Worship: The Road to Significance
Holy Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2003
Isaiah 6:1-8
(Shared with the people of Friendhsip Church)

If I were to ask every person in this auditorium today, “What were you doing when the World Trade Center towers were attacked?,” chances are very good that all of you would be able to answer the question in detail. The attack of September 11, 2001 was a cataclysmic event that created uncertainty and fear in all of us. You remember a thing like that!

Our Bible lesson begins with a similar event. For the people of ancient Israel, the reign of King Uzziah had been a good era. They had prosperity and peace. Everything was going well. Then, Uzziah died. The result was uncertainty and fear.

On the Sunday after September 11, church buildings across America were packed with worshipers. A National Service of Prayer, where Billy Graham preached, held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. brought together all of the most prominent leaders of our country and attracted a nationwide television audience. When faced with overwhelming fear and uncertainty, the natural inclination of even the most hard-hearted person was to look for God.

The same was true in ancient Israel. After King Uzziah’s death, Isaiah sought solace and guidance by worshiping God in the temple at Jerusalem.

It was then that Isaiah saw a stunning vision. In contrast to the dead king of Israel, a mortal whose heart had stopped beating, Isaiah saw the living King of the universe, God almighty! Isaiah records his vision in our Bible lesson:

"...I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of His robe filled the temple... [Angels surrounded God] And one called—notice that they were calling, shouting—to another, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts [the hosts are the thousands upon thousands of angels that God commands]; the whole earth is full of His glory.'”

As Isaiah looks at this awesome vision, he felt the earth move beneath him. The “house”—the temple—fills with smoke.

Now, if during one of our Sunday morning worship celebrations, you and I caught a vision like this, how would we react? I tell you one thing: we wouldn’t yawn. We wouldn’t look down at our watches and wonder how long until the first inning of the ball game, either. Nor would we necessarily feel very comfortable.

Isaiah wasn’t comfortable either. Looking at God’s greatness, majesty, and perfection, Isaiah reacted as I think you and I would react if we had an ounce of sense. He said:

“Woe is me! [That means, “I’m a hopeless, done-for, condemned goner.”] I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then, something really strange happens (as if what has happened so far weren’t strang enough). One of the angels attending God approaches Isaiah, holding a burning coal in a pair of tongs. He touches Isaiah’s mouth with that hot coal and tells Isaiah that, having acknowledged his sin and been purged of sin, he was no longer guilty. “Your sin is blotted out,” the angel tells Isaiah.

A moment before, Isaiah had been overwhelmed by his sinfulness, his unworthiness. He didn’t feel qualified to even stand in the presence of God. But now, freed of the power of sin and death, when God asks for a volunteer to do His will in the world, Isaiah cries out, “Here I am, Lord; send me!”

When I was a young man, I wanted to be a BMOC, big man on campus, and I wanted the world to be my campus. I thought that leading a life of significance meant achieving prominence. Some people hold onto that idea and let it propel them toward wealth, power, prestige, property.

Others, discouraged by the failures and setbacks we inevitably encounter in life, give up on having significant, meaningful lives. Their motto is, “You’re born. You hang around for awhile. You die.” These folks sneak through life, taking few risks and reaping little joy.

But here’s what God is teaching me: We should never give up on the quest for significance. Instead, we need to change our understanding of what that means. Having a significant life doesn’t reside in being a BMOC.

Isaiah shows us the road to living significant, meaningful lives in our Bible lesson today. A life of significance begins in worship. I’m not talking about going through the motions on a Sunday morning. I mean bringing our whole lives before God the way we all did on that Sunday after the September 11 attacks, the way Isaiah did after the death of a beloved king.

Real worship means seeing God, as Isaiah did, through the eyes of a person totally in awe of God. When Isaiah showed up for worship in the temple that day after King Uzziah died, he felt vulnerable. He needed God and he knew he needed God. He knew that he was a sinner who didn’t deserve to live. He knew that He didn’t deserve to be in God’s presence. He knew that God is bigger than any of us. Once Isaiah was able to understand these things, he was ready to do something significant with his life. It’s only when we’re willing to admit our inadequacy without God that we can move toward doing all that God has in mind for us.

Millard Fuller’s life was a mess. He and his wife had all the financial rewards that can come to people. But their marriage was on the rocks and they were miserably unhappy. In humility and desperation, Fuller came before almighty God and asked for help. Do you know what God seemed to say? “Now you’re talking, Millard. Now I can do things in your life.” Fuller got rid of all his business interests. And together, he and his wife started Habitat for Humanity. Their marriage was saved and thrived because they turned away from thinking about themselves and turned their attention instead toward God.

Today is Father’s Day. I’m convinced that if we fathers would take our gaze away from being successful in the eyes of the world and turned toward God, we might not start worldwide movements like Habitat for Humanity, but we could have a significant impact on our own little corners of the world. All of us—singles, marrieds, childless, “child-full”—can have lives of significance when we dare to truly worship God and put Him first.

Three years ago, my family and I were in England. You may remember that our kids’ high school choir went on a concert tour there. The first place they sang was the former abbey in Shrewsbury, near the border with Wales, a place made famous in the fictional Brother Cadfael mysteries. The abbey is now a church. After Palm Sunday worship there, I was talking with one of the other choir parents. He leaned on one of the huge pillars, a piece of construction that’s eight-hundred years old. The guy said, “You know, some might think that the people who built this were primitive. But it’s been here since the thirteenth century. They must have done something right!”

After Isaiah’s encounter with God and his humble acknowledgment of God’s greatness and his own smallness, he volunteered to go wherever God would send him. He volunteered to share whatever message God would give to him. Isaiah became a prophet. Among the prophecies God revealed to Isaiah were details about the birth of the Savior of the world, Jesus, an event that would only happen seven centuries later. Those prophecies gave people hope even when things looked bleak. And two-thousand, seven-hundred years later, we still derive hope and inspiration from the Old Testament book of Isaiah.

Some people may think that a man of God who lived three-millennia ago was primitive. But I’ll tell you, Isaiah did something right for us to still be talking about him. The “something right” he did was build his life on the God that he worshiped.

If I were to ask another question, I’m equally confident of the answer I would get. The question: Do you want your life to count for something? I believe that all of us want to live lives of meaning and purpose. If that’s how you feel, the road to significance is clear. Use your whole life to worship the God we know through Jesus Christ. There will be times when you sin and fail and “crash and burn” along the way. I say that from bitter experience because sometimes I sin and fail and “crash and burn.” I am human and sometimes I let my agenda and my desires get in the way of God’s agenda and desires for me. That’s always a mistake. That’s why I’m so grateful that God allows us to repent—to turn from our sin and come back into His strong, loving arms just like Isaiah did that day in the temple when he saw his vision of God. When we build our lives on God, that’s when we’re on the road to significance. That’s when we’re living!

[The theme of this message was suggested by a message on the same text by Pastor Michael Foss, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Burnsville, Minnesota.]