Come All Ye Weary

Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. Are you tired now of trying to be God in your own strength? Are you tired of trying to be good in your own strength?

Have you found what you're looking for? That's Carter Conlon with an insight into this week's program. We're glad you're with us today on a call to the nation. Carter would like you to know that God desires to do something for you that you cannot do for yourself. And what He will do is like living water to you. It's going to be a source of eternal joy.

And you don't get this with human effort. God says, listen to me, hear me on this. Let's join Carter now from Isaiah 55 with his message titled, Come All Ye Weary. Now if you turn your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 55, I want to share with you, and it's really just simple, come all you worry.

Everyone who's tired. And there's so many people online that are just at the end of your own efforts to find a way out of your dilemma or to find the strength that you believe that God wants to give to you. I want to encourage you to trust God. So Father, thank you, Lord.

Thank you, God. Thank you for your holy word, which indeed is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Thank you, Lord, for the strength that you are willing to give to people who are with us. Lord, I just ask you now for the great privilege of stretching your hand out, my God, through the internet and start to bring power and deliverance and healing and victory into so many lives of so many that are turning to you at this time, this darkened time in this world. God, we want to be a living testimony for Christ, but we recognize that it's only by your strength that we will ever be able to do this.

We can't be clean in our own strength. We need the covering of the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and we can't live as lights in this darkness without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. So Lord, we yield to you tonight, God, and we just simply ask you to be God in us, be God through us, be God in our homes, be God in our families. Push back the darkness that wants to destroy your life and your light in our homes and marriages and children, my God, physical bodies. We ask you to stretch your hand out and heal, heal miraculously people who are trusting for the victory that only you can bring. And Father, we thank you for these things. God, help me to share your word in a way that people can understand it, and we thank you for it in Jesus' name. Amen. Prophet Isaiah speaks these words in chapter 55.

He says, Ho, or listen, or hark, or pay special attention. Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. You who have no money, come, buy, and eat. Yes, come and buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in abundance. Incline your ear and come to me. Hear and your soul shall love. So three times he says, listen carefully, incline your ear, and hear. And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, the sure mercies of David. Indeed, I've given him as a witness to the people, a leader and commander for the people. And surely you shall call a nation you do not know, and nations who do not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your God and the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

Let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Now this particular passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah, it's like every once in a while in the Old Testament, God just parts the curtain and gives a glimpse into something that was that's available to people, something that was was coming, something that was too wonderful to even understand. You see the whole system, the whole religious system that the people of this time were under is a system of human effort.

It's a system of of money. It's a system of trying to to to be clean, of trying to find meaning in life all through human effort. You remember the the original sin in the Garden of Eden when the devil came in? He's so he sowed something in humanity, and the thought that he sowed in Adam and Eve and subsequently in all of their ancestors, that would include you and I, the thought that is the food source of the sin nature in man is that without God we can be godly. Without God we can be actually as God is, and we can become arbiters of our own future. We can start judging. We can say this is good and this is evil.

According to our own heart we can be just as God is, and isn't that the besetting sin of this particular generation? But there were certain people even under that Old Testament system that's that that really thirsted, that really wanted to be right with God, but but it it cost something. You had to buy a lamb. You had to buy a goat. You had to bring a calf.

If you were poor you had to bring in turtle doves. Everybody had to pay a price. You had to bring in wheat.

You had to bring in barley. You had to bring all these offerings unto God, and eventually people would simply I think go bankrupt in one way or another. A lot of people just didn't have the wealth and the resource to keep up this religious system.

They tried as best as they could. Could you imagine being part of that system in that day? You really want to walk with God. You want a living relationship with God, but every time you sinned, every time you failed, every time you faltered, you had to buy another lamb. You had to go back to the temple in Solomon's day, and buy another goat, and buy more doves, and you had to go into the priests, and go through all the ritual cleansings, and you had to sacrifice this this offering at the altar so that you could feel that you're in right relationship with God, only to go out and sin again, and knowing that sin separates from God, having to go back, and and it was a system of such rigidity.

It was because, of course, remember Paul the Apostle says this whole religious system was like a schoolmaster teaching us that we needed a savior. We can't save ourselves. We can't save ourselves even with the best of intentions.

With all of the human effort we put into trying to change, we literally can't change our nature. We can't change what we are, and then suddenly, every once in a while, all through the Old Testament, right in the middle of Isaiah, warning the nation about judgment, and talking about a lot of things that pertain to this Old Testament legal system of religion, every once in a while the curtain just parted, and an invitation came, and it must have seemed so incredulous to the people who were part of this system. He says, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, you who have no money, come by and eat. Yes, come and buy wine and milk without money and without price.

In other words, here's what the invitation was. God, all through the Old Testament, is peeking through this canopy of human effort, trying to be godly without God, and he peeks through and he says, are you exhausted yet? Are you tired now of trying to be God in your own strength?

Are you tired of trying to be good in your own strength? Are you tired of all the places you spend your money looking for joy and looking for substance and looking for meaning, even religious places where you do these things? Have you, have you, are you still thirsty?

Have you found what you're looking for? And he gives an invitation. He says, come and buy wine and milk without money and without price. And the wine always speaks of joy. It's at a wedding feast in Cana that Jesus first turned water into wine. It speaks of this interior joy, this celebration, and milk speaks of substance and provision. So God is saying, come and find joy, and come and find provision, come and find meaning for your life without money and without price.

It would have been so foreign to the people of this time, and sometimes, sadly, it's foreign to us. We try harder. We reap more. We want to be better. We make promises we can't keep.

We tell people we're going to change. We promise ourselves we're not going to do the same old things that we've done for most of our life, only to fail and fall and then somehow try to maybe purchase our way back into the favor of God, which is exactly what these people of this time spend a lot of their time doing. And he said, why do you spend money for that which is not bread?

Why are you putting all this effort into something that doesn't satisfy? And your wages for that which does not satisfy, all your effort is going into this, this failing, in a sense, approach to God, which is never going to bring you into any sort of victory. Then he goes on and he says, now listen carefully to me. Then the next verse he says, incline your ear to me, hear me, and your soul shall live. When they would read these words of Isaiah and they say, what in heaven's name could this man be talking about? What is it that God wants to speak?

What is he wanting me to listen carefully to and give him my best listening ear? What is he wanting me to hear with the promise tagged onto it that my soul will live, that I won't have to live in this constant state of defeat any longer, that I won't have to get up in the morning depressed and despairing? Where is this place of wine and milk? Where is this place of joy and abundance? And the honest man, now the man who still thinks he can earn favor with God will probably not be able to hear this, but the man or woman who just says, I can't go on, I don't know what to do with life, I'm done, I'm failing, I'm faltering, I feel like a whisper in the dust and I don't know what I'm going to do in the future.

It's this man, it's this person, this woman that suddenly the voice of God says, come if you're still thirsty. I have something for you. I have an abundance to give you.

I have joy to give you that you can't produce in any amount of your own human effort. I'll give you a joy that's deeper than your deepest satisfaction when you've felt good in my presence because you know that that good feeling doesn't last forever. And he says, I will make an everlasting covenant. I'll make a promise to you, he says, that I won't break.

Amazing. I'll make a covenant with you. When you made a covenant in the Old Testament, it was made with blood. Do you understand? He says, I'll make a blood covenant with you.

That's what he's saying. I'll do something for you that you can't do for yourself. And what I'm about to do is going to be like living water to you.

It's going to be a source of eternal joy. It's going to be a place of abundance and you don't get it with human effort. You don't get it with human resource. You don't get it by making promises. You don't get it by anything you can bring to God. It's only when you open your heart and let God bring something to you.

Listen to me, he says, hear me on this. I'll make an everlasting covenant with you. The sure mercies of David. Indeed, I've given him as a witness to the people, a leader and a commander for the people. Surely you will call a nation you do not know and nations who do not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your God and the Holy One of Israel for he has glorified you.

Now this is on a whole bunch of different levels, but let me try to make it as simple as I can. The sure mercies of David, of course, David is in the lineage that leads to Jesus Christ. We know that he's the Christ type in the Old Testament, but there's something about David. God says, I'm going to make a covenant with you and let's look at David as an example of what I'm willing to do for you.

And the people knew the story of David. It meant something to them because they understood that even as a boy, the spirit of God came upon him and he was given the power of God to defeat that which should have defeated him. He destroyed a lion.

He destroyed a bear. He was given courage far beyond his years. He was given the ability to worship to the point where the devil would be driven away from a king who had backslidden and fallen away from God.

He was able to go into a valley as a teenager and take on a giant who was 10 times his superior in the natural and defeat him by the power of God. He was anointed with oil from on high by the prophet Samuel. The spirit of God came upon him from that day forward. And yes, even though he had to go through difficulty trials and valleys, he remained a man upon whom sat the spirit of almighty God.

And he finished his life in victory. Praise be to God. Praise be to God. And God said to the prophet Isaiah, I gave him as a witness to you of what I am able and willing to do. All nations who don't know you will run to you because of the Lord your God and the Holy One of Israel for he has glorified you. God says I will do something in you so powerful that people will hear about it and come to you and want to hear your story.

They'll want to know what I've done for you. And this I believe is going to be the testimony of this last day generation. This last moment of time church age where so many people are so down, so many people are so thirsty, they're so hungry, they're so tired, they're so sick of trying to be holy in their own strength. They've come to the place where perhaps, just perhaps, their ears are now open. They're willing to hear something that God's been willing to give for a long, long time. But we just we have to sometimes exhaust our own efforts. We have to get to the end of what we think we can do for God to finally realize we can't do anything for him. We have to now turn to him and let him do something for us. You asked me is there a New Testament type of this particular Old Testament story?

Yes there is. In the book of John, just let me read it to you, chapter seven, they had been celebrating for eight days. The Jewish people would gather every year and for eight days they would celebrate various feasts.

But one of the larger feasts they celebrated was called the Feast of Tabernacles. So a feast where they remembered the goodness of God to bring them out of captivity and bring them through a wilderness experience to provide for them bread from heaven and give them water out of a rock. And for eight consecutive days there was a specific ceremony that was done at this time where one of the priests would take water that was considered holy out of a well and he would bring it. And there was a lot of pomp and ceremony surrounding this and the the priest would bring it and he would pour this pitcher of water out upon the altar reminding the people that God in their wilderness experience gave them water out of a rock. Reminding them of the faithfulness of God. And the people would look at this and they would be thinking as we are God you have been faithful to people in the past.

You've been faithful to people who have trusted in you. It was at the last day probably after the last pouring out of the last pitcher in the last ceremony that Jesus Christ himself stands up and cries out if anyone is thirsty let him come unto me and drink. If you're tired of just talking about what people did in the past we're so thankful for the past we're so thankful for previous spiritual awakenings in various countries and places throughout the world. We're so thankful for the testimonies of those that God has fed, living water in impossible places. We're very very thankful for the history of what we read in the scriptures and how he poured out his spirit on 120 failures in an upper room. We're so thankful in Acts chapter 4 that when they were being threatened by a godless society that they prayed and the place was shaken. They were filled with the Holy Ghost. They spoke the words with boldness and great signs and wonders were done in the name of Jesus Christ the son of God. We're so thankful for the past but we are thirsty because we don't live there. We live here today and we need the power of God the very same way they needed his power back then. Jesus stood in the midst of all the remembrance of the past and he said if you're still thirsty come to me. Come to me.

It's the cry of Isaiah. Oh everyone who's thirsty. Oh you who have no money. Oh you who don't have the strength and you don't have the resource anymore to live in victory. You who have no joy. You who have no power. You don't have a reason to live. Come to me now. Jesus said in John 7 if anyone thirsts let him come to me and drink and he who believes in me as the scripture have said out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. It won't be a rock anymore. There will be living water in you that will flow through you and give drink to those all around you.

This he spoke concerning the spirit whom those believing in him would receive for the Holy Spirit was not yet given because Jesus Christ was not yet glorified. Are you thirsty? I want to ask you sitting in your home groups of people that are gathered individuals kids in a park on your cell phone are you thirsty? Are you tired of trying to do good and be good? Are you trying to tired of looking for joy in places where it's not found and if you do find it it doesn't last?

Are you tired of of having a listlessness in your heart your life you don't even know what your life is about and and what it is what is your purpose? God says listen to me now come to me now give me your best ear and if you will listen to me your soul will live I'll make a covenant with you and look to David the king is a type of what I'm able to do. I'll take you in your youth. I'll take you in your weakness.

I'll help you when you fail. I'll carry you when you can't go forward. I'll give you strength when you don't know what your future is going to hold and I'll do something in you so profound that people will come from everywhere and ask you for a reason for the hope that is now in you. You see God says I will be your source of strength. I'll be your life.

I'll be your living water. Don't bring a price in your hand for this. You can't afford it by the way it's free anyway. You don't need to buy it. I'm willing to give it to you. I'm willing to give it to you freely.

All you have to do is come to me. Then he says in verse 6 seek the Lord while he may be found. Don't put this off for another day. Don't put it off for another week.

Don't put it off for another hour. Seek him while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. The scripture says in the book of Hebrews today if you can hear his voice don't harden your heart.

Don't put it away for another day. The more often you put away this call of God the duller your hearing will become to hearing his voice calling you. Seek him while he is near. Call upon him. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to the Lord. Simply just admit what you are. Admit your failure. You know for a lot of people you're saying well that's not a problem.

I've got that down really good. I know what I am and I really do appreciate. We do appreciate the honesty in a lot of the prayer requests coming in from around the world. You're not playing games with the Holy God.

You're not trying to buy your way into his favor anymore. You know what you are. So this message is for you. It's for the downtrodden. It's for the oppressed. It's for the weary. It's for the tired. It's for the bankrupt. It's for the broke. It's for the failure.

It's for the person who can't get up and can't get out on their own. This message is for you. This call of God is for you.

It's for the people who have no money. No more resource. I don't know what to do and I don't know how I'm ever going to get to where I need to go. Forsake your way. Forsake your old thoughts.

Let him return to the Lord and he will have mercy on him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. Hallelujah. He who believes on me as the scripture has said out of his inner parts his belly shall flow rivers of living water. It's the Spirit of God coming and taking up residence inside your earthly body. This is the wine.

This is the milk. This is the presence of God that you can't buy your way into. You only get it when you bend your knee to God.

You only get this living relationship with God when you confess with your mouth that he's now your Lord and your Savior and you just admit your condition. Say, God I can't save myself. I can't buy my way into your favor. I can't be. I've tried to be good. I can't. I've tried to get up. I can't walk.

I've tried to stay steady and I'm not and I'm just done. You see great revivals throughout history, that means that turnings to God happen at these moments in history when people just know that they're done. They're done. They're done.

The religiousness. They're done playing the religious game. They're done going to church and pretending they're in victory. They're done. You say I'm not doing this anymore.

I'm not going to try to pretend that I'm living in victory and I'm not going to try to buy my way into the favor of God. My life is a mess. My family is broken apart. I'm troubled and struggling in my mind and so I'm just done with all of this and now my ears are open. God almighty if there's ever going to be a change in my life it's going to be you that brings it about. Oh are you still thirsty?

He says come to me and drink. That's what the cross is all about. The cross was God's invitation to come into a living relationship with Him. Confessing your sin. Admitting your condition. Believing that Jesus Christ died on a cross to pay the price for your sin. Believing that His hands are stretched out towards you saying here just come to me now and let me forgive you for I will abundantly pardon you as the scripture says.

And inviting God through the Holy Spirit to come into your life and be that source of living water that you have always longed for. The message today has been brought to you by Carter Conlon from Times Square Church. For more information log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. Plan to be with us next week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.