Missions Paul

Isaiah 3
See now, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support, v1

The first LORD is a translation of the Hebrew Adonai meaning Master and Owner. The second LORD is a translation of the Hebrew Yahweh, it is the personal name of God. Yahweh, the Adonai Almighty. God is saying you had better repent for I am not only the Master, the one who is in control of everything, but I am the personal One. He is far off and up close. He is above and below. A God of anger and a God of love. Is that possible?
Only those who have witnessed evil can truly understand how these two names can sit together.
Miroslav Volf, a Christian theologian from Croatia, used to reject the concept of God’s wrath. In his book, Free of Charge, Volf reveals his new understanding of the necessity of God’s wrath: “My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love”.
We need to carry in our faith the Almighty and the Personal God. The One who carries out judgment in His wrath and One who laid His life down for us.

Isaiah 2

Stop trusting man, who has but a breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he? v22

Don’t look at what man looks at to gauge your successes. He may not even be around to see it. He is just a breath. Your life is for eternity, the results will outlast your life on this earth. You will be watching from heaven on so much more. So eyes on God, trust Him.
The missionary Adoniram Judson arrived in Burma, or Myanmar, in 1812, and died there thirty-eight years later in 1850. He was imprisoned, tortured, and kept in shackles. After the death of his first wife, Ann, to whom he was devoted, for several months he was so depressed that he sat daily beside her tomb. Three years later, he wrote: God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I cannot find him. But Adoniram’s faith sustained him, and he threw himself into the tasks to which he believed God had called him. He worked feverishly on his translation of the Bible. Statistics are unclear, but there were only somewhere between twelve and twenty-five professing Christians in the country when he died, and there were not churches to speak of.
He died a pauper, but left the Bible for the Burmese. When he died, there were few believers, but today there are over 600,000, and every single one of them trace their spiritual heritage to one man: the Rev. Adoniram Judson.
He never saw it on this earth and we may not see what we are called to give our lives to on this earth. But we trust Him who will bring the success.
Today we do not trust man.

Isaiah 1
The name Isaiah means “the Lord is salvation.”This book is the book of Salvation. Written between 740-680 BC the first 39 chapters is a call to God’s people to repent and the last 27 chapters contain a message of forgiveness from God and the hope of the coming Messiah. Isaiah had upwards of a 60 year ministry as a prophet who loved his nation and God’s people passionately. Tradition has it that he was martyred for his beliefs under the reign of King Manasseh.

Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow, v17.

Isaiah today would not just choose the fatherless and the widow. He would choose those who are unpopular, the unemployed and the unemployable, brain-damaged, the parents with wayward children, the broken families, the unrespectables, the HIV victims.
This is the heart of God.
People ask me all the time, where is God in suffering? My answer: where are you?
Last year in a village near Chennai, India, a local official identified as S. Kandaswamy, summoned the courage to rescue the captives in his own community. He organized a raid against a brick kiln where 143 families, a total of 522 people, had been kept as slaves. Police under his direction freed the labourers, commandeered a local high school to provide them with health care, and arrested the owner of the brick kiln. On that day hundreds of men, women, and children who had been robbed of their God-given dignity had been set free.
God was there.
God is where you are. Will you stand up for the outcasts? If you do you will know His presence and the world will see Him.

Song of Songs 8
Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away, v7

It does not matter what comes your way. Trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, loss, danger, death, life, angels, demons, present, future, powers, anything created, Apostle Paul must have read this verse! Nothing, God’s love remains. Pray thankful for this love.

Song of Songs 7
I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me, v10

You know who your source is and where you belong. It is not what others say that counts, and neither whether they love you or not. You belong and are desired by Him. Prayer is easy when this is known.

Song of Songs 6
I went down to the grove of nut trees to look at the new growth in the valley, v11.

God loves growth. Growing is painful. We struggle with what God loves. Pray through the pain today. You’re growing!

Song of Songs 5
My love thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him, v4.

God reaches into the place of reluctance and tiredness with love not condemnation and stirs the love inside of us. Through prayer open your soul to the inflowing of His love.

Song of Songs 4
You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, v9.

He does not want much, just a glance. Failure, disobedience and difficulty may only let you glance. But just one glance will cause His heart to be all over you. Open your eyes again in prayer today.

Song of Songs 3
I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go, v4.

Above all else, against all the strain, you will not let go. Thinking of how life was like without Him, pray for the determination to hold on to what you have discovered.

Song of Songs 2
See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone, v11.

Don’t be trapped in a season when it is over. Winter is where we have died. God is calling you to now move forward. Pray for this new season of your life.