Isaiah 58:8-9 “Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.”

The nation Isaiah served 2700 years ago was not suffering an unusual health crisis when the Lord offered them healing. They were not the victims of some grand epidemic. Their problems were bigger than that. The Lord promises healing to a faithful people whose religion is more than externals, and lip service, and self-chosen ways of worship. “Love me first, and love your neighbor like he is your own flesh and blood. Really invest yourself in loving him, and see if your problems don’t start to get better.”

This is the way the Lord made the world to work. Living a loving, selfless life in close communion with the Lord has a way of healing families, reducing stress, removing harmful habits, sometimes even bringing physical healing to our bodies. Convince enough people to live this way, and see if some of the great problems that plague society–crime, poverty, prejudice, substance abuse, injustice–don’t start to get better, even without passing new laws.

Even if you and I are the only ones who hear Isaiah’s call to adopt such a life of love, and the problems around us remain the same, we may enjoy the Lord’s healing blessing in our lives anyway. Almost 80 years ago Viktor Frankl was living in a German concentration camp in the middle of the Holocaust. All of the prisoners were living under the same conditions. But Frankl noticed that those who stopped feeling sorry for themselves and spent their time befriending and helping others somehow managed to thrive even while those around them were dying. Maybe living a life of serving others isn’t going to change the conditions around us. But it changes us. It helps us to cope. It offers a kind of healing as it invites the Lord’s blessing into our lives.

More than that, for the believer it brings a promise of the Lord’s own presence. “Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.” Those who humble themselves under God’s commands, and show mercy to their neighbor in a way consistent with the mercy God has shown to them, have a promise of his answer to their prayers.

Don’t misunderstand the prophet’s point. He is not saying that God’s love for us is conditioned on our behavior. In his freedom God continues to love the whole world just because he chooses to love the whole world, including you and me. Our love is ever only a response to the love he has already shown by forgiving our sins and making us his own. What Isaiah describes always begins with God’s grace. For the New Testament Christian, all of this must flow from Jesus’ cross.

But like a good parent, who truly loves his children, he doesn’t want to reward bad behavior. He may delay his response to our calls for help because the crisis of the moment is useful for getting our attention. C.S. Lewis was fond of saying, “Pain is God’s megaphone.” It gets us to turn to him, to consider his ways, and to reconsider our own. When putting God first and serving others have become priorities in our lives again, he is ready to answer our cries for help and make his presence known in our lives.

Our Lord has not made a secret of what he wants of us. He hasn’t made it complicated either. We don’t need to go and invent ways of making him happy. We don’t have to sacrifice things he never asked us to give up. “Love God and love others” still sums up his demands.

A popular belief claims, “God helps those who help themselves.” You won’t find those words or that thought in the Bible. But Isaiah’s words remind us, “God helps those who help others.” And that can be true because God himself first helped us.