“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips… for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Isaiah 6:5
Isaiah’s vision of God is one of the most vivid in Scripture — the throne, the train of His robe filling the temple, seraphim calling out to one another, the foundations shaking at the sound of their voices. It would be reasonable to expect the prophet’s first response to be awe, or excitement, or eagerness to be sent.
Instead, his first word is woe. Undone. Ruined. Seeing the King with total clarity produces, first, an honest reckoning with his own uncleanness — not despair exactly, but a genuine confrontation with the gap between who he is and what he’s just seen.
Only after that — after a coal from the altar touches his lips, after guilt is taken away and sin atoned for — does the commissioning happen. Whom shall I send? Here am I; send me. The willingness to go comes after the undoing, not instead of it.
That order isn’t incidental. Nobody volunteers for a genuine calling from a position of untouched strength. Undone comes before commissioned. Cleansed comes before sent. Trying to skip to the sending — eager, capable, ready — without first being honestly undone in God’s presence tends to produce something that looks like calling but is missing its foundation.
Prayer
Lord, let me not rush past being undone in Your presence on my way to being sent. Like Isaiah, let me see You clearly enough to be honest about my own need first. Cleanse what needs cleansing, and only then send me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Declaration
Undone comes before commissioned. I do not skip being honestly undone in God’s presence on my way to being sent.
