Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The text for today’s meditation is Isaiah 64:8-9.

"⁸But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. ⁹Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people."

Isaiah wrote this as a prayer of faith; He is turning to God in faith knowing what He has done in the past for the nation of Israel. He has delivered them from Pharaoh in Egypt and He has delivered them throughout their history. Isaiah recognizes God as their creator and Lord. He pleads for God’s mercy and reminds God that they are His people. Notice the first two words of the prayer, "but now" or in other translations, "yet." These words speak volumes. These words acknowledge who they are and what they have done. Isaiah just got done asking God to come down and judge all nations and realized that would include the nation of Israel as well. These words acknowledge and recognize a sinful nature and in an earlier verse describe how disgusting the character of their sin is before God. Isaiah describes their best and most righteous deeds as filthy rags but this translation does not fully capture the disgust of the rags. Not only are they filthy rags but they are unclean bloody rags which makes these deeds unclean and unfit before the Lord. That makes these deeds unworthy to even be in the presence of the Lord let alone account for anything. If their most righteous deeds are disgusting just imagine what their sin is before the Lord. This is where we can include ourselves as well. Their sin and our sin absolutely disgust the Lord which means we are disgusting before the Lord. Are you grasping this? We are like bloody rags that are unclean and untouchable before the Lord. This sin that lives in us makes us lifeless and dead, isn’t that a turn of phrase the sin that lives makes us dead. Just as dead as these leaves. The result of persistent sin is that God hides His face from the sinner; He abandons the sinner to their sin. This reminds me of a song, the chorus really hits this on the head, "It's a slow fade when you give yourself away. It's a slow fade when black and white have turned to gray. Thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid, When you give yourself away. People never crumble in a day, It's a slow fade, it's a slow fade." Persistent sin doesn’t happen overnight. Each sin draws the sinner further from God; each sin draws the sinner closer to destruction; each sin draws the sinner closer to judgment. Jesus remained silent at times during His ministry, in fact He taught in parables so that the persistent unbelievers would not understand. He gave them up to their unbelief; He gave them up to their sin. We are all chained to sin, doom, destruction and we cannot rescue ourselves from the inevitable consequences of sin.

Isaiah fully acknowledges how bad it is in these two words, "but now," and at the same time declares his faith in the gracious promise of the Lords. Isaiah is clinging to the underserved grace of God just as we can cling to that same underserved grace. The two words, "but now" expresses faith because they say in spite of our sins and in spite of the fact that even our best amounts to nothing but dirty bloody unclean rags. In spite of the disgusting stain of sin, the prayer expresses faith in the Lord because it calls on the promises of God.

In the prayer Isaiah uses two different names for God, Lord and Father. First he uses Lord to call to the God of the covenant who revealed His name to Moses. This is the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. Secondly he uses Father; he is saying He is "our father." In this cry of faith he claims God as the dearest treasure.

This prayer recognizes God to be the creator, the potter who made them, the potter that shaped them into a nation after He called Abraham. The potter that not only made a new creation out of the descendants of Abraham but made a new creation out of each of us. He shaped us as individuals, each in their own special way. We are shaped differently for different uses.

The potter took what we are, sinful unclean bloody rags and threw us on the potter’s wheel and through His son Jesus He makes us into a new creation. Our sin separates us from God but faith in Jesus and His dying act of forgiveness, faith in Jesus’ resurrection that puts an end to eternal death, faith in Jesus turns to God and depends on His gracious promise. We come to God in the name of Jesus, Jesus who shed His blood to wash away our sins. God invites us to pray to Him as dear children ask their dear Father. WE can pray with confidence and boldness because, in Jesus, God is our dear Father and we are His new creation. This prayer boldly erupts from the heart of a believer who trusts in the gracious promises of the Lord. You too can pray trusting in the gracious promises of the Lord. They are promises made to you from a Father that loves you more than anything else. During this, the first Sunday of Advent as we anxiously await the coming of our Lord in the person of Jesus as a baby in Bethlehem remember why it was necessary for God to send His Son. We are filthy bloody disgusting rags but our Father wants to create a new creation in us through Jesus Christ. So let’s await His coming with excitement and joy knowing He does it because He loves us.

Amen