Turn and be saved

“Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear. They will say of me, ‘In the LORD alone are righteousness and strength.’”

All who have raged against him will come to him and be put to shame. But in the LORD all the descendants of Israel will be found righteous and exult.

Isaiah 45.22-25

What an invitation! It is made to ‘all the ends of the earth’ so no one is outside its scope, and it is made by the one and only God, for there is no other.

And yet it is possible to read these words and allow them to pass over us leaving us unchanged. If we read these words as Christians they should surely elicit at least two responses.

First:

They should cause us to fall on our knees, literally or metaphorically in wonder love and praise that the truth  stated here is demonstrably be true in our own lives. At some point, by the grace of God we turned to him from the way in which we were going and we now know the joy of his salvation. We know this because we know the one true God, the source of all, and true, just and righteous in all his ways.

Second:

They should cause us deep concern that so few hear, or if they hear so few respond to the invitation. This likewise should cause us to fall on our knees, literally or metaphorically and plead with God to open the ears and eyes of these multitudes, so that they might turn and be saved.

Both these responses, if genuine,  necessarily mean that we must act!

In response to the first we must, with the aid of God’s Spirit, live lives that demonstrate that we are his. Too often I fear, we are indistinguishable from those around us. So we must examine our lives that we may indeed be people who by the grace of God radiate light in a dark world.

In response to the second, we must work as individuals and particularly as individuals together as the ‘Church’ where God has placed us, to contact and impact, through our ministries and by every means at our disposal, those whom Jesus described as ‘harassed  and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ Dare we hold back when, as we will explore further in a couple of days,

All who have raged against him will come to him and be put to shame.

That is a devastating prospect when the means of ‘being saved’ are freely available.

How then can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? Romans 10.14

There are many was of preaching (sharing the Good News) and only those who know it can share it – you and me

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