A tremendous message of the gospel. And I made a note, a mental note, to go away and to have a look at Isaiah the prophet. Because I was caused to reflect on the fact that I know so perhaps little about it. It reminded me of an incident that we had at our children's camp some long time ago with the youth group, the older teenagers, and how the speaker on that occasion challenged the young people. He said to them, I want you to take a sheet of A4 lined paper, and I want you to start writing on the top of it and all the way down and across the other side, and I want you to write everything you know about your favorite television series? Write down everything you know about your particular hobby or interest in life. How much do you think you'll be able to write? How much of that paper will you cover with information about those subjects? Then he said, I want you to take another sheet of paper. And I want you to write on it everything you know about the prophecy of Isaiah, the book of Isaiah. Well, he didn't make them do it, but you get the drift of what he was trying to impress upon them. How much information we lust after and we garner and we fill our lives with concerning various activities in our lives or various things that are special and precious to us. how that so often we allow very little time before meditating upon the word of God. And so I thought, well, I'm going to have a look at Isaiah again. Now, there are precious passages of Isaiah that we will all bring readily to mind. We'll think about Isaiah 9, about the names of the Lord Jesus Christ. We'll think about that wonderful chapter 53 that tells us all about the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. We'll think about perhaps Chapter 61 that brings us that quotation that the Lord Jesus brought to the people in the synagogue on the day he was preaching there. These passages come to mind readily, but I thought I'm going to start at Chapter 1. I'm going to read Chapter 1 and just have a think about what it means to us. And I was astonished. astonished because here is a book that was written by Isaiah to pull up the people short and to cause them to think about the situation that they were in as a nation and the situation they were in in their private lives. And it is very, very piercing. It is very, very instructive as to the way, not in which they saw themselves, but the way in which God saw them. And this morning, I don't think we'll get very much further than verse 1. But if you bear with me, we'll go down later in the day in the will of the Lord this evening and we'll look at a few extra verses. Because it's not all doom and gloom. There's a tremendous, tremendous section in this first chapter of Isaiah that deals, that points us to the wonderful grace of God. There was a writer who wrote a book called More Than Conquerors about the Christian life. a man called John D. Woodbridge. Now, I've not read it, but I've picked up this quotation from it. He says this, who can tell us whether this awful and mysterious silence in which God has wrapped himself portends for us mercy or wrath? Who can say to our troubled conscience whether he, God, whose laws in nature are inflexible and remorseless, will pardon sin? Who can tell us that? Who can answer the anxious inquiry whether the dying live on or cease to be? Is there any future state? And if so, what is the nature of that untried condition of being? If there can be immortal happiness, how can I attain it? If there be an everlasting woe, how can I escape it? These imponderable questions. We would say, perhaps humanly speaking, unanswerable questions. But mankind has been bound up for centuries in trying to understand the meaning of life. I can remember lying in bed as a youngster at night and lying there trying to trying to get some sort of handle on life. Am I really here? Or am I just a figment of my imagination? I tried very hard to imagine who I was, what I was, why I was. You know, folks have studied these subjects inexhaustibly for so long. But when we come to the end of it all, we gather together all the wisdom and experience of all the learned men and women of centuries past and of our present time. But we discover that with regard to matters such as these, We are matters which totally transcend all earthly experience and totally out of the reach of human knowledge. The answer is we know nothing of our own intelligence, our own learning. We know absolutely nothing. We delude ourselves into believing what we want to believe. We know nothing of any real substance. But wonder of wonders, we can know, because God has spoken. And God has spoken, particularly to us this morning, I pray, through this prophecy of Isaiah. You know, we need to go deeper. than the remedies deduced by human intellect. People will try and tell us what we're all about, how we should live, why we should live in a particular way, what our end will be. But we need to go beyond human intellect, beyond human thought, and way beyond human reasoning. As I've said, we consult the experts, and any amount of in-depth research leaves the ultimate questions of life totally unanswered, don't they? We hear people pontificating all the time. The great man of recent days was Hawkins, wasn't it? And yet you listen to him and what did he got at the end of it all? Nothing. Nothing at all. He hadn't got an answer for it. He believed he had an answer that he'd made up. But, but, for you and I, for the world, for all living mankind, God has spoken. And he hasn't just spoken, he's spoken in plain language. That's what's so incredible that we don't understand it and we don't take account of it. Because when God speaks in plain language, it's nothing but good news for us. That's the truth of it. God has spoke eloquently through his word, and he does so through this prophet Isaiah. We read through that first section of the first chapter of Isaiah, and it doesn't paint a very encouraging picture, does it? It's pretty grim stuff. But you know, God is speaking to us through that grim situation that that nation of Israel was going through. And it was plainly obvious to me as I studied this passage again that yes, it was written by Isaiah to the nation of Israel in their particular circumstances at that particular time, but it just came to me again and again how relevant it is to you and I as individuals to the world as individuals, and certainly to our nation at the moment, how relevant it was, God speaking through the prophet Isaiah two and a half thousand years ago, and yet relevant to you and I and to the country in which we live. We read verse one, the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Azaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. It raises three questions. What? Who? When? What is it all about? Well, it's about the vision of Isaiah, which he saw. We need to note that. It wasn't something he dreamed up. It was a revelation given to him by God. It was something tangible to him. It wasn't just a dream. The Old Testament prophets, as we look at them in detail, had a unique God-given way of seeing, and through that seeing, what God wants to give to the people of the day and of our day. What God wants to give is a new perspective on everything. He wants us to put aside our own human reasoning, thought, and knowledge, and he wants us to concentrate our thoughts upon his perspective and give us that perspective. that we might understand entirely what life is all about and what his desire is for us. Because it's patently obvious as we look around this world in which we live, and we have no greater demonstration of that, I don't believe, than this business of Brexit at the moment. How our own devices, using our own devices, we are blind to the things we most need to know. But a prophet was able to see beyond the immediate. In the Bible it's obvious too, to as patently obvious as we read through our Bibles, that God is central. He's the central, unavoidable figure everywhere. So in all questions of life, in fact, all the questions are God questions. That's what we should be questioning. That's where we should be looking for answers to our problems. What Isaiah could never have stumbled upon by mere chance was given to him by God as a revelation to challenge the people of his day and to challenge people down through the ages of time since he preached and to challenge us in our very, very day and in our particular circumstances. God revealed to him, and in passing on this revelation, He interrupts our familiar ways of thinking and trying to deduce what it's all about. This is what God does. And we take consideration of God. He comes into our lives and into our situations, and he completely interrupts our thought, our familiar ways of thinking. Put simply, we struggle with our problems, And Isaiah comes along and he taps us on the shoulder quietly and he says, there's another way to look at this. There's another way to look at your life and the difficulties and the ups and downs of it. There's another way to look at it. Are you interested? Are you interested what God has to say about life and the way we live? As we read through this chapter, it cannot have been passed our insight into it that God is disruptive. His word challenges us to have a different perspective, to look at things in a completely different way. And we have to be ready. We have to be ready to adjust. So that's the what. That's what Isaiah is about. He's about passing on to us a vision. a meeting, if you like, that he had with God, information he gained directly from, a revelation he had from God. And the revelation was that we all need to take on board a new perspective, God's perspective of our life. So then, who was Isaiah? Who was he? Well, there are two answers, really. The first one is his family, which is laid out for us in verse 1. And secondly, I suggest to you, is his very name, Isaiah. So it tells us that he was the son of Amoz. Not much written about Amoz in the Bible, as far as I can deduce. Virtually nothing at all. But it tells us that Amoz was thought to have been brother of Amaziah, king of Judah. So Isaiah comes from a royal family. He was obviously fairly highly born, not an England peasant. He was married with children, and he lived in Jerusalem. So all pretty standard stuff, really. We've got a picture of this man, born into a royal family, a man who was married with children, living in the city of Jerusalem, all pretty standard stuff. The second answer to who he was is the important one, and it's his name. Now, one of the most difficult things you and I will have ever done, those of us who've done it, is to choose a name for your children when a child is born, when a baby is born. It's not easy. And these days, we tend to use names that we like, that sound right, that go together with our surnames. We try to make them sound reasonable and sensible. You'll argue with me that there are a lot of names out there these days that are not reasonable, sensible at all. But you know what I mean. When we were certainly naming our children, it was not easy. I've told you before about when my brother and I were born as twins. My brother was born first. Didn't even know, my mother, that she was having twins. And suddenly the doctor says, hang on a minute, there's another one here. And my mother was absolutely shell-shocked. She wasn't expecting twins at all. There's another one here, she said, and out I came. I think she was fairly pleased in the end of her days with me, but you never know, do you? But there she was. She got twins. They'd only got one boy's name. They didn't know whether it was going to be boys or girls. They only got one boy's name, Colin. So they had to scrabble around and find another name for me. And they decided they would call me Robert. And the nurses said to them, you can't call him Robert, because Colin and Robert doesn't flow off the tongue nicely. So you can't call him Robert. Call him Robin. So even my parents didn't choose my name. So they said, no, Colin and Robin goes much better. Colin and Robin Macy. But in the days that we're thinking of here, when Isaiah was born, names had a very real meaning. It's incredible how the names that people bore in those days related to them particularly. But of course, we think of that tremendous example of our Lord Jesus Christ and the names that he was given. The names that he was given. Jesus, he'd save his people. Emmanuel, God with us, didn't he become that? Son of God, wasn't he always that? And so Isaiah had his name. And you're dying for me to tell you what it was, aren't you? Or do you know it already? His name simply meant, the Lord saves. The Lord saves. Imagine if we'd been born with a name like that. Quite a name to live up to, isn't it? The Lord saves. It points us to grace beyond ourselves. The Lord saves. We don't want someone else to save us, do we? Naturally speaking, we want to save ourselves. We like to be in control. We don't like that thought of being under the, being indebted to somebody else in that particular way. We want to be into control. We want to set our own terms, pay our own way, do our own thing. That's what we want to do. It's true of every one of us, isn't it, to a degree, and certainly before we ever become children of God, believers in the Lord Jesus, we want to do it our way. I'm told that today the most popular piece of music that is sung at funerals is Frank Sinatra's I Did It My Way. You know, I trust that each and every one of us would want, would desire, that at our funeral it was said, He, she, did it God's way. It's a challenge, isn't it? Could that be said about us? I've always had this idea that I'd like to be, I'd like to run a practice funeral for myself because I'd like to hear all the nice things people say about me. You know, it might not be nice, might they? We might not want to hear. Was it Robbie Burns who wrote those immortal lines? Oh, to see ourselves as others see us. Can't say it in the Scottish accent, but there you go. Oh, to see ourselves as others see us. So we don't like the thought that we've got to be saved by somebody else. We don't like that idea. We want to do our own thing. But you know, that leads us, doing our own thing, without any question of doubt, leads us into idolatry. Is that too strong a word to use? Doing it our way leads us into idolatry. We fix all our hopes on material things. We parade them as they're the things that prove we are somebody. We've done something. We've proved ourselves. We kid ourselves again and again that the reassurance these things are to us, these things that we have put together and done serve to show that we amount to something. That's what the world wants. The world craves after celebrity today, doesn't it? I mean, every second person you see on your television these days, every second person you see in your newspaper these days is called a celebrity with a little c. And you look at them and you think, well, what makes them a celebrity? What have they ever done? And yet, that's how we are to one way or another. But you know, even on those celebrities, so-called, and even, can I suggest to ourselves, the realization eventually dawns that all those man-made idols, all those things that we parade with their promises of bringing some good for us, finally, are failing us. and every single one of them will end up on the bonfire of vanities. That's the truth of it, isn't it? Everything that we think we are and we've succeeded at is all hay and stubble and wood, and it burns on the bonfire. So in Isaiah's name and his message, the Lord saves. drives right to the root cause of the problem. That's the wonder of God using the name for Isaiah here as our instructor. Because it drives right to the root of the problem. Because we need to be saved and it's only the Lord who can effect salvation. We wonder how much longer we'll be able to say that in this country in which we live. Or is it going to be called Islamophobic or something like that? But here we have God announcing through Isaiah, without even Isaiah uttering a word, that He, the Lord, for all that He is, saves. For all that's worth, sinners. For all that we need. Just through His name, didn't have to open His mouth. I think we need to take that on board sometimes, I certainly do. I have written in the front of my Bible, probably told you before. What you are speaks so loud the world can't hear what you say. They are looking at your life. They're judging you by your life, by the very way you are. That's what they're judging you on, not what you say. We can say all sorts of things, we can paint all sorts of pictures, but we are what we are by the way we live our lives. Isaiah's name said it all. God the Lord saves. I understand that in the Lutheran Church, In the affirmation of baptism, it says this, or rather, the one who's being baptized is challenged to reply in the affirmative to this, do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises? Bit quaint, isn't it, in our modern language to think of that, but it really is what is the biggest question of our life. and what our lives turn on? Are we prepared to renounce all the forces of evil, the devil? And here's the point, here's the point, and all his empty promises, all those things that we build up and parade in our lives as being our life's work. When somebody comes to write the eulogy at our funeral. Something I hate. What are they going to say? What are they going to say? Is it going to be all about our Christian lives? Our love for God and the Saviour? Our hope for the future? Or is it going to be about all those things that we've done outside of our Christian lives? So are we banking on God's promise of salvation? Or are we banking on empty promises? Empty promises of a false salvation that are pressing in on us all around. If we're not letting God save us, we are exposing ourselves to the forces of evil more than we can ever know. God's salvation is a powerful resource in our lives for living life. And it's not only living life to the full in this life, but it's being guaranteed eternal life. This is what living for God is. This is what allowing God to save us does for us. In Isaiah's day, it was an unpopular message, no doubt. And it's no different today, is it? We try and talk to people about being believers in the Lord Jesus, having their sins forgiven, and it falls on deaf ears. It's fought against vehemently in many places. Men, women, boys and girls, the world over, past and present, want to be their own saviour. They don't want to put faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. and as you approach them and preach the Gospel to them or live the Gospel out in your lives so that it challenges them. Because that's the truth of it, isn't it? The Apostle Paul teaches us that. That our very lives, our very Christian lives, stand and condemn the people around us for their sinful lives. The thought of ceding our salvation to God, for many people, is an intense irritation. It's an irritation to their self-importance. I can do it my way. It's an irritation to their lust for control. It's a severe irritation to their perceived superiority. We are 21st century men and women. We have so much behind us, so much knowledge that we can make decisions for ourselves. Look at Brexit. People are saying now that two years ago, or two and a half years ago, or whatever it was, We had no idea what we were voting for. Well, I think I did, but that's beside the point. We had no idea. Now we've got all this knowledge. We know what we're voting for. We know what the situation is. We have perceived superiority, don't we? We think we know it all because we've had those experiences. And as I say, preaching and teaching, and poor old Isaiah having the name, the Lord saves, sparks controversy. Isaiah sparked controversy before even he opened his mouth by his very name. And as I've said, Isaiah's message is directed primarily to the nation of God, to the nation for God is most present in his chosen people. They were the people sovereignly chosen by him, not because they were any better than anybody else or had any greater potential, but because he chose them sovereignly in exactly the same way that he chooses people today to be his family, to be born children of God. not because we're any better than anybody else, not because we're more lovely to God than anybody else, but simply because He sovereignly chose us before the foundation of the world. But this message, as I say, although it's directed primarily at the nation of Israel, is something that is relevant to us today. It's for everyone. including believers, including unbelievers, and especially speaking, can I say, to the church today, to the body of Christ. Nothing is more important, I believe, than the state of the world today, than the state of the church. God speaks first to believers, saves them, gathers them into a fellowship. And then, and then, the salvation that is enjoyed by those folks should be spreading out to the world around, to men, women, boys and girls. What the world needs most today, I believe, is to see the church so obviously saved, so obviously confident in its salvation, so obviously all for God and all for his word, that there is a wonderful alternative presented to them to be converted, to convert to this wonderful God that we have. We sometimes just, I believe, put ourselves down too heavily, the effect we can have upon the world outside there, just by living joyful lives, rejoicing in salvation, Believing Isaiah's name, the Lord saves. And therefore, he can save them. So that, then, is the who, Isaiah. What about the when? It tells us when he was in the days of Amoz, which he saw in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. The southern kingdom of Judah in 740 BC. It had enjoyed a long, long period of prosperity. But the dark clouds were on the horizon. Here was a pivotal moment in a threatening world for them. everything was going to change quite radically in their lives. The Assyrian Empire was rising in the east, and the four kings of Judah, these four kings here, had to decide what they were going to do about it. Were they going to rely upon God and upon the promises that he had given to Abraham all those years before? Were they going to rely on the God of Abraham, or were they going to indulge themselves in self-salvation? God through Isaiah the prophet here is going to offer himself. He's going to offer himself as their saviour for their salvation. He was going to offer himself to them as their most powerful ally in the battles that were going to lie ahead. Sometimes I think I forget that. Do we forget it? That we have the most powerful ally on our side in the Father God We have the most powerful ally on our side in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ and His promises. Do we recognize that we have the most powerful ally living within us, the Holy Spirit? We should be, of all men and women, most confident as we step out into the problems and vicissitudes of life. It's not easy. There were those amongst us this morning going through very, very difficult times, and it's not easy, I'm not saying it is, but we have that opportunity to rely upon this most powerful ally that we have, our Father God. We can recognise as we look back across history that every generation has its crisis, and they're called upon to trust in God, or to go a more complicated, difficult route and trust in themselves. So it is for our generation today. And the decisions that we take as we face these problems and difficulties, whether to trust God or whether to try and to do it our way, as we try to make those particular decisions, we have to recognise that in the most crucial decisions we're involved with, nothing else matters but to rely on the fact that God, the Lord, saves. But Isaiah kept preaching, he wasn't going to give up. Few people took any notice, it seems. What he saw, as we said, was real. It was not a dream, it was a vision. And so it is for us individually and as a nation today. We need to embrace the truth of the message of God, that God saves sinners. This is what Isaiah's prophecy is all about, that God saves sinners. It's the most underrated truth in the world today, that God saves sinners, that the Lord saves. Our most urgent need, surely, surely our most urgent need is self-awareness. Our first step back to God is to be convicted of our sins. That's exactly where Isaiah starts. God says to you and to me, you shouldn't resent being convicted of your sins. You shouldn't fear it. It's not destructive being convicted of sin. It's life-giving. The world will tell you and me today that we need more self-esteem. We need to big ourselves up. We need to believe in ourselves, have some confidence in ourselves. Be full of self-confidence, it says. There's a whole industry out there geared towards that, isn't there? Look at the millions of pounds of cosmetics that are sold and clothes that are sold and advice that's given to make sure that we feel good about ourselves, that we have self-esteem. God says what we need is more humility. God says what we need is more Christ esteem. We need to esteem Christ and his sacrifice at Calvary, to esteem his life, to esteem his promises, his commands. We need to esteem God in our lives, not ourselves. More self-awareness. and a clear conscience of sin is what we need, he says. We might feel good about ourselves perhaps at times. But what if God thinks what we're doing is wrong? A lot wrong. Not much right in our lives as far as he is concerned. What about if he wants, if God wants to have a conversation about it with us? He only wants to have a conversation about us, about our sinfulness, and make us conscious of it and convicted of it, because he has a remedy for it. That's why he wants to speak to us about our sins. What if he can see that our self-protection is really self-imprisonment? That what we're doing and the way we're living our lives, both those who are believers and those who are not, Even down to our corporate collection of believers in a fellowship like this. What about if God wants to have a conversation with us about the way we're living and behaving? So, you ask, what is a conviction of sin then? Well, it's not an oppressive spirit, first of all, of uncertainty. And it's certainly not paralyzing feelings of guilt. That's not what God has in mind for us. Conviction of sin, the best description I saw of it was this. Conviction of sin is the scalpel of the divine surgeon, God, piercing our infected soul, releasing the pressure and draining the infection. That's what conviction of sin is. It's God using his scalpel to cut into our very selves, our self-awareness, and to release the pressure that that brings, and to drain the infection. Confiction of sin, is life-giving, invasive surgery. That's what conviction of sin is. It's the Holy Spirit shining a light on the things we don't want to see ourselves and we certainly don't want to admit to others and for others to see. Conviction of sin is the love of God overruling our dishonesty. blindness, our favorite excuses. Conviction of sin is a merciful God declaring war on false peace that we settle for. Conviction of sin is the very foundation for us to escape from eternal loss to eternal gain, from faking to authenticity. You see how vital conviction of sin is. If somebody has a particular problem in their lives, if they have perhaps an addiction, until they can confess and are convicted that that is wrong in their lives, they're never going to be healed. And it's the same with salvation. We can never be saved. The Lord cannot save us, and I say it reservedly and I say it very humbly. The Lord can never save us until we get to the point where we need to be saved, where we recognise that we are sinful, that we're convicted of our sin. Isaiah 1. God is telling us the truth about ourselves. We'll see more of that in the will of the Lord this evening. God is telling us more about ourselves. And it paints an unflattering picture, I'm afraid. It really does. An unflattering portrait. But it's God's way of disturbing us. conviction of sin, disturbing us until under conviction of sin. We turn to Him in our need and we make ourselves available to Him to breathe new life into us. That's what conviction of sin does to us. It shows us what we are, this first chapter of Isaiah. It shows us what we are, left to our own devices. And then what we can be after we've allowed God to save us comes in later chapters. Perhaps we'll look at those on another occasion. It's all exciting stuff. It looks to be doom and gloom, but it's very, very uplifting and exciting stuff. Not just a patched-up version of our old self God is promising us if we allow Him to save us. Not just a patched-up a part of ourselves, but it's going to be a complete change. All things have become new when we become children of God. I don't know, perhaps you've watched some of the MasterChef this week, but they seem to have gone for these things. They deconstruct everything these days. You don't have a lemon meringue pie now, you have to have a deconstructed lemon meringue pie. In other words, they take it all to pieces and they spread it round a plate and say, there's a lemon meringue pie. Deconstructed things. That's what God wants to do for us. He wants to deconstruct us. He wants us to be glorified by being deconstructed. Deconstructing our self-glorification and presenting it as His glorification. And in Isaiah 1, we have three views of God's uncomprehending people played out here for us. And as I say, we can relate them to ourselves. The tragedy of their humiliation, the hypocrisy of their worship, the corruption of their character, and then the alternatives that construct them. Not keen on the idea of being deconstructed and remade? O to see ourselves as others see us. Calvin said that to make contact with reality, to really get to the bottom of who we are, what we are and why we are. To get to the bottom of it, Calvin said, we need to know God and we need to know ourselves. We need to have that appreciation written by God of ourselves and then we need to know God. Isaiah says to the people of his day, you need a new self-awareness, and that through conviction of sin. Then he goes on to tell us how that can be obtained. He speaks to us about God's broken heart. He speaks to us about our broken strength. He speaks to us about God's unbroken grace. In the will of the Lord, we'll look at those three things this evening and encourage ourselves that the Lord saves. Amen.