Fear God
if you want to be a minister of his Word!
Read: Isaiah 6:1-10
Dear brothers and sisters, we are gathered here to dedicate this building to God. I suspect that we all know that a seminary building is more than just cement and wood and iron and glass. This kind of building only becomes a true theological seminary if it has a warm heart beating within it, and that warm heart is the teaching of God’s Word in the fear of the Lord. Let us read about that in the book of Isaiah, chapter 6, verses 1-10.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. He was sitting on his throne, high and exalted, and his robe filled the whole Temple. Round him flaming creatures were standing, each of which had six wings. Each creature covered its face with two wings, and its body with two, and used the other two for flying. They were calling out to each other: uj
“Holy, holy, holy!
The Lord Almighty is holy!
His glory fills the world.”
The sound of their voices made the foundation of the Temple shake, and the Temple itself was filled with smoke.
I said, “There is no hope for me! I am doomed because every word that passes my lips is sinful, and I live among a people whose every word is sinful. And yet, with my own eyes, I have seen the King, the Lord Almighty!”
Then one of the creatures flew down to me, carrying a burning coal that he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with the burning coal and said, “This has touched your lips, and now your guilt is gone, and your sins are forgiven.”
Then I heard the Lord say, “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?”
I answered, “I will go! Send me!”
So he told me to go and give the people this message: “No matter how much you listen, you will not understand. No matter how much you look, you will not know what is happening.” Then he said to me, “Make the minds of these people dull, their ears deaf, and their eyes blind, so that they cannot see or hear or understand. If they did, they might turn to me and be healed.”
Dear brothers and sisters, I can hardly imagine a more miserable failure than a minister of the gospel who imagines that he is worthy of being a messenger of God – one who imagines that he is actually doing God a favour by entering the ministry. If any of us has the presumption to think that he or she deserves to be a messenger of God, that he is worthy of this honour, the message of this passage is a single word: “Repent!”
No true prophet ever regarded himself as worthy of this task. When the Lord Himself appeared to Isaiah in order to call him to be his messenger, the prophet said, “I am doomed! How can these impure lips of me proclaim the holy Word of a holy God?”
The apostle Paul was struck down and blinded by die vision of the glory of the risen Christ. So was the prophet Ezekiel when he saw the glory of God.
John the Baptist said, “I am no more than a voice calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way or the Lord.’”
Elsewhere the apostle Paul said, “We apostles are like pots of clay which contain the treasure of the Gospel of Christ.”
If that is true, we have no basis for being proud of ourselves and our own worth. A clay pot does not become a wonderful clay pot because it holds a treasure, its only worth is the treasure that is in it. Yes, we are proud of the gospel, we are proud of our Saviour and King, Jesus Christ; we are not ashamed of the gospel. That is true, but that is our only pride. We have no reason to be proud of ourselves. Being a Christian believer is not a matter of merit, it is a matter of privilege. Even more so being a messenger of the Gospel. Jeremiah said, “If you want to boast, boast about Yahweh, not about yourselves.”
I have seen famous preachers, much admired by people, but empty of the truth. I tried to see Christ in them or behind them, but they were so large and broad and full of themselves that I could only see the great preacher and no Christ. The people left their services talking of the wonderful preachers, not about the wonderful Christ. Those preachers were full of themselves, and therefore not full of the Holy Spirit. You cannot be full of yourselves and at the same time full of the Holy Spirit. If you are Spirit-filled, you will be full of the Word of God, not of yourselves. That is what the apostle Paul teaches, and you will understand that it cannot be otherwise if you compare the two parallel places in his letters to the Colossians and Ephesians. (Eph 5:18 and Col 3:16).
Anyhow, that type of pastor often preaches a lot of nonsense even if he claims to preach the Word of God. They think that being full of the Spirit means that they control the Spirit of God, and that they can dispense Him the way a chemist dispenses medicine. The Bible teaches us that being full of the Spirit does not mean that we control Him, but that He controls us. One of the first works of the Spirit, according to the Lord Jesus (John 16:8), is to convince us of sin – not the sins of other people, but our own sins.
Isaiah first had to realise that he deserved to perish in the fire of God’s holiness, and only then were his lips touched by the fire of the Holy Spirit and could he proclaim those glorious prophecies.
Two examples of ministers of the gospel
I am going to ask you to look with me at two examples of ministers of the gospel: one who is full of himself, and one who is full of the Holy Spirit.
A pastor who is not full of the Spirit of God will be more or less full of himself, his own importance, his own dignity, his own honour, his own comfort.
He will be more interested in getting the church building full of people than he is in the salvation of those people or in their holiness.
He will never be quite satisfied with his stipend or salary; he will think that such a wonderful minister as he deserves more than he gets.
He will not study the Bible faithfully and prayerfully, because he thinks that he knows quite enough of it, and anyway even if he reads it, he does not hear God speaking to him in it. He does not even desire to hear God speaking, because anyway he is going to preach his own ideas instead of the Word of God.
He may flirt with the female members of the congregation, and he does not think it is wrong. In many cases he would commit adultery with them, and even then still think that he deserves to be a pastor. Why? Because he does not know God and he is not concerned with the honour of God. He does not care what God thinks of it. He has never encountered the Holy God.
A pastor like that can be of no use to the kingdom of God. He promotes the kingdom of Satan, not that of Jesus Christ. Even if he says some things which are true, they turn into lies because he does not truly speak for God. His prayers are reckoned as curses in the ears of God.
He preaches a Christ who is a stranger to him. He himself is a stranger to grace. He will tell the people that they are saved because they come to his services, and he will not show them the true way of salvation, and they will die in their sins.
He does not take sin seriously – neither his own nor that of the church which has been committed to his care. He may even think sin is a joke.
He will not pattern his life according to the standards of the Word of God, and he will not tell the church members to pattern their lives on that standard. Instead, he will adapt his message to his own unholy life and teach the church that this is acceptable to God.
He will not call the church to repentance of heathen practises. He will encourage ancestor veneration, the cult of the badimo, and the amadlozi.
I once heard a truly Christian pastor from Lesotho, pastor Mohono, saying , “At every church service there is an announcement that so and so has a mosebetsi at their home (ritual to venerate ancestral spirits), and the church members are invited to that mosebetsi, and one wonders if Christ is still alive in Lesotho,” because so-called Christians seem to be more concerned with dead ancestors than with the living Christ.
One can hear a professor of theology, moderator of a large denomination, viciously defending ancestor veneration. One may then ask with pastor Mohono whether Christ is still alive in that denomination.
Because of ministers like this, the only gospel many church members ever hear in Southern Africa is when they sing old hymns like the ones in the Difela tsa Sione, hymnbook that were compiled and written in the seSotho language by French missionaries from Huguenot descent in the 1800’s and if ever they are saved, it is because they listen to that gospel contained in those old hymns, not to their minister.
Is that the type of minister who you want to be? God forbid!
So let us look at the other type, the one genuinely called by God.
He is not perfect. None of us is, least of all I myself.
We have different gifts. Some are gifted preachers. A few may even be great preachers. Some are very good organisers, some are very sympathetic shepherds for looking after God’s flock. Some are not great preachers, but they have the gift of evangelism, they know how to show people the way to Christ, and they show them, and people are saved.
Some have the gift of inspiring people and motivating them.
Here and there you may find a pastor with more than one of those gifts.
We all differ, but all true pastors have one thing in common: THEY KNOW GOD. When I meet a pastor and I listen to his message, I listen and look for one thing before everything else: DOES HE KNOW GOD?
He may not be an eloquent speaker, or he may not have a good-sounding voice, but if it is clear that he knows God, and fears God, I love that man. He is a true servant of God. God can use that man.
There are too many preachers of whom you just accept that they may be Christians because they are preachers, but you will never conclude from their preaching that they truly know God and fear Him.
Therefore I ask you the question: Do you know God? Do you know the God who is holy and hates your sin – hates them so much that He demanded his own beloved Son to enter hell and die your death in order for your sins to be forgiven?
That man does not think that sin is a joke.
Isaiah did not think that his sin was a joke. When he encountered God in his glory and holiness, he cried out in anguish, “I have no hope left, I am doomed, because my every word is impure!”
If you know your Bible, you know even more than Isaiah how serious your sin is: every sin that I do, every impure thought, every silly word, every untruth or half-truth I tell, every truth of the Bible that I distort, every failure to witness to the greatness and love of Christ, is a nail in the hands and feet of the Lord Jesus. That is what it cost Him in order to obtain the forgiveness of my sin. It is much more serious than any human being can ever realise.John Calvin once wrote that no person knows even one hundredth of his own sin. Only God with his holy all-seeing eye knows how guilty I really am.
That is why Isaiah cries out in holy fear.
One of my Roman Catholic colleagues who worked with me in translating the Venda Bible objected to the term which we used for unmerited mercy, (khathutshelo). He said that it pictures us as “too abject” before God, “abject” meaning “crawling in the dust before Him with no claim to mercy”. Well, I crawl in the dust before God with no claim to mercy, and I do not apologise for it. Isaiah was a better man than me and he did the same.
That is why this man, the truly called pastor, is concerned about his own holiness and that of the church committed to his care by God.
He does not keep quiet if a member lives in sin or has an unforgiving spirit, no matter if that person is a prominent member of society. He fears no man, because he knows the fear of the Lord.
The truly called pastor does not imagine that he does God a favour by preaching the Word, or even has any claim to be a messenger of God. Being a pastor is not a right to demand, it is a great privilege that a sinner like me is allowed at all, is even called by God, to proclaim his holy Word.
The first words of this passage are very important for understanding the message. It happened “in the year in which king Uzziah died”. Who was Uzziah (the name means “Yahweh is my strength”, and he is elsewhere called Azariah, “Yahweh is my help”)? He was a very successful king of the kingdom of Judah. In his time there was peace with the northern kingdom of Israel, and the people of Judah became mighty and prosperous. But we read in the book of Chronicles (2 Chron. 26:16ff),
But when King Uzziah became strong, he grew arrogant, and that led to his downfall. He defied Yahweh his God by going into the Temple to burn incense on the altar of incense. Azariah the priest, accompanied by 80 strong and courageous priests, followed the king to resist him. They said, “Uzziah! You have no right to burn incense to Yahweh. Only the priests who are descended from Aaron have been consecrated to do this. Leave this holy place. You have offended Yahweh, and you no longer have his blessing.”
Uzziah was standing there in the Temple beside the incense altar and was holding an incense burner. He became angry with the priests, and immediately a dreaded skin disease broke out on his forehead. Azariah and the other priests stared at the king's forehead in horror, and then forced him to leave the Temple. He hurried to get out, because Yahweh had punished him.
For the rest of his life King Uzziah was ritually unclean because of his disease. Unable to enter the Temple again, he lived in his own house, relieved of all duties, while his son Jotham governed the country.
Uzziah was the opposite of Isaiah. He presumed to take for himself a ministry to which he had not been called by God. He regarded himself, Uzziah the Great, worthy of this honour. God and his courageous priests rejected his presumption.
Isaiah on the other hand regarded himself as totally unworthy of this honour, and for that reason was deemed worthy of it by God.
None of us has the right to this ministry. None of us has a claim to it, but from among those who regard themselves as unworthy, God calls his messengers and makes them worthy of it by touching their lips with the fire of his Holy Spirit.
The coalwhich the Angel fetched to touch the lips of Isaiah was taken from the altar of burnt offerings, the symbol of Golgotha, where Christ was burnt in the fire of God’s holy anger. Only because of that can we ever be purified and become fit to be God’s messengers.
Unless your lips have been purified by that fire, you can bring no true message from God. On the other hand, once your lips have been burnt by it, you are unable to keep quiet. Jeremiah more than once decided that he had had enough, he was not going to bring God’s message any more, but listen to what he says:
But when I say, “I will forget the Lord and no longer speak in his name,” then your message is like a fire burning deep within me. I try my best to hold it in, but can no longer keep it back. (20:9)
Be constrained by the love of Christ
Dear brothers and sisters, I have drawn two pictures, depicting the two extremes. The second picture is that of a true messenger of God. But keep in mind that none of us corresponds totally to that picture. Only Christ corresponded perfectly to it. There is in every one of us something of the first picture, because even as true believers we are still sinners. I learn that from the Bible, and I experience it in my own life and my own heart. I can tell you from bitter experience that the moment one starts trusting in one’s own abilities, one becomes unfruitful and will probably be put to shame. God in his grace will bring you back to earth the hard way.
Have you seen the glory of the Lord? Have you seen Jesus? He, Jesus Christ is the glory of the Lord. He is the Shechina, the glorious presence of the Lord among his people. The apostle John quoted Isaiah 6 in his gospel, chapter 12, verse 40, referring to the Jews rejecting their Messiah: “God has blinded their eyes and closed their minds, so that their eyes would not see, and their minds would not understand, and they would not turn to me, says God, for me to heal them.” And then John adds, Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him.” Isaiah saw the glory of Yahweh. John says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus, thereby confirming that Jesus is Yahweh who came to us as his Son Jesus.