I wonder if you can think of the most precious person in your life. Just picture their face. If that person, the one who means more to you than anyone else in your life, if that person were in trouble, what would you do? How would you react?
YOU ARE PRECIOUS
We all have someone or we’ve had someone in our lives who is more precious than anyone else. It’s probably a wife or a husband or a child or a friend or a mentor, everyone’s circumstances are different but of course if I asked you to picture the face of that person it would come to you in an instant, right? And if I asked you, how do you feel in your heart about that person then I’m sure that you’d tell me exactly how you feel.
It could be that you love that precious person with all your heart. It could be that … that precious person has passed away and you miss them with all your heart. Or perhaps that precious person betrayed you and is with someone else now and all you feel is a sense of pain and loss and devastation when you think of him or her.
Whatever your circumstance what I know is that … that precious person elicits a strong emotional response in your heart. That’s because they are or were precious to you and dear to you. Now you may not always have treated them the way you should have. That’s almost certainly true because none of us is perfect, I get that, you get that. But precious is precious.
So imagine for a moment the response that God has to someone who’s precious to Him. Imagine what’s going on in God’s heart for someone who is precious to Him. It would completely dwarf anything that you and I could ever think or feel because the love that God has is infinitely greater than the love that you and I can ever have.
Over the last few days on the program, we’ve spent some time examining grace. In fact, more specifically the grace intervention of God into the life of Israel when the nation as a whole was in a desperate place. A quick recap, through Moses and then Joshua God had brought Israel out of four and a half centuries of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and with honey, the land that He had promised to Abraham centuries before.
Battle by battle they had to take it and He blessed them in the land and yet the nation of Israel rebelled against God. Despite all the good things that He’d given them they worshipped false gods so after many warnings through the Prophets of old God punished them. He allowed the Babylonians, the world’s super power of the day, to invade, destroy Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take the people into slavery, into captivity back to Babylon where they laboured under the burden of their sin, generation after generation for seventy years.
But there came a point where God said, enough is enough. Let’s pick up the story, Isaiah chapter 43, verses 1 to 4.
‘But now,’ thus says the Lord, ‘he who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel, do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you, when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour’.
‘I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you because you are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you. I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life’.
Now we’ve spent a bit of time lately on the program talking about the first three verses there. This is a major grace intervention, a bleak dark hopeless time for Israel. All they can pretty much remember is seventy years they’ve spent in slavery. All they can see is a future, a lifetime of slavery and exile. The consequences, as they’ve now come to understand, of their rebellion and sin against God.
Sin always has consequences and yet seemingly out of nowhere, out of the blue, God shows up and does His ‘but now’ intervention. He completely turns the tables and tells Israel that He’s already redeemed them which incidentally is what He’s already done for thee and me even though our circumstances, like theirs, won’t always immediately reflect the fact.
You have to ask yourself, ‘Why?’ You see they deserve the punishment of God, they were getting their just deserts and then this, why did He do this? Well in that passage I’ve just read to you He tells us why, did you pick it up? It was towards the end, verse 4 of Isaiah chapter 43. He says:
Because you are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you.
That’s why. Because when God looks at His people they are precious in His sight. Listen to me, God loves all people. But those who belong to Him, those in this day and age who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour are special, they’re different, why? Because they’re precious in His sight and honoured and He loves them, that’s why.
Do you believe in Jesus? Have you accepted Jesus as your Saviour? The one who redeems you from the pit, the one who plucks you from the precipice and gives you a new life, have you? If the answer is yes know that He has a plan and a future for you because you are precious in His sight and honoured and He loves you.
Each one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, each one of us deserves the exile from God and the slavery to sin that we, by our own hand, have bought down upon our lives, each one of us. And yet in Jesus, through Jesus, because of Jesus the grace of God has instead fallen on our lives.
Change doesn’t happen in our lives by working harder. We don’t get rid of the sin in our lives by trying harder because nothing that you or I can do can set us free from the exile and slavery occasioned by our sin anymore than the Israelites could have fought the world’s super power Babylon to set themselves free from the slavery occasioned by their sin.
Change happens, transformation begins, freedom starts to take hold in our lives when we take grasp of the free, unmerited favour of God, the grace that we have in Jesus Christ. When we become so thankful for what Jesus has done for us on that cross the Holy Spirit changes our lives. It’s a grace transformation, not hard labour. And it was always meant to be.
To be perfectly honest with you, I love my job because I get to share this good news with you each and every day here on the program and it is good news, right? The sin that’s ruining your life at the moment, Jesus came to take it away. Listen to this Scripture, Romans chapter 6 verse 14.
For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under the law but under grace.
What did God say there through Paul the Apostle in His Word? That sin no longer has any dominion over you. It no longer has any power or influence over you. Why? Because no longer are you called to hard labour in trying to keep a bunch of rules, the guilt of failure is gone because you are now no longer under a law but under grace. Hard labour doesn’t work. It never has and never will.
So if you’re into hard labour, if you’re into trying to be a better person, if you’re on some self-help kick at the moment, stop it, it will always end up in failure. The only thing that makes a difference is Jesus. The freedom you’re looking for from the burden of your sin is found in Christ and Christ alone.
Come to me, (He said) all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11: 28-30)
Would you be free from your burden of sin? Then the answer, the only answer is Jesus.
DO NOT FEAR
Before the break we were chatting about the fact that anybody who belongs to God, anybody who believes in Jesus is incredibly precious in His sight. When you think about it, that is incredibly special. I mean, I care about people, really I do, but my own children, well, they’re different. They are special because they are precious to me. It makes sense doesn’t it?
God is very much the same only on a much bigger scale, much more powerful, much more loving scale. He created every person on this planet. He loves them all and His heart is that none should perish but all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). But as we saw there in the Book of Isaiah chapter 43, He will do amazing things for His people – His own, those who are precious in His sight. Why? Because they’re precious.
I want to take another quick look at this passage together because our preciousness to God is something that really needs to sink in, Isaiah 43: 1-8.
‘But now’ thus says the Lord, ‘Who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel, do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour.’
‘I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you because you are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you. I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life.’
Those powerful promises come to Israel at that fearful time when they’ve been in exile as slaves in Babylon for almost seventy years. They come to Israel at a time that must have seemed to be to them a hopeless time.
As I said at the top of the program, when disasters befall our lives as they invariably do, there’s this terrible time between when the bad stuff happens and when God sets things right. It’s a fearful time. I remember a time when my finances were so incredibly tight, some years back and it didn’t seem to matter how much I prayed God was mute and inactive or so it seemed. I was close the brink of financial disaster.
It was a fearful time for me, especially as a man because we men have this instinct of protecting our families and providing for them. Looking back on it, I can see exactly what God was doing. If I was going to be useful to Him as His servant I needed to discover His faithfulness first hand, my faith in Him needed to grow. But back then I didn’t have the luxury of that lesson. Back then, it wasn’t some academic exercise about growing my faith, it was a fearful time.
Fear is something that we’ve talked quite a bit about on the program over the last few months and I keep circling back to it not because I have some fixation with fear but because it’s important to overcome fear. And so often, as I open my Bible, I hear God saying to me, ‘Listen up Berni, don’t be afraid. There’s no need to be afraid.’ It appears so often in Scripture, it’s remarkable. Maybe it’s because God knows that fear is something that’s eating away at a lot of people.
Did you notice how that passage from Isaiah that we just read, began?
‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you’re mine’.
It’s a great theory there God but what does that actually mean? Well He goes on to say this,
‘So when you pass through waters I’ll be with you and through rivers they won’t overwhelm you. When you walk through fire you won’t be burned and the flames shall not consume you.’
So often we’re looking for God to save us from the rivers and the fire whereas all along He’s looking to save us in the midst of them. That’s a huge insight. Let me say that again. We are always looking for God to take the rivers and the fire away but God is looking to meet us in those places to save us in the middle of them. ‘God get me out of this river. God get me out of this fire. God what the blazes are you doing?’
And His answer is, ‘Child, don’t be afraid, you won’t drown in the river. You won’t burn in the fire’. God’s favour and protection are with us in the middle of those terrible fearful times, that’s why He says do not be afraid. And He says it again in this same chapter in a different way. Let’s have another listen, Isaiah 43: 5-7.
Do not fear for I am with you, I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west and I will gather you. I will say to the north ‘give them up’ and to the south ‘don’t withhold, bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the ends of the earth’. Everyone who is called by my name whom I created for my glory, whom I have formed and made.
What is God saying to His people, to you and to me in those few verses? Don’t be afraid. Why? Because He’s with us and just at the right time He will bring salvation through His power and His might and His compassion and His Word.
If the Israelites had a choice, they certainly wouldn’t have put themselves in Babylon as slaves in captivity for seventy years. But God had a purpose in letting that happen, His purpose was to bring His people to their senses and back to Him. That’s what often happens to us in times of trial. In the good times we just go on our merry way, a way that all too often leads in the opposite direction to the one that God wants us to head in, a direction that leads away from God rather than towards Him.
And this God in whose sight you and I are so incredibly precious, like a good father, allows us to suffer the consequences of our sin. Or sometimes it’s not so much that we’re doing the wrong thing but rather that He wants to take us deeper with Him, to grow our faith in Him, to bless us with His faithfulness.
And so we find ourselves in those dark and fearful places and when we do what God says to us, what He’s saying here through His Scripture is this, ‘Don’t be afraid, I am with you. I’ve got your back. I’ve got it covered. I have redeemed you.’ And you’ll see that when the time is right. And once that gets through into our hearts guess what? The fear just goes away.
How many times have you in your life been in a dark and fearful place and how many times has God come through just at the right time to save you from all the terrible things that in your fear you imagined was going to happen to you? Exactly. God always comes through.
Now His salvation, whatever that’s been in your life, His way of plucking you out of that mess isn’t always the ideal outcome that you’d imagined in your mind, it’s not always the ‘live happily ever after‘ ending. No, more often it’s much better than that because in our suffering God is interested in achieving something much more important than a fairy tale ending.
Here’s how James put it almost fifteen hundred years after Isaiah, James 1: 2-4.
My brothers and sisters whenever you face trials of any kind consider it nothing but pure joy because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance and let endurance have its full effect so that you may be mature and complete and lacking in nothing.
And as you and I look back on the trials that we’ve faced and the way that God’s helped us out of them, we know don’t we how powerfully He’s worked in our hearts and in our lives to transform us into who we are today. You know what they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and He does that by His grace because we’re precious in His sight.
He’s transforming us day by day back into our original image, the very image of God. He’s setting us free from all the hang-ups that hang us up because we’re precious in His sight.
Me? I call it The Grace Transformation. So whatever you do don’t be afraid – He’s got you covered.
GOD’S TRANSFORMATIVE POWER
Grace is the free, unmerited favour of God in our lives. It is something that we don’t deserve; it’s born out of His heart of incredible love for you and me. That’s why He sent Jesus, and that’s why the Bible says that:
It’s by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not a result of your works, so that no-one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
But that’s not just a forensic statement of fact about something that happened in the past, the day you gave your life to Jesus, it’s a statement about your life today and tomorrow. It’s not the end, it’s just the beginning.
I know that there are people listening today, maybe you are one of them, who are crying out to be saved by the grace of God. Would you be free from the burden of your sin? Would you? Come on … do it … pray with me now:
Father God, the sin in my life is killing me; it’s robbing me of my todays, its robbing me of my future; and something has to give. Lord, today I’ve heard about Jesus, the free unmerited favour of God through His death on the cross that is available to me. Lord, I want that, I want your grace; I want to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. I need saving from my sin; I need that ‘but now’ grace intervention in my life. Please do that for me. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Come on, if you prayed that prayer from your heart with me today, then be assured of this: God has heard you, He has come to set you free, Jesus will start to make a powerful difference in your life from this day forward, there is nothing surer than that.
And whatever you do, don’t just leave it there, get on with it, start praying, start believing, start living your life for Jesus, start reading God’s Word, the Bible. And I know you will be utterly amazed at the invention of grace – that totally unmerited, unlimited favour of God upon your life – because God has the power to transform your life, to radically change your life for good, for His glory.
Have a listen again to what His Word says about you and your life and the transformative power of His grace in you. 2 Corinthians 3: 17 and 18:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
What God is saying is that we don’t change our lives by trying harder or working harder, by complying with the letter of the law. Because that sort of glory just fades away, that’s the point that the apostle Paul makes in the few verses before the ones we just read.
Now our lives are transformed as we gaze upon God, as we draw close to God, as the Holy Spirit brings freedom into our hearts and that freedom works its way into our lives.
God’s presence in us through Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, is what transforms our lives, so if you have been trying to live a better life, if you have been trying harder and harder and harder and harder and failing, just stop and listen.
Instead, draw close to Jesus and allow Him to transform you from one degree of glory to another. So that as each day goes by, the glory of the Lord will shine through you into this dark, hurting world, into the hearts of people whose lives are being lived out in darkness.
This comes from the Lord, the Holy Spirit, not from working harder – it’s a gift of grace. Just as you and I have been saved from our sin from eternal damnation through Jesus, by His grace, so our lives are being transformed from glory to glory, a day at a time, through Jesus, by His grace.
Jesus is the power of transformation, Jesus is the one who will transform you and your life, Jesus is the one who came to give you a completely new life, one that will last for ever and ever and ever. Amen.
Jesus – He is the answer! So please don’t spend one more day trying harder to be a better person, or to get yourself out of this mess that you find yourself in. Go to Jesus and experience His power of transformation – The Grace Transformation.