Wake Up and Grab Hold – Isaiah 64:7

This morning in prayer I felt prompted to read Isaiah 64. God has been speaking to me quite a bit from Isaiah recently, and I foolishly argued/ hesitated for a moment, making sure it really was Him speaking, and not my own assumption. He patiently repeated Himself & I knew that I’d only find out if it was His leading by reading it to find out. As I read the first couple of verses, my heart strongly identified with Isaiah’s heart cry for God to reveal His glorious and mighty presence. I continued reading and came to a full stop at verse 7 – this was the particular verse that God wanted to speak through:

“No one calls on your name
or presses in to lay hold of you,
for you have hidden your face from us.
You have let us be ruined by our own sins.” (Is 64:7 – TPT)

Now, “press in” is a phrase that God has been saying over and over again to me this year – it is His persistent and loving call to all of us. So I wanted to dig deeper, and did a quick word study:

The Hebrew word translated as ‘press in’ is “ur” (Strongs 5782), which means to rouse oneself, awake, master, stir up oneself, and open one’s eyes. There are many times in the Bible where we are told to ‘wake up’: Isaiah 60:1; Eph 5:14 etc

Yesterday a friend of mine shared an article about the “fastest growing church in the world”, which is the underground church in Iran. The whole article is well worth reading – you can find it here – but the part I remembered this morning as I read God’s desire for us to wake up, was about the Iranian wife who with her husband had moved to America, but after a few months chose to love back to Iran, telling her husband, “There is a satanic lullaby here. All the Christians are sleepy and I’m feeling sleepy.” She realised that sleepiness was a greater threat to her faith than persecution! If that’s not a wake-up call to the Western Church (it’s not unique to America), I don’t know what is.

Many of us have heard God calling us to wake up over the past couple of years – and many of us are dissatisfied with the passive, self-indulgent imitation of Christianity that our nation has been lulled into. We are not content with meeting in our christian clubs every Sunday, praying for our own needs to be met – we know that God’s Kingdom is about bringing freedom to captives, healing to the sick, and salvation to the lost. There is a real thirst and a cry growing for the fullness of Christ to be manifest in our lives, and God is clearly behind it. Praise God we know that when He leads us to pray something, it’s because He’s getting ready to answer! Let’s not allow ourselves to be lulled back to sleep, but take responsibility to stir ourselves and keep each other awake so we are alert to what God wants to do in and through His glorious Church.

So, God’s call is for His Church – His Bride, to be His partner in ministry. We can’t do that if we’re asleep, so He is rousing us to wake up and “lay hold”. The word translated here as ‘lay hold’ is “chazaq” (2388) which has a wide range of meaning, but includes: to grow firm, strengthen, prevail, capture, lay hold, seize, hold firmly to, devote oneself to, press, be urgent, cleave.

It’s not enough to wake up and see/ hear what God is doing. This is going to take effort. So much of Western Christianity has not only dozed off, surrounded as we are by the comfort produced by freedom to worship – but as we slept we have become lazy and forgotten how important it is to pray, study God’s Word, tithe, fast, forgive, and meet together regularly with a local body of believers. And as a result we have become spiritually flabby. I’m not trying to be harsh or condemning, because that’s not how God works – but we do need to wake up and realise that God is calling us to more. And it is going to take work. The meanings listed above are not words that you can accomplish without trying: it takes effort to lay hold, to hold firmly, to be urgent, and prevail.

It reminded me of the stories of Solomon and Jacob that I have blogged about before. Solomon’s downfall was that he deliberately clung to his wives and their idols instead of God (blog post here), while Jacob clung to God even when he couldn’t see a thing, and prevailed upon Him until he received the blessing he needed (post here). With all my heart I believe God is calling us to be a Jacob-generation who will wrestle with the difficulties and give all we have to lay hold of God. It’s not that He’s hiding in reluctance to be found or to bless – but as shared in another previous post (here), He wants us to appreciate the value of what He has given. So there is a cost to laying hold of that which Christ laid hold of us for (Phil 3:12). It’s the paradox that salvation is both a free gift that Jesus paid the full price to give, while also being the pearl of great price that requires us to give everything we have (Matt 13:45).

Thanks to 500 years since the Reformation, we have a reasonable grasp of grace and we enjoy that freedom and salvation that Jesus gave as a free gift – but we have forgotten how to “press in” and contend for the fullness of Christ. He didn’t come just to bless us, but to equip us to partner with Him in blessing others.

We know there is no condemnation in Him, and I am certainly not here to condemn anyone. But I do want to share the words I hear Him crying aloud – that we would wake up and press in! That we would be willing to meet with Him daily in personal prayer, worship and His Word – that we would not neglect the disciplines of tithing, fasting, walking in forgiveness and meeting together. Not as religious duty, but because when we deny ‘self’, we enter into His glorious freedom.

The Bride of Christ is also a terrible Army, and it is time for us to take up our armour and weapons, and ‘take the Kingdom by force’ – which doesn’t mean physical oppression of other humans, but the kind of forceful and disciplined exertion that our old spiritually sleepy & flabby selves never knew, and that will see His Kingdom manifest on Earth.

Let us commit to be those who will wake up and press in to lay hold of His fullness – for His glory!