Many people struggle with a sense of feeling unworthy or with feelings of inferiority. Like the guy who said, I have an inferiority complex; it's just not a very good one. We have to admit that many times those feelings of unworthiness and inferiority come from the way others act towards us and treat us.
An 80-year-old woman was arrested for shoplifting. When she went before the judge he asked her, “What did you steal?” She replied: “ A can of peaches.” The judge asked her why she had stolen them and she replied that she was hungry.
The judge then asked her how many peaches were in the can. She replied, “Six.” The judge then said, “I will give you six days in jail.” Before the judge could actually pronounce the punishment the woman’s husband spoke up and asked the judge if he could say something. The judge said, “What is it?” The husband said, “She also stole and can of peas.”
Sometimes the things people
say about us don’t help our self esteem at all.
There is one case in which those feelings are perfectly justified, and that is how we feel about ourselves related to God. The correct and proper feeling that we humans should have is that seem feeling that John the Baptist had. John said, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.” Later John said, “He (Jesus) must increase, I must decrease.” John recognized that compared to God in Jesus Christ he was nothing, his soul was like a filthy garment. John realized that he was of nothing compared to the greatness, the holiness and the majesty of God.
It is this same God that our lesson from Isaiah proclaims is the God who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth, and what comes from it.”
It is this same God that the Bible describes as absolutely holy, pure and just. This God has all of the loving qualities toward which we aspire as humans, but so often do not possess. This God is a God who knows all, sees all, comprehends all, and is over all. So often, we simply human beings fail to see the awe, majesty and the mystery of this God. We are guilty of doing what one theologian suggested – we try to make God fit into a little box we have constructed. We succumb to the human tendency to do as J.B. Philips suggested – to make God too small.
John the Baptist had the right perspective on God and on Jesus. This God is an awesome and fearsome God.
Our scripture lessons today give us a glimpse into how God made us as human beings and how he has come to the aid of those same human beings who have been infected with a deadly disease- sin.
Our Lesson from Isaiah today also describes for us how God made us. God tells us in our reading today that just as he made the heavens and the earth, so also did he make man and woman. We know from Scripture that he made man (male and female) in his image. How did he make us in his image? He certainly didn’t make us in his image in the sense that God is a giant man on the throne of heaven. The Bible says God is Spirit. God the Son took on a human body to become one of us, but the true nature of God is spiritual.. So if we are made in the image of God, what does that mean?
God through Isaiah says that it is God who “gives breath to the people on the earth and spirit to those who walk in it.” So God created a human body into which he put the true human nature. That nature is spiritual. God put a spirit inside our bodies. It is that spirit that is made in the image of God. It is made in the image of God in the sense that just as God is spirit, he has give us a human spirit with which to relate to the God who is Spirit. The human spirit has the capacity to have many of the qualities of God’s spiritual nature. He has given us the ability to think, to rationalize, to think cognitively, to have emotions, to have a conscience (to know right from wrong), to enjoy beauty, to have the ability to love, to have joy, to have peace, to have patience, to have goodness, to be faithful, to be gentle, have self-control. God is a God full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger. He is a just God, doing all things righteously. All of those qualities are perfectly found in God.
God has also has other qualities like righteous indignation, anger, wrath, and vengeance. Those qualities were given initially to us as humans to a lesser degree to reflect those same qualities in God.
When sin entered into the world through Adam and Eve the good qualities of the human spirit became corrupted. Sin in us makes those qualities of God within us corrupted. As a result we find that human beings are not as loving, not as compassionate, not as merciful as God. We do not reflect the good qualities of God all the time because of the damage that sin has done to us and our world. So, while we are made in the image of God, that image has been distorted, tainted and corrupted.
This corruption of the image of God causes us to have broken relationships, broken marriages, broken families. It also causes us to be divided from one another because of the color of our skin, or the ethnicity of our origin. When Peter, the Jewish believer in Jesus, went to Cornelius’ (a Gentile) house, Peter had overcome one of the prejudices of the fallen human condition. He had formerly believed that the Gentiles (any non-Jew) was not worthy of receiving the Gospel of Jesus. It should only be given to the Jewish people. When Peter had a dramatic conversion experience with the Lord his human nature was changed. He now began to realize the God shows no partiality in the sense that all people are potential recipients of the Gospel of Jesus. He had a change of heart because of a spiritual vision that God gave him.
As we look at the Bible as a whole we see that dramatic changes happened (changes by the way, for the better) when the Holy Spirit of God got involved in the lives of humans. In the Old Testament we see that the Holy Spirit came upon certain people allowing them to perform certain tasks that would bring about the purpose of God. In Isaiah’s lesson today we see God speaking prophetically about a time when he will no longer simply occasionally come upon specific people for specific tasks. He said, “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.”
God is speaking prophetically about the fact that he would be sending Jesus into the world to give people a whole new and better way to relate to God. He also is speaking about the fact that there will come a day when the Holy Spirit will be poured out upon all flesh (as the prophet Joel mentions). This is a new thing.
What God is saying here is that Jesus will come to establish a way for us to be reconciled to the Holy, Righteous, and Just God. He will do that by energizing our human spirits. By causing them to become more like the image of God which they were originally intended to have.
How does God energize our human spirits? He does so first of all by sending his Holy Spirit to mingle with our human spirit when we accept Christ into our lives, when we ask him to be our Savior and Lord. Listen to what St. Paul said about that in Romans chapter 8 “The Spirit, that’s the Holy Spirit, testifies with our spirit that we are children of God.” So when we receive Christ into our lives the Holy Spirit comes to live inside us to begin the process of changing our human spirits back into the image of God they were designed to be. We were designed spiritually to have a spiritual relationship with the God who is spirit. The Holy Spirit begins to try to grow and develop the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is a reflection of the very nature of God. Our Christian lives are designed for that fruit to grow to the point that we begin to act, speak and think like Jesus. The rest of our human lives are spent as Christians in a battle, a battle between our sinful human spirit and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is constantly trying to change and reform our human spirits to conform them into the image of Christ.
God doesn’t only want to work on the inside of us to make us more like Christ, he wants to go back to the Old Testament way of the Spirit as well. John the Baptist talked about Jesus “Baptizing with the Holy Spirit.” When we look at that phrase in the context of the New Testament we see that it refers to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and in the days, months and years after that. The Holy Spirit was to fall upon people (to use the biblical phrase) to empower them to be witnesses for Christ to the Jew and the Non-Jew, and to empower them with spiritual gifts to minister to specific people at specific times in specific places, just like the Old Testament. The difference is that this power is available not just to special or holy people, but rather available to all Christians who do not quench the Spirit.
Just as God, in Isaiah, spoke about the Messiah coming to open the eyes of the spiritually and physically blind, to set free those who are imprisoned by sin, so too, are his followers to bring freedom to the spiritual captives of this world through Jesus. In our Epistle from Acts 10 we see that Jesus came to do good and to heal all those who were oppressed by the devil. So, too, are we to go about doing good to all and being agents of Jesus’ healing to those who are oppressed by the devil. Have you ever laid hands on someone and prayed for them to be healed? Have you ever asked God to fill you with his Spirit and empower you to be his witness and to be used for good works? You might try it some time.
Tony Evans tells the story
of a man who went to buy a refrigerator he bought the most incredible
refrigerator you could imagine it had all the bells and whistles you
would expect, and then some it cost thousands of dollars more than a
normal refrigerator, but what could you expect for such a fine product?
The store delivers the new refrigerator to the man’s home he fills
it with all his food, and he’s so excited to have this great new refrigerator.
The next morning he goes into the kitchen to make breakfast, only to
find that the milk is spoiled, the ice cream is running out of the bottom
of the freezer compartment, and the vegetables are changing color. The
refrigerator is not working. So the man calls the store to give them
a piece of mind. The man at the store says, "I don’t understand
what’s wrong. Open the door and see if the light comes on"
He opens the door; No light.
"Put your ear up close to the refrigerator and see if you can hear
the hum of the motor" No hum.
Then the man says, "There’s a cord at the back or your refrigerator.
Check and see if it’s plugged in". The man looks, and sure enough,
it wasn’t plugged in. So he comes back to the phone and said, "You’re
right, the cord was not plugged in. But for the kind of money I paid
for this refrigerator, that shouldn’t matter. This thing should work
anyway"
Now that’s sort of a silly story right, because all of us would say,
well of course you’ve got to plug the thing in. That’s obvious.
That’s what happens with the spiritual life, we don’t realize that
we are designed to be plugged into the Holy Spirit. We try to live the
Christian life, but we have no energy to do so.
After
the service today if you want to receive prayer to come into that first
phase of spiritual energy, if you want to ask Christ to save your human
spirit and to receive the Holy Spirit, I encourage you to stay around
after the service and let me pray for you. If you want to get to the
second phase of spiritual energy stay around in church after the service
and I will come back in to pray for you. If you would like to be used
by God to be an instrument of healing or deliverance as I talked about
earlier, join me up at the front when I come back in after the service.