This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

[Music] Welcome back for week two, day three of our look through the book of
Isaiah. We're going to turn to Isaiah chapter six, one of the most famous
chapters in the book of Isaiah, where Isaiah meets God in the temple. As we turn
to this chapter, we're turning to a look at where change starts.

We've been looking at God's vision for change in our lives through the first
five chapters, but it's here that that vision becomes most clear. We all have to
come to a place in our lives where we stop spectating and we start living, where
we stop looking at the lives that other people are living, and we look at the
life that God has given us to live. And most of us, we have to come to that
place again and again and again in our lives.

Isaiah tells us in chapter six about that kind of an experience in his life.
This experience is the starting block of his life in many ways, and as you look
through what happened with Isaiah, we're going to see together these next few
days five things that are required for personal change. We're going to see these
things actually throughout the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, as he talks about
God's vision for change in our lives, but here we see them personally.

We see them powerfully in the life of Isaiah. Here's where this process starts,
these five things that are required for personal change. Here's where it starts.

Number one, you have to see the Lord. You see the Lord. Isaiah six verses one to
four, "In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and exalted, seated on
a throne, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Above him were seraphim, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their
faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying, and they
were calling to one another, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole
earth is full of his glory.

' At the sound of their voices, the doorpost and the threshold shook, and the
temple was filled with smoke. " See the Lord. The first step toward personal
change is always seeing who is in control.

I'm not going to change as long as I feel like I'm the one who has to be or is
in control. See the Lord. He's the one who's in control.

How do I do that? How do you do that? How do you actually allow God to begin to
direct, to guide you every day?

Isaiah expresses here in this experience that he had two significant factors to
seeing the Lord. You have to perceive God and you have to praise God in order to
see the Lord. You have to perceive God.

He says, "I saw him. " Now John 12, 41 identifies that him, Jesus. See how Jesus
wants to be involved in your everyday life.

I saw him. I saw that he wants to be a part of who I am. He wants to be a part
of my every decision.

He wants to be a part of my every prayer. I saw him. When you start to see God
as a part of your circumstances, see Jesus as a part of your day, you're
starting to perceive God.

And then Isaiah says, "I saw him on a throne. " Not just I saw him, but I saw
him on a throne. Yes, Jesus is your best friend, but he's your best friend on a
throne.

He is the king. He is the one who's in ultimate control. He's the king of
everything, all eternity, and he's the king of your life.

So when you perceive God, it's not just that you're aware of his presence,
you're aware of his power, you're aware of his control, you're aware of the fact
that he is on the throne in that circumstance, but also in your heart, in your
life. And if you're like me, you're going to need to see that again and again
and again and again, because we tend to want to put ourselves back on the throne
or put that difficult circumstance back on the throne, thinking that it's in
control. So life is constantly seeing him as the one who's in control.

As you perceive this, you start to change. Your circumstances, your thoughts,
they start to change. So that comes to the next phrase that we see.

"I saw him on the throne, but he began by saying, 'In the year King Uzziah died.
'" King Uzziah. Remember Uzziah was likely Isaiah's cousin.

He's a good king. He's a trusted king. He's a good friend.

He's a family member. And now that king is gone. And so many times when there's
been a good king, they're followed by a bad king.

So Isaiah is in doubt right now what's going to happen in his nation. And he
should have been. As we continue to read in the book of Isaiah, you're going to
see he should have been in doubt.

He knew that some bad days were coming. So he saw God on his throne when he most
needed him, when he was most in trouble. King Uzziah, for Isaiah, was a place of
security.

He could be secure in his leadership. And that was taken away. When what you
thought was your security is taken away from you, the question Isaiah is asking
us here is, are you going to see the Lord on his throne?

See that he is your security. That thing that you thought was your security
really wasn't. It was just something God was using in a good way in your life.

He is the one who put that in your life. And he is the one who can be your
security even when difficult, terrible circumstances are in your life. I saw the
Lord.

You got to perceive God, see God as a part of all that you do. But then you also
have to praise God. This is the seraphim model for what we do when we encounter
God's presence.

Isaiah comes into God's presence and there's seraphim there. There's angelic
beings there, great beings. And you see this picture of humble reverence.

They're covering their faces. They're covering their feet in God's presence. You
see this picture of praise.

They're praising God. Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth
is full of his glory.

Holy. When you praise God, you talk to God about his person. You are a holy God.

You're a God who is so different from us, so perfect in light of who we are that
we can't even imagine it. But yet you still relate to us. You still love us.

Holy is the Lord Almighty. When you praise, you also talk to God about his
power, about his person, and now about his power. He is Almighty.

He has the power to do anything. He is the powerful God that I trust in. And
then the whole earth is full of his glory.

You talk to God about his plan. You know what God's plan is? Glory.

God's plan is his glory for all eternity. The whole earth being filled with his
glory. In the new heaven and earth, he's going to do that.

All eternity of heaven being filled with his glory. But even now he is working
to show his glory on this earth. He does it through his church.

He does it through ministries. He does it through you. But God's plan is his
glory.

Now in this lesson of praise, don't miss this. If you want to see God as a part
of your everyday life, do you see God as a part of all that you do? We just
asked.

Praise is one of the primary ways that you see God as all that you do. By
beginning to praise God in every circumstance, praise him throughout every day,
you begin to see him as a part of every circumstance. You begin to see him as a
part of every day.

It's one of the keys. It's what the Seraphim teaches. So if I'm going to truly
change, it has to start with this place of seeing the Lord because he's the one
who's in control.

But then immediately you move into the next step of true personal change, and
that is you have to experience forgiveness. Here's Isaiah's response to what's
happening around him. It's the response any of us would have had.

Verse 5, "Woe to me, I cried. I'm 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. Then one of the Seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand,
which he had taken with tongs from the altar.

With it he touched my mouth, and he said, 'See, this has touched your lips. Your
guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for. '" Isaiah immediately runs into
this huge roadblock in his desire to live this God-centered life, himself.

Who he was did not match up with even being in God's presence, let alone serving
God. And the same thing is true of all of us. Seeing God helps you to see
yourself in stark honesty.

I'm unholy. I'm unclean. Everyone around me is unclean.

In the previous couple of days, we looked at all the woes that Isaiah talked
about that were in everybody else's life. Woe to them, and woe to them, and woe
to them. Now Isaiah's in God's presence, and he's saying, "Woe to me.

How am I going to stand in God's presence? " And all of us have that experience.
You can excuse your need for forgiveness if you compare yourself with others,
but it becomes painfully evident that you need forgiveness in the presence of
God.

And the truth is you cannot truly change without the assurance that you have
been forgiven. Without forgiveness, you'll keep trying to change yourself based
on your own power. You can't change yourself except at a very surface level, and
even then you keep bouncing back to where you were.

It takes God's power to change us at the deepest level. And without forgiveness,
you will never feel worthy to be even in God's presence, let alone connected to
his power. So rejoice.

God is willing to forgive us. He's not only willing to forgive us, he's willing
to give us the assurance that he has forgiven us. He does this for Isaiah, but
it's actually a picture of something that's to come.

The Seraphim takes the live coal, touches his lips to say, "You are forgiven. "
As with much of the Old Testament, this is a picture of what's going to happen
when Jesus Christ comes. And he takes on the cross the punishment for our sins.

For Isaiah, the assurance was a piece of coal touching his lips. But for us, the
assurance is looking to the cross of Jesus Christ. Do you want to know that
you're forgiven?

You say, "Jesus Christ, I ask for your forgiveness. " You trust him for that
gift. And from that moment on, you can look to the cross as the assurance that
he heard your prayer, that he answered your prayer.

You may doubt it sometimes. You may struggle with it sometimes because of what
you've done, what somebody else has said. But the truth of the matter is that
cross stands in the middle of history.

The cross of Jesus Christ giving you the assurance you are forgiven by the power
of Jesus Christ. That's where the power for change is. That's where the power to
stop trying to change yourself and start trying to trust, start choosing to
trust God for change.

That's where that power comes from in every one of our lives. So let's pray. In
light of our gratefulness for that, let's pray.

Jesus Christ, thank you for the cross, the cross of forgiveness. We look to it
right now for the assurance of our forgiveness. And right now, along with
Isaiah, we pray in that spirit of forgiveness that, Lord, we would see you today
in our lives.

We see that you're on your throne, that you can be trusted. No matter what the
circumstance I'm facing today, no matter what life throws at me today, you are
on your throne. I trust you today.

In your name. Amen. Amen.

Tomorrow, we're going to look at three additional things we learned from
Isaiah's meeting with God.