“Trust and Surrender”
Isaiah 55:1-13
When we left the book of Isaiah before Advent, chapter 54 announced that all was forgiven. Today, in chapter 55, we are given the invitation to experience that forgiveness. Isaiah is not passively suggesting it would be a nice idea if people accept this invitation of forgiveness. He is downright stressing it. There are twelve imperatives in just the first seven verses.
God has done everything necessary!
The tables have been set, they are ready…
But where are the people?
What a tragedy it would be if no one showed up?
If we look back at chapter 53, we can now sense the significance of what Isaiah prophesied.
He proclaimed that the bride is restored!
The city is rebuilt! The invitations have been sent,
where is everyone?
The invitation speaks clearly to those who have no resources of their own, it begins with their physical needs, v.1
“Those who are thirsty…
You who have no money….”
Then it addresses a more spiritual need, v.3
“That your soul may live.”
God’s invitation includes not only a response to our physical needs but the needs of our whole person. He continues in v. 3 with a language of an “everlasting covenant.” Isaiah is declaring the old covenant has been annulled, the required punishment has been provided for and God has created another covenant, an “everlasting covenant.”
If we were to go back to chapter 2 of Isaiah, we would see that this is exactly what was predicted.
Chapter 53 describes how God’s people really will be enabled to fulfill the servanthood promised to them at the beginning of this book.
With but one problem,
people must accept what God has done for them.
What good is a banquet table full of food,
if people are too ashamed or too proud to come and eat at it?
This week I experienced this exact predicament.
(Share the story of showing #10 for Stepping Stone Housing)
This person was sitting in a clean kitchen with new appliances, washer & dryer, clean bathroom with hot water for a shower, and a large room for a bedroom. He was also being offered assistance in providing a better place to live on his own property. The fulfillment of his desires. But he would not accept the offer. Was he too proud or too ashamed? Either way, he walked out to return to squallor. How sad.
This is a universal problem for those who hear God’s invitation and comprehend it, yet do nothing. Like the man sitting in the kitchen at #10 Bluehaven, they cannot deny the reality of the choice: either to stay where they are in unbelief or to go forward in immense uncertainty. As for those listening to Isaiah when he wrote this and for those of us reading it today, therein lies a mystery. It demands an exercise in faith first and complete understanding to follow.
Okay, for the renter to trust me, a volunteer he had never met before, I can understand a bit of reluctance. Even though I had made him come in and see the place with his own eyes, so he could make an informed decision. But when it comes to God, His promises are solid, reliable, and the Israelites were aware of what God is capable of, all they needed to do was seek him sincerely and unreservedly. What it comes right down to is our alienation from God, not just our deliverance from physical captivity.
Verse 7 tells us that if the “wicked” will turn from their “ways” and “thoughts” to the Lord’s “ways” and “thoughts” even if they don’t understand them, the results will be “mercy” and “pardon.”
Isaiah completes this chapter with all nature rejoicing in the redemption of humanity.
Sorrow will be replaced with joy
and sighing with peace,
when the captives attend the banquet and return to God.
Jesus uses this same intense invitation when He tells the parable of the king’s banquet in Luke 14. As a child I learned this message in a song which I placed in today’s bulletin under “Pastor’s Pondering.” Those that were first invited, the Jewish brethren, refused to come, so the king told His servants to invite the “peasants and paupers,” and then to go to the “highways and byways.” God has made all of the preparations, He will find people who will respond.
Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
“Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”
It comes right down to humans having to “trust and surrender” and we’ve had a problem with that since the beginning. We want to decide what is right and wrong for ourselves. When everything is looking good, we don’t want our Creator telling us there is something wrong. Neither do we want this same Creator to tell us something will be good for us when it looks as though it is going to require a great deal of effort or may actually bring us some pain.
The reality is, we want to hold the place of God in our lives and would rather have God serve us by supplying our needs as we see them. Yet God requires faith, and faith is
The confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1
Faith means letting go of our (apparent) securities and certainties and doing things God’s way.
The Lord said to Zerubbabel in Zechariah 4:6
‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’
Peter comprehended it when he stepped over the side of the boat, into the heaving waves, in Matthew 14:29. Until he took his eyes off Jesus, and placed them on his surroundings, then he began to sink.
Here’s the place where you need to take a moment and do a personal inventory. Are you someone who insists that God’s ways and plans need to be completely intelligible before you decide to act on His invitations?
Or, are you willing to surrender your right to decide what is best for you and will allow God to determine what is best?
If this is the case, you have turned a most critical corner, the corner of surrender.
Scary as it may seem, by choosing to let God lead, means we are allowing God, the Creator to govern the terms and let’s face it, He knows best.
Whether you want to admit it or not, life outside of God is only apparently secure and abundant. It only takes one sudden death or severe accident to bring this reality to the forefront.
God’s invitation isn’t just for those outside the faith, it is also for those of us who have been living in faith for many years. Commentator John Oswalt wrote,
“One of the problems of living on earth is that the longer we live here, the more its ways become our ways.”
He’s got a point. Somehow in our childlike faith we find it easy to believe. As we get older, there is a tendency to resist “childish enthusiasm.”
Today we celebrate the very invitation Isaiah declares. God is urging us to leave our comfortable worldly ways and step out in paths of service and living that do not depend on our strength, but on the power of the Holy Spirit. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead, can do the “impossible” that is set before you. This table reminds us that “nothing is impossible” for God. We just need to be listening, trusting and surrendering what He has for us to do and say. It starts here, at the Lord’s Supper.
