something, or but we're all nervous about our kids and our grandkids.

We're all nervous about how are we best to influence our kids and our grandkids about the things that matter most, the important issues and values and beliefs of life.

I just wanted to remind you today that 2,000 years ago, Jesus declared the two most powerful words of influence that have ever been uttered.

Follow me.

Follow me.

God's primary plan for me to influence my grandson about marriage, about dealing with enemies, about relating to people that I am very different from, I see very differently, about how to handle money, how to handle the word of God, how to talk to God, how to deal with sin and failure and victory and blessings.

God's primary way for me to influence my grandson about these things is to not talk him to death, but to show him a life consistently that is joyful and that is superior.

My grandson's not an idiot.

And your children and grandchildren aren't idiots either.

Here's a pile of manure and here's a chocolate cake.

Oh, which is he gonna pick?

No, unless he's an idiot, he's gonna pick the cake.

He'll pick what's superior.

Given enough time, he'll pick what's superior.

It is not my job to talk him to death.

It is my job to show in front of him, to give him a sign, a symbol, a picture of a superior, joyful life.

So, oh that we would stop fretting and stressing and pushing and nagging and relax, calm down, and rest in the plan that God has created for us to have influence in the lives of those we care about.

It's through living a superior life.

Oswald Chambers said this the people who influence us most are not those who detain us with their continual talk, but who live their lives like the stars in the sky and the lilies of the field, simply, consistently, peacefully.

Those are the people that mold and shape us most.

I shared what I felt like you wanted me to share.

I pray that your words would not fall to the ground, but that they would take root in all of our hearts, starting with me.

That your words would take root, and that we would understand and grasp and uh accept your calling to be your image bearer, to make visible your invisible attributes, to emphasize through our lives the things that matter most to you.

Please, God, help us with this very daunting task and responsibility.

God, we need grace.

But thank you for having an abundance of it available.

We love you, Lord.

Amen.