9.17.24

This week we turn our attention to the holiness of God from Isaiah 6. Yesterday we saw how God’s holiness overwhelms us. And as a result, has the ability to overcome our problems. Today we see that his holiness strips us of the deceptions of our self-righteousness.

It’s interesting - and important to note - that when Isaiah was confronted with the holiness of God, he wasn’t intimidated by the ugliness of his many sins. He didn’t run straight to repentance for all the ways he had messed up. But what does he say? Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Why did Isaiah talk about the uncleanness of his lips? Why was he not overwhelmed by the sin his feet had led him into, or the sin of what he ears had heard, or the even deeper sins of his heart and thoughts? Why his lips?

For Isaiah, his lips were not the source of his greatest weakness. Rather, they were the source of his greatest strength. As a prophet, it was his job to speak, and he likely was proud (or at least self-confident) in his abilities to speak the truth of God to the people. That’s what he did!

When confronted with the pure holiness of God, Isaiah saw how ugly and tainted and worthless even his best things on his best days were before his holy presence. Anybody who is confronted with the real God feels guilt and shame over their many sins. Even religious people feel that. But when confronted with the holiness of God, it strips away the delusions that we have anything good to offer him from our strengths and gifts.

This leads us to one of the most challenging things to understand about our relationship with God. The core assumption of religion is that people need to be motivated to live better lives. And the goal of the church is to push people to better and more consistent moral living. And deep down, we have this feeling that spiritual growth means to graduate from needing as much grace as we did yesterday. But Isaiah here shows us that the gospel produces the exact opposite. Because the holiness of God exposes our best things as a mere pile of worthless rags in his sight. And it awakens us to the realization that even our repentance needs to be repented of. Even our strengths and gifts and best deeds before God need to be repented of. Because nothing we do or offer or say is ever pure and holy. And before his holy presence, it is exposed for the worthless efforts they really are.

If the goal of Christianity is not to grow out of our need of grace, then what is it? It’s to grow in our awareness of our neediness. As we come to see that even our best things are worthless to God, it shifts the reliance of our standing before God from what we do to what Jesus has done for us. In the end, the only thing we bring to the table of our salvation is our neediness. All we need is need. But most people don’t have it. We have need plus our best efforts. Need plus our promise to try harder tomorrow. Needy but not as needy as others. And Isaiah shows us that God’s holiness blows that whole pretense away, as we stand naked and bare before his holy presence.

Isaiah shows us here that what God is after is total and complete reliance upon his grace. He wants us to run to it every day. And he wants us to realize that we will never outgrow our need for it. WE…NEED…JESUS. And we always will. He is our salvation, and our worth never comes from our response to his sacrifice on the cross.