Isaiah 66:2 For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word
Did your five-year-old child ever want to help you wash the car or some such thing? If your child ever did that, you realized that if you allowed your child to help wash the car, you were helping him; he wasn’t helping you. You may have been investing in his helping you in the future when he was capable, but he wasn’t really helping you. He needed you to teach him. Sometimes we think that God really needs us, that God is desperately in need of us. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be sure, if I refuse to serve God and do what God made me to do, there may be people who will suffer for that because God would have provided through me. But in the strictest sense, God is not lacking or impoverished by anything I would withhold from Him. God doesn’t need me; God loves me.
Isaiah 66:1 says, “Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?” God is a massive God. How could man possibly build Him a place with human hands in which He could dwell. Solomon, when he built the magnificent temple, said in I Kings 8:27, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?”
God doesn’t need us. In fact, in Isaiah 1:11, speaking to a rebellious people, He says, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?” He basically says, “I am not pleased by them. I don’t need them. I don’t need your sacrifices as if I were hungry. What is the purpose of them?” Jesus quoted Isaiah when He was speaking in Mark 7:6 about those who were religious but rejected Him, “Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” So, God is a God Who has no need, but He loves us. God doesn’t want you to help Him; God wants you to hear Him. I think we should serve Him, and if you will hear Him, then you will be serving Him in ways that matter.
In Isaiah 66:2 He says, “For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.” How could you possibly impress an infinite God with some good act of virtue? God spoke the worlds into existence and I am supposed to impress Him by some little thing that I have done? Yet, if you look at Jesus, God incarnate, in the gospels, He oftentimes marveled, not at people’s words, but at their faith or lack of faith.
Isaiah 66:3 says, He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man.” It goes through all these wonderful things that the people pretended to do but were really an abomination to God. Verse 4 says, “I also will choose their delusions.” This is a response to verse 3 where God said, “Yea, they have chosen their own ways.” So, they chose their ways and God chose their judgment. Isaiah 65 is about the fact that God was not hearing His people because His people were not hearing Him. So, God doesn’t want you to merely help Him. He wants you to hear Him.
Why do we say that? First, God has more ambition. You may have great ambition and great desire to do great things for God. That is fine, but what is vision? The Bible says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” In that proverb it is obvious that the vision talked about is God’s Word, which tells us what God has said and what God wants. Isaiah is the book where God prophesies of Cyrus in some detail a hundred fifty years before Cyrus was even born. Do you think your ambitions are greater than an infinite God? God doesn’t want you to help Him; He wants you to hear Him.
God has more power. He says, “The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.” Verse 14 says, “The hand of the LORD shall be known toward his servants, and his indignation toward his enemies.” God has more power than you can possibly imagine. Verse 23 says, “Shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the LORD.”
God also has more intelligence. In verse 18, speaking of those who were wicked and strayed from Him, God says, “I know their works.” He knows our works, good and bad. He knows us to our core. God has knowledge of the future, the past, and the present. God knows me better than I know myself.
God has more longevity and more life. Verse 22 says, “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed and your name remain.” There are very few things that remain in this earth. If I were to say, “Name five gospel-preaching, Bible-centered churches that are more than a hundred years old,” most of us could not name them. That is a sobering thought. God is not impressed by what you do for Him if you are not listening to Him. So many churches, colleges, and organizations have stopped listening to God. They were satisfied with what they were doing instead of what God wanted, and they lost their way. God doesn’t want you to help Him; God wants you to hear Him.
How do you do that? If you want to hear God, hear His words through any part of the Bible. Then, hear His words through His servants. No person is infallible, but a good Bible preacher preaches God’s authority. He tells you what God has said, not what he, a man, thinks. If you want to hear God, hear His Word and those who speak His truth.
God doesn’t want you merely to help Him; God wants you to hear Him. Will you hear Him now? If so, then go and do something. That is exactly the way God designed us to be, to do something to serve Him, but only after we hear what He has to say. If you hear Him, your life will count for things that matter.