Transcript

Well, let’s go to the book of Isaiah. We are in between book studies at the moment, and I like to take this time to re-look at some foundational things. And who knows, we might get stuck in Isaiah for a while. Isaiah is such a wonderful prophetic book. Oswald in his very worthy commentary on the book says that the theme of Isaiah is the servant of God. And that’s not hard to discover if you’ve studied Isaiah. The flow of the context of Isaiah is that God called Israel to be his servant.

Now, one of the failures of systematic theology and the way we like to organize things is we chop things up into areas that really all mingle together and go together. For example, we would say, well, serving the Lord is like this, but over here is worshiping the Lord. No, they’re one and the same. Serving the Lord is worshiping the Lord. And worshiping the Lord is a service due unto the Lord. So when you labor in your small groups or bring your tithes and offerings or a thousand and one things we do to keep a local church strong in that service, that’s worship. That’s worship.

And so God has always ordained that he will have his servants, he will have his worshipers. And the reason he’s ordained that is because it’s fitting, it’s proper. It’s criminal that God not be worshiped because he’s God. He’s just worthy of it, intrinsic worthiness.

And so God intended to have a servant, so he starts this nation with this man in Ur of the Chaldees called Abram, and Abram later changed to Abraham, is gonna be the father of this great nation, and Israel is gonna be God’s witness in the earth. Israel’s going to be the example of a true servant, a true worshiper, but Israel failed completely. And so in Isaiah, as in the balance of the biblical text, God said, since Israel has failed, “I will raise up another. And this one will be the true servant and the true worshiper of God”.

When Paul writes Timothy in the New Testament, he has an interesting phrase in chapter two, 1 Timothy. He says this, “great is the mystery of godliness”. Great is the mystery of godliness. Now, the word godliness there doesn’t have the typical meaning. Actually, it’s more the idea of faithful serving, faithful worshiping. Great is the mystery of what a true faithful servant of God is and a true worshiper of God.

Of course, this points to Christ. Jesus Christ, listen to me now, is the only true servant God’s ever had on the earth. Jesus Christ is the only true worshiper that has ever walked the earth. And we become true servants and we become true worshipers in him. Are you hearing me, church? In him. So it’s not a matter of you’re striving, or you’re working, or you’re laboring, or you’re self-denial, or you’re moral turnaround in life, all of that may be fine. And well, you are satisfied in the eyes of God as a true servant and a true worshiper only if you are in Christ, because he’s the only true servant. and the old true worshiper.

So here we have Isaiah writing that God sees Israel as a colossal failure as a servant worshiper. And so God says, okay, what I’m going to do then is make my own servant. And Christ is the ultimate picture there, of course, but then those who are in Christ can then become in Christ’s merit through Christ going forward, blazing the trail for us. We can therefore in him become true worshipers and true servants, though we don’t deserve it. It’s all of grace.

So when we have in Isaiah chapter six is what I call the making of a servant. The making of a servant. Of course, Christ just comes out of Isaiah all over the place. In Isaiah 7:8, 9, you have those glorious passages on the incarnation of Christ, the Immanuel child. Do you remember Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz? Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was one of Isaiah’s sons who was the God with us, the Immanuel child that all points to Christ.

And then Isaiah 53, you have that glorious chapter on the death and resurrection of Christ for his own. And then you have glorious pictures of Christ here. But in addition to Christ being unveiled in this chapter, you have the picture of what happens to every single person who becomes a true servant, a true worshiper of God. That is one that God fully and wholly accepts. We don’t wanna be a like Cain and bring maybe a genuine service or a genuine worship that God must reject. We’ve got to be the kind of servant and worshiper that God wholly and joyously welcomes.

That means we’re truly saved. You see, you didn’t get saved just to miss hell, you got saved so you could get in on being a servant and a worshiper of God. because that’s what he deserves. If you don’t like serving and worshiping God, you don’t need to go to heaven. That’s why we’re here, to serve him, honor him, and glorify him.

So here’s what’s happening, Isaiah chapter six, beginning in verse one. “In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of his robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above him, each having six wings. With two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to the other and said, Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory”.

What a scene this is. Now, what we’re gonna see here is that God is going to show himself to Isaiah in a new and true way, in ways Isaiah had never seen God before. And God is pointing out, as he does repeatedly, that I am radically, wholly unlike the gods of the peoples. Look at me. Get a glimpse of me. I am your protector. I am your provider and I am your savior.

And I would say that’s one of the great, great needs in our churches today is a thorough biblical understanding of who God is. He’s not the God of your feelings or your sentiment or the God that you think he should be. Well, I think God is like this or I think God is like that. That doesn’t matter, God’s who he is. And we come each Sunday to realign ourselves, to view God as God has revealed himself to be.

When God’s making a servant, notice as our first main point, it’ll not be on your screen because it’s so very short. Roman number one, he removes what we are trusting in. He removes what we are trusting in. You see, God cannot have a servant that doesn’t trust in him. And we all naturally, are born into this sinful realm, looking to, depending upon, honoring, trusting in everything but God. It’s just normal. Just everything but Him. We’re fallen sinners and that’s what fallen sinners do. We look to everything else.

So here we have in verse one, “in the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord”. You see, it’s no coincidence that Isaiah sees the vision of God in the year of King Uzziah’s death. You see, King Uzziah was the greatest king since Solomon, one of the greatest of all time.

He was a very able military ruler. He kept the people safe. He was a very efficient administrator. The economy prospered under him. The nation had grown and prospered in every way possible under King Uzziah. They had leaned on him. They had looked to him. They had depended upon him. They had trusted in him. He had been a true king. King Uzziah was the kind of king that it was very easy to put your confidence in. But now he’s died.

And on top of that, the ever-present nemesis of Israel is raging, getting stronger and stronger and pressing toward the borders of Israel, the mighty Assyrians. Historians talk about how the Assyrians would march on an opposing army and their army would be miles wide, the whole front, and many, many, many layers deep as they would march into battle. The whole world was terrified of Assyria. And here they come, and Uzziah’s dead.

And I quite honestly think they were shaking in their boots at this time. Israel, the nation that is, knew that they needed help, but more than the help an earthly king could give them, they needed an ultimate help. You see, God can more easily make himself known to us when we are not so complacent and self-confident and self-sufficient. You’ve heard me say the phrase many times, God, if you don’t do this, I’m sunk. We throw ourselves at the feet of a bloody cross and we cry out in total bankruptcy. God, if you’re not able to save a wretch like me, I have nowhere else to go. I have to have an ultimate help. I don’t know about your sin issue, but my sin issue requires an ultimate solution. And so does yours.

So it’s true of all of us. But if God is reaching you, if God is changing you, if God is bringing you to be a true servant worshiper of his, he first has to remove the other things that you are trusting in. I’m not saying in an absolute and ultimate sense because there’s many things we look to and rely upon and depend upon and we don’t even realize we are and that’s part of our sanctification after we’re converted. The light goes off and you think, oh no, that’s an idol. I’m trusting too much in that. Oh no, that’s an idol. I’m living my life through my children. Oh, that’s an idol. I’ve gotta quit putting so much confidence in my spouse. I mean, on and on and on we go, even after conversion, finding idols and things we’re looking to other than God, and that’s why I say when you’re saved, you didn’t just repent, you became a repenter. You can’t possibly in your finite, dulled, weak mind understand all the things you need to repent of. It takes a whole lifetime to learn it all and then you don’t get done. But there’s some major things that God has to take out of our lives.

Sometimes it’s our health. Man, I feel great. Man, I’m doing good. Man, I got the world by the tail. Well, listen. It used to be an old advertisement on TV that said, man, if you’ve got your health, you’ve got just about everything. No, you don’t. Sometimes God will take your health away because you’re trusting too much in the fact that you think you’re very healthy and yet you’re terminal. No, I don’t care how good you feel. Pastor a Baptist church for 45 years and you’ll feel bad in your 60s.

Maybe it’s your wealth. Maybe God’s blessed you financially. Well, be careful. Look at it as a joy and a tool to honor God. Don’t let it become your hope. Don’t trust in it. Nothing wrong with having it, but don’t trust in it. Maybe it’s people around you. I don’t know what it could be, but God had to bring Isaiah and the nation to this point. King Uzziah is dead. and Assyria is threatening. So what are they going to do? Well, God gives them a vision of himself. God reveals himself to us secondly after he removes what we’re trusting in. Roman 2, God reveals himself to us.

Let me back up just a moment because I like to bring this out and that is, you remember my designation of primary and secondary repentance? that salvation is centered in primary repentance. And what I mean by that, those things, those people, whatever it is that we tend to look to, to save us, to keep us, to protect us, to get us to heaven. and you maybe have grown up in a very religious family and maybe in an ecumenical type of religious organization and you look to the sacraments or the ritual, the motions of the worship service and you put your confidence in those things and primary repentance is you’ve got to turn from trusting those and turn to look only to Christ.

That’s a primary repentance. Baptist folks and others can begin to look to, well, I prayed that prayer. Well, I walked down that aisle. Well, I raised my hand when the evangelist said, if you want to be saved, raise your hand. That may not all be bad, but it’s not nearly enough to know if you’re converted. And if you’re looking to those acts, those things you did, no matter what they are, for your salvation, you’ve got to turn from that, repent of looking to that, and look only to Christ. It’s what I call primary repentance.

Then obviously, immoralities, impurities, ugliness, selfishness, envy, jealousies, those things you become aware of, those should be things we’re repenting of also. But like I said, you’re not infinite in your mind. You’re not omniscient. You don’t know everything about yourself. So if it’s required that you repent of all your sin to get saved, no one can get saved. You don’t even know all your sin. But those that you know, you want to turn from. And especially the big things we might say that we’re putting our confidence in other than Christ. And God has to bring us to that place and then he reveals himself to us.

Well, how he does this, first of all, note that Isaiah sees the Lord as the supreme deity, i.e., that is, the Yahweh, the one true God of heaven, the God of Israel, is not like the gods of the other peoples. He’s radically, wondrously unique and special and stands alone. So he says, “in this day I saw the Lord”, Isaiah 6:1, “sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, and the train of his robe filling the temple”. John, writing of this text in his gospel, says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus, because that’s who this is, sitting on this throne. So somehow Isaiah, like the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, is allowed to peer beyond the veil and gaze upon realms of glory.

We don’t know exactly how it happened. Perhaps some way God just peeled back the temporal and allowed Isaiah for a few moments to see the eternal realm. Perhaps he was translated, like Paul was, to the third heaven. And he beheld with his eyes things that Paul said men can’t even speak about. It’s so awesome. But Isaiah simply says, he doesn’t describe how it happened, he simply says, “I saw the Lord. I saw the Lord”.

Now it’s interesting to me that when you think about the magnitude of this event, The awesomeness of this event, Isaiah spends three verses describing it. One, two, three. Today, if a tele-evangelist had had this experience, he’d made it into a 10-part series and toured the world talking about it.

You know, when some of our men, sometimes maybe even ladies, which I wish they weren’t in this, go off and fight and they face things and they see things that no man ought to have to face and see and do. You know what you find? It’s true of my grandfather. It’s true of other men I know in this church. They don’t talk much about it. They just don’t talk much about it. I think that’s the way it is. If a man like Paul or a prophet like Isaiah really sees the Lord, there’s not much to say because vocabulary cannot do it justice.

You know, men cannot explain gravity. Think about it. Gravity holds 10 massive planets in their orbit plus their moons, plus endless numbers of other celestial bodies throughout the galaxies in the universe. They’re just stuck on their orbits. We call it gravity. How does that work? Well, I know what it is. It’s the present personal persistent power of a person, Jesus Christ. Colossians says he holds all things together. And it’s no problem for him, by the way. But we can’t explain it.

Man cannot explain the sun. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter and 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core. How do you explain that? And it’s only one of an estimated 200,000 billion stars. And that’s just in the known universe.

Man can’t explain gravity. Man can’t explain the sun. Man can’t even explain the weather. These guys get it wrong all the time. We still turn them on and listen to them again. Ravishing floods, blistering hail, devastating winds, piercing snow and ice. We don’t understand exactly how all this works. And yet these are all but tiny elements of the king’s creation set in place by his brief spoken word. Well, how could we explain him?

When you get to heaven, told you this many times, you’ll have a perfect mind, but not an infinite mind. So your perfect mind will begin taking in the dimensions, the aspects, the wonders, the glories, the majesty of all that God is. And for a hundred million years, you’ll just be getting started bringing in the awesomeness of God.

You cannot fully grasp him, though you can know something of him truly. And for us in this day and time, that is through his word. We can know truly some things, but we cannot know exhaustively. He’s inexhaustible. Get over your pride. He’s bigger than you.

So no wonder Isaiah writes only three simple verses because human cognition and human vocabulary are not able for such an event. Again, we can sense his infinite wonder, but we cannot grasp or explain it. Isaiah said “in the year that King Uzziah died”, verse 1, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted. with a train of his robe filling the temple”. Let’s talk about that, the train of his robe. That’s a anthropomorphic expression. It means they’re using a human image to try to describe what God is doing or what God is like, and it’s incomplete. It fails, but it’s the best we can do because we don’t want no other way to explain God, and there’s a lot of those in the Bible. Like God’s right arm will protect him, and God’s finger will do that, and God walks among us. He doesn’t literally. They’re anthropomorphic. Human images are expressions to describe what God is doing. But here he is seen in a robe, if you will, and the train of his robe is filling the temple.

The idea there is that the temple is full when God is there. His beauty and his glory fills it out. It’s the idea that it is fitting for him to be there. It wouldn’t be fitting for you to be there. It would not be fitting for me to be there. But it’s fitting, it’s proper, it’s good, it’s right. He fills it, the temple, the abode of God. Because the temple has always been the abode of God’s presence. You know, in the Old Testament, when they were instructed in how to make the temple, there was very detailed specifications for that holy of holies and the dwelling place of God, because God alone fulfills it. God alone fits in it. God alone is proper to be there.

No priest can go there. No prophet can go there, no king can go there. Well, the priest can go, the great high priest once a year, but he has to have a rope tied around him unless he’s impure and be dragged out. So no one can fill the temple but Yahweh, the true God of Israel. And no one can fill that place in this temple. It’s just not their abode. You ever heard someone say, he does not, she does not know her place. Well, this is God’s place.

So there is a seamlessness, there is a propriety about Isaiah’s vision. His robe touched throughout the temple, giving it a fullness and a completeness, kind of like a loving mother and homemaker fills the house with her special touch. I love homes like that. You go in there and everywhere you go, not just the decorations, that’s a part of it, but more than that, that everywhere you go, things are done specially to be a blessing, a security, a comfort for those who are there. And only a mom can do that. Get out of all this nonsense of men are like women and women are not like men. No, they’re not. You know what that is? That’s stupid. No man can keep a home and make a home like a lady can.

And as she fills that house and makes the whole house special with its comforts and its security and its blessings to those who come in, so God fills the temple and he makes it special and fills it out with his presence. Additionally, he fills the temple because when he gets in the temple, there’s no room for no one else. He fills it completely.

You see what God’s doing to Isaiah? The grandeur, the majesty, the fullness, the greatness, the exhaustiveness of God. In another phrase, “seraphim”, the Bible says, in verse two, “stood above him, each having six wings, covered their feet with two of them, covered their face with two of them, and with two of them they fly around”. Now these seraphim, the word seraphim has the idea of fiery, I think it speaks of the holiness of God, the purity, the moral, ethical, uprightness of Yahweh, the one true God of Israel, our God. But the seraphim stood above him, first of all, not to guard him, or His omnipotence could not be deterred. Not to rule over Him, for He is their Creator and their Ruler. Not even to meet His need, for He is all-sufficient, but to honor Him and stand ready to answer every call.

A little bit like our president in the State of the Union address in the House of Representatives, the vice president and the speaker of the house are behind him, not because they’re above him, but they’re there to honor his office. And then the Bible says in verse two, “with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew”. I think that’s a gesture of humility. “And one cried out to the other”, the text says, verse three, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory”. You wanna hear something pitiful? Pitiful? Me trying to describe to you the holiness of God. If the Holy Spirit of God does not enable you to sense it, I cannot help you. It’s beyond me.

Holiness, though, has the concept of distinctiveness. Now, look, folks, you use your brain for a lot of stuff. Use your brain when the Word of God is preached. Use it. Think on these things. Holiness means distinctiveness. No one is like Him. Holiness speaks of the onlyness of God, that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is different from all of the gods. He has moral and ethical uprightness, and he holds that moral and ethical behavior are essential for one to be righteous before him.

That’s not like any other God of the land. All the other gods of this day were powerful, were influential, so they taught, but they were corrupt, and they were liars, and they were greedy, and they were selfish, and they were, in every way, immoral and unethical, sexually immoral, and you could go on and on, but Israel’s God was different. in an ethical and moral uprightness. It put him in such a contrast, so different from all the other gods of paganism of this day and of any day.

Of course, it’s Holy, Holy, Holy, thrice holy, because there’s God the Father, there’s God the Son, and there’s God the Holy Spirit, the Trinity. He is the infinitely wondrous, separate, one, Holiness or holy as the superlative of God is the grandest way to describe God.

And you will remember that I’ve told you many times and I repeat it on purpose so that it’ll be in your mind. And that is that in every way that God made man like himself, God is yet infinitely superior to us. We know something about love because God is love, but he’s infinitely superior to love. We know something of wisdom because God is wisdom, but he’s infinite superior in wisdom. And then in contradistinction to that, there’s so many, many, many myriads of way that God is radically unlike us.

God is spirit. God is eternal. God is omniscient. And on and on and on we could go. That means his uniqueness, his distinctiveness. I want you to struggle. Struggle. I want you to wrestle. with the person of God. I want you to just shake your head and say, it’s too great for me. It’s too glorious for me. It’s too wondrous for this puny gray matter between my ears to possibly comprehend.

“One called out to the other”, the verse says in verse three, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is filled with His glory”. The Hebrew scholars that study ancient Hebrew custom says it’s very likely this is like two choirs. One would cry out, Holy, Holy, Holy, and the other would join and say, the whole earth is full of His glory. And this group of Holy, Holy, Holy, and the other group, oh man, the whole earth is full of His glory. Holy, and they can’t stop.

Are they required to do it? No, they can’t help but do it. Can you imagine Isaiah seeing this? It gets good when he talks about this in just a moment. And by the way, the whole earth is full of his glory. When are we gonna see that again when Jesus comes back again? The whole earth, he will come out. The word revelation means unveiling. When Jesus comes again, he will unveil the temporal dimension of his humanity and his full deity will shine forth and the whole earth will be full of his glory. The prophetic word about Christ. at the risk of sounding irreverent. And I think if I was Isaiah, I’d say, Lord, time out. I’ve got to take this in for a moment. I’ve got to take this in for a moment. The wonder of this, the marvel of this.

When he says the whole earth is full of his glory, this also speaks to us about the fact that the whole earth illumined by the Shekinah glory that resonates from his person is greater than all the other light sources we could ever imagine. The Bible says the new heaven and new earth, you won’t need a sun or the moon because the lamb is the light thereof. There’s coming a day, brothers and sisters, when all the 200,000 billion stars in the known universe fizzle in embarrassment and insignificance, being completely overwhelmed by the illuminating glory of the king on his throne. Do you understand the light that you see coming from the Sun and the light that comes from all the stars and all the galaxies and all the suns that are out there, the 200,000 billion of them? You know where that came from? Jesus just took a little tiny of his light and placed it on them. He said, now you burn brightly until I come back, then I’m gonna shut you off.

Now, The whole earth is full of his glory. And again, that’s prophetic of what’s coming. And again, what’s finished in heaven, the whole earth is full of his glory. In heaven, it’s finished already. You see, Isaiah was transported to an eternal realm where it’s finished already. But he’s going to have to come back to the temporal time realm where it’s not played out fully yet.

And that’s why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, the model prayer, what I call the realignment prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it already is in heaven”. Woo, that’s good news right there. You and I are just living out in time, getting in on what’s gonna be perfectly orchestrated and completed when he comes back.

How does God do all of this? An amazing thing. Heaven’s already got it all planned out. Heaven says it’s really already done. Now you, while you’re down here in time, ask God to help you get in on continuing the work that he gets here and completes it. He does it through us down here, but it’s already fully done in heaven already.

So he is so wondrous. He is so glorious. He is so majestic. He is so holy. He is so radically in contrast to every other so called God. He is so infinitely powerful.

So God is telling Isaiah, God is telling Israel, I’ve removed you, Uzziah. I’ve removed what you’ve been trusting in. But then God is saying, Isaiah, Israel, look at me. Look at me. Place your confidence here. Put your hope in me. Put your confidence in me. I am the sufficient one that you need.

And we know that Isaiah never got over this event, this experience, because over and over and over, his prophetic signature, what he says over and over in the book of Isaiah is the Holy One of Israel. That’s how he refers to God. Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel. I’ve seen Him and He’s not like any of the others. He’s the Holy One of Israel.

Now foolish friend, foolish friend, who or what are you trusting in other than God? If God wants a servant, he just makes one himself. He’s making Isaiah into one. Israel had failed, so God said, I’m going to raise up my own servant. He did that in the person of Jesus, and through Jesus, others can be raised up to be true serving worshipers of God. That’s my story. I remember several things that I was trusting in as a young man.

I guess you could start back really in grade school. When my parents were divorced, when I was in the fifth grade, in the home was not a pleasant place before that, to say the least. And very soon, around the fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, it just became a resolute fact in my heart and mind that my home, my parents, are not gonna be what I’d like for them to be. Just wasn’t gonna work. I had to find life’s purpose or life’s joy or life’s blessings, love, whatever it is, I need to find that somewhere else.

So I did what junior high and high school kids do that don’t know the Lord and are little pagans. I thought, well, I’m gonna live for popularity. I did this and I did that and I achieved this and I achieved that. Got some state honors here and there and different things. It didn’t take me long to realize that I’m still empty. That’s not working for me.

Then there’s always pleasures. Those go together a lot of times. So I just got myself involved in the fleshly pleasures that a young man can be involved in. But you know what’s interesting? God had put something in me. I could not get by with what a lot of my friends could get by with. I’m so thankful for that too. Now don’t misunderstand me, I was a heathen. But I see even then the restraining work of God in my life. I had to give up my hope and trust in my parents, give up my hope and trust in popularity. And pretty soon I thought, was this all there is when it comes to pleasure? I mean, is this it? We’re studying Ecclesiastes, aren’t we? It’s all in there. Is this it?

And I started reading and thinking, and I was influenced by some radical liberal thinkers of the day. And by the way, the radical liberal thinkers of my day as a young man are nothing compared to these wackos we’re hearing today. I remember standing up in history class, Lawrence County High School and debating the Christians in the class that the Bible was not the word of God when I was a junior in high school. One of my problems was I knew a lot of Christians and I visited some churches. I didn’t see any difference. I didn’t think it was real.

And I had all of this going, but one of the things that really impacted me was I thought as a little boy, those adult people are special. Man, those adult people, they’re wise. I couldn’t have used the word, but they’re righteous, they’re moral, they’re good. And Brother Steve, I got up in high school and got a little older, studying these philosophies and things, these radical, I found out the old people are just as immature and ungodly and selfish and mean and jealous and vindictive as the children were, just in bigger bodies. And I thought, well, there’s no hope there.

I was a freshman at Middle Tennessee State University, and I got in my car one February night. I remember there was ice on the roads here and there, and I’m driving through Columbia, Tennessee, and I thought, I’m going to listen to some Southern rock music. And I turned on WSM radio out of Nashville, Tennessee. I did not remember this or didn’t know this, but WSM radio in Nashville, Tennessee played religious broadcasting on Sunday. And I turned that station on and it wasn’t southern gospel, it was choir singing. And I can’t explain this, but I liked it. That wasn’t my kind of music, but I liked it. I was just drawn to it.

And then after that went on for a few minutes, Leaving Lawrenceburg, getting up toward Columbia, a broadcast came on, and I, to this day, believe it was M.R. DeHaan, a Presbyterian minister, and his son. And I’m driving there through Columbia, Tennessee, and he shared this story. He said, now notice where I am in my life. He had disassembled and crushed at my feet the other things I tried to put hope in. The other things I tried to trust in, they just were gone. I was really depressed, really discouraged.

And M.R. DeHaan came on there and Imar Dehan said in his sermon, he said, you know, one day God looked down from heaven and God found the very best man on earth. I mean, the man who worked harder at pleasing God and doing right than any other person on the earth. And God called an angel and he told that angel, I want you to go down there and speak to this man and tell him you work harder at doing right and being righteous and doing good more than any other person on earth, so you’re gonna get to come to heaven for a little while and just fellowship with God.

Then you’ll have to go back, but it’s gonna be a wonderful thing. And the man said, oh my goodness. And the angel grabs him by the arm, and they go up through the celestial heavens, terrestrial heavens, celestial heavens, and they get to the domain of God. And the man grabs the angel and says, stop! The angel says, why? And the man standing outside the gate of heaven looks up on the throne of heaven, and there sits God.

And flowing out from God is beauty and holiness and glory and peace and joy and love like this man couldn’t even comprehend. And the angel said, don’t you want to go in? He said, yes, but I could never deserve to be in his presence. And he put his head down and he wept and he wept.

And all of a sudden, someone put his arm around him and it was Jesus. And Jesus looked at him, and Jesus looked up at God the Father sitting on his throne and said, Father, this one is mine. And when he said that, the man rushed in there and knew the peace, the joy, the love, the glories of being in the presence of God.

I’m driving my car through Columbia, Tennessee. McDonald’s was on my right and the Murray County Hospital was on my left. I thought that’s just what I need, the bread of heaven and the hospital for sinners. And it was as if there was a beam of light that came out of heaven and went through the top of that 72 Cutlass Oldsmobile and just liquid waves of love and joy flooded my soul.

And I’ve never been the same. I remember the next three or four weeks, I became so radically convicted of my sin. I just felt so rotten and filthy and ruined and undone before this holy God. But at the same time, I had a joy and a peace that somehow Christ took my sin and forgave me. But first, God had to remove everything I was trusting in. Is he doing that to you? Maybe this morning, this day, the last idol needs to be cast down.

You say, Lord, I’m not living for any of these other things, any of these other worldly philosophies or viewpoints or approaches. I’m not gonna come up with my own little moral, ethical code to try to make me feel good when I violate your holy law. I’m not living for self and popularity and pleasure. That’s not my hope. Christ, you and you alone are my hope. And I wanna say something to you. He’s mighty to save. He’s sufficient to save. Turn from your idols, from all the stuff you’re placing your confidence or hope in for whatever, and turn exclusively, turn radically, turn wholly, turn only to Christ, and he will save you.