Isaiah 3:5-7 - People
will take advantage of each other -- man against man, neighbor fighting
neighbor. Young people will revolt against authority, and nobodies will sneer
at honorable people. In those days a man will say
to his brother, "Since you have a cloak, you be our leader! Take charge of
this heap of ruins!" "No!" he will reply. "I can't
help. I don't have any extra food or clothes. Don't ask me to get
involved!"
Isaiah had one of the hardest jobs that God
anoints people to do. He was commissioned
to speak the truth to a nation who had forgotten their first love…and replaced
it with their own selfish desires. It is not an accident that God allowed his
words of judgment and discipline that God would use to correct his people….for
they have just as much truth today.
The problem is that we become so engulfed
in our sin that we don’t see it as sin anymore.
Our sin has become our normal….and we justify everything we do based on
the new normal that satan has tricked us into believing. We even search out
scriptures to justify the things we have come to believe falsely are good and
righteous ways to act.
I have been on the road for the last two
weeks…vacation one week…youth camp another…and took a bit of a break from the
writing task God has given me to do. God has used the time that I have been on
the road to deepen my understanding of the 15 chapters of Isaiah that I will
try to catch up on this week.
One day I met a young man named Ben…because
the car my widow friends and I were traveling in broke down. He drove us to the
rental place…and I used the time we waited for the paperwork to be completed to
ask him if he were a Christian and where he might be going to church. He
quickly answered that he was ‘saved’…but did not go to church. He felt his time on Sunday should be used for
‘sleep…and ‘rest’….just like we are told God rested in Genesis 2:3.
I have not been able to get ‘Ben’ out of my
heart. I somehow sensed the confusion
and pain he must be going through to not know the healing support he could find
in a loving church family. I shared briefly with him how I never could have
made it the last few years without my church friends and family. And it seems
that something happens every day to remind me to pray for him to find a church
that can help him see the truth.
“Ben’ has become a reminder to my heart
that millions of other Americans…and citizens of other Christian nations have
wandered so far from the truth. The anarchy we experience in the world today is
a direct result of all the ‘Bens’…who have decided to rewrite the book and make
their own rules for how to love God and the others around us. Every broken
relationship…all the lack of respect we see for all the differences in the
human life God created…the blindness of our hearts to see the needs of others around
us….and the forgetfulness we see of a God who could fix it all if we just
humbled ourselves and asked…is a direct result of the complacency we have
allowed to rule in our hearts. It will eventually cause our self-destruction.
Father…thank you for the reminder that I
need to ask you to take off my blinders.
Help me to identify any sin I have let become my normal…and really gasp
the truth of what you intended for me to be when you allowed me life on Earth.
Show me the scriptures I need to shake of every sin that I have justified as
okay…because I let my self be tricked into be living it was okay. Amen.
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