Download the Bethlehem Baptist Church Mobile App
Available for iOS and Android
June 29/30, 2013
David Livingston (South Campus) | Isaiah 55:1-13
Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.
Behold, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
Behold, you shall call a nation that you do not know,
and a nation that did not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, and of the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
'For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.“
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the Lord,
an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.--Isaiah 55:1-13
Introduction
We’re focusing on outreach today ... evangelism, the Great Commission, having hard conversations with lost people about God, sin, the cross, repentance and faith. I want to start with a "bang." We’ve already heard the reading of Isaiah 55, and especially verses 6-7. Look at those two verses again with me:
Seek the LORD while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
Let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the LORD, that he might have compassion on him,
And to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
What a combination of instruction and invitation, of divine commandment as well as supernatural promise! That’s where we will camp out in God’s word this morning. We’re coming back there, but to reinforce where we’re going, listen to two more quotes, one from Jack Miller, a former seminary professor of mine:
“The command to go to the nations with the gospel is not one command among many, it is the master command of Jesus the Master. If we do not obey this command, we are living out of accord with our whole reason for being in this world” (The Heart of the Servant Leader, p. 36).
And another, this one from a fellow at Southern Seminary named Jim Stitzinger, who says,
“Christians must cultivate 'evangelistic instructs' that compel them toward unbelievers, and they must develop a humble tenacity that is willing to go beyond the point of least resistance and move toward the gospel. The Great Commission is not fulfilled in silence, but in conversations that confront ungodliness and unrighteousness with the kindness of God that leads to repentance” (Southern Seminary magazine, 2013).
If you and I are going to obey Jesus’ “master command” by cultivating “evangelistic instincts” and humbly yet relentlessly going beyond the point of least resistance toward the gospel in our conversations, we will need the supernatural wisdom and power. They are already at work within us, but must spring into new resolves, deeper motives, fresh and fruitful measures of loving action. So, let’s ask our heavenly Father to give us more help from his Holy Spirit, help right now to listen on our way to obedience in outreach.
Prayer
In concluding this little series on worship, nurture, and outreach, I began reading a book I’ve had for several years titled, A Pastor’s Sketches: Conversations With Anxious Souls Concerning The Way of Salvation. The author, I.S. Spencer, lived and labored in the middle 1800’s, for over 20 years in Brooklyn, New York. Before that he also preached and led the Congregational Church in Northhampton, Massachusetts, made famous a century before by the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. Spencer averaged over 800 house calls a year among his parishioners and meticulously recorded the results of a total of over 20,000 such visits. From them he extracted 77 sketches to illustrate his experience of helping men, women, and children come savingly to Christ.
Contained in these 77 sketches is a veritable tidal wave of Scriptural wisdom, exhortation, instruction, and warning. It is no wonder that in his day I.S Spencer was nicknamed “the Bunyan of Brooklyn.” As I read I didn’t try to make an accurate numerical count of Spencer’s favorite soul-winning Bible texts; nevertheless, Isaiah 55:6-7 surely ranks at the top. It appears these two verses were always readily on his lips both to start and to finish what he wanted sinners to know and to do in order to have peace with God and useful membership in the church.
So, I will lay claim to that very purpose with you this very morning, namely, that you and I be sure both to have done this morning’s text ourselves, and if so, that we will consistently urge it on others for their everlasting good from this point forward. As I said, I think that in a “gospel conversation,” this text can start and even conclude what we need to know and do.
It appropriately starts the gospel conversation by directing us straight to God. God is the gospel. The gospel is a God-centered message and experience. We will never start wrong if we begin and remain God-centered. That is what these two verses do. They are like a two-sided coin of action in relation to God: the “heads” for seeking him in verse 6 and the “tails” side of renouncing what keeps us from him in verse 7.
Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.
The positive invitation is to tell ourselves and others, “I must pray to God, and pray with the assurance that I will be heard and answered!” Verse 6 lays a simple duty on everyone, and it vigorously presses two motives on us for doing this duty. First, the duty, plainly stated and repeated in other to be emphatic: “Seek the Lord” (6a) and “call on him” (6b). Start in that one indispensable place. We won’t get the gospel right if we don’t urge one another to seek God and to call on him.
This is the command to pray. This word “seek” is an energetic, dynamic one. To seek is to stop doing everything else and to focus on finding something, like the woman in Jesus’ parable of the lost coin, who “lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and seeks diligently until she finds it. And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost'” (Luke 15:8-9).
So, we are to earnestly urge sinners that nothing is more important in all their lives. Fast, pray, venture until you know God and his fellowship with a personal, confident, confidential experience with him! One of the Hebrew words for seeking, shachar, is used in Psalm 63:1 and Proverbs 1:28; 7:15; 8:17. It can be variously translated “to seek early.” In other words, do it first thing, early in the morning, like, “O God, you are my God; earnestly [early] I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).
The Scriptures are full of such exhortations to seek and to call on God!
Application: Why Come and Seek?
We must urge the doing of this duty to seek God; however, no loving evangelist merely issues God’s commands. We are persuaders, presenting with heartfelt pleas, as God’s ambassadors, God’s appeal. So, why should people come early and earnestly and diligently to pray and seek and call upon God? Look again at the two reasons given in v. 6, one having to do with timing and the other to access:
Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.
Do you see these motives that we must feel ourselves and persistently try to instill in others? (1) There is the motive of timing and (2) of access. See them in the words “while he may be found" and "while he is near.” Now, today is the day of salvation. If you hear God’s voice, delay will only harden your heart and tempt you with the delusion that you have control over time, that you can respond to God on your terms and at your leisure. None of us knows even how this day will end for us, let alone all the times God holds in his hands. When Noah was building the ark, every plank he and his sons laid, every portion of the great ship of salvation they finished brought closer the awful day when God would shut the door and his clouds of judgment would roll in.
Once a person says, “Yes, I understand the gospel. I comprehend what you are saying, namely, that I am a sinner. My sin is that I have broken God’s holy, just, and good law. I am guilty and alienated from God, I am worldly and proud and selfish, my heart is wicked, and God is angry with me, but nevertheless sinners like me can be saved because Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. God so loved the world that he gave his own Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s son, cleanses from all sin. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us. Therefore, sinners can be saved because Christ died for them.
Then indeed, the LORD is near to that person! And God is willing to be found by him or her! But the day of grace is also a day of warning that another day comes when God will not be near and will not be found.
That day was fast approaching for Israel when Isaiah first pled our text.
The LORD, the God of their father, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD rose against his people, until there was no remedy. Therefore, he brought up against them, the king of the Chaldeans, who killed their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged. He gave them all into his hand.--2 Chronicles 36:15-17
Hear and tremble at the word in Proverbs 1:27-33, about a time when God will not be near and cannot be found:
When terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their own turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.--Proverbs 1:27-33
Now, in the light of what verse 6 says, it might sound contradictory to further say that we must not rush people into seeking the LORD before they understand what he is calling upon them to believe and to do, pushing them into an excited experience of thinking they have found God when it is likely that no such encounter and lasting discovery has taken place. Instead, we may have merely extracted from their anxious wills a temporary and shallow decision that could make it all the more difficult for them to really become a disciple of Jesus and a lover of God. To forestall any such evangelistic superficiality, let’s hasten on to observe that our text turns over this gospel coin from the "heads" side of seeking God in verse 6 to the "tails" side of turning from sin in verse 7.
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the LORD, that he might have compassion on him,
Let him return to the LORD, that he might have compassion on him,
And to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
The good news we have before us, and can start sharing, not only contains the invitation to pray with its assurance that our prayers will be heard and answered, but that in praying, sinners must repent and reform in order that their sins will be pardoned. And here in a single verse, Isaiah tells us two more gospel ingredients (1) what it is to repent, and (2) what encouragement we have to actually do so.
What is it to repent?
Isaiah speaks of the “about face” of turning from sin and returning to God. Our sins reside both in our wicked ways (“Let the wicked man forsake his way”) and in our unrighteous thoughts (“Let the unrighteous man forsake his thoughts”). In other words, repentance shows itself is a change of outward behavior. Paul gave examples of this repentance in Ephesians 4:
Repentance must demonstrate itself most readily and visibly in changing from bad behavior to good, from evil deeds to good works. Genuine repentance bears outward fruit. Others will see it and give glory to God.
And while doing an “about face” shows itself in outward good behavior and can never be less than that, repentance must be more. Repentance must penetrate into one’s thought-life, into the operations of our minds and hearts. Why? Because it’s our thoughts that give rise to our actions, and the mind can remain full of every kind of corruption of rivalry and envy and conceit and greed, yet mask itself with soft words, external smiles, and hidden motives. If I give away all I have [outward generosity], and if I deliver up my body to be burned [apparently ultimate outward sacrifice to the point of martyrdom] but have not love, I gain nothing --1 Corinthians 13:3
What encouragement do we have to actually repent?
The encouragement is to return to God so that God will have mercy on anyone who does repent, and that he will not just pardon them, but “abundantly pardon.” Here is the reason to seek God and call on him. In his justice ,he is loving and in his wrath, he remembers mercy.
Psalm 130:3,7 says, “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, who could stand? But, with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared . . . O Israel, hope in the LORD. For with the LORD there is steadfast love and with him is plentiful redemption.” It is the realization that though “None is righteous, no, not one; [that] no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Romans 3:10b-11), that God himself is our Seeker. He has come seeking us: “the hour is coming and now is here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:23). And that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).
So, before turning to five practical applications, let me underscore one more thing about repentance, actually, two things:
1) Don’t leave it out. The gospel coin of Isaiah 55:6-7 (and everywhere in God’s word) has both sides, the “heads” of heading for God through his Son Jesus in faith, and the “tails” side of turning tail on sin in repentance. It is a worthless gospel that persuades sinners they can treasure Jesus while keeping their beloved sins at the same time.
2) Don’t expect or demand of yourself or any other sinner to repent of sin and believe in Jesus by their own efforts. We absolutely need the aid of the Holy Spirit to renew our hearts and to bring us to faith and repentance. “Unless a man is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God . . . That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and which is born of the Spirit is Spirit” (John 3:3,6). We are helpless without enabling work of the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit is anything but helpless--he is the Helper.
The reason I spoke of not rushing a person to a decision lies just here. “In evangelism,” Jack Miller wrote, “we stand before the heart’s door and knock, but then we must be prepared to wait until the Holy Spirit moves the man to open that door to the inner self and welcome Christ into the living room” (The Heart of a Servant Leader, p. 47).
Application and Conclusion
Now, as we wrap up this morning, and as we move toward the 4th of July holiday next week and on into a summer season that has finally arrived, let me exhort you in the light of this great little two-verse nugget of evangelistic gold in Isaiah 55:6-7. Together we must consider:
1.Our God
If Isaiah 55 does anything it does that! God really does have the evangelization of the whole world, and therefore of south suburbs all planned in advance. He has chosen each and every person who will seek him, call on him, and be saved: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless in his sight (Ephesians 1:3). It is all planned.
By nature (and in continuing sin) we are cowards, inexperienced, personally immature, or any combination of defects that render us feeling like ten of the spies who came back from scouting out the Promised Land feeling like “grasshoppers in their own eyes,” before the “giant unbelievers” in the land. Nevertheless, we are God’s adopted children, redeemed by his Son’s blood, granted insight into the divine plan for all of history, and sealed with his own Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:5-14). That’s who we are, God’s “ambassadors,” making the gospel appeal on King Jesus’ behalf, pleading for people to be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20).
In 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul said he delivered to the church “as of first importance what I received: that Christ died according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” There is our message that we have to share in super-concentrated form. The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Repeat it, phrase by phrase with me. There, you’ve spoken it.
You are not there by accident. The last two sections of the booklet we handed out two weeks ago titled, “5 Ways to Tell the Story This Summer” invite you to zero in on up to ten of those “divinely orchestrated” relationships you have: five you could invite to one of our Wednesday night or Sunday morning services this summer, and five you could pray will believe in Christ this year.
One of the biggest reasons many churches are doomed is the prayerlessness of their leaders and people. There is no way forward in anything that matters for eternity without knowing Jesus Christ personally and intimately. This morning I am inviting you to share with the staff and elders of our congregation your name and that of up to five people whom we pledge to pray for with you every week throughout the rest of this summer. Write them on the slip provided and drop it in the wooden tower by the door on the way out. If there are 500 of us here this morning, we could be praying for 2500 people in the days ahead, people who will "Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; Who will forsake their wicked ways and their unrighteous thoughts, who will return to the LORD that He might have compassion on them, and to our God, that He will aboundantly pardon!"
Prayer