Isaiah 20 is a rather short but sobering chapter. Isaiah has been God’s prophet for a while by now. He has been sharing God’s truth boldly and accurately and the people are still being quite stupid and rebellious in spite of everything Isaiah tells them coming to pass. So God instructs Isaiah to take a different tact here. “Go take off your clothes and sandals”….. “and Isaiah did it”. God instructs His man to basically get naked and walk “around town naked and barefooted for three years”. Did you catch that? God asks Isaiah to basically humiliate himself before the very people who are supposed to be listening to him, and not just for a day or a week or a month – but for three years. Now there are different discussions about what “naked” really means here – may not have been completely without clothes but the point is that Isaiah completely changed what he was wearing to the point he stood out from the crowd in a significant way. And he did it for a very long time. Why? Because God told him to. The real message here is not about being naked and barefoot, it is about how God’s people need to obey like Isaiah does – he is setting the standard for obedience. And that is the standard that applies to you and me too……
What if God asks you to change something completely and stick out from the crowd. For most of us, we work hard at fitting in and not being noticed. In fact, research says that most Christians work so hard at being part of their environment that no one even knows who they are. That is not God’s desire for us. We can’t be salt and light if we don’t have any spice or shine. We have to be willing to follow God to the point of really standing out, not in a prideful or look at me sort of way, but a quiet and focused obedience lifestyle. People should see we are God’s by how we use our time (that 168 hours God gives us each week) and our money (which really isn’t our money anyway). They should see a difference in how we treat others and how we react to difficult situations. They should know that our spouse and family are a higher priority that our work, and that our relationship with God comes above all else. But how will they know if we don’t live life in a way they can see those things. God was using Isaiah here to give warning to the coming situation for the people. They were going to experience exactly what Isaiah was living. God has called us to be a “peculiar people”. We need to be different and that difference needs to be marked by our obedience to the Creator of the Universe – our God and Savior. We need to live in a way no one wonders to whom we belong. God wants people to know…..are you willing to tell them?
