They say that old habits die hard. It’s true and it’s even truer about bad habits. Have you noticed how difficult it is to get rid of bad habits? Some, me included; some would say it’s virtually impossible. So what bad habits do you need to get rid of out of your life?

We’ve all been there. There is this one bad habit that we just can’t seem to get rid of. There is this one, no let me start again, let’s call a spade a spade, there is this one sin that we just can’t seem to get rid of. That’s better, sin – it’s the right word. I know that some find that word just a tad confronting maybe even anachronistic, a bit old fashioned, irrelevant in this day and age. And I understand that.

If we focus on today, our lives here and now, it can seem just a bit irrelevant. But if we zoom out and look at our lives as a whole we can see how our sin, the bad things we’ve done, has left a trail of destruction in our lives and in the lives of others. Zoom out a bit further and look at the whole world and you can see how sin, the sin of men and women and even young folk, is tearing families and societies and nations apart.

Now twist the lens some more and zoom out even further and look at the whole of the history of humanity and the thing that’s wrecked a great world and a great plan has been what? The sin of humanity, the hatred, the selfishness, the anger, the wars, the exploitation, the genocide.

Think about it, God gave us a perfectly good world in which to live. I mean He’s given us an amazing world, an amazing universe in which to live. He’s created each one of us so incredibly, the way our bodies function, the incredible talents and gifts and potential that each one of us has.

And yet somehow humankind has been on a course of self- destruction, whether down in our personal lives or in the geopolitical events that are sweeping the globe today, the destructive power of sin is as plain as the nose on my face and yours, you just can’t miss it. Its effects are totally devastating.

And yet we kid ourselves that somehow our personal little brand of sin, whatever that may happen to be, doesn’t really matter. I’m not such a bad person, really I’m not. Okay I get this wrong, I get that wrong but I’m not that bad. Everybody’s entitled to one or two bad habits, aren’t they?

Do you see how easy it is to rationalise our own personal sin when the truth is that the cumulative effect of my sin and yours and everyone else’s is what sets us on a course to destruction? Do you see how easy it is to downgrade our sin and write it off as just a bad habit?

So deep down we know that sin is sin even if we don’t like to admit it to ourselves and what’s more we use the sin of others as our excuse to escalate our sin and get revenge. The problem is, call it sin, call it a bad habit, it’s the same thing. But try as we might we can’t seem to shake it, it’s entrenched, its deep graven in our flesh. We know the difference between right and wrong, we know what’s right to do, it’s just that we can’t seem to do it, have you noticed?

The reason for that is that it was always meant to be like that. The reason for that is that God wants to have a relationship with us. And the only way, THE only way that that’s going to happen is through what He does and what He has, in point of fact, already done for us not through what we do for ourselves.

Have a listen to this, it was written by the Apostle Paul a couple of thousand years ago. He was writing about this self same problem that you and I have, the problem that even though we know what’s right we can’t seem to do it, Romans chapter 7, verses 21 to 23.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what’s good evil lies close at hand. You see I delight in the law of God in my innermost self but I see my members another law at war with the law of my mind making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, wretched man that I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?

That’s rather a good question, who indeed? Well our first response, yours and mine, is to get a handle on our sin, when we finally do and decide for ourselves, ‘You know what, I just have to do better. I just have to stop sinning. I have to overcome this one bad habit that’s totally ruining my life – my anger, my gossip, my jealousy, my smoking or my over eating’. Or whatever other addiction happens to be plaguing us.

It’s just that it never works and in fact that’s exactly what Paul goes on to say just a few verses later in Romans chapter 8, verses 3 and 4.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, couldn’t do by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he has actually condemned sin in the flesh so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. (Romans 8:3-4)

Let’s just focus on the first part of that for a moment. God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh could not do. In other words the law, a bunch of rules, is completely and utterly powerless to help us to change and get rid of this rubbish particularly when those rules, in effect, are weakened by our own sinfulness.

So many people, So many people believe with all their hearts in Jesus and yet because they themselves can’t seem to overcome their sin they live with a constant sense of guilt and condemnation before God. Well if you know anyone like that I have some good news for you today. Who will rescue me from this body of sin and death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord for there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death because God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, couldn’t do by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin he condemned sin in the flesh so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. (Romans 7:25 to Romans 8: 1-4)

What Paul’s saying there is the answer is Jesus, the answer is grace. But the grace of God in Jesus Christ is something that you and I struggle to get our minds around because grace is completely unnatural to us.

And that’s why today we’re kicking off a series of messages that I’ve called The Grace Transformation. The only thing that is ever going to change us, the only thing that is ever going to transform our lives by gradually getting rid of sin that is so destructive is the amazing grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Amazing Grace is one of my favourite hymns but every time I sing it,I wonder to myself whether I really grasp what grace is all about, do you? Do you have a real handle on the amazing grace that God afforded to you by the death of Jesus on that cross to pay for your sins?

I think I’m going to spend the rest of eternity and then some trying to wrap my heart around the grace of God. But as we begin to do that what we discover is that the transformation and the freedom we’ve been trying to make happen in our own lives and failing miserably, just starts to happen of its own accord as the Holy Spirit makes grace real in our lives.

You have been saved by nothing more and nothing less than the incredible grace of God, the unmerited favour of God, the sovereign decision of God to spare your life and to give you a new start and a new eternity by heaping the punishment that you so richly deserve onto Jesus on that cross.

And if it is by grace it is no longer on the basis of works otherwise grace would no longer be grace. (Romans 11:6)

So as we spend some time together in this series over these coming days my prayer for you is that the grace transformation that God intends for you will become a reality in your life as you come to know the truth and that truth sets you free.

In everybody’s life there comes a turning point. Things have been going on the same and the same and the same then all of a sudden God steps in. Not all of us accept Him of course but there is a moment in every person’s life where God would reveal His grace to us and that turning point is the beginning of something completely new.

There’s a beautiful old hymn called Would You Be Free From Your Burden Of Sin. Now I’m not going to sing it for you, I would never do that to you but here are the lyrics of the first verse and the chorus, just a bit of a reminder.

Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.
Would you o’er evil a victory win? There’s wonderful power in the blood.
There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb,
There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the Lamb.

A great old hymn, one of my favourites. I wonder how often we think about the burden of sin. The incredibly heavy load that it causes us to carry. The word sin as it’s used in the New Testament simply means, ‘to miss the mark’ or as we might put it ‘miss the point’. And the whole point of life isn’t that we should carry around a heavy burden that drains us emotionally and physically and spiritually but that we should live free as a bird to enjoy our lives.

That was Gods original plan, that was the plan that Adam and Eve were living out in their idyllic existence in the Garden of Eden until they sinned. And from that moment forward they had to live out a terrible burden of suffering and sickness, the murder of one son by the other and on it went.

Those are the consequences of sin. They were back then and they still are today and Lewis E Jones when he wrote that beautiful old hymn back in 1899, asked exactly the right question, would you be free from your burden of sin? Well … would you? The sin that dragged you down, the sin that holds you back.

Then listen to me, the only place where you’ll find that freedom is not in your good works, not in trying harder but in the wonder-working power that can only be found in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for you on that cross – the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

And it’s that grace that we’re going to chat about for a few minutes together today and the best way I know to do that is to take you back to a time when the nation of Israel was suffering under the burden of their sin.

It was a terrible time. God had brought them into the Promised Land from their slavery in Egypt. He had set every good thing before them, the land flowing literally with milk and honey just as He does for you and me. And just like you and me these people rejected God. They went their own way, they worshipped their idols, they sinned against Him and so following warning after warning He sent His judgement upon them, He gave them what they deserved.

He allowed the Babylonians sometimes also called the Chaldeans, the largest and greatest world power of that day, to completely destroy Jerusalem and the Temple and kill many and take the rest into captivity. It was a terrible time, those left were taken into slavery in Babylon where they lived out their burden of sin and the sin of their forefathers for seventy years, seven decades.

Imagine what that would be like, being torn from your home, seeing everything around you destroyed and being taken from your freedom into captivity as a slave. Sounds rather dramatic but I imagine if it happened to you it would be devastating. And in a very real sense the effects of our sin are devastating. Homes, marriages, families are being torn apart every day through sin. Lives are being destroyed every day through sin, it’s all around us, look up and see and it’s in us too. Our lives are devastated when we allow sin to reign.

What’s the answer? Who will save us from this body of sin and death? Hard work won’t, trying harder won’t, only grace, God’s grace. And at some point something has to give, at some point something has to change ’cause nothing else works. And at some point something did change for the Israelites who are captives there in Babylon. God came along and changed it. Have a listen, Isaiah 43, just verse 1.

‘But now’ thus says the Lord, ‘He who created you O Jacob, who formed you O Israel; do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine’.

We’re going to spend quite a bit of time in this chapter of the Book of Isaiah over the coming days but for now I want to focus with you on just two words. Here they are ‘but now’. I call it a grace interruption. Life was going along so miserably for those Israelites, those captives as it is for anyone who’s carrying the burden of their sin.

And then all of a sudden along comes God with an interruption, a complete discontinuity of grace, His free unmerited favour that He lavishes on those whom He loves, His people, those who believe in Jesus His Son who died for their sins and my prayer for you today is that you’re going to have a grace interruption just like those Israelites had almost two and a half thousand years ago.

They had no prospect of a future, all they saw was more slavery tomorrow and the next day and for the rest of their lives. But along comes God through His Prophet Isaiah and says. “But now …”

Now despite everything that’s gone before things are going to change. Now despite the fact that all you can see is a bleak future and more suffering at the hand of the sin that’s holding you captive. Now I am going to break into your world, says God, with my grace, I’m going to turn everything on its head, my free unmerited favour is going to flow into your life because I love you, but now …

That same thing that He did for His people, breaking into their slavery to sin and setting them free, is what God wants to do in your life right now, today.

‘But now’ thus says the Lord who created you. ‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.’ (Isaiah 43:1)

With all my heart I believe that that’s the word the Lord has for you today, NOW. The grace of God, the favour of God in Jesus Christ has come to set you free.

For by grace you have been saved through faith and it’s not your own doing, it is a gift of God not as a result of your works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2: 8-9)

That’s not just some 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 and for the rest of eternity.

I know that there are people listening today, maybe you’re one of them, who are crying out to be saved by the grace of God, would you be free from the burden of sin, would you? Then pray this with me right now.

Father God, the sin in my life is killing me. It’s robbing me of today, it’s 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 Saviour and the Lord of my life. I need saving from my sin, I need a ‘but now’ grace intervention in my life. Please do that for me. I pray it in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

If you prayed that prayer from your heart to God with me today then be assured of this, He has heard you. He has come to set you free. Jesus will start to make a powerful difference in your life from this moment onward. There is nothing surer than that.

And whatever you do don’t leave it there, get on with it. Start praying, start believing, start reading God’s Word, the Bible and I know that you’ll be utterly amazed at the intervention of grace, the totally unmerited, unlimited favour of God upon your life.

But now …

Anybody who has ever come to the conclusion that they’ve made such a mess of their lives that nobody or nothing could ever, ever, ever make things better, anybody who’s ever been in that place needs to know something, something important … something, the only thing that could ever make things better.

One of the things that Christians do is that they throw around words, words that seem important to them but are meaningless to the rest of us. Worse than meaningless actually, it makes them sound almost like a cult, the blood of the Lamb, sin, salvation, communion, redemption. It’s a pretty long list of in house jargon that for quite a long time kind of made the goodness of God, the amazing love of God, His grace in Jesus, inaccessible to me, it turned me off religion, to tell you the truth I remain turned off from religion and jargon and rituals. None of those things in and of themselves have ever done anything much or meant anything much to me.

And I guess that the sad thing about all of that jargon is that by using it without explaining it we kind of obscure the power and the wonder of the meaning that lies behind it.The word that I particularly want to focus on right now, not because I want to do some irrelevant word study but because it really matters, is redemption.

What does it mean to be redeemed? Who cares? Does it matter? Is it relevant to our lives today? Well you make up your own mind.

Yesterday on the program, we were talking about a bad time in the life of Israel, a time when through their rebellion against God they found themselves living out the consequences of their sin as slaves and captives to the Babylonians. It was a terrible time. It lasted for seventy years which is almost three generations.

But one day God decided that enough was enough. They’d had enough pain, enough suffering, the direct consequences of their rebellion – their sin, it’s what always happens but enough was enough, it was time to act because God so loved His people beyond measure. Isaiah 43 beginning at verse 1.

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.

See there it is, that word ‘redeem‘, did you pick it up? He goes on to say:

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 flames shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour. I give Egypt as a ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. (Isaiah 43: 2-3)

So what does it mean to be redeemed in the context of what God is saying there to His people? Well in that context, remember as far as the Israelites were concerned all was lost, they were third generation slaves in captivity with no prospects of freedom. Jerusalem, their capital, lay in ruins. The Temple where the presence of God supposedly dwelt lay in ruins, all was lost, their lives were lost, their future was lost.

But now God comes along and says, ‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you.’

I have brought you back from the abyss. I have lifted you out of this pit, I have restored your future to you. I have saved you from a lifetime of living out the consequences of your rebellion against me, aka your sin. I have removed the burden of your sin from you.

And notice with me if you will the tense of the verb ‘redeemed‘. It’s not future tense. God’s not saying ‘I will redeem you one day’. It’s not even present tense, ‘I am redeeming you today’. It is in fact past tense, it’s a completed act, it’s a done deal, ‘for I have redeemed you’ says the Lord.

Now just imagine what they, the Israelites, felt when they heard the great Prophet Isaiah declare that to them. ‘But now’, says the Lord, do not fear for I have redeemed you’. They would have been confused. Hang on a minute, right now I’m still a slave, right now the Babylonians are still the dominant global super power on the planet, nothing’s changed.

And yet this isn’t just anyone saying this, this is after all the Prophet Isaiah. What do I do with this? How do I process this? The Word of the Lord and the evidence of my circumstances are in total conflict and opposition to one another so what do I do now? Which one do I believe, Gods Word or my circumstances?

That is pretty much the dilemma that we all find ourselves in pretty often. It looks like the burden of our sin will never leave us. The consequences will never go away and yet the truth is that in Jesus, just as the Israelites were redeemed through God’s Word and in subsequent chapters in the Book of Isaiah you actually see how all that plays itself out. Just as they were redeemed so have you and I have already been redeemed, already plucked from the pit of our despair by the grace of God.

The free, unmerited, unlimited favour of God who doesn’t want us to live out the punishment and the consequences that we so richly deserve but who wants to set us free to be all that we can be for His glory.

Romans chapter 5 beginning at verse 6:

For while we were still weak at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

Much more surely then, now that we’ve been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his light. But more than that we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:6-11)

It’s a done deal! It’s past tense. Whatever it is that’s going on in your life at the moment, whatever exile and captivity and slavery that your rebellion against God has been brought upon you, I want you to hear this very good news. The very Word of God for you today is this, ‘Do not be afraid for I have redeemed you .I have called you by name and you are mine.’

Where there’s a conflict of evidence between your circumstances and God’s Word, God’s Word wins. God’s Word always wins.

So let’s move from Israel’s predicament to your life, your circumstances, your predicament. I know that there are some consequence of sin that you are living out in your life right now. I’m certain of it because we’ve all sinned and we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God, we all deserve His punishment for the wages of sin is death.

Although these days He punishes us not because instead He heaped all the punishment that you and I so richly deserve on the shoulders of Jesus Christ as He hung there and suffered and died on that cross for us.

But we do live out the consequences of our sin. If you don’t forgive someone that’s sin and it will eat away at you and your relationship with that person, it will hurt so much. If you’re dishonest and you cheat on someone the guilt will eat you up and when they find out about it, which they almost certainly will, it will destroy the relationship. When you speak evil of someone it always comes back to bite you.

Sin always has consequences that we have to live through and the point is that at some stage God comes along. He proactively steps forward. In fact He already has by presenting us with a solution, the only solution that will ever, ever work – Jesus. That’s God’s gift of grace to you.

He doesn’t want you to live out the consequences of your sin anymore. If you believe in Jesus you are saved from the wrath of God. You are redeemed from the pit that you find yourself in. God is with you so that the rivers won’t overwhelm you. You’ll walk through fire but the flames won’t burn you. You are His and He’s called you by name and that’s good news for you today. That’s stunningly good news.

And that’s where the grace transformation begins, with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

I wonder if you can think of the most precious person in your life, just picture their face. If that person, the one that means more to you than just about anyone else in your life, if that person were in trouble what would you do, how would you react?

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 43: 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 6:14.

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.

There’s always a tense period between the moment when disaster strikes in our lives and the moment when God starts to set things right. Now we’d like to believe that He’s going to set things right, right? Really we would but well, you know how it goes.

Over the past few days, we’ve been 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’s incredibly special. I mean. I care about people, really, I do. But my own children, well they’re different. They’re special because they are precious to me. 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 to 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 to 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 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 to 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.