“For you shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace; the mountains and hills before you will break forth in singing, and the trees of the of the field shall clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12).”  These words were originally spoken to a nation whose guilt had led them into exile in Babylon.  But God had not given up on them.

Has anyone ever said to you that ‘God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; God’s ways are not our ways’?

We tend to say this when things happen in our lives that are not what we would have wanted or expected. That is true, but it was only when I read Gentle and Lowly that I realised that the context of this truth is actually the mercy of God.

What Isaiah is saying is, ‘while we struggle to forgive, and sometimes imagine that God is reluctant to forgive, his ways are not our ways, and His mercy exceeds our greatest expectations.’

God is more merciful than any of us can grasp!

1. It is not too late to come home.

‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him while he is near’ (6).

You have to realise that the very ability to call on the Lord is a gift from God. By nature, we run from God’s call. We are hostile to the idea that we are wicked people whose only hope is God’s abundant mercy. We would rather prove ourselves worthy than admit that our only hope is Jesus’ taking our guilt on His shoulders. It is a sign of God at work when we call on Him!

John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, wrote that ‘you can never come too late to Jesus Christ if you truly come.’ Maybe you have resisted a real relationship with him for years. You have a lifetime of rejecting His offer of grace. It’s not too late. But be careful. It could become too late. You could drop dead this afternoon and have to face Jesus not as rescuer but as judge. It could become too late because your heart might become so hard from saying ‘no’ to Christ’s invitation that it reaches a place where it can no longer say ‘yes’.

Come now! If you have never known him before, come now! If you have drifted away from Him, come home! He will welcome you with open arms! ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return to the LORD, that he may abundantly pardon.’ (7). Notice that there is no small print in this promise. There are no exceptions. Come and He will embrace you!

2. God’s welcome has no exceptions.

But maybe you have small thoughts of God’s forgiveness. You fear that He could not forgive you. Your problem is not that you have exaggerated thoughts of how awful your sins are—they are worse than you realise—but you have too small a view of God’s willingness to show mercy.

In Psalm 103:11-12 we read, ‘for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west so far has he removed our transgressions from us.’ In our passage we God says, ‘as the heavens are higher than the earth, so and my ways greater than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’. His thoughts are greater than ours because they are rooted in a love that can barely imagine and a forgiveness that is immeasurable.

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