Becoming Convicted

"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"

And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

Has there been a time when you heard or saw something of God that made you realize that you fell really short of his perfect standards?

And felt a fire flicker within you? A fire that you felt wouldn't stop until it consumed you totally?

Recently, God spoke to me deeply about some key issues in my life via Ps Jeff's sermon on Sunday, Eugene's preaching about living the productive Christian life, some feedback at work, and reading Huanyan's blog about his thoughts on receiving a team ministry commendation.

So I was evaluating how my service in ministry, work and family has been. And I realised that I have not been putting in my best for the Lord in so many areas of my life.

Things like being late for HopeTots so many times, and so on. Not going the extra mile to serve others during work. Preferring to surf Facebook instead of spending time with my parents. All these things are actually indicative of my underlying attitudes towards serving God. It's so true what Ps Jeff said on Sunday: "God is not so concerned about the outward appearances, as He is concerned about the heart attitudes!"

I think that's why the passage in Isaiah 6 spoke to me a lot as I was reflecting and evaluating my life before God. When Isaiah saw the sheer height and exaltation of the Majestic God, and heard the thunderous voices of the seraphs crying "Holy, holy, holy", and felt the trembling of the holy place, and smelt the billowing smoke fill the temple... all his senses were overwhelmed, and more than that, Isaiah knew he was doomed and done for.

For when Isaiah saw God's standards of holiness, he knew he was totally ruined. Because he realised how badly he had failed God, and he knew that his lips had spoken hypocritical, religious words that he had never lived out. More than that, he probably had, as an aristocrat in King Uzziah's court, purposely used his brilliant oratory skills to put down a fellow nobleman, or to shoot off a repartee to skewer a political opponent.

So all these promptings from the Holy Spirit were like fire to my soul. Ah. But yeah, thank God for showing me what He really expects of me. To aim for nothing less than complete Christlikeness in all that I do on earth here.

Oswald Chambers puts it so well:

When I get into the presence of God, I do not realize that I am a sinner in an indefinite sense; I realize the concentration of sin in a particular feature of my life. A man will say easily - 'Oh, yes, I know I am a sinner'; but when he gets into the presence of God he cannot get off with that statement. The conviction is concentrated on - I am this, or that, or the other. This is always the sign that a man or woman is in the presence of God. There is never any vague sense of sin, but the concentration of sin in some personal particular. God begins by convicting us of the one thing fixed on in the mind that is prompted by His Spirit; if we will yield to His conviction on that point, He will lead us down to the great disposition of sin underneath. That is the way God always deals with us when we are consciously in His presence.

This experience of the concentration of sin is true in the greatest and the least of saints as well as in the greatest and the least of sinners. When a man is on the first rung of the ladder of experience, he may say - I do not know where I have gone wrong; but the Spirit of God will point out some particular definite thing. The effect of the vision of the holiness of the Lord on Isaiah was to bring home to him that he was a man of unclean lips. "And he laid it upon my mouth, and said Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The cleansing fire had to be applied where the sin had been concentrated.

The good news is that once the tumour of my sin has been uncovered and laid bare, then upon it can the radiant fire of God truly be brought to bear, and then we can begin from there.

Dear Lord. I pray that this fire that You've started in my heart won't go out. Help me not quench this fire... help me grow to be the man that You want me to be... a man totally after Your own heart. Help me start becoming a true servant in Your name. In Jesus' most precious name, amen.