Isaiah 41:14 NIV
Do not be afraid, O
worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you," declares the
Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.
What Can God Make of You?
When I first became a
part of the ministries of Warm Springs Church, I wasn’t the full-time
pastor. My friend Keith Williams was the
pastor but he asked me to be co-pastor with him. So in addition to leading the youth
ministries, I also shared in the preaching.
Our income came from my wife who had a good job working in management
for a major corporation. Financially we
were fine. We were living in a mobile
home which we liked and our first son had just arrived and Mary Jo and I were
ecstatic about having him. People in the
church liked me and were appreciative of the youth ministry we had. We were experimenting with contemporary music
in the service and that seemed to be going well. I had a great friendship with Pastor Keith
and we worked well together…we were on the same page and had a common vision
for the church. And yet something wasn’t
right with me. I was dry and lacked
joy. Although I felt like what I was
doing was important, I did not have a great amount of enthusiasm for my work. Something was missing and I could not figure
out what it was.
Have you ever felt
spiritually dry? You were doing all the
right things but there was no passion to any of it, no fire, no bounce to your
step. Perhaps you are there now. You can’t put a finger on what is missing but
you know something is. Others may not
know that there is anything wrong with you but you know there is. It might be your growing lack of motivation
to get up early and read your Bible, to pray, to dedicate yourself to following
God’s guidance. You might be wondering
about the whole matter of doing God things.
Is it important for you to think about God, talk about Him, hear from
Him? No one wakes up one morning and
decides to be spiritually dry. It isn’t
a goal of most people to give up on having passionate faith; it just happens
kind of like catching the flu or getting into an accident in a parking
lot. Plenty of people in churches are
not as enthusiastic about their faith as they once were. They may want to be passionate about God and
living a Christian life but they just aren’t and they don’t have a lot of
motivation to see this turn around. You
might be like that now. You aren’t alone
though!
One of the highly
underrated passages in the Bible is found in the Old Testament in Isaiah
41. Starting in verse 14, it describes
the psychological and spiritual condition of many. Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little
Israel, for I myself will help you," declares the Lord, your Redeemer, the
Holy One of Israel. "See, I will
make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth. You will thresh the mountains and crush them,
and reduce the hills to chaff. You will
winnow them, the wind will pick them up, and a gale will blow them away. But you will rejoice in the Lord and glory in
the Holy One of Israel. "The poor
and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God
of Israel, will not forsake them. I
will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs. (Isaiah
41:14-18 NIV)
Not many would tolerate
being called a worm. Not even citizens
of a tiny country like Luxemburg would take kindly being called a worm of a
nation. We are after all people. We create.
We build bridges. We write poetry. We develop computer programs. We fix dinner. We have opinions about things. We are intelligent. Strong.
Thoughtful. Here is the ironic
part of this way the Lord addresses His people.
Does a worm know it’s a worm? Do
they think of themselves as lowly, as insignificant, weak-minded? Probably not!
If you called a worm a worm, the worm most likely would just nod at you
and see nothing significant about your name for him. Worms don’t take it as an
insult to be seen as worms. Likewise,
does a desert know it is a desert? Does
it realize how dry it is or how lifeless?
The desert would probably point out a rattlesnake as a way of defending
how full of life it is. “See, a buzzard
flying overhead and an iguana over there!”
“Dry? What do you mean dry? Just the other day there was a drop of dew on
this rock. Five months ago we had a full
out thunderstorm. What do you mean it is
dry? No vegetation? How can you say that? Look on the horizon. There is a cactus. Over there to the right is another one.”
One of the effects of sin
is that it ruins our capacity to see ourselves as we actually are. Sometimes we lose sight of our strengths and
fail to recognize our abilities. Like Moses
complaining to God that he could not do what the Lord was asking of him, there
are those who are unable to grasp just how capable they are. Far more often though sin has the opposite
effect. It blinds us to our true
shortcomings. We see ourselves as more
adequate than we are, more intelligent, more logical and less susceptible to
making mistakes than we actually are.
Just consider how quickly sin impacted the earliest people. Adam and Eve put on fig leaves to cover their
nakedness. Who were they trying to
avoid? God! Did they not realize that fig leaves could
keep God from seeing what they were hiding?
In the very next generation Cain killed his brother Abel and thought it
was reasonable what he did. A few
generations later, Lamech killed a man because the fellow wounded him and
thought such revenge was rational. The
Bible tells us that the oldest living human being died in the year of the
flood, most likely because he choose to not ride it out in the ark his grandson
built.
Recently I heard a
musical artist discuss how hard she worked on her Grammy winning album and in
the interview she boastedof its popularity.
I did not know a single song this person had done and so I thought I
would listen to some of her music. It
was terrible. Musically the songs were
awful and the lyrics were horrible. They
were perverse and filled with cursing. I
wondered if she realizes how bad her music is and how ridiculous her songs are. Will she be proud to have her grandkids
listen to her songs when she is sixty?
She admittedly is an extreme example of how sin ruins our ability to see
ourselves rightly but we all face this same predicament. We can’t really make sense of ourselves
because sin keeps us from having access to enough information to have an
informed opinion.
Let us consider one
example of this in the Bible. When Peter
the disciple was told by Jesus that he was going to deny knowing Christ, Peter
vehemently rejected the notion Peter declared, "Even if all fall
away, I will not." "I tell you
the truth," Jesus answered, "today — yes, tonight — before the
rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times." But Peter insisted emphatically, "Even
if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." And all the others
said the same. (Mark 14:29-31 NIV) We all know just how wrong Peter was and for
that matter all of the other disciples too.
Peter did just as Jesus said he would and Peter was so shocked by his
cowardice that he wept bitterly over it.
Peter was not being a blustery fool when he insisted he would
courageously stand by Christ. He just
did not know himself because sin had done its work in him too. He was like us all, unable to see everything
in himself and what he did know he had a warped view of it.
In our Bible passage, you
are told that you are a desert. You are
spiritually dry and lifeless. You are
poor and needy and do not know how to get the water that can quench your
thirst. You are a worm that is helpless
and inadequate. Not just you…me too…every
one of us in fact. We might think we are
great lions and mighty eagles. You
could insist you are a fertile valley that is producing a great harvest of the
sweetest fruits but you would be wrong.
God is not blinded by sin like you are.
He sees you as you are…helpless, dry and barren. That is not a slam against you; not the
cutting assertions of an insensitive critic.
It is just how you are…how I am.
Take a moment to consider
what God promises to do for you. He says
He can make the parched ground in you become springs. He is able to help you. He can take away those mountains that are in
your way. He will not leave you to fend
for yourself. He will see you through
the difficulties you face. He will be
there with you and make you into a sort of Garden of Eden, a person whose
spirit is thriving rather than barely getting by on fumes. What our Lord is promising you is something
you cannot gain from friends, from family or success. It can come only from Him. But how do you access this “living water”
that bubbles up inside you? Jesus said
this of gaining His living water. “Whoever
believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow
from within him." (John 7:38 NIV)
It is not a matter of doing but of believing. As you believe Christ is with you, that He is
helping you, that He is comforting you, you will find His help in all sorts of
places without any logical explanation.
Encouragement will arise in you.
Guidance will come to you.
Support will be available for you.
No one can explain how Christ does it, making water bubble up in you
when you are dry but He does. Is it a
miracle when God provides you a friend that you need, when He gives you some
way out of your financial difficulties, when He sees you through your
confusion? Perhaps we would call it a
miracle…or maybe we would just say that God loves you and has a lot of
different ways to be there for you!