Isaiah 29:13-14--When God Get's Left Behind Week 4

I've heard it said that one of the best places to hide is in plain sight. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but you can get away with an awful lot if you have that type of mentality. "I'm going to hide in plain sight." Sometimes it's harder to see things that are right in front of you, right under your nose, than to spot things that aren't as in open sight. You might experience that when you go to grab your keys or grab your wallet and, "Oh, where are they?" You're looking all around, and they were right in front of you. I may have had that experience in my life.I was thinking about this concept of hiding in plain sight. Our kids are at the age where they're really into animals right now. Aiden did some zoology for science class a few years ago, and he was into learning about all the animals. I remember learning about some of the things that he would talk about, that the camouflage in a way that certain animals could manipulate their bodies to hide in plain sight. Camouflage gives many animals the ability to kind of disappear even though they're right in front of you . . .Many times, believers can become masters at hiding in plain sight. Let me talk about what I mean by that. You can get so involved and so busy in serving God, the things that God wants us to do, that we hide behind that. The result is that it can be really easy for us to look good on the outside when we have stuff going on that we're not dealing with on the inside that nobody knows about. Nobody can see, nobody can tell because we're hiding in plain sight. We can say the right things. We can do the right things along with everyone else, but inside, things can be radically wrong.Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight. So maybe we immerse ourselves in church culture. We do things believers do. We serve alongside everyone else. We have our ministry in music or teaching Sunday school or sound room or grounds work or whatever it is that you do. And we do these things, and it looks like there's nothing wrong. It's like we're a great model of what a godly believer ought to be, but it's easy to hide in plain sight. Oftentimes, there can be deeper things going on in our hearts that we really need to deal with. And so maybe we come to church and we do the Christian thing, and we serve God. But God gets left behind in our service because our hearts aren't really in it to begin with.Now as we come to our text today, Isaiah chapter 29, verses 13 through 14, we find that God's people Israel struggled with the same exact thing in their spiritual life. They struggled with hiding in plain sight. They did everything right on the outside. They offered their service to God like everyone else, but it was mere externals. They were hiding things on the inside. And we learn the hard lesson that they learned when they tried to hide in plain sight. And that's very simple: you can't hide from God. You can't hide from God. God knows what's in our hearts, and in our passage today, God kind of steps into Israel's life and he kind of isolates for them what their issues were and what he sees and observes in their lives. And he cautions them because they had all the right externals, but there was no heart. And I am concerned that that is far too often the case with believers today.So we're going to unpack this passage for us, see what God has to say to Israel and what God has to say to us today. And as we do, there's one big idea that I want you to take away this morning--if this is all you remember, remember this:Big Idea:external discipline can hide internal difficulties