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"Woe is me! For I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." (Isaiah 6:5) Vision! and breakthrough! a conscious contact! It had just happened to Isaiah in the temple. It was in the year that King Uzziah died. The shock of tragedy may have opened his eyes. It does happen at times. "I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple." (Isaiah 6:1)

As Browning put it, "No face: only the sight of a sweepy garment, vast and white." It was the majesty, the awfulness, the splendor of God revealed!

Then in Isaiah's vision the seraphim took over: "And, one cried unto another, and said, 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.' And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke." (Isaiah 6:3-4)

What really happens when you really see God, when you perceive his presence? Stay with Isaiah and find out. "Then said I, woe is me." I am blind, I am unclean, I am selfish, I am unrighteous! My nation is unrighteous! All this is realized in the critical light of God's Presence.

But God doesn't leave Isaiah wallowing hopelessly in his deep guilt: "Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged.' "(Isaiah 6:6-7) You have seen your sins, your break with God. You have repented. You are forgiven and restored in your relationship with God and with life.

Then one last thing crowns this rebirth experience: "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' "

The rebirth experience includes a call to mission. You see who you really are, you realize your gifts, you see the world's need; and the meaning of your life is uncovered before you! And Isaiah responded, with new understanding: "Then said I, 'Here am I; Send me.' " (Isaiah 6:8) And God said, "Go!"

Isaiah's life and ministry has blessed humankind. It all began with vision! When you hear the Hallelujah Chorus you are listening to Isaiah's compassionate description of the coming Christ. When you see Christ on the cross, you are beholding Isaiah's vision of God suffering for his people. The great doors to truth were flung open to him when he stumbled into the temple and really experienced God for the first time. He became one of God's messengers of truth.

As a people, the world today is where Isaiah was before his vision. We are a people of "unclean lips," a people of blinded eyes. We cannot see deep reality, and we are perishing. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." (Proverbs 29:18) The writer of Proverbs saw the truth. The tendency today is to see the surface things, and not the deep truth underlying the visible surface. Carl Sagan is a brilliant scientist. He observes the universe to the galaxies millions of light years away. But Sagan seems to be unsure of the creator God who is back of all this scientific wonder.

Sagan writes in Parade Magazine: "My parents died some years ago ... I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere ... If some real evidence for life after death were announced, I'd want to examine it: but it would have to be hard scientific evidence ..." I am afraid that we are not going to know God, or the Eternal, by "hard scientific evidence," though Raymond Moody comes very close to this by the research described in his book, Life After Life.

There is a truth that lies deeper than science, that lies back of all science, that cannot be seen or heard physically, but has persisted in the heart of the human race for centuries. It is known intuitively and the hard evidence of science does not deny it. Speaking of this, Pascal once said, "The heart hath reasons the mind knows not of." The right lobe of the brain realizes truth and reality beyond the processes of reason. This deeper truth has guided humanity for
centuries. It is reliable.

Dr. C. A. Coulson, former head of the Department of Higher Mathematics at Oxford University, and until his death one of the world's top physicists, said once in my hearing: "I am a physicist. In dealing in my discipline, which is science, I demand hard scientific evidence. But I am also a Christian; I believe in life after death. This is the dimension of faith in which I am just as absolutely certain as I am when I work in my special dimension of science." Or, as Einstein once said, in speaking of his insights into the sub-nuclear world: "It came to me! It came to me!" These new scientific revelations were first a gift, a revelation which later he put into scientific equations, and were tested scientifically. He recognized that the source of truth and ultimate Reality comes from beyond us and is revealed to us. Vision is essential to the survival of the individual, and to the development of humanity. Science reveals much about the constant activity of the Creator. But science cannot contain the Creator nor reveal all truth. Science is only one of the dimensions of God's amazing and ultimate Reality. God is the Father of science. He is also the Father of the human soul, and of Jesus Christ - of healing, of hope, of forgiveness, of love and of truth. Science is vastly important, but there is far more to life! This something more is revealed by faith, by inner vision, by the intuitive lobe of the brain. Some things we know beyond reason, and they are not contrary to reason. Kipling caught it long ago:

Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the ranges.
Something lost behind the ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go.

This Isaiah was introduced to in his vision of God in the temple. This was what William Blake touched many years ago in England. Blake was a brilliant scientist, a poet, an artist. On his deathbed he was singing beautiful songs no one had ever heard before. His wife came closer to hear. He said to her, "They are not mine; they are not mine." He went on singing this heavenly music until his soul quietly left his body to be with God.

Vision, this deeper vision, is what the world is dying for at this present moment of history. It is the vision of reality that can bring the human race back into line. It is the glimpse of God in the life of Jesus Christ that can heal us and give us peace. I can't prove it scientifically, but I am sure of God. He is deep in my consciousness. He is my life. He has broken in upon my conscious mind again and again in my eighty years of life. First he was real in the atmosphere of my home, in the faith of my parents, in the solid reality of their prayers. God entered powerfully into my life when, at eleven years of age in a conversion experience, I was shocked into the absolute reality of the spiritual world. I was forgiven; I knew I was forgiven. I was promised eternal life. I was assured. I was not afraid to die. Now I was a different person, hating the bad things I used to like and loving the good life to which I had been indifferent. I had broken through, in vision and experience, into a new and eternal dimension of life.

God has made himself known in my awareness many times in the crisis experiences of my life. After my conversion my life was ordered, controlled, directed from deep within. I was quietly being moved, step by step, toward the ultimate purpose and fulfilment of my life. It was not by choice that I became a minister. I was coaching track in a northern prep school and was happy. In the spring of the third year I was inwardly compelled to give up teaching and coaching and enter seminary. There was no argument. I knew this was it. God said, as he did to Isaiah, "Go!" and I went.

In a faith-doubt struggle in seminary I was torn apart. But in a prayer experience God spoke in my mind, saying, "All I want you to do is to find out what is true, and give your life to that." I was on track again, and I have been learning ever since. If we write off the invisible, we ignore the basic resource of all of life here and hereafter. Science is good, but science is not enough.

After a long barren period in one of my appointments, I had a vivid breakthrough. I was praying at a little prayer desk in my study, when suddenly and quietly everything opened up. My mind began to whirl; thoughts began to flow; I saw things clearly. Problems began to unravel. Plans began to be made clear. My work again became a challenge, and not a burden. God was there. I was ready to go! And all of that came at the end of a period of barrenness. The invisible world, that other wave-length, the depth of reality broke in upon my subconscious and conscious mind.

I was sick and tired. One night at the end of a retreat session I went to the room of a friend and asked him to pray for me. He prayed and nothing happened. I was discouraged. But as I opened
the door and stepped out into a long lighted hall, a vision appeared in the periphery of my left eye. The long lighted hall became a warm, lighted passage - a passage into the presence of God. I knew in a flash that, if I died, I would walk down that passage to God; and if I lived, I would still walk down that lighted passage with God, and later into the presence of God. I was refreshed and I was healed.

While preaching in Charlotte, North Carolina, I had a surprising vision at three a.m. I awakened to a strange, gentle light on the floor just to the left of my bed. The light had the gentle folds of a Calla lily. But the strange thing was my experience of total joy and peace. There was no threat anywhere in the universe. I am sure that this experience was a glimpse of heaven. How could we possibly be afraid to go there?

In another appointment, I was healthy when something suddenly struck me. I went to the doctor, who examined me and said out of the blue, "We have fifty percent certain indication that you have cancer." I was shocked. I went home and dropped on my knees in front of a picture of Christ to talk to God about this. As I prayed, there came to my mind the incident in the life of Jesus where a sick man approached him and said, "If you will, you can make me well." And Jesus answered quietly, "I will." And the man was healed. At that moment, there was a clear whisper in my mind, "I will." I was at peace. I went on through the difficult surgery in deep assurance. That has been fifteen years ago.

One of my church members had a severe coronary and was in cardiac care, dangerously ill. As I walked down the hall toward his room, I had a brief vision of Christ standing at the foot of his bed in a light blue robe. I felt an assurance that my friend would get well. He did. He also felt a powerful spiritual action in his healing. He still feels it.

About four years ago, I had a heart attack. The first few days in cardiac care, in a semi-conscious condition, I was strangely at peace. I knew deep in my total being that I was pivoted between life and death, and that I could fall either way at any moment. But I was at peace. I knew that if I lived I would be with God; if I died I would be with God. This was not thought out rationally - it was experienced as reality. And I am certain that it was reality, that other world of God beyond the veil, simultaneous to our own.

These are the most vivid experiences of God running throughout my whole life. Occasionally we should spot these experiences and realize how close we have been to God - or, rather, how close God has been and is to us. Without this realization we stumble in uncertainty and frustration and the world moves from war to war. I am now eighty. Through the years I have learned to trust him. I have lived subconsciously in his presence. I am sustained by Him. I am not afraid to live; I am not afraid to die. I am far from perfect; but I really love Christ and Christ loves me. I rest in him. As it was with Isaiah, for me "his train fills the temple."

This is not odd. It is the experience of the highest level of awareness possible to the human race. We go back into the shadows of history and see a young man, Abraham, dissatisfied with the shallow idolatry of his day. He left home, for "he sought a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." He sought a new society based on eternal truth. His grandson Jacob had his own personal problem; he wrestled with the Spirit in the desert all night long. His life and his name were changed. Thus God started the Hebrew-Christian chain of revelation and experience that has been the backbone of the highest level of civilized human development.

Even the primitive tribes, all over the world, have a sense of God, of the presence and the power of the invisible world. Vision means, not to see the clearly visible, but to perceive the ultimate reality invisible to the optic nerve. Five-hundred years before Christ, Plato perceived the reality of the invisible. He pointed out that "the soul is a divine entity." He held that the body is a temporary prison from which we will be freed at death. He pointed out the three parts of the human soul: Reason that governs, Moral Courage that pursues the honorable even against great obstacles, and Appetite, which must be kept in close confinement. In his "Allegory of the Cave," Plato pictures humanity as chained with our back to reality. Behind us the deep realities move in interrelationships, and we see only the shadows of reality cast upon the wall of the cave in front of us. As Paul put it: "Now we see though a glass darkly; but then face to face."

Moses, the refugee from Egypt, keeping sheep in the desert, was confronted by God in the burning bush: "Go back, free my people." He went, and history was changed. Inspired by God, Moses brought us ten great moral principles for humanity to live by. Soon the Psalms were to proclaim over and over the beautiful reality of God: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want ... though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me ..." A little later in history, Isaiah sees "God high and lifted up," and is inspired to write glimpses of the coming Christ: "He bore our iniquities ... with his stripes are we healed."

Then came the central breakthrough of the eternal reality upon the consciousness of humanity, the coming of the God-Spirit in one of us, Jesus of Nazareth. He revealed the Spirit of God in human terms. Jesus lived in both worlds at once: he touched the life of God and he touched the life of humanity. He moved back and forth readily between the world of the Spirit and the contemporary world of humankind. He revealed the atmosphere of the eternal world to the present world. He constantly received power from the Father, power he used in his ministry to people. He was seeking to lead humanity into a heavenly life-style, to be lived out on earth: "Thy Kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven ... For thine is the Kingdom and the power and glory, forever." He came from God's presence. He returned to God's presence, but remains with us in the presence of the Holy Spirit.

After the crucifixion, the resurrection, the ascension, and Pentecost, the disciples lived the life of the kingdom on earth. They established the Christian reality in human affairs. Stephen, as he was dying, saw the heavens open and saw Christ at God's right hand. Saul of Tarsus, attacking and killing Christians, was overtaken by Christ on the Road to Damascus. He was overwhelmed by Christ in a vision of the reality back of life. He became the world's greatest missionary: he called upon us "not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds that we might prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God." Paul prayed for us: "that your inward eyes may be illumined, so that you may know what is the hope to which he calls you, what the wealth and glory of the share he offers you among his people ... and how vast the resources of his power, open to us who trust him." (Ephesians 1:18) Paul, still overwhelmed by the eternal world of the Spirit, continues to pray for us: "that out of the treasures of his glory he may grant you strength and power through his spirit in your inner being, that through faith Christ may dwell in your hearts in love. With deep roots and firm foundations, may you be strong to grasp, with all God's people, what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge. So may you attain to fulness of being, the fulness of God himself." (Ephesians 3:16-19) Paul could not
contain himself when the Spirit of Christ possessed him.

Peter and James and John, on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus, saw Moses and Elijah. They beheld the glory of Christ and heard the voice of God: "This is my beloved Son, Hear ye him." Why does our present world shut out the glory of God and the fulfilment of life? What are we afraid of? Clearly, we are afraid of our own sinfulness!

Martin Luther had a fresh vision of Christ: "You are saved by faith through trusting him." His emphasis began the Protestant Reformation and launched the Church with new spiritual awareness and new spiritual power. The real power of the Christian movement is its immediate awareness of God, his power, his authority, his compassion, his forgiveness, his demand for accountability. All this translated through a living Christ. At intervals in history we get an Abraham, a Moses, an Isaiah, a Paul, a Luther, a Wesley, a Stanley Jones, a Mother Theresa. When the vision dies, the people perish.

When England was at a low spiritual level, God broke through to John Wesley. He "felt his heart strangely warmed" and he moved out into all of England with a new message of hope that brought moral and social reformation to the whole nation. When the American colonists were laying the foundation for our nation, God broke through in a great colonial preacher, Jonathan Edwards, and a spiritual revival swept the colonies and gave the basis for the spiritual influence upon the developing institutions of our young nation.

God is the contemporary fact, beyond all other facts. Look at Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Gandhi and Mother Theresa in India. Look at Pope John Paul II, casting his influence for peace all over the world. The world of the Spirit is the source of life for humanity. This is the creative basis for science, for music, for human relations, for high moral principles, for peace, for the abundant life. Dag Hammarskjold came to new life in his leadership of the United Nations, because of an experience of God. Strange and hopeful things are happening in China and Russia today. Could it be that God is about to break through on the other side of the Iron Curtain to bring the world to Peace? We need an awareness of the spiritual reality, that other wave-length, that other dimension that underlies all of life - the creator God, of absolute authority and of total compassion. Could it be that our blindness to this truth is destroying us? Isaiah was shocked into a new awareness of the contemporary, living God. His nation was saved, and the history of the world moved into a new era of hope.

Perhaps we face one of those pregnant moments in history when the world is about to be reborn - or stillborn. God save us! Such a moment came in A.D. 410, when the news was brought to Saint Augustine in North Africa that Rome had been destroyed. All those around Augustine were crushed. This, they concluded, was the end of time. The civilization, the law, the culture of the whole world had collapsed. God spoke in the mind of Augustine and he wrote a book, The City of God, which was to be a kind of guidebook for the Christian movement for the next 1500 years. In this book, he wrote: "All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is the City of God which man did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting." Saint Augustine was the Isaiah, the man of vision, for that moment of history.

The Jacksonville Florida Times-Union carried an article that declared that "American confidence in organized religion dropped precipitously before 1986 ... but in 1986 only 57% were confident in organized religion - a plunge of 9% ... In fact Americans had more confidence in the military (63%) in 1986 then in religion for the first time since the polls were taken (Gallop Poll)." What does this say to us? Does it say that "organized religion" is losing the power and compassion that comes from a fresh contact with God? Are we blundering along in a one-dimensional life when in reality we are a part of an eternal dimension which is only realized through the reality of faith?

It is not surprising that a recent Christian journal, Weavings, issues a pertinent invitation "to all those who believe that the spirit of a person is of ultimate importance; to all those who believe that the spirit, like the body and mind is open to education, training, and growth; to all those who believe that spirituality and social justice cannot be separated; to all those who recognize that the spiritual life leads to the heart of the world, and that there is no issue in life that is without spiritual significance ..." What an invitation to a hungry, blinded, stumbling world! Can we rise, or are we too far gone?

It is accurately stated: "The Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state but not religion and life, and not God and state." But today we seem determined to establish a way of life which is totally secular and exclusively materialistic. In such an atmosphere we will smother. There is no oxygen of the Spirit to keep us alive. But there is some hope that the world of science is gradually seeing deeper than its false bottom, and beginning to rediscover God and spiritual values. Robert Jastrow, the astronomer, says in one of his books that science, in search for truth, has crawled across the flat lands, has climbed the foothills, has struggled up the mountain sides, has scaled the final peaks, only to discover that the persons of faith have been there all the time.

In a new book, Fearful Symmetry, based on new research in Physics, Dr. A. Lee writes, "I like to think of an Ultimate Designer defined by Symmetry ... We are on the threshold of really knowing (God's) thoughts." There is hope because God is at work beyond the veil, giving us glimpses of ultimate truth.

In Galapagos, Kurt Vannegut suggests that our "brains are much too big and untruthful to be practical." Our over-big brains get us into terrible trouble such as nuclear wars. The oversize brains that we have must be guided by the Spirit which touches ultimate truth. Really, our faith is quite practical. Jesus said, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, who will stay with you forever. He is the Spirit, who reveals the truth about God. The world cannot receive him, because it cannot see him or know him. But you know him, because he remains with you and is in you." (John 14:16-17) Our manueverings are risky, except when guided by Spirit. Dr. Douglas Corriher in a little book, Seven Prepositions, states it crisply:

The Spirit was not and is not a part of our (physical) world - as light is a resource, as water is a resource, as food is a resource. Nor is the eternal God Spirit, the Jesus Christ Spirit, the Holy Spirit, a natural resource within ourselves as human beings. The scriptural assertion that God gave the Helper-Spirit as a gift - that is, presented his presence as a present - is absolutely fundamental and needs to be comprehended.2

To grasp this power, to be open to this guidance, demands faith and vision - the ultimate ingredients of the abundant life and a peaceful world.

When preaching in South Africa, I picked up a little book, God among the Zulus, which reveals the universality of this faith. Gabajana Mabaso, a Zulu of royal descent, had gone from witchdoctor to witchdoctor. He had accumulated enough idols and witchcraft materials to fill a room. He brought offerings of cows and goats. But he was still restless and disturbed. Just before his conversion he had two dreams. He saw two Bibles coming down to him and heard a voice saying: "Read this! Go to the Christians." The second dream told him to stay with the old way. He decided to join the Christians. He destroyed his idols; he made known his faith. He was made King in 1972. He brought to an end the murderings and the burnings of the hundred-year war between the Masasos and Tempus. There was a beautiful peace. "Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit saith the Lord."

Just before his death, Albert Edward Day, a great man of spiritual vision, sent me a small book he had just written. It is entitled The Captivating Presence. Vision, spiritual awareness, was the strength of his great ministry. He tells of a little girl playing alone near the stone cottage where the family spent holidays. She described her experience: "Something made me pause; something was happening, just out of sight; something was coming, nearer and nearer ... No voice nor call came from what was coming ... I stood still for a long time. Some words which I must have heard came to me: 'God is spirit!' So that was what Spirit meant. I wanted to be alone for a while with the Presence which was here, and yet not to be seen. There was a big flat stone there. I did what I have never done before. I knelt down beside the stone facing the woodpile. Silently the words said themselves over and over again in my mind: 'God is Spirit' ... How do I know that this event was more than a child's play or fancy? Well it has influenced my life ever since." There is something there. Go and find it. Seek, ask, knock - it shall be opened unto you. "My soul thirsts for the living God."

Dr. Day continues speaking of his own overwhelming experience of God: "In that night of darkness and pain ... the holiness of God became an ecstasy, a captivity of adoration, a heart-smiting and heart-cleansing and heart-possessing reality. I was caught up and then bowed in enthralled worship. I wanted to be wholly so engaged forever, I wanted everything I said or did to be an act of worship. What I became aware of thrillingly and exclusively was a holiness that is wholeness! It includes everything the human heart at its best craves, everything the human mind in its greatest moments reaches after, everything the authentic self needs for its fulfilment. It was goodness of infinite dimensions; truth transcending all limitations; beauty endlessly satisfying; mercy without limit; forgiveness equal to every desperate sin; restoration transcending every prodigality; wisdom surpassing all human knowledge; everything of value in time and eternity; and always there, without variation, for everybody, in every situation!" Dr. Day's life and ministry bore witness to this inner peace and power.

Dr. Day outlines what this experience of the Real Presence has meant to him:

An emancipating assurance of the
gracious forgiveness of sins;

a revelation of available resources
for desperate situations;

a guidance in perplexities that
baffle thought and research;

a healing of illness when other
helpers failed;

a release of unguessed faculties
for creative writing;

an unveiling of the awesome
holiness of God;

a birth of passion to be as much
like God as is possible for a finite being;

an addition of depth dimensions
to compassion for all people;

a dedication to vigorous
action in behalf of the underpriviledged
and dispossessed.3

This God-presence is available through vision and faith to every person in God's world. It is the pearl of great price!

We may have to go through the steps that Isaiah followed in his vision:
The sense of need;
Glimpsing the Presence of God in Vision;
Realizing the Holiness of God;
Repentance of his sins; seen in contrast to God's holiness;
The experience of spiritual cleansing through forgiveness;
The acceptance of mission - answering God's call!

Theology without experience is an empty activity of the mind; but with experience it becomes an exciting way of life!

We are called to a new experience of faith by the desperation of our times. We find this new life in prayer, in commitment and worship; in studying the revelation of this truth in our Bibles; in meeting in Christian dialogue and fellowship in small seeking groups; in giving ourselves to the service of love; in daring to trust God in all situations.

There is another world out there. It is the Alpha and the Omega - the beginning and the end. God pursues us in love.

Be still and know!

1. Parade Magazine, Feb. 1, 1987, p. 10.
2. Douglas Corriher, Seven Prepositions, p. 29.
3. Albert Day, The Captivating Presence, Parthenon Press. Used by permission.