Summoning the Nations: the Means of Mission Isaiah 54-55
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CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 1 Summoning the Nations: The Means of Mission Isaiah 54-55 1. Where Passion Might Lead … the irresistible & free Passion Fruit Invitation 'Come to me' Isaiah 55.1-3 2. The Suffering of the Servant has removed the Barrier to Blessing ... - children for Sarah (promised to Abraham) Isaiah 54.1-8 - a new age of mercy (as with Noah) Isaiah 54.9-10 - a heavenly Jerusalem (as in Rev 21.19-20) Isaiah 54.11-17 - a new King (promised to David) Isaiah 55.3b-4 CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 2 3. His free pardon for all who turn to Him Isaiah 55.7-9 4. His powerful & effective word Isaiah 55.10-11 - sharing Jesus' witness to the nations Isaiah 55.5 - the whole of creation! Isaiah 55.12-13 5. “Come to me!” CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 3 1. Where Passion might Lead … the irresistible and free Passion fruit invitation • Tonight I want to offer your something irresistible. I’m offering you a free invitation to come and to taste the fruit of passion. Passion fruit. Who here would like to come and taste what is good? To come and buy without money, without cost? • On Thursday night we saw that no one is more Passionate for his Glory than God himself, and that God’s Passion for his Glory is the motive for mission. • Yesterday we heard how the basis for mission is the Arm of the LORD, exercised through the sin-bearing suffering servant of the LORD, who opens the way for nations to come to God. • Tonight we see where God’s passion (which prompted the Servant’s passion) - inevitably leads. To the Summoning of the Nations as the Means for mission. • Chapters 54 and 55 are, if you like, the fruit of God’s Passion. His Passion Fruit. • You’ll have to forgive me for that one. That’s what happens when there’s a deadline for the talk outlines and it’s late. • That, and the fact that something genetically happens to men when their wives give birth, when the ‘Dad-joke gene’ becomes activated. Though we Dads may try to reverse it, everyone with a Dad knows it’s genetically impossible. 215 words Come to me ➡ But - back to the point - it’s no surprise that in Isaiah 40-55, after God comforts us with who He is in chapter 40, then says why He is uniquely God and worthy of Glory in chapters 41-49, then outlines his great plan to CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 4 redeem people from all nations to himself through the Servant in chapter 51-53, it’s no surprise that now - at the end of the section, God invites - (No. It’s stronger than that … ) God calls people to come to him. Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters ... come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost … Give ear and Come to me … • Here is the great mission call from the living God for people to come to him, and to keep on coming. • This call would now go out (to the Jews first, Yes), but to all people, irrespective of nationality or race, because did you hear the audience? All you who are thirsty. • People with thirsty souls. Souls hungry for the living God. • It might surprise us who this is! Here in Australia, people can hide their thirst, and we can think that they are not thirsty, when they are. • I remember my sister-in-law, an inner-city Sydney flamenco- dancing PhD microbiologist into Jungian psychology (whom I felt very boring by comparison). She was the last person I thought who’d be hungry for God! And so I almost fell off my chair when she opened up to us one day and said, ‘I want to know God’. She knew that we knew him and she didn’t, and she was thirsty for the God we knew. • An example overseas. One CMS worker wrote me the story of an 18 year old girl she met in Kabul airport girl. Just married. They began speaking. The girl was nervous - her first time on a plane. This CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 5 worker shared her Snapchat photos with her. And then the girl asked, ‘What holy book do you have?’ She said she’d heard a story of Jesus once, but hadn’t been able to find any more. She asked the worker, ‘Do you have the holy book about Jesus? Could you tell me about him?’ • God does plant in people’s hearts a thirst for him. And he is summoning the thirsty of the world now to come to him. • And his Call is not just for non-Christians to come to him! • He also calls us. Because (I hope!) that one of the reasons you’ve come to Summer Encounter this weekend was because you have a soul which is thirsty for God. (And haven’t we drunk deeply?) • Even the Psalms - which were sung and which fed us - even they express this longing: ‘My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD, my heart and flesh cry out for the living God’ (Psalm 84:1) • And Yes - Jesus did say, ‘Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’, and there’s a real sense in which that’s true, but there’s another sense where - until Christ returns - we still thirst for God. (Even the Apostle Paul - who knew Christ - said, ‘I want to know Christ and the power for his resurrection, that the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’ - he knew him, but he was thirsty to know him better). • So to every person who is thirsty, the LORD is Summoning us to Come to him. Come, and Keep on Coming. CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 6 • And God’s promise to us is that when we do Come to him, our souls will delight in the richest of fare. When we come to him, God says, our souls will live. • Remember Isaiah 40, and God’s promise? ‘Those who wait upon the LORD will renew their strength’. • And God tells us HOW to come to him! Look at verse 3: ‘Give ear and come to me; (we think, ‘That’s funny. I thought you used your feet to come to somebody) … Hear me, that your soul may live’ • We come to God by opening ourselves to his voice. His word. • And it’s true isn’t it? When we’re too busy to read his word, when we skip hearing his word, or when we go to church and don’t open ourselves to listen to his word (because we’re thinking about other things, or wishing church was better), then feel dissatisfied, dislocated, like something at the centre is not right. • But you know that when we listen to God with open hearts; when we take the time to come to him, He satisfies us. That’s when we’re renewed. How should we see this ‘call’ in Isaiah 55? • Just a ‘nice’ moment in the scriptures? A moment when God was kind? This is God’s agenda, his call, his vision for the world now. • This call comes at the end of chapters 40-55, where God’s revealed, He is above the nations, he has a heart for the nations, his servant has suffered for sins of the nations, he’s identified witnesses to the nations; he’s taught us what witnessing to the nations means; and now what he’s doing is NOT just giving an isolated word of consolation to to the Jewish exiles. CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 7 • In fact, what he says here he says first and foremost to US (and only secondarily to the exiles! - even though they were Isaiah’s original hearers). Why do I say that? • For the simple reason that: 1. God is laying out a mission plan to bring the nations to him; 2. the centre piece in that plan is his Servant who suffers and then sees the light of life; 3. and - in the unfolding of the plan - the invitation to come to him comes after that moment (and not before), and so 4. first and foremost Isaiah 55 applies to those who live after the suffering servant, not to those who lived before. Put this in the broader theological context of Isaiah, • where God outlines his plans to bring blessing and restoration to the whole universe!, but • where the blockage is always the sinful wickedness of human hearts, (which is incompatible with a holy God, and results in judgment). • That’s why the first 39 chapters of Isaiah have so many prophecies of the judgment (which land God’s people in exile). • Then in chapters 40-55, God speaks to his people, promising their restoration, but still the question remains: how will this blockage to blessing (how will the problem of human sin) be overcome? • And so the whole book had been leading up to chapter 53, where the Suffering Servant King takes upon himself our iniquity and guilt, where he’s pierced for our transgressions, where the punishment that brings us peace is upon him, and where - by his wounds - we’d be healed. - This is where our sins are paid for. - It’s at this moment that the Suffering of the Servant removes the blockage to blessing. CMS SE 2017 Talk 3 8 - So when we get to chapters 54 and 55, sin has been dealt with, and now the blessings from God are flowing like a river.