Committed to Seeking God

Wednesday Morning Prayer

Date: July 17, 2024

Scripture Isaiah 55: 6-13

Main Verses: Isaiah 55:6-9

Isaiah 55:6–9 ESV

“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.

Let’s Pray:Lord, we thank you for this medium (Phone Conference) where we can come together collectively worship you, praise you, and call on you for help. Now, Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.

Title:Committed to Seeking God

Introduction:

To seek means to look for and search for, inquire about, investigate, pursue, strive after. It also means to plead and cry for something to the point of struggling. Only a person who senses a deep need will seek the LORD with such urgency. And this is exactly the objective of God’s invitation. There is an urgent need for every human being to seek the LORD.

My aim and my prayer in this message is that we would seek the Lord this morning. Huber, as children of God we need to seek the Lord continually to remain in the love of God (Jude 1:21). Unbelievers need to seek the Lord decisively that they may be saved (Romans 10:13). There is not a person on this phone conference this morning, for whom this text is irrelevant. Some need to seek the Lord so that you won’t be left in the hardness of unbelief and destruction. Others need to seek the Lord lest you miss his special help and guidance and blessing.

Background:

Isaiah’s ministry was a call to repentance. Failure to repent meant destruction. Isaiah was told two things about Judah. First, since his preaching would fall on deaf ears, destruction would occur. (In fact, it did in 586 b.c.) Second, in order to keep His covenant, the Lord would preserve a remnant of faithful people in spite of this destruction (Isaiah 6:8–13). This remnant was the exiles surviving the Babylonian captivity, which ended in 539 b.c. My study this morning stresses that message again.

The first section of Isaiah, chapters 1–39, is mostly judgment. The second section, chapters 40–66, is mostly blessing; almost all of it is poetry ,which means there is much use of figures of speech.

The Savior’s Great Invitation 55:1–56:8.

1. The invitation to come to the Lord (55:1–5).

2. The invitation to seek the Lord (55:6–13).

3. The invitation to live righteously and to worship the Lord (56:1–8).

Lesson Outline

1. Seeking—v. 6. Calling upon Him

2. Salvation—v. 7. Not Punishment but Pardon

3. Saviour—v. 8-9. Our Thoughts and Ways Vs. God’s

1st Point. Seeking—v. 6. Calling upon Him

To seek the Lord means to call upon him (v. 6).

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.

If you set yourself to seek the Lord this morning, or tonight in the stillness of your room, the first thing you will do is call on the Lord. The religious word for this is “pray.”

The first thing we do to seek the Lord is call to him. The Hebrew word for call is qārā' (kaw-raw')We might use words like these: “O God, help me!” Or: “God, if you are really there, show me!” Or: “O God, I need you, come and save me, forgive me, make me new.” Or: “Father, I need your guidance, show me the way to go.” And that is the first step in what it means to seek the Lord.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about:

After the Israelites had been captives in Babylon for seventy years, King Cyrus decreed that any Israelite who wanted to return to Jerusalem could return. When Nehemiah, an Israelite (Nehemiah 1:6) and cupbearer to the king of Babylon (v. 11), learned that those who had returned were “in great trouble and disgrace” (v. 3), he “sat down and wept” and spent days mourning, fasting and praying (v. 4). He wrestled in prayer for his nation (vv. 5–11). And later, he too called his people to fast and pray (9:1–37).

Centuries later, in the days of the Roman Empire, the apostle Paul similarly urged his readers to pray for those in authority (1 Timothy 2:1–2). Huber,Our God still hears our prayers about matters that affect the lives of others.

In addition, To seek the Lord means to forsake wicked ways and unrighteous thoughts .

(v. 7).Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

If you take seriously the positive side of seeking God, you have to take seriously the negative side of turning from behaviors and thoughts that offend him. You cannot seek God and practice sin or plan sin at the same time.

Have you yielded to temptation? Do you ever doubt your salvation? Then return to Him and He will have mercy—and He will “abundantly pardon” (Isa. 55:7).

Seeking the Lord means forsaking the ways and the thoughts that are displeasing and dishonoring to him. You can’t seek him where he is not found—in sin.

To seek the Lord means to turn to him for deliverance from his own anger.

In Numbers 14, the Lord told the people of Israel that, because they didn’t believe the promises of God, they would have to wander in the wilderness for forty years.

“Oh, no!” they said. “Let’s storm in and claim the land. Let’s make it happen.” So they went in to try and take the land that they were previously afraid to take—only to be soundly defeated. Sometimes we, too, need to realize that it’s not a matter of doing more or beginning again. Sometimes it’s a matter of submitting to the Lord’s chastening hand upon us. When we suffer reversals in business or setbacks in relationships, it would do us well to stop and seek the Lord rather than to merely figure out how to rectify the situation. Wise is the man or woman who, in humility, seeks the One who allowed those things to take place in the first place. How many of know that if God is your problem, then only God is your solution.

To seek the Lord means to ask for his guidance and put our trust in that rather than human strength and wisdom.

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult [literally: “seek”] the Lord. (Isaiah 31:1)

“Why are you looking to the Egyptians?” the Lord asks. “They’re not going to be able to help you. They’re not God. They’re only men. So seek Me instead.” This seems so obvious—but, like God’s people in Isaiah’s day, we, too, fail to seek the Lord’s counsel. Yet our strength comes from our dependence upon God alone. If that is lost, even though we might be armed with our own abilities, wisdom, and technology, we’ll discover there is no way out.

2nd Point. Salvation—v. 7. Not Punishment but Pardon

You should want to seek the Lord because when you do, what you find is not punishment but pardon (verse 7 says).

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

God wants people with wicked ways to come to him. He wants people with unrighteous thoughts to come to him. Jesus did not come to call the righteous Huber, but sinners to repentance. It is not the healthy who have need of a physician but the sick. The thought that you are too bad to come to God is a thought straight out of hell.

God’s thoughts are higher. And one of those thoughts is to have mercy on bad people who seek him.

And don’t miss the emphasis in that word “abundantly” in verse 7 (“freely,” NIV). God wants us to know that this is what he loves to do most. His heart overflows to pardon. He rejoices to pardon. Let’s check out that great word from Micah 7:18

Micah 7:18 ESV

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.

The reason God pardons sin as horrendous as Israel’s and as terrible as mine is single: He delights in mercy. The justice of God took the wrath I deserved and poured it on Christ Jesus, His Son, who was slain for my sin. When Jesus cried from the Cross, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” He was feeling the anger God should have hurled on me. Thus, God can say, “I delight in mercy”—not, “I have to develop it, discipline Myself to feel it, or determine to show it. No, I delight in mercy because the price of your sin was fully paid on the Cross by My Son.”

He delights in it! He loves to show mercy. He rejoices to pardon. And therefore he does it abundantly, profusely, deeply. Paul says that the love of Christ is so deep and high and long and wide that it surpasses knowledge.

3rd Point. Saviour—v. 8-9. Our Thoughts and Ways Vs. God’s

You should want to seek the Lord because until you seek the Lord, your ways and his ways and your thoughts and his thoughts are as far apart as heaven and earth.

Most of the time verses 8–9 are quoted out of context:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says 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.

This is often quoted to show that some circumstance that puzzles us is no puzzle to God. His ways are higher than our ways. That, of course, is wonderfully true. But it misses the point of this text.

Why does verse 8 talk about the thoughts and ways of God? Because verse 7 talked about the thoughts and ways of evil men. Unless we relate the thoughts and ways of God in verse 8 with the thoughts and ways of God in verse 7, we will miss the sense of the passage and what God wants us to hear.

Listen to the flow. Verse 7: “Let the wicked forsake his way [!] and the unrighteous man his thoughts [!]; let him return to the Lord for mercy …” Why? Verse 8: Because God’s thoughts and God’s ways are not wicked and not unrighteous. In fact they are as far above our evil thoughts and our evil ways as the heaven is above the earth.

The point of verses 8 and 9 is to stress the tremendous need that we have of seeking God. Only when we seek God can we overcome this Grand Canyon of separation between God’s ways and our ways and God’s thoughts and our thoughts. Only when we seek the Lord can we begin to have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) and the mind of the Spirit (Romans 8:6).

Before I give you my concluding statement, Let me remind you of the three points I tried to emphasize this morning.

Lesson Outline

1. Seeking—v. 6. Calling upon Him

2. Salvation—v. 7. Not Punishment but Pardon

3. Saviour—v. 8-9. Our Thoughts and Ways Vs. God’s

Allow me to close with an illustration of both the gravity and the intensity of this invitation, which can be illustrated by a time of tragedy, such as a flood. A mother, a son, and a daughter are clinging to the upper branches of a large tree surrounded by raging flood waters. The rescue team in a boat cannot get right up to the tree because of debris, but the distance between the boat and the tree can be jumped with effort. The team in the boat shout with urgency, “Jump, jump,” but the family members are afraid. Finally, summoning up courage, the son jumps and lands safely in the boat. Then the daughter jumps. She falls into the water, but the rescuers are ready and quickly pull her into the boat. Now the rescuers along with the son and daughter plead with the mother, “Jump, jump, you can do it! We’ll catch you if you fall short.” There is a compelling urgency in the invitation. But she is afraid, and as she debates whether to jump or remain in the apparent safety of the tree, there is a terrible crack, the tree falls, and she is swept away with it. “Seek the LORD while he may be found.