Sinclair B. Ferguson

One dimension was an awareness of his own sinfulness.

He felt as though he was disintegrating before God.

And what interests me, I suppose, as a preacher is that he was undoubtedly the most eloquent prophet of his day, perhaps for that matter of any day in the Old Testament.

But what he felt his sin had polluted was the very instrument God had given him to proclaim his word.

He says, I am a man of unclean lips.

It's very telling, isn't it, that he was conscious that his sinfulness was not just to be found in what he or others regarded as one of his weaknesses, but actually it embedded itself in his greatest gift and his greatest strength.

If you read through Isaiah from the beginning, you'll notice that in Isaiah chapter 5, he had already pronounced six woes on others.

And where there's six in the Old Testament, you're always looking for the seventh.

And now in chapter 6, he pronounces the climactic seventh woe.

And it's not on others.

It's on himself.

Those God uses have always been those who have been conscious of their sinfulness.

The second dimension of his experience, of course, is his experience of God's pardoning grace, that electric moment when the seraph takes the burning coal from the altar with tongs and puts it on Isaiah's lips and cleanses him.

That's exactly what he needed and what we need at the beginning of the year, cleansing.

As the hymn teaches us to sing, be of sin the double cure.

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

But then the third dimension of his experience was this, an unreserved willingness to serve the Lord without question.

He didn't even know what God wanted him to do, but he was willing to say, here am I, send me.

All this week on Things Unseen, we've been thinking about what I've called the parable of parables, the parable of the farmer, the seed, and the soils, the parable that explains what happens when the Word of God is preached.

Jesus himself is like a farmer sowing seed.