25 Real Lessons from Isaiah 55: Buy Without Money, the Pardon That Runs Past Yours, and the Word That Will Not Come Back Empty

Everything you have ever wanted has carried a price, and you have mostly paid it. Money sometimes. More often time, effort, and years you do not get back.

The lessons from Isaiah 55 turn on one word that should not have survived the sentence it sits in. The word is “buy”.

That is either careless language or the most exact writing in the chapter, and Isaiah is rarely careless.

The same chapter holds the line about God’s thoughts being higher than ours, the verse people reach for when life stops making sense. Read where it actually stands, and it is doing something narrower, and a great deal better, than we were taught.

Brief Summary of Isaiah 55

Isaiah 55 closes the long section of comfort that began in Isaiah 40, spoken to exiles whose homeland lay in ruins and whose future looked settled and small. God calls the thirsty and the penniless to water, wine and milk at no charge, then asks why they keep spending on food that never fills them.

He promises an everlasting covenant, the sure mercies of David, and points to one given as a witness, leader and commander. The chapter then calls for seeking while He is near, promises abundant pardon, insists His word will not come back empty, and ends with thorn ground growing fir trees.

Lesson 1: God Invites You by Your Need, Not Your Credentials (Isaiah 55:1)

Isaiah 55:1: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

The chapter opens on a shout. “Ho” carries the ring of a street trader’s call, the noise used to stop somebody already walking past, and Isaiah puts that sound at the front of God’s invitation.

Look at who is addressed. The call goes out to “every one that thirsteth”, which steps straight past the categories a reader expects to find here: the faithful, the temple crowd, a nation named at the front of the sentence. The invitation is issued to a condition, and thirst is one condition nobody has to qualify for.

Then the second clause widens it before anyone can start calculating: “he that hath no money”. The one item that would ordinarily send a person away from a market is named out loud and waved through.

Search this verse for the bar you have to clear and the search comes up short. It names what you lack, twice, and treats the lack as the reason to come. If you have been waiting to be in better spiritual condition before you approach God, verse 1 has already ruled on that.

Lesson 2: You Are Told to Buy With No Money (Isaiah 55:1)

Isaiah 55:1: “he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

You would expect a free offer to drop the language of buying altogether.

Verse 1 keeps it. The price disappears and the verb survives: “come ye, buy, and eat… without money and without price.” A man with nothing in his hand is told to make a purchase.

Removing the price does not lower the value of what is on the table. Water, wine and milk are worth exactly what they are worth, whether or not the person collecting them could ever have afforded them.

What is still asked of you is the coming and the taking. Grace costs the receiver nothing and still requires the receiver to put out a hand, which is what Paul means when he writes, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

Read also: What Does Grace Mean in the Bible

Come, and let the empty hands be the thing you bring.

Lesson 3: God’s Offer is Better Than Bare Survival (Isaiah 55:1)

Isaiah 55:1: “come ye to the waters… come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

Three things are named in the invitation, and not one of them is optional in the sentence: waters, wine and milk.

Water keeps a person alive. The other two are what people drink once survival has already been taken care of. Readers have long taken the wine as gladness and the milk as nourishment for growth, and that is a reasonable way to read it, though the plain force of the verse sits in the number rather than the symbolism. God named three drinks where one would have met the need.

He could have offered a minimum and called it mercy. Keeping the thirsty alive would have counted as kindness by any reckoning, and it is already more than exiles with nothing to trade had a claim on.

Much of Christian living gets conducted on the assumption that God deals in rations, and that anything past bare survival must be asked for apologetically. Verse 1 has no ration in it. Gladness and growth were written into the offer before a single hearer had come near it.

Lesson 4: God Argues With You Before He Commands You (Isaiah 55:2)

Isaiah 55:2: “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

Why would God ask a question He already knows the answer to?

Verse 2 opens with two of them, and only afterwards does it start giving orders. Three imperatives follow the questions: hearken, eat, delight. The reasoning comes first and the commands come second.

That order tells you something about how God handles people. He could open with the orders and skip the conversation, since He is the one being ignored here. Instead He puts a question in front of a tired crowd and gives them room to look at their own accounts.

Both questions are about their spending, and neither is cruel. He asks what they are paying for, and then whether it has fed them. A person who answers those two honestly is already halfway to obeying the commands that follow.

So when the orders do arrive, they arrive after an invitation to think. Have you ever let God ask you the question in verse 2 without hurrying to defend your answer?

Lesson 5: You Can Spend a Whole Life’s Labour on Food That Does Not Feed You (Isaiah 55:2)

Isaiah 55:2: “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not?”

Your bank statement is not the only thing this verse is reading.

Two things are named: “money” and “labour”. John Wesley took the money here to stand for all a person’s time, strength and cost, which fits the pairing the verse itself makes. The wallet and the working week are both on the table.

The complaint is precise. These people worked hard and came home with something to show for it, since money went out and goods came back. What came back cannot feed them, and Isaiah says so twice over: “that which is not bread”, “that which satisfieth not”.

Jeremiah described the same transaction from another angle: “they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). The digging was real and the cisterns were real; the water was the part that never arrived.

Count honestly what this year has cost you in hours and strength, and then ask what it has actually fed.

Lesson 6: God Commands You to Enjoy Him, Not Only to Obey Him (Isaiah 55:2)

Isaiah 55:2: “hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

Enjoyment usually gets treated as the reward for obedience rather than a part of it.

The third command in verse 2 is “let your soul delight itself in fatness”. Fatness in this older English means richness, the best portion of the meal rather than the scraps. God is telling the soul to feast, and He says it in the same breath as “hearken” and “eat”, in the same imperative mood as both.

Read the three together and the shape of the invitation changes. Listening, eating and delighting are one instruction in three movements, so the delight is not a bonus that arrives later for the especially spiritual. It belongs to the same sentence as the obedience.

Joylessness is not the same thing as humility, though the two can look alike from outside. Someone can serve God faithfully for twenty years while half believing He would rather the service came without pleasure in it. Verse 2 hands that person a command they may never once have obeyed.

Lesson 7: Life Comes In Through the Ear (Isaiah 55:3)

Isaiah 55:3: “Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.”

The order of the verbs is worth slowing down over. Incline your ear, and then come.

The ear goes before the feet. Coming to God is described first as the bending of a head toward someone speaking, and the living of the soul is fastened directly to the hearing: “hear, and your soul shall live.”

Paul says something very close to this when writing to Rome: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Life arrives along a particular channel, and Isaiah names the channel.

What the verse promises is life itself, and it places that promise on the far side of listening. A person can stay busy for God for years and starve without ever noticing, if nothing is going in through the ear.

“Incline” is a word for leaning, the small physical adjustment of somebody who has decided to catch every word. The chapter asks for that posture before it asks for anything else, and the covenant of the next clause follows it.

Read also: How To Hear Gods Voice In The Silence

Listen first, and let the coming follow the listening.

Lesson 8: God’s Mercies to You Are Secured, Not Just Offered (Isaiah 55:3)

Isaiah 55:3: “I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.”

You can hold an offer in your hand and still have no idea whether it will be honoured when you present it.

Verse 3 puts two words side by side: “sure mercies”. Certainty joined to kindness. God announces the covenant in His own voice as something already decided: “I will make an everlasting covenant with you.”

Behind the phrase stands the promise spoken over David: “But my mercy shall not depart away from him… thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Samuel 7:15-16). That mercy had already survived a great deal by the time Isaiah’s hearers were in exile.

Paul quotes this exact line in Antioch and applies it to the resurrection, “I will give you the sure mercies of David” (Acts 13:34). What made the mercies sure, in his preaching, was a grave that stayed empty.

Mercy you have to renegotiate every morning is an exhausting thing to live on. The mercy named in verse 3 was settled by God before a single hearer was asked to believe it.

Lesson 9: A Promise Made to a King Is Offered to Ordinary People (Isaiah 55:3)

Isaiah 55:3: “and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.”

The small word doing the work in verse 3 is “you”.

What had been said of one royal house is now said to a crowd of exiles who have no throne between them. Scholars often describe this as the Davidic covenant being widened to the whole people, and the sentence supports it plainly: the “you” who receives the covenant is the same “you” who was told to incline an ear.

These were people with no dynasty to inherit and no capital worth the name. The covenant language of kings is spoken over them anyway, over a whole listening crowd, as though it had been theirs from the start.

A promise can be perfectly true and still feel like somebody else’s post, opened by mistake. Verse 3 puts the letter into the hands of the people actually listening, and not one of them is a king. If you have read the great promises of Scripture as belonging to people more useful to God than you are, this verse was addressed to a crowd who would have said the same.

Lesson 10: What God Gives Is a Person, Not a Programme (Isaiah 55:4)

Isaiah 55:4: “Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people.”

The gift in verse 4 is somebody, and the verse is careful with its tense: “I have given him.”

Three offices arrive in one line. A witness tells the truth about God. A leader goes in front of people who would not find the way alone. A commander carries authority, which settles what kind of arrangement this is.

The verse says “him” and supplies no name. Christians have long read the line in the light of what the New Testament does with this chapter, since Paul takes the sure mercies of David from verse 3 and applies them to the risen Jesus (Acts 13:34). The connection is made backwards from the apostles rather than out of verse 4 on its own.

Read also: Why Was King David so Special to God

What God hands over here is a person to follow, and following is a different act from enrolling in something. Which of the two have you been asking Him for?

Lesson 11: What Draws People to You Is What God Did for You (Isaiah 55:5)

Isaiah 55:5: “Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the LORD thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.”

What makes strangers run toward a people who have spent decades with nothing to show for themselves?

Verse 5 reverses the traffic of the chapter. Everything up to this point has been a summons to come; here the movement turns around and nations who never knew the hearer come running to him.

The reason is stated in the same breath, and almost nobody quotes it: “because of the LORD thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.” The pull is not the hearer’s charm, history or usefulness. Glory was received first, and the glory received is what draws.

That lifts a weight off any Christian who has been working to become impressive enough to be worth listening to. Whatever draws people in this verse was placed there by God, and He placed it on a people with nothing left to advertise.

It also settles the order of things. Glory comes to the hearer first, and the running crowd comes second, so the attention is a result rather than a goal to chase.

Lesson 12: God Gives a Window for Seeking, and It Is Open Now (Isaiah 55:6)

Isaiah 55:6: “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.”

You have probably assumed there will be a better moment for this than today.

Verse 6 places two commands inside one limit. Seek, and call, both of them governed by “while”: “while he may be found”, “while he is near.” The verse asserts a window.

It also stops there. No explanation is given for why nearness might pass, which means every account of that, including the familiar ones, is a reading laid over the verse rather than something the verse says.

Two wrong responses wait on either side of this. One is fear, as though God were watching for a chance to shut a door on somebody who wants Him. The other is presumption, treating tomorrow as though it had already been handed over. David sits between them: “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found” (Psalm 32:6).

Seek Him in the season you actually have, which is this one.

Lesson 13: Real Repentance Changes Your Reasoning, Not Only Your Behaviour (Isaiah 55:7)

Isaiah 55:7: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts…”

Verse 7 names two things to be forsaken, and most of us stop after the first.

The way goes, and the thoughts go with it. Conduct is the visible item and reasoning is the second one, set after it in the deeper position, because a way of living usually grows out of a way of thinking.

Someone can drop a habit and keep every argument that produced it. The drinking stops and the reason for the drinking stays. The visible sin ends while the resentment that excused it, and the private opinion of God that made it seem reasonable, carry on undisturbed.

God asks for the thinking too. That can be the harder surrender, because a habit feels like something we do and our reasoning feels like who we are.

Read also: Steps of Repentance

Which of those two has actually changed in you since the last time you repented of something?

Lesson 14: Repentance Is a Return, Not Only a Departure (Isaiah 55:7)

Isaiah 55:7: “and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him…”

Leaving a sin behind and coming home to God are two separate movements, and only one of them tends to get preached.

After “forsake”, verse 7 names a destination: “and let him return unto the LORD.” The turn is toward a Person. Stopping the sin opens the sentence, and the LORD closes it.

A person can quit something and never come home, ending up cleaner and no nearer than before. Reform of that kind can even harden a heart, since a life tidied up by willpower gives a man something to point at instead of a God to come back to.

Mercy in this verse is promised to the one who arrives. “He will have mercy upon him” follows the returning, and the destination is named as a Person rather than a standard of behaviour.

Return to the God you walked away from, and not only from the thing you put down.

Lesson 15: God Does Not Stop at Mercy; He Pardons Abundantly (Isaiah 55:7)

Isaiah 55:7: “and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

Two promises answer the returning man in verse 7, and the second is larger than the first.

“He will have mercy upon him” would have been generous standing alone. The verse keeps going: “he will abundantly pardon.” That adverb is not ornament. It gives the size of what is being handed over.

Abundant pardon is forgiveness beyond what the case required, and well beyond the careful measure most of us keep for people who have wronged us. The picture is of forgiveness handed over the way a wealthy man gives, without a glance at the balance first.

Notice also who the pardon is spoken about. “Our God” is the phrase Isaiah uses, which sets the promise inside a relationship rather than announcing it as a general policy about mercy.

Some Christians come back expecting to be received at arm’s length, given a place near the door, put on probation for a season while everyone watches how they behave. No probation appears anywhere in verse 7.

Lesson 16: God’s Higher Thoughts Are First About How Freely He Forgives (Isaiah 55:7-9)

Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Verse 8 opens on the word “For”, which means it is finishing an argument rather than starting a fresh subject.

Look at what stands immediately in front of it. Verse 7 has just told the wicked man to forsake his “way” and his “thoughts”, and has promised him abundant pardon. Verse 8 then picks up those same two nouns, way and thoughts, and sets God’s beside the man’s.

So the first thing being compared is the way God pardons against the way we pardon. Matthew Henry read the passage this way, and the wording supports him: the distance between the heavens and the earth measures how far God’s willingness to forgive runs past our own.

Most of us met these verses somewhere else, in a hospital corridor or the week a plan collapsed, and took them as comfort about God’s mysterious ways. That comfort is real, and Scripture does say elsewhere that His judgments are unsearchable. Nobody should feel foolish for leaning on these words in the dark.

In their own place they are doing something narrower and, for a guilty person, more useful. They answer the man who cannot believe pardon could be handed over that cheaply, by telling him God does not think about forgiveness the way he does.

If you have never quite been able to accept that God has really let it go, these two verses were aimed at you long before they were ever aimed at your circumstances.

Lesson 17: You Are Asked to Trade Your Thinking, Not Just Admire God’s (Isaiah 55:7-9)

Isaiah 55:7-8: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts… For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.”

Your thinking is the thing verse 7 asked for, and verses 8 and 9 tell you what it is being exchanged for.

The command in verse 7 asks for the thoughts. The comparison in verses 8 and 9 shows what is standing ready to take their place, and it is not a better mood or a stricter rule; it is God’s own way of seeing the matter.

Admiring the difference costs nothing and changes nothing. What verse 7 wants is the exchange itself: a man’s reasoning about his sin, about God, about what he is owed and what he deserves, put down in favour of God’s.

That is slower work than changing a habit, and it happens in ordinary places. It happens when you decide that God’s verdict on a forgiven sin outranks the one you keep issuing against yourself, and when you let His estimate of a situation stand where yours has been standing for years.

Read also: How to Accept Gods Forgiveness and Forgive Yourself

Trade the thinking, one settled opinion at a time, beginning with whatever you currently believe God feels about you.

Lesson 18: God’s Word Works the Way Rain Works, in Stages (Isaiah 55:10)

Isaiah 55:10: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.”

Verse 10 describes a process with stages rather than an event with a moment.

The rain comes down. It waters the earth. The ground brings forth and buds. Only after all that is there seed for one man and bread for another. Each step in the sentence depends on the one before it, and none of them is the whole of what the rain came to do.

Isaiah gives the stages and says nothing about how long they run or whether a watching farmer can see them, so a teacher of this passage should stop where the verse stops. Slowness and hiddenness are things we bring to the text out of experience, and the verse itself does not claim either.

What the verse does establish is that God’s word can be genuinely at work in ground where nothing has yet broken the surface. Rain that has soaked in looks like nothing at all from the road, and it is doing the only thing that will produce bread later.

Lesson 19: One Rainfall Feeds Today and Plants Next Year (Isaiah 55:10)

Isaiah 55:10: “that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.”

Two different people stand at the end of verse 10, and they walk away with two different things.

The eater gets bread, which is today’s meal and is gone by evening. The sower gets seed, which cannot be eaten at all and which next year depends on entirely. One rainfall produced both, and neither man got what the other one needed.

God’s word tends to arrive as one or the other. Sometimes it feeds you where you stand, in a week you would not have survived without it. Other times what you are handed cannot be used yet: a promise with no date on it, a warning that will only make sense in five years.

Both came out of the same rain and both were intended by the God who sent it. The sower who complains that his seed is not bread has misunderstood what he is holding, though the mistake is an easy one to make when a person is hungry.

When the last thing God said to you turned out to be seed rather than bread, did you file it as a disappointment?

Lesson 20: His Word Never Comes Back Empty (Isaiah 55:11)

Isaiah 55:11: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”

Has God’s word ever failed?

Verse 11 answers by describing a journey with a return leg. The word goes forth out of God’s mouth and comes back to Him, and the rain picture just before it supplies the manner of the return: not unchanged, but carrying harvest.

“Void” means empty-handed. The promise is that God’s word never makes that homeward trip with nothing in its hands, however the ground looked while the work was going on.

The same claim brackets this whole stretch of Isaiah. Chapter 40 opened it with “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8), and chapter 55 closes it with a word that cannot return void. Fifteen chapters of comfort rest on the durability of what God says.

For anyone who has watched a promise sit unmoved for years, that is an odd comfort and a solid one. The word is on its way back to God, and it is carrying something.

Lesson 21: God’s Word Succeeds at His Purpose, Not Always at Yours (Isaiah 55:11)

Isaiah 55:11: “it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”

You can hold a promise for years and privately conclude that it failed.

Verse 11 states the measure of success twice, and both times the measure is God’s: “that which I please”, and “the thing whereto I sent it.” The purpose that decides the outcome is the sending purpose.

Most of us use the verse differently. It gets quoted over a prayer for a wayward son or a friend in a hospital bed as a guarantee that the particular outcome we named will arrive on schedule. What the verse actually guarantees is harder and stronger than that.

A word from God can complete its work in a situation that still looks like wreckage to the person praying. Hebrews describes that word as “quick, and powerful… and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12), which is work carried out where nobody can watch it happen.

None of that makes the waiting easy, and this verse should not be used to tidy away real grief. Some of what God sent His word to accomplish may not be visible in this life at all.

Read also: What Does It Mean To Wait On The Lord

Wait for what He sent it to do, even while you keep asking Him for the thing you sent it for.

Lesson 22: You Will Go Out, and You Will Be Led Out (Isaiah 55:12)

Isaiah 55:12: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace…”

One verb in verse 12 is active and the very next is passive, and Isaiah puts them in the same breath.

“Ye shall go out” is something the people do with their own feet. “Be led forth” is something done to them by someone else. Joy attaches to the first and peace to the second, and the verse makes no attempt to choose between the two.

Walking out of an old life takes real steps, and they are yours to take. Being brought out of it is God’s work, and it is yours to receive rather than to manufacture.

A Christian who will only accept one half of that verse spends years either straining or stalling. One waits for a deliverance that has already been described as a walk; the other marches at a life that was never going to yield to marching. Isaiah offers both halves in a single line and asks nobody to choose.

Lesson 23: Your Restoration Is Not a Private Event (Isaiah 55:12)

Isaiah 55:12: “the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”

You may be treating your own restoration as a quiet arrangement between you and God, with nothing much depending on it.

The witnesses Isaiah calls in verse 12 are hills and trees. Mountains sing, and branches applaud. The language is openly poetic, so the trees need no literal hands for the promise to stand, and the scene is no less serious for being a picture.

What the picture insists on is scale. A people walking out of exile is not a private matter settled between God and a few individuals, and the landscape itself is pulled into the response. Isaiah puts the singing before them, along the road they are walking.

There is more riding on your restoration than your own relief. God treats the freeing of His people as an event the created world has reason to celebrate, and the joy in that verse begins somewhere outside the person being freed.

Lesson 24: God Does Not Clear the Thorns; He Replaces Them (Isaiah 55:13)

Isaiah 55:13: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree…”

Thorn and brier carry a history in Scripture, and verse 13 names them on purpose.

They are what cursed ground was told to produce. “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Genesis 3:18) was God’s word to Adam about the soil, and Isaiah reaches all the way back to that sentence for his two weeds.

The promise made here is a swap rather than a clearance. The phrase is “instead of”, and something valuable comes up in the exact spot the worthless thing occupied. Fir and myrtle were trees people valued, for timber and shade and scent.

Pulling thorns out and leaving bare earth is within anybody’s power. What verse 13 promises goes further, because the ground that produced the curse is the ground that produces the fir tree.

Verse 13 has an opinion about the patch of your life you wrote off as thorn field years ago. Look at it again.

Lesson 25: The Ground That Changed Becomes God’s Reputation (Isaiah 55:13)

Isaiah 55:13: “and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

The chapter ends by saying who the change belongs to.

“It shall be to the LORD for a name.” The transformed ground becomes God’s reputation, part of what He is known by among people who watched the field before and after. Fir trees standing where briers stood are a memorial rather than a tidy improvement.

Then comes the last phrase, and it borrows a word from the world of trees: “an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” Fir and myrtle can be felled by any man with an axe. The sign God has made of them cannot.

Isaiah later uses the same picture of people. Those God comforts are “called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified” (Isaiah 61:3).

Whatever God does with a life He has changed, He puts His name on it. The restored person becomes part of how God is known, and that standing is the one thing in this chapter said never to be cut down.

Frequently Asked Questions About Isaiah 55

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Conclusion: What the Lessons from Isaiah 55 Leave You Holding

You came in on one word that should not have survived its sentence, and the chapter has spent thirteen verses explaining why God left it standing. God pardons on terms no one would have drafted, works by a word that comes home carrying harvest, and plants fir trees in soil that only ever grew thorns. The lessons from Isaiah 55 all run back to the same place: what God offers costs Him a great deal and costs you nothing except the coming. Read Isaiah 55 again this week, taking verse 7 and verse 8 as one sentence, and let the height of the heavens be about His willingness to forgive you.