If you want to continually see the Greatness of God, you have to get stuck on the Grace of God and not the greatness of our Sin.

On Wednesday, Derry talked about being in the awe of God and recognizing His greatness and awesomeness. All of this comes out of Isaiah 6 and the beginning of that chapter. I find it interesting where we can easily find ourselves and even where we can think we see Isaiah in this passage.

In Isaiah 6, Isaiah exclaims, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;..." This statement is huge at this moment because it shows Isaiah's recognition of how Great God is. But, I fear that we can have a reaction to this comment that is not what the point of the scripture, at all.

See, when Isaiah cries out how "unclean" he is and the people he is with in comparison to God, we can get on the mentality, quite quickly, that Isaiah was having a moment of recognition of the sin in his life. I think we find it easier to identify with that mentality rather than identifying with the truth of the scripture, which is much more important than the recognition of our sin.

If you look back to the beginning of the chapter, Isaiah describes how Great God is through the things that he sees.

"High and lifted up..."
"The train of his robe filled the temple."

These two statements are huge in understanding what God wants to express through this passage. Do we not recognize that Isaiah is AMAZED, AWESTRUCK and COMPLETELY WRECKED because of what he saw. Isaiah does not give us a laundry list of the things that he was being convicted of in his own life. But he recognizes the Huge-ness of God, the Power of God and the recognition of all of this compacted into this one encounter. Sure, Isaiah says that he is man of unclean lips and that the people of the earth are a people of unclean lips. But, there is a huge thing that we miss in most cases when we read this passage.

Does Isaiah recognize that he is a sinner. Absolutely.
Is he probably running through the list of things that makes him unclean. Most likely.

But, if you look in verses 6 and 7 we have a huge lesson to learn. The seraph touches Isaiah's lips with the burning coal and says, "your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for." This is HUGE and my main point!

We have the tendency to recognize God's Greatness, move towards recognizing how unclean we are and how insignificant our lives actually are, but we take so long looking at ourselves that we forget to go back to the messages that God wants to send to us. We get so focused on ourselves and the things that we can think about and comprehend that we forget to go back to the Grace that we can't even come close to comprehending or understanding. We get stuck on ourselves and not stuck on the Greatness of God.

If you want to continually see the Greatness of God, you have to get stuck on the Grace of God and not the greatness of our Sin.