chosen a passage of scripture familiar to some of you perhaps from the book of Isaiah chapter 6. We'll read the first eight verses. This particular portion of scripture is often used by preachers and missionaries to encourage those who may feel the urging of the Holy Spirit to take to the mission field and thus to encourage them to do so. However, This portion of scripture, I do not believe, was written for missionary conferences or for encouraging the psalm into missionary endeavors, although I consider it to be a valid scripture, perhaps for such. I think the primary reason why this passage of scripture was read is so that we might, along with Isaiah, get a view, albeit a second-hand view of what it is like to be in the presence of God. I trust that you here who named Jesus Christ as your Savior know what it's like to be in the presence of God. But since Isaiah did so by reason or through the process of a vision, Perhaps it would do us well if we would just investigate for a moment or two what it was like for Isaiah and I must tell you that for Isaiah it was a time of tremendous uplifting and Awesomeness he was filled with awe. This is the one time when the adjective awesome, which the kids just wear out is really valid Here it was an awesome experience, an experience filled with awe. And the year the King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. And above it stood the seraphim, each one had six wings. With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto the other and to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. The whole earth is filled, is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him who cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, woe is me, for I am undone. Because I am a man of unclean lips and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. And then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth and said, lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, here am I, send me." Now let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, our Holy God, our gracious Redeemer, our Lord, our King, we come to you, though we are, too, a people of unclean lips. And we come to you asking that your presence would be experienced here by each of us and that we who are gathered here shall be partakers at this moment of what we experienced at the moment of our new birth that we would for the moment now experience being partakers of the divine nature and then perhaps Holy Father you would be gracious enough to us to enable us to leave this place with the knowledge of your presence about us. So use our moments and our thoughts, our words, our meditations, our worship to invade our thoughts and our hearts, to capture our minds. and energize our tired spirits. I pray in Christ's name, amen. As is so often the case, there have been those numbered among us, perhaps each one of us at one point of time or another, or maybe even at this moment, who have left off in their focus, in their zealousness for things of God, who have moved away from their first love, whose occupation of mind has become encumbered not with heavenly things, not with holy things, godly things, but with the kind of things that encumbered them before they ever experienced a new birth. That's a reversion. That leads to a sad state of affairs because the result of that is being alone. It's possible for someone to be in the company of many people and still be alone. Now from a doctrinal or theological perspective, God has promised that he would never leave his people alone. And that's a very good thing that he made that promise and made that statement, and I'll tell you why. Because during those periods of time when we are nearly certain that we have been left alone, or that we are alone, when we have moved away from him, because I must tell you that God never moves away from us. And so that when that loneliness begins to creep up on us and we begin to feel not attracted, just not attracted to, to heavenly things, and not attracted to the things which reveal heavenly things, such as his word, and not attracted to the hearing of the word priest, and not attracted to getting off by oneself and speaking to and communicating with God, when we get like that, It isn't because God has left us. It's quite the reverse. And I think maybe we need to take a few moments to consider that while it is true that we sometimes will gradually move away from God, it is also true that we can instantly get back. I'd like to talk to you for a few moments about that. Notice Isaiah. Isaiah found himself in the presence of God. In fact, he was experiencing what I think would be very nice for me to experience. Probably you too. An overwhelming sense of God's presence. Overwhelming. Have you ever been overwhelmed by God? I mean overwhelmed. So that you could hardly think of anyone else or think of anyone else but God. The fact that you are in the presence of this thrice holy God who is always protected by the wings of the seraphim and there you are standing in his midst and his very presence begins to surround you like the smoke surrounded Isaiah and how excited that would be. Would you ever do that? Has that ever happened to you? That's a very good thing because that should happen often. I do not say that we become so occupied with heavenly things that we can't think of anything else all the time, but I must tell you that it's an experience we ought to have on some kind of a regular basis. It's like being malnourished and suddenly fed and nourished again. It's like being ill and suddenly vibrant again. It's like being nearly dead and suddenly very alive again. Well, if you think that would be a very nice thing to have happen to you, if you would really love to have the kind of closeness to your Heavenly Father through His blessed Son, Jesus Christ, then you ought to pay attention, I think, to your life, because it's your life that robs you of those things. It's your very life, it's you, the very person of yourself that does that. I was talking to a man today who stopped by my office to tell me he was going out of town because he had to go to a funeral in Florida for his niece, who was 41 years old and died a terrible death of cancer, left two children behind, and she had everything going for her. a doctorate in education, and her husband was a PhD in physics, and it was just one of those kind of families, everything gone, and she was dead, and he said, there is a God, I sure wonder what he's doing, in times like this. And I said, well, you know, there is a God. There is God, no question about that. And he knows exactly what he's doing. that he sees what we don't see, and has the power to do what we can't even begin to think of doing. And to really know God, one must get close to him. He said, I have the foggiest idea how to do that. He's out the door, and I said, when you come back, stop and see me. I'd like to tell you how. And maybe he will. At any rate, the point is that I'd like to tell you how. For you, it's a little different. It's not like you're starting from ground zero. It's a matter of getting back to where you used to be, if you used to be there. That's probably as good a question as any as you could ask yourself. Have you ever been there in the first place? When I was saved, was I filled with the energy and the enthusiasm of the knowledge that I had suddenly become a new creation in Christ? Have I been uplifted by the Holy Spirit of God and set upon a solid rock of faith, a foundation that undergirds me, so that when I face the calamities that are bound to come in my life, I will be able to stand as... Has that happened to me? When we experience his presence, we will want to be quiet and listen to him. Or if you wish to experience his presence, you probably want to be quiet anyway. Isaiah said, Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. If Isaiah was not aware of anything else, and he was aware of many things, the one thing he most certainly was aware of was the holiness of the person whose presence he stood. Holy, holy, holy, cried the seraphim. They ought to know. They were the ones charged with the responsibility of guarding the throne of his holiness. If any beings would know about the holiness of God, it would be them. And they cried out thrice, holy, holy, holy. And Isaiah was immediately aware that he was in the presence of divine holiness, the most pure, the most thorough, the most eternal holiness that one could ever, ever stand. He was there. And what advantages are there? might ask you to being in the presence of that kind of holiness. I know that you could probably list some advantages of being in the presence of the God of the universe, the omnipotent king of all creation. I would think that you would grant that having him for your for your closest friend and constant companion and being aware of the presence of that person would accrue unto you certain advantages that would not be to unbelievers. But the idea of standing in the presence and being surrounded by this holy person, really holy. Another matter. And if you are going to come into the presence of God and be aware of his presence surrounding you and being with you and gaining all the benefits of being there and the peace and comfort that comes with it, you certainly will be aware that as you encounter Jesus Christ, you will be aware of his infinite holiness. Isaiah saw the seraphim and they said, holy, holy, holy. Well. Isaiah said, I live in an unholy society. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. So do we. In fact, I think our society is far worse than Isaiah's, believe it or not, and I'll tell you why. In Isaiah's society, even though the people of God, the Hebrew people, the chosen people, had moved away and had adulterated their worship. They still lived under the restraint of a holy law. They still were required by the rules and values of their society to live in conformity with a holy law. Well, I think that our society is far more blatant. We're more blatantly irreverent than they were. We're irreverent in our conversation, in our art, our music, in our entertainment. There's irreverence everywhere. Had a discussion at lunch the other day. Three or four of us were sitting around and one of the women who worked in the office out of a clear blue sky because somebody else was talking about a certain television program said, You ever watch the Simpsons? And this person said, not me. She said, why? This guy's not a Christian. She said, why? He said, well, it's anti-family. And another man who was sitting there said, it's irreverent. She said, no, no, no, no. It's entertaining. She has teenage kids and some teenagers. And she says, you have to expect your children to read between the lines. They obviously don't think that's the real stuff. That's a training film. They use cartoons for training films for lots of things, but for children particularly, are cartoons used for training films, and that's a training film. And what is training the children to be is irreverent. See, we don't need to be trained to do that. Our conversation concerning Jesus Christ is degraded. It degrades him. Our society laughs at him. But holiness, on the other hand, speaks of absolute purity and perfection. Wouldn't you prefer to be connected to the purity of the holiness of Jesus Christ? than to the impurity of the world in which we live. Well, if we're going to experience the sense and knowledge of the presence of God every day in our lives, we've got to make conscious and deliberate efforts to get rid of the things that this world puts into our lives, which rob us, rob us of a sense, the sense of God's holiness, because they are designed to do that. We pay money to be robbed of the sense of God's holiness. We drive out of our way to be robbed of the sense of God's holiness. We read books deliberately and willfully to be robbed of the sense of God's holiness. I must tell you that if we put these kinds of things consistently into our beings, we will not experience the reality of the presence of God ever. We have a scaled value system. Believers do. And you put at the top of your scale those things you value the most. And those are the things that occupy you. And we put at the bottom of our scale the things that we value the least. And those are the things that don't occupy us. Enough said. I think you get the picture.