About half of Americans can’t see clearly. We are nearsighted or farsighted and we deal with astigmatism and cataracts. When we wake up without our medicine, and by medicine I mean our glasses, we struggle to make out the time. When we want to read on our tablets or phones, we fumble for our glasses. We often don’t think about it, but there is a pain involved in having imperfect vision.

There is also a pain involved in our faith journeys because we can’t see. It’s not because we haven’t memorized enough scripture, or can’t grasp deep concepts, or that our church doctrine is too complicated for us. It’s because we don’t see God clearly.

The single-most important concept of your life and mine is how we see god. Two sociologists from Baylor University surveyed almost four thousand adults and discovered that nine out of ten Americans believe in God. But the way they picture God determines their attitudes on everything, including economics, justice, morality, war, natural disasters, science, politics, and love.

How do you view God? listen to the language of our culture:
The Old Man Who’s Out To Get Us
The Buddy Who Hangs With Us While We Live Our Own Lives
The Bellhop Who Gives Us Everything We Need
The Man Upstairs
The Higher Power
Mother Earth

Notice: each of these is a functional image of God. Though we say we believe in a fuller picture of God, these are the default ways we relate to him in our daily lives.

What is your picture of God? Do you draw a picture of him that you think is true, or do you allow him to show you what he is like?

How do you react when someone misunderstands you? What goes through your heart when someone assumes your motives are skewed, your intentions are selfish, or your purpose is something other than what you know it to be?

Well can you imagine how God feels with our incorrect pictures of him? I am amazed beyond comprehension that the God who created the universe wants to have a personal, eternal relationship with me and with you.

Sadly and unfortunately, many people don’t have a relationship with God because the God they claim to have a relationship with is not God, just a functional image of God. And the sad thing about that is that when our relationship with God is not based upon reality, as God reveals himself to us through the scriptures and his son, Jesus Christ, then our rapport is ruptured.

If your view of God is wrong, then your view of life is wrong. Your view of success is wrong. Your view of what is important is wrong. Even your view of yourself is wrong. We must see God the way he sees himself.

Our focus scripture for today looks at an incident that took place in the life of a man named Isaiah over twenty-five hundred years ago. In this incident, Isaiah gives us a better picture of God.

Allow me to show you three things, as it relates to seeing God clearly:

My mother and father would often talk about where they were and what they were doing when JFK was shot. The same goes for Dr. Martin Luther the King. I remember what I was doing when the twin towers fell that morning of September 11, 2001.

We are capable of mentally stamping such “big shift” experience with detailed memories. We can retell the elements of important events because the event changed the way we went forward in life.

Isaiah 6:1 begins by telling us the exact year that this incident took place in his life; it was the year that King Uzziah died. Why would Isaiah remember that detail? Because in that moment, his vision changed. He saw something that changed everything.

Isaiah saw the Lord sitting upon a throne. For the first time in history, he saw God in a way that no one had ever seen him. He saw the creator of the universe, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, sitting on an eternal throne, “high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” But that’s not all – look at verses 2-3.

That is the single most important picture of God you will find in all of the Old Testament. God is not some man upstairs, not a good ol’ boy God, God is not your homie or your homeboy, God is not your dog. The God that Isaiah saw is holy! Look at I Peter 1:16.

More often than any other attribute – love, grace, mercy, compassion, power, or knowledge – God is described throughout scripture as holy! This is the chief attribute, separate from everything else. We cannot treat him like another human being, we cannot speak to him like a servant or an errand boy, a vending machine genie or a cosmic bellhop. He cannot be compared with anyone else or anything else, because no one and nothing else is like him.

Notice, his glory doesn’t just fill the temple, “the whole earth is full of his glory!”

If you don’t see God as holy, you have the wrong view of God. Now you may be asking, but how do I know if I have seen God the way God really is? In other words, how will I know when I am seeing clearly?

In Isaiah 6: 4-5, we get to see Isaiah's next vision.

Remember, his first vision was of God himself. He looked at God in all his holiness and then his next vision was that he noticed his own sinfulness. When you see the real God, you will see the real you. You will never see yourself for what you are until you see God for who he is!

Many of us live in one of two extremes: we are either full of God and empty of ourselves or we are full of ourselves and empty of God. When Isaiah saw who he was, he didn’t like the picture. In verse 5 he mourned, “woe is me! for i am a man of unclean lips.”

When Isaiah saw God, the way scripture reveals him, he said in essence, “all of my so-called goodness, integrity, and decency is nothing compared to God's holiness.” You see, when God is lifted up, we will be brought low and taken down.

Note also, it is only when we get honest in our relationship with God that he gets merciful in his relationship with us. You can’t get cleaned up until you admit that you are dirty. Look at Isaiah 64:6.

Now look at Romans 3: 9-18. if that doesn’t make it clear to us, nothing else will.

When you’ve found something that makes you feel balanced, blessed, better, when you find something that gives you physical, mental, and spiritual rest, when you find something that resolves your anxiety and saves you money, you want to share it with any and everybody. When you are cured of a disease, you want to share that with everybody and especially share the one who is responsible for it, the holy, righteous god of the bible!

This is what happens to Isaiah in Chapter 6, verses 8-13.

Right after his new vision of God, and a freeing experience of cleansing, Isaiah hears a conversation the triune God is having. He hears God ask, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

Enter Isaiah, filled to the brim and pouring over with gratitude and hope and praise. He waves his hand wildly and shouts, “here I am! let me do it! people gotta know about this!”

With his vision corrected, Isaiah could see the true picture of the people around him, and everyone had the same need.

If you want to know if you are hitting on all cylinders in your relationship with God, this is how you know:

Once you see God for who he is and experience the freedom he offers, you’ll want to surrender everything you are to everything he is. The measure of the depth of your relationship to God is the extent of your surrender.

The single most important thing about you is not how much money you make, not what you look like, not how popular you are, or how prosperous you are. What matters most in the end for every one of us is that we have a real relationship with the real God, the holy God of the Bible!