Such texts as this ought to terrify us. For they speak of religious people and of a religious nation, and of a fearful mistake which they were making, and a fearful danger into which they had fallen.
I. Isaiah tells the religious Jews of his day that their worship of God, their church-going, their Sabbaths, and their appointed feasts were a weariness and an abomination to Him. That God loathed them and would not listen to the prayers which were made to Him. That the whole matter was a mockery and a lie in His sight. These are awful words enough that God should hate and loathe what He Himself had appointed; that what would be, one would think, one of the most natural and most pleasant sights to a loving Father in heaven namely, his own children worshipping, blessing, and praising Him should be horrible in His sight.
II. The text should set us on thinking, Why do I come to church? Because it is the fashion? Because I want to hear the preacher? No; to worship God. To adore God for His goodness, and to pray to Him to make us good, is the sum and substance of all wholesome worship. Then is a man fit to come to church, sins and all, if he carry his sins into church not to carry them out again safely and carefully, as we are all too apt to do, but to cast them down at the foot of Christ's cross, in the hope (and no man ever hoped that hope in vain) that he will be lightened of that burden, and leave some of them at least behind him.
C. Kingsley, The Good News of God,p. 51.
References: Isaiah 1:13. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 365.Isaiah 1:16. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 263.Isaiah 1:16; Isaiah 1:17. J. Keble, Sermons from Advent to Christmas Eve,pp. 424, 435, 446; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 228; D. Burns, Ibid.,vol. xxix., p. 83.