Word of Salvation – Vol.50 No.12 – March 2005

 

The Way of Salvation

 

Sermon by Rev A Esselbrugge on Isaiah 30:15

 Scripture Reading:  Isaiah 30

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…

In Isaiah 30:15 we have a marvellous offer of grace and mercy from the hand of Almighty God, and today we want to focus on that offer. But before we do that, we need to observe a few things about what is happening here in this chapter. There is always a danger that we lift a few sentences out of the Bible, and lift them out of their context, and end up making God say things that He never said at all.

Isaiah was a prophet, he was a man of God, and his ministry was to the southern part of the nation of Israel, a nation that had once been a grand and mighty world power. But the nation had begun to decline, and in Isaiah’s day, it was showing severe stress. She was no longer a powerful nation. She was no longer rich. She no longer held much territory. Other nations around her had grown, and were a constant threat to her, and Isaiah’s message throughout was that all their woes and trials were because the people had left the One True and Only God. They had turned to images of stone and wood, and called them gods.

Isaiah condemned their idolatry. But the people wouldn’t listen to Isaiah. And in the early verses of this chapter we’re looking at, they were trying to make dishonest political and trade deals with a neighbouring nation in order to secure for themselves protection and support and a measure of peace. But they should have been seeking these things from the Lord.

The people, in hardness of heart and blind foolishness wanted the preachers of God’s Word to stop preaching the Word of the Lord and to stop giving them visions of what is right, but instead to tell them positive and pleasant things, illusions, and to stop confronting them with God. Positive thinking was their desire.

Sounds more like modern history and not ancient history.

Isaiah, under the compulsion of the Spirit of God went to his people and cried out to them that if they continued on in their present attitude and behaviour, terrible and even unimaginable punishments would be poured out against them from the Lord God, who is a jealous God, jealous for the love and affection of His people.

Not only are we reading the very Word of God here; these verses stress that God is the Sovereign One, the Holy One. He is, in other words, the God of power, the only one who could accomplish the nation’s deliverance. The people couldn’t save themselves. Their kings couldn’t save them. The neighbouring nations, far from saving them would destroy them. Only God, the Sovereign and Holy One could save them. Only His power, only His strength could rescue them from the consequences of their rebellion against Him.

In order to have security and peace, there is only one thing you and I need and must have, not only in this life, but also in the life to come after this one. There is but one thing this world needs, there is but one thing that can rescue us from corruption of all kinds, and from the horror and evil of terrorism and corruption in general, there is just one thing that can rescue us from cancer and diseases due to the way in which we ourselves have messed up the environment: we need God’s grace! This world needs it, and as we listen to Isaiah here, there is a deep and an immense longing in God to actually give His grace.

But there is only one way in which He will and can give His mercy. If we believe the Bible to be the Word of God, if we believe that in this book God provides us with the keys to peace, harmony, contentment and peace, then what are so many of us doing trying to create these wonderful things we all desire ourselves? I can tell you that there is not a single page in the Book of God that tells us or would lead us to believe that a person can achieve peace and contentment by working incredibly hard in high paying jobs, or that you will gain the desire of a well balanced life in which everything works wonderfully for you, and everyone loves you by developing a good sense of self esteem.

The Bible tells us that there is only one way in which anyone will gain the grace which God so longs to give, and its only by true conversion, by changing from the frantic efforts to achieve our own security, to a quietness and confidence in the power of God. That’s something that only comes by repentance. It is only after we have fallen down before the Almighty, and confessed to Him our sin, our weakness and our self-centredness, it is only after grace has been conferred, that strength and humility and trust become a part of us.

We often talk about repentance. We mention it regularly as something we must all be doing, or have done, before we can know the peace of God in His Son Jesus, but what is it? What is repentance?

Salvation, says Isaiah, lies in repentance. The gospel of Luke tells us, “Unless you repent, you too will perish” (Luke 13:3). So what is repentance? This is a question about one of the very foundation stones of Christianity. The first doctrine our Lord Jesus Christ preached was, “Repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The apostles went out as sent by the Lord, two by two, and they “preached that people should repent” (Mark 6:12). And as He was about to ascend into heaven, our Lord said, “repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in (My) Name to all nations” (Luke 24:47).

The apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God came down upon the people of God, concluded his great sermon with, “Repent and be baptised”, repent and be converted (Acts 2:38; 3:19). And we could go on, showing how throughout the Scriptures we and all people everywhere are called upon to repent and turn to the Lord.

But what is repentance? We all know that repentance has to do with saying sorry for something we’ve done wrong, but that is only a small part of it.

Repentance is in fact, a thorough change of a person’s natural heart with regard to sin. We are all born in sin. We naturally love sin. We take to sin as soon as we can act and think. You don’t learn these things from bad company. They simply spring up by themselves. They are in our hearts from conception on, and it is when this heart of ours is changed by the Spirit and power of God, when this natural love of sin is cast out, that’s when that change takes place which God’s Word calls “repentance”. The person in whom that change is worked, is said to repent.

But we need to go further, it isn’t safe to leave such important doctrines as this with just some general statements. So let’s think about the elements of true repentance.

True repentance begins with a knowledge of sin. In repentance your eyes are opened, and you are horrified to see the length and breadth of God’s law, and with shame and fear you begin to see the extent, the enormous extent of your own sin. You discover to your surprise, that all the time you thought of yourself as a good sort of person, that it’s all been one huge delusion. You find out that in reality, you aren’t just wrong and sinful, but that you are corrupt and guilty and wicked in God’s sight. Your pride breaks down. Your high thoughts melt away. You see yourself for what you are, neither more nor less than a great sinner. That’s the first step in repentance.

True repentance then goes on in the second place to create sorrow for sin. The heart of a penitent soul is touched with deep grief and remorse because of past sin. You are cut to the heart to think that you have lived so wickedly. You are brought to mourn over time wasted, over talents used in wrong ways and over how you have brought dishonour to God, and the burden of these things is sometimes so great and so painful, that its almost intolerable. When you have such sorrow, you have the second step of true repentance.

A lot of psychology and counselling today wants to smooth all of that away and prevent people from feeling the depth of that guilt and pain. But that’s not the Biblical way, that’s not God’s way, the way of grace.

True repentance continues on from here to a third step, to produce confession of sin. Your tongue is suddenly set free, like it’s never been before, and you feel that you must speak to God, that you must talk to the One, against whom you have sinned, that you must go to the One who has been offended. Something in you drives you to cry to God, to pray to God, to talk to Him about the state of your soul. You find that you simply must pour out your heart and acknowledge your sin at the throne of sovereign grace. Your sin, your guilt, your grief are a heavy burden to you, and you can no longer hold it all in and continue trying to hide it.

You find you can no longer keep silent, and you hold nothing back. You go before God, pleading for yourself, and you say as the prodigal son and the tax collector said, “Father, I have sinned, I have sinned against heaven and against You. God be merciful to me a sinner.” When you go like that to God in confession, you have the third step in true repentance.

Genuine repentance goes on further though, and it shows itself before the whole world, before all who look and see, that there is a thorough breaking off from sin. Your life is changed. The course of your daily conduct is completely different to what it was before. There is a new authority in control of your heart. The old man is put off. What God commands, that’s what you long to do. What God forbids, you now do everything in your power to avoid. You do all you can to avoid sin, and you fight against it in order to win over sin. You make a sharp break from bad ways and bad companions, and you come to hate sin in all its forms. You now delight in the law of God, and you mourn that you constantly fall short of your desire to be holy, and to please and glorify God.

It is then that you discover in yourself an evil principle that is at war against the things of God. A holy tension develops within you. When you ought to be hot for God, you find yourself cold. When you ought to be forward for God, you find yourself backward. You become deeply conscious of your weaknesses. And, you begin to groan under a sense of the sin that still clings to you. But still, despite all of that, the predominant bias of your heart is toward God and away from evil. When a person consciously and actively goes against sin, and breaks off from it, you have the fourth step in true repentance.

All of this is contained in the longing our Lord expresses there through Isaiah. Look at the verses there in this chapter. We could look at many other passages of Scripture and find the same longing, but we’re looking now at this chapter. Look at how He, in what is almost an agony of desire toward His people, longs to be gracious and kind to them. In verse 18 it says, “The Lord longs to be gracious to you.”

In verse 19 there is a testimony to His mercy. In the next verse, Isaiah affirms that those who are blessed will see the beauty of the Lord. In verse 22, those who long for the Lord will live what they believe, and you will see them, they will discard evil from their lives, and in verses 23-26 we find a description of the blessing and the favour of the Lord to His people, who repent and turn to Him.

All of that is because true repentance, as we’ve described it, is never alone in the heart. It always has a wonderful companion. It is always accompanied by a lively faith in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Wherever there is faith, there you find repentance. Wherever you find repentance, there you find faith.

You can’t have ice without cold, or fire without heat, and so you will never find true repentance without a living faith.

You and I must now test ourselves, and see what we know in our hearts about true repentance.

I don’t say to you that the experience of every penitent person is exactly the same. I’m not saying to you now that there is anyone who ever knows sin, or grieves over it, or confesses sin, or forsakes sin, or hates sin as perfectly and as completely as he ought. But I do say this to you: All true Christians will recognise something that they know and have felt in the things we have been saying about repentance.

Repentance as we have described it now, in all its major points is the experience of every true believer. So brothers and sisters, see that you know it in your own soul.

Don’t let the devil deceive you in this. It is easy for him to dress up counterfeit examples of repentance, and it is one of his chief strategies. Make sure you aren’t deceived.

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength”; this is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One says. He longs to be gracious and to show compassion.

Amen.