*This is part 1 of a 3-part series. Read part 2 here and part 3 here.

By Bunni Pounds

“I saw the Lord....”  (Isaiah 6)

Those were the four words of Isaiah that changed his life. He was marked. He was now different.

As believers in our culture, we want to be sent. We are ready to go. We are ready to preach, to serve God, to run for office, to build a business, to change the world and to make our lives count for eternity- BUT we forget something really important. 

There is nothing for us to TELL if we don’t SEE.

In the year when his king died, Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.” That is all that needed to happen for him to hit the ground in humility and then later action. He SAW JESUS. He saw the holiness of the Lord, the seraphim crying “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!” He was stunned and he had no words for the splendor around him. 

With that one look his eyes were open to the Lord like he never had been before and he was changed.

(Ok - I am about to say something strong here. Get ready!)

Isaiah didn’t have anything to say - UNTIL he saw the Lord.

American church, we are so quick to move, to want to speak, to carry a message of change, to post on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds, but we have not put ourselves in a posture to SEE the LORD.

We do everything else but spend time looking at the precious words in His book. We run to look for everyone else’s opinions without looking for His opinion. 

We do everything else but spend an hour worshipping Him.

Once Isaiah saw the Lord, THEN and ONLY then could he hear the Lord clearly.

We try to skip those two steps - the seeing and the hearing. We want to carry a message, but we haven’t yet sat at His feet.

We want the sending and the telling WITHOUT the seeing and the hearing - but that is not where the power is. The power of the telling is in the SEEING.

We do everything we can to run away or occupy ourselves away from the place of abiding in the vine - the true Messenger.

How can we carry His message – if we don’t know the Messenger? 

Then we wonder why all these “great messengers”, our spokesmen in our Christian culture, are falling away, saying unscriptural things, or abandoning their faith?

What have they been looking at? Social media? YouTube? Netflix? Something else but Jesus and His Word, I can tell you that.

I have been so convicted about this the last five or six years - we have to prioritize our walk with Jesus, period. We are seeing the ramifications of not doing that more and more in our world.

Many days I spend more time talking about Jesus than actually being with Jesus in the place of prayer, worship, and meditation in His Word. God, forgive me!

I am asking God almost daily to continually crush any reliance I have in myself and make me dependent to see and hear from Him. I am nothing without Jesus.

Sometimes we have to get violent in our own souls to see breakthrough, and that means simply we have to take our calendars by force and SCHEDULE time with Jesus. We have to make Him a priority. If we don’t - we will not have anything to say. 

We have to have daily bread from Him to multiply anything, and if we want to feed the hundreds and thousands, then we have to have something to feed them with, not just recycled words from someone else. 

In John 4, the woman at the well saw Jesus, and it impacted her so greatly that she had to tell the whole village about Jesus.

I really believe our lack of telling the gospel story throughout our personal lives is in our lack of seeing Jesus - His love, His passion for people, and His character. 

Why don’t we share the gospel?  

Because we don’t really know Him. If we did, we would have to tell others about Him somehow, someway. 

If I ever get to the point again where I think I have anything to say without Him speaking first to me, I pray that the Lord sits me down in that moment. 

All I know right now is that I am desperate to SEE Him - not just so I have something to say to you - but because I am finally getting to the point where I understand Jesus is my entire life.  

My prayer: Please open my eyes to see You, God, like Isaiah did. I want to see YOU clearly! 

I want to see the Lord… 

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