PAUL TRIPP

MINISTRIES, INC.

Radical Change January 31, 2010

Isaiah 55:8-13

It was for me a moment of danger and grace. I was 17 years old. It was the end of my
senior year of high school. I was invited to an end of the year party at the home of the
wealthiest kid in our class. I rode there with 4 or 5 of my friends. I arrived, went into
the house, and it was a scene of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. I stood in the living room,
and something welled up inside of me--something very powerful. I was, in that moment,
filled with fear. I wasn't afraid of the situation. I wasn’t afraid of the people there and
what they would think of me. I was afraid of God.

I was filled with a sense of the fear of God, and I knew that I should not be in that place.
I ran out the front door, not really having a plan, realized that I was 5 miles from home
and that night walked home. I remember that walk very well. I remember as a
seventeen-year-old, walking step after step and saying again and again, “Thank you
Jesus, thank you Jesus!”

Where did that fear come from? Well, I reflected on my growing up. My father was very
faithful in reading to us every morning from God's Word. He wasn't a teacher--I don't
remember him ever making a comment, but he would start in Genesis, and we would
read, day by day, all the way through the Bible to the end of Revelation, and then we
would start again. My dad was very concerned that we would not miss a day.

My brother, Tedd, had a job very early in the morning, so my dad made us get up at five
o'clock the morning to read God's Word--I appreciated that! But I didn't realize that as
the Word of God was being exposed to me day after day after day, this change was taking
place inside of me.

And in that moment, what overwhelmed me were not the temptations that were available.
What overwhelmed me was not what other people would think of me. What overwhelmed
me is this wonderful, protective, rescuing fear of God that came from this constant
exposure to His Word.

I've thought many times of that evening. I’ve thought many times what the course of my
life may have taken had that fear of God; the result of the powerful work of the Word of
God had not captured my heart. And I'm thankful for that morning after morning after
morning after morning after morning of being exposed to the truths of the Word of God.
Turn, if you would, in your Bibles to Isaiah 55, page 615 in your church Bibles. Two
weeks ago, I introduced you to this chapter written to people who had been in captivity,
written to remind them principally of two things: 1) God's offer of His grace, and 2)
God's gift of His Word. We want to look at that second gift this morning. And follow as I
read beginning with verse eight:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares
the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher
than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow
come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it
bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall
my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it
shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I
sent it. For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and
hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the
brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall make a name for the LORD, an
everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

Look, if you would at verses 8 to 9, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so
are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Why is God
making this distinction? Why is He saying, “Don’t you understand that my thoughts are
not like your thoughts, that my thoughts are higher from your thoughts in the way that
that furthest twinkling star that you can barely see it's twinkle is from where you stand?”
Why is the prophet saying that? Because God wants His people to know how desperately
they need His revelation. How desperately they need His Word.

Now to get that, you have to really go back to the beginning--think about this. When God
created Adam and Eve as adult human beings, He did not build in them the ability to
figure out life on their own. He created human beings who were uniquely dependent on
God's revelation in order to make sense out of life. And He gave them communicative
and conceptual abilities so they could process His revelation and apply it to their
everyday experience.

Think about this--the very first thing God does when He creates Adam and Eve is that He
speaks to them. It's a remarkable moment, because although they are perfect people
living in a perfect relationship with God, they are not capable of figuring life out on their
own. They won't, by their own research and conversation and experience, know all the
things they need to know.

There are mysteries of the universe coming out of the mind of God that give you a sense
of your identity and meaning and purpose that only come by means of revelation. You
will never discover those by research. You'll never discover those by experience. And so
we could say this…” That our basic need for God's revelation is not first the result of sin,
its first the result of being human.”

Because I'm a human being, I am dependent on God; I'm dependent on His thoughts,
those beyond origin, beyond destiny perspectives, that are held in the mind of God. God,
who is sovereign, God, who was creator, God, who is the definition of everything that’s
wise and good and true and loving, that He would speak truth to me, that truth would
help me to understand who I am, what life is about, who He is and what I am to do with
the life that He's given to me.

That fundamental need, first of all, is not the product of my sin; it is the product of my
humanity. I would ask you this morning, “Are you embracing your humanity?” By nature
of your humanity, you need the Words of God. You need Him to express His thoughts to
you so that you would understand things about you and life and Him that you wouldn't
understand in any other way.

There’s a second thing. I’ve hinted at it. That our need for the Word of God and the
separation between the way we think and the way He thinks is not just the product of our
humanness, it's the product of our sin. Sin reduces, in some way, all of us to fools. Sin
distorts the way we think. It distorts our desires. We look at the world in uniquely self-
centered sort of ways, and because of that, we need God to interrupt our private
conversation by His Word and help us to see ourselves with accuracy and to know and
understand the things that we would know in no other way.

Luella and I have thought of this many times when we celebrate our anniversary. We
have been married for almost 39 years. We were married when we were five. And we are
very, very aware that we could not have lived in this relationship as we have without the
rescuing truth of the Word of God--we wouldn’t have had clue one on how to do marriage.

We wouldn’t know how to love one another. We wouldn’t know how to deal with the
difficulties that happen as you live together in a fallen world. We wouldn’t know how to
speak to one another. We wouldn’t know what kindness is. We wouldn’t know how to
reconcile the moments of brokenness. We wouldn’t have known the importance of
forgiveness.

We wouldn’t have known, we wouldn’t have known, we wouldn’t have known. And when
we celebrate an anniversary, we don't celebrate our glory, we celebrate the stunning
wisdom of the Word of God that taught us things about this primary relationship of life
that we wouldn’t have known any other way--we wouldn’t have known.

We have four grown children. It is a scary thing when that dependent infant is placed in
your hands and you realize this is a real, living human being who has been placed in your
care--it makes your knees weak. And how we were protected and instructed and directed
by the Word of God that told us what it means to raise up this child in the nurture and
the admonition of the Lord. We wouldn’t have known; we wouldn’t have had a clue. We
would have had no ability to discern what is right and wrong, what is wise and what is
foolish, what is good and bad. We wouldn’t have known; we wouldn’t have known; we
wouldn’t have known; we wouldn’t have known.

If God, in the goodness of His grace, hadn't directed His Word and spoken through the
many spokesmen that He raised up and protected His Word and delivered His Word to us
by His grace…brothers and sisters, do you love this Book? Do you say, “Where would I
be without this Book?” Do you celebrate this Book and do you say, “Every shred of
wisdom I have, it's here; it's this Book? All the good choices I've made have been driven
by this Book. God, You’ve spoken Your thoughts to me, I love You for that.” Is that
where you are?

It’s so easy for this Book to be relegated to this sort of religious dimension of our lives.
It’s so easy for us to fall into thinking that we know more than we actually know. It's so
easy to relegate it to theological systems, and those are very, very important. I love the
doctrines of the Word of God.

But do you embrace your humanity and your sin and say, “I can't live without this Book
because it opens things to me that I would never know, I would never consider, I would
never love, I would never embrace if it weren't for this Book? God you're right; Your
thoughts are higher than my thoughts, Your ways are higher than my ways? I thank you
for revealing Yourself to me in this Book?”

What a reminder, not just for God's children of old who had forgotten His Word, who
would turn from it, but for us that we would never forget, that we would never quit
celebrating, that we would embrace our humanity and our sin and in embracing our
humanity and sin, we would celebrate this beautiful gift that we’ve been given.

But Isaiah wants to remind us of a second thing of equal glory. Look at verse 10 and
11,

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but
water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and
bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not
return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed
in the thing for which I sent it.

Just as when the rain comes down and nourishes the soil, and those nourishments are
sucked out of the soil by those plants, and those plants produce food, produce fruit, and
that fruit produces food, so is the Word of God. Perhaps every Bible should have a
warning label on it, “There is awesome power inside of these pages, be careful,” This
book will alter your life, because behind the truths of the Word of God, stands a God of
awesome power and awesome sovereignty and awesome grace, and His Word will do what
He's intended for it to do.
I think again of my own life that, I had no idea as a little boy as I would yawn my way
through the Old Testament as my father read, the power of what I was being exposed to.
I never knew that, that as that Word was coming to me, it was changing me in the
process. I didn't know that until that evening it became very clear that a significant and
wonderful change had happened inside of me. I stood at 17 years old; this is grace; it
has nothing to do with me; it’s grace and there was something stronger in me than
temptation. There was something stronger in me than the opinion of other people.
There was something stronger in me than the pleasures of the moment; the power of the
Word of God had changed me because God's Word will do what He’s intended it to do.

And God, in sovereign grace before the foundations of the world, raised up a man; I don’t
even know the final spiritual state of my father, but He raised him up as a spokesman;
He raised him up to speak God's Word into my life because God had ordained for me to
be exposed to that Word, and the power of that Word would alter me. Praise Him!

I can't even say I was a good listener, a good student. I know I surely said to my father
many times, “Are you done reading yet?” I can remember my father once reading, he
did this very well, he didn’t alter the quasi monotone of his voice; I had fallen asleep.
He kept reading and walked over and bumped me on the head with the Bible that he was
reading. But the Word was doing its work.

Now, if you believe that, then you want to put yourself under its rain, wherever the Word
of God is raining, you want to be there. You want it to water you and to grow you. You
want to experience the powerful sovereign rain of the Word of God that will do what God
has purposed for it to do.

Now, that begs a question; it actually should be the question in your mind right now.
The question should be, “Okay, if God's Word will accomplish its purpose, then what is
its purpose? What is it that the Word of God is intended to do?” I've often heard
preaching on this passage, and often it ends with verse 11, and that's always kind of
frustrated me because verses 12 and 13 really do lay out for you the ultimate purpose of
the Word of God. And in graphic word pictures…

For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills
before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap
their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier
shall come up the myrtle; and it shall make a name for the LORD, an everlasting
sign that shall not be cut off.

I want you to hear what I am about to say, “The ultimate purpose of the Word of God is
worship.” The ultimate zeal for the Word of God is God's own glory…that we, as His
children, because of the rain of the Word of God, would become people who, in every
way, delight in His glory, and we live for His glory and celebrate His glory and worship
Him in glory forever. That's the end! That all creation will turn and stand and applaud
the awesome glory of God; the trees clapping, the mountains singing, that all of creation
will finally do what it is meant to do--worship the Lord forever! The purpose of the Word
of God is worship.

Now what's the pathway? Well, you see it here, “Instead of the thorn shall come up the
cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle.” It’s a bit of a weird metaphor.
Because you still have this rain metaphor, and think about this, when rain rains down on
a little thorn bush and it's nourished, what do you get? You get a bigger thorn bush.
When rain rains down on a myrtle or a little brier, what do you get? You get a bigger
brier.

You've never seen rain fall down in your backyard turning a bramble bush into an apple
tree. It’s a metaphor of fundamental organic transformation, organic change that when
the rain of the Word of God comes down on you, it fundamentally alters the organic
content of your heart. That you just don’t become a bigger and better you, you become a
radically different you.

Now what's the core of that difference? Here it is--it's what's seen in the history of
Israel. We, in our sin, become people who forsake the glory of God for what glory? What
glory? The temporary glories of creation, the temporary glories of self-sovereignty, we
begin to live for our glory. We begin to make our own rules; we begin to replace God with
the creation; so rather than God's glory, we’d rather have the glory of human acceptance,
or the glory of power, or the glory of pleasure, or the glory of comfort.

In that way, we’re like that thorn bush, the thorns of our own pride, the thorns of our own
greed, the thorns of our anger, the thorns of our selfishness, the thorns of our lust, that
are all the result of self being in the place where only God is meant to be. And so God
says, “I’m going to give you My Word and what that Word is going to do by the power of
My grace operating through it is radically change you from the inside out so you no
longer desire to have you in the center of your universe.

You want Me to be there, and you no longer pursue your own glory, but you pursue Mine.
And you want to be part of My work on earth; you want to live inside the boundaries of
My truth; you want somehow, some way, that your words and your thoughts and your
actions would live for My glory.” The purpose of God's Word is that there would be in us,
radical, personal change that causes us to be people who have, as the center motivation
of our life, the glory of God.

Now you will recognize, if you're able to look into the mirror of the Word of God this
morning, that you and I aren't there yet. There is still this skirmish of glory in our hearts,
and so we need more of the transforming power of the Word of God. We need more of its
rain on us, that rain that is able to turn a thorn bush into a cypress tree, a brier into a
myrtle. You can't consider the wonderful encouragement of this passage without
thinking about the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
How does God transform us?--By this Book, driving us to the foot of the cross of the Lord
Jesus Christ because the central character of this Book is the Lord Jesus. The central
event of this Book is His life, death, and resurrection that releases me from my bondage
to me, offers me forgiveness and right standing with God in the hope that someday every
thought, every desire, every motivation every action, every word of this man will be done
in a consistent pursuit of the glory of God. Hear this, Jesus is that rain. What the Word
of God rains down on you is the person and work of the Lord Jesus--His transforming
grace.

I would ask you this morning, “Do you love this Book? Have you embraced how
desperate your need is for it, not just because you’re a sinner, but because your human,
never designed to figure life out on your own? Have you celebrated His power? Are you
encouraged with its progressive transformation of you and desirous of more, and are you
deeply grateful that, in the pages of this Book, you have met the one Person who has the
power to alter everything in your life, the Lord Jesus Christ?” And this Book is turning
self-love and self-glory into the love of Jesus and a life lived to God's glory. God help us
to love this Book and to run under its rain.

Let’s Pray: Lord, how thankful we are that the God who rules, the God who creates, the
God who acts with wisdom and authority is also the God who speaks, and You have
spoken to us the deep mysteries of the universe that liberate and redeem in Your Word.
Your Word brings us to Jesus with the new life that can only be found in Him. Your Word
gives us wisdom and understanding that we could never have. Your Word changes at the
level of the deepest motivations and desires and thoughts of our hearts. May we be
those who love Your Word, who want to be wet with its rain, and may that bear a harvest
of continuing new fruit to the glory of Your name, Amen.

We are now going to sing next, “Joy to the World.” That's not a mistake. These hymns
should not just be relegated to the Christmas season; they are wonderful hymns of the
faith, and we should sing with this kind of joy this morning.

© 2010 Paul Tripp Ministries

www.paultripp.com