This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. Hi, this is Pastor Tom, I want to welcome you back for day four of week two of our look through the book of Isaiah. We're in the middle of Isaiah chapter six, looking at Isaiah's experience with God in the temple and what you and I can learn about personal change in our lives. Yesterday we saw that to experience personal change, first, I must see the Lord. Second, I must experience God's forgiveness. Today we see in the experience of Isaiah, we learn from him a third thing that has to happen for change to be happening in my life, in your life. And that is, I have to say yes to God's call. You say yes to God's call. In verse eight, "Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? ' And I said, 'Here am I, send me. ' God called and Isaiah said, 'That's my phone ringing. ' And then he had the courage to answer the call. " Who will go? God was challenging Isaiah to recognize his responsibility to say yes to God's call. Now, since only God and Isaiah are in the room, there's some angels, but God and Isaiah are in the room and God's saying, "Who am I going to get to do this? " The answer might seem fairly obvious, but just think about how Isaiah might have responded. Instead of saying yes, he could have responded with deflection, depression, delay, or denial. He could have responded with deflection. Sometimes in deflection we say, "Let's have a prayer meeting about this and pray that somebody else does this," when really God's asking you to do it. Many people, they never start to live because they spend their life looking over their shoulders. Who will go? And you look over your shoulders, seeing, is somebody else raising their hand? He could have chosen deflection. He could have chosen depression. "God, I'd like to say yes to you, but you know, I'm not qualified. You've seen my life. You've seen what I've done. You've seen what I haven't done. I wish I could say yes to you. I'm going to be depressed about this the rest of my life that I couldn't say yes to you, but I'm just not qualified. " He could have chosen that, but instead he said, "Here I am. Send me. " He could have chosen delay. We love this one. He could have said, "God, that is an excellent question. Whom shall I send? Let me study this issue some more, and then I'll get back to you. In fact, let's really go into a deep study of this. I'm going to study all these words, "whom shall I send? " I'm going to do like a year-long study of the word "whom" and then a year-long study of the word "shall" and a year-long study of the word "I" and of the word "send. " And then, God, maybe I'll be ready to answer this question. He could have chosen delay. And sometimes we choose study instead of action as the way we delay our yes to God's challenges in our lives. He could have chosen denial. He could have acted like he didn't hear it. "Hey, God, let's talk more about those seraphim. Aren't they something with all those wings? " In denial, you pretend, even to yourself, you just didn't hear the question. But in the back of your mind, you know you heard it. You know. When you hear God asking a question, maybe it's through a message, maybe it's as you're reading the Bible and you sense God's asking a question of you, "Will you do this? Are you willing? " You can know that he's asking you. Why in the world would he communicate a question to you that's for somebody else? He can communicate that to them. So the answer isn't, "What about them? And what could they do? " He's not giving you the question for somebody else. What's your answer going to be? Instead of deflection or depression or delay or denial, say, "Yes. I know you're not qualified. I know you can think of others that are better qualified. But God asked you, and the question is, "Will you say yes? " If change is going to happen in your life, it happens at the point that you say yes to God. So you say yes. This is the crucial moment of change in most of our lives. What are the things in my life that I have not yet said yes to that I know I need to say yes to? It's coming to your mind right now. You don't want it to. You're trying to push it to the back. What are those things? Say yes to God. And then you do a fourth thing. You start to share God's message. Verse 9, the first half of that verse, God says to Isaiah, "Go and tell this people. " You said yes, so go and tell. God gave Isaiah a message to share. Go and tell. Can you think of a follower of God he did not give a message to share, whether it's Noah or Abraham or Moses or David or Solomon or Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel or a whole New Testament full of people? They all had a message to share. Seeing yourself as a person, beginning to see yourself as a person with a message to share through your life, it's one of the keys to personal change. God's wanting to use your life to actually influence others. As imperfect as you are, as much as you struggle, he wants to use your life to encourage others. You don't have to be a preacher to have a message to share. In fact, it's good if you're not. We share this message of the good news that Christ has given us by the way that we raise our kids, the way that we run our businesses, the way that we go to school, the way that we work with our hands, the way that we compete on the field, the way that we face our problems. The message is the good news, the good news of Christ's love through it all. And that's seen as people see the good news of Christ being worked out in your life through it all. You're an example of that message by the way that you live. And people know that, by the way, by the things that you say. How you live is more important than what you say. But if you never say anything about it, people won't understand that that's the reason why you live. So it's vital to say something. There's something about a world-changing, life-transforming message, knowing that God has put that into your life, it adds a whole new vitality to life and change, because then it's not just about you anymore. It's about what God wants to do in other people's lives, the message he wants to communicate. He wants to use all of us. I'm humbled by this. I'm still shocked by this because I see my own inadequacies and so do you, mine and yours. But God wants to use us as his messengers. He's got a message to share through you. And personal change, one of the keys to it is beginning to see that that's true for your life. And then if personal change is going to happen, there's a fifth truth that we learn from Isaiah, and that is that you have to face reality. In chapter 6, starting last half of verse 9 into verses 10 and 11, God says, "I've got a message to share, and then the message is, be ever hearing, but never understanding. Be ever seeing, but never perceiving. " And then God says to Isaiah, "Make the heart of this people calloused. Make their ears dull and close their eyes, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. " And then I said, "For how long, Lord? " And he answered, "Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged. " Wow, what a message. Now you and I, we get to share the good news of Christ, and the end of the story isn't ruined and ravaged. The end of the story is a new heaven and a new earth. We get the better part of this deal, no doubt about it. But God has a message for Isaiah to share, and part of that message, all of that message almost for him, is this harsh reality from the very beginning, that the message would fall on deaf ears. So of course, Isaiah's question is, "How long am I going to have to share that message? " Well, until it all falls apart, God says. There's a reminder here, there's a lesson for us here, that as your life is being changed by the power of Christ, you have to face reality. God was truthful with Isaiah from the very beginning. You're going to share a message, and people aren't going to receive it. It's going to be a message of judgment. The same thing is true for you and I as followers of Jesus Christ. We have to face reality. It's not as harsh as what Isaiah had to face, but it's also real. There's times when we feel like once we become a Christian, everything's going to be perfect. All is going to be roses, never going to have any problems. That's not reality. Christianity is not fairy tale living. It's not a yellow brick road, it's a narrow way. So it has problems, it has challenges. It has people rejecting you sometimes. It has you not wanting to go down that road sometimes. It's not fairy tale living. It's not fairy godmothers popping up in and out giving you whatever you want. It is the constant love of God, our real Father. In our lives, frogs don't always turn into princes, but Jesus, he's got a way of using us warts and all. That's the reality of the life that we have in Christ. We live in a real world with real hurts, real struggles, real problems, but we also have a real Lord who can bring real life right into the midst of the real problems in that real world. That's who he is. Facing reality means you realize in the midst of the problems, Jesus is still going to be working. And facing reality doesn't just mean seeing the bad, just as much as it's not real to deny that there are problems that we're going to face in our life as Christians. There's problems I'm going to face as I seek to change and live this life of change. It's a denial to say I'm never going to have a problem. But it's also a denial to not see that God's going to work in the midst of the problems, that he has his promise that he's going to give us, his blessings that he's going to give us in the midst of those problems. Some people think, "Well, I'm a realist if I say it's all bad. " Well, it's not. God's blessings, God's promises are real in our lives just as much. And that's even true for Isaiah. In verse 13, God gives him this tiny bit of hope, "But as the terribent and the oak leaves stumps when they're cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land. " He's looking forward to Jesus Christ here, the holy seed of faith of what God's going to do. And he's saying even in midst this time of judgment in Israel, God's looking forward to doing something. Don't miss that, Isaiah. He's going to get to talk about that more later in the book of Isaiah, but don't miss that. The reality is there are problems. As you seek to change and live this life of change, you're going to see problems. Problems in people rejecting you, problems in you struggling with it, the problem with three steps forward and two steps back. But the reality is also that no matter what the problem, God is still at work in your life. We've looked these last couple days at these five things that are crucial for change. You got to see the Lord, experience forgiveness, say yes when God calls, share God's message, and face reality. Our Father, we depend on you for true change in our hearts and lives. Without you, we can move the pieces around a little bit on the board, but we can't see genuine change. So we ask that you make us more like Jesus. We ask that through the experience of Isaiah, we learn some things about how you're at work in our lives today. I know, Lord, we want to give up sometimes because it feels like it's not happening fast enough. It feels like other people are growing faster, other people are changing more. It feels like we were growing so much and now we've taken such a huge step back. I know we want to give up sometimes, but God, you're never going to give up on us. You will never give up on us. So because you're going to keep working for change in our lives, we lean on you right now, no matter what. We lean on you. Whether we feel good about the change or terrible about it right now, we lean on you because the only hope for continued change, the only hope for continued growth, it's in you, Jesus. We lean on you. In your name, amen. Join us tomorrow. We're going to talk about what to do when your heart is shaken.