Day 3....RUINED!

"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a

 man of unclean lips, and I live among

a people of unclean lips, and my eyes

have seen the King, the LORD Almighty." Isaiah 6:5

I am going to start my post with, wow! God meant for me to read this today. Right here in this moment. I pray that my post does not step on anyones toes and that it is not read harshly. Because I will be honest. God put me through the ringer on this one.

Mr. Nasser said it perfectly, "We are incredibly self-absorbed people." All we seem to think about is our appearances, what we want, how to get what we want, when will we get what we deserve. As Mr Nasser puts it self-absorbness leads to two things cockiness and shame. If we feel like we are doing a good job, we somehow get a complex like we are above other people. If we feel like we aren't measuring up, we feel like complete failures.

In my devotion, Mr Nasser made the perfect point that as Christians, we normally focus our self-absorption on "my growth" or "my progress".  We talk about wanting to be like Jesus and instead of loving Jesus we spend all of our time comparing ourselves to others.

I love the book of Isaiah, I don't know if Ive ever shared that fact about myself. But I really do. In fact the opening verse in this devotion is one of my favorites. Because it was read to me right before I gave my own life over to Christ. See, Isaiah was a prophet. He went around telling people to stop living in sin and how if they didn't repent from their wicked ways, they would spend eternity separated from God. Then one day, God revealed himself in a vision to Isaiah.

1In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

4At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

5“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” -Isaiah 6:1-5

The angels in this passage had six wings, two that covered their eyes. Because God is so Holy that the light blinds even them! And they repeat over and over "Holy, holy holy!" In front of God, His holiness swamps our petty selfishness and shatters our pride. In front of Him we are broken, helpless and hopeless-unless God himself touches us.

I wonder if my preacher will read this, because I chuckled to myself when I read the next paragraph. Mr. Nasser then talked about how we have dumbed down Jesus to our level and how we tend to treat him like a buddy, "or we call the Father 'the man upstairs". The phrase "the man upstairs" fires my preacher up! LOL! I never thought about it, until he spoke about it in a sermon one Sunday morning (Yes, Brother Mike, I was listening). To me, it wasn't a big deal, until Brother Mike made the point that when we speak of God, the Alpha, the Omega, the Creator, of complete Holiness, it is a BIG deal to dumb him down with such a cliche name. To quote Mr Nasser "Yes, Jesus calls us friends, but be sure of this: Jesus stoops from the blinding majesty of his heavenly throne in order to stand next to us and call us friends. He didn't come from the next street over. He created the entire Universe!"

When Isaiah saw God, he cried out "woe is me!" Mr Nasser made the point that Isaiah had said this phrase many times before, but never about himself. But in the presence of God, all the sudden, Isaiah realized how unclean he was and what trouble he was in. He was ruined.

See, it's like the potter and the clay, we ask God to break us and mold us again. God wants to ruin our already dead lives in order to resurrect in us real life. Again, Jesus brought us "Good news" not "Fun news", but you can't realize how good the news really is until you realize how bad off you are. And when facing God with how bad you are, there will be change, I'm not talking a little bit, I'm talking about your life being dumped upside down. As Mr Nasser put it, "Our lives will then be driven by conviction, not just convenience."

But visions don't just happen. We can prepare our hearts and position ourselves to hear what God has to say, but ultimately only God can initiate a vision. Most visions, come in a time of desperation. Isaiah's vision came in the year that King Uzziah died. A time when the country was in turmoil. God saw an opening in Isaiah's insecurity and was able to break through. Stability produces passivity, upheaval breaks us, and opens us up.

Isaiah screamed "I am ruined!" There he stood before GOD! Imagine what you would have yelled. Realizing all your impurities and having nowhere to run and hide, no way to fix it. But then God touched him.

6Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

-Isaiah 6:6-7

So what was Isaiah's response to this?



8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom

shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

9He said, “Go and tell this people:

ACTION! Isaiah took action.  As a christian, you are going to be one of three types of people when it comes to witnessing God's holiness.

1. Your going to be the person who can walk away unchanged
2. your going to be the person who it affects some
3. your going to be the person who will never be the same from it

So the question today is, what person will you be?