Isaiah 6:8

Isaiah 6:8

I. God often chooses marked seasons for His greatest self-manifestations; makes individual souls associate eventful days with their own more personal history. It was so with Isaiah. In that memorable year, naturally speaking, he himself was to see God.

II. It is the sight of the King which works conviction. One half-hour of Divine communion, one resolute determined entering of the Holy of Holies, that we may see the Lord seated upon His throne, and the holy angels veiling face and feet as they sing His praise, will do more for us in the wholesome work of self-abasement and self-abhorrence, because it will bring us into the light which alone makes manifest, and show us, in the very act of condemning, the beauty of the holiness which condemns.

III. Yet even the sense of sin might paralyse being alone. The man who is to do God's work must not only see himself in God's light, but see also how the light which exposes is a light also to purify and to transform. There is an altar of Divine sacrifice kindled from heaven it stands not within, but in front of the Divine dwelling and each coal of it is for the purging of the conscience. God sends His messenger to fetch from that altar which is, being interpreted, the Cross of Jesus a live coal to touch the unclean lips, and take away the iniquity which would else preclude the service.

IV. God asks, Whom shall I send? God wants a person. He cannot send a thing, nor a machine, nor a sound, no, nor even a book. God wants us not to aid Him in guiding the stars in their courses, or in giving growth to the vegetable or life to the animal. For us, God's business is with human lives, human souls. That which God has in view, that which God is perpetually taking counsel upon, is the welfare, the happiness, and, if either have been disturbed, then the restoration, the rectification, the redemption, the salvation, of the lives which He created, of the souls which He has made. When He says, Whom shall I send? He inquires, in other words, Who among the living will lend a hand to this work? Be jealous to be the one sent.

C. J. Vaughan, Half-Hours in the Temple Church,p. 177.

References: Isaiah 6:8. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xii., No. 687, and vol. xxiii., No. 1351; A. Maclaren, Old Testament Outlines,p. 169.