The Hardest Part

Nesting doll illustration:

I wanted to be able to use nesting dolls for this illustration, but I don’t have any and I didn't feel like paying for cheap nesting dolls on Amazon. That’s the kind of thing that will end sitting around on my end table for the next 4-5 months. Then I’ll find them one day well into the future and wonder where they came from.

So I grabbed these nesting containers I bought for the girls when I went to Kenya a few years back and thought we could use our imaginations a little bit. For the purposes of this illustration, let's just assume these are nesting dolls, alright?

This little one here represents you at elementary school age. We’ll say 6-7 years old. What were the dreams of this person? Did you dream big? The big question back then was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” So, what was it? For me it is one of two things, I either wanted to be a doctor or a firefighter like my dad. I remember getting super excited on career day back in the first grade. My dad came in with some of his firefighting buddies and I could hardly contain myself. I just thought he was the coolest, man. They came dressed in their gear. Very cool as a first grader to see that sort of thing.

What were your concerns during these ages? What made it hard to sleep at night? Did you have any big fears that you were dealing with? Again, with me, it was the fear of moving into a new house. We lived on Washington St for a few years, then we were on Clemens in an upstairs apartment. After that is when we moved into our house behind the Methodist church on Church street. It was exciting, but there was also some fear because we would have to get used to new surroundings. There were new neighbors and such and that was going to be somewhat of an adjustment.

Alright now, let’s put this inside the next one and this one represents you going into your senior year. What’s changed since those elementary years? Did you feel like you were all grown up and ready to take on the world? Maybe you were a little anxious about what life would be like once you got out of high school. How different were your circumstances as those years passed? Were there any new promises to consider? What were you excited about? Were you headed off to college, trade school, going straight to work? No doubt things had changed in some way during those years.

Now, let’s put these two inside the next one and fast forward a bit. This is you now. What kind of things motivate you now that didn’t when you were young? How often do you think about the things that shaped you from the past? How many big moments can you count in just a few minutes? Is there anything you wished you’d done differently? Are you just happy to have had some experiences that made you who you are today? And again…any new promises? What are you committed to? What inspires you? What gets you up in the morning? How do you define success? Are you where you thought you’d be?

The point of this is to get us thinking about where we were and how that relates to where we are. All of the things we experience in life are still in there. Some of them are constantly at the surface, while some others are locked in the deep recesses of our minds. When I was working through this exercise at home, there wasn’t anything that really surprised me about processing my experiences. Without question there are some really good things that have happened to me over the years that have shaped me into the person I am today. On the other side, though, I’d be lying if I didn't say I was negatively affected by some of the bad things that happened. Like a lot of people I have some really powerful memories that have stuck with me throughout the course of time. I’ve also made some good decisions and I’ve made some bad ones.

There was a time when I was more prone to think about the bad things that had happened in my life and internalize them in such a way that I would convince myself I was unlikeable. This made me work really hard to show people that I was, in fact, a good person. For me, this was a result of shame and not knowing how to properly understand repentance. I also didn’t know about God’s promises or even how to accept the gifts He’s willing to bestow on all of us through Jesus. All I cared about was trying to convince myself I wasn’t bad…Today we’re going to explore how God’s people also struggled through this and how Isaiah started to rally the troops for the coming of something really great.

Here we go this morning through Isaiah 55:1-9

When we get to chapter 55 in Isaiah, what we see him doing is answering some tough questions about what exactly would happen during Judah’s exile at the hands of Babylon. Just as a reminder, there was a time when Israel split up into two kingdoms. Judah is the kingdom to the south. Once again God’s people find themselves under the rule of a kingdom, in Babylon, that doesn’t take its cue from the Lord’s leading. God again works through his prophets to show His people he is truly more powerful than any other kingdom that chooses to follow a false and idolatrous god.

Using Isaiah as his mouthpiece during this point in history, the key question being answered is whether or not God has been defeated by the Babylonians. Is he still there? Does He still care for His people? Is He still willing to lead them out of darkness once again? And if he is, what is his mode for doing so?

The answers to those questions don’t seem to be coming as easy as they once did for God’s people. When you’re facing uncertain times, those are the types of questions you start to ask. Doubt or unbelief most certainly starts to creep in, and that brings with it a type of darkness some of us can relate to. When I think about the dark times in my own life, the questions I have for God are not that far off from what God’s people are asking during the time when Babylonian occupation of their land and the subsequent exile from it was a harsh reality.

The section of scripture we are working through today comes near the end of this exile and what Isaiah has to offer is tremendous hope. More so than any other prophetic book in the bible, we find heavy overtones of New Testament symbolism in Isaiah and you’ll pick up on some of those themes today.

During this time period, coming out of this exile, food and water are scarce commodities amongst God’s people. Isaiah draws on that reality in the first couple of verses when he talks about free food and drink. It says, “Is anyone thirsty?” Of course, they would’ve been thirsty, and in true prophet fashion he uses that symbolism to elevate what’s good in God’s kingdom. The best wine and milk is all free! What God has to offer quenches the thirst of the spiritual, social, and physical voids they have been feeling during the exile. Isaiah’s reminder that God is, in fact, good, leads him to talk about the covenant God made with David.

It’s another reminder to the people that the promise God made is not broken. You can understand why people might have felt that way, though. Just a few years before all this was taking place, the entire city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Their temple was burned to the ground and the hope they might have had was decimated along with their city. This is where hope plays such a crucial role in the way we understand God’s covenant. It does not end. What God offers is constant even during the tough times when we view ourselves as unworthy of such a gift.

And when Isaiah says, “Come to me with your ears wide open. Listen, and you will find life. I will make an everlasting covenant with you. I will give you all the unfailing love I promised to David,” he’s talking about the Messiah…Jesus.

And Jesus hasn't yet arrived on earth at this point, but this projecting Isaiah is doing here is a call to repentance for God’s people at the time. And what he’s saying in this moment is what we talked about a few weeks ago is that there’s no time like the present to bring yourself into right relationship with God. “Seek the Lord while you can find him. Call on Him while he’s near.” The life God offers us through his love, grace, and care for us is truly a life worth seeking and living.

There are instances elsewhere in his book when Isaiah draws on his own conversion and desire to change his life around to be a person who follows God. You can feel his passion in the next few verses as he implores people to turn their lives around and to choose the mercy and compassion of the Lord. He’s telling God’s people to remember the generosity they have been given and then he takes it up a notch when in verses 8-9 he talks about how the thoughts and ways of the Lord are far beyond anything we can imagine. Isaiah gives the people a peek into the mind of God as he tells the truth about the nature of God’s plans.

Our plans. Our thoughts. Our ideas about how to do things, the desires we have, are just imitations for the plans God gives us. To seek God’s desire for our lives is a worthy endeavor to be explored by all people.

I often choose to view God as a Creator when I’m thinking about the way he chooses to do things. It’s just what makes sense to me. I imagine God actually building the natural things in the world. That’s just where my mind goes…I don’t view God as a genie, looking down on the universe and just POOF, there it is. Particularly when it comes to the things on earth, I imagine him spending time making things with his hands. Actually molding and shaping things into the way he wants them to be. I mean if you look at Genesis 1:25, after God comes up with the idea for animals, it says, “God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind…And God saw that it was good.”

In this regard, I have a curiosity about the things God has made. The other day Piper and I were watching the nature documentary called “Our Planet” on Netflix. And the episode we were watching was called “The High Seas.” The beginning of this particular episode features the blue whale.

The Blue Whale is the largest animal to have ever existed. When fully grown, it can measure 100 feet from nose to tail. It weighs over 200 tons and it’s heart is about the size of a Honda Civic.

It’s found in all major oceans, but prefers deeper water as opposed to coastal ones. It is also the loudest animal on earth with a piercing call that registers at around 190 decibels, which is more than 50 decibels higher than a Boeing 747.

Point being, this is a magnificent animal. Right? But as we’re sitting there watching it, I became mesmerized by two things.

First, it was swimming near the top of the surface. And it would breach ever so gently to take a breath. And the way the camera was positioned just directly over top of the whale, you could see how this was happening. Now, I’m assuming most of us know how a whale takes a breath, but this is a 200 ton animal moving with the gentleness and grace of a ballet dancer. So as it’s clearing the surface of the water to breath, it’s blowhole releases air, takes more in and closes right before it goes back under the water,

And I’m just sitting there, like, “how in the world does it know where its blowhole is?” So of course, I google it expecting to find a scientific answer and it’s all instinctive. It just knows. There’s no secret to it, it just knows where it is.

Well, about the time I had gotten over how incredible it was that this whale is able to breath in this instinctively graceful way…a baby come from underneath the whale, breeches the top of the water to take a breath, then dives back down underneath a protective fin on the mother to guard it from predators…and I was like, “That baby would have to come out knowing exactly how to do that…I mean, there’s no learning curve when you’re born in the water and live in the water…you pretty much have to figure that out…right now, you know what I mean?

Here’s where I’m going with this…the whale breathes whether it chooses to or not. God has designed these whales to know what to do instinctively. He cares enough about all the things he creates, that he even makes sustaining life achievable for this animal very few people have ever seen in the wild. If he’s willing and able to do this, not only for the blue whale, but for all his creations, how much more is he willing to do for us? If we believe when the word says we were created in his image, the vastness of the universe should be no match for his journey to come and get us.

This is the thought we have to come back to in the moment when we don’t feel like we are enough. The paradox we will continue to live in is knowing we are God’s people, but we also have to struggle in some sort of exile at times. Not fun. Not ideal. But it is a reality we have to live with because of our separation from God back in the Garden.

And this is the thing God’s people are dealing with as they’re yet again coming out of exile and the occupation of the land by the Babylonians is coming to an end. They’re got all of these experiences of bad things happening they have to deal with as God delivers them once more. Dealing with famine, the loss of their homeland, not having readily available food and water are some pretty bad things that have shaped them during all this time have likely got them thinking about how they can satisfy The Lord so it doesn’t happen again…

Inherently, that’s the problem with the way we think about this. What if I told you repentance is not about trying to be a good person. I’m not saying it’s an unworthy thing to pursue, but I happen to think repentance involves so much more than curbing our behavior to quench the urge to be a good person.

The question then becomes, “What does repentance look like?”

We’ve all heard some version of this that says, “Repent of your sins so you can be saved.” This is how some of us have heard the process of becoming a Christian explained to us. And I guess in a nutshell, that’s what it is. But I wonder if the word repentance has been distorted or misunderstood a bit over the years.

The word “repent” doesn’t necessarily conjure up kind feelings for some reason. We recoil sometimes because when we hear it, we feel like we’ve done something bad. And the truth is, repenting is not about choosing to do good things instead of doing bad things. It’s about so much more than the good or bad choices we make. It’s about shifting our focus and moving past the mind we currently have. It’s about opening up and letting God’s love into our hearts and choosing a path that leads us to be people of compassion and mercy. It’s about a total life transformation that aligns us with God's Kingdom rather than our own desires. Repentance is an invitation to step into a new way of living, one that reflects God's grace, truth, and purpose for us.

Remember back to the gospel of Matthew when Jesus started his public ministry. And I’m thinking of the verse in Matthew 4:17 when Jesus says, “Repent of your sins and turn to God, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.”

If you were to go back to the original text of this verse, what you would find is the Greek word “metanoeo.” This is the word that normally gets translated into “repent.” But the meaning behind this word tends to get lost in translation. When Jesus would have taught this concept to his disciples, he would’ve expected much more than a mere change in behavior; He was calling for a complete transformation of heart and mind. Repentance, in this sense, is not just about avoiding sin but about stepping into an entirely new way of seeing and living in God’s Kingdom.

This example is found best in the lives of the people Jesus called to serve as his disciples. I feel like the one we always tend to go to is Matthew, who was a tax collector for the Roman government. He was a person who was despised amongst the Jewish community because of how he built his wealth. Zaccheaus was also a tax collector. But one of the disciples I feel like we often overlook is Simon, the Zealot. Different from Simon Peter, for the record.

This might be another case of words getting lost in translation or maybe we’ve just skirted the issue in some ways. But being a zealot was a lot more than just having that title associated with your name. Technically speaking, a zealot is someone who is fanatical and uncompromising in their pursuit of their religion, politics, or other ideas. But in New Testament Israel, being associated with the sect of religious fanatics known as the Jewish Zealots had a very specific meaning. This was a radicalized group of people who resisted Roman occupation, and sometimes they did it through violent measures. And they believed the Messiah was going to be a militant-type of leader who would overthrow the Roman government by force.

You can only imagine what Simon would’ve been thinking when Jesus called him to be part of his meek, compassionate, mercy-driven band of disciples. I mean just consider what Simon would’ve had to renounce by making the choice to follow Jesus. Everything he was about would’ve changed quite dramatically.

But he makes that choice. He decides to put a lid on the chapter of his life and move his mind past what he previously held to be absolute truth, now knowing that Jesus’ Kingdom was nothing like he had expected. Instead of overthrowing Rome by force, the hope Jesus brings involves a revolution of love, grace, and self-sacrifice. Simon had to completely rethink his understanding of power, justice, and what it meant to be truly free. By following Jesus, he was choosing to trust in a Messiah who conquered not with violence, but with mercy—who won victories not through force, but through surrender to God’s higher ways. That echoes the message the Lord brings through Isaiah when he says in 55:8-9, ““My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord, “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

This is what repentance looks like…

Being a good person, while a seemingly noble quest, is not the point of choosing to follow Jesus. We have to consider what it looks like to move beyond the way of thinking that confines our faith inside a moralistic box. The invitation from God in Isaiah 55 is open, “Are you thirsty?” “Do you want a drink?” Are you ready to experience what real life change is all about? Do you want to live the kind of life that encourages checking the boxes of being a good person, or do you want the type of transformation that leads to Practicing the Way of Jesus? Let’s pray