"An Attribute for the New Year"

Isaiah 6:1-5

     Dear Friends in Christ,   

   Today we find ourselves just 2 days into a brand new year.  And I always find that to be kind of a double-edged sword.  For one thing, we have no idea what this new year holds in store for us.  Will there be sickness in our family?  Will death claim one or more of our loved ones this year?  What will happen to the economy?  Will it recover or continue its downhill slide?  And what about our church?  Will we leave the vicarage program and call an associate pastor who would specialize in youth ministry?  If so, what kind of pastor will we get?  What will he be like?  There’s no doubt about it.  There are lots of unknowns when we find ourselves standing on the threshold of a brand new year.

   But then there’s the other side of the coin.  There can be a lot of excitement and anticipation about the coming year if we keep our focus upon God and trust him to lead the way.  Proverbs 3:5-6 says: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”  One translation of the Bible renders that last part: “He will direct your paths.” But is this God really worthy of our trust?  Is he really worth following?  Or to put it another way, who exactly is this God that directs our paths? 

   Well, that’s what I want to spend my time talking about on this first Sunday of the year as we consider the theme “An Attribute for the New Year.”  Now down through the ages people have come to picture God in a wide variety of ways: sweet old grandfatherly figure with white hair and long flowing white beard; giant Santa Claus in the sky; the Deists.  Today, however, I want to present to you a picture of God that is very biblical, but one that I believe many in the Christian community have lost sight of.  I also firmly believe that if we can recapture this view of God, it could completely revolutionize how we do ministry as a congregation and how we live out our lives as God’s people in this dark and sinful world.  The theme, then, that I want to focus upon in this sermon is the holiness of God.

   I remember when I was in Confirmation class 41 years ago, one of my favorite parts of that class was when we studied the attributes or characteristics of God.  Remember that?  We learned, for example, that God is omnipotent (all-powerful); omniscient (all-knowing); omnipresent.  We discovered that he is gracious, merciful, faithful, and just.  But then we also learned that he is holy.  And while I was taught by my dad at that time that the word holy means absolutely pure and perfect, flawless and sinless, I’ve discovered since then that while that is true, the word holy has another definition – one that we modern day Christians have kind of forgotten about, and that is that it can also mean “separate, unique, set apart,” or as I like to put it, “in a class all by oneself.”  And certainly those definitions very accurately describe the God whom we’re studying today.  As he puts it in Is. 46:8-9: “Remember this, fix it in mind, take it to heart…I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.”

   And I love how the holiness of God comes out in our text for today.  As Isaiah is given this incredible vision into the very throne room of God, he not only sees these 6-winged angelic beings called seraphs gathered around God’s throne, but he also hears them.  And what are they saying?  In antiphonal response to one another they are saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.”  Notice the 3-fold use of the word holy there.  I always used to teach my Confirmation students that this was a veiled reference to the Trinity, and it may very well be.  But sometime ago I heard a different explanation for this that I really like.  And it has to do with emphasis.

   Whenever we want to emphasize something in print, how do we do it?  Well, with today’s computers we can underline it, italicize it, put it in bold print, increase the font size, or put an exclamation point after it.  The Jews, however, did not have those capabilities so they had another way of emphasizing something in both print and speech.  They did it through repetition.  We see Jesus doing this.  For example, when he really wanted people to listen to him and take to heart what he was saying, he would preface his statement with the Hebrew words, “Amen, Amen,” which are translated in our English Bibles as “Verily, verily,” or “Truly, truly, I say to you.”  That was his way of saying, “Now hear this!  What I’m about to say is of the utmost importance!”

   Well, I find it interesting that of all the attributes of God found in the Bible, only one of them is ever repeated in the 3-fold manner that we find in our text.  Notice, those seraphs do not say that God is merely holy, or even holy, holy.  Rather they proclaim that he is holy, holy, holy.  Nowhere in Scripture does it ever say that God is gracious, gracious, gracious, or merciful, merciful, merciful, or just, just, just.  Only here in Is. 6 do we find such great emphasis being place upon an attribute of God and that attribute is his holiness.

   And notice Isaiah’s reaction to all this.  He says, “Woe is me!  I am ruined for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”  You see what Isaiah was doing here?  He was expressing an incredible awe and reverence for the holiness of God and recognizing how far removed he was from that holiness.  For perhaps the first time in his life Isaiah understood who God was, and the moment that understanding hit him, he also understood who he was.  And it was that understanding that led Isaiah to have this profound reverence and respect for this great and awesome God.

   Well, what about the holiness of God today?  Do we in the 21^st century still possess and express this reverential fear for God?  I’m afraid we don’t and I firmly believe that’s one of the problems with the church today, why the church is not having the influence in our culture that it once had.  Too many people have lost this profound respect for God.  Instead, they have a tendency to soft-peddle his holiness by thinking of him as the Man Upstairs, their buddy-buddy, this sweet old grandfatherly figure who couldn’t harm a fly and who kindly looks the other way when his children are doing wrong.  Well, I’m sorry, but that is not the picture that God gives us of himself in his Word.  Rather, he reveals himself as a holy God, a God who is so magnificent, so awe-inspiring, so absolutely pure and distinct from the rest of his creation that we must consider ourselves as nothing more than the most unworthy of creatures whenever we enter his holy presence.

   Now I realize that’s not a popular or politically correct view of God when it comes to most people today, but I firmly believe that if we could recapture and reclaim this biblically correct view of God, it would have a dramatic impact upon our lives as individuals and our lives as the Church, the Body of Christ.  And how might that impact be seen?

I.                   To begin with, it would affect our view of ourselves.

A.                Have you ever noticed how we human beings have a tendency to overrate ourselves?

B.                 Ask most people on the street if they think they’re going to heaven when they die and often they’ll reply…Then ask them why they feel that way and they’ll say…

C.                 We like to compare ourselves to the worst of humanity – the Hitler’s, the Charles Manson’s, the Mussolini’s, but guess what?  That’s not what God does.  Rather he compares us to no one else but himself…”Be holy…”  And he thus places before us a standard of righteousness that is utterly impossible for us to attain and that reveals our own utter unholiness.

II.                This in turn affects our view of sin.

A.                It’s sad to say, but sin is not taken very seriously these days.  Sexual immorality, living together outside of wedlock, viewing pornography on the Internet, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, child abuse, spouse abuse – all of these are rampant in our culture these days.  Like somebody once said: “What once was good is now considered bad and what once was bad is not considered good, the right thing to do.”

B.                 This low view of sin is even seen in some churches where sins are referred to as mere mistakes, if indeed they are mentioned at all…The reporter who reviewed the sermons of 32 prominent clergymen in NYC and found that only one of them mentioned sin.

C.                 But when we take seriously the holiness of God, we can’t help but see sin in a much different light, like Isaiah did in our text when he proclaimed, “Woe is me…”  We understand that sin is a major offense to a holy God.  But there’s more.

III.             A proper understanding of God’s holiness will also affect our view of Scripture.

A.                No secret that many people today no longer take the Bible seriously: too old-fashioned, too outdated, too hard to believe for us modern, sophisticated, scientific people; just a bunch myths and fairy tales that serves as a crutch for the weak of heart.

B.                 But, my friends, if God is holy and the Bible really is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, and holy Word of our holy God, then that significantly changes our view of it, doesn’t it?

1.                     It’s worth listening to!

2.                     It’s worth following!

3.                     It’s worth believing in!

4.                     It’s worth using as our guide, our compass through life that will ultimately lead us to the eternal joys of heaven.

IV.             Finally, it will affect our view and appreciation of Jesus and all that he did for us and went through for us.

A.                If God is so holy and we are so unholy, then he would have been perfectly within his rights to remove himself from us as far as possible, to leave us alone to live out our miserable lives in this earthly vale of tears, to die in our sins, and to spend eternity in hell forever separated from him.

B.                 But is that what God did?  NO!  Instead of distancing himself from us, he closed the gap.  In fact, he visited our planet in the person of Jesus, as we’ll be celebrating later this month.  He took on our dirty human flesh and exposed himself to the worst that this world had to offer, including a shameful, painful, and humiliating death on the cross.  And he did all of that as our Substitute.  That was the word that my dad really wanted us in our Confirmation class to always remember about Jesus.  He was our Substitute.  He took our place and bore our sins and received our punishment and experienced our hell that we deserved, all so that we would never have to know what that is like.

C.                 Now if that doesn’t do something for you, if that doesn’t stir you from within, if that doesn’t fill you with joy, gratitude, and praise to God, then maybe you’d better check your pulse to see if you’re still in the land of the living.  For once we understand how a holy God could love such unholy people as you and me and yet could still sacrifice himself on our behalf, we can’t help but join the hymn writer of old and explode into that song of praise: “Thousand, thousand thanks shall be, dearest Jesus unto Thee!”

D.                And as we reflect upon all that God has done for us and all that he’s made possible for us, we can’t help but want to respond in another way, and that is by loving him, serving him, and remaining faithful to him all the days of our lives.  And that’s where I’d like to draw this sermon to a close.  How are you doing in your daily walk with the Lord?  Have you been faithful to the One who has proven himself so faithful to you over the years?  Can you be found in his house of worship regularly or do you allow other things of much lesser importance to take precedence over that which is so extremely important to your spiritual life?  In short, have you backslidden from God since that time you stood before this altar or some other altar and professed your allegiance to him and promised that you would remain faithful to him, even unto death?  If you have, or even if you haven’t, what better day to renew your commitment to him than today.  Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are such a faithful God and that you have proven your faithfulness to us in so many different ways.  We admit and confess that we have proven unfaithful to you far more times than we care to remember.  Forgive us, Lord, for the sake of our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, and pour out your Holy Spirit upon us in abundant measure starting right now in order that we might take ever more seriously your holiness and become the kind of men, women, and children you desire us to be.  Yes, help us, Father, to hold fast to our Christian faith until that glorious day when you grant us the privilege of being reunited with all your faithful people before your heavenly throne where we will then taste of the eternal joys and pleasures you have prepared for us there.  We ask this in the name of him who alone makes it all possible for us, your Son, our Savior, our Substitute, Jesus.

Amen.