Making a Difference

A sandy beach was covered with starfish that had washed ashore with the tide and were stranded. A young man walked along the shore, picking starfish up at random and tossing them back into the ocean. Someone approached him and laughed. “What good is that?” he said. “There are so many of them. What you are doing makes no difference at all.”

The young man picked up another starfish and threw it out to sea, saying, “It makes a difference to this one.”

This familiar story came to mind when I read a few verses from Isaiah 26 this morning. It says:

Yes, in the way of Your judgments, O Lord, we have waited for You; the desire of our soul is for Your name and for the remembrance of You. With my soul I have desired You in the night, yes, by my spirit within me I will seek You early; for when Your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

The author describes how the people of God long for God, and how he also desires God and seeks Him. I noticed how the pronouns shifted from “we” to “me” in two sentences. Then in the next sentence he shifts to the people of the world and they become the benefactors of his desire for God.

Sometimes I think that my life doesn’t matter very much. There is more need in the world, even in my small part of the world than I can do anything about, and the little that I am able to do often seems insignificant. Yet the prophet Isaiah knew that if the people of God held up and maintained the judgements of God, the people of the world would learn righteousness.

Sometimes I long for a revival, a giant-sized moving of God’s Spirit whereby all of humanity is affected. In the history of revivals, some large and world-changing, individual beginnings are not always known. What is known is that some of them did begin with one person praying, one person desiring renewal, one person on their face before God saying, “Lord, change me.”

Isaiah gives the pattern. Wait for God, don’t move ahead of Him. Desire God and seek Him early; desire Him to the point that when I wake up at night all I think about is the will of God. Uphold truth. Uphold the gospel and the judgments of God.

No person can make a revival happen; this belongs to God alone. Yet these verses tell me what my role is, and I must do what I can with the small tasks God gives me. Even if what I do has no effect on the multitudes washed up by the tide of sin and their spiritual lostness, it will make a difference in my life, and maybe to one or two others.