What Isaiah said under the power of the Holy Spirit carries a message for the bride of Christ; the saved and believing members of the body of His body, His church…
Isa 45:22 “Look to Me, and be saved, All you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.
Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest) got me to thinking about that this morning and something he said really hit home…
The great difficulty spiritually is to concentrate on God, and it is His blessings that make it difficult.
After some soul searching that comment made a lot of sense. In times of troubles it is always easy to quickly look to the Lord for answers and salvation, but in times of blessings it is so easy to find ourselves looking elsewhere. We forget in the midst of both cases that at the heart of the issue is the fact that “we are saved.” And so, when we are tempted to be distracted when all is going well, we need to be ever mindful that is the moment when we most urgently need to “look up to Jesus.”
When we do, especially in the times of blessing, all of our preoccupation with the world will disappear and the issues of His Kingdom and our place and responsibility in it will become clear. We can’t forget that in the good times that all our hope is still solely in Jesus, because those times will soon pass and be replaced with the difficult times. And that brings us to the term in Isaiah’s message that we tend to gloss over… be saved.
In our daily lives we tend to see that word “salvation” and surround it with a definition of being converted from lost to saved in Christ. While that is true, we need to remember that it is His promise that His salvation is permanent and refers to much more than just becoming a believer, a member of His bride.
That salvation is there for us in any situation… saving us in a difficult challenge and saving us from the distraction of a blessing. In both cases our hope is to be steadfastly focused on Jesus. We are to look up and be saved, and the moment we do, the Holy Spirit will immediately refocus our mind and all thoughts of difficulties or blessings will vanish. In their place our hope in Him will be built even stronger as the cares of this world fade away.
The bottom line in life… just look unto Jesus, and in that moment… salvation is!