Thoughts on Isaiah 6

Today’s reading: Isaiah 6-7; Hebrews 11

Isaiah 6 is a chapter the Lord has used a lot over the years to temper my pride through two questions: (1) How am I measuring spiritual success? and (2) Is success before the Lord more important than success before men?

Before I get into those questions though, I want to make a quick note on the content of chapter 6 because it may seem out of place if you aren’t already familiar with the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 6 is the commissioning of Isaiah as a prophet of God, but this comes after five chapters of Isaiah already doing prophetic things. So was he already acting as a prophet before God called him to be a prophet? Nope, the first five chapters are essentially a summary of the case God makes against Israel through Isaiah throughout the rest of the book. Isaiah is following a legal genre here which, in broad strokes, starts with a summary of the case being made before diving into the specifics (think opening arguments in a trial versus the actual detailed proceedings). Chapter 6 is really the start of the detailed case, and what we will find as we continue reading is that the content of the first five chapters will be repeated and expounded upon as we get further into the book.

When God is looking for someone to go to Israel on his behalf and Isaiah agrees, God essentially tells Isaiah that his success will be failure. A prophet’s job is generally to call the people back to faithfulness to Yahweh, but God says that Isaiah’s ministry will dull the peoples’ hearts, blind their eyes, etc., specifically so that they will not turn back to God and be healed. He is to declare God’s truth to Israel, but Israel will not listen, and God tells him this from the very beginning.

What does this mean for Isaiah’s success or failure in his work for the Lord? It means he certainly can’t measure it by anything like conversions, sermon attendance, etc. For Isaiah, success was faithfulness, and that was about the only criteria he could go by to measure it.

This brings me to that first question, “How am I measuring spiritual success?” It is so easy to want to quantify spiritual health by some set of metrics, like how many times you are sharing your faith in a given week, how many people you have led to Christ this year, how many younger Christians you are mentoring, etc. Measures like this can certainly be evidence of spiritual health when they are present, but the problem is that their absence does not necessarily mean something is wrong or needs to change. Isaiah was incredibly faithful but his ministry would probably be considered a failure by pretty much every metric churches these days tend to use to measure success.

And that brings me to the second question, “Is success before the Lord more important than success before men?” If I am being faithful to the Lord, but have nothing to show for it, is that enough? There have been times in my life with Him where I felt completely confident saying God was pleased with how things were going between Him and I, but where there wasn’t significant visible “fruit” being borne, and it left me feeling a pressure to try something different or change something. That pressure didn’t come from the Lord calling me to something further, it came from a need to “prove” to other people that the Lord was pleased with my life by meeting the metrics they were monitoring.

This is something God has had to do a lot of work to change in my heart. I can be a very prideful person, and so the temptation is to feel like I need to prove to other people how well I’m doing, but sometimes there simply aren’t the measurable metrics to “prove” it. So what do I do in those times? If the Lord is pleased with me, do I still take on extra and work harder to try to make things happen so that I have something to show, or do I content myself to rest in the pleasure of the Lord, regardless of how other people will view my “work”?

Honestly, if I didn’t have Isaiah 6, I think this would be much more of a struggle for me, and I would constantly be measuring how fruitful I am (or, more honestly, how fruitful others perceive me as being). But here we have God Himself telling us that there may be times and ministries to which He calls us in which there will be little to none of the visible fruits we are otherwise looking for, and we have to be okay with that if we are going to faithfully pursue His will.

Ultimately, it is a question of faithfulness. Regardless of what external fruit is or isn’t being borne from my spiritual life, am I being faithful to what the Lord is calling me to? And if the Lord is pleased, that is enough.

As much as my pride might want me to perform for all the world to see, I have an audience of One.