How does a people God has blessed so richly turn their backs on him? Isaiah 1 opens with God’s lament over Jerusalem—once full of justice, now a harlot filled with murderers—and brings the question home for Lent: when he looks at you, does he lament?

Study Questions

The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.

Pastor Perron uses the image of smelting silver to describe God's purifying work—intense heat that removes impurities until a clear reflection appears. What “dross” do you sense God may be working to remove from your own heart right now, and how has that process felt in past seasons compared to what you expected?
The sermon highlights how Israel's worship became external and rote rather than coming from a genuine love for God. How can you tell the difference in your own life between going through the motions and worshiping with a sincere heart? What tends to shift that for you?
Pastor Perron identifies subtle modern idols—anger, the need for control, pleasure—that can quietly take root even in committed Christian lives. Which of these, or others not mentioned, do you recognize in yourself, and what would it look like practically to let God remove them this Lenten season?
The sermon draws a parallel between Israel's drift from its godly foundations and America's spiritual trajectory. Do you find that parallel convincing? What specific responsibilities do you think Christians carry in response to cultural drift away from God's Word?
In what specific ways has God's restoring discipline—aimed at reclaiming rather than destroying—shown up in your own story, and how does that shape the way you approach this season of preparation for Easter?

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.

I can tell you one thing: he's definitely not dumber than an ox. He is an incredibly wise man. Come on, Pastor Dan, come on up. What a joy it is to have you here. I'm going to get out of the way so we can hear God's word from him.

Well, that's a hard act to follow. It's a joy to be here tonight. I have looked forward to this opportunity for several years, and finally it's happening. I've been watching as Tim has been growing and putting together this Little Hills Church. What an encouragement this is. Tim, yes, I love you dearly, my friend, and we've had some incredibly wonderful times together over the years. It's been 15 years since we left St. Louis, and God has done lots in those 15 years, including eventually retirement, which I hate. I don't like it at all, but it's where I'm stuck. But it gives me opportunity to do a lot more different kinds of things for the Lord, and I'm grateful for that opportunity.

We are here in St. Louis because we are babysitting two grandchildren, where our son and daughter-in-law are both on business trips at opposite ends of the country. We got in this afternoon, and I want to tell you what a nice warm welcome it was to drive over here from South City. But I want you to know that tomorrow night in Indianapolis, where we're living now, we get it, and it's the same thing with all the same warnings. But anyway, it's a joy to be here. It's a joy to see some of you that I have loved and prayed for so many times because you were with me at Grace Church. So it's a joy to be reunited tonight with you. Thank you for letting me be here.

I want to explain what I'm doing tonight. I've been assigned a passage—Isaiah 1, verses 26 and 27. You're going to have to wait because I'm not going to read it until near the end of the sermon. I've been praying about this passage. Isaiah is my favorite book in the Bible, and I love preaching from it and teaching from it. It was a joy to be able to do this. I looked at that text, prayed over it, and thought, what's the best way to deal with it? I'm quite capable of coming up with 30 or more minutes on those two verses. There's lots there. But as I looked at it and prayed about it, I thought it might be more helpful if I started with a review of what's here in chapter 1.

I know Tim's been preaching through it. Tim had sent me his sermons and the basic idea behind the sermons. It looks wonderful—what a great Lenten series. By the way, Melanie, the music you chose today was incredibly perfect for a Lenten Sunday. Great focus. Thank you.

So what I'm going to do is a quick overview of the first 25 verses before I get to the text assigned for today, because it's in the bigger picture that you start to see what Isaiah is saying as he speaks the Lord's Word to God's chosen people, and then to the church, and then taking it down further to us individually.

Let me start by reminding you that on the 11th of November, 1620, the men who were on the Mayflower, under the leadership of Governor John Carver and William Bradford, pulled together the Mayflower Compact. The Mayflower Compact was a document that was put there to oversee and direct how a new colony would function. What's significant about the Mayflower Compact, other than what I just said, is the idea behind it: that they were there to honor God and to bring glory to his name and to put together a society that was following the principles of God's Word. God blessed that and honored that. A number of my grandparents were among that group, and several of my grandfathers were the signers of the Mayflower Compact, so I have a special connection to it.

Ten years later, in 1630, just a few miles north in Boston, Governor John Winthrop, speaking to the Puritan church, was preaching a sermon in which he said that Boston was to be a city on a hill. What that really meant, according to Governor Winthrop, was that it would bring glory to God and start a whole new society focused on serving God and bringing glory to Him. That's our foundation, and God has blessed that foundation in phenomenal ways.

Now, let's move forward 400 years. Is that what America looks like today? No, of course it doesn't. We are a nation that has moved away from God's law and God's Word. In fact, we aren't even allowed to speak it in many different places, and we've elected people to stand over us who not only don't believe it but who hate God and hate His Word and are doing everything that they can to banish it or at least diminish it.

So the question is, what is the impact that this has caused in America today? I'm not going to spend any time answering that question except to say that we are much poorer today than they were 400 years ago, even though we may be the most wealthy nation in the world. There's a huge loss. You all know that. I'm not telling you anything new, and I don't need to work to convince you of that. But the bigger question is: How does that happen? When God has blessed so much and when the roots and the foundation were so clear, how does it happen that in 400 years we turn our back on God?

Which brings us to Isaiah chapter 1, because there are a lot of parallels between Israel, God's chosen people, and the United States of America—people whom God has decided to bless in amazing ways. We aren't God's chosen people; don't get that mistake. I'm not wanting to connect that, but we do need to recognize that God's blessing rested on Israel like it has on America, and yet what we see is a people who turned their backs on God. They've done it differently than we have here in America, and that's what we see here.

What Isaiah chapter 1 really is, is God's lament over Israel. In Isaiah's prophecy, he talks about Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem. They're all interchangeable in Isaiah's mind. Although they're different, yes, they're interchangeable. So Isaiah is talking about how God has lamented over the holy city, the city of righteousness that He had blessed so much, that He had set apart. He talks about how that has happened. It's a parallel to our own nation today, and we need to see it, particularly here in the Lenten season as we prepare for Easter.

So as we come to the lament, I want us to turn to verse 21. In verse 21, we read, “See how the faithful city has become a harlot. She once was full of justice, righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers.” That's God's lament: the people that He loved so dearly had just forgotten Him, and that's what sets the tone for this first chapter of Isaiah.

Now I'm going to run through several verses quickly just to point this out. I know Tim has already talked about them, so I don't really need to, other than to get us all thinking together. Verse 2 of Isaiah 1 says, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared up and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.” As much as God blessed them, they rebelled against the very One who had loved them and blessed them so significantly.

Or we come to verse 15, which says, “When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.” So the next part of the lament is that their worship has become such that God has rejected it.

It's important to recognize these were very religious people. They worshipped far more than we do. They went through all of the great commandments that God had given in the Pentateuch, and they worshipped God with great zeal. But God had rejected their sacrifices and their religious experiences, and God is saying, “I'm not listening to them anymore.” It's pretty scary, actually.

Then we come to verse 23, which reads, “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow's cause does not come to them.” So the righteous city, as Isaiah starts calling it, has become a place where justice is perverted and where men's sinful desires have taken over and where they have refused to have justice, even though that's what God is all about.

Here's the lament that Isaiah, speaking God's Word, articulates for us. I want you to understand it's the same in America. Justice is perverted. We might not all agree where the perversion is or who's the most perverted in the justice area. That doesn't really matter. The fact is, as a nation, there really isn't the kind of justice that this nation started out to have. It's a lot like Israel was. It's a lot like Jerusalem was.

But God isn't just talking to the people of Israel. He's talking to America, but more than that, He's talking to you. He is talking to His people who are all about serving Him, I might add, in their own way but serving Him. And so the application of this really comes down to us and where we are in our relationship with God. That's what we are looking at during the Lenten season as we prepare for Easter.

I have some friends who claim that they love Jesus, claim that they're Christians, but they live unholy, unrighteous lives. Their expectation is, “I'm out having a good time. I'll repent just before I die.” You probably have known those kinds of people. The sad part is it never happens. I've known one or two deathbed conversions in 55 years of ministry, but it doesn't happen. When we put it off, death gets us, and we stand before the righteous judge, and we never have set things up with Him. I am terrified for those people.

But let me go further. Over the years, the two most fun days in church worship are Christmas and Easter. Do you know why they're fun? Because the church is always full. I can remember Grace setting an attendance record on one Easter because everybody came for church. Many of those people who have come, and don't come any other time but have come for those two big Sundays, are finding that God's not hearing their worship. And that's what Isaiah was talking about when he talked about God having turned His back on their worship.

But here's what's interesting. In the middle of this lament, in the middle of Isaiah outlining where the sin is, and in the middle of Isaiah saying God's going to deal with it, and there's going to be judgment, and there's going to be destruction, and you really don't want to see that or be here when it happens, in the middle, we come to verse 19.

So in the middle of his lament, even then, the Lord is giving them one more time to repent—to turn from where their sinful hearts are to a place where God can work in them and use them, and where they can experience His love. That's what we see here in the first chapter of Isaiah.

So here comes what I would call a holy house cleaning. God is going to clean house so that He might restore His people. It's no different than that in the church today. I had a text from my cousin two or three days ago, and he was filling me in on several details about his life. It's a cousin that I'm close to, that I love, and who walks with the Lord. He was telling me how he had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to go to the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking of his Methodist church where he grew up, where they were married, where my uncle and aunt attended until they died—a church that had been very precious to them. He was talking about what a wonderful experience it was, and then he said, “But the sad part was that was the day when the church was closing because attendance had dwindled to that point.”

I don't think it was a church that was very faithful to begin with, which is part of the reason why it was dwindling, but that's beside the point. The fact is that God was removing a church that wasn't faithful so that the church might be turned into a place of faithfulness before God. That's where we are as we're seeing God at work all around us. God calls us to repent; He calls Israel to repent.

In talking about repenting, we need to understand God's discipline. One of the confusing things is the word discipline really has two very different applications. There's one application of discipline, which is punishment and destruction, where God takes those whom He no longer will tolerate and destroys them. An example of that is when Joshua led the children of Israel into the promised land. They were told to destroy the Canaanites, who were wicked, and not one of them was to be left alive—women, men, children—all of them were to be destroyed. Israel did that job partially; they didn't finish the job, but nevertheless God said that they had become so wicked He would no longer try to make something new of them.

Of course, they weren't His chosen people either, but He was giving their land to Israel. That has all kinds of interesting implications for today, doesn't it? But nevertheless, you see that very same thing happening where God destroyed the people whom He was not giving any more opportunities. It's a pretty scary thing.

Part of what is happening here in Isaiah 1, and which goes on through the rest of this prophecy, is that there are those whom God has marked for destruction—and by destruction, I mean eternal hell. There aren't any more chances. Even though He was giving them an opportunity, that was their last chance, and God would be removing them and destroying them. That's part of the discipline thing.

But discipline has another application in Scripture: when God works to reclaim His people, to restore them, and to return them to godly living and righteousness. That's really what is happening here in Isaiah chapter 1. Yes, it's a warning that God is bringing destruction, but the bigger purpose is that God might restore His people. That's getting close to my text, although I'm not there yet.

In verse 25 we read, “I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye, and remove all your alloy.” God is saying He is going to work in them. The key in this verse is the word “smelt.” Smelting is a process of removing impurities.

Now, I'm not a jeweler. I don't work with silver; in fact, I don't have much of it. But from what I've read, silver has all kinds of impurities and requires a lot of heat to move the impurities out so that they can be scraped off the top. How you know the silver has been purified is when you look at it and can see your reflection. So God is saying, “I'm going to smelt my people.”

Implied in that is something really painful. I can't imagine how painful that heat would be for purifying the silver, but it has to be purified if it's worth anything. Impure silver doesn't have much value; it's only when it's been purified. God is saying that's what He is going to do with His people. He is going to remove the sin, remove the barriers, remove the unrighteousness from His people.

What we read here in chapter one is God telling them, “I'm getting ready to purify you, and it won't be easy.” I want you to know that there have been a number of times in my life when God has used the smelting process for me. It's painful. It hurts. But when we come out of it, we come out of it with a much different desire for honoring God, and we are righteous through Him rather than living out the barriers that we tend in our lives to put up. This process of smelting is so important for God's work in our lives.

Now that's a long introduction, but finally we get to verse 26. That's the text that Tim assigned to me, and it's going to be shorter. It's not going to be relative to what the introduction was, but as I looked at it, I don't think we can understand verses 26 and 27 until we understand the things we've just looked at in that big picture of God's lament for Israel.

So now we come to verses 26 and 27: “I will restore your judges as at first, and your counselors as at the beginning. After that, you'll be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city. Zion will be redeemed with justice, her repentant ones with righteousness.”

That's God's plan for His people. When you read Isaiah chapter 1, that is what you need to see: God is planning to restore His people. It's God's real intention not to destroy His people who have become so polluted, but to smelt them, to work in their lives, removing the dross—the impurities, the bad attitudes, the emptiness that is there.

We see God saying it's going to be painful, and indeed it was painful. As Isaiah starts to flesh out in the rest of this prophecy what He is going to be doing, we begin to realize that it's going to end up in them being taken into exile in Babylon for 70 years. I can't even imagine the pain of that except for the fact that if all of us were to be carried away for 70 years, probably none of us would ever be able to see the finished work that God has, but it would change things dramatically for us.

So it requires this painful clearing out so that God's people can be pure and perfect and holy and righteous, and that the city of Jerusalem, which is the representative of God's people, can begin to become again the city of righteousness.

What is He doing to restore His people? First of all, He is restoring the judges. The judges had become corrupt. They had quit having justice. They took bribes, according to Isaiah. The judges took what they could, what they wanted. They benefited for their own benefits, but when that happens, there's no justice. So we see the judges being restored to righteousness.

Maybe it requires getting rid of the judges, but it certainly requires changing the hearts of the judges, and that's what God is doing here. Then we read that He is restoring justice. To whom is the justice being restored? We're told it's being restored to orphans and widows, and elsewhere, Isaiah adds, and in other places in Scripture as well, the immigrants, the aliens. In other words, those who don't have any capacity to protect themselves, and they have been taken advantage of, and what they have has been taken from them. God is there working to remove what allows that to happen so that justice might return.

Perhaps you have experienced injustice in how you've been treated. I have. But Isaiah is saying that as the judges are being brought back to righteousness, justice is returning, and the holy city, the city of righteousness, will be returning to a place where those who are vulnerable will be protected. They need extra protection, and they will be protected.

I've been reading through the Bible in a year, as I do every year, and right now we are in the book of Deuteronomy. The Pentateuch is a slog to go through, as you know. In Deuteronomy, there are many laws about how the vulnerable are to be treated. Israel started off treating them like that, but they don't do it anymore.

As God works to restore justice, there is hope for the vulnerable, for the ones who can't protect or defend themselves. There is someone to stand up for them. It didn't used to be like that, but it's going to be like that.

Then God is going to be removing the idols. We need to understand about the idols we're talking about. The people of Israel continued to worship Yahweh. They did all the things He told them to do. They did the sacrifices, the feasts, the fasts, the sin offerings—all the things God said they should do—but they managed to bring in the beliefs of other peoples, people who were not God's people, people who had nothing to do with honoring God. They brought in those other beliefs, and so all of a sudden there was syncretism—a blending in God's righteous city of worship that was faithful and worship that was idolatrous. They combined the two.

What was the end product? Unrighteous worship. Unrighteous living. It wasn't that they didn't have the stuff of God there; it was that they added to it. One of the things I always struggled with as a pastor was how do we do what we need to do without adding things that dishonor God.

One of the struggles we face in the church is how do you draw in people, and the temptation is to add things that aren't really what God has said should be there. I'm not casting stones at anybody in particular. There are lots of megachurches that are very faithful and are doing an incredible job. There are also lots of churches that have added things so that they might draw people by things not of God.

That's what happened in Jerusalem. That's what happened in Israel. It's what happens in the church today. Frankly, it's what happens in our lives when we start to add in things that dishonor God. They look good to us, but they make us idolatrous. We are called to get rid of the idolatry.

Then there's one more thing Isaiah says here in these two verses: the worship is being restored to holy worship. I want to explain that because what He is really talking about, what the condemnation was when God said He was rejecting their worship, was that the worship was external, not internal. The worship was coming by going through all the rules and regulations of the Old Testament—of which there were legions—but at the same time, it wasn't coming from their hearts. It wasn't coming out of a love for God. It was coming out of rote process, where people were doing the very things they felt like doing, but when they came to worship God, it wasn't from their hearts.

That really is where we are today. We need to look hard at our hearts. I'm not speaking to the world out there; I'm speaking to you all here, good Christian people. But as we go through the Lenten season, the question is: how much of what we do before God is really out of an empty heart? How much do we serve God going through the motions, not really caring for the rest of it? That's what Isaiah is talking about here.

Isaiah says He is going to restore His people, and as He restores His people it involves changing their hearts so their worship might be filled with desire for God.

The prophet Jeremiah picked up on this. In Jeremiah chapter 31, Jeremiah says God is restoring His covenant with His people.

When we did the confession time this morning before we left Indianapolis, we worshiped at the church we attend, and they have a nice confession time just like the one we had right now. I have to admit, I thought, “I haven't had time to have more stuff to confess,” but the reality is my heart isn't as pure and clean as it needs to be, nor is yours, which is why this Lenten time is so important. It gives us time to look hard at who and what we are, and as we look at who we are, we are able to start removing the things that cause us to go through the emptiness of doing rote things—not out of love, but just out of obligation.

There are times when I go to church on Sunday morning out of obligation. You do too, I'm sure. God doesn't find that honoring. In fact, He doesn't even hear us when we are there out of obligation. We ought to go to worship Him because we are so excited about being with the One we love, who loves us, and who has blessed us so richly. I like that.

So as we think about that, we come to Lent—the Lenten season—and the whole purpose is for us to look hard at our hearts, to look for the places where we're just going through the motions, that we might confess that, but also to look for the places where there are idols that have come in that need to be removed.

Now, I doubt that any of us has little statues that we worship, but that's just not the thing we do. There are idols—for instance, the idol of anger. I keep running into that because I keep running into people who basically say, “I can't forgive and I won't forget.” It's an idol. Or the idol of needing to be in control. God is the one who is to be in control of our lives, but part of our battle is, “I want to be in control.” I'm talking now as me as a Christian, not me as a person out in the world.

Part of the battle we have is when we have an idol of pleasure. It's a big one, and it's all around us. We all work for it, whether it's how we work to accumulate so that we can have pleasure, or what we do in our time off—whatever it is, because it's an endless number of things. But the point is that there is this desire, this idol of pleasure.

The list can go on and on. That's between you and the Lord; it's not between me and you. As we look at our lives, we need to realize there are idols there. I've been a pastor for more than 50 years, and I still have some of those idols. I work on getting rid of them. That's why we had the time of confession this evening—which, by the way, wasn't long enough. It really should have lasted a lot longer, even for those of us who already did it this morning. But that's what God has called us to do.

Ultimately, when we see God's lament, the question is, is He lamenting over me? I'm His child. Jesus died for me. I'm going to go to heaven when I die. But when He looks at Dan Perron, does He lament? That's the part that's really difficult to ask. Does God lament over me? That's what we need to be asking ourselves.

We're going to come to the communion service, and as we do that, let me encourage you to spend time asking those hard questions. Is God lamenting over me? Where are the idols that are hidden there that I'm so used to I don't even think about them? Because we all have them. What are the things I need to let go of so that God can remove the dross, the impurity, to make me more useful for Him?

As we come to communion, use this time to start asking yourself those uncomfortable questions. Use this time of Lent to reflect and rethink God's desire for you, and where you are keeping that from happening.

But see, the joyful part of this, because I don't want this to be a downer: I want this to be a time of hope. The incredible part is that Jesus has come and died for us, and we're going to celebrate that here in a month. We need to be ready for that. If Jesus did everything for me, what do I need to be doing in response to that?

So let me encourage you: Tim, you have set the tone well for your Lenten series. I liked it. It looked really good when you sent it to me, and I'm not here to correct it; I'm just here to say these two verses tell us what God is planning to do for Israel, for Jerusalem, and what God is going to do for Dan Perron and for you, that you might be more prepared to enjoy and embrace the incredible gift of the Lord Jesus dying on the cross on Good Friday, and rising again on Sunday in victory over death, that we might not face it, but that He might set us up for an eternity in heaven that is more glorious than anything we could begin to imagine.

I've been thinking about that more. See this hair here? It's kind of indicative of the fact that I'm getting closer to that day. In fact, I just threw Dan goodbye before I left our son's house and, rather facetiously, said, “In case I don't get a chance ever again, I love you,” knowing what the weather was. Understand, I was not in the least bit concerned; she was obsessing, I was not.

But the fact is, God has something incredibly wonderful for us, and we're building up to Easter where we see that. Don't allow this time to be wasted, but rather look for the places where God wants to work in you and through you for His glory. For His glory.

So we come to the communion table, and that's what we're going to be celebrating, but use this time to lay out your heart before the Lord Jesus. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for your mercy in our lives, for your goodness and your care for us. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you have loved us with such an incredible love and forgive us for the places where we allow things to come in to keep that love from really being expressed and fulfilled in our lives. Oh Lord, show us those things, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

So that God can remove the dross, the impurity, to make me more useful for Him. And so as we come to communion, use this time to start asking yourself those uncomfortable questions. Use this time of Lent that you might be reflecting and rethinking, again, God's desire for you, and where are you keeping that from happening?

But see, the joyful part of this, because I don't want this to be a downer. I want this to be a time of hope. But I want us to recognize that the incredible part of this is that Jesus has come and died for us, and we're going to celebrate that here in a month. And we need to be ready for that. If Jesus did everything for me, what do I need to be doing in response to that?

So let me encourage you. Tim, you have set the tone well for your Lenten series. I liked it. It looked really good when you sent it to me, and I'm not here to correct it. I'm just here to say that these two verses tell us what God is planning to do for Israel, for Jerusalem. But what God is going to do for Dan Perrin and for you, that you might be more prepared to enjoy and embrace the incredible gift of the Lord Jesus dying on the cross on Good Friday and rising again on Sunday in victory over death, that we might not face it. But that He might set us up for an eternity in heaven that is going to be more glorious than anything we could begin to imagine.

I've been thinking about that more. See this hair here? It's kind of indicative of the fact that I'm getting closer to that day. In fact, I just, through saying goodbye before I left our son's house, rather facetiously said, in case I don't get a chance ever again, I love you, knowing well, knowing what the weather was.

Now understand, I was not in the least bit concerned. She was obsessing, I was not. But the fact is, God has something so incredibly wonderful for us, and we're building up to Easter where we see that.

Don't allow this time to be wasted, but rather look for the places where God wants to work in you and through you for His glory.

So we come to the communion table, and that's what we're going to be celebrating, but use this time to lay out your heart before the Lord Jesus.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for your mercy in our lives, for your goodness and your care for us. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you have loved us with such an incredible love and forgive us for the places where we allow things to come in to keep that love from really being expressed and fulfilled in our lives. Oh, Lord, show us those things, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Tags: Repentance, Worship, Idolatry, Justice, Discipline, Righteousness, Purification

Also Filed Under: Home: Messages: Sunday Messages: God's Holy House Cleaning: When He Smelts His People (March 15, 2026)\n\t\t\tHome: Sunday Services: God's Reason: God's Holy House Cleaning: When He Smelts His People (March 15, 2026)