God Saves Sinners

“The biggest obstacle to our spiritual progress is that we feel healthy.” Ray Ortlund, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners

Throughout the past month, my reading of Scripture has been self-consciously topical. The needs of each day have been so insistent that I have required immediate and obvious application from my reading. Over the past few days, though, I have been sensing the need to immerse myself into a more settled book study. I’ve decided to add Isaiah to my readings in the Psalms and in Colossians.

I'm fortunate to have a copy of Ray Ortlund's commentary, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, to use as a reference in this study. Here's a little tidbit from the introduction. You'll notice immediately how my recent reflections situate me right in the middle of the "we" of whom Ortlund speaks:

"[Isaiah's] Hebrew name means, 'The Lord saves.' This man's very identity announces grace from beyond ourselves. We don't like that. We want to retain control, save face, set our own terms, pay our own way. Every day we treat God as incidental to what really matters to us, and we live by our own strategies of self-salvation. We don't think of our choices that way, but Isaiah can see that our lives are infested with fraudulent idols. Any hope that isn't from God is an idol of our own making.”

These strategies of self-salvation are what is under attack in my life right now. I recognize in myself both the search for salvation and the resistance to receive it; I know that I have positively located that salvation in Christ and yet that I continue to search for it in other places. And I know the slavery of those “other places.”

Isaiah describes Judah’s spiritual crisis in chapter 1:

The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds; they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil.

He uses imagery of physical sickness to speak about the spiritual malady of Judah; in a similar fashion, I look at my physical condition and draw conclusions about my spiritual health. I don’t draw these conclusions to suggest that this sickness has befallen me because of my spiritual condition. Instead, I look at it as a manifestation of the overwhelming tendencies of the human heart to self-destruct and to rebel. I think of my portable altars and am saddened. But I do not hope in my heart or its rightness or righteousness; I hope in the fact that God saves sinners.

Father, you have made known to us through your Son and in your word that you save sinners. Your spirit has opened my eyes to the truth that I am such a sinner and that your salvation is my only hope. I confess that I could not pay my own way, save face, or set my own terms. It was on your terms that I came to you, in order that you might receive all the glory for my salvation.

I thank you that you continue to awaken in me a fresh sense of my own sinfulness through conviction. Help me, Father, always to turn from that sin and focus upon Christ. Help me to see that he has borne those sins and put them to death at the cross. Help me to live in Spirit-empowered freedom instead of fleshly idolatry. I give you thanks, even now, for the physical suffering that reminds me of my spiritual need. I thank you for the helplessness that points to hope; for the emptiness that points to satiation; for the pain that points to joy. I trust you that what is mortal will be swallowed up in what is eternal, and I long for that day. Sustain me until I see you face to face, in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.