Isaiah 44:9-23 • Grits and Grace
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
All right, the best summer travel advice I can give you. We discovered this two summers ago, traveling home from Colorado. It was getting late.
We were tired, long drive. We were hungry. And so we stopped at the best waffle house we could find.
And there I discovered, because we'd not been to a waffle house in years, that one of the featured items on the menu was cheese grits for 35 cents.
I mean, I'm not talking about a little dab. I'm talking about a heaping huge bowl of cheese grits for 35 cents.
I mean, that is almost as good as free. I mean, I was doing the math here. I'm kind of going, listen, I might not have to wait until anniversaries or birthdays to go out to dinner. I mean, 35 cents.
You know, if you can get cheese grits for 35 cents, that's almost heaven. I mean, you kind of said, this is really good. And then I read the fine print.
Cheese grits, 35 cents with any full entree.
Yeah, almost free, but then you got to get something else.
And I soon thought, isn't that how a lot of us think of the free grace of God?
Almost free.
Provided by Him, but you know, surely you have to do something else. We can be in the church long. And while you hear the sermon and while you're in the Sunday school class, you think, "Christ, Jesus died once for all. His blood sufficient, full, once for all. We're free." And then, of course, we sin.
Or our families fall apart.
And we wonder, what else does God really require?
What is going to make this right with Him?
Surely it can't be free. I mean, not really free.
And what we're struggling with, the fact that we might have to do something else to make something right with God beyond what He would do with ourselves, for ourselves, is what the prophet Isaiah is dealing with here.
What do we have to do?
What do we have to do to be right with you finally, ultimately God?
The apostle starts in a strange place. He begins talking about idolatry before he ever begins talking about what redemption really is. You know, he begins talking about the blacksmith.
Verse 12, "The ironsmith takes a cutting tool, works over the coals, he fashions it with hammers, works it with strong arms."
And yet, though he's making an idol to take care of him, what happens? He becomes hungry and his strength fails.
He drinks no water and his faint. I mean, it's just a subtle irony, right? He's making an idol to help him out, but instead the idol just wears him out.
He works and works at it.
And it can't really solve the problem he wants it to solve.
The next example, of course, is the carpenter, verse 13. "The carpenter stretches a line, he marks it out with a pencil, he shapes it with planes, and marks it with a compass." It's kind of sweet to see that an ancient carpenter still uses the same tools, right, that carpenters use today.
But there is a problem, of course. Once that compass is used, the carpenter shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man to dwell in a house.
Apparently, it's the image of a little house sanctuary that pagans would have in an ancient culture.
But the prophet recognizes that once you have measured as a man and once you have cut as a man, that the image that you ultimately have just reflects the ability of a man.
The idol really just reflects who you are. It's the reason so often, of course, that people reach the pinnacle of their own success, their own career, and recognize at the end of it they don't have anything more than the limits of themselves.
I just created myself.
I just made what I thought would satisfy me or lift me or remake my world, and at the end of it all, I just have me again.
What I make only reflects myself. My limits, my blessings, but just who I am, that's all I get.
If my heaven depends on me, what I end up with is still just me.
Finally, there's the example of the cook.
It's really just the carpenter cooking his meal. Verse 14, what does he do? He cuts down cedars or he chooses a cypress tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and rain nourishes it. So he may cut a tree down in the woods or he may domesticate a tree, but regardless, he still depends on the rain. He cannot supply himself for his idol to be made.
And then verse 15, "Then it becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread, and he also makes a god and worships it and makes an idol and falls down before it." Now, do you get the picture? All right, he's got his log. He takes half the log and burns it to fix his meal.
The other half of the log becomes his idol that he's shaping for himself. The irony of that is said at the beginning of verse 16, "Half of it he burns in the fire," beginning of verse 17, "and the rest of it he makes it to a god." Verse 19, "No one considers nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. I also bake bread on its coals. I roasted meat and eaten, and shall I make the rest into an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?"
Hey, it can't take care of itself. Why would I think it can take care of me?
It's burning up in the fire. Why would I think it can rescue me?
It's a delusion, a lie, ultimately an abomination.
And the apostle, not the apostle, the prophet here ultimately makes fun in a sense of those who depend upon their own hands' work to feed them and satisfy them. Verse 20, "Whoever does this, he feeds on ashes." Just the stuff that burns up that doesn't last. "A deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, his or not a lie at my right hand."
So do you get it? All the prophet has done so far as he's just kind of laid out this series of ironies of idolatry. And in order, they are these. An idol promises to help you out, but instead it wears you out. It promises to remake you, but instead it just reflects you. And finally, it promises to satisfy you, but you end up only eating ashes, and you want to rinse and spit.
It doesn't do what you think it's going to do. Now, you have to understand, at this point, the prophet is preaching to the choir.
He's speaking to Jews about idolatry. And at this point, everybody's kind of agreeing. After all, they're monotheists, right? They're spiritualists. They believe that God is spiritual. They don't believe that God is something that you make with your own hand. So as the prophet is speaking about idols, all the Jews are nodding their heads. In fact, they're kind of chuckling and shortling at these foolish pagans who have an idol that they think can rescue them that is the product of their own hands. But now the prophet has you just where he wants you.
I want you to think what the principle is. What's the common denominator of all of these idols?
What's this?
If it depends upon you for its creation, it cannot be your salvation.
If it depends upon you for its creation, you cannot depend on it for your salvation. If you make it, it will not rescue you and cannot.
Now, you already knew that before you sat down if you're talking about idols.
But the prophet is after your heart. Do you actually really believe that?
That if it depends on you for its creation, you cannot depend upon it for your salvation.
With that principle in mind, the prophet now turns to what our redemption looks like biblically. These words are dear, but they are important. Verse 21, "Remember these things, O Jacob and Israel, for you are my servant. I formed you.
You are my servant, O Israel. You will not be forgotten by me."
Here's the first principle of redemption. God is simply saying to his people, "I will not forget you." Why? Because I formed you. You get the reverse?
If it's an idol, we form it. But God says, "No, listen. I formed you.
So you're precious to me. You are a treasure to me, and I, therefore, will not forget you."
Why is that important?
Because this is Israel in a time of great discipline. Just a remnant remains. The people have turned to other forms of idolatry in the past. They have turned away from God. They are in sinfulness. Many of them are already in exile.
And now, as a result of their being so far from God, they do not remember his commands. They do not remember his worship. Many of them do not even remember the language of the Israelites anymore. And yet God is saying to them, "Though you have forgotten me, I will not forget you."
Think of what it would mean if you were one who are coming now today, and maybe in this experience of being in a church, you recognize you've been a long way away for a long time from the things of God.
And this may seem strange and foreign, and people are talking about prophets in the Old Testament. I don't even remember what that stuff is about.
Would it help you to know that even if you've forgotten God, he has not forgotten you.
He formed you. He made you. You are his. As the creation of God, he says, "You need to know that I will not forget you." Then there'd be all kinds of reasons that you may be deserving of my lack of memory for you, and you may have forgotten me.
I won't forget you.
Elaine Pereira is a name some of you will know, author of "I Will Never Forget."
The story of a woman who is caring for her older mom who is going into dementia.
And Pereira describes her mother's descent in a way that is not flattering at all. Her mother can't remember things, and in her dementia begins to put strange interpretations on what is going on. Her mother can't remember in the nursing home room where she has put her brown pants, and so she begins to say, "They've been stolen.
The nurses have stolen my brown pants."
And Elaine Pereira says, "Why would the nurses do that? The pants don't fit any of them."
And then the nail file is missing.
I can't remember where I put it. The nurses stole my nail file, but then the worst.
I can't find my piece of lint.
The nurses stole my lint.
And in the embarrassment of the indignity of the loss of the memory of her mother, we begin to understand that as the story unfolds, the dignity is restored not by the mother's memory, but by the daughter's memory. She remembers her mother, the brilliance, the love, the warmth, the nurture. And in the daughter's care for her mother, in the memory of what she was and still is by virtue of her creation is that image of God.
The mother is redignified. She's ennobled again because her daughter will not forget who she really is.
And here is God saying to people who are broken and crumbling in their lives in the Old Testament, who have not got it all put together, who have not even got their repentance put back together before God. And God is saying, "You have been faithless, but I abide faithful.
I will not forget you. You may have forgotten me. You may have wandered away. You may not know the things of the church. You may not know the things of the faith anymore. It does not ultimately matter. I formed you and I will remember you. And though all the family and all the world and all the nation, everybody else forgets you." I will not forget you.
It's not something we make.
It's not the creation of our hands. It's something in the heart and the mind of God. More than mere recollection, it is the promise of the preservation of our dignity by the memory of God.
And the prophet is just beginning to scratch the surface of how deep, deep and wonderful is the redemption of God.
As he goes on from talking about memory to matters of forgiveness, verse 22, the same God who is speaking to Israel in the covenant language, Jacob, Israel, I made you, you're mine. He says, verse 22, "I have blotted out your transgression like a cloud and your sins
like mist."
You know, when I first read those words, just the image that came to my mind was that God was somehow putting a cloud between Himself and our sin so that He was blotting out from His vision our sin. And the mist was somehow obscuring to Him our sin. But that doesn't work at all, does it? God isn't blinded by the clouds or the mist. He knows deep into our hearts what's there.
As I studied more, I began to recognize that what the prophet is saying is that the cloud is what is caused by our sin.
The mist is the darkness, the misty wash in which we walk as our own sin begins to obscure to us the sunshine and the goodness of life.
And the Lord is saying that though our sin be upon us, the radiance of His love is driving away the cloud, blotting it out.
And just as the morning mist is relieved by the dawn and the warmth of the sun, so the Lord is saying, "Though your sins surround you like a mist, I'm taking it away.
I am taking it away." It's not what you do.
It's what I'm doing.
Some of you will know the name Anne Lamott, a novelist who is coming from a very different place than most of you in this room.
A life of sin, destitution in so many ways, a life seeking God in all the worst things of this world. She writes about her progress to faith and how the clouds and the mist had to disappear.
"What did it mean to be saved?" I asked the minister.
He was the first Christian I ever met whom I could stand to be in the same room with.
Most Christians seemed almost hostile in their belief that they're saved and you're not.
"What does it mean to be saved?" I asked.
"You don't need to think about that right now," he said. "No, just tell me. What does it mean to be saved?"
He said, "I guess it's like discovering you're on the shelf of a pawn shop, dusty and forgotten, and not worth very much.
But Jesus comes in and He tells the pawnbroker, I'll take her place on the shelf. Let her go outside into the sunshine."
What was the promise of new light in a new day, just in being remembered, not left in the dust on the pawn shelf?
But some of you know that the mist wasn't all gone in her life. It still needed to dissipate. She writes after hearing what it meant to be saved, "I wanted to fall on my knees, newly born, but I didn't."
I walked back home and got out the scotch.
I was feeling better in general, less out of control, even though it would be four more years before I got sober.
I was not willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.
But slowly, slowly, I came back to life.
It had been like one of those people that Ezekiel comes upon in the valley of dry bones, people who had given up, people who were lifeless and without hope, but because of Ezekiel's presence, breath comes into them.
Spirit and kindness revived them.
I love her words, spirit and kindness revived them.
It wasn't something ultimately out of them. It was this expression of the grace of God perceived his spirit, working in her spirit, the understanding of his kindness for one who was in the midst of a sinful, dark life and yet was reaching to her and using the son of his countenance and his mercy to drive the mist away. And it was that that was before she'd even turned and understood it. It was working in her behalf.
It was forgiveness, as it were, even after her sin, as the Lord wasn't simply walking away because she didn't have everything straightened out yet. I think of it maybe in terms simply of having been in a seminary setting for about three decades in which there are lots of young couples, lots of Christian young couples having lots of Christian young babies. And the consequence of having lots of little babies is seeing them go through their stages of development. I see lots of first steps, right? You know, what does a parent do? You know, there's the child taking first steps and the parent gets down and goes, "Come
on kid, come on, come on, come on, I'll hug you, come on, come on."
There's actually very few parents I have seen that say to that little child, "You take a few steps and then I'll hug you."
It's kindness that calls even before you've taken the steps, even before you know how to, even before you're able. Here is the kindness that is reaching forward.
Do you recognize how God is saying that? It's in language that is truly radical in terms of what we expect to be the reaction of God to our sin because God is not simply promising forgiveness after sin.
God is actually promising forgiveness before repentance.
Did you hear that?
God is actually promising forgiveness before repentance.
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for repentance is simply the word "shuv," it means to turn.
But I want you to recognize where the turning is relative to the forgiveness of God in verse 22. Are you still there?
"I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist.
Return to me, for I have redeemed you."
The command to return is in the present tense, which means the people have not returned yet. They are still in their exile, they're still in their sin, they're still in their lack of understanding, and yet God is saying to them past tense, "I have blotted out your sin. I have forgiven your transgressions. I have redeemed you."
Now this begins to trouble us. Wait, wait. I thought that forgiveness came after we repented. You don't expect God to forgive you, I mean, if you haven't really repented. Now listen, you have to understand, repentance is still important, I'm going to say that.
But you have to understand, if you think that God's rescue of you depends on something that you are making, even your repentance.
You have fallen back into the idolatry of Israel. Your salvation depends upon you.
The way in which we understand it is to understand well by people who are coming out of the darkness and understand that the work has to be entirely God's, not ours.
St. Lamont wrote about how God began to reach to her.
She said, "Mine was a patchwork God sewn together from bits of rage and ribbon, Eastern and Western spirituality, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink or Jesus."
Then one afternoon in my dark bedroom, the cracks webbed all the way through me. I don't exactly know what that means. I think of kind of like ice on a lake and you step onto it before it's fully firm. The cracks begin to web through her, she said.
"I believed that I would die soon from a fall or from an overdose.
I knew there was an afterlife but felt they couldn't possibly take you in the shape I was in. I could no longer imagine how God could love me.
But in my dark bedroom, out of nowhere, crossed my mind to call the new minister at St. Stephen's. It took me 45 minutes to walk there but this skinny middle-aged guy, obviously it wasn't Carrie.
Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome.
This skinny middle-aged guy was still in his office when I arrived.
He listened.
And so I let it all tumble out.
The x-rated motels, my father's death, a hint that maybe just ever so often I drank a little too much.
I don't remember much of his response except that when I said, "I didn't think God could love me anymore," he said.
God has to love you.
That's God's job.
Now I confess to you, that language scares me a bit.
But listen to what happened.
Years later, the minister explained why he had put the responsibility of Anlomat's redemption entirely on God, saying to her, "It's God's job to forgive you, not your job to get it somehow."
He said these years later to her, "Here you were in this desperate situation, suicidal,
clearly alcoholic, going down the tubes. I thought the trick was to help you extricate yourself enough so that you could breathe again.
You said your prayers weren't working anymore and I could see that in your desperation you were trying to save yourself.
So I said you should stop praying for a while and just let me pray for you."
And right away you seem to settle down inside.
What settled her?
Not trusting in the God of her making, not trusting the adequacy of her prayer, but letting another take the load entirely. First the minister and then ultimately God, simply trusting that it was God's… I want to say this carefully, but I want you to hear that it was God's job, a covenant keeping God. It was His job to love her.
And it wasn't her job to make Him do that, to somehow leverage God with the adequacy of what she could bring to the table where her prayers were good enough, was her life straightened up enough? Did she say repentance in the right terms? It wasn't her making of anything that was going to be the basis of her forgiveness. It was instead resting upon what someone else had provided.
That message is a tough one for us even now. Because if I tell you that forgiveness precedes repentance, we get very concerned. Are you saying that repentance isn't required?
In order for God to forgive us, are you really saying that repentance isn't required?
Well, before I answer that question, I want you to think of what the alternatives could be.
Is God's forgiveness dependent on the adequacy of our repentance?
Hear the question? I mean, if we are saying really God's forgiveness depends upon your repentance, and by the way, all of us will agree, it has to be sincere, right? It has to be sincere. And then what?
You know, God happens to be holy and perfect.
So if God's pure and perfect forgiveness of you depends upon your repentance, it had better be perfect.
And with no wrong motives, it had better be absolutely holy or will actually be abhorrent to Him.
It's why the Puritans, when they wrote about this, actually said, "We have to learn to repent of our repentance."
Because if you don't, you don't actually recognize the imperfection of what you're bringing to God.
But if you actually begin to say, "Okay, well, okay, I know it can't be perfect forgiveness, perfect repentance," well, that's not the only problem.
Now you have the problem saying, "If God's forgiveness depends upon the adequacy of your repentance, what about the sin that you can't remember?"
Anybody willing to confess there might be sin in their lives that they can't remember?
Do you know that the ancient Hebrews actually had to bring a sacrifice to the temple for the sins they couldn't remember?
And that's not the only problem.
If God's forgiveness depends on the sin that you adequately, fully, and rightly repent of, then what happens if you die before you repent?
Some of you have faced awful, terrible situations in your families and lives where there are issues of accident and suicide.
And I want you to know something.
God is not waiting for the adequacy of anybody's repentance to forgive them.
Forgiveness from a covenant-keeping, holy, gracious God precedes even the adequacy of our repentance.
I love the way the Apostle Paul says it in Romans 5.1, where he says, "In Christ we have received access into the grace in which we now stand."
As though we've already entered the ocean of grace in which we swim day after day. God is not somehow waiting, you know, to let the dam breach by our repentance so that He can let the water of mercy flow. We live in grace. Listen, how much of your past sin did Christ take the penalty for? How much of your past sin did Christ take the penalty for? All of it. How much of your present sin did Christ take the penalty for?
How much of your future sin did Christ take the penalty for?
All of it. What that ultimately means is God is not waiting to say, "Listen, when your repentance gets adequate, when you've remembered enough, when you've done enough, when you've shed enough tears, when you have done all that you can do to make it right, then I will love you." That is not what God is saying.
That's actually the form of idolatry that is saying it's the work of your hands or of your heart or of your tears or something in you, that it's your work that makes things right with God. Jesus made it right with God.
We rest upon Him. I love the way the Reformers say, "We receive and rest upon Him alone for our salvation." Repentance is not so much a doing as a depending. It's not so much an action as an attitude. It is resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Well, if that's the case, why do we repent?
Not to make Him love us. It is actually to return the embrace of the One who already holds us. It's to claim the grace that already claims us. It's to experience the wonder of the love that has been ours because of the work of Jesus Christ, not because of the work of my repentance. If God is waiting to forgive me fully until my repentance is full, then I die in the shame and the harm of my own sin because I don't know how to repent fully and well. But I do know how to put my faith in the One who took the full penalty. And that one is my hope, not my repentance, His provision.
And when that is my hope, I'm suddenly free. I mean, really free from the limitation of thinking, when am I going to repent enough? When am my wife and I going to have paid the penalty enough? When are we going to do enough to make God truly, really set us free from the guilt and the burden of the sin and this hurt that we're family is going through? And you have to say, "No, listen, you are free.
Really, really free."
Oh, but doesn't the Bible say if we confess our sin, He's faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse from all our... First John 1.9 is really there.
But you have to understand what's being said there. God is not saying this condition, you know, "If you confess your sin, then I will forgive your sin."
This is a statement of fact. You know, those who are confessing their sin, those who recognize the wonder of the grace of God, those who are living in the land of confession, know the wonder of the grace of God. No, to forgive your sin, not because, not because you confessed it, but because even in confessing, you are understanding the glory and the goodness of the grace of God that has already captured you.
It's the wonder of really, really being set free.
That's our joy.
What results?
Profound security.
Ricky Gray is a friend of mine, a missionary who's very honest in what he writes about the troubles of his own heart, particularly since a son named Chase was born with multiple birth disorders.
And Ricky writes occasionally how, you know, after the multiple operations and the trips to the doctor, how they watch every growth chart and every piece of progress and when there's any setback, how their hearts automatically reverse to, "Have we not repented enough?
Is there some reason we're experiencing this now that we haven't done enough for God?"
And then he says, "We have to take our hearts back to the gospel.
We are made right with God, not by what we do."
Jesus made us right. Our lives now are hedged about by the grace of God, and nothing enters the hedge but what is best for us and our loved ones eternally.
And that's the promise of a God who has forgiven even before our repentance is all that it ought to be.
And then profound humility. If I really believe that forgiveness precedes my repentance, then I get beyond comparison. I get beyond the sense of I've got to be right enough now for God to love me and better than you or something like that. I mean, listen, it's the summer season, so we're largely family here. And we so much pray and want a lot of people to return to grace. And we know there are all kinds of issues of past and so on. But what if we actually believe that God's love were just not based upon our appearances or goodness? Or would we be able to say to people, "Listen, we're sorry.
Either we didn't or didn't even know how to make the worship experience what it should have been for you and we're just sorry."
How it might change, "Wait, wait, you can't tell me that. No, listen, I'm right with God.
I'm eternally, totally right with God.
So I can be humble before you."
And the last result, if we actually believed that forgiveness preceded repentance, wouldn't just be security, wouldn't just be humility. You know what the final result would be?
Repentance.
Is that good?
He forgives me even before I've got everything worked out right.
I want to be with him.
If that's how good he is, I want to be with him.
Some of you remember that famous painting of the prodigal son done by Rembrandt. And the reason it became so famous is because, listen, lots of people have done paintings of the prodigal son. Rembrandt is so famous because it's the painting of the son in his absolute destitution.
He's been living with pigs and feeding on the pods that they were eating and so Rembrandt really represents him in the deprivation and the destitution of his clothes are filthy and torn and because of malnutrition he's going bald and he's emaciated and there he is just clinging to the father in the royal-seeming robes. It does seem like I ought to be touched by this filthy young man who's at his knees.
But instead what you see is the faith of the father. The face of the father has no reproach, no repulsion, but deep and abiding love.
This is my son who has come to me.
And it is the love of the father that welcomes the return that has caused the return.
So God calls you today.
I don't know where you are in repentance.
If there are things in your life that you know you need to repent of, if there are things you think you have repented of, but listen, I don't want you to wait to think I've got to make this right before I can be all right with God.
I want you to know of a forgiveness that is free, really, truly, fully free so that you're freed from you and rest in him fully, entirely.
And then you would really know the freedom of his forgiveness that is offered to you. Father, so work your will in us, we pray.
Let us know the wonder of a God who forgives even before we've got it all figured out or done right so that we would run to you and lean on you and rest in you. Grant us the wonder of a grace so free that it frees us from ourselves and enfolds us in your arms forever.