As we lead the Christian life, sometimes we become taken up with the things of this world. Our walk with our God is not as close as it once was. Our desire to pray and to read the bible diminish. We feel we’ve lost the joy in God which we once had. So often, this stems from a small view of God. We forget who God is, and begin to live life in our own strength.

Isaiah had to be reminded of who God really was. He needed a new vision of God, a vision of the God who is high and lifted up. The God whose glory fills the earth. The God who reigns from his throne over all. The God who the seraphs declare to be

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

If we claim to be Christians, then this is the God who we worship. Our view of God should be as he is, because when it is, our view of everything else is corrected.

When we see God for who he is, we’ll see ourselves for who we really are. Isaiah looked upon God, and cried out

“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.”

For before an almighty holy God, we’ll realise we are small sinful men and women. Who are we to complain before God? Who are we to try and live our lives apart from God? Who are we to worship anything else but the one true living God?

This should bring us to a state of repentance, with a desire to turn away from our sin and to turn towards God. As believers, when we humble ourselves before God, when we stop trying to do things in our own strength, then God will work in us. Just as Isaiah’s lips were made clean by God, so our hearts can be purified through the blood of Jesus. We are filled afresh with the Holy Spirit. This should cause us to re-evaluate our lives, to ensure that we are living to serve our Lord and God in his strength and not ourselves in our own strength. There should be no idols in our heart.

This proper view of God will also give us a correct view of the world. Without a proper view of God, it is so easy to think the world’s answers for life are true, and yet they always fail us. The world would tell us to make our own salvation. The world might even tell us that there’s no sin, no right or wrong, and no God.

Yet we are not here to judge the world, but to have compassion on it. For in and of ourselves, we are no better than the world and it is only by the grace of God we have been made holy. For God calls us to tell the world of the salvation which has been purchased with the blood of Jesus on the cross at Golgotha, out of love, mercy and grace. To tell the world that, through faith in Jesus the Christ, there is atonement with God. To tell the world of that great sacrifice from which we ourselves have benefitted.

That we, along with Isaiah, might be able to say

“Here am I. Send me!”