Please open your Bibles to Isaiah 55, Isaiah chapter 55. I'm going to read the entire chapter. We'll pay particular attention to the first seven verses. We'll go with the first eight verses. You know what, knowing me, we'll probably deal with the entire chapter. Isaiah chapter 55. Hear now the word of the Lord. Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat. Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, Come unto me here, and your soul shall live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, for he hath glorified thee. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For you shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace. Mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. May the Lord continue to bless the reading and the hearing of his word. Let's bow in prayer briefly. Sovereign Lord, you have called us here tonight. Every event of our lives, you've ordained to bring us here, now, to this place, on your day, to close out the remainder of the day hearing your word proclaimed. And I pray that we would all have ears to hear, and that we would look to you and be saved, all the ends of the earth. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen. These words are familiar to many. They're certainly familiar to Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The words that began to bring him under conviction of sin come to mind. The idea, the concept of how man can be made right in the sight of God. For many of us, we have had evangelistic conversations. People have asked us, well, why do you believe what you believe? Why don't you just not? So the very question that was asked of me this past week, a young person, wayward in many ways, wandering adrift, asked me in a very unusual place. There's more to the conversation outside of the realm of our study this evening, but she asked me, She said, why do you believe in Jesus when you could not believe in Jesus? Okay. I said, you're missing the point. Right now, I cannot not believe in Jesus, but it's nothing that I've done for myself. The idea of how we might be made right in God's sight came to mind in the hour-long conversation that took place with a dozen and a half other people witnessing it. How are we made right in the sight of God? Is it possible to be made right in the sight of God? Jesus in Matthew chapter 11, what we read earlier, said that there's no way that anybody can be made right in the sight of God because they won't recognize the father or the son unless what? Unless they themselves reveal themselves to that person. And so by that rationale, why bother if I'm not the one to whom God reveals himself? And what does Jesus say? He said the gospel call, a very similar gospel call to our text tonight, he issues it to all. He says, come unto me all ye who are labor and are heavy laden. And of course, all of us labor and are heavy laden. because all of us in our natural state are laboring for ourselves and to make ourselves right, to live what we perceive to be a good life. But the problem is, as Isaiah tells us in our text this evening, we don't understand righteousness. We don't understand the ways that would make us right in the sight of God unless God initiates the action first in our lives. We're gonna get to the beginning, but let's jump down to verses eight and nine. God says this. He says, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. He says, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. We simply cannot work our way to heaven because we don't understand the instructions. And yet try as we might, We will labor and labor and labor not believing in God, not giving honor or respect or dignity to the one who made us, the one who made all things, and the one who has a right and a claim to everything that there is. But we don't stop. We continue on down our road. We decide for ourselves what is right, We decide for ourselves what is wrong. We even decide for ourselves what scripture is and what it's not. These things I like, these things not so much, so I will explain them away. I will pull them and twist them and distort them in such a way so as to not mean what they claim to mean, what they clearly mean, if anyone had eyes to see and ears to hear. That's what we do because we can't do anything but that in our natural condition. Our ways and our thoughts are simply not God's ways or thoughts until God changes us, until he does something that he doesn't have to do, but he does for his mere good pleasure and because it was his sovereign plan from creation past. My young friend asking me, why do you believe in Jesus? Because Jesus changed me. Now, ultimately, we got around in our conversation to passages like Romans 1, like the beginning portion of Romans 1, where Paul says that God has clearly given mankind enough information to know that he exists. That it's clear, it's plain before him. And we talked about that. I said, look. That phone you're not supposed to have in your hand, you're supposed to have in your backpack. It was designed, yes. The existence of the phone speaks to the designer of the phone, yes. Had no problem acknowledging that. The book that I hold in my hand, I picked up a book off the table. Might have been, it certainly wasn't scripture at the time. I had that tucked away in my backpack. I said, the author of this book, obviously wrote this book, right? And we know that because the book exists, yes? No problem admitting that. I said creation around us. The existence of the creation itself speaks to the creator and the designer, yes? Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. Lacy. Let me slow you down right there. But that's what we all do. Left on our own, we have no problem acknowledging the small designs, but we have big problem acknowledging the design that's beyond us, that's above us, that's greater than. And for the record, I have no problem with this person asking the question. Frankly, it was an exceptionally insightful question for someone that didn't necessarily know exactly the road down which we would travel after that one hour. Now, just to skip to the end, As we talked about it, she said, yeah, there were a few times there I wanted to punch you in the face. I said, that's okay. I said, the truth will set you free, but sometimes it'll take you off. It's all right. Because that's what God's ways do for the natural man, for the one that hasn't been changed, for the one that's laboring for themselves. It upsets us, because I'm human. My condition is your condition, is their condition, is every condition that is commanded in Scripture to repent of. It's the human condition to be rebels left on our own. But the issue, the blessing, in fact, the encouragement from Scripture is that we're not left on our own. We don't have to labor as though we're unaware and we have to just do enough and hope for the best. My conversation with this person came back to something like this, came back to Matthew 11, came back to Isaiah 55, where Isaiah says, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat. In the ancient Near East, water was sold. If you didn't have money, you didn't have water. You had access to a well in some cases, but this concept of coming and buying without money Contextually, it would have made no sense to the person that knew you needed to have some money in order to play in that society. No different than now, because what's old is new and there's nothing new under the sun. If you don't have the right stuff, you aren't accepted in the world. So this call in Isaiah 55 to come and gain access to something that gives life, even though you don't have the ability to compensate in the simple exchange, it shouldn't make sense to people. And in fact, for most people, it doesn't. You share the gospel with somebody, you say, we are liars and adulterers and murderers at heart and blasphemers and we are rebels. And we rightly deserve and are indeed under God's wrath and curse, but God doesn't want us to die and have to pay the penalty for our sin. He sent his son to pay the debt that we owed so that we might live eternally with him, if we would trust in Christ's work and not ourselves. You share that with somebody that it's a free gift. You can't do anything to earn it. What will a lot of people say? Well, what's the catch? There is no catch except for the fact that you have to repent of your own righteousness in addition to your own unrighteousness. You can't think you bring anything to the table that makes you clean in the sight of God. Oh, it can't be that simple. There's got to be something I can do, right? I can contribute a little bit. No, nothing. Isaiah tells us in the beginning of chapter 55, bring nothing to the table, bring nothing to the transaction, but come and take, take and eat and drink by wine and milk without money and without price. That's the gospel call right there. As sure as it is at the end of Matthew chapter 11, when Jesus says, come all ye who labor and are heavy laden. And I will give you rest. We just read it earlier. If I can find it quickly. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. The easy yoke is that it's free. It's free. And Isaiah tells us just that. He tells us in verse two, he asks the question, why are we focused spending money on the things that aren't bread, that aren't going to provide us life, that aren't going to provide us sustenance, our labor, our time, our efforts for that which satisfies not? Why do we do that? Because as rebels, we don't know any better. We will try to do enough good things. In fact, if you asked me prior to my conversion, that's exactly what I would have said, because that's exactly what I said. When the man who would eventually become my pastor and my father-in-law asked me that time-honored question, if you were to die tonight, you stood before the Lord, and he asked you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say? My answer was, because I meant well and because the good outweighed the bad, like there's some sort of cosmic scale. And eventually, I mean, essentially a lot of our friends and relatives and neighbors think that, that there's some sort of weird cosmic scale and we have to do enough good to balance out the bad and maybe tip the scales and the good a little bit and then we get let in. Nevermind that the bad might be horrific. I mean, and we can also go farther back and wonder by what standard are we measuring good and bad? And isn't it often the case that if left to our own devices, we would set up a standard of goodness or badness that is about as far from scripture as God says is as far from scripture. As high as the heavens are from the earth, the thoughts of God versus the thoughts of man. Yeah, that's how we would handle things. unless something happens, unless God intervenes. Because back in the Matthew passage, we see in verse 27, neither knoweth any man the father save the son, and he to whomsoever the son will reveal him. active language for God the Father and God the Son. And if God is the active agent, then we are the passive recipients. We are the recipients of God's intervention into our lives. We've done nothing to bring it about. We haven't gotten ourselves together and cleaned ourselves up enough for God to take notice. The psalmist tells us that God is angry with the wicked every day. Now that flies in the face of modern evangelism that says that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And he's standing at the door of your heart, hat in hand, knocking humbly. And if you just let him in and give him control over your life, then all will be well. And so we'll turn the lights down and we'll play the organ nice and low. And if you don't want to come to the altar, then just raise your hand and we'll pay attention. But that's not what the scripture says. God is angry with the wicked every day because he cannot abide sin, and that's all we do in our natural state. All of the good we think we do, we're just piling rag upon rag upon rag at the foot of the cross as though We look to the Lord and say, see all these good things that I provide for you. Surely now I'm acceptable in your sight. Because that's how messed up our heads are until God clears our thinking. Until God reveals himself and his son to us. And he does that by sending the Holy Spirit to convict us of sin. to convert us from rebels to redeemed, and to comfort us, not only as we walk with the Lord, but in recognizing the sinfulness of our sin, and how much we have offended a holy God. He changes who we are. Paul would tell the Romans to not be conformed to the ways of the world, but to be what? Transformed by the renewing of our mind. That language speaks to some active agent renewing our mind. Again, Paul is pointing out that we are the passive recipients of God's active work in our life. And so we can't say, well, I've got this money, Lord. I would like this water and perhaps some of that wine and bread, please. No. We come to the one that can provide us the things to live, specifically because we recognize that we don't deserve to come at all. But like the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, we stand in the back of the sanctuary, pounding on our chest, not looking up to the heavens and recognizing that we have no hope unless God has mercy on us. And it is that mercy to which Isaiah refers. that God is willing to receive us and give us something freely that we don't deserve. We don't deserve this. We don't deserve the wine and the water and the milk and the bread and the life. We deserve to go hungry. We deserve to suffer and die and be damned. We are dead in our trespasses and our sins. But God, being rich in mercy, does not leave us that way. And he never left us that way. If you'll recall, Isaiah is an Old Testament book. And in many of our conversations with wayward friends or family, or simply rebellious people that we know, what have we heard? And sadly, maybe some well-intended but uninformed brothers and sisters in Christ, they'll say something like, Well, you know, the Old Testament saints were saved by doing these things that the Old Testament God talked about, and we're saved, like the New Testament people, by just believing in Jesus. Now, for our rebellious friends, we can give them a pass. They don't know, because prior to our conversion, we didn't know. but for our brothers and sisters in Christ that maybe have that idea, we can gently remind them, hey, the author of Hebrews challenges your assertion by pointing other Hebrews to the hall of fame of faith that we see in the latter portion of the book, reminding us that by faith, Rahab and Abraham and all of the other saints that we see in the Old Testament Paul as well has a similar problem with your point of view because he notes Abraham believed and it was counted unto him as righteousness. For that matter, Moses has a problem with your view as well, and we can go on and on and on. Isaiah has a similar problem with the view that people were saved differently in the Old Testament than they are in the New. It's the same faith. It just has a different direction. It's looking. The Old Testament saint, trusted in the promises of God, that he would send someone, and he looks forward. The New Testament saint trusts in the promises of God, but looks back on what was done. Our Old Testament brothers and sisters didn't see it come to fruition. We see it in the person and work of Christ, in the work of the cross, in his birth. I'm gonna get this out of order. His birth, his life, his death, his burial, his resurrection, and his ascension. All of it. We can look back on it. They looked forward to it. It's the same faith. We still trust in the promises of God, even though we have no right to be included in the covenant at all. None. And Isaiah tells us this. He said, everyone that thirsteth, all of us thirst. In the same way, that Jesus says to come unto him all you who labor and are heavy laden. We are all thirsty because we're tired. Tired of trying to be good people. Because on our own, we don't even know what a good person is. We make up a bunch of standards. Maybe we baptize it with a Bible verse. But unless our ways are conformed to God's ways, we don't have a clue about what genuine goodness is. And the blessing, the beauty of the gospel call is that's exactly what he does for us. He changes us. He removes the heart of stone, like Ezekiel reminds us. He gives us a heart of flesh. He transforms us by the renewing of our mind. What we once thought was evil, we now think is good. No. What we once thought was good, now we see as evil. Everything gets transformed when God intervenes in the life of a sinner. That's what grace does, that's what mercy does, that's what gospel transformation does, that's what the third person of the Trinity's work is in our lives. We can come freely to God the Father because of the work of the Son, by the power of the Spirit applying all of it to us. It's a Trinitarian salvation, we can come and buy because of the work someone else did for us and for our salvation. we don't have to have it all together. In fact, earlier in Matthew chapter 11, Jesus says it's actually better that we don't have it all together. Remember in Matthew chapter 11, he says in verse 25, that it was good that the father hid things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes. Now that doesn't mean that smart people or prudent people can't receive the free gift of salvation. What he's saying is those people that think that they're wise in their own eyes and prudent and that prudence and that wisdom of self and from self and originating in the human psyche, that somehow that makes them presentable and acceptable in the sight of God? He's like, yeah, hit it from those people. Because remember the people for whom Jesus had the harshest words, the religious establishment that sought the praises of men rather than the obedience of God. Jesus says, it's better you show it, you reveal this stuff to the babes, to the youngsters, to the children. They can't do anything to affect their salvation at all. It's good. Because it throws the human mind's equilibrium off. Because an adult human mind thinks, well, I'll just do enough good stuff, you know, make it outweigh the bad, and I'll avoid the bad things, and eventually it'll be fine. Someone once said to me, if all we could do, if our country could just live by the Ten Commandments, we would be fine. And I said, sister, I appreciate the sentiment. It's never going to happen because there's no way natural man can live the Ten Commandments. Because by definition, when he thinks he can live them out, he's broken the first and the worst. And if you think you can do all of the law and you violate one, it's like you violated all of it. The only way we can live as God's people is if we recognize the preface to the Ten Commandments. Exodus chapter 20, verses one and two. We focus on the latter portion of the chapter. the actual commandments, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't focus on God's law, don't hear what I'm not saying there, but sometimes we gloss over verses one and two. If you don't have your Bibles, you're not flipping there, that's perfectly fine, I've got it right here. Moses writes this, and God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. And then there unfolds the Ten Commandments. So God reminds his people what he has done for them, that he's rescued them, that he's redeemed them. They didn't do anything to justify it, to earn it, to make themselves right. They were slaves making bricks in Egypt. But what did they actually do? They cried out to the Lord. They submitted to the Lord. They called out to him for mercy. God remembers his covenant, and what does he do? He redeems them. They didn't earn it. It was God's sovereign action on their behalf. And he reminds them of that as he lays out and unfolds how he wants them to live in light of what they've already done. And so out of love and joy and gratitude, the godly saints of the Old Testament essentially came to the well. and they bought water and wine and milk. They didn't have money. They trusted in the promises of God. Certainly, godly saints obeyed the Lord with regards to worship and dietary laws and civil laws and those things, but they were trusting in the lawgiver, not trusting in the works to save them in and of themselves. The ones who actually did that were the ones that Jesus rebuked the harshest. that in and of themselves just keeping all of those laws would make them right or would prove their rightness and their righteousness. No, we are saved by grace through faith from Genesis to Revelation. And we see it all through the scriptures when God changes our mind so that we can see it. Isaiah tells us all through the beginning of chapter 55, He says, incline your ear, listen, pay attention, come to me here and your soul shall live. Those are actions that we're supposed to do in submission to God. To incline our ear, to pay attention to the Lord, we're submitting to him and his instruction in our lives. To approach him, to come to him for all that we have and all that we are. And he tells us what's going to happen. Your soul shall live. I'll make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. There are promises to be had that we need to remember. The Christian life isn't one of the doldrums and the brutality of just rank, simple, blunt, dead obedience. I'm gonna do all these things because if I don't, God will punish me. No, I get to do these things because God has changed me. The Christian life is a life of gratitude because we don't deserve it, but it's exactly what we get. when we come to the Lord, when we incline our ear. And when we recognize that it's God that's made us come to him, that's caused us to come to him, we ought to be that much more grateful. Isaiah says, seek the Lord while he may be found. Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. And return unto the Lord and he will have mercy upon him. And to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. seek, call upon him, rest in the Lord, trust in the Lord. We don't deserve the opportunity to call him our Lord, to call him our Father, and yet that's what he provides us. So there are some people that would say, well, Faith then is the gift that man gives to God? No, God forbid that we think that. Because then at that point we've turned faith into a work. I'm gonna be faithful and then take that faithfulness and present it to the Lord as my good gift. And see Lord how faithful I am? No. Book of Jonah tells us that salvation is of the Lord. And that we're dead in our trespasses until God makes us alive in Christ. We can't boast in our faith. We've done nothing to earn it. We can't boast in the things that we have because God has provided them. Because without that intervention, the things that God says are abomination are the things that we would judge the standard of goodness by in our lives. The very things that God rejects are the things that we accept until God changes our thinking to conform to his own. We cannot conform our thinking to God's without his intervention in our life. It can't possibly be because the natural man doesn't receive the things of God. He can't even understand them because they're spiritual in nature. Isaiah goes on, and he says, as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven returneth not thither, but watereth the earth and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please. So what is it that God pleases as his word goes out? Well, that those people whose ears he inclines to cause them to hear, would hear and repent and believe. You say, well, pastor, I don't know who those people are. Yeah, I don't either. That's why it's that much more important to share the gospel, to have an answer for the hope that lies within us. So when you are confronted with why do you believe in Jesus when you could just not, you'll know why. Because dear friend, left on my own, I would be in a world of hurt. And I was, until Jesus intervened in my life and showed things to me that caused me to realize that the things that I valued were the things that God rejects. And the things that I'm rejecting are actually the things that God values. He showed me the sinfulness of my sin and my desperate need for salvation, and then He showed to me how He provided that for me in the person and the work of His Son, the only Redeemer of His elect people, Jesus Christ. Dear friend, I couldn't believe, or I couldn't not believe any more than I could just stop being human. That ought to be the sort of answer we give to our unbelieving friends, recognizing that it's quite possible that they won't understand that, because none of us do until God applies his spirit. And that should be our prayer for our non-believing friends, that as we have this answer for the hope that lies within us, and we give it with gentleness and respect, that the spirit would apply those words, apply the scriptures, because our language, when we talk to our friends who don't believe, ought to be saturated with it, because it's the word that converts. It's not us. It's not our slick evangelism program. It's not having all the answers to the right questions. It's not a script that we follow like we're some door-knocking cult. Far from it. It is the scriptures that we have, that we hide in our heart, that we pray, that we share with our brothers and sisters in Christ, that we read daily. It's the scriptures that save our souls, and it's the scriptures with the spirits leading that can save the souls of our friends and neighbors who don't know the Lord, who haven't had him revealed to them yet. The gospel call is simply this, exactly what we see in Isaiah 55.1. Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. And he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat. In our natural state, we've got nothing. We come to the cross. And by God's grace, and because of his mercy, he gives us everything. He gives us a place at his table. He gives us a crown for our head, shoes for our feet. He changes us from wicked disgusting sinners, and to sons and daughters of the Most High God." That's the bottom line from the Scriptures. Old Testament, New Testament, it doesn't matter. Come and receive the free gift of salvation without the works that you think are necessary because they're not. It's a free gift. It's yours for the taking. If you would repent of your righteousness, repent of your unrighteousness, and trust in the finished work of Christ and the finished work of Christ alone. Let's bow in prayer. Father, we are thankful beyond measure for the blessings that we have in Christ. We are grateful for the free gift of salvation. We pray, Lord, that we would not lord it over anyone that you have seen fit to save us. Help us to point past ourselves and to the cross of Christ. For our non-believing friends and family members, we ask that you would reveal your son to them. Father, if we could play a role in that, then that would be fantastic. But if not, Lord, your will be done. But please save our rebellious friends and family and help us to point to the cross where those who have nothing can come and get everything. It's in Christ's name that we pray, amen.