Purified and Risen in Christ

[00:00:00] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:10] Here am I. Send me, Send me. Hear the excitement in the repetition. Send me, Send me. [00:00:20] These are the words of Isaiah when he finds himself in the throne room of God. [00:00:30] But those aren't the first words he says. [00:00:35] The first thing he says is, woe is me, for I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. [00:00:51] He finds himself in God's presence and he recognizes his unworthiness. I should not be here. I'm in trouble. [00:01:02] And then he's purified. [00:01:05] Purified by a coal from the altar. A burning coal from the altar. He's purified. Now, why is there a burning coal on the altar in the first place? [00:01:16] How'd that get there? [00:01:19] Well, it's a reference to the sacrifice. The sacrifice is being offered to God. [00:01:27] And why are they burning? [00:01:30] We could talk about sacrifice for a long time. Let's just suffice it to say that you burn things to purify them. We talked about gold a few weeks ago. It takes a really hot fire to purify gold. You're getting rid of the impurities. This has obvious relation to sin. [00:01:50] Our sins need to be burned away, purified by God. [00:02:00] Now, sometimes the image of burning in scripture results in it just totally burning away. [00:02:07] You could think of chaff. [00:02:10] The chaff will be burned with unquenchable fire, John the Baptist says. Or that the ax is laid to the root of the trees and any tree that doesn't bear fruit is going to be burned. [00:02:24] So we talked a few weeks ago about the fire and the purification and what's going to make it through. [00:02:34] How do we escape the judgment of fire? And the answer is in Christ. [00:02:43] Kind of like, let it happen. Let everything burn away that doesn't belong and just seek to be found in Christ with a righteousness not your own. [00:02:52] In Christ, you'll make it through the fire. You'll pass through fire and water in Christ, Christ is the burning coal. [00:03:07] That's an interesting thing about coals. Coals are. It's different than like chaff, let's say the leftover substance from wheat that's just going to burn up and it's going to be gone. [00:03:21] But a coal actually sits and burns for a long time. And if you put that coal on a dead coal, then that dead coal is going to start burning. [00:03:34] It's kind of cool. So maybe you've heard and remember this image in scripture. [00:03:40] Kind of kill them with kindness, be kind to them, and you'll heap burning coals on their head. [00:03:49] And growing up, I always thought, well, that's kind of cruel, you know, I guess I can get excited about that. I don't know. I don't know how to think about that. You know, like to heap burning coals on somebody's head. But that's the image going on. It's actually that apart from God and his love. God, who's a consuming fire, apart from God, I'm dead. I'm like dead coal. [00:04:16] And I need to be awakened. I need to be set on fire by God and his love, His Holy Spirit, through whom he's poured his love into our hearts. I need burning coals put on my head so that I become alive, so that I'm no longer just earth, just dead coal, so that I'm set on fire by God. You see what I mean? See what I mean? So Christ became one of us. [00:04:50] He took on our human flesh. [00:04:54] And in such a way that he's not consumed by the fire, he actually brings us into God's fire. I don't know. This is going kind of far. We could just talk like that forever. But basically, let's just say fire purifies and it also brings to life in this sense. [00:05:20] All right, so Isaiah is purified by the coal from the altar, this burning coal. [00:05:28] There's another place in scripture where Jesus purifies with a burning coal. [00:05:34] Although you get there in kind of a roundabout way. Remember when Jesus is on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and his disciples get a miraculous catch of fish. [00:05:46] This is actually a different. This is in the Gospel of John, not Luke. We'll get to our reading briefly in a moment. But in the Gospel of John, at the end of the Gospel of John, Jesus is on the shore, and he calls to the disciples. They're in the boat, and they don't recognize him. And he says, try the other side. So they do, and they get this miraculous catch. Well, then they go to shore, and Jesus cooks the fish over a fire of burning coals. He purifies the fish. [00:06:19] He burns away the impurities that don't belong, and then he incorporates them into his body. [00:06:28] He eats them. [00:06:30] You see that? He purifies the fish with fire, and then he incorporates them into his body. Because that's what happens when you eat something. You make it a part of your body. [00:06:41] All right, so why are we talking about fish? It's because we're fish. [00:06:46] Jesus told his disciples, from now on, you're going to fish for men. [00:06:52] I stopped and clarified this to the young people in my house, and there was much surprise. [00:07:00] Wait, wait, wait. You mean actually like, you know, catching men, catching people? [00:07:08] Yes, yes. That's what he's talking about. He's talking about fishing for people instead of fish. [00:07:15] Or you could say, because people are like fish. [00:07:20] And one part of that is that, like fish, we need to be purified. [00:07:29] So let's talk about the image of fishing for men for a second. [00:07:35] The thing about fish, and we've talked about this before, but it's been a while, the thing about fish is that they live in opposite world. [00:07:41] Everything for fish is opposite. From our experience, we live above the water, we die below the water. [00:07:49] Fish live below the water, and they die above the water. [00:07:55] For us, breath, breathing is essential to life. [00:08:01] And you could see that in the creation, when God formed Adam from the dust and then breathed into him the breath of life. And that breath, that word is spirit. We were made to be, to live by the spirit of God, to receive from God our inner life, our invisible life, our understanding and our mindset, the way we think about things, to receive all of that from God. And we gave it up. [00:08:27] We gave it up and we became carnal, we became fleshly, we became earthly. [00:08:34] So that Paul says, put to death what's earthly in you, and set your mind on things above which we do in Christ, who gives us his spirit. So fish, well, they're alive without breath, as Tolkien says in the Hobbit in that rhyme, the riddle in the chapter Riddles in the Dark, go find it. Alive without breath, cold as death. [00:09:02] That's. That's a fish. It's opposite. [00:09:06] But that fish that's down in the dark can't see above the water, that's alive without breath. It's living kind of a living death. That's what it's like being slaves of sin and being separated from God and his spirit. Without understanding, even our understanding becomes backwards. We start to think that just pleasing ourselves and doing whatever we want with our life is what's truly good or worth striving for. [00:09:37] And we're missing a whole world above us. You could say, right? [00:09:43] And then Jesus, by his word, that's what the apostles are, right There. They bear God's word to the world. They bring God's word to the world. And by that word, they bring people out of this living death. They bring us out of this living death where we're confused, but think we're not. [00:10:03] They take us up out of the water. But for us that means a kind of death. Dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. [00:10:13] It's a death to our old self, the old sinful Adam and the life to God in Jesus Christ. A totally new way of life. We're seated in the heavenly places with Christ. We've been brought out of the pit, out of death, into life. And there we are with Christ and incorporated into Christ's body. It's like we're one of those fish. Those fish that Jesus gave to the apostles, not because they knew where the fish were or how to get them, but because it's his ministry through the disciples. He caught a bunch of fish and that was prefiguring Pentecost. And the process through which each of you has come to believe in Jesus Christ and has been brought out of death to life. [00:11:08] You and I, as Christ's people, as his faith fish, have been purified by Christ and brought into his body. We've been incorporated into Christ's body through faith. So that Christ is our head and we the body. That's what the church is. That's what we are together. Anything that remains after the fire, which is ongoing, let's say we confess our sins this morning to receive purification, forgiveness of sins from Jesus. We hear God's word and pay attention to him through Christ so that we might be purified. So that by daily repentance we die to sin and live to Christ. [00:11:57] We're continually being purified by Christ and incorporated more and more into Christ's body. Being brought in and division removed and being united ever closer to Christ and brought to God in the process. [00:12:21] That also makes us coals. See, Christ is the purifying coal. He became one of us. He took on flesh and received the Spirit in his baptism for our sake. He took on flesh. [00:12:37] He was totally human, earthly, so to speak. [00:12:42] But the full divinity of God was pleased to dwell in Him. Paul says, so here we have this divine human being, God in the flesh. [00:12:57] And he is transforming us into his own image. [00:13:03] From glory to glory. That's like up and up. [00:13:07] He's transforming us into the same image. And so just like a coal gathers more burning coals and builds a fire. That's what he's doing for you and for me. That has an implication for when we go out. See, Isaiah is purified by the coal, but then he goes out and speaks God's word. [00:13:29] That purifies and brings in more people. [00:13:34] You and I today we have been set on fire by Christ. [00:13:40] We have been united to God who's a consuming fire to be consumed by him and incorporated into Christ's body. And so we go out, we share God's word and through that word God catches more people, brings them up out of death to life so that they're dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. [00:14:02] And it's simple, just like the hymn said. You don't have to preach like Paul or speak like angels. [00:14:09] You can say Christ died for all. [00:14:15] Answer quickly when he calleth. Here am I. Send me, send me. Do you ever feel unworthy to speak God's word or to share him with others like I got to get my life in order first, you know? Well there's some truth to that. [00:14:33] If you feel that way, repent and look to Christ and receive his forgiveness and then boldly go in the name of Jesus, Amen.