Isaiah famously said, "Here am I. Send me!
In anticipating General Conference sessions, Ed revealed that the CGGC Church Planting team took Isaiah 6:8's question and "sought to address the leadership issues it raises."
Based on my theological analysis of Ed's account, the Church Planting team has made one of the mistakes that CGGC's shepherd-whipped leadership has been making regularly for at least 80 years: It engaged in what Bible students call eisegesis, or, according to Miriam-Webster, "the interpretation of a text (as of the Bible) by reading into it one's own ideas." It also ignored every part of the biblical message that is inconvenient to it.
Recently, Evelyn and I were given free tickets to a York Revs (minor league baseball team) game. One of the between-innings activities struck me as a letter-perfect metaphor for how CGGC leadership leads.
York Revs employees walked along the edge of the field with one of those guns that propels tee shirts into the crowd. All around us fans jumped to their feet, began waving their arms and shouting, "Me! Me! Shoot at me!" And all but about a half dozen people in my part of the stadium cried out in vain.
That has been the story of the Churches of God for generations.
As a prophet, I'm saying that it will be the story of the CGGC with Ed's four recently announced priorities.
Based on Ed, leadership now thinks it hears God saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"
In truth, haplessly, like those most fans at the Revs game, they are shouting, "Us! Us! Here we are, Lord! Send us!"
As I read the whole story that Isaiah tells, this is just another fantasy like the other well-intentioned whoppers CGGC leaders have told in recent generations. We know that all of those fantasies made for amazing stories at the time but, we also know that each and every one of them, in reality, led us nowhere--except to continuing decline.
Based on what Ed wrote and the fruit leadership is producing, our leaders have castrated the Lord's questions in Isaiah 6:8, as well as Isaiah's response, from the body of the passage.
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This is what happened BEFORE the Lord asked, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us:"
Isaiah brought himself into the Lord's presence in the temple and, when Isaiah did that, he encountered God's holiness. In that moment, Isaiah was awed and terrified. (Is. 6:2-4)
When Isaiah encountered the Lord, he began to think honestly about himself. He was overcome by a sense of his own sin and he cried out in anguish and despair.
This is what Isaiah said before he said, "Here am I. Send me!"
“Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (vs. 5 NIV)These are words our leaders have not said and won't say--in spite of superintending decades of CGGC decline.
They have not said those words because they remain unrepentant.
They are not honest about themselves as Isaiah was. They do not believe these things about themselves. They don't bear fruit of thinking about themselves, "(We are) ruined! For (we are people) of unclean lips."
It is every bit at least as important that they don't bear fruit of thinking about the CGGC the things that Isaiah came to think about his contemporaries. They do not live as if they understand that they "live among a people of unclean lips."
Because of his fear of the Lord and his abject despair over his true nature, Isaiah allowed himself to go through a painful process of atonement for his purification:
"Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, 'See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.'"Our leaders have hard hearts regarding their past and present sin. They have sinned. They need to confess that they are people of unclean lips.
They need to be honest about the spiritual state of the CGGC, which the Lord has not been blessing for generations.
They need cleansing from the Lord that will cause them immense pain. Then they need to lead us to seek and accept cleansing that will cause all of us immense pain.
Our leaders claim Isaiah's example, yet they ignore all of these essential parts of the story of the call of Isaiah.
According to Isaiah, the Lord's call came only after Isaiah experienced God's holiness, in response, confessed his own sin and was willing to accept that painful act of atonement.
That is why these latest priorities, handed down from our mountaintop, are doomed to fail.
They come from haughty, not humble, hearts.
My CGGC friends, we must begin where Isaiah began.
We must expose ourselves to the holiness of God.
We must be willing to see ourselves as He sees us--
as men and women who sin and who need to repent.
The Lord only asked the question about whom He would send
after Isaiah declared his abject sinfulness.
The Lord only sent Isaiah AFTER one of the seraphim touched his lips with the live coal and declared “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Nothing spiritual will happen in the CGGC until we say, along with Isaiah, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips,
and I live among a people of unclean lips,
and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
We must expose ourselves to the holiness of God.
We must be willing to see ourselves as He sees us--
as men and women who sin and who need to repent.
The Lord only asked the question about whom He would send
after Isaiah declared his abject sinfulness.
The Lord only sent Isaiah AFTER one of the seraphim touched his lips with the live coal and declared “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Nothing spiritual will happen in the CGGC until we say, along with Isaiah, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips,
and I live among a people of unclean lips,
and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
We must enter unguardedly into the Lord's presence and expose ourselves to His purity and power. We must be willing to see His truth about us and to repent.
We must display our spiritual nakedness to the holy and just God whose very nature demanded so great an atonement that He sent His own Son to live and die for our sin so that we could be forgiven and saved.
This is what our shepherd-dominated leadership has never, ever done. It is what the CGGC, as long as it is led by shepherds, will never be able to do.
The reality is that the Lord of grace and mercy and love, forgiveness and blessing is not blessing the CGGC. He isn't because He is holy and we, from our mountaintop down, do not acknowledge His holiness or feel shame over our sin.
For generations, the Lord has not been asking, in the presence of the CGGC, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
His ears are deaf to us. He has not heard us say, "Here am I! Send me."
The fruit the shepherd leadership produces makes it clear that they really don't know a holy and just God before whom human beings must say "Woe is me!"
They don't know the Jesus of the Word.
They believe in a Jesus who prayed from the cross, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing," but they don't believe in the Jesus who cleared the moneychangers from the temple.
They believe in the Jesus who says, "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest..." but they refuse to consider that, just before He said that, He "began to denounce the cities in which most of His mighty works had been done because they did not repent."
Shepherds are theologically deficient--by God's design and plan.
They are called to be stewards of relationship in the body of Christ, not stewards of His truth in the body. They are unacquainted with a God who is holy and just. Examine their fruit. You will see that that this is true.
As long as shepherds and those whipped or charmed by shepherds lead us, we will never get to the place where we can hear the Lord ask us to go for Him.
We must repent.
