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In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
Woe to
you, Ariel, Ariel, the city where David settled! Add year to year and let your
cycle of festivals go on. Yet I will besiege Ariel; she will mourn and lament, she
will be to me like an altar hearth. I will encamp against you on all
sides; I will encircle you with towers and set up my siege works against you. Brought
low, you will speak from the ground; your speech will mumble out of the dust. Your
voice will come ghostlike from the earth; out of the dust your speech will
whisper. But your many enemies will become like fine dust, the ruthless hordes
like blown chaff.
Suddenly, in an instant, the Lord Almighty will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire. Then the hordes of all the nations that fight against Ariel, that attack her and her fortress and besiege her, will be as it is with a dream, with a vision in the night—as when a hungry person dreams of eating, but awakens hungry still; as when a thirsty person dreams of drinking, but awakens faint and thirsty still. So will it be with the hordes of all the nations that fight against Mount Zion.
Be
stunned and amazed, blind yourselves and be sightless; be drunk, but not from
wine, stagger, but not from beer. The Lord has brought over you a deep sleep: He
has sealed your eyes (the prophets); He has covered your heads (the seers). For
you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. And if you give
the scroll to someone who can read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will
answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” Or if you give the scroll to someone who
cannot read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I don’t know how
to read.”
The Lord
says:
“These
people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their
hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they
have been taught. Therefore once more I will astound these people with
wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the
intelligent will vanish.”
Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, “Who sees us? Who will know?” You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “You did not make me”? Can the pot say to the potter, “You know nothing”?
In a
very short time, will not Lebanon be turned into a fertile field and the
fertile field seem like a forest? In that day the deaf will hear the words of
the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see. Once
more the humble will rejoice in the Lord; the needy will rejoice in the Holy
One of Israel. The ruthless will vanish, the mockers will disappear, and all
who have an eye for evil will be cut down—those who with a word make someone
out to be guilty, who ensnare the defender in court and with false testimony
deprive the innocent of justice.
Therefore
this is what the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, says to the descendants of Jacob:
“No
longer will Jacob be ashamed; no longer will their faces grow pale. When they
see among them their children, the work of my hands, they will keep my name
holy; they will acknowledge the holiness of the Holy One of Jacob, and will
stand in awe of the God of Israel. Those who are wayward in spirit will gain
understanding; those who complain will accept instruction.”
Isaiah 29
This ends this
reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
How is your worship attitude? Do
you go into worship every week with a sense of excitement and anticipation,
anxious to come into the presence of the Lord to give Him all your honor and
glory, singing praises to Him in song while hungering and thirsting for His
righteousness as discovered through the reading of His word, the preached word
from the pulpit, or in the prayers of your heart and congregation?
Or has worship become just another
mundane routine you go through one day a week, not unlike any number of other
rituals you do on any given day? You come to church, sit in the pew, stand up
and sing a few songs, place a few dollars in the offering plate, listen to the
sermon, and then get up and go home to get on with things, sometimes doing
things you would on any other day of the week because the world certainly has
made Sunday look like any other day instead of the holy and sacred day it is
intended to be.
There is a real danger in finding
ourselves going through the motions when it comes to worship and unfortunately,
it is an outflow of an overall life attitude we carry as our faith life is
often just as mundane as the church services we sit through.
As we look at our scripture passage
for today, taken from Isaiah, Chapter 29, we’ll see that the matter of a “groundhog
day” approach to worship is not just a modern day phenomena. It ranges back to
the earliest days of God’s people in Jerusalem. Look at these words of the Lord
from this passage and what they have to say about His expectations for our
worship:
Be stunned and amazed, blind yourselves and be
sightless; be drunk, but not from wine, stagger, but not from beer. The Lord has
brought over you a deep sleep: He has sealed your eyes (the prophets); He has
covered your heads (the seers). For you this whole vision is nothing but words
sealed in a scroll. And if you give the scroll to someone who can read, and
say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” Or if you
give the scroll to someone who cannot read, and say, “Read this, please,” they
will answer, “I don’t know how to read.”
The Lord says:
“These people come near to me with their mouth and
honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me
is based on merely human rules they have been taught. Therefore once
more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the
wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, “Who sees us? Who will know?” You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “You did not make me”? Can the pot say to the potter, “You know nothing”?
In a very short time, will not Lebanon be
turned into a fertile field and the fertile field seem like a forest? In that
day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the
eyes of the blind will see. Once more the humble will rejoice in the Lord; the
needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. The ruthless will vanish, the
mockers will disappear, and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down—those
who with a word make someone out to be guilty, who ensnare the defender in
court and with false testimony deprive the innocent of justice.
Therefore this is what the Lord, who redeemed
Abraham, says to the descendants of Jacob:
“No longer will Jacob be ashamed; no longer
will their faces grow pale. When they see among them their children, the work
of my hands, they will keep my name holy; they will acknowledge the holiness of
the Holy One of Jacob, and will stand in awe of the God of Israel. Those who
are wayward in spirit will gain understanding; those who complain will accept
instruction.” Isaiah 29:9-24
Note what happened to the
Israelites who allowed their worship to not be based on their love and
relationship with the Lord God Almighty but rather on the human rules they were
taught. Worship was simply a matter of going through an order of steps and
rules set forth by man. Stand here, pray here, bow and kneel here, sing here.
There was no spirit attached to this kind of worship. Just an attitude of “going-through-the-motions”
in worship so it could be checked off the list of things to do, no different
than going to the grocery store to pick up a few things or cleaning up around
the house.
This worship is lifeless and void
of spirit. It’s a place where man thinks he knows how to live and need not pay
heed to what the Lord has to say. It’s a place that says God is as ordinary as
breathing when in fact, it is He who grants us each breath through His grace
and mercy. It’s a place that says the world has a better understanding of life
than the One who created life and everything in it, expressed in our passage as
the pot carrying on as if it is greater than the potter who created it. It’s a
place filled with disrespect and disregard for the God who deserves nothing but
our fullest praise and gratitude.
The Lord could leave His people in
this place but He doesn’t do so today anymore than He did in the Old Testament
times we are studying from. For instead of simply rejecting His people and
turning from them as they were turning from Him, instead He took action to show
them who was the true King of glory, the true Author of all wisdom and
understanding.
Our scriptures tell us that the Lord
chose to astound His people with wonders and impart a wisdom and intelligence
on them that would make man’s wisdom and intelligence pale by comparison. He
still does so today when the people of the Lord keep their eyes open to the
work He is doing in and around us.
What would the outcome of this
action be?
Worship will turn from being
desolate to being fertile. Those who worshipped in blindness will be able to
once again see the glory of the Lord they are worshipping. Those who were deaf
to the truth in His words would have their ears fully opened to receive His
guidance and direction, a guidance and direction that would serve to move them
more and more to the righteousness the Lord expected them to show in the way
they lived. And convicted once again by the word of the Lord, people would once
again fall into the proper sense of humility in worship coming before their
Lord and Master, awestruck before the One who had, has, and will always have
the power to do all things. They will cry out songs and words of praise to the
Lord they once again see as holy, the only One worthy of their praises.
This is the right attitude of
worship God wanted believers to have in Old Testament days.
This is the right attitude of
worship God wants believers to have today.
Where does your worship attitude
stand?
Amen.
In
Christ,
Mark
PS: Please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
Send any prayer requests to OurChristianWalk@aol.com
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