Three Elements Necessary to Serve God Part 2

Pastor Mike will be speaking on Three Elements Necessary to Serve God Part 2. He will be reading out of Isaiah 6:8-13.

And sometimes we are called to difficult ministry, but we are called to persevere and not to deviate from our assignment, but to stay on mission for the Lord Jesus Christ, as He is calling us to stand fast for Him. Hello, this is Pastor Mike Sanders, and I am delighted to welcome you to the Hope Worth Having radio program. And today we’re going to be in Isaiah chapter six, and we’re continuing our study, not only in the book of Isaiah, but we’ve been talking about the three elements that are necessary for serving God.

So I want you to grab your Bible and join me as we jump into Isaiah chapter six. Because we’re reminded that we are His workmanship, and we are created unto good works. So you’ve been saved to serve.

How about that, church? You thought you were just saved to sit on the pew and just come hear what the pastor has to say, and then do your duty, check that box off, and go live your life however you want it. But my friends, it’s so much more than that, and that God has called you to be fully engaged in His cause and His purpose and what He is doing here on this earth. And Isaiah heard that call, and Isaiah responded to that call, and he responded with a spirit of readiness, and a spirit of resolve, and a spirit of trust.

And so let’s talk about those three things real quick. A spirit of readiness. It is a desire, an eagerness, and a willingness, and a preparation to serve the Lord.

Did you get all that? A desire, an eagerness, and a willingness, and a preparation. I like that last word, preparation. And I thought about that, how sometimes, you know, I love sports.

You guys know that. None of my teams are doing good this year, so don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear it, okay? But you might hear a coach talk about how important it is to be prepared.

And it is true, and it’s true in our spiritual life. Some people say, well, man, you’re lucky. But one coach said this, that luck is simply preparation and opportunity coming together.

And I think it’s true spiritually, not that we believe in luck at all, because we believe that we’re fortunate and we believe that God is in control and that He is sovereign and that He’s orchestrating events and circumstances, whether they’re good or they’re ugly or difficult or hard. We know that God is sovereign and we trust in Him, but we know that we have this responsibility that in part of our readiness in serving God is that we are prepared, that we are eager and ready to serve the Lord. The scriptures teach us in 1 Peter 3, verse 15, to be ready always.

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Be ready. Be ready, church.

That means you have to be ready always. That means you have to be prepared. That means you have to know how are you going to answer some of these questions that people have.

Why is it that you’re different? Why is it that in an uncertain time that you have so much certainty in your heart and you have so much hope in your heart and you have so much peace and that you’re not wigging out, freaking out about the election? How about that one, amen? That we have the peace of God, whichever way it rolls. We’re trusting God all the way, amen? We’re not stressing. We’re just getting up every day, rejoicing in the Lord, trusting in the Lord.

Our assignment here to win people to Christ, to win them to Jesus, we understand, so we have a preparation in our heart and we are ready to give an answer to every man that asks, why are you different? Why are you different? But there’s also a spirit of resolve, which is a determination to go and to bear witness despite the difficulties. You’ll note again that Isaiah says, here am I. Send me. I am ready and I am resolved to go.

I am resolved to go. There is a determination to serve the Lord and to serve him faithfully. And this is what we need more than ever before, church.

We can’t shrink back from the moment. We can’t say, well, because life is difficult, oh, because we’ve got this issue and this problem that it’s time for us to just step back, give up and quit. No, my friends, church, we must rise to the level of the moment that is before us.

God has raised up this generation and it is time for us to move forward for the Lord Jesus Christ and to have a spirit of resolve in our hearts, a determination. We’re going to serve the Lord. But there’s a spirit of trust.

As Isaiah says, here am I. Send me. It’s one thing to say, Lord, send me when we know where we’re going, when we know what all the assignment involves. Sometimes they say, well, you know, you got to let everybody know the job description before they sign up.

But I’m telling you this, that sometimes God says, I just want to know your heart. I want to know, will you make yourself available? Will you be resolved in your heart to trust the Lord? Think about Abraham. God said to Abraham, I need you to relocate.

And guess what, Abraham, I’ll tell you where you’re going later on. Most of us said we’re not signing up until God tells me the details. Unfortunately, God gave too many details to Jonah and he ran.

And sometimes God doesn’t give us all the details, but can we trust the Lord? Can we trust him that he has a perfect plan and that maybe things aren’t exactly the way we wanted them to be, but we trust him that he has called us, he has assigned us, that he’s given us a mission, he’s given us a responsibility, and we’re going to do our best by being faithful and available to God. Someone once said that availability is the best ability. You see, friends, that’s the question.

Are you available? Are you available to serve God? How many times has a pastor, have I heard people say, well, I can’t do that, pastor. I don’t do that. I don’t have those skill sets.

Well, do you need skill sets to move a table? Is there a spiritual gift for changing diapers, church? There is none of these things. I understand, I’m all for identifying your spiritual gift and serving, but I’m just going to tell you, sometimes it’s just a need and a job’s got to get done, amen, and somebody’s got to pick up the banana peel that’s on the floor before somebody else slips on it and falls down. Right? It’s just a need.

There’s no spiritual gift. Maybe a little discernment, right, amen? A little discernment to see, to know that that’s a potential hazard, but faithfulness requires us that we would understand that the providence of God is continually at work in my life as a believer. Now, look, if you’re going to be faithful to God, it’s not because you’re going to be faithful to God because you’re going to always work with some dynamic people, or that everybody’s going to always love you, and everybody’s always going to say something positive, and every day somebody’s going to give you a hug, and every day somebody’s going to give you a certificate, and every day somebody’s going to give you a ribbon.

Every day, because you showed up, everybody’s just going to fawn all over you. No, my friends, that’s not the way it works. You show up to work and people grunt at you.

And sometimes they’re wondering, why are you even here and how can we get rid of you, right? Sometimes you come and people are complicated, and there’s a new set of problems. But faithfulness to the job that God has given you is that you understand the providence of God, that God has you here for a purpose, that God has a plan in your life, and that He is at work in your life, and He is using your life to make a difference for the cause of Jesus Christ. If you serve God based on how people respond to you, you will never make it in the work of Christ.

You will be a church hopper and a church shopper, and you will jump from one place to another, always looking for the greener grass, only to find that the grass was green, but the water bill was higher, right? Now daily trusting in God and in His providence is not easy. I’m going to be honest with you, church, it’s not easy. There’ll be times when you will have doubt.

You will question God’s goodness. You will wonder, did I make the right decision? I remember when I first came to the Open Door Church, I’m talking about the first day in the office, and the secretary said, Pastor Mike, somebody wants to talk to you on the phone. I said, okay.

I’m all excited. First day, we’re going to take on the mountain. We’re going to conquer the world.

It’s going to be awesome at the Open Door Church. And little did I know, when I picked up the phone, they said, if the Open Door Church doesn’t pay this bill, we’re going to sue you by Friday. And I said, Lord, did I come to the right church? Was this the church you told me to come to? Yeah.

And so, we gathered the deacons and elders and said, Wednesday, we’ve got to get this taken care of. Thank God, they all pulled their resources together and got that taken care of. But I want you to know, there’s going to be times you have questions and you have doubt when you’re serving God, but we must have a strong foundation of faith, and we will be able to weather these storms, and we must be ready, church.

Have a spirit of readiness to serve God and to trust Him even when it doesn’t make sense. Number two, the second element necessary that we see in the life of Isaiah to serve God is a willingness to warn others. Now, here’s what’s so interesting.

Isaiah says, here am I, send me. Well, he didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t go to another country.

He stayed in Judah. He stayed in Jerusalem, and he sent him to a most difficult people, to a hard-headed people. Well, I want you to look at verse 9 and 10 for me.

It says, and he said, go and tell this people, the people that you’ve been ministering to, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and returned and be healed.

I mean, that’s quite an assignment, amen? I mean, this assignment was so astounding to Isaiah that in verse 11, he said, how long do I got to do it? How long do I got to put up with this? How long is this assignment? We’ll talk about that later, but I want you to go back to verse 9 and 10, and I want you to understand that the message that Isaiah was entrusted to by the Lord was a message that was not only shocking to him, but it was shocking to all those that he was to share with. We can’t forget the context of chapter 6, in light of chapter 5, in which Isaiah has been teaching, and he’s been preaching, and he’s been warning the people of God that they have turned their back on God, that they put God on the back burner, that he’s no longer preeminent in their life. He’s not important.

They are not fully, faithfully following him. And so, God says to Isaiah, go warn them. Go warn them of the coming wrath.

Urge them to flee, to run to Christ, to run to God, to run to the only refuge that they have, which is only in God. There are times that God calls us to warn people on his behalf. I know some of you say, well, I don’t know if I believe that.

Well, I mean, you drive around Chambersburg, and there are signs up, road closed, do not enter. You see these signs, and they’re designed to prevent us from going down that road to making a mess, finding ourselves. Because, and I see these people, they are not going to listen to no sign.

It doesn’t matter. They don’t care that that sign says road closed. They’re going to finagle themselves around that sign, and they’re going to go down there where those guys are working, and then they’re going to be stuck in a mess, right? And I think about how that’s like people sometimes, right? You warn them, you give them a sign that this is not the right direction, and rather than thanking you, they get angry with you.

And they not only get angry with you, but they are so stubborn in their desire to go this way that they refuse to change direction. We find this need to warn others, even in the church. Remember that the Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians that he said, we urge you brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.

But I want you to notice he says, admonish the idle. The word idle means literally to put to mind. It’s the idea of warning and reproving, to bring to someone’s attention.

You and I are called to reprove one another, to admonish one another, to bring to our attention, to remind us that that is not the most honorable and godly way to go. And so Isaiah has this challenge to go to God’s people and to tell them a message in which they will hear, but they will not understand. They will see, but they will not perceive.

Their ears will be heavy, their eyes will be shut, and they will continue to be stubborn in their hearts and refuse to believe and to make God a priority in their life. The ministry that Isaiah has is to exercise his responsibility of teaching and preaching a message that has a heartening effect on the people of God. Now, what I want you to understand, church, is that sometimes people define success by the response of others.

If that is the standard of what success is in the eyes of the Lord, then I tell you that Isaiah and Noah and many of God’s apostles and preachers and teachers are miserable failures. But that is not the standard. The standard is to be obedient to the assignment.

It is to make sure that we listen to what God is telling us to do, that we understand that we have this responsibility to warn others, whether they are outside of the church and they need to be warned of eternal damnation, or they are within the church and they need to be warned of the discipline of God if they choose a path that does not honor Christ. And yes, there’ll be times that they will mock you, they will make fun of you, and they may even resist you, or they might even avoid you. But if you’re going to be effective in serving God, you must have a willingness to warn others.

And let me tell you about your message of warning others. It will either soften the heart or harden the heart. We think about the Bible says that when Moses went to Pharaoh in Exodus 8, verse 15, when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and he did not heed them as the Lord had said.

Pharaoh hardened his heart. God did one miracle after another. Every miracle that God did through Moses before the Egyptians and before Pharaoh was an undercut of their false gods that they were worshiping themselves.

It was a reminder that their gods could not save them, could not sustain them, their gods could not help them, that there was only one true God, it was Yahweh, it was Jehovah, it was the Lord God Almighty, and Moses was his representative, and he shared a message of warning to Pharaoh. But Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he refused to believe. Over and over again, you and I could walk through Exodus and we could see that.

And the sad thing for us, as we are out there witnessing for Christ, that every day people choose to live their lives apart from God, despite the message that we give them. Despite it. Think about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Why did Israel reject Christ? Their hearts were hardened towards God. The Bible tells us in the sovereign plan of God in Romans 11, 25, that I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that the blindness, in part, has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. God has hardened the heart of a nation, the nation of Israel, his chosen people.

That doesn’t mean that Jews cannot be saved, but as a nation they will not follow God, they will not see Christ as the Messiah until the fullness of the times of the Gentiles has come in, until it is completed, until it is finished. At the second coming of Christ, the fullness of the Gentiles will come in, finally, and they will recognize, as Zechariah teaches us, that Jesus is the true Messiah. But it’s not that they lacked prophets, it’s not that they lacked teachers, it’s not that they lacked a competent message that was relevant enough, it wasn’t that they didn’t play good enough music in the temple, it’s that the people chose to follow their own way instead of God’s.

We like to blame everything else on everything, when the truth is that many people’s hearts are hardened to God, and it gets harder and harder every time they hear the message of God. Why is it? Because as Tozer taught us, that the sun that melts the ice also hardens the clay. The same sun that melts a heart that is tender, the same message, and they’re responsive and they’re ready and they want to receive Christ, is the same sun that hardens the clay or hardens the heart, and people become defiant and resistant to the will of God and they refuse to follow it.

But if you’re going to be an effective servant of God, you have to be faithful like Isaiah to continue to give the message, a willingness to warn others, and then thirdly and finally a commitment to persevere. So we come down to verse 11, and he says, Isaiah says, Lord how long, how long do I got to do this? And look at the answer, until the cities are laid waste without inhabitants, until the houses are without a man, the land is utterly desolate, the Lord has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land, but yet a tenth will be in it and will return and be for consuming as a tree-brent tree or as an oak whose stump remains when it is cut down, so the holy seed shall be its stump. Well there’s a lot to unpack there, but here’s what I want you to get most of all, is that if you are going to be a faithful servant, you need to persevere.

If you’re going to be an obedient servant, you must persevere. Did somebody tell you there was a crown before the cross? Did somebody tell you there was glory before the grief? Did somebody tell you that it would be easy to follow Jesus Christ and that there would be no troubles and trials in your life? Did somebody declare that message to you? They lied to you. They did not tell you the truth.

When God called Saul, who would later become Paul, he was up front with him and said in Acts 9 verse 16, for I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name’s sake. I want you to understand that Christian life is a call to victory. Victory over our sin, victory over ourself, and victory over Satan.

But I want you to also understand that it is a call of victory while we are on the path of suffering. That there will be many, there will be many trials as we faithfully serve the Lord Jesus Christ. It is no wonder the apostle Paul said to Timothy, the young pastor, thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

No man that woreth and tangleth himself with the affairs of this life that he may please him who has chosen him to be a soldier. I know you want to see everything in tenderness and beauty and an easy path, but in serving Jesus Christ’s church and faithfully following him requires you to be a soldier, to push through the problems, to push through the trials, to endure hardness. No magical formula the apostle gives us, no relevant next steps to take he gives us.

He simply says endure hardness. And sometimes we are called to difficult ministry with difficult people, but we are called to persevere and not to deviate from our assignment, but to stay on mission for the Lord Jesus Christ as he is calling us to stand fast for him. James 1.12, blessed is a man who perseveres under trial.

For once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love him. Did you get that? You must first persevere before there’s a crown. You must first endure before there is a crown.

I want the easy life, pastor. I want my best life now. Friends, your best life won’t come until you enter into the presence of Jesus Christ in heaven.

If this is my best life now, I am of all men most miserable. I am looking for something so much better than a sin-cursed world, amen? My hope is not in this world, but I have set my affections on things that are above. The evidence of authentic saving faith is that we press on.

How do you know the Spirit lives in you? You just won’t quit. You just won’t give up. You just stay at it, being faithful to Christ.

There are days it rains, and then there’s days that the sun comes out. The warmth of the sun energizes us and invigorates us that we want to all of a sudden serve God, but there are days that it rains and it snows, church. Did you know snow’s coming, church? Now, look, you got to give me the same standard as the weatherman.

I get to be wrong half the time. But I’m just telling you, we keep pushing. We keep persevering.

We keep serving the Lord Jesus Christ. By faith, the Bible says, by faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to endure ill treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the temporary pleasures of sin. I hope it’s true in our heart that God will grant us perseverance to keep moving forward in these days that we live in.

Would you pray with me? In response to the question that the Godhead asked Isaiah is who will go for us, Isaiah responded and said, here am I. Send me, Lord. And so he was ready. He was ready to go, which is a very important part of serving others, but it’s also a willingness to warn.

And so we have this responsibility to not only share the good news, but we also have to share the bad news because the bad news lets us know how good the good news is. And if we forget the bad news, then people are going to say, why do we need the good news if there is no bad? So it’s very important for us, if we’re going to serve God, have a willingness to warn others. And that’s exactly what Isaiah did in verses 9 through 10.

He shared the admonishment from God to the people. Now, God said to him that, hey, these people aren’t going to listen. And it doesn’t matter whether people listen or not or respond or not.

We just got to be faithful to God’s will if we’re going to be a servant for God. Now, I want to remind you that you can hear this message in its entirety if you go to our YouTube channel and just type in three elements necessary to serve God. And you can hear the whole message preached on a Sunday morning.

And I know it’ll be a blessing to you. So take advantage of that opportunity. We want to encourage you to check us out on HopeWorthHaving.com. And you can leave any comments or encouraging words or prayer requests.

We will follow up and continue to pray and keep you encouraged. This is Pastor Mike Sanders reminding you that in Christ, there is hope worth having.