Sermon Tone Analysis

Good Morning, if you have your Bibles turn with me to Isaiah Chapter 55.

The title of our message today is, “God’s Ways are not our Ways.”

Has there ever come a time where you have said these words.

God’s Ways are not my ways.

His thoughts are not my thoughts?

In other words, we are acknowledging that God is not like us.

In fact, he is different in many ways and let’s be honest aren’t we thankful for that?

Amen and Amen.

So we as humans can typically use this phrase after something difficult happens.

I think many people used this phrase when 911 happened or at the beginning of our Pandemic.

I hear people use this phrase when God is working in their lives with a particular job and then switches things up.

God shows us a different set of plans, a different set of ways.

What can often rise to be a problem is that we see or view God a certain way.

We want God to do something or be something that He is not.

In fact, here is what the great theologian John Calvin said about this problem.

“There is nothing that troubles our consciences more than when we think that God is like ourselves.”

HE IS NOT!

I can assure you of that.

What we see here in the opening verses of our passage today is that this first part of the passage tells us what to do, and the second part tells us why.

Let’s jump into verses 6 and 7.

1.

What we are to do.

The Lord comes near to His people.

In other words, what we need to really understand here is that God is ready to be found.

Unfortunately often the sheep tend to wonder away from the Shepherd.

God has a desire to comfort those who despair, He has a desire to forgive those who have sinned, He desires to deliver those who are bound to the shackles of sin.

(So often, we think the exact opposite) God doesn’t love me, He doesn’t want to help me or forgive me.

But what exactly is blocking this from happening?

Here in these verses we see what we need to do.

-We are to seek the Lord!

-We are to call out to Him.

-We are to give up our wicked ways and thoughts.

(Repentance)

-And we are to return to God, from where we have been.

We are to seek the presence of God and His ways for our life.

What we see here in just these 2 verses is a clear Old Testament call to salvation.

What this does, is give us a clear understanding of how people in the Old Testament came to be saved.

Again remember that this was before Christ humbly came and offered up his life as a sacrifice for sin.

Salvation, grace and mercy were available to those who would seek God and call out to Him while He was still there to be found.

This type of faith and trusting in God would be followed up by repentance and forsaking their ungodly ways and thoughts.

A sinner must come believing in God, recognizing his or her sin, and desiring forgiveness and deliverance from that sin.

The sinner cannot save themselves so they run to God and cast their life on God’s mercy.

Isaiah reminds us exactly what it takes for us to really seek the Lord.

We turn away from our wicked ways and the root problem which is sin, and we turn to God.

Today we can place our faith in Christ believing that our sin has been covered by his blood.

Again this is faith and trust in God and not ourselves.

The word “forsake” here in verse 7 is extremely important because it helps us to understand that there must come a time where we forsake and turn away from our sin.

We don’t hold onto it or play around with it as we are custom to do.

We must have a desire to say NO I am not going back to that life or that sin any longer.

Jesus is my Lord and Savior and I am going to follow Him from here on.

His word tells me that this is wrong and so I am choosing to live for him and not my self.

When we forsake our ways and follow God we are met with His compassion and His abundant pardon.

We are going to look at this in just a moment.

But, this can only happen because of the finished work of Christ.

So, the main problem that we see here is that of human rebellion.

We as humans naturally want to rebel against God and His good ways.

But there is a way to be found.

Turn around from your rebellion.

Confess your sin today to God.

Admit your a sinner.

Accept your sin offering in that of Christ.

He alone can restore us to a holy and righteous God.

Christ’s sacrifice made a way.

Do this today!

2. What God will do:

Now, let’s look at the back part of verse 7. I want us to see the Lord’s response to us as sinners.

One thing that I want you to keep in mind is that God does not have to do this, but because He loves us He so chooses to do several things here.

Let’s take a look.

-The first thing we see is that God will have compassion on us.

-And the Second thing we see here is that He will abundantly pardon us.

Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly says that, “this response by God is a profound consolation for us as we find ourselves time and time again wandering away from the Father, looking for soul calm anywhere but in his embrace and instruction.”

We should return to God in fresh contrition, however ashamed and disgusted with our sin, and then God will not tepidly pardon us, HE WILL ABUNDANTLY PARDON US!!!

He does not merely accept us, He sweeps us up in his arms again.

God’s heart of compassion cofounds are thinking many times over.

What I mean by this is that it’s hard to believe that God can choose to actually love us if we his people would just give him our wrecked and messed up life.

I think so often we feel as if we must get our lives cleaned up first before we come to God.

So, this idea of us just running to Him first and letting Him deal with the mess and cleaning us up and changing our lives into something beautiful can be hard to make sense of right?

We can never keep ourselves clean church, however we can take our lives to God and let Him alone restore us and pardon us.

When Christ pardons us, he declares us not guilty.

What is so amazing about that is that we are guilty because of our sin.

We are all guilty of death and Hell.

But, because of the sacrifice Christ made on our behalf we have been declared not guilty, set free, and pardoned.

Christ helps us understand that we have been declared righteous before God.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Not only does God pardon us as penitent, He has determined to bring us as His people into a future so glorious.

Someday we will have an eternal future with him forever, what a glorious day that will be.

3. Who God is:

God’s ways and thoughts are of upmost importance here so I want to make sense on why this is, and what this shows us about God.

When we take a look into a persons life one of the things that we know to be true is that our ways make up our behaviors, and those behaviors have to be changed if we are to ever live for God and truly follow Him.

Wether we realize it or not, God has good ways for us to live our lives and He shows us that by having faith in Him.

So, a change in behavior means a change of values.

-We change the way we think.

Our mind.

-We change the way we talk and act.

-We change our attitude toward sin, because we cannot continue to live independently from God.

What verses 8-9 show us here is that we as humans should seek God and turn from our ways because those are not God’s ways or thoughts.

Our ways may seem right but ultimately they have been perverted by original sin, and it is only when we turn to God and His mercy that we can ever have peace with Him and live lives that will be productive.

Now there have been some scholars who have debated that this passage is talking about the restoration of God’s people back to their land of Israel, and has nothing to do with sin and repentance.

Most of these scholars just delete all together verse 7 or gloss over it very quickly because they don’t want to address the main problem or are trying to be culturally relevant.

So, we cannot miss the problem here of sin and the importance of repentance however I would be amiss If we also did not mention that once we see the need to repent of our sin we will be met with compassion and a pardon of sin that is a result of God’s divine action.

-Turn from your sin today.