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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Isaiah 55 one through nine
come,
everyone who thirsts, come to the waters,
and he who has no money come, buy any.
Come by wine and milk, without money
and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that
which is not bread?
And your labor for that
which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat
what is good,
and delight yourselves in a rich food.
Incline your ear and come to me.
Hear that your soul may live,
and I will make with you
an everlasting covenant, my steadfast,
sure love for David.
And behold,
I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
Behold, you shall call a nation
that you do not know,
and a nation that did not know.
You shall run to because of the Lord
your God,
and of the Holy One of Israel, for
he has glorified you.
Seek the Lord while he may be found.
Call upon him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts.
Let him return to the Lord,
that he may have compassion on him
and to our God, for
he will abundantly pardon.
For my
thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways.
My ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways,
and my thoughts than your
thoughts.
Everybody, good morning
and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.
I am so, so glad that you're here.
Thanks for coming. Welcome.
Those of you
that are East Service as well.
All right.
This is the fourth message
of our five part series.
We've been calling every Minute Matters.
There are approximately 478,000
more minutes in 2025.
We want to make every one of them count.
Today we're looking at, Isaiah chapter 55.
So if you have your Bibles,
you can turn there.
If you have a phone or a tablet
or if you want to use one of our Bibles,
in the pew, it's on page 576,
page 576, or you can just wait for
it to come up on the screen.
I love this passage.
I've loved it for a long time.
There are some passages in the Bible
that strike my soul like a tuning fork.
And, this is one of them.
And I want to get right into it,
because I want to make sure I.
I leave you as many of your seven minutes
as I can.
We have a a really full
service is going to be a great service.
We have, baptism today.
We're baptizing 29 people
throughout all the services,
which is going to be really fun.
But I want to
give you your seven minutes
because I love the way you're spending it.
Some of you are coming up front to pray
with the prayer team, or you're saying
and little groups and visiting or out
getting a cup of coffee and visiting.
The reason I like that
so much is that the church
isn't supposed to be like an audience,
where it's like,
you come in for a performance
or a concert,
you come in and then file out
and you only talk to the person
you came with.
The church is the community,
and that's why we have carved out,
seven minutes at the end of the service
for you just to take a breath
and visit with each other.
All right.
Isaiah 55. You just had it read to you.
Let me give you my three points
to you know where I'm going.
If you're a note taker
you can write these down.
But I want to talk about the wonder
of the invitation,
the wonder of the invitation.
Secondly,
the responsibility of the mission.
And third, the urgency of the moment.
All right.
First, the wonder of the invitation.
Look at verses one through three.
You know, when I memorize this passage
years ago, I memorized it in a version
that said this, that started out saying
how you who are thirsty come to the water,
you who have no money come by wine
and milk, without money and without cost.
Why do you spend your money on
what is not bread,
and your wages, and what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me and eat
what is good, and delight yourself
in the abundance of fair.
I like how
poetic that
is, but I really like the way it begins,
because it's the cry of God and it.
It starts out whole.
Like he's crying.
Like he's yelling
at somebody who's walking away from him.
Not to him. He's gone.
How you who are thirsty
come to the waters?
Because he really was crying out to
Israel, and Israel was moving
away, for Israel was in decline.
They'd been disobeying God for a while.
One of the good things
about the Old Testament is when you read
about Israel, it's, it's a lot like,
kind of getting insight
into the way the human heart works
writ large with a nation.
It's kind of the way your heart works,
the way my heart works.
I think what Israel did was
they started to disobey God some.
And then your life started to get messy.
And instead of running right back to God,
they they went deeper into disobedience.
The sting of a little bit of disobedience
usually isn't enough.
To make me run back to God
is probably not enough for you either.
We're a little bit like people
that, you know, are speeding.
And then, you see the blue lights come on
and you think to yourself,
maybe I can make a run for it.
You know,
maybe I'm the only one who thinks that.
Or maybe it's better.
It's like if you catch a little, child,
you know, obviously, you know,
before they get good at lying and,
you confront them with a lie,
and instead of just fessing up,
they they double down.
That's that's the human heart.
That's part of what makes the
this invitation so amazing, because Israel
isn't coming back to God and begging
to get connected with him again.
God is calling out to them
and say, and saying, aren't you hungry?
Aren't you thirsty?
You know the metaphors of eating
and drinking, being hungry and thirsty
because every one of us experiences
that every day, every day you are hungry.
Every day you are thirsty.
This metaphor is supposed to connect
to life itself.
You don't live very
long without food and water,
and that's what this is.
That's why every person is looking
for something to fill themselves up.
You're looking for something
to fill your soul up.
I remember
being in the Dominican Republic years ago.
This is heartbreaking, by the way.
But I was helping to build an orphanage,
and I was taken to a little shack where
there was a little boy
who was going to be fed at the orphanage,
and they were just introducing me
to this little two year old.
They had him in their arms
and he had a distended belly,
and he had that, the thinning brown hair
that showed that he was malnourished.
But they also brought out,
this piece of foam
that he had been sleeping on
in the corner of the shack.
It was dirtier than this piece of foam,
but there were big pieces,
chunks that were ripped out of the foam.
And they said at night,
this little boy had been tearing
off parts of the foam
and eating it because he was so hungry
and his
belly was full, but he was starving.
That's what God is saying.
God is saying, why do you spend your money
and what is not bread?
Why do you spend your wages
and what does not satisfy?
What he's saying is that, listen, we're
all filling our trying to fill ourselves
up, our souls up with some semblance
really seems really good.
Like,
we we try to fill ourselves up with family
and friends
and our marriage, our children,
our career, or our health.
But what God is saying here
is, if it's not me
that then you're starving.
You just don't know it yet.
And God is inviting us to say, here come,
I will make myself
what you really hunger for,
what you are really thirsty for.
I will give it to you in abundance.
But he's not just offering the banquet,
he's offering rest
because he's saying,
I will lay it all out.
All you have to come to do
is come and eat.
And this is one of the ways
that, you know, you're trying
to fill yourself up with something else
is that you're just exhausted.
It can grind
you to powder, trying
to be the perfect parent,
trying to climb the ladder at work
or whatever it is.
And God is saying, come to me.
That's why Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew
says, come to me, all you
who are weary and heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Rest.
That's the first thing,
the wonder of the invitation.
The second thing is
the responsibility of the mission.
What he says in verses four and five,
he says, behold, I made him
a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
Behold, you shall call a nation.
You do not know.
In a nation that did not know,
you shall run to you
because of the Lord
your God and of the Holy One of Israel.
For he has glorified you.
What it says is, God says, if you come
and you begin to enjoy the banquet,
you have true bread.
You have pure water for your soul.
Then he says, you become a witness.
You tell other people, you we
I think we gonna
we can all bunch up about being,
about witnessing, about Jesus.
And I don't think it's as hard
as we make it out to be, I think.
I think being a witness comes
pretty naturally for most.
I think it does for me.
Like if I find something
that that helps me,
I am always ready to share it
with somebody.
Like if I find something that
helps me sleep when you get to be my age,
that's one of the major things
you think about and talk
about with people my age.
But, if
I find something that helps me sleep, I.
And I hear somebody talking
about struggling with sleep, I'll say,
hey, have you tried magnesium
that help me something, right?
If I eat, at a really good restaurant
and I have.
And I enjoy myself,
and I hear somebody talking about
going out to eat,
I say, have you tried this place?
I love that place. Right?
And what what God is saying is,
if you found true nourishment
for your soul,
you need to know everybody around you
is is hungry and thirsty.
They're filling themselves up with stuff
that does not
still of them, does not feed them.
Then you should just tell them
about Jesus. Right?
But he says this to it verse verse
five, behold, you shall call a nation.
You do not know.
And a nation that did not know
you shall run to you because of the Lord
your God and the Holy One of Israel, for
he is glorified. You.
What he's saying
is the whole nation of Israel was supposed
to be a witness, whereas
a whole group of people who had found
that God had provided nourishment,
real food for their souls,
so that if somebody came from another
nation this way, it was supposed to work,
they were supposed to cross the border
into Israel and just just kind of sense
that something was different here.
That's what the church is supposed to be.
That's what
this church is supposed to be like.
That's what we want it to be like.
What have we?
A place where in all the craziness
of the world, you can tell your neighbors
or your coworkers, listen,
if you if you ever want to go to a place
and see how people can really act,
how people can really care for each other.
You ever want to bring your kids
to a place where they can learn and love
and be loved,
and you should bring them to my church.
If you ever want to be involved
in a sports program where people
don't scream at the refs
or getting fights after the game, right?
And the reason that people do that is
because it has become way too important.
They're trying to fill their souls up
with something else.
But you say you
you should come and be a part
of what my church is doing.
We want to be like an oasis in a desert
where if somebody comes into this church,
they can just sense
that something's different here.
That's what it means to be a witness.
And then the third thing
is the urgency of the moment.
So what he says in verse six
and seven, seek
the Lord while he may be found.
Call upon him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts.
Let him return to the Lord,
that he may have compassion on him
and to our God, for
he will abundantly pardon.
I think it's really interesting
that he says, seek
the Lord while he may be found,
because that implies
that there might be a time
where he won't be able to be found.
You know, I grew up a preacher's kid,
and that means that, among other things,
I was in church all the time.
You know, when your dad gets paid
for going to church, you go with him.
And that's the way my kids grew up, too.
But, I didn't know what it was like
to miss church for a couple of weeks
in a row, or let alone a couple of months
in a row until I went to college.
And whenever I talk about the time
when when I really fell in love with Jesus
and felt like Jesus was in love with me,
I always say that
I went to the University of South Florida
and I went on a like a 13 month
moral freefall when I first got there.
And what I did was I was
trying to fill myself up with everything
that a college kid, that someone people
told college kids that would fill them up.
And what I it was just so much fun.
And I found myself empty.
And I jumped in my car
and started the trip
from Tampa to Orlando,
where my parents lived.
And I didn't even know it was God
who was calling me,
but was like this
distant voice saying, oh,
I, aren't you thirsty? Aren't you?
All I knew is that I was starving,
and I asked God if I could come home.
And the reason I'm in ministry right now
is because at that moment,
because I felt so filled,
I was invited to this feast.
And I thought if I could spend my life
telling people about
this, be a life well-lived,
I don't know.
Now, I say, I went on a 13 month
moral freefall.
I don't know how much longer
I would have lasted.
You know, when it says
that, call upon the Lord
while he may be found.
It may be may not be that
that God makes himself scarce.
It may be that you wait too long.
You know,
we were on vacation,
years ago.
We went out west with the family
to look at the
go to the national parks and everything,
and we rented a van.
So I wasn't very familiar with the van.
And we were driving in Wyoming
to get to one of the national parks.
And there's
a whole lot of nothing in Wyoming.
And if you've ever been there.
But I was driving and I went by an exit
and I saw the sign at the exit,
and I read it just as I was driving by,
the sign said, next gas 46 miles.
And as I as I went, I saw that sign go by.
My fuel light came on and I told the kids
were turning off the air conditioning.
We're not going to roll down the windows
that causes drag.
I was like trying to draft behind a truck.
I was just desperate to try it.
I didn't know if I was going
to make it right. I made it.
When it
says seek the Lord while he may be found,
if you're in a desert,
you walk by enough watering holes.
You may not get to the next one.
So that means
if that's you,
if you are here and you've been thinking,
you know what?
I'm kind of empty.
You know what? I'm.
I'm kind of thirsty.
I'm hungry.
This is your day,
right?
You came here for whatever reason,
and God is shouting out.
You say, hey, aren't you thirsty?
Aren't you hungry?
Would you come to me?
And I wanted to just tell
you, don't put it off and listen.
If you're here and you know what it's like
to really have true bread in Jesus.
Pure water.
If there's a reason that Jesus
calls himself the bread of life,
there's a reason he calls himself
living water.
That metaphor,
it goes all the way through the Bible.
What he's saying
is what you are desperate for is me.
If you already know that,
then you need to remember that
every person you run into is hungry.
Every person you run into is thirsty.
It's like, this invitation is wonderful.
It's the greatest invitation
that it's ever been given.
It's better than any.
This is what makes it better
than any other religion by a long shot.
Because God is shouting out
to people who are far away.
You can come home right?
The responsibility of mission is ours
to let people know where they can
find true bread,
where they can find pure water.
And there's an urgency to the moment,
right?
Because every minute matters.
Everybody you know is hungry.
Everybody you know is thirsty.
Let them know about Jesus.
Bring them here.
We will tell them about Jesus.
And if you know Jesus,
then just enjoy the banquet and rest.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven.
I love, love, love this passage.
And I don't know if it's this passage
that saved my life
those many years ago, but
thanks that you call out to everybody,
no matter how far away they are.
And you say, aren't you thirsty?
Aren't you hungry?
Then come to me.
I pray for anybody here
who, feels kind of the
the catching their throat,
the tears behind their eyes, and they know
that you are talking to them.
I pray that this would be the day
that they would, come
and pray with somebody in the prayer team
and just, come to the banquet
that you have for them that you laid
for them when you sent Jesus for all of us
and for this church.
I pray that you'll make us a witness
in such a way that anybody who comes to
anything here will realize it's
a little bit like an oasis in a desert.
Recognize something's different.
Thank you.
Thanks for sending us
such a wonderful savior.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.