Serve With Passion

Happy Sunday!
Bishop Alexis A. Thomas continued his series, "Serving With Passion and Gladness". He used Isaiah 6:1-8 as his reference scripture.

It may be a cultural thing but I believe that I have heard this scripture preached in every church I've ever attended. Many of the members sitting near us were quoting the passage word for word. "In the year that king Uzziah died"...sound familiar? Even if we hear it again next Sunday it still has relevant and necessary information for us. The Word is alive! It ministers in the past, in the present, and in the future.

Isaiah loved and admired King Uzziah. Perhaps you know how it feels to lose someone you love. You remember the day, the hour, the weather, and the circumstance for the rest of your life. For Isaiah the death of Uzziah marked an important occurance in his life. He saw the Lord. "Really seeing the Lord begins with brokenness!" - Bishop Alexis A. Thomas

Perhaps Isaiah was still greiving over King Uzziah, but where ever he was emotionally became the perfect place for him to "see" God. He saw God "High and Lifted Up" and "Sitting on a throne". He saw God the way we should see him. God is Exalted. He is higher than our little world! He is bigger than our little problems. Isaiah saw him "seated" in bible terms people sit only when their work is completed! God as done everything he had to do. He's not worried! He's not wringing his hands trying to figure out how to pay your water bill. Genesis 2:2-3 says, "By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing. On the seventh day he stopped the work he had been doing. Then God blessed the seventh day and set it apart as holy, because on that day he stopped all his work of creation. - God's Word Translation

Isaiah gained perspective. He realized that he was so sinful when compared to a Holy God. He was terrified and cried, "Doom! It's Doomsday!
I'm as good as dead! Every word I've ever spoken is tainted— blasphemous even! And the people I live with talk the same way, using words that corrupt and desecrate. And here I've looked God in the face!" (Message Translation) But, GOD had a plan! He had plan to redeem Isaiah and he has plan to redeem us. 2 Peter 3:8-9 says, "Don't overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn't late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn't want anyone lost. He's giving everyone space and time to change".

Romans 8:3-6 says, "God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored. (Message Translation)

Have a sensational, successful, and Spirit- Filled week!
Cynthia