The God Who Sends

Read the sermon · 26 min

Saying yes before you see the assignment▶ 28:37

That's user error on my fault. But good morning everybody. It's good to be with y'all this morning. My name is Austin Duncan. I am the associate pastor here at Crosswalk. And today we're going to be continuing our series in Isaiah.

As I was preparing for today, I was just thinking, have you ever said yes to something before you knew what you were actually saying yes to? Maybe a good friend asks you to help them move. So you say what a good friend would say. You're like, "Absolutely. Yeah. Whatever you need." And you say that on a Tuesday, and Tuesday is just so generous. Tuesday you loves his neighbor as himself. And then Saturday you pulls up to a third floor apartment with no elevator and a staircase that turns twice, and there's a piano. No one ever mentions the piano when they ask, do they? That's the whole strategy, right? They get your yes first and then they show you the assignment.

Well, this morning we're going to watch a man say yes, maybe one of the bravest yeses in the Old Testament. And then we're going to watch God show him the piano.

Where we left off in the throne room▶ 29:54

Last week, Gavin ran the first leg of Isaiah chapter 6 for us. He brought us into the throne room. We saw the Lord high and lifted up. We heard the seraphim saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." And we watched the room shake. We watched Isaiah come undone. And then we watched grace move toward him. A coal from the altar touched his lips. And then the word came, your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for.

If we think of Isaiah 6 as a relay race, last week was basically the baton exchange. The baton of grace has been placed in Isaiah's hand. He's cleansed. He's forgiven. And this week, starting in verse 8 and going through the end of the chapter, he says yes, before he's heard a single word of the job description. And then God reads him the assignment, and the course turns uphill, turns into the wind. It's like uphill both ways, like how our parents went to school.

But the baton is still grace. And the difficulty of the assignment doesn't mean that the grace was less real. The resistance of the people that we're going to see doesn't mean that Isaiah was sent wrongly, and the hardship of the course that he's running doesn't mean that God is absent from the race.

This is the last message in our series, just a two week series. What stuck with me this week is one of our staff said at our staff meeting a phrase that could basically just be the title over this whole chapter. She said it's so important how we finish the race. Isaiah 6 isn't a sermon for us about starting well. It's a sermon about finishing faithful when the finishing is hard.

So in our passage this morning, we're going to see four movements that I'll sum up with four short sentences: grace sends, truth reveals, faithfulness endures, and hope survives.

Grace sends▶ 32:05

Notice the order of Isaiah's life in this chapter. He sees God. He sees himself. He receives grace. And then he offers himself. And that order matters. He doesn't offer himself so that God will cleanse him. He offers himself because God has cleansed him. He doesn't say, "Here I am. Send me," because he's finally proven that he's useful. He says it because he's just admitted that he's unclean and God has shown him mercy anyway. The coal touches his mouth before the commission even reaches his ears.

And what does that mean? It means that grace always goes first. Isaiah's "here am I" isn't him trying to build up his resume. It's not Isaiah saying, "Hey, look, I have the right personality. I have the right experience. I have the right platform. I have all the strength in the right places."

Most of us, if we heard God ask the phrase, "Whom shall I send?" maybe we wouldn't answer right away. We might be like, where are you sending me? Also, for what? Also, how much am I getting paid? Is there a nursery? Do I get benefits? We'd ask to see the job description first. We'd want to know the compensation. We'd want to know the location. We'd want to know if there's a nursery, or whether we can get back to him after we pray about it. And I think often when we say that phrase, "Well, let me pray about it, I'll get back to you," sometimes it's a spiritual sounding way of just saying no.

Isaiah doesn't do that. Isaiah in effect says, after mercy like that, what else would I do with my life? He doesn't volunteer for a ministry. He's volunteering for a person, capital P person.

Notice also what Isaiah doesn't say. He doesn't say what we think when a pastor asks us to volunteer, that initial thought of, well, if you really can't find anybody else. He doesn't say, "I've done that. I did that last year." He doesn't say, "Have you asked the Cravers? The Cravers, they seem awfully gifted. You should consider them." There's no committee. There's no signup sheet that he's avoiding eye contact with. A holy God asked and a forgiven man answered before the question was even finished echoing.

That is what grace does. Grace doesn't merely comfort us. It claims us. It doesn't remove guilt and then leave us untouched. Grace puts our lives back into the hands of the King who saved us.

Back again to our staff meeting this week, during a time of prayer, Kelly Wegner said something that hit me. She said, talking to God, "When you call us to good things, you give us the means to do it." And that's exactly what's happening here. God calls Isaiah to a good thing, and he's already given him the means. Not a platform, not a personality test. He's given him a clean mouth and a true word. Hold on to that, because in a minute you'll see that the means that God gives us is not a guarantee of success. It's a guarantee of his presence.

Whose glory did Isaiah see▶ 36:09

Before we leave verse 8, I have to show you something that I think is staggering, and then I'm going to make myself leave it alone, because it could take over the whole sermon. When the Apostle John writes about people rejecting Jesus, he quotes this very chapter. And then he says something that should stop us in our tracks. He says in John 12:41, "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him."

Whose glory? The glory of Christ. So when Isaiah looks up and he sees the Lord on the throne high and lifted up, John tells us he's looking at the pre-incarnate Son, the one who fills the temple, the one whose holiness makes seraphim hide their faces, the one who asks, "Whom shall I send?" That is Jesus.

Which means the one who says, "Whom shall I send?" isn't standing at a safe distance from the mission. He's the Son who would one day be the one who is sent. Remember that. We're going to come back to it at the very end, at a tree stump one on Friday. But for now, let's just let verse 8 stand and be what it is: a forgiven man with clean lips saying yes to the God who saved him. Because a cleansed mouth is a commissioned mouth.

The second paragraph of the letter▶ 37:46

Verse 8 was just the yes. And then verses 9 through 13 are the staircase. Imagine you get a letter of acceptance that you have waited years for, from the school that you dreamed of or the job offer that you prayed would come. And the first paragraph is everything that you hoped. It reads, okay, you've been accepted, you've been chosen, we want you. And you're like, yes. And then you keep reading and the second paragraph says, your assignment is going to be so much harder than you ever expected. Many of the people that you're going to serve, they're going to resist the very help that they need. You may not even see the results that you hoped for. In fact, we're sending you precisely because this assignment we're giving you is going to be hard.

The first paragraph is still true. You're still accepted, still chosen, still wanted. But the second paragraph just redefined what success looks like. And that's what happens to Isaiah. The acceptance came in verse 7. The volunteering came in verse 8. And then comes the second paragraph.

I'm not going to soften that for you because God didn't soften it for Isaiah. This is one of the hardest things a preacher can be asked to say out loud, that Isaiah is sent to preach a word that in these people will not soften them, it will harden them. He's going to speak and their hearts are going to grow more dull. He's going to plead and their ears are going to grow heavier.

The tragedy in this isn't that Isaiah lacks power. The tragedy is that the truth itself, in a heart that is already set against it, becomes the very thing that seals it.

Sovereignty and responsibility▶ 39:55

God's word doesn't let us off the hook here. It says that God is sovereign over this judgment, and it says that the people are responsible for their hardness. It says both of those things and they're both true at the same time.

Here's a small window into that. The New Testament quotes these verses more than almost any other passage in the Old Testament. Jesus quotes them in Matthew 13 to explain why he teaches in parables. John quotes them in John 12, like we read, to explain why the crowds rejected Jesus. Paul quotes them in Acts 28 at the very end of the book to explain why so many refused his preaching.

And here's the thing. Some of those quotations stress what the people have done to themselves, that they closed their own eyes. And some of them stress what God has done in judgment, that because they've closed their eyes, he allows those eyes to be blinded. Same passage. Both true.

And I know some of you want me to resolve that this morning. I want you to know that I tried. I nearly have an MDiv from seminary and a shelf full of commentaries and professors to talk to and ask. And the honest answer is that the apostles left this not tied, and they had better sources than I do.

So we don't need to be embarrassed by that in the Bible either. God is God and people are responsible, and both of those are like load bearing walls for us. We don't knock either one of those down. And the honest thing and the merciful thing is that that's also the key that unlocks this whole passage.

You become like what you worship▶ 41:44

Look again at what the judgment targets. It targets eyes that don't see. It targets ears that don't hear. It targets hearts that don't understand. Where else in the Old Testament do you hear language like that? You hear it whenever it talks about idols.

The Psalms describe the idols of the nations like this: they have eyes but they do not see, they have ears but they do not hear, they have mouths but they do not speak. And then the psalm says something chilling for us. It says those who make them will become like them.

And Isaiah himself says the same thing later in his own book in chapter 44, in the middle of this great takedown of idol making. He says of these idol worshipers that they know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes so they cannot see, and their hearts so they cannot understand. Same eyes, same ears, same hearts, same failure. You become like what you worship.

Do you see what God's doing? His judgment is not arbitrary and it isn't cruel. In fact, it's fitting. Judah had given its heart to dead things. It had given its heart to false hopes, to false securities, to empty religion being dressed up as the real thing. It had given itself over to pride, greed, power, comfort. And so the sentence that God hands down is simply this: you will become like the things that you have loved. You worshiped what could not see, so now you will not see. You bowed to what could not hear, so you will now not hear. They are turning into their idols. And notice, God doesn't just stand back and let this happen. He sends Isaiah to preach it. The judgment is fitting, but it is also decreed.

A mirror, not just history▶ 43:53

It's easy as we're reading through this to shake our heads at ancient Judah and say, that would never be me, they're bowing down to statues. I think we should be honest that we do the same thing with things that just have better production values.

We would never carve an idol out of wood. Hopefully not. It's not on my to do list. But we just carry one in our pocket and we stare at it until we can't look up. We mock people who bowed to images while we refresh a feed that is quietly reshaping what we feel.

This is a mirror. It's not just history. If you worship comfort, obedience will eventually feel unreasonable. If you worship approval, truth is eventually going to feel like an attack. If you worship control, trust will eventually feel impossible. And if you worship entertainment, prayer is going to start to feel boring. If you worship outrage, gentleness is going to start to feel weak. You become like what you behold.

So here's the question that this text is putting to every single one of us this morning, myself included. And it's not the question that we'd expect. The question isn't, do you go to church? The question isn't even, do you listen to sermons? You're doing it. Good job. You're hearing one right now. The question is, what kind of person am I becoming as I hear?

Because here's the sobering thing about these verses. Nobody leaves God's word unchanged. You maybe think that you can hold it at arm's length, that you can look it over and set it back down and say, oh yeah, I read that, and you can just leave it exactly as you were. You can't. Every time you hear the word of God or you read the word of God, you walk out a little softer or a little harder, a little more tender or a little more callous. Never the same.

The smoke alarm you learned to sleep through▶ 46:11

Most of us know what it's like to hear something without really hearing it. You can ask my wife. She knows that I can do that.

Or maybe a smoke alarm chirps when it has a dead battery. At first it drives you crazy. At first you hear every single chirp. But if you don't deal with it, something strange is going to happen. You adjust. You learn to sit in the room with this warning going off and you just live around it somehow. And also, how is it that it's always 3:00 in the morning whenever it starts, and somehow you still learn how to sleep through it? The warning didn't stop. Just your ears learned to ignore it.

And that can happen to us spiritually as well. The first time God convicts you about something, it feels sharp. You know you need to repent. You know that you need to apologize. You know that you need to forgive. You know that you need to confess. You know you need to surrender. You know you need to believe. But if you keep pushing it away, the warning gets quieter. Not because God stopped speaking, but because you're training yourself not to hear.

So I'll just ask you plainly, what have you learned to ignore? Don't answer that question out loud, anybody. But keep it in mind, answer it in your head and hold on to it. We're going to come back to what to do with it, because in this chapter, the ability to still feel and understand the warning itself is a mercy.

How long, O Lord▶ 47:49

Isaiah gets his assignment, and the assignment is preach and watch it harden them, speak and watch them refuse. And Isaiah's next words aren't, oh, okay, sounds good. No, his next words, verse 11: "Then I said, How long, O Lord?"

And that question tells us everything about the heart of a faithful servant. Isaiah is not eager for judgment. He isn't excited that the people are going to refuse. He isn't standing over Judah with a smug spirit thinking, finally they're going to get what they deserve. No, he grieves.

That question, how long, is not a faithless question. Understand that. It's not rebellion. It's a prayer from someone who has agreed to obey and still feels the full weight of what obedience is going to cost.

And Isaiah's in great company whenever he asks that question. How long, O Lord? It's one of the oldest prayers in the Bible. The psalmists say it. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? Psalm 13:1. And it doesn't stop in the Old Testament. At the very end of the Bible, the martyrs under the altar cry out with the same words. O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long? You notice what they call him? Holy and true. The same holiness Isaiah saw in the throne room. How long is the prayer that God's people have always prayed when they're being faithful in the dark.

Some of you know this question. Maybe you didn't say it in these words. How long, Lord, do I keep praying for this person who won't change? How long do I keep having the same conversation with my kid? How long do I keep serving when I see zero fruit? How long do I keep forgiving? How long do I keep showing up? How long do I keep doing the right thing when it doesn't seem like it's going to change anything?

The reformer Jacob Riis said that when he felt like nothing was working, he'd go watch a stone cutter. The man would hammer the same rock a hundred times without so much as a crack showing anywhere. Then at the 101st blow, the stone would split. And he knew it wasn't that 101st hammer that did it. It was every blow that came before, when nothing seemed to be happening at all.

Maybe some of you are on blow number 73. Nothing looks cracked. Nothing looks different than it did when you hammered at number 40. And God's word to Isaiah and to you is not, okay, well then you can quit swinging. No, it's keep swinging.

Faithfulness through ruin▶ 51:22

Isaiah 6 doesn't give us an easy or cheap answer to this. When he says, how long, O Lord, God doesn't come back with, just a little while, Isaiah, and then it's going to get easy. Now look at the answer he gives.

That's the answer. Keep going till it's empty. Keep going through the devastation. Keep going. Isaiah is called to faithfulness through ruin.

Here I want you to hear the mercy in this for you. Rejection isn't proof that you were wrong to obey. Not always. Sometimes hard soil is the exact place that God sent you. Isaiah's ministry wasn't a failure. Judah's response was the failure. Don't confuse the two. Isaiah's assignment came straight from the throne and it still ended in a resistant crowd and in an empty land.

So if your obedience hasn't produced the results that you hoped for, it doesn't automatically mean that you disobeyed. It might mean that you were sent, like Isaiah, into a place where faithfulness is the win.

And that's why success and faithfulness aren't the same word. Success is God's business. God measures the harvest. He's sovereign over who softens and who's rejecting. Faithfulness is our business. We speak the truth. We do so in love. We keep showing up. We keep praying. We keep sowing. And we leave the results in the hands of the one on the throne.

Which brings me back to that relay. It's important how we finish the race. And finishing the race in Isaiah's case didn't look like breaking the tape with his arms up in front of a roaring crowd and everyone cheering. It looked like running the last leg uphill into the wind past people who aren't even happy that he's running, and not dropping the baton. A lot of times that's what faithfulness can look like. Not applause, just a servant who's not going to set the baton down.

So if you're tired this morning, if you've been obeying God in a season that feels barren, hear this. You haven't necessarily done anything wrong. You may be exactly where he sent you. Keep running.

The holy seed in the stump▶ 55:09

But Isaiah 6 doesn't end in the empty land. There's one more line.

Picture that. A great forest cut to the ground, and even the tenth that survives the first cutting gets burned again. So God's not minimizing the judgment here. He isn't patting Judah on the head and saying, it's all going to work out. He's saying the felling is real and then the burning is real on top of it. This is as far down as it gets. Stumps, ash, nothing left standing.

And then at the very end of the verse, almost impossibly, comes this one more phrase: the holy seed is its stump. That little line keeps this whole passage from ending in despair. There's a stump. There's life where it looks like everything has been cut down. There's a future where it looks like only loss remains. There's a holy seed preserved by nothing but the mercy of God, hidden in a burned over root. Judgment cuts the tree to the ground. Grace keeps life in the root.

And Isaiah chose his trees on purpose in this passage. A terebinth and an oak, they're not like a pine. You chop a pine down, game over. You chop down a terebinth and the root doesn't even know that it's supposed to be dead. This is a terebinth tree, by the way, if you haven't seen one. I know whenever I'm reading through the Bible and I read something like that, I want to know what that looks like. You cut it down, the root doesn't know it's supposed to be dead. Give it a season and green shoots come up right out of the cut. Anyone who's hiked a Tennessee trail after trees have been cut down, maybe you've seen this. Stumps everywhere, and some of them are sprouting.

Judah heard those tree names and knew exactly what God was implying. This felling is not the kind that you don't come back from.

And here's what I love. If you look at the word that God uses for that surviving remnant, what does he call it? Holy. In verse 3, the seraphim used that word for God alone. Holy, holy, holy. And now God turns and shares his own word, holy, with a burned stump in a ruined field. That is grace stooping all the way down. The holiness that terrified Isaiah becomes the hope that survives now in verse 13.

A shoot from the stump▶ 1:00:19

Later in Isaiah, we'll see this image open even wider. Isaiah looks at a cut down family tree, the royal line of David reduced to a stump, and he says, "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit." It's Isaiah 11:1.

Those aren't the same exact Hebrew words being stitched together, but it is the same picture. It's the same hope. It's the same root system running underneath this whole book. Everything looks cut down, and out of the stump God brings a shoot.

And that shoot has a name. The one who said, "Whom shall I send?" is the one who would be sent. The one Isaiah saw on the throne high and lifted up is the one who would come down into the hardness of the world. He would speak the truth and many would not hear. He would shine the light and many would not see. He would come to his own and his own would not receive him.

Isaiah's commission found its fullest echo in Jesus. The word made flesh, standing in front of people with eyes who would not see and ears who would not hear. And then he was cut down.

Friday looked like a stump. The cross looked like the end of every hope. The disciples scattered, the crowd mocked, and the light of the world went dark. And they laid his body in a tomb, and it looked to everyone watching like the tree had finally been felled for good.

But the stump wasn't the last scene. On the third day, life came up out of the cut down place. The rejected Christ walked out of the grave. The holy seed wasn't dead in the root. He was alive. And because he lives, the very thing that Judah denied is now held out to each and every one of us. They were told that they would not turn and be healed. But the risen Christ now says in effect to anyone who will hear, turn to me and be healed.

So don't despise the stump. Don't assume God is finished just because all you can see is what has been cut down. Maybe that's in your own family. Maybe it's in your work. Maybe it's in your own tired heart. God knows how to bring life out of the root. He did it on Sunday morning and he's still doing it.

Will you hear▶ 1:00:07

The whole passage is about hearing and not hearing, about seeing and not seeing. So the question this morning isn't first, will you go? Isaiah's willingness was never really our problem. Our problem is Judah's problem. The question is, will you hear?

Because the same word that sent Isaiah is the word that exposed Judah. The same word that saves the humble hardens the proud. And the same Christ who was rejected is the Christ who is now calling you to come to him. So if you hear his voice today, don't harden your heart.

I want you to catch the mercy that's hiding in that warning. Earlier, I asked you what you've learned to ignore. I told you to hold on to that question. And here's why. Because if you can still feel the warning, if something in you tightened up whenever I said it, that's not condemnation. That's grace. The people in Isaiah chapter 6 were past feeling. If God's word can still land on you this morning, if it can still convict you, if it still softens you, if it still makes you uncomfortable in the right way, then that door is wide open for you. The door's always open. The warning itself is the mercy. Judah couldn't hear the chirp of the smoke alarm anymore, but you still can.

So don't wait until it's too late. If God's convicting you, respond today. If he's calling you to repent, don't delay. Repent. If he's asking you to trust him, stop bargaining. If he's sent you into a hard place, stop measuring your faithfulness by visible success and just keep running your leg of the race. And if all you can see right now is a stump, remember our God specializes in life out of stumps, out of down places. He proved it on Easter morning.

Maybe for you, this isn't about a warning that you've been ignoring or a race that you're tired of running. Maybe it's about a turning that you never made. Maybe you've been around salvation without ever receiving it. Hear what God holds out to you. The risen Christ is standing at the door this morning and holding it open for you. Turn and be healed. That's not a threat, it's an invitation. Turning means you stop trusting your own record and you start trusting his. It means you bring him your guilt the way Isaiah brought his unclean lips. He has never once turned away a person who has turned to him. Not one.

So if that's you, don't leave this room the same. In a moment, we're going to sing and I want you to settle this with God right where you stand. If you want someone to pray with you, come talk to me after the service or anyone on staff here. We'll all be more than happy to pray with you and to celebrate with you. And we'll count it the best part of our week. Because grace sends, truth reveals, faithfulness endures, and hope survives. And the God who sends is still on the throne.

Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you that we can gather here and that we can grow closer to you together. Thank you for moving in the people of this church. Thank you for the warning and the mercy that's embedded within it. Lord, we just ask that if anyone is hearing you this morning, let the result be a softening of the heart. If anyone feels you calling them, Lord, just let them respond. And let all of us who already believe continue to be a light for you. Help us to see that when we're in a place where it seems like everything is cut down, that you bring life out of the stumps. And give us wisdom as we share with others the hope that we have found in you. In Jesus name we worship and pray and ask you. Amen.