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Isaiah 6:1-7

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!"

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for."

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The chorus of the angels is interesting; "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!" I've heard that this is a convention in the Hebrew language for superlatives. If you want to say that something is, for example, "the best pie", in Hebrew you might say the pie is "delicious, delicious, delicious".

The most astounding thing is Isaiah's reaction to his vision of God. "Woe is me!", he yells. In the Bible, "Woe..." is how a curse is pronounced. Isaiah curses himself, "For I am lost;.." he says. Some translations render this, "For I am undone;..." Can you imagine that? Can you imagine seeing something, or someone, so astounding, so amazing, so pure and bright and powerful, that you wish you were cursed rather than look on it any more?

It reminds me of Revelation 6:15-17, when Judgement begins;

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Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?"

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"...hide us from the face of him..." Incredible. Again, I ask myself, can you even imagine someone so terrifing, awe-inspiring, and powerful that you would rather die than face them? Rather have a mountian dropped on you than have Him look into your eyes? "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts..."

Tonight, I was baptised into faith in Christ.  I was saved by faith in Chirst and baptised in the Holy Spirit more than a year ago.  But tonight, I obeyed God and was baptised in public, giving witness to the miracle God has worked in my heart through my testimony.  I share that testimony below;

I came to Michigan from my home in Virginia nearly four years ago, to attend Michigan State University and study nuclear physics.  At the time, I was an atheist, as I had been since I was a teenager.  I’ve studied physics since high school and all along it had provided me a strange kind of comfort in my atheism; not in that it confirmed there was no God, but for me it held the promise that it ultimately would, if I just learned enough.   Using what I did understand though, I took pride in challenging other people beliefs and encouraging atheism in those who were unsure.   My undergraduate studies reinforced this idea and my time spent on them never really challenged my own convictions.  I left Virginia feeling like a big fish in a small pond and being right about my beliefs was just a matter of going graduate school and learning the details.

By the end of my first year however, it was clear to me that this wasn’t going to work.  Not only was I nowhere near as smart as I thought I was, I was surrounded by many other students and professors who were much more talented than me and even they didn’t know the answers to everything.  I worked harder and longer than I ever had in my entire life.  Suddenly, I had become a small fish in a big ocean and there was more to learn than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes.  Where I had believed the universe was a simple, mindless clockwork thing before, now it seemed a towering intellectual feat, riddled with echoes of choice and design, symmetry and beauty.  And every corner of it had enough mystery to spend a lifetime studying.  But perhaps the most startling discovery I made during that first year as a graduate student was that one of my classmates was a Christian.

My friend’s name is Matt and as classmates, we spent many nights gathered around tables, struggling with homework and drinking lots of coffee.  I was fascinated and confused as to why a Christian would be a scientist and so as we got stuck or too tired to work, our conversation would often turn to religion.  Many months later, Matt invited me to church with him and I actually panicked.  I say panic because the idea of being in a church, surrounded by Christians terrified me.  Not only was I fairly shy in general, I was so nervous that someone would try to talk to me about faith or ask me questions about the Bible and would find out that I didn’t know anything.  I was truly scared of the possibility of feeling like I didn’t belong there.  So I said to Matt that I wanted to read the whole Bible before I made a decision about it!  Now, I said that, not entirely out of anxiety.  A part of me really did want to figure out everything about God on my own, before saying I believed in Him.  Of course, Matt called my bluff and went out and bought me a Bible.    And it was one of the most touching things anyone outside of my family had ever done for me.  We had spent hours debating and discussing faith and God but they were always just ideas to me, abstracted, academic and distant.  But this simple gesture, more than anything he could have said, showed me he wasn’t just trying to win a debate, it wasn’t just an idea to him.  He cared about something that was in the Bible and he cared about me.

So I started reading the Bible.  I read from the beginning, starting in Genesis and I also read specific chapters Matt recommended to me.  And to be honest, I read it on and off for months and I didn’t understand anything.  In the mean time though, I met Loraine, who would later become my best friend and so much more to me.  She was also a Christian and she helped my understanding a great deal by explaining the overall arc of the Bible, like how the Fall and our own sin had turned us away from God and how Christ paid for that sin on the Cross.  She also convinced me to start going to church and so I finally took Matt up on his offer and I came here to South, sometime in the early spring of last year.

For the next couple months, I came to South for Sunday services, I read the Bible as I could alongside class work and Loraine and I had long conversations about things I read and heard in the sermons.  Now, the sermons were my favorite part of the service.  It was just like a lecture at the university.  I listen, scribble notes furiously and crosscheck references as the pastor gives them.  But I had a problem.  You see, I was learning and understanding some things in the Bible but I realized that I didn’t feel anything for God and I couldn’t seem to reason my way into accepting Christ.  I didn’t really understand what accepting Him meant.  And I started to sense that while I understood and agreed with Loraine on important Biblical truths, our conversations were becoming strained and she was getting frustrated.  I slowly became desperate.  I wanted so badly to believe as she did and feel for God what I saw she felt for Him.  I kept thinking that if I came to church enough and studied the Bible enough and prayed enough that I could earn God’s favor and earn some secret wisdom in the Bible that would bring me to faith in Christ. 

I just wanted time to seclude and devote myself and figure out the details so I could get this faith.  But Loraine insisted to me that there was no way for me to earn God’s favor, no way for me to be pleasing and to earn saving faith on my own.  In one conversation Loraine backed me into a corner over it so badly I was left speechless.  I knew she was right but I couldn’t see any way to honestly progress past where I was stuck.  That was on a Saturday, the night before I was saved.  I went to church the next morning where Pastor Don was in the midst of his segment on the life of David.  The pastor's sermon centered on 1Samuel, mostly chapters 22-24 about David and Saul.  It felt like he was talking to me alone.  He talked about hardship and crisis being important for people for three reasons; first, to reveal their heart and how far from God it may be, like the time David spent on the run, repeatedly lying to avoid capture.  Second, to show how they will treat their enemies, as when David spares Saul when he is at David's mercy.  And how they will rely on their friends, as David did on Jonathan, Saul's son.

What he said about this last point rang very strong with me...he said, 'At no point has God ever endorsed a monastic brand of spirituality,...certainly their are times that call for solitude and reflection but, always you are expected to return and be their to be helped by your friends and to help your friends.  We are not designed to endure isolation.'  I realized that this was exactly what I had been trying to do.  So many feelings about so many things came over me then.  I had been like David, wandering my whole life in a desert, lying to avoid being cornered with nothing smart to say.  Later that day, as I wrote an email to Loraine, trying to explain all that I had felt, everything that I had struggled to see snapped into focus.  God’s plan for us as is all about ending our separation and isolation and restoring our fellowship with Him.  And to overcome the demands of His own holiness to our sin, out of His great love for us, He gave His only son Jesus to die on the cross and pay that penalty for our sin.  All I had to do was accept Christ.  Finally, I understood what it meant to accept Christ.  And It wasn’t in any book; I couldn’t calculate or study anything that would give it to me.  I had heard it said that it comes only from the Holy Spirit moving us to that faith and I realized at that moment the Holy Spirit was with me.  I met with my friend Matt that afternoon and shared my faith with him as well.  We talked and prayed together for what seemed like hours.  And I looked back on my life.  I felt so sorry for all the times I had ridiculed believers.  I felt so sorry for all the sins I had committed, for all the ways I had failed God.  But I felt so wonderful and so loved to be saved and to know that the Holy Spirit was with me and that eventually, I would be with God.  My isolation and separation from God was over.   On that day, April 10th 2005, I placed my faith in Jesus Christ.

Praise and glory be to God !!!

Some thoughts for my fellow Christians.  I am sitting at work, eating my lunch and thinking about where I was that day.  I was in the physics department of my alma mater, where I was at the time, working on my bachelor's degree.  I had driven to school for class that morning and as was my habit, intended to stay most of the day in the department computer room, working on homework while leaving for classes during the day. 

I walked down the hall to the computer room when my friend Mike told me an odd thing, "I heard on the radio on the way in this morning that a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers."  My first thought was about the B17 Flying Fortress that flew into the Empire State Building during WWII.  It was a terrible accident, but it was just that; an accident.  I was getting ready to go to class, around 9am I think, when word quickly flew around the department; a second plane had hit the other tower.  It suddenly dawned on me, 'The probability of two accidents is so small...wait...its intentional...its an attack...we are at war."

Several other students were with me in the computer room at the time.  We set up a small TV and managed to get the local news on.  Not long after, we saw CNN's footage of the second plane fly into the towers.  I just watched it again as I sit here eating my lunch.  I didn't know anyone in the Trade Center, or the Pentagon, or on United 93.  But the footage sent chills down my spine.  As I watch it again, it still sends chills and moves me to tears.

I was unsaved at the time and I don't know how I would react to the same events today, but at the time my sorrow was short lived, perhaps because it didn't happen to me, because I didn't know anyone who was hurt or killed.  What little sorrow I did have soon turned into a great rage.  My memories of my time in the military came swirling back.  I was a cadet four years earlier, at a military academy.  I left and resigned my appointment but if I had stayed, I would have been commissioned by then, and probably would have been fighting in Afghanistan not long after.  At the time, I wished I had, that I had stayed and that I would get to go fight.  I even contemplated enlisting, just so I could get a piece of the action.

I look back on those events and those feelings today and I am glad I didn't.  Not because of anything political that has developed around them or the wars that followed since, but because of my salvation.  If I had been in the military still or had enlisted, I may well have fought and if so I might have died, without ever having heard the Gospel, without ever having known its Truth, without ever having known Christ as my Lord.  I think the same of those who died on that day five years ago; hijacker, hostage and victim alike.  Who of them did not know Christ as their Lord?  Who among them faced God without Christ as their advocate and savior?  I wish I could go back, to September 10th of that year, not to join the army, not to kill the hijackers, not to warn anyone.  But with my Bible in hand to sit with just one of these people who isn't saved and tell them, "I have something to share with you and it could make tomorrow the worst day of your life and it could make tomorrow the best day of your life."  But I can't and it almost moves me to tears as I rewatch this footage.  You see, you never have a time machine, you can't go back and you don't have tomorrow.  All you have is today. 

I remember to how I felt when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq.  I cheered.  I was delighted that justice was being done, that hopefully the guilty would be flushed out and punished, that the world would tremble at our country's resolve and that our enemies would never think of us as weak again.  Among all those feelings, some good and some bad looking back, the most striking was my reaction to the celebrations amongst Arabs and Palestinians at the news of the Trade Tower attacks.  At the time, I imagined them dying in droves in Afghanistan and Iraq and that thought too, delighted me.  But like I said, I was unsaved.

I sat several months ago in church listening to a sermon in a series of sermons called "Big Truths from Little Books".  The one I was listening to was from the book of Obediah, next to Jonah in the Old Testament.  It tells of the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians and the subsequent captivity of Israel, but the focus is on the reaction of the nation of Edom, one of Israel's neighbors and bitter enemies.  I can't remember all the details, but the pastor made it clear; God revealed to His prophet Obediah that Edom and the Edomites would suffer under His wrath.  Why?  Not because they helped Babylon, but because they stood by and laughed, they delighted in Israel's ruin.  Look at where Edom stood today; desert and waste.  Were it not for their forebearer, Esau, they would be all but forgotten.  Then the pastor asked us, "Do you delight in the death of muslims?"

You see, whatever my feelings and thoughts are about the politics and the wars, one things is true , Satan is my Enemy.  He is like a lion the Bible tells us, roaming back and forth in the world, looking for people to devour.  Now, America has enemies and Iran has enemies and al-Qeida has enemies; every nation, every person has enemies; lower case "e".  But we all have an Enemy in Satan and in sin.  And that is what I think about as I think back on September 11th.  The hijackers were my enemies and those who would follow them are my enemies but Satan, is my Enemy.  And something else occurs to me; Jesus said to pray for them...not Satan, not my Enemy, but my enemies.  Not my adversary in my spritual war, but my adversaries in worldy war.  Can I do that?  It's a big challenge but I didn't become a Christian to follow me...I became one because I want to follow Jesus.

So, to all my Christian brothers and sisters out there, I want to encourage you to do something today.  If you have friends or family that died in the attacks, I mourn your loss and I pray for your family.  I can never feel or understand fully your pain.  But as I get ready to pray for my lunch, to do my little obligatory prayer, I thought of all that I have written here.  I pray for the families who lost loved ones, for the lives that were shaken to the core.  And I'm going to try to pray for my enemies out there.  I encourage everyone to try too.  Wherever you are, whatever country you are from, pray for your enemies.  My enemies need Christ as much as I ever did.  I encourage you to pray for justice and protection but pray for compassion, for comfort and for mercy too.  But above all, pray for the Holy Spirit's work in their lives because no matter who your enemies are, they only have today and God wants all of us in Heaven to glorify Him.