Grace and peace be to you from God our Father and from the LORD Jesus Christ! Amen. Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Parents! Something is bothering your child and you don’t know what it is. Your son or daughter isn’t speaking to you because he, or she, is ashamed of something. As time goes by, it seems as if you and your child are becoming strangers. What will you do? Probably you will sit down and talk to you child. Maybe you will say something like this: Don’t be ashamed. I promise I won’t get angry with you. Please tell me what is bothering you. I want to help you before it is too late. If you can imagine such a situation, then maybe you can begin to comprehend what out text is talking about. We are God’s children, but our shameful sins have separated us from Him. Our heavenly Father doesn’t want us to be lost. He wants to help us and this is why He calls out, through the prophet Isaiah: Call on the LORD while He is near. Call on Him for compassion and forgiveness. Call on Him according to His thoughts and ways.

Listen, now, to the Word of the LORD, taken from the book of Isaiah, chapter 55, verses 6-9. We read:

6 Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.

7 Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

8 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.

9 "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

This is the Word of the LORD.

Before we consider the LORD’s call to repentance for us, it is important that we look at some details concerning the prophet who gave us the call. The prophet Isaiah lived around 740 –700 BC in the country of Judah. His name means: the LORD is salvation, and exactly that was Isaiah’s message. Many even call him the Evangelist of the Old Testament because of his detailed prophecies about Jesus. The people of Judah were in moral decay. They were no longer worshipping the true God, but were rather worshiping foreign gods, gods of sex, money and violence. Their society was, what ours is turning into. Isaiah’s message to this people, then, was two fold: First of all he warned Judah, and all the godless nations around it, about God’s sever judgment because of their godlessness and immorality. Secondly he comforted the remnant of believers left in Judah with wonderful descriptions of their Savior from sin: Jesus. Right before our text, the LORD, through the prophet, invites all nations to come to Him. He offers them undeserved love and salvation, all with out cost. Now he calls each individual person to return to Him.

Seek the LORD while he may be found. Imagine that you going for an evening walk and you see a man coming towards you with a knife. Your life is in danger! What would you do? Most likely you would try to get away and look for a police officer. The LORD wants us to look for him the same way we would look for a police officer if our lives were in danger. Why? Because our eternal life is in danger because of our sins.

Isaiah tells us to seek the LORD while he may be found. A better translation of this would be: while he is letting himself be found. Police usually station themselves in a place where they are easily found if you are in danger. God has also stationed Himself in a place where we can easily find Him. We find God in the Bible and in the Sacraments. God wants us to read the Bible and use the Sacraments as often as possible because it is only there that we find God. It is only through these means of grace that God draws us to himself. Yes, we need to be drawn by God to himself, because it is impossible for us to come to him on our own, as Jesus says: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

Our text tells us to call on the LORD while he is near. The first time I was in New York, I remember people warning me never to enter Central Park after midnight. Why? Because all the police would leave the park at this time. I would no longer be able to find them. They would no longer be near. God warns us that we only have a certain amount of time to come to him. This time is called our time of grace. The LORD is calling us now. He wants us to heed his call now and return to him now! If we don’t immediately heed God’s call, repent of our sins, and return to him, it could happen that it becomes too late: that we have let our time of grace pass us by.

We could die tomorrow. Maybe the end of the world will happen tomorrow. Maybe the LORD will remove his Word from us so that it is impossible for us to find him. This has already happened to many people. If we don’t listen to God now, we are in danger in becoming the people to whom the LORD says: Be ever hearing but never understanding. Be ever seeing but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull, and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and be healed.' Yes, may the LORD ever keep us from falling into such a horrible judgement!

The LORD is calling out to each one of us. It doesn’t matter whether we are black or white, male or female, young or old, rich or poor, free or imprisoned. God wants all of us to return to him. Isaiah writes: Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. Each one of us must confess that we are the wicked and evil ones talked about in this verse. Do any of us claim to be perfect and able to come before God to tell him, "God let me into heaven. I deserve it. I am perfect"? No. We all know what God’s word says about us. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and, If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Yes, we all are entirely sinful and haven’t deserved anything but an eternity in the fires of hell.

But God doesn’t want us to die. He wants us to return to him. He wants us to confess our sins and be forgiven, as St. John says: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. The LORD wants us to confess our sins, leave our sinful life and live. What does it mean to confess our sins? Do you remember what you learn in confirmation class? Luther beautifully explains it in his small Catechism when he writes: Confession has two parts. The one is that we confess our sins; the other, that we receive absolution or forgiveness from the pastor as from God himself, not doubting but firmly believing that our sins are thus forgiven before God in heaven. God has so beautifully told us that he will have mercy on us. The word mercy in our text is actually better translated: he will show us compassion, a deep love. God will show us penitent sinners a deep love and much forgiveness. This love of God reached it’s climax when Jesus, God’s one and only Son, hung on the cross, suffering for the sins of every, single, person that has ever or will ever live on this earth. Because of this love, we want to abandon our sinful life and return to Him: to the LORD, our God. His love, which saved us, empowers us to live a life worthy of the Gospel of Christ, as our second reading encouraged us to do.

God exhorts us to confess our sins and to abandon our sinful way of life. He offers us deep love and unlimited forgiveness. But, what is our answer? Do we come to the LORD? Do we search him out as we should, in complete humility and trust in his promises? Certainly we make an effort on Sunday to come to Church, or at least to give God some thought. But what do you do otherwise? What do we do during the week when we once again fall into our pet sin as always? The devil tries to tempt us in two different ways. On one hand he might lead us to think: It wasn’t that bad, I mean, I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t steal anything. It was really nothing, just a little bit of anger I had to vent. The guy deserved it anyway. God can give me that one, right? Yes, many times our sinful nature likes to think this way, but such thoughts only lead to eternal death. God calls us now. He wants us to come to him and confess our sins to him right away, because even the smallest sin is worthy of eternal hell fire.

The other temptation of the devil is when he lets us think: My sin can’t be forgiven, at least not now, right after I sinned. We think: I just sinned and it was that same sin again. How can I come to God? He is probably tired of all my pleas for forgiveness for the same sin. No I have to wait. I have to prove to God that I am truly sorry for my sins. I feel sorry for the poor sinner who thinks this way. Such thinking is another attempt to earn God’s grace, and it won’t work. God calls us now. He promises us unlimited forgiveness. Right after we sin is the time to confess our sin and trust that our all of our sins (no matter what we think about them) have been entirely, totally, absolutely and instantaneously forgiven.

Call on the LORD while He is near! Call on Him for Compassion and forgiveness! Call on Him according to his thoughts and ways.

Why does God love us so much that He is willing to forgive us everything we ever did? What moved God to send his Son to earth, to live, suffer, and die for us? Our text tells us that his thoughts and ways moved him to do this. We will never be able to fully understand God’s thoughts and ways in this life. Why? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." If it is hard for us to understand the thoughts and ways of another culture, how much harder it is for us to understand the thoughts and ways of God.

But, what is the difference between our thoughts and ways, and those of God? In order to understand this, first we have to understand what our own thoughts and ways are. Where do our ways lead? God’s word tells us: There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. Our ways, then, lead only to death. What about our thoughts? God tells us: The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. Scriptures clearly tell us that we are totally sinful. Our sinful ways and thoughts only lead to one thing: eternal death and damnation. Realizing this, we cry out with the apostle Paul: What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God-- through Jesus Christ our Lord! Thanks be to God that he isn’t like us His ways and thoughts are full of love and forgiveness. His thoughts are that, all men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth, as Paul writes. The way of God is Jesus, as John writes: Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Yes, the thoughts and ways of God are deeply compassionate. They are so filled with love that they motivated God the Son to suffer and die for us. Just think of it: So great is God’s love for us, that he damned himself, for a time, that we might live! The apostle Paul speaks of such love when he writes: You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Yes, such love could never come out of us. This kind of love only comes from a righteous and compassionate God.

God wants us to come to him and ask for forgiveness according to his thoughts and ways. But what does this mean? His thoughts and ways are much higher than ours. What this means is that God wants us to trust him at his word. When we ask Him for forgiveness, he wants us to trust that our sins are already forgiven, and that he loves us with a deep, unending love. Receiving this love and forgiveness, we will, with the help of the Holy Spirit he promises to give us, also show that same kind of love and forgiveness to others. We will live according to his thoughts and ways, as God encourages us to do: be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Yes, carrying the love and forgiveness God has shown us, we will forgive our neighbor when he sins against us. We will invite everybody we meet here in Benton Harbor to Church. We will show them God’s love and forgiveness, offered to them through faith in Jesus Christ, and say to them: Call on the LORD, while He is near. Amen