“And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’ And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’” (Isaiah 6:7-8)
How many of us have ever desired to encounter the Lord face to face? There is a contemporary Christian song in which the singer speculates on what it would be like. But we don’t have to imagine: the prophet Isaiah was one who did meet the Lord face to face and wrote about it. Which of us has not thrilled to read about this fantastic vision? Which of us has not desired to experience such glory in our worship?
Well, Isaiah for one was not thrilled by the “experience”. Face to face with the Lord Almighty, he was terrified. He was scared to death! He knew he was a sinner, unclean, unfit to be in God’s presence. He was as sinful as his faithless and idolatrous countrymen. Yet here he saw the holy, righteous, and Almighty God in all His majestic glory and he lived.
As blessed as Isaiah was to behold this glory, he was terrified because he knew that the Lord sees the innermost being of every man. No one can hide from Him. The Lord is infinitely superior to us. He is omnipotent and omniscient. He is beyond the vain manipulation, words, and deeds we human beings use to attempt to win Him over. He sees our self-serving attempts to appear righteous. He knows that we human beings carry out vain and fraudulent rites and rituals, make sacrifices and perform great acts of charity while our hearts are faithless, sinful and self-centered. And that is scary. We stand naked and powerless in the presence of His holiness.
But the Lord had chosen Isaiah. He cleansed him of sin, declared him righteous. He then commissioned him as His prophet. Isaiah gladly accepted God’s call. We should as well for the Lord cleanses us from sin by the body and blood of Jesus. Our mission is to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness found in Jesus alone. The message is quite unpopular in the eyes of today’s success-oriented world. There will be no mass conversions, no earth-shaking revivals. The majority of the people we speak with will harden their hearts. God’s servants will suffer violence and persecution. Yet in God’s Kingdom what is important is not how many people or how much money we bring in to the Kingdom, or how dynamic our worship seems to be. What God values most is faithfulness to His calling. That is how He measures success.