Goodness week4

 

n the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy , holy is the LORD Almighty; 

the whole earth is full of his glory.” 

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. 

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” 

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. ”      Isaiah 6:1-7

Isaiah acknowledged his own moral shortcomings even as God was calling him to service. Isaiah focused on goodness before he accepted God's call. Goodness must be the bedrock character trait for all who take up the special mantle of service. We have had an overabundance of morally depraved servants in our time, and wherever these

"men and women of God" have

become corrupt, their work has been hampered or even nullified in the lives of those around them. Goodness is essential in performing our call to serve others.

Sadly, the word good has taken on bad connotations in our time. It smacks too much of goody-goody. It implies a kind of hypocrisy. To be a ‘goody-two-shoes’ or to be ‘so heavenly minded we are of no earthly good’ seems the ultimate slur, especially when it is laid at the feet of churchy people.

But genuinely good people have never been in great supply. Those who hunger to be of use to God have not set out to achieve some kind of moral reform and thus appear holy or godly.

The truly good have been called by God, just as Isaiah was, to live in the world. They don’t become good by grunting and sweating in their attempt to keep all the commandments. They love God. They want to please him. Soon, all God desires for them they desire for themselves.

Ironically, when they have become good, they see themselves as Paul perceived, the worst of sinners. Such people readily concede that whatever good is in their lives has been placed in them from the perfect sacrifice of Christ and was nothing they achieved on their own. Then they live in the daily demonstration of the very goodness they deny. They serve others. They have no choice about it. It’s what God expects of them, and his expectation is their delight.