The Call of God - Chambers, Oswald
July 1, 1917, Zeitoun , Sunday morning Service & devotional hut
Isaiah 6
It is difficult to define the call of god it is an implicit thing, like the call of the sea or of the mountains. Not everyone hears the call of the sea and of the mountains, but only those who have the nature of the sea or the mountains in them. In the same way no man hears the call of god unless he has the nature of god in him and has got into the way of listening to the implicit leading of the call. The significant thing is that god did not call Isaiah. There are times when god does call a man to a special work, but in pariahs case god did not call him; he [over]heard the voice of the lord, saying, whom shall i send, and who will go for us? Isaiah had been brought by spiritual concentration as well as consecration inside the moral frontiers where he could hear gods voice. We need trained ears to hear. One man may hear the call of god and another hear nothing; it depends on what goes on within the man, not outside him. In the year that king uzziah died, i saw the lord . . . (rv ). In the years of the great war, i saw the lord. That is the time when a man sees differently. It takes a crisis when the deeps are opened and life is profoundly altered before a man can say, i saw the lord. After Hezekiah had come face to face with death he said, i shall go softly [as in solemn procession, RV mg] all my years, because of the bitterness of
My soul (Isaiah 38:15). There is always a difference in the man who has come face to face with certain death, when he goes through the supreme crisis the true elements come out. This war has brought tension to countless lives and people are coming to see differently because of it. When a man goes through a crisis he fears he is losing god, but instead of that he is beginning to see him for the first time, and he sees him as a grander, more marvellous being than ever he imagined.
1. Comprehensiveness of the call
The first thing that impresses us about the call of god is that it comes to the whole man, not to one part of him. The majority of us are godly in streaks, spiritual in sections; it takes a long time to locate us altogether to the call of god. We have special days and religious moods, but when we get into contact with god we are brought in touch with reality and made all of a piece. Our lords life was all one real- ity, you could never cut it into two shallow here and profound there. My conception of god must embrace the whole of my life. When i see the lord truly i see him as god of my whole being; if he is only god in sections of me, he is not god at all.
2. Consciousness of grossness
Then said i, woe is me! For i am undone; because i am a man of unclean lips, and i dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the king, the lord of hosts. (Isaiah 6:5)
Isaiahs words are a confession not of sin, but of the sense of absolute grossness. I was as a beast before thee said the psalmist, not an immoral beast but what an incapacitated type of man i am! I have seen the lord, but how am i going to come anywhere near his marvellous holiness? Any man will go to god for deliverance from sin, but it is another thing to have this consciousness of grossness dealt with; it takes discipline and patience and concentration. Will i agree that i am gross woe is me! For i am undone? If so, i am coming slowly to the condition Isaiah was in. It was his consciousness of grossness that brought Isaiah into a right relationship to god, that is an illuminating point. It is never my sense of goodness that brings me into touch with god, but my sense of unworthiness: woe is me! For i am undone that brings me into the presence of god at once. When a man knows his destitution, knows he cannot get hold of god, cannot be the things he longs to be, he begins to realise what it was Jesus christ came to do, viz. , to supply what he really lacks. There is no obstacle, nothing in the past or the present or in his heredity, that can stand in a mans way if he will only make room for jesus christ. Once let him realise his need i cant be holy, i cant be pure in heart, i cant be the child of my father in heaven and be kind to the unthankful and evil, i cant love my enemies Jesus Christ claims that he can do all that for him, but it depends on the man, i. E. , upon how much he has come up against the things he cannot do for himself.
3. Character of the commission
Isaiah saw the lord, then he saw himself; then he overheard the voice of god saying who will go? And he said, here am i; send me; and then god gave him a staggering message to deliver. And he said, go, and tell this people, hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed (Isaiah 6:910 RV ). Unless the people turn, the truth will deepen their condemnation, but you must speak. Gods condemnations as well as his promises are conditional; as long as we remain with the wrong dis- position unremoved, every truth of god will harden us and ripen us for judgement.
Isaiah caught a sudden glimpse, terrible in its clearness, of his own sin and his peoples sin. There is very little of that amongst us nowadays and a lot of gathering our spiritual skirts around us; instead of our repentance being social repentance and our intercession vicarious, we are vindictive and bitter in spirit. The sight of god deepens humiliation in a saint and lifts him into intercession. Repentance is needed not only for individual sins, but for social sins. There is a social repentance to-day, but it is repentance not for the honour of god but because of the sorrows and sufferings of the people. All through the bible runs the idea of national repentance, of social sanctification, until the idea reaches its climax in a holy city.
