A Gift for God

 December 12 2021

Isaiah 55:1-13

         To say that the season of Christmas is a season of giving is kind of an understatement. I mean, we all know that at Christmas we are to come bearing gifts, that’s always been the expectation. So, if someone suggests changing the rules its easy to be suspicious. You know, if somebody tells you that this year let’s not exchange gifts you might not be able to contain your excitement. You get sucked in to the very idea that this year everything is going to be different. But then as you’re heading to bed on Christmas Eve you notice a package under the tree and upon closer inspection you discover to your horror that your name is on said package. When you ask about why there is a package with your name on it you find that while yes, there was an agreement to not exchange gifts this year there was this thing that had caught their eye and she decided on a whim to just get it for you. Without even realizing it, the whole dynamic of Christmas has been altered because everyone knows that if you are given a gift then you have to have a gift to give in exchange. I mean, the least desired gift on Christmas is a big load of guilt because you have been given a wonderful gift and all you can do is to smile and say thank you because you have nothing to give them.

         We just all seem to understand this whole idea that if we are given a gift then we are to give a gift in return. It just makes sense that we don’t want to be caught empty handed when the the gift exchange happens. So, with that in mind, we might want to listen again to what our scripture is telling us today. Isaiah here is recording the words of God who is inviting those who hear him to come on in for a bite and a beverage and the good thing is it won’t cost you anything at all. Now, where I come from when somebody gives you something for free that qualifies as a gift. So, in these first few verses of this fifty-fifth chapter, what we have is God offering us a gift. If we are thirsty, we can come on in and quench our thirst. If we are hungry we are invited to come and eat the good stuff, to delight ourselves in the rich food at God’s all-you-can-eat buffet . The good news is that it won’t cost you anything; if you have no money, hey, no worries, you can come right on in and fill up. This is God’s gift to you. Since we all know how awkward it is to not have a gift to share when somebody gives you a gift, and its obvious that God has given you a gift, then, I guess, the question  becomes just what will be your gift to God this Christmas?

         Perhaps the best thing for us to do is to take and unwrap this present that God has given us so that we might know just what might be the appropriate gift for us to give to God. Just what does God mean when he tells us that those who are thirsty that they are to come to the waters? Well, in Isaiah, we find in the forty-fourth chapter that God states that he will pour water out upon the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground. He will pour his Spirit upon his people’s offspring and his blessing will be on their descendants. They will spring up among the grass like willows by flowing streams. So, when God invites us to come to the waters he is really telling us to come and allow his Spirit to fill us and satisfy our thirsting for the world to be set right. When God goes further and tells us to delight ourselves with rich food its isn’t hard for us to remember the vision that God gave to Isaiah in the twenty-fifth chapter where God explains to Isaiah that there on the mountain God is going to make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. There, God will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations . God is going to swallow up death forever and God himself will wipe away the tears from all faces. This is what is being remembered in the beginning of the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, and now the reason for death being defeated is further explained as being that the Spirit of God himself, his life, will become our life and it is this life that death cannot defeat.  This is what God is telling us when he pleads with us to incline our ears, to lean in to what he is saying because when we come to God and hear what he has to say then we will find life. This life will be an everlasting life because God tells us that with us he is going to make an everlasting covenant, an enduring bond with us that death will be unable to break. This life is the gift that God desires to give to each of us, and it is a true gift in that it is given without a price tag; all we must do is to accept and find delight in this present God is offering to us.

         God goes on to tell us more about this gift that he has for us. He tells us that this everlasting bond has its foundations in God’s steadfast, sure love for David whom God promised that the house and kingdom of David would forever be before his face. It was God who took David from the sheepfold and formed him into the great king of Israel. David was the one we are told, that had a heart for God. As a king who loved God, David was a leader and commander who witnessed to the power of God. It is the descendant of David, the one who Isaiah refers to simply as the Servant, who like David, is one who once again would have a heart for God. It was the Servant, who will be the fulfillment of God’s promise to David, the one who would be the promised everlasting king of the house of David. It is this one called the Servant who will accept the will of God and allow himself to be crushed, who will experience grief and sickness because of the iniquities of God’s people. And it is the Servant who will give his life as an offering for the guilt of God’s people. Yet even so, Isaiah also records, that the Servant, out of the anguish of his soul would see and be satisfied that through his knowledge, God’s righteous Servant will make many to be accounted righteous because he was the one who took upon himself the evil of his people. This is why the Servant would be the one that God would lift up and exult so that he alone might be Lord of all.

         It is when God’s eternal covenant with David is upheld in the life of the one Isaiah knows as the Servant, this is when the nations, all of the people of the earth, will come to God’s people because through the Servant, the glory of God will shine in their midst. This was Isaiah’s hope as he writes about it in the second chapter of his book where we read that many people will come and say, “Let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob, that he might teach us his ways, that we might walk in his paths.” The glory of the Lord is his life, and when the Servant comes and deals with the evil of God’s people then at last they will be empowered to live out the right way of living. When this righteous life is lived out before the nations they will come running to Gods people so they might be able to live that life for themselves.

         So, this gift God is giving to us is the gift of life but it is not just any life but it is rather his life, the life of God, this is the gift God is giving to us, a gift he gives to us without price. This life is being held out for us to take and receive but because of the nature of this gift, that it is the life of God, this requires us to search for God, to cry out to him, for he is the one who has the operating instructions that we need so that the gift can move by the power of the Spirit in us. If we desire to hold this gift within our hands then everything else that we might cling so tightly to, we have to let go of, to set aside our old tired worn out way of life and take hold with a firm grasp this new gift of life. When we forsake, the wicked unrighteous ways we used to live by and turn to receive the gift God has for us then we are told that there is God welcoming us with compassion, forgiving and forgetting all of our old ways that brought him so much grief.  God tells us that his ways are not our ways, that his thoughts are not his thoughts and we are left wondering just what are those ways and thoughts? The answer as to what are the thoughts and just what are the ways of God is exactly what we have experienced when we turn to God to receive the gift he has for us, compassion and forgiveness. The thoughts of God focus on his love which is the same ache a mother has for her child because the word “compassion” comes from the Hebrew word for “womb”. This is an important term for us to understand the thoughts of God. As we learned last week, God desires us to know him as our Creator, to understand that God has intentionally created each one of us, that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. It is when we know this that we then understand that no matter where we go, from the heights of heaven to the depths of the sea, we can have the assurance that God will be there with us because we have been created by him. So, we have this bond with God from before we were born this is the reason for our assurance of the compassion of God toward us. This relationship that we have with God then is also the reason why we know that God is a God who abundantly pardons. You see, what is of utmost importance to God is us, who we are, that we are his masterpiece, and because of who we are God is willing to suffer when we do what goes against him. This is what the Servant of God demonstrated in his life that God is a God willing to bear upon himself the horrible grief and pain that we bring into our relationship with God. The source of this pain and grief that we bring into our relationship with God comes about precisely because we refuse to understand that not only are we fearfully and wonderfully made by God but so is every person on the planet. Every person we encounter is someone God intentionally created and therefore every person is someone God has compassion for, the same feeling a mother has for her child that she has carried in her womb. What happens though is that when people wrong us all we can see is the ways that others have hurt us, all of the ways that the other person has wronged us, all of the ways that this wrong tells us that this world is filled with people who just aren’t right. How easy it is for us to separate the world into a world of “us” and “them”! Yet, how also very wrong of us to do so because there is only us, people who are all fearfully and wonderfully made by God. This is what it means to learn the thoughts of God. Only as we understand how God thinks about the people we encounter can we then understand the ways of God. The ways of God always leads with how precious each person is in his eyes and because of the infinite worth God places upon each person, this is why God is willing to pay the infinite price necessary to continually repair the relationship he has with each and every person. This is what is meant by us walking in the ways of God that as we go about our dealings with each other that we might behold each person as someone who is worth everything to God.

         Now when we begin to understand just what are the thoughts and ways of God it is fairly easy as to why we would just as soon take this gift of life that God is attempting to give to us and give it back to him. We would much rather be people who demand justice, to seek others to pay in full for all the ways they have harmed us. To this we need to heed the words of James from the second chapter of his letter where he teaches us that judgment is without mercy for those who show no mercy. If we refuse to extend mercy, seeking rather to be people of justice and judgment then we will be people who refuse to live according to the ways of God and find ourselves under the judgment of God. This is why that if we desire to experience God’s mercy, we have to be people of mercy when we deal with others.                 It is God’s mercy that we all need so desperately for we can all confess that we have not always treated the people around us with the infinite worth that they have in the eyes of God. Too often we have placed the value of ourselves and our needs to be greater than the worth and dignity of a child of God. This is why it was the will of God that his Servant, the one we know as Jesus, the one who knew so intimately the thoughts of his Heavenly Father, this Jesus would be the one who would take upon himself our iniquities, laying down his life as the greatest act of love. Jesus knew that those who had cried out, “Crucify him” were nonetheless people God had created and even in the depths of their sin, they were still precious to God. It was that Jesus knew that his Heavenly Father was willing to pardon even those who crucified his own dear Son this is why Jesus could cry out that he also forgave his enemies, thus the pardon of the Father was indeed the very pardon of the Son. And since Jesus is forever united with us through his coming in our flesh we know that this life can be our life too. We too at last can look in the eyes of another and know that they, just like us, are worth the gift of the precious blood of Christ. In light of this grace, we are free to extend grace and mercy just as God first had extended that grace and mercy to us.This is what is meant by living a life patterned by the very thoughts and ways of God.

         You see, when we live out the life of God, when his thoughts and his ways are our thoughts and our ways, then God’s creation has, at last, not returned to him empty. God’s word, the word that spoke our world into being will at last have been said to have fulfilled what it set out to do, to have a world where the life of God is reflected back to God through what he created. At long last, the curse under which our world lives, symbolized by the thorn and the briar, will have at last been broken. All of creation which has languished for eons under the futility of sin will be set free so that the mountains and hills break out into song and the trees will clap their hands in praise. This is why we can say that to receive this gift of God, to accept his life and make it our very own, this is a world changing event. What God gets out of his giving is that his name, his reputation, which has been tarnished by the evil and sin that comes about through our refusal to know God’s thoughts and to walk in his ways, this name will at last be high and lifted up.

         So, ok, God has given you a gift. He has placed this gift in your hands and now comes the awkward part where you have to figure out just what it is that you can give to God in return. The good thing is that Jesus already has revealed just what it is that God desires so there’s no guess work on our part. The story Jesus tells is found in the fifth chapter of Matthew where  Jesus speaks about a person who presents his gift at the altar. The altar was the place where God’s people were given the assurance of their forgiveness so it makes sense that upon receiving the gift of God’s forgiveness one would understand that giving God a gift would be appropriate. But Jesus says that a better gift when attempting to respond to God’s forgiveness is to pause for a moment and think about whether anyone has something against you. As you think about God and his mercy, think of the ways that you have failed to be merciful, the ways that you have been hurtful towards someone, when you have a name then Jesus says for us to drop everything and go. Go and confess to another the ways that you have not treated them as the ones who have been fearfully and wonderfully made by God and this time get it right. Live as if the very life of God lives in you, that you have experienced the power of his thoughts and his ways and now there is no better way to respond to God than to treat others as God first treated you. Jesus says that this is the best gift you can give God, the gift you should give before any other gift. To seek to forgive and be forgiven, to be reconciled is demonstrating that you know the higher thoughts and ways of God. God has given you a gift, the gift of life. Jesus has paid the price for it. The question for you this day is this: are you ready to give God his gift today? Just who is it that you need to forgive? Just who is that you need to seek forgiveness and be reconciled?  May the joy of giving this greater gift be yours today! Amen!