Jesus' call can be traced...
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Jesus' call can be traced back to his baptismal experience and to that Isaiah 61 passage.
Having heard that he was God's beloved, the Lord reached out and told everyone he
touched that they were beloved, too. No wonder he took the words from the Isaiah scroll
so seriously. His was a ministry that always reached out lovingly to human need.
Isaiah traced his call back to an event that happened in the temple. It was a time of grief. The king had died, surely Isaiah wondered about his future and his country's future. In a vision, he saw the Lord and that experience transformed his life forever. He answered the question: "Who will go?" by responding: "Here am I, send me." And God did send him. Scholars say Isaiah can be divided into pre-exilic writing (1-39), exile writing (40-55), and post-exilic writing (Isaiah 56-66). His words would rally and encourage his people through dark days. His words are some of the greatest writing that we have in holy scripture. One wonders what Isaiah's message would have been like if it had not been for that life-changing experience in Isaiah 6.
Is it too much to believe that even now God just might speak to us in church and that we might find our lives changed? Might the church and the world be a different place if we listened carefully to the "Who will go" that comes to believers in every age.
Isaiah traced his call back to an event that happened in the temple. It was a time of grief. The king had died, surely Isaiah wondered about his future and his country's future. In a vision, he saw the Lord and that experience transformed his life forever. He answered the question: "Who will go?" by responding: "Here am I, send me." And God did send him. Scholars say Isaiah can be divided into pre-exilic writing (1-39), exile writing (40-55), and post-exilic writing (Isaiah 56-66). His words would rally and encourage his people through dark days. His words are some of the greatest writing that we have in holy scripture. One wonders what Isaiah's message would have been like if it had not been for that life-changing experience in Isaiah 6.
Is it too much to believe that even now God just might speak to us in church and that we might find our lives changed? Might the church and the world be a different place if we listened carefully to the "Who will go" that comes to believers in every age.
