In These Dark Times, What Stunning Truth Can Help You Stand Strong No Matter What? This Truth Can.

Wow, did you hear the news?  Now we have not one but two vaccines!   And they are both looking great.  Oooh, but hold on a second…let me look at the small print.   Oh, I see…I see.   Well, yes we have them but we probably won’t get a chance to get one until April.   Oh well.

But hold on a minute, April?  Really?  We need it now.  Our nation has more cases than ever, more than during those bad days in New York.  The virus is spreading everywhere, even in places you’d never think, like the Dakotas.  

And I wish I could tell you that our leaders in Washington are going to help.  But it looks like no one there is thinking about that much at all.  Right now, Washington can’t agree on anything.   Washington can’t even agree on who got elected President.   And as bad as that is, it gets worse.

We have folks out there who still can’t agree that there’s a virus.  This week, I read a heart- breaking tweet from a nurse in South Dakota, Jodi Doering.   She shared how so many of her patients even as they are desperately sick, say things like: “’This can’t be happening.  This virus is not real.’”  And they keep saying that until the breathing tube goes down their throat.  Then they realize how terrifyingly real it is.    She ended her tweet with these sad words; “The South Dakota I love seems far away right now.”    

You might feel similar words as you look at how our nation is struggling, how our entire world is.  So, in all that how do you have hope?   How do you trust that we’ll get through, that God is working to that end?  You hold onto the words we’re about to hear.  Here God shares a truth so stunning, so breathtaking that thousands of years later, we still have yet to grasp it.   But the more you grasp it, the more it opens you to hope, to a bold confidence of better days to come.   What is that truth?  In these words, God points the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say.

Isaiah 49:8-16

These days can be discouraging.   But in these words, words written to folks going through far worse than what we face, God gives you such a wondrously beautiful, totally jaw-dropping insight into who God is that thousands of years later we still struggle to believe it.  Yet, if you believe it, if you trust it, it gives a foundation for your life that nothing can shake.  For here, God tells you not just who God is.  God tells you who you are right now in God’s eyes.  

And we all need to hear that because, well, we’re not terribly good at seeing who we are.   We tend to focus on the worst in ourselves rather than the best.    What do I mean?  Let’s say.   Someone you know gives you a great compliment, but a few minutes later you’re driving in your car.   And a random stranger in another car screams at you, calls you an idiot, and then finishes it off with an obscene gesture.   Let me ask you.  What will you be thinking about, even believing more, the nice compliment or the verbal attack? If you’re like most, it’ll be the attack. 

If someone says something really cruel to us, those words haunt us for years.   Yet at the same time, sometimes share something positive and kind, and you can forget it almost immediately.  We believe the worst rather than the best. 

And here that is happening not just for an individual but a whole nation.  You see.  We are jumping right into the middle of a huge pep talk that God is giving the nation of Israel.   God is talking about how God is going to deliver them; how awesome it’s going to be.   God is laying it on thick.  But then, what does Israel say.  All they say in response to God’s exuberant vision of the future is simply this. “The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me.”  The people of Israel can’t see past their setbacks, their mistakes, their misery.   No matter what God says, they can’t see it.  

You see, Israel has lost everything.  Babylon has conquered them, sent them into exile. And they can’t see any way back, any way back to anything better, much less this beautiful vision God gives.  Have you ever been there?   Have you ever been in such a dark place?  

A few weeks ago, I found myself there.  As Halloween approached, I felt more deeply than ever the separation from my wife and son.   Here at the church things were improving but still not enough to ease my worries and fears.   And of course, the news wasn’t helping either. Now, I knew in my head that things would get better, but my heart didn’t feel that at all.  And, honestly, I had it a lot better than those folks in Israel.   No one had conquered my country or carried me away into exile.  So, I can’t imagine how dark it must have been for them.  

So, what do you do, when you find yourself in a dark place like that, a place that you struggle to find hope?   You do what God does here.   You stop and listen but then you argue.   Now the stopping and listening, you may not see so much here, but it happens.  For right after Israel’s dejected response, God’s tone, even his words change radically.   And why?  God had stopped and listened.  

You see, when you find yourself in a dark place, you can’t ignore it.  You can’t ignore the pain of your heart.  You can’t deny it.    If you do, it’ll wreck you.   That pain is real, and you ignore at your peril.    You can know that because you know how it feels when others ignore it. 

When you go through a terrible loss, you don’t need to hear cliches.  You don’t need to hear.  Well, God needed another angel or if God closes a door, he’ll open a window.  No, hold on a second.  Maybe that cliché could help, but you don’t need to hear that first.  No, you first need to know someone hears you, senses your pain, your loss, your hurt.  And in this shift of tone here God is doing just that.  God is feeling the loss, the heartbreak of those he dearly loves.   But God doesn’t stop there.  Why?

You don’t just need someone to listen to your heart.  You also need someone to argue with it, even if that person is you.    When my heart felt so dark, so bereft, I listened yes.  But I knew too.  My heart wasn’t seeing things clearly.   I had to argue with it too.  And that’s what God does here.  God argues with Israel’s heart, and as God does, God tells them as never before just how deeply God loves them, how deeply God loves you. 

Do you see how God describes her love?  I use her on purpose, because God portrays herself as just that a “her”, to be more specific, a nursing mom.   Now why does God choose that image?   God could have described himself as a passionate lover or a faithful father.  So, why here a nursing mother?  It’s because God is sharing something stunning.

If you love somebody but they betray you or do you wrong, you can walk away.  Now, certainly, you have moms that walk away too.  God acknowledges that. God says.  Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.  But that walking away does not come naturally.  In fact, nature literally stands in the way.   Take a nursing mom.  Until a nursing mom releases that milk, until she can feed her child, she is in pain.  She hurts.  But more than that when a mother releases the milk, heck, even before that, all through pregnancy, her body releases huge amounts of oxytocin, what scientists call the love hormone.   When you feel in love with someone, that’s what courses through your body.  A mom’s very nature, her literal body compels her to love her kids.  When my son falls and hurts himself, yeah, I feel for him.  But my wife, sheesh, she feels it in a way I can’t.  That’s the oxytocin.  

Do you see what God is telling you about her very nature?  God is saying. “Don’t you get it? I can’t help myself.  I have no choice but to love you.  I’m that mom and infinitely more.   I cannot stop myself from loving you.  That’s my very nature.   As the preacher, Tim Keller puts it, God is saying “If I ceased loving you, I’d cease being me.”

That’s crucial to know because too often we live in this default position of a God who is going against his nature to love us.  But God says here. “No, it’s the opposite.”   I can do nothing else but love you.  That’s who I am.   

But God doesn’t stop there.  God says.  “I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”   God doesn’t say tattooed or written.  God is saying. I have done what you see out there on those stones in the Memorial Garden.  I have chiseled you into my very body like an artist chisels a sculpture out of stone.   Why that word? 

Because in that word, God is telling you two things.  God is saying. It’s permanent.  Nothing will take your names off my hands.  But more than that, engraving means artistry.   God doesn’t only see you.   God looks at you and is ravished by you, by your beauty.  Do you see how this connects to the mother image?   A mother looks at her child and she is ravished like that, the smell, the feel of the skin, the eyes.  Her child captivates her.   And God says that’s me.  I look at you, and you captivate me. You take my breath away.  And if God sees you like that, then by definition that’s who you are.  It doesn’t matter what your friends say or your family or even yourself or your mirror.  God’s word is definitive.   It’s the first word and the last. 

But it doesn’t stop there.  Where does God engrave your name?  He engraves it on the palm.  When someone says hands up, you know it doesn’t mean this.   It mean’s this, your palms out front.  Palms out means no weapon.  How do you shake a hand?  You shake it palm to palm.  When your palms are open, you are vulnerable, utterly so.  And that’s where God engraves your name.

But how do you do that?  How do you carve into someone’s palm?   Now we know.  For thousands of years later, Jesus said to his disciple Thomas in his moment of darkness and doubt.  Here are my hands and my feet.  This is how real my love is, how intense, how complete.

And in that love, you can know, even at your worst, even at the world’s worst God never walks away.  And even at your worst, God sees you in the full beauty of not only who you are, but who, by God’s grace, you will be.   

In the very last sentence, God says to Israel these puzzling words.  “Your walls are continually before me.”  That doesn’t make any sense.  Israel walls are broken.  They’re nothing but rubble, but not to God.  No, God see beyond the rubble.  God sees when that city, when each of us will be all God has destined us to be, that Jesus died for us to be. 

And if God sees you that way, then see yourself that way.  See yourself as the masterpiece you are by God’s grace.  See those around you that way.   See this world not only for what it is now, but what it is even now becoming, a world healed and restored, transformed by the unstoppable power of God’s love.   Let that love fill you with confidence and peace.  Let it quiet your doubts and fears.  For that love has the last word, not this virus or any other ugly thing in our world.   

So, live in that love.

Invite and welcome others into that love.

Share it joyfully and boldly, just how God loves you, how God loves me, how God loves this entire beautiful, broken world no matter what, and how that love wins over everything.