Isaiah 43:1-7 ‘When you pass through the waters’

 

Keith Jones worked with the Mission Aviation Fellowship.  He served for two years in Chad, and as chief executive.  His wife Lynn was diagnosed with Leukaemia.  He went to visit her in the isolation ward, and she was skin and bones.  She looked at him and declared, ‘Keith, get out of my life.  I don’t want to see you again.’  He told her at the end of the visit, ‘I will see you tomorrow.’  ‘Don’t bother,’ she replied.  ‘But, I can’t leave you.’

Lynn died at the age of forty-three.  

A few months later God spoke to Keith in his mind.  ‘Remember the time Lynn rejected you?  I felt something similar.  My Son was unrecognizable in his suffering, I wanted to embrace Him.  But I turned my back on Him.  I did that for you.’

The Father wanted to embrace His beloved.  The Father withheld that embrace in love for us!

1.      God does not love you because are good

Look back a few verses and see what these people are like!  God had brought His people into exile in Babylon because they would not obey Him in love.  There he sought to win back their hearts.  Yet they continued to sin.  They are blind—refusing to look at Him, deaf—refusing to hear Him.  Here was their God ‘in whose ways they would not walk, and whose law they would not obey?’ (42:24).

But in His amazing grace God is not going to treat them as their sins deserve but according to His loving kindness.  ‘But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’  They have shown no interest in God and yet He has always loved them.

2.       God is with you in the storm

I spoke on these verses in a church, and after the service a young woman, health problems came and spoke to me.  She said that when she was a young Christian God had woken her in the middle of the night with these words.  ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’  She wasn’t particularly familiar with this passage and had to look them up.  She holds on to these words in the storms she passes through.  The most important thing in your life is not what people say about you but who you belong to.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk on the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you (2).  It is quite like Psalm 23, isn’t it?  In the middle of that Psalm David says that he fears no evil ‘for you are with me’.

Notice that God says ‘when’ not ‘if’.  When you pass through the waters I will be with you.    These people in exile in Babylon would pass through many difficulties before they returned home.  They are loved by God, but they are not promised that life and easy life.  Circumstances may suggest that God does not love us, but His promises tell us that He is with us.  Corrie ten Boom famously said that ‘there is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper deeper still.’

Psychologists say that the brain cannot process anxiety and gratitude at the same time.  I have tried to use this to deal with stress.  When you are passing through the waters try to remember God’s presence by thanking Him for His goodness.  Try to thank Him for those beautiful pictures of Jesus’ sympathy that we see in the gospels.  Try to thank Him for the way that He has brought you through similar stressful situations in the past.  Most of all thank Him for what He has done through the cross.

3.      God wants us to know His love in the storm

He will be with us in the waters and the fires, ‘For I am the LORD your God.’  It is His very nature to be with His people in the midst of our storms.  He is Yahweh.  The God who revealed His name to Moses at the burning bush.  Moses was to tell his people that God was going to confront the Egyptians and bring them out of Egypt.  When they thought that the task was too great for them Moses was to tell them that God is the great ‘I am’.  Yahweh is the God they need Him to be in the situation to which He is calling them.  Yahweh is the God we need Him to be in the storms that we find ourselves in.

He is our Savior who gave up Egypt as our ransom.  He overturned Egypt to bring their ancestors our of slavery in Egypt.  Why did he do that?  ‘Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you’ (4a).  ‘I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life’ (4b).  In fact, God has done something far greater than overturning Egypt to bring His people out of slavery.  He has given a man—the man Christ Jesus so that we could be set free from guilt and the fear of death, and we could live our lives in the gaze of His love.  This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us (1 John 3:16).

‘And I love you’ (4b).  Those are life transforming words.  My friend Georgina was given a copy of the little book, ‘The Heart of Jesus’, by Dane Ortland.  She read it twice in a week and it turned her world upside down.  She said, ‘In all my forty-seven years no one ever told me that God actually loves me.’

For some of you those words are harder to accept than for others.  Maybe you look at the circumstances of your life and they seem to speak against God’s love for you.  Please ask God for the strength to trust Him.  Please ask God for the ability to look at the cross and see the objective evidence of His love of His love.  For some it can be our disposition.  In our struggles with our mental health we are beset with doubts.  I think one of the most important prayers that we can pray for our struggling brothers and sisters in Jesus is that they would have the strength through the Holy Spirit to comprehend with all God’s people what is the length and height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:14-21).

Our reading ends with God gathering His scattered people to Himself for His glory.  He would bring the exiles home.  He continues to gather people from every corner to Himself.  Jesus invites us saying, ‘Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.’  He promises to never turn anyone who comes to Him.

Conclusion

When I heard that illustration about Keith Jones and his wife, Lynn, I actually thought of it a different way.  I say ourselves being like his wife saying, ‘Keith, get out of my life, I don’t want to see you again.’  And God is the one who says, ‘I can’t leave you.’  We break His heart all the time, but He goes on loving us.  He loves us despite all our failings; He is with us in the storm: He wants us to know that love in the storm.