Undone, Cleansed, and Sent

At a glance

Scripture referenced in this section

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.

Isaiah 6:5 KJV

Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

Isaiah 6:6–7 KJV

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

Isaiah 6:8 KJV

Read the whole vision together in the UECF.NET NKJV Bible.

UECF.NET summary

Repentance and self-awareness

Tozer draws a line here that he considers easy to miss. Isaiah's outburst — "Woe is me! for I am undone" — is not the language of a man remembering a lie he told or a theft he committed. Isaiah, remember, was already established as a man of real character: cultured, well-placed, a poet, no obvious scandal attached to his name. What breaks him is not a memory of what he has done but a sudden, total awareness of what he is in the presence of what he has just seen. Tozer calls this something like a total disvaluing of the self — not false modesty, not a pose, but an accurate reading of a creature's condition once the light of God's holiness falls on it directly.

"I am undone"

This is the pivot of the whole sermon for Tozer, and he presses hard on the contrast between Isaiah's generation and his own. Isaiah was unclean, he says, and Isaiah knew it. The trouble with the modern church, in Tozer's diagnosis, is a people who remain just as unclean but have lost the awareness of it. That lost awareness does not produce peace; it produces a false confidence, a boldness that has nothing to be bold about, and a comfortable religiosity that quietly closes the door on the very repentance that would open the door to grace. Isaiah's undone-ness was not a tragedy to be managed. It was the necessary first fact.

Cleansing and purification

Only after that confession does help arrive, and Tozer refuses to let it arrive gently. A seraph takes a live coal from the altar itself — not a soothing symbol but a coal, fire, something that in Tozer's telling would genuinely burn — and touches it to Isaiah's mouth. He draws out the imagery deliberately: this is a purification bought at the cost of real fire, and he links it to the old Salvation Army motto, "blood and fire," as a way of saying that cleansing in Scripture is never bloodless or painless in what it cost, even when what it produces in us is pure relief. What comes immediately after the coal is a plain declaration: "thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." Isaiah is left holding two things at once that might seem to cancel each other out but do not — a clear-eyed knowledge of his own depravity, and an equally clear knowledge that it has just been dealt with.

"Whom shall I send?"

Only now, after the confession and after the coal, does the commissioning come. Tozer treats the sequence as the whole point: God does not call Isaiah into service and clean him up afterward, and He does not accept an offer of service made before the cleansing. The call comes to a man who has already been undone and already been purged, and Isaiah's answer — "Here am I; send me" — is immediate, because there is finally nothing left in him insisting on its own competence. Tozer warns his hearers against the opposite instinct: assuming that education, ability, or self-confidence qualifies anyone for God's work. In his view, no amount of natural equipment substitutes for this: a person must first be undone, stripped of reliance on themselves, before the Spirit can use what is left.

Key ideas

• Isaiah's collapse is not about a specific sin remembered; it is a whole-self recognition of unworthiness before a holy God.
• Tozer's central diagnosis of his own era: people remain unclean, as Isaiah was, but without Isaiah's awareness of it — and that unawareness, not the uncleanness alone, is what blocks repentance.
• Cleansing precedes calling, never the reverse. The coal comes before the commission.
• Purification costs something real (fire, in the image); it is not sentimental or automatic.
• Readiness for God's service is not competence or learning; it is having been undone and cleansed. Isaiah's "here am I" is possible only because of what came just before it.

Bible references in this chapter

• Isaiah 6:5
• Isaiah 6:6–7
• Isaiah 6:8