Concordia Lutheran Church
January 15, 2023

Glorious! (Not useless)
Isaiah 49:1-7

† I.H.S. †

May the grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ convince you of the glory your life will bring them!

• Arguing with God

Have you ever met someone who had to always be right? Who if I said my stole was green, they would say, no, it’s red?

Sometimes people are like that when they are 3, or entering their teenage years, or sometimes as we get older, we think we have to correct those youngsters….

We all go through that stage, or stages.

Even pastors.

Even prophets.

We see that in the Old Testament reading today.

God says Isaiah – Your life (and all of Israel’s) will bring me glory

Isaiah responds, “Not so fast God, my work is useless, and I wasted all my energy! Got nothing left!

Basically this guy, one of the greatest of all the prophets, claiming his life is useless, does the most useless thing imaginable.

He argues with God.

• Is this the prophet, or Jesus

I thought to use the word irony, the idea of uselessly arguing with God that his life was useless. I think a better was to explain it is…. silly.

I think we’ve all been where Isaiah is, we don’t see our hard work making any impact. The things that might have worked in the past don’t seem to work anymore, or maybe we just don’t have the patience we used to have.

It really doesn’t matter how the feeling develops, but that feeling that everything is vain, empty, worthless, useless.

The problem is that we can’t see 20 minutes into the future, never mind 20  hours from now, or 20 days.

But it is comforting to know we aren’t the only people to feel this way. Isaiah obviously did, as did Jeremiah, Moses, David, and so many others.

And here is the kicker – this passage is a prophecy about the Messiah – so even Jesus was tempted to feel this way.  Understandable of course, having to work with Peter and keeping the Tax Collector and the Anti-Tax, anti-Government Simon the Zealot from killing each other.

But that is where the strength comes, for only Jesus could easily say, “I leave it all in YHWH’s hands, I will trust God for my reward.”

That’s were we need to be, in the middle of feeling useless, but the only way is to trust completely in God… and in what He promises. The only way to have that much faith, is to be united to Jesus, to His death on the cross and the resurrection. Otherwise—such faith is impossible!

That our lives will bring Him glory and praise.

• God’s Long Range Vision for Us… in Christ

That means there has to be something abnormal, something glorious about our lives. Our lives, like Isaiah’s are going to cause people to praise and see the value of what God is doing in our lives.

Verse 5 begins to describe that, about Isaiah, about Jesus, about us.

⁵  And now the LORD speaks— the one who formed me in my mother’s womb to be his servant, who commissioned me to bring Israel back to him. The LORD has honored me, and my God has given me strength.

It is one thing to realize that God honors – which simply means to place high value on Isaiah’s work, and it is simple to see that about Jesus…

But what about you.

Do you know that God formed you in your momma’s womb, and has a plan for how you are, like the prophets and like Jesus, to work in His kingdom? Part of your life is to help people come back to God.

No matter how far they have drifted away.

In Isaiah’s day it was bad. People were worshipping other gods, people were not faithful to their families, and to their spouses. People were even taking their newborns and sacrificing them to an idol by heating up this brass statue and tossing their babies into its glowing arms.

IF God was able to use Isaiah and Jeremiah to return people like that to God, how much more can we see it, because of the work of Jesus at the cross!

He goes on to describe this some more,

He says, “You will do more than restore the people of Israel to me. I will make you a light to the Gentiles, and you will bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.

These promises are far more than about Isaiah, they are about Jesus, and because Jesus dwells in us. We’ve seen people baptized in Cerritos, and Nebraska, in Papua, New Guinea and the Sudan, in Turkey and Cameroon, in China and the Philippines because of what people in this church has done. We’ve seen relatives come to know Jesus, and we’ve seen people who have gone away from God come back.

So will we see more of this? Of course.

And here is why,

God chose us in Christ, and because He dwells in us, the mission of Jesus continues through each one of us.

We aren’t Jesus, but our lives bring God the Father glory, because we are united to Jesus. That is what the sacraments do, whether it is remembering our baptism, hearing that our sins are forgiven, or receiving His body and blood, they remind us that because He died and rose, we have died to sin and have risen with Jesus.

What you do this week, as you trust in Jesus, as the Holy Spirit guides you, as you love those around you, including the unlovable – will draw people to the Father through Jesus. There will be people in heaven because of Jesus working through you…people in heaven, not in hell.

And because of that, God will be glorified – because of you, because of the work Christ does through you.

This all happens through the work of the Holy Spirit, because of Jesus, who protects you – your hearts, your minds, as you dwell in the peace of God, a peace that doesn’t make sense, but which you’ve been called to, by name.

AMEN!