We've been thinking all week about the new year, and as the years pass, sometimes they become a bit of a blur.

Sometimes we watch politicians on television, for example, and we're staggered by their remembrance

of dates and places and what was discussed at meetings.

And most of us forget more than we ever remember, it seems.

But it's interesting, isn't it, that events that transform our lives, events that shape our destiny or that change our

future, even though we may not have thought too much about them at the time, are events that

we remember forever.

And I suppose most of us can point back perhaps even to a single moment, a single hour, an experience

somebody we met that has radically changed the direction of our future lives.

Often at the beginning of the new year, I think about the experience that the prophet Isaiah had in this connection.

If you imagined all the prophets before Jesus climbing a mountain to look over the summit

and to see the coming of the Lord Jesus, then John the Baptist would be the man standing on the summit, wouldn't he?

But I rather suspect the man standing just behind him would be the prophet standing on the summit, wouldn't he? But I rather suspect the man standing just

behind him would be the prophet Isaiah, straining his neck out to see who the suffering

servant of his 53rd chapter really was. And God prepared him for that ministry very early

on in his career.

If you're familiar with the ministry of Ligonier over the years, there are two passages in the

Bible that you think of instinctively. One is Romans 12, 1 to 2, which speaks about as being transformed

by the renewing of our minds.

And an even more fundamental one is probably Isaiah chapter 6, the great biblical chapter

on the holiness of God.

Isaiah's encounter with God and the manifestation of God's holy majesty, the holy, holy, holy one.

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