Without wrath and doubting, because you're suffering.
Otherwise, there'd be no need to encourage people to pray. So when Luke says men ought to always pray not to lose heart is what Jesus was teaching. He's saying there are going to be things that make you want to lose heart.
Don't lose it. And I can tell you, if you hang in there, it could be years, the Lord will refresh you. Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.
But you're going to have some new bruises by the time your strength is renewed, and they will become emblems of faith. That's it for today's message. To hear more information about Cross Reference Radio.
Specifically, how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Isaiah chapter 1 is where Pastor Rick will begin today on this edition of Cross Reference Radio. He shall prolong his days and the pleasure of Yahweh shall prosper in his hand. God will be pleased with the sacrifice of the cross and the fruit that comes from it. The souls, salvation of souls, the disciples that come. That's the seed that he's referring to in Isaiah 53. And so it's just interesting to hear that God is saying, I do not like those sacrifices because they're false.
But this is the model sacrifice. It's almost like Isaiah never loses touch with all that's going on. Because he doesn't. The Spirit of the Lord is upon him also as a prophet of God. Verse 12, when you come to appear before me, who has required this from your hand to trample my courts?
Satire runs through the rebukes. This is God, you know. When you come before me, when you come to church, who's required from your hand to trample my courts? So, pretending on the outside that you care on the inside when you don't. And God sees it.
They're making them two-faced. But what he says, you trample my courts. He is saying, the noise of your feet is the only thing you're offering up.
I hear you're trampling my courtyards. That's all I'm getting. A crowd of people with empty hearts. And all their suffering was a result of artificial religion.
All of it. You know, there's the curse, of course, but God balanced that out in his promises, which they routinely did not avail themselves of as a nation. Verse 13, bring no more futile sacrifices. Incense is an abomination to me. The new moons, the sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meetings. Bring no more futile sacrifices.
What's the operative word there? Futile. Vain. In vain they worship me. Meaningless offerings.
Gifts of nothing. They knew the story of Cain. That God rejected his religious offerings.
They knew this story from childhood. Cain's evil was the rejection of God's view. He didn't side, he didn't agree with God.
And he didn't care. He's going to jam down God's throat his type of religion. Yeah, I know he wants a blood sacrifice.
I'm bringing him this. And he couldn't handle it when God said, get that away from me. I'm not, no, I reject that. It's not a single act of sin, but a single act of the heart that made Cain who he was. And God reached out to him, if you do right, if you do right, it's going to go right.
But if not, sin is at the door and it's crouched, waiting for you. And so he read in 1 John, not as Cain, who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his works were evil and his brother's righteous.
Now there's John writing. He is a Jew. He's raised in a Jewish world. He knew the story of Cain. So did these people in the days of Isaiah.
And John gets it right. And he does not give any quarter to the memory of Cain. There's nothing about Cain that is redeeming. There are few people like that in the Bible.
There's just nothing about them that's good. Not on record. And there's some people like that in life. Most of those people in life, they blow a lot of smoke screens around themselves, and a lot of people can't see through it. Oh, he's such a nice guy. Why don't you like him? You like that guy?
I just got two enemies in one day. I mean, not really. But you know, you're disappointed when someone is, when an aunt brings an aardvark home.
She says, hi mom, what could be wrong with him? As he wipes out the nest, right? Incense is an abomination to me. Me too, Lord.
Moving on. Some of you weren't around in the 60s and 70s when incense was the big thing. You walk into everybody's house, there was incense going on. Was that Captain Crunch? No, I don't think there's a Captain Crunch cereal incense.
There should be. Anyway, the smell of their religion was foul to God. And that's what he's saying. The smell of your religion is an abomination to me. It's not a sweet smelling aroma as it was with Noah, after all Noah went through. Steps off the ark and worships God. Genesis 8, 20. Then Noah built an altar to Yahweh and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird. And offered burnt offerings on the altar.
And Yahweh smelled a soothing aroma. Yes, this man's heart is right. It is expressed through the sacrifice of animals. As I've told him to do. This is right. Take another man offering up the same animals, as I mentioned earlier, and his heart could care less about what God wants.
Just playing the game. And to that one God says, it is an abomination to me. And he goes on, and here in verse 13, the new moons, the Sabbath, and the calling of assemblies. Well, Israel's days, the new moon marked their month. Every new moon was the beginning of a month and they had to offer sacrifices for that beginning of the month.
Their lunar calendar was set by the natural cycles that God of the seasons and the days that God has put in place. And they were merely checking the box. Well, there are people like that. They go to church to check the box. Some will only go at holiday seasons.
You know, it's happening here too. This artificial interest in God. How unlike this psalmist. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful to him and bless him.
It doesn't say, if your life is going smoothly. As Job said, the Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Thank God there's more to life than this life. Well, the laws of Moses were handed to the people of God and they were to follow those laws because they were interested in God. They wanted to please him. Same with the Christian. We try to obey Christ because we love him. Well, you know what?
He's got a good policy. So I'm going to follow you. That's a better way to do it.
It is a better way, but our motive is love. We love him. And their unbridled sin taunted God. It made mockery of his omniscience. It said, that doctrine of God knowing everything, he doesn't know everything because he can't see what we're doing.
And that's, they were wrong. And the prophet is trying to tell them that. He says, I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meetings. Strong language to describe temple worship.
Meaningless, detestable, unbearable. God said, I just can't stomach you people. Well, that's what he did, you know, the church at Laodicea. I vomit you out of my mouth. How do you get any more intense than that?
I mean, that's like maxed out. What did the Lord say about that church? He never say that about this church. So Isaiah, again, with this insight that he has, he will end his last chapter speaking about keeping these feasts of the new moons and the Sabbaths the right way.
He never is out of touch. And you can't, you just can't make that up. Verse 14, your new moons and your appointed feast, my soul hates. They are trouble to me.
I am weary of bearing them. The next time somebody wants to use that lame old line, well, if God is a God of love, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. God is a God of love, but he's also a God of wrath.
And it's up to you which one you want to receive. He's not petty. He sees your sin. He knows you're not going to be perfect.
He's made mercy available for those things. But to come to him with this two-faced thing or to completely reject him, make mockery of him, don't expect mercy. Expect judgment. And here, your new moons and your appointed feast, my soul hates. This is emphatic, incidentally, in the Hebrew and in the English.
It is emphatic. To this day, God detests baloney religion. You know, we have to factor in when we deal with people who are guilty of this that they either don't know or they don't care. And when they don't care, well, then we move on.
We knock the dust off our feet. But until that point, try to understand what you have when you're dealing with another human being, especially on spiritual matters. What's going on here?
Does this person get it? My approach used to be, well, I don't know what they're doing, but I know how excited I am about what I'm saying, and that's what I would focus on. And let the Lord take it from there.
And that proved to be, I think, successful much of the time. But sarcastically referring to the feast here, look again at verse 14. Your new moons, your appointed feast, my soul hates. Not my new moons, my appointed feast, yours. He's disassociating himself from their religion.
God does these things. And he says, when he says, my soul hates, it's emphatic, the equivalent of saying, I hate with all my heart. Are there degrees of hate?
I'm not so sure there is. I hate is a pretty strong word. I misuse it often. You know, I'll say, like, I hate bananas. Yeah, but not with the same thing as I hate evil. I mean, that's, you know, so I try to fix that. But it's late in life.
I don't know if I'm going to catch up. So anyway, they are trouble to me. I am weary of bearing them.
Irritation. God is just sick and tired of it, is what he's telling them. Anyway, they had done their best, the group that he's talking to, to make the shameful things an acceptable part of life.
They had done their best to do it, and now he's calling them out. Verse 15, when you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you, even though you make many prayers. I will not hear.
Your hands are full of blood. Just what God did not want. People pretending to be pious, holier than thou. Oh, Lord, we love you, when they knew they did not mean it, and he knew it. So when Paul says, 1 Timothy, I desire therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. He should, you could add, it's in there, you could add, without wrath and doubting, because you're suffering.
Otherwise there'd be no need to encourage people to pray. So when Luke says men ought to always pray not to lose heart, is what Jesus was teaching. He's saying there are going to be things that make you want to lose heart.
Don't lose it. And I can tell you, if you hang in there, it could be years, the Lord will refresh you. Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. But you're going to have some new bruises by the time your strength is renewed, and they will become emblems of faith. Do you plan to turn in your armor nice and shiny and polished, unscuffed?
I get the feeling my armor is going to be pretty singed, pretty beat up, but it will be my armor nonetheless. One of my favorite memories about the military, and there's only like two of them, was the beginning of the Rifleman's Creed. This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine. And that is faith. There are many that have faith, but this one is mine. And that is something God has given. This is your faith. Work out your salvation. You're saved.
It doesn't mean you're earning it. It just means now carry it out. I will hide my eyes from you, the opposite of letting his face shine upon them. The Lord bless you, keep you, make his face to shine upon. This is the opposite. God is putting called blocker on these people.
He says, even though you make many prayers, I will not hear. He's unplugged the phone. Remember the days when you had phones on the wall and you just unplug it when you didn't want it? You'd take it off the hook if you wanted, but unplugging it was better.
Plus it was fun to hear that little click when you put it back in. Anyway, I'm not the only one. They were seeking wealth from God while taking it from men, like the prosperity churches. Go ahead brother, put a seed offering in of a hundred dollars and God will bless it a hundred fold.
He's lying to you. Isaiah 59, behold the hand of the Lord is not shortened that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot bear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. Now he's not talking to sinners who are struggling to obey, but failing. He's talking to those who are careless. And you read the rest of that, verse 3, he goes on to talk about the bloodshed that these people were guilty of. And he does it here. He says here in verse 15, your hands are full of blood. How does he mean that?
I mean they weren't all going around killing people, but their blood sacrifices were disqualified worship. There's a big bug flying through the sanctuary right there. You see the problem with warm weather? This is why I like winter.
Alright, anyway, I know most of you are like, I don't really like warm. God will forgive you of that, I'm sure. Anyway, back to this. The blood sacrifices. To God, your hands are full of blood. They're just slaughtered animals. You're just spilling blood. I'm just one way to look at how this charge is coming at them.
I'm not receiving this. You know, you're going to eat most of the offerings, many of the offerings, people would consume some of it. Their acts of violence were akin to murder.
The bribes, the purchase of properties to the ruin of widows and orphans. The sacred nature of blood. Very serious with God in the Old and New Testament, and he's not negligent in pointing it out. Going back to Genesis chapter 4 is a prohibition of murder. Then in Genesis 9 is the prohibition of consuming blood. Which, when you get to the New Testament, you would think that the Gentiles coming to the church that were previously eating blood dishes would say, you know, God is, he doesn't like this in the scripture. He's not going to disqualify me from my salvation, but he has spoken about this. I think I'm going to stop eating these bloody things.
Anyway, I mean, all out, just, you know, straight out. The vital role of blood in sacrifice, which is man's approach to God. That's pointed out in Hebrews 9, verse 7 and 18. And in 1 John 1-7, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins. So my point is, the prohibition of murder, the prohibition of consuming blood, and the solemn act of blood sacrifice fulfilled in Christ, they're very serious things. So when he talks about blood, God is always serious.
And so am I. I mean, you know, if you bump yourself, you look to see real quick how much blood's coming out of me. So anyway, this is a sacred perspective that they treated with sacrilege. Remember, especially you young men, there's nothing cool about hell. And to act like you're too cool to be righteous and that some things are sacred to you is a trap from hell. It is okay to say to irreverent sacrilegious people, no, I don't play for that team. I reject that approach. Some things to me are sacred, whether they are to you or not.
And they're in the inside and not the outside. Yeah, you could take my Bible and you could throw it into the river, but it's still a sacred document to me. And I'm not going to dive into the river to get it. It doesn't make it any less sacred to me.
I don't worship it, but I understand what these things mean in the presence of a holy God. He says in verse 16, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes cease to do evil. Threefold. Wash to be clean. That's the past. Put away the evil ways. That's the present. Stop doing what you're doing.
That's the future. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away the evil from your doings. Cease to do evil.
That's the solution. Be done with evil and get busy with good. The New Testament picks that right up. That beautiful 12th chapter of Romans.
Don't be afraid of Romans because a lot of Christian teachers make Romans, they scare you with it. This is a doctrinal statement. You're looking for the doctrine and you can miss all the beauty of it. Just listen to the poetic nature of this verse. Romans 12, 9. Love without hypocrisy, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good. It's just so simple.
It goes back to Micah, you know. He's showing you, oh man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you. Love without hypocrisy, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.
How do you improve that? Verse 17, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. Isaiah is saying, these are the charges against you.
Here's the solution, here's the way out. So he directs them how to go forward. Righteous leadership always involves fair treatment of the weakest members of society, always.
And that's why God points out what he says here. Seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. And in those societies, those folks, they had a thought, today in our society, in this country, it's not as bad.
It's actually pretty good. You can be left a sizable amount of money to take care of yourself. In those days, oh man, you could be in a real bad place. Orphans and widows, the underdogs, dogs of society, not just them, all underdogs of society is the point. This is voiced, so serious is God. It's voiced in the law, example, Deuteronomy 24, 17. It is voiced in the prophets, here, verse 17, Jeremiah 7, Zachariah 7. And then the wisdom book of Job, Job 31.
God makes, and of course there are other places, so James picks it up. Verse 18, this is one of the most beautiful verses in all the Bible. Come now, let us reason together, says Yahweh. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
Come now, let us reason. This is sort of a preview of the last 27 chapters of Isaiah, which lays the focus more on grace and forgiveness than judgment, more on the coming kingdom through Messiah than the sins of the people and the nations. That's the difference between the first 39 chapters and the last 27.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out we have 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books. And I think those kind of things are an act of God also. But notice what he says here in verse 18 when he says, Come to reason about what? Your sins. And then he says, looking at verse 18, They, they, they, the sins of the individual soul, these are my sins.
There are many like them, but these are mine. And they have to be dealt with by somebody bigger than me, better than me, and that is to Christ. And so God invites man to use his brains to consider. Come now, let us reason. Now, you know, one commentator I was reading, he actually says, there's this thing in people that they have to attack their, their own people. It's like, well, it doesn't mean what the English translators like to say, come, let us reason. Yes, it does mean that. Then he goes on to say, it means come, let us argue. Not, not a fussing argument, but an exchange of ideas. Is that not reason? I mean, this is a guy who's supposed to be pretty smart.
Why? And he gets, you know, they get, we get, they get. Not me, because I don't make these mistakes. I just point them out in others.
No, I do, I do, but hopefully you don't catch them. And hopefully they're minor. But the point is, it means just that. God is saying, come, let's discuss this, let's reason it, let's argue it, let's put it on the table, let's get to the bottom of your sins, because they're, they're glaring. Crimson is a glaring color.
You notice that right away. I mean, it's a beautiful color, but God, in this context, it's the mark of blood, of sin. And God says, I can deal with this with you. He does not want us to have a non-reasoned experience in our faith. And there are churches and Christians that teach just this. You've got to have faith, brother, don't think. Just feel it, just do it.
That's crazy. That's not walking in the light, that's walking in the dark. We have a whole book of forcing you to think, it's called the Proverbs. And it's God saying, hey, look, don't go thinking, you just have all the answers. You need to learn, get wisdom, lay hold of it. It's not enough to amass data, you need to know what to do with it, and that is called wisdom, the proper use of knowledge. So you may know something about somebody, but that doesn't mean you need to go say it to them.
You're just not, you're wise. I mean, there are things, some of you are familiar with the boxer Mike Tyson. Are there things, would you go up and say just anything to him?
Would you walk up to him and say, you know what, I've never liked you, I think your face is ugly. You might get to say it. I'm just saying, we have to think through life all the way through. And there's nothing wrong with that. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick, right here on Cross Reference Radio.
