As we continue using multiple texts, I wonder, how high, or how deep, is your calling from the Lord?
We have been thinking about call language for a few weeks now.
The Magi were called to follow and their calling was deep. It is wide and it required great faith on their part to listen to the voice of the Lord when others who encountered them might doubt their story. God’s voice lead them through the desert, to King Herod, and to Jesus where they presented their gifts him. Their calling required a depth that allowed them to hear God’s voice in a dream and go home via a different route.
Last week we learned that God’s call to us to repent can only be lived out as we experience the One who discloses the divine name, takes us by the hand, and simultaneously reassures us as we take bold steps in our faith. For we cannot resist sin on our own. It is not possible. We fail when we attempt to do this alone.
As you can see, we are building upon each text.
Now this week we uncover and we consider the Servant Song of Isaiah 49. And I wonder, how far does the Lord God take us when He calls us? For as I read this week, “We are destined for more than what we [initially think].”[1] God’s call in your life is deep and wide.
God places us in situations, around people, and in moments, that we do not have to understand. Yet in those moments, the steadfastness of the Lord is present; it can be felt in all three of the scriptural readings that we read, and said, today.
I want to begin with the words of the Prophet Isaiah.
Move 1- servant song
While sounding like words from Psalm 139, Isaiah 49’s language is also found in Isaiah 44. In all three places, we hear that God forms us. God knits us together before we were born. And in this moment of creation, and attention, according to Isaiah, God performed the intimate act of naming us. Such attention to detail by the Creator. Such. . . individual attention to each of us by our Lord.
Isaiah 49 begins with words that feel like they were addressed only to you… only to me. As if the exiles hearing these words were not the intended audience so many years ago. Instead, God wanted to hand them, pen them perhaps, personally, to one single person. In this case: YOU.
“I formed you. . . I knit you together. . . I named you.” The Lord says. These are all Singular verbs from a singular God who cares for us in a remarkably personal way which we can see and experience in our calling.
Yet the understanding of our calling takes times to understand and unpack. And as we spend the time with the Lord and as we serve the Lord and are faithful to the Lord, verse 4 comes into focus for us and it becomes another aspect for us.
Verse 4. This verse is a prayer. Since the author, and by extension, the audience, has come to trust in God and their faith has developed, they offer God an honest prayer.
“I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;”
Then the prayer shifts tonally. . .
“yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”
In the first half of the verse, we read an affirmation that many of us make. It is a confessional statement if you like.
Isaiah has the church, the people, stand before God and confess the feeling that we have done our best and it seems that our best is not enough in that moment. The work we have done feels like it was done for nothing. And while we all know that we are nothing that we do in the Lord’s name is done for nothing, there are times when our heads hang a bit lower than we would like, and we. . . wonder.
To be able to stand before God and confess this is cathartic. It is cleansing. It can be healing. For God knows this and I wonder if God is the one who helped us to discover it. Like Paul the scales fell off, and we saw how we truly felt. Not sugar-coating it; we were honest with God.
Then the power of the verse hits: “our reward is with God.” And what Isaiah is saying here relates directly to the very character of God. It would be like saying, “and the very character of God is with me and that is my reward.” This is a word of union both of belief and of practice.
And in all of this, from the knowledge that God formed, knit, and named us, to the confession of our reward is with God, even when we feel like the work we have done has felt like it was for naught, the servant is both faithful and obedient in the community and to their high calling from God.
Move 2- Psalm 40
This is no small feat to consider.
For as we go all the way back to the very first text we read together in worship, the Psalm of the Day, we hear that God drew each of us up out of the pit, the clay, to bog. Regardless of what that looks like in your individual life, God was there to pull you out of that place of separation and set you on a new place. God places us on a new path because, again using Isaiah’s language, you were knit, formed, and named by God. You were given a reward that is so personal and it is the very character of God that is with you.
And the blessing, the reward, is not just to pull you out of the struggles of your day, but as God reached down, God has taken the very person who he named by the hand, and the Lord then helped you confess that His character is with you, a new song was placed in your heart.
I wonder what that song sounds like? What does it resemble?
This takes us back up again to the Isaiah text. This takes us back again to of the idea of a reward.
For when any of us hear that “our reward is with God” we immediately begin thinking of victory. We start thinking in terms of wins and losses—to use a sports analogy. If my reward is with God, and if God is drawing me out of where I suffer, then my extension those who do not… whatever do not “looks” like or resembles… well they do not get what I get do they?
That is not what this says.
Instead, today, God invites us to see how deeply our calling for the Lord runs
Move 3- 1 Corinthians
This takes us finally into the church at Corinth.
Paul had a very special relationship with the church at Corinth—and it was not always positive. As we know Corinth was a church in conflict, a church in strife. It was a body of who could not agree on anything worship.
So much of Paul’s first words to them attempt to help them find a path toward unity and harmony as a church. Here at the beginning of his letter, Paul gently steers them away from their faults and towards their faith.
Notice verse 7, “so that you are not lacking any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If you consider why would Paul write these words in this way, then it becomes clear. They were lacking. They did not have the revelation of Jesus Christ in their midst.
So, they need to patience. Gentleness. “When Paul admonishes them for their faults (as he will do often in this book) and (their) failures, he does so because he is calling them to be who God has called them to be.”[2] Paul is inviting them to remember that they are called by God and even if they are weak, flawed, divided, sinful, they are still knit together by God.
They are still named by God. God has still drawn them up out of the miry clay and set their feet on the solid ground. Even if yesterday, or even this morning, they were quite sinful, their high calling is deep. . . it is wide. It calls them onward to greater things than they realize.
They church must just trust in the Lord who began that good work in them.
Conclusion
As must we. God has done so many great things in our midst. Things that we did not think God could do. That statement invites reflection and consideration. In what remains of our time together today, and as our ministry time begins again this week, I hope you will take these three texts with you and consider them and consider your calling.
For we are building together.
DM
No comments:
Post a Comment