Sinclair B. Ferguson

It was the year that King Uzziah died.

It was a year of sadness for the people, but it was a new year that shaped every year of Isaiah's future life and indeed every single day that he lived from that point onwards.

Yesterday we were thinking about the fact that sometimes you might be reluctant to wish someone a happy new year when you know that people can't really be happy unless they are holy.

And I think it was Isaiah's encounter with God that made him realize he could never be truly happy until he was really holy.

And for that reason, if you read through the rest of his prophecy, you'll notice that his favorite description for the Lord becomes the Holy One.

So many things to learn from Isaiah chapter 6.

One of them is how to respond to God.

And you've probably noticed that Isaiah's response seems to have been three-dimensional.

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.