Isaiah 12:1-6 – In that day you will sing: “I will praise you, O Lord! You were angry with me, but not any more. Now you comfort me. 2 See, God has come to save me. I will trust in him and not be afraid. The Lord God is my strength and my song; he has given me victory.” 3 With joy you will drink deeply from the fountain of salvation! 4 In that wonderful day you will sing: “Thank the Lord! Praise his name! Tell the nations what he has done. Let them know how mighty he is! Sing to the Lord, for he has done wonderful things.   6 Make known his praise around the world. Let all the people of Jerusalem shout his praise with joy! For great is the Holy One of Israel who lives among you.”

After calling us to praise God for Salvation Isaiah now calls us to praise Him for He is our:

• Strength

As verse 2 says, “The Lord God is my strength.” In your life have you ever been weak and in need of strength? Think of the last time you lost your strength and were weak, what was the result? Like me in that moment you needed help. We may know that we are weak but here is the question, is the way that we are living really reflecting this reality? Are we admitting our weakness and our need for strength? Many of us live more in defiance of this truth than in dependence on Jesus because of it. We know we need strength but we don’t submit to the reality of what we know. Today we have replaced trusting in the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with trying through the trinity of self, Me, Myself and I. We have rewritten Philippians 4:13 to read: “I can do all things through ME that gives Myself strength” We have substituted the Savior for self. I don’t need to convince you that you need strength from an outside source because you and I both know your strength isn’t cutting it. The question is are you ready to submit to the truth and turn to the Father or keep faking? For others the issue is not that we are resisting the reality that we need strength. We know and we have submitted to the truth that we need strength, it’s just that we have submitted to substitute strength instead of the Saviors. The question we never thought through was where are we going to look for this strength? Am I going to lean on the Saviors strength or substitutes? One of the biggest substitutes to the Savior strength that we turn to today is money. Instead of leaning on God we lean on gold.  Why does the world frantically strive for financial stability, because it is their source of strength. Why are they always scrambling, because their substitute strength is fleeting, its foundation is not firm.  Gold is a gift given not to remove God but to remind us of His goodness. Why did Jesus spent so much time talking about money, because He knew that many would waste their lives chasing cash. Today many are living like moths drawn to the flame, choosing to circle the financial glow instead of God, only to get consumed by the cash instead of Christ.  Why do we skate around on the thin ice of treasures, why do we spend our lives on the shifting sands of riches because we have bought and believed the lie that we can lean and rely on our riches. S. D. Gordon said “Money supplies a channel through which one may reach most intimately to others, near by and around the world. It is the golden channel of service.” The problem is that today that we are grabbing for the gold instead of God. We have turned the treasure from being a tool of service into substitute strength for self. We’ve turned from trusting in God to trusting in our treasure. But my greatest resource is not my riches, it is my relationship with the Redeemer. Money may make some things easier but money is never not enough. It will always be a substitute strength that comes up short, only Jesus is enough. You see your soul will never find strength in a substitute. For some of us we are not turning to an outside substitute, we are rely on one closer to home, the substitute of self. We choose to parade around in our own power but eventually it will be revealed for what it is, pathetic. Our physical bodies have one destination, death. Physically I’m not getting more powerful I’m getting more puny, and my power is anemic compared to the Almighty. We don’t just try to rest in the strength of our muscles but also in our mind, but just like our physical strength we also lose our minds. There is a story told about an elderly Christian lady whose age began to take a terrible toll on her memory. She once knew much of the Bible by heart, but eventually only one part of one precious verse stayed with her. It was part of 2 Timothy 1:12, where Paul said: “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.” Yet as time went on, even that brief portion of Scripture began to slip away. In her last days as she hovered near death, her loved ones noticed her lips moving. They bent down to see if she needed anything. And they heard her saying over and over the one word she remembered from the Bible: “Him, Him, Him.” She had lost most of her mental abilities, but she never lost Him. When it’s all stripped away what do you really have? Today I pray that God in His grace will give us the gift of stripping us of our substitute strengths so that all we have is Him. It’s a scary prayer and seemingly sour at first as we lose our substitute source of strength, but oh so sweet when we find the Saviors. You see your source of strength will become your well of worship, its where your focus and faith will be found. Finances or the Father, self or the Savior what are you worshipping, the One who is worthy or that which is worthless? For the financial fool it’s a prayer for God to break the bank so that we stop leaning on the lies and start leaning on the Lord. What do you care more about being bankrupted financially or broke biblically? What about the impact that this prayer has on the substitute of self? Stripping self may mean stripping our strength physically, but what’s more important health or holiness? Paul got the gift of God’s grace when in 2 Corinthians 12:9 he wrote, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Why is strength such a big deal because it gives us a sense of security. The problem is that many of us are focused on a false and fleeting sense of security instead of the steadfast strength of the Savior. Today are you resting and rejoicing in the joy of His strength or the junk of substitute strength?

Isaiah 12:1-6 – In that day you will sing: “I will praise you, O Lord! You were angry with me, but not any more. Now you comfort me. 2 See, God has come to save me. I will trust in him and not be afraid. The Lord God is my strength and my song; he has given me victory.” 3 With joy you will drink deeply from the fountain of salvation! 4 In that wonderful day you will sing: “Thank the Lord! Praise his name! Tell the nations what he has done. Let them know how mighty he is! Sing to the Lord, for he has done wonderful things.   6 Make known his praise around the world. Let all the people of Jerusalem[a] shout his praise with joy!  For great is the Holy One of Israel who lives among you.”

Today if you need a reason to rejoice then listen to the words of Isaiah. This is a song of praise for the captives coming home, a song for the sinner who finds salvation, and a song for the backsliding believer who is comes back to Christ. God saved us for a purpose and that purpose is praise, it’s a word that’s mentioned over 200 times in the bible. Here Isaiah says that we should praise Him for He is our:

• Salvation

Isaiah mentions salvation here three times, and reveals one of the most amazing truths, that God’s righteous anger against our sin is turned away from us. David paints this picture of peace in Psalm 103:8-12: “The Lord is compassionate and merciful, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. 9  He will not constantly accuse us, nor remain angry forever. 10 He does not punish us for all our sins; he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve. 11 For his unfailing love toward those who fear him is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth. 12 He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.” Part of the sweetness of salvation is seeing and admitting the truth that God has a right to be angry with me but isn’t. In Romans 3:23 Paul points out how short we are because of sin:  “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” God has a right to be angry with me over my sin but instead His anger was turned to His Son. Isaiah 53:4-6 says: “Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! 5 But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. 6 All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.”  When was the last time you really stopped to let the coast of your salvation really soak in, and consider what your Savior really did for you on the cross? Jesus didn’t just take my physical death, He took my spiritual death, an eternal death. Without Jesus death on the tree I was heading for an everlasting torment in Hell. This is the greatest exchange of all time, I got God He got my guilt, I got God’s promises He got my pain, I got pardoned He my punishment. He took the death I deserved so I could have His life I didn’t deserve. In Romans 5:6-9 we are reminded that the gift of grace is not because we are good but because He is God: “6 When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. 7 Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. 8 But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. 9 And since we have been made right in God’s sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God’s condemnation.”  Salvation gives us a reason to shout, so what about you are you experiencing Jesus joy in your life? If not it might be because you have wondered away from the well of your salvation. Thirst always comes when we trade trusting for trying. I think our problem today is that we have become content to sip from the supply when we could be slurping, “With joy you will drink deeply from the fountain of salvation!” Are you drinking deeply from the source? In John 4:4-12 Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman about salvation and the real well water of life: 4 “Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus is the well and He offered this woman the water she needed. At first this woman chose to argue with wisdom, what a waste of the well. Yet how often do we argue with the Almighty instead of drinking from the well of His Word? Today what are you drinking deeply from, is it the fountain of life or lies? This woman was caught up in the carnal but after Christ she chose life. Only truth can quench your thirst. Maybe today you’re not feeling the joy, maybe someone has hurt you or betrayed you. Maybe a loved one is going through a terrible illness, or dying from a deadly disease. The truth is that no matter your situation you can always drink deeply from the fountain of salvation. Hurt does not hinder hope. Salvation is not just our help it is our healing, it brings us peace in the panic and comfort in the chaos. Are you rejoicing in your rescue, are you praising in His provision? It feels good to be forgiven, yet far too many of us are sipping from the free fountain of forgiveness. Today is it time for you to stop sipping and start slurping?