Unleashed: As You Go – Pray

Until the End

“The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I; send me!” Isaiah 6:4-5,8

“Send me” is the only response Isaiah can make. In this moment of complete surrender, Isaiah said he would go. In this moment of total worship, Isaiah knew he had to say yes. In this moment of overwhelming emotion of his own sinfulness, Isaiah said yes.

If you had been standing there, would you have said “Yes, send me”?

The call of God hasn’t changed over the generations. He still calls us to go into this world that needs Him. We may be called to the marketplace where we encounter the lost. For some of us the call is to the ends of the world, to other cultures and people groups. Granted, the call for most people will never be quite as dramatic as it was for Moses, David, Peter, Paul or Isaiah but the impact will still be Kingdom changing.

Sitting in the Regal Cinema watching the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) documentary “Ends of the Earth,” I couldn’t help but think, God is still asking the same question, “Who will go?”  “It’s a mysterious part of the gospel that says God loves the people at the very edge of the world, the people who are marginalized. You know, even among Christians there’s is a kind of calculation about return on investment (ROI) and “bang for our buck.” You hear this with mission work too. But we can’t really approach this from an ROI perspective. The gospel is costly. Jesus comes and He gives His life so we can have life. And He’s the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep.” David Holsten, Pres MAF

The gospel is costly in so many ways. It puts you in the crosshairs of our secular culture. The cost will require you to sacrifice time and energy. For some, such as MAF pilot, Joyce Lin, it was giving her life in a plane crash in Papua, Indonesia. Her yes to “send me” cost her life. In Haiti this week, 17 missionaries were kidnapped. Their yes to “send me” is a loss of freedom and possibly worse.

Your yes to “send me” will cost you. Will the cost be worth it?  Isaiah doesn’t ask what cost he will suffer, his only question is, “How long, O Lord?” God’s answer: forever. Isaiah doesn’t think, he simply says, “send me”. Frederick Buechner writes, “And that is what a prophet does for a living and, starting from the year that King Uzziah died, when he saw and heard all these things, Isaiah went and did it.”

A young coal miner from Iowa said “yes” to God’s call. George Bennard became an itinerant missionary and preacher. When he was interrupted and harassed in a service by those mocking the cross, it caused Bennard to think deeply about Christ and the Cross. As he meditated on the meaning of the cross, six initial words “I’ll cherish the old rugged cross” birthed the hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Our “yes” to “send me” will cost us something. Our “yes” to “send me” will look different from anyone else’s “yes.” Yet in the end, our “yes” will be worth it. The words from the final verse of Bennard’s hymn say it well:

“To the old rugged cross I will ever be true; its shame and reproach gladly bear;

Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away, where His glory forever I’ll share.

 So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, till my trophies at last I lay down;

I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.”

Use me Lord to the end. Let others see you in me. Give me eyes to see, ears to hear your call in my life. Fall fresh on me. Fall fresh on me. Amen

God is great,

Pastor Lynn