A reading from the prophet Isaiah and it shall be said,
build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction
from my people's way. For thus says the one who is
high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy, I
dwell in the high and holy place.
And also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to
revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the
contrite. For I will not condemn forever,
nor will I always be angry. For the spirit would grow faint
before me, and the breath of life that I made because of the
iniquity of the unjust gain. I was angry, I struck him, I hid
my face and was angry, but he went on backsliding in the way
of his own heart. I have seen his ways, but I will
heal him. I will lead him and restore
comfort to him and his mourners, creating the fruit of the lips.
Peace. Peace to the far and to the
near, says the Lord, and I will heal him.
But the wicked are like the tossing sea, for it cannot be
quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt.
There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked, the word of the
Lord. Let's pray together, Lord, We
need the wind of the Holy Spirit to blow into our hearts and our
fellowship this morning. We pray that as Your word is
opened that we would be given the grace to come to you, Lord,
not in the night, but in the day, ready to repent, ready to
shine with the glory that you impart in the place of what we
give to you Lord, our sins, our doubts, and all of the needs
that we have. We pray that the Spirit of Jesus
would be alive and well as we listen to the prophet Isaiah.
We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
Oh, please be seated and you can turn your bulletins or your
Bibles to Isaiah 57 looking at Isaiah 57, verses 14 through 21.
This is the second message in our series that we're in called
Shine, which is looking at our spiritual beacon call.
We're right in the middle of our Arise journey which began in
November of 2024, which is a 2 year initiative helping us
prepare for a long term spiritual beacon calling.
We're not just here temporarily. We believe God's calling us to
put down roots here in Chicago and to shine with His glory and
His love for generations to come.
And so to prepare for that, we have embarked on this two year
journey and it is in part a financial and stewardship
journey. But it doesn't end there.
That's a starting place. It's not an ending place.
The ending place is our whole life, our spiritual lives, our
relational lives, the way in which we minister.
And so this is something that we're asking, we're not actually
not seeking primarily a certain number that would be artificial
and superficial. We're actually seeking 100%
engagement of hearts and lives in not only in this initiative,
but just in following Jesus. So money has this way though of
getting to the heart, doesn't it?
Where Jesus says where money is, so will a heartbeat also.
That's why money is involved. And we are asking for a
commitment. If you call Emmanuel your home
church on March 22nd and a few weeks from now, we're going to
have a commitment Sunday and we're going to be inviting
anyone who feels ready and if you can in freedom make a 10
month commitment to Emmanuel Anglican financially and
spiritually, we want to invite you and give you an opportunity
to do that. And along the way, you're going
to be able to hear some stories of those who have already made a
commitment, one of whom are really cool, someone from our
congregation with a very cool story to tell later on today.
But let's look at Our Calling, what we're here for.
We're looking at shining with repentance.
Today's message is a word of hope.
It begins with a word of hope for people who are far from God.
Do you feel spiritually dislocated today?
You feel any kind of boy, post traumatic faith, any kind of
longing for God, but you can't connect with him.
Are you discouraged? Hear verse 14 from Isaiah and it
shall be said, build up, build up, prepare the way, remove
every obstruction from my people's way.
Isaiah is hearing a promise from God, which is this picture of a
road being built that would lead us into the presence of God.
Imagine if there was a road, a highway built up, it would lead
you right into the presence of God.
And you know, as Americans, we might hear this and go, yes, Rd.
building. We know how to do that.
We can remove every obstruction, we can solve for X and we could
become a spiritual success together.
Let's join a new group. Let's do a service project,
let's do, let's take on some more spiritual disciplines.
Let's get close to God together, remove every obstruction, and
let's just look like God together.
There's something good in that. We've got high hopes for our
lives, for our families, for our church.
So yes, let's prepare the way and get the work done.
Let's build that road. Let's build that life.
So let's just pause for a moment and say this.
Sometimes Rd. building can backfire.
And especially when we're we're paving quickly over something or
someone important. You know, back in the day, the
the Eisenhower Expressway, the 290, you know, it had this way
of devastating Little Italy and it actually contributed toward
the famous and tragic racial segregation of our city.
The Dan Ryan Expressway gouged a hole right through the heart of
Bronzeville. The community still feels it to
this day. The wrong kind of Rd. building
can ruin us. The wrong kind of Rd. building
can ruin the world. So let's just ask this question.
What if the road and the highway mentioned in verse 14 is not
meant to go up, but to go down? What if it leads somewhere that
you and I would rather not go? Somewhere low, somewhere humble?
And what if those obstructions in the way are not just some
external problem to solve, but internal pride and performance?
What follows verse 14 is one of the most hope filled
descriptions of God ever written.
It tells us two different places where God lives and how we might
be with Him. Verse 15 says this, for thus
says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits
eternity, whose name is holy, I dwell in the high and holy
place. God's dwelling is in a high and
holy place. His very name, verse 15 says is
holy, which means set apart, pure, perfect by definition, not
part of the creation which He made, which He exists above.
Creation can't hustle to Him creation.
Human beings can't build a road to this high and holy place.
It's too high, it's too holy. His holy and eternal dwelling
exists far above all human striving.
In fact, when we try to get to this high and holy place, when
we try to build a road to an upwardly mobile above average
life with God, we end up in some above average space where He
doesn't dwell at all because He's up in the high and holy
place in His holy temple in heaven.
And he also dwells at what one pastor called rock bottom.
Those are the two places where God makes his home and one we
can't build a road to. And one that's where he's
calling us. second-half of verse 15.
I dwell also with him or with her who is of a contrite and
lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to
revive the heart of the contrite.
Now that's where the highway that verse 14 alludes to, that's
where it goes friends, goes down to this contrite place, to this
lowly place. We can meet God there.
Isn't that amazing? He's made his home there, not
just a summer home like a permanent home.
He is there. He was there.
He, he became man and he, he said I'm that God man said I am
gentle and lowly in heart, and he came to offer rest for our
souls. The Hebrew word for contrite
here you can translate it as like crushed or pulverized.
And it describes someone who's at the pit of human existence.
They're exhausted, they're demoralized, they're brought
low, they're humiliated, they're dejected.
They have nothing, but they have everything because the God of
the high and holy place is with them and he's not paving a
highway over their sorrows. He's not spiritually bypassing
their pain. He's not rushing them through
some performance improvement plan.
He's with them reviving their spirits.
You hear that inside out language, the unrushed human
language of came to revive their hearts and revive their souls.
It's like he's breathing life into them, his breath into them
until they can breathe too. What's got us down this morning?
What's discouraging us? What's weighing, what's weighing
you down? What problems do we have that we
kind of wish we didn't have? If we could solve the problems,
we'd solve the problems. What have we failed at that we
were hoping we would succeed at? What dreams got crushed?
What part of us got pulverized in that?
What have we lost that was very, very precious to us?
And what if? What if going down was our true
highway to the presence of God? What if all those bad things
that happened were just obstacles getting removed to get
here? The one place we didn't want to
go, The one place we can meet with God.
Chuck Colson was one of the most powerful men in America a few
decades ago. He worked his way into the inner
circle of the administration of President Richard Nixon,
becoming part of his inner circle.
And he helped President Nixon advance illegal and sometimes
violent paths that that Nixon went along with.
And there was a scandal broke open by some reporters known as
Watergate, Watergate in an exposed Coulson and ultimately
landed him in prison. So he went from one of the
highest and loftiest places that you could get to in one of the
most powerful nations in the world, in all civilization to a
place of being crushed, pulverized, made low.
And as he fell from grace kind of mid fall, he went and saw a
friend, an old colleague who was also an extraordinarily powerful
man at that time, who had become a Christian.
And here's what Coulson said about that fateful meeting.
He says this that night he read to me from Mere Christianity by
CS Lewis about the great sin that is pride.
A proud man is always walking through life, looking down on
other people and other things, said Louis.
As a result, he cannot see something above himself
immeasurably greater. That is God.
Tom that night. Tom's the name of his friend.
Tom that night told me about encountering Christ on my own
life. He didn't realize it, but I was
in the depths of deep despair over Watergate, watching the
president I had helped for four years flounder in office.
I'd also heard that I might become a target of the
investigation as well. In short, my world was
collapsing. But when I got in the car that
night, I couldn't drive it out of the driveway.
Ex Marine, captain, White House, tough guy.
I was crying too hard, calling out to God.
I didn't know what to say. I just knew I needed Jesus and
he came into my life. Now.
Coulson's story echoes this quote, this beautiful quote from
a medieval theologian named Anselm who also found himself at
rock bottom. And he said this to himself.
Come now, little man, flee for a moment from your agitated
thoughts. Pull aside now.
Put aside now your burdensome cares and worrisome toils.
Abandoned yourself for a while to God and rest in him a little
while. This is the thing about rock
bottom that we don't always think.
We don't always know. It's a relief to get there.
Once we're there, it's a pretty restful place.
We can actually rest in God's greatness.
He's up there high and lifted up and we're like, wow, I don't
have to be up there. I can be down here.
I could rest in his settled, beautiful holiness that's
reviving me back to life. When we can experience God's
greatness as kind of pure gentleness.
You ever known the pure gentleness of God, which is also
His greatness and it revives us revive some deep place in us
that got wounded along the way. Verse 16 the Lord says about
himself, for I will not contend forever, nor will I always be
angry, for the spirit would grow faint before me.
This the spirit of human beings, of of women and men, of
children, and the breath of life that I made you.
Can you see from verse 16 and from Isaiah 57 that the Lord God
doesn't want us to grow faint. He doesn't want to destroy us
with his anger. He doesn't want to destroy us
with His Holiness. He wants to renew us with His
Holiness. He looks gently upon our frail
nature. He he doesn't want us to die or
grow faint. But like Chuck Coulson, we're
paving roads to success for ourselves.
We're building highways to get us out of rock bottom.
Some of us build highways that gouge out the goodness of other
people. Some of us are tempted to do
some Rd. building that that ruins and precisely because of
his gentle love for us, God cannot stay silent when we start
those Rd. building projects. Verse 17 because of the iniquity
of his note this phrase, unjust gain.
I was angry because of the iniquity of his unjust gain, I
was angry. I struck him, I struck her.
I hid my face and was angry. But he went on backsliding.
She went on backsliding in the way of their own heart.
Friends, why is God angry? Why does he get angry?
He's not angry at people's gain some there's a myth out there.
God get, you know, God's against people flourishing.
God wants us to flourish. He wants us to to bear fruit in
the world and to fulfill our call, but not at the expense of
justice, not at the expense of someone else's dignity.
God wasn't angry at Chuck Coulson for going into public
service. He was angry at Chuck Coulson
for seeking power by planning violence and lying about it.
Have we paved a road to success, a road to pleasure, a road to
fulfilment on someone else's dignity?
See, for us it's more subtle than with Chuck Coulson, isn't
it? Have we ever sent signals to
someone that we're maybe interested, but we know we're
not, we just like the attention? Have we ever taken credit for
other people's hard work, but never giving the credit, never
passing it on because we want the promotion?
We need the promotion. What about building a nice, nice
nest egg for ourself, but passing up opportunity after
opportunity to be generous to the people in our life that have
real need and are really hurting financially?
Making everyone at the party laugh, but at someone else's
expense. They're not in the room to
defend themselves. Martin Luther King Junior called
this the darkness of destructive selfishness.
The darkness of destructive selfishness.
Isaiah calls it unjust gain, and the Lord feels anger about it,
no matter how subtle or not subtle it is.
This isn't who He created us to be, so he he strikes us.
This is the language in Isaiah's prophecy.
That is to say, he lets us feel the pain of our choices.
Sometimes He even hides his face, which is his consoling
presence. That is a sense of God's
absence. And this is not punishing
absence. It's it's meant to wake us up
because God cares too much. So he intervenes and he he
actually demolishes our Rd. building ruinous projects and
this might getting caught totally red handed like it did
for Chuck Colson or having a stricken conscience or friends
who care in us to confront us or getting fired or getting dumped.
God is beckoning us all of these ways to come back to rock bottom
because that's where he can dwell with us and make us whole.
He wants to heal us. He says in verse 18, I have seen
his ways, but I will heal him. I have seen her ways, but I will
heal her. What a countercultural message
that is. We're used to hearing.
I have seen their way, so I'm going to punish them.
I've seen their way, so I'm going to pay them back.
I've seen her way, so I will judge her.
I have seen his way, so I will exploit him.
But in his fatherly love the Lord says I have seen her ways,
but I will heal her. I have seen His way, so I will
heal him. Weeping may come through the
night, but joy comes in the morning.
That's God's ark, that's his intention.
Resurrection comes after death. Where do we need God to heal us
this morning? What part of our lives are are
infected or out of joints are wounded?
God has some healing in mind for rock bottom.
And in verse 18, the Lord promises I will lead him or her
and restore comfort to them. That is His mourners.
God's looking for mourners, those who will grieve, those who
will lift up their pain to him and says, I will bring comfort
where there's grieving and pain. And then in verse 19, he says
peace, peace to the far and to the near.
And this word peace is, is Shalom, which is this amazing
complex Hebrew word for wholeness.
I will make whole. I'm going to heal and make whole
where there's been breaking and tearing.
The Lord God is putting our lives back together at rock
bottom from the inside out. It's just crazy that you're
like, no one wants to go there. You, you look down at the like
ravine, you know, like there's no way I'm going down there.
I I'll do everything I can to stay up here, but I'm not going
down there. Looks too steep.
It looks too scary. It looks terrible from a
distance. Everybody's crying.
But once you're there, it's a place of healing.
It's a place of consolation. It's a place of being made
whole. Chuck Coulson breaks the law of
God and man in pursuit of power, and his worst nightmare comes
true. He finds himself locked up in
prison, humiliated publicly serving time behind bars.
What happens for him at rock bottom?
God heals his pride. He forgives his sin, and he
redirects his leadership, gifting to serve inmates all
over the country and to an extent, the world for the rest
of his life. He's totally fulfilled in a way
he never was when he had power. A woman harbors resentment
against her mother-in-law for decades because of her meddling
and her cruelty. And one day this woman realizes
that what began has hurt has become pure hatred, and that
this hatred is slowly destroying her body and soul to the help of
a loving small group and the Holy Spirit.
She grieves the pain of all those years.
She just releases all that pain. She learns how to forgive her
mother-in-law. She releases the hatred.
And even though that road of forgiveness is long, she can
finally sleep at night. A young man is secretly addicted
to pornography. It's consuming more and more of
his time, and it's eroding his willpower.
It's filling his soul with shame.
After one relapse, he cries out to God for help.
And then there's this idea that just kind of pops into his head.
Search for a recovery group. He does that, and the next day
he summons every ounce of courage he has to walk into a
room full of strangers who welcomed him as a brother.
And he walks out the first day of his freedom lighter than he's
felt in years. A woman in the middle of her
career is burning out. She's given everything she has
to her clients and her craft, but somewhere along the way, she
forgot how to rest. She thought she couldn't afford
to rest, but. And her body over time begins to
fail her. Taking a true Sabbath for her
was an act of repentance at rock bottom, and at first it felt
like a threat to her system. But week by week she begins to
overflow with grace and love, which was the first reason she
got into this in the first place.
It takes real humility to go down to rock bottom, to let
ourselves see how crushed we really are and to let the High
and Holy One just be with us and to love us back into life and to
be to be put back together in a Shalom like way.
There it is. That's the road back to rock
bottom, the cross of Christ. It's the way of the suffering
servant who was crushed for our iniquities.
He came down from his high and holy place, that high throne
where God dwells. He took the immense weight of
the wrath that we deserve, and He bore upon Himself the unjust
gain of billions of people. And He did that so He could give
us the light and easy yoke that He brought from heaven to rock
bottom, where we could be healed.
Being at the foot of the cross is a very peaceful, shaded place
where God's greatness becomes gentleness, where His Holiness
becomes forgiveness, and we are brought into a community of love
and grace that shines with repentance.
Some of us friends want to go there, but we're not quite
ready. Some of us are hearing this and
we want, we want, part of us wants to go to the cross.
Part of us wants this repentance.
Part of us wants to go to rock bottom.
But part of us really just can't get there yet.
And we're wrestling and we're, and we're, we're in an in
between place. The thought of seeing our
faults, the thought of taking responsibility for them, the
thought of being LED down a road of humility where we cannot be
in control or the feeling of in control is just too hard.
And we're resisting. And for, for, for some of us,
there's like some spiritual turbulence this Lent.
Now Isaiah ends this passage with a bit of a picture of what
turbulence looks like kind of an image.
This is 1 of this was not a road image, but it's more of an
aquatic image. Verse 20 and 21.
But the wicked are like the tossing sea for an it cannot be
quiet and it's waters toss up mire and dirt.
There is no peace. There's that word again.
There's no Shalom says my God for the wicked.
So in Isaiah's prophecies, this word wicked is interesting
because he often uses it of respectable, upright, otherwise
religious people who look really good on the outside.
They're often very moral, very pious.
What makes them wicked is that they resist the grace that only
God can give. They resist the rest that he
offers. They resist the call to be
forgiven. And what they've decided is I'm
going to be my own savior. I'm going to work up the
forgiveness I need, the healing I need, the life I need.
I don't need God. I've got this foreign nation
over here. I'll make an alliance with them.
I've got this idol that I can control over here.
I'm just going to go ahead and like adopt some of the Yahweh
practices. But basically, I don't actually
need the Lord God anymore. That really is Isaiah's
definition of what it means to be wicked.
And I've been there, definitely tried to make peace for myself
apart from God. Maybe you've been there too.
Wicked's kind of a bracing word. Sometimes we need a bracing word
or a bracing experience to realize I am resisting God right
now. So our lives become like a
tossing sea, always churning ourselves into being awesome and
forgiven and whole. But instead of that wholeness,
just producing muck and mire and making a mess of it.
And The thing is that sometimes when we're as storm tossed like
this sea, if you imagine like Lake MI just churning, like it's
like we can't stop. We're just we're feeling all
these feelings. Our mind is spinning, our soul
is shaken up and like we can't calm ourselves down.
And there's this great story in the Gospels, Mark chapter 4
where the disciples are like that.
They're in a boat on the sea. The sea is churning and the
disciples are churning and they're freaking out and they
wake up Jesus, like, don't you care?
And Jesus says, oh, you have little faith.
He stands up, he puts his hand up and he says to the sea, peace
be still. And the disciples got to see the
power of God, the greatness of God become gentleness where
there's only anxiety and churning and strife.
It's something calmed down in them too.
And the other thing about those men on the boat is that they
were freaking out, but they went to their deaths bravely and
boldly, and their hearts were stilled.
They went to rock bottom, trusting God with everything
because Jesus had brought them a peace they couldn't bring
themselves. And this is what Jesus offers to
you and me this morning, this Lent.
Peace be still peace. Know that he is God.
Peace. Follow him away from the
upwardly mobile highway of a self-directed life.
Stop the churning, walk the road to rock bottom.
Be calm, be restored, be made whole through Jesus.
Now what does this vision of repentance have to do with our
church's mission to be a spiritual beacon Church in
Chicago that makes the gospel known?
Everything, everything. The best way, friends, to
display the actual gospel of Jesus to our friends and
neighbors isn't to have it all together.
It's to have been put back together and to be brought into
a community of people who have been brought together in a
forgiving, humble, approachable foundation of rock bottom.
We aren't here to lift high, the name of our church.
That's not our goal. That's not why we're here.
We're here to lift high the Son of God who's loved our church
into life and wants to love our city in the same way.
And I love what the Reformed theologian Martin Luther said.
He he said this may a merciful God preserve me from a Christian
Church in which everyone is a St.
I want to be and remain in the little flock of the faint
hearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize
the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God
incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the
forgiveness of sins and friends. I too want to remain in the
little flock of the feeble hearted, shining with
repentance. Friends are is going to keep us
in a good spot. Not glaring, not glaring from on
high, but shining from the valley of rock bottom.
Shining with a light that isn't from us, it's from the high and
holy place given to us by Jesus. What if we were friends for for
years to come? To shine with Shalom, to shine
with kindness, to shine with the beauty and glory of Jesus that
put us back together in the merciful shade of the cross.
Friends, I want to remain there with you and at the foot of the
cross, at rock bottom. May we make space for many, many
others to join us right here in the little flock of the faint
hearted at rock bottom where God's greatness becomes
gentleness. In the name of the Father, Son
and Holy Spirit, Amen.