THIS WAY

 FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Isaiah 30:18–26

18 Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.

19 O people in Zion, inhabitants of Jerusalem, you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it, he will answer you. 20 Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any longer, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. 21 And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” 22 Then you will defile your silver-covered idols and your gold-plated images. You will scatter them like impure things; you will say to them, “Away with you!”

23 He will give rain for the seed with which you sow the ground, and grain, the produce of the ground, will be rich and plenteous. On that day your cattle will graze in broad pastures, 24 and the oxen and donkeys that till the ground will eat silage that has been winnowed with shovel and fork. 25 On every lofty mountain and every high hill there will be brooks running with water—on a day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. 26 Moreover, the light of the moon will be like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, like the light of seven days, on the day when the Lord binds up the injuries of his people and heals the wounds inflicted by his blow.

Isaiah 30:21

Whether you turn to the right or the left your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’.

This passage and its message has sustained me in many situations of uncertainty in my life. What leaps off the page for me, is the certainty that we have a God who promises and genuinely leads us.

Take careful note of the description of God’s character in our reading. Gracious and compassionate, he rises up, blesses us, answers us and provides for us. He binds up our wounds; he heals us. Read that last sentence again. Powerful and comforting, right?

Consider the image in verse 21. How reassuring it is that whether we turn to the right or the left, we will hear a voice behind us saying, "This is the way; walk in it"! We have our God on our side, leading us. That is very good news.

There is one final point I would like us to consider today and it is whose voice are we listening to? Let us acknowledge that there are many voices calling out to us, we live a noisy culture. It can be confusing. Our passage today suggests that we need have ears for only one voice, the voice of our faithful and loving God. Did you notice that hearing the voice of God behind us leads us to saying to the other voices, the ones that are just noise, the ones that try to distract us, “Away with you!”

In the confusion of our living, in our noisy generation, let us listen intently for God to call out to us, “This is the way; walk in it”. Put God’s leading first, and not the voices on the right and the left.

LET US PRAY

Lord, I pray you will silence the voices on the left and the right, the tossing about and influences that are not of you. Renew a right spirit within me and speak to me with a clear voice: ‘This is the way; walk in it’. In Jesus’ name, Amen.