It’s great to be with you again in a fresh new week on A Different Perspective. I don’t know if you have ever noticed but we have lots of expectations in life. Big ones, small ones, we expect a bright future; we have hopes and dreams about our marriages and for our kids, right down to the little things. You go out for a cup of coffee you expect good coffee and great service. We buy a new car, we buy a new, whatever, and we expect it to out perform the old one. The bottom line is, we expect a lot and yet so often we are disappointed. Life doesn’t live up to our expectations, things, people, circumstances; they so often fail to live up to our most optimistic expectations. That’s life, ok? But what about God? If God is God, what are our expectations of Him? Now that’s an interesting question.

Last week, we did a little series called The Long Road Home. So often we are out there wandering in some sort of spiritual wilderness and somewhere deep inside we know that God’s out there somewhere yet the road back to Him can feel like such a long one. If you missed that, you can listen to the whole series again at our website, www.christianityworks.com. Just click on A Different Perspective and go and check it out. And during those programs last week we predominately looked at the story of the prodigal son, you may know that story. It’s the story of a son who goes to his Dad and says “Dad, I’ve had enough of working on the farm with you and my brother. Give me my inheritance now and I’m out of here”. So his Dad gives him his inheritance and he wanders off and he squanders it all on parties and drinking and prostitutes and all of a sudden he finds that he is starving because the money has run out. And ultimately he decides to go back to his father, not for any other reason than he’s starving and he needs some food. But he realises, because of what he has done, he’s not worthy to be called Dad’s son anymore so he goes back to Dad thinking, “Well, you know I’m not worthy to be a son anymore but if I can go back and just work as a servant I know I will have enough food to eat.”

Now this isn’t a true story that Jesus tells, it’s a story that Jesus tells to explain what God is like, it’s a parable. And what we find out in this parable that Jesus is telling us, is that when the son finally wanders towards his father’s house, Dad is already out on the road, waiting for his son. And the moment he glimpses his son coming back, it doesn’t matter what his son has done, Dad races out and he hugs him and he puts a ring on him and puts sandals on his feet and a robe on him and brings him home and says, “Look, my son is back.” And they throw a big party, they kill the fattened calf and it’s always struck me how Jesus, in this story, is pointing out to us, that our expectations of Gods grace and love and compassion fall so short of reality. Because of course, in this parable, in this story, the father is God and the prodigal son, well that’s you and me, and Jesus comes up with this story to explain how we have low expectations of God’s grace when we come to him. How we struggle with understanding how good and how loving and how forgiving and how compassionate God the Father actually is.

A man by the name of J B Phillips, a few years ago, wrote a wonderful little book called “Is Your God Too Small?” I wonder whether sometimes, we don’t have God in a tiny little box and we miss the point entirely of who he is, of what he’s like, what he can do and what he won’t do. And you know we have these consumer expectations, we’re so used to shopping and looking around and we look at that product versus that product and we take this option or that option. Maybe we look at God that way, maybe we look at God as being a commodity rather than being the God of the heavens and the earth, the God who made it all, the God who is above all.

I remember at the end of one of our theology subjects, a few years ago when I was at Bible College, the lecturer asked us what we had learnt in that subject and one of the men in the class, who was really very quiet, said at the end, he said, “You know how we all have God in a box,” we all nodded. I guess to some extent we all put limits on God without realising what we are doing. Anyway, he said “Look I think I’ve got God in a much bigger box now”, and I’ve never forgotten that and I think “wow, maybe I need to see God for what He is and not have such low expectations.” We talk about there being a God, an all powerful, an all knowing God. A God of blessing, and a God of forgiveness, a God of wrath and a God of punishment. A God who sent his son Jesus to die on a cross, a God of love and grace and forgiveness. This week on A Different Perspective, what I hope we can do as we spend some time together over the next few days is blow the walls off our boxes, to examine our expectations of this God, of what He’s like.

Today, I don’t have any answers. Today I just wonder if we can wonder and ponders some of the questions. Ponder some of our thoughts and expectations and open them up and unpack them just a little bit. Let me ask you, “What are your expectations of God?” Given who you are and where you’re at in life, what are your expectations? When you think of God, when you look at him, when you think about him, what do you expect him to be like? For instance, sometimes, some of the stuff Christians say about God and about life and about society, well to be frank, it seems out of step, out of date, not up with who we are as a society and as people today. Surely God’s not like, that we think. So what are the contemporary situations and issues in your life? Family or money or sexuality. Do you expect God to be out of step or out of date? Do you expect him to be judgemental and acronistic, or, do you expect him to be accommodating? Should God take a stand on issues or
Should he just move on with the times?

Today we have a way of living that says “if it feels good – do it”. We’re going to look at that in a few days time. It’s a maximum for life, if it works for you buddy, you just go ahead and you do it, that’s fine! Whatever you do behind closed doors as long as it works and doesn’t hurt anyone else that is fine. Well? What do we expect God to think of that? Do we expect God to have a view? Do we expect God to say, “Well, you know, I know that society’s moved on just, whatever you do that’s fine” or do we expect him to say “No, there are some things you can’t do!” What about heaven and hell? Should God, a God of love, punish some people? Can a God of love, sentence someone to an eternal hell? Does God bless people and curse people? Do you have to be poor to be a God follower, to be a Christ follower? Or, does God give people money? And what about character development, does God want to deal with difficult issues in our lives? I have a challenge for you. I said I wasn’t going to answer any questions today; I really just wanted to raise some questions and some thoughts. What are your expectations of God? Not in a dry, theological, text bookie kind of sense, but in life today, in the middle of things that matter for you?

Here’s the challenge. I wonder if you could take just ten minutes today, quietly, somewhere alone, off to the side and just sit and think and ask yourself, what are my expectations of God? In the areas that matter to you, right here, and right now. Just jot them down, look at them, think about them and tomorrow we’ll come back and look at God as the creator of heaven and earth and begin to look at some of the expectations we have of him as God. I wonder, is your God too small?

It is just fantastic to be with you again today in your part of the planet. This week on “A Different Perspective”, I guess we are taking a bit of a look at the expectations that we carry round inside us, specifically the expectations we have of God. And one of those expectations that sometimes emerges is that because we can’t actually see or touch Him like we can the world around us, we consign Him into a small space. Not that He is irrelevant, you know, the powerful forces in our lives, the people that we see on television, the emotions we’re dealing with, they seem so much bigger, so much more powerful, so much more capable of impacting us, than a God whom we can’t see. Make sense? So, well, what does God have to say about that?

Well He starts in the very first verse, of the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible by saying this, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now you might say to me, “Berni, now the Bible, c’mon.” Well it may or may not carry sway with you in your life, depending on where you are at. If it doesn’t, just humour me for a moment. God’s saying that He made the whole cotton picking lot. Do you know how many stars there are in the universe we know about? Ten to the power of twenty stars. If you are not a mathematician, I had to kind of figure this out, that is ten trillion, trillion stars. Now, trillion rolls of the tongue fairly easily I guess. But a billion, right, is less than a trillion, a billion seconds is thirty two years. Now a trillion is one thousand billion. It gives you some sense of the size of that number. Now we are talking a trillion, trillions. That’s just the ones that we know about. Because of course we can’t see to the end, we don’t know what is at the end of the universe. This is as far as we can see and mathematically estimate, ten to the power of twenty two, or a trillion, trillion stars. Spread over distances so vast that we can’t comprehend them. The star that is closest to the earth other than the sun, (the sun is only ninety two, ninety three million miles away), but the next start that is the closest one to the earth after the sun it takes, two thousand years for the light that it generates to get to earth!

Two thousand years and our little galaxy the Milky Way, that’s a hundred thousand light years across. So from one side of the Milky Way to the other it takes, one hundred thousand years for light to travel across that space. The furthest distance that we can see presumably using the Hubble Space Telescope is eighteen billion light years away! Eighteen billion light years away! Now light travels at a million kilometers an hour, or six hundred and seventy thousand miles an hour and at that speed, at a million kilometers per hour it takes eighteen billion years for light to travel as far as we can see! Ahhh… I don’t know about you, but that’s a long way. You look at the cosmic forces, the cosmos, the forces of nature right down to the little things… the bees, the flies, you look at your hand or you look at the way the human spine holds the body up and we walk around. We, you and I are regular, engineering marvels. People in robotics have been trying to create what God created in the human body and we… we just can’t. It is an amazing thing. Then you look at the human mind. Your brain and my brain weigh about one and a half pounds, less than a kilo. Yet we can recall things from years ago. How does that get stored in one and a half pounds of grey blob that sits between our ears? That’s incredible stuff. And God’s perspective on the fact that you and I can’t see Him is this. “I created all that. All of it!” And then He put us in it.

Now when you look at it that way, does that kind of change your expectations of God? In the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, if you have a Bible, I suggest at some stage you read Isaiah Chapter forty in the Old Testament, God says, “Look, go and look at all the stars, go and have a look at all that. Look around at all the rulers of the earth, all the kings and princes and presidents and prime ministers. Look up at the heavens, look at all of the people. All that, all that you can see and touch and smell and feel, everything that impacts you, that lifts your spirits, that drags you down, everything… I made that.” And over and over and over again, right from the very first verse of the very first chapter to the last verse of the last chapter, He says, “despite the fact that you can see all of that stuff, and you can’t see me, trust me! I created it, I put you in there. It’s I who holds it all together every little cog, every little speck of dust, every little grain of sand, every little hair on your head, I know them all… because I put them there. And I hold them together.”

I cannot help but look at the universe that we live in and conclude there must be a God, it couldn’t just have happened randomly. And then God says, “All that stuff you can see, trust me, come to me! Let me be the one to make a difference for you! Let me be your God. Whatever your problems, whatever adversity, whatever your pain, whatever your need. I am sufficient for you. I can help. Why? Because I am the creator. All of those trillion, trillion stars, I know each one by name, I know how much it weighs, I know how wide it is, I know how hot it is. I know when it came into being. I know when it will pass away!” Essentially that’s what faith is. It’s hearing God’s whisper somewhere deep inside. It’s hearing that call, it’s looking around and concluding… “Ahh God!” And looking at that God through Jesus and saying, “Yes, I believe” Not just in my head but in my heart, in my life!

Now if we look at God from that perspective, if we hear His call, maybe you are hearing that call right now, maybe you have heard that call in the past and you haven’t answered it. But if we look at the God who created the universe and the heavens and the earth and everything in them, how does that change our expectations of what God wants to do in our lives? How does that change our expectations of what God can and will do in our lives? Not just in theory, not just from a text book, but living it? Just look back at my 10 years of walking with Him, of being healed from a broken spirit. Of finding a wife who loves me and whom I love! Of finding myself in tough financial spots sometimes and saying, “Lord I need your help!” Of dealing with difficult people over and over and over again. As I brought those things to Him, to the God who created all those stars, who created the bees and the ants and the fish and the animals and you and me. As we bring that stuff to Him, it’s not some little God in little space because we just can’t see Him. I look around and I see God in the middle of it all!

This is God’s creation. Yes he stands separate from it, but it’s his creation, you can’t help but conclude… “Ahh God!” As we look at Him you and I we say, “What do we expect of that sort of God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, of all the stuff that is around us. He’s reaching out to us.

Let me ask you something, “Is your God too small?”

My 15 Year old daughter like so many kids of her age these days, has a mobile phone so that we can contact her when she is out. But the thing that I have noticed is how often she and her friends change the plastic covers on those phones. It seems that the more the economy develops the more the marketers find ways of relieving us, you and me, of our hard earned cash. And the more choices there are the more we like to customize those choices. Hence the different plastic covers for mobile phones. And the internet sites you can customize for yourself. And the different skins and computer based media players. We live in a world of the enormous consumer choice. And increasingly we are into mass customization. Tailoring all those different things so that they fit the look and feel and image that we want to portray.

Mass customization is all around us. You go into the clothing stores and the styles and colours is such a vast array of clothing. Years ago when Henry Ford rolled the first Ford off the mass production line, you could chose any colour as long as it was black. Well these days there are so many models and colours and trim options and… you name it you can option your car up. And it is not just in the developed world. In the developing nations you can buy cherry flavored Coke. You can buy mobile phones with different covers, and MP3 players with different skins, and often we use different packaging to customize look and feel. The idea is that whatever it is that we buy or consume we can fit it into our image. If you have a car, the brand and the model of the car will doubtless have something to say about who you are and how you want to portray yourself to those people around you.

Now none of those things in and of themselves are bad. But what they reflect is a highly developed part of our psyche these days, which says, “I am in the centre of the universe.” There are so many choices out there, life is about me being in the middle and making choices that work for me. So that everything else whether it is an MP3 player or a mobile phone or a car or a relationship or a job, everything else fits in and around me. Because we have so many choices, we have so many options, it’s like a little Rubik’s cube, we can juggle it and twist it until it suits exactly who we want to be. And in a sense it’s how we define ourselves in a world where there are so many options. As much as we do with things and with careers and with relationships I wonder whether that part of our psyche hasn’t permeated into the way we see God, and how we expect to relate to Him. Now you may want me to say, “Well God’s like a mobile phone or car, we can fit Him into our image. If I don’t like this version I can buy another box and put him into that. And it looks different and I am happy with it.” But I can’t say that. Because it is not true. If that disappoints you I am sorry. But if I said that we can fit God into our own image I would be lying.

If we have an expectation that we can fit God into our image and trim Him and take the bits that we want and the options that we want, if I said that to you I would be misleading you. Yes like any loving father he tailors his approach. Some days I need compassion and frankly I need a kick in the tail! He understands that we are all different, that we have different cultures and different ways of looking at the world. And different skills and abilities and limitations. And so like any loving father He customizes the way He loves us. But… but… He is who He is! Way back when God spoke to Moses He said, “Go and tell Pharaoh let my people go” Moses was a broken old man in the desert. I mean God came to him in the burning bush and said, “Moses I have a job for you. You are going to go to Pharaoh and tell him, “let my people go.” Moses had all sorts of excuses. He said, “Who am I to go, they won’t listen to me. What should I say; I am not a very good speaker. Who shall I tell them sent me?” And God said to Moses, “Tell them, I AM who I AM sent you.”

It is the name God gave himself, “I AM, who I AM.” Funny, Pharaoh as the geo-political reality of the time, the Pharaoh of Egypt, had the power of life or death. He was like the president of the United States. He was the head of the most powerful nation in the known world. And here is this broken old man, out in the desert. And not unreasonably Moses says, “who do you think I am that I should go and tell Pharaoh to let my people go?” And God says, “Listen you go tell pharaoh that the God who is who He is, I AM who I AM, that is who sent you.”

Yesterday we looked at the fact that God is the creator of the most amazing heaven and earth in the universe. He has the power to do things. Today if we are to manage our expectations of who God is and how He interacts with us, I don’t know, I think we need to understand that as the creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, He is who He is. And we are made in His image and not the other way around. As much as we would like to customize it. Now, what are our expectations of God? We come to Him with consumer motives. Let’s go God shopping… “Well I would like a little pink fluffy one with leather trim and this option. Ah no I don’t want that option and I don’t want that option and… me, me. I am a sinner and if this God is going to relate to me I just want the bits that work for me and some of this other stuff that he talks about, well, take up your cross and follow Him, I don’t want any of that stuff.”

Jesus said, “If anyone would follow me, let them deny themselves. And take up their cross and follow me.” How do we reconcile that? Mostly when I speak of God you may have heard me on previous programs, I am always emphasizing God’s love and God’s grace, God’s compassion, God’s forgiveness, I hold God in wonder and awe. But if we expect God to be some kind of sugar daddy, I think we are in for a rude shock. As the human race has progressed and developed, yes, God’s has revealed more of Himself. He has dealt with us in new ways. He sent his son Jesus in the middle of all of that to say, “I love you” Yes He understands that we are different people, sometimes with different cultures, we are individuals, He deals with that too.

But here is the bottom line. It’s not for us to option Him up or option Him down. It’s not for us to say, “I’ll have this bit of God and not that bit of God.” As he tailors his approach to you and to me, here is the bottom line. It’s His choice. He is the God of God’s and the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and the Creator of all the Universe. Of all the stars, of all the animals and all the people, everything He is God of. And just like a loving father He is who He is. This is not some dysfunctional sugar daddy, this is a God of love and grace and forgiveness. But a God who knows right from wrong. A God who knows good from bad. A God who has the best intentions for you and me. He is who He is!

We cannot, cannot option Him up or option Him down. What are your expectations of God? As we live our lives in this busy consumer world, how do we see Him. C’mon do we want a pink fluffy one with leather options? Is your God too small?

This week on A Different Perspective we’re poking our way through some of the expectations that we have in mind, particularly of God. One of the ones that so many people have is that all this talk of hell and judgment, well they can’t possibly be true. I mean, if God is a loving God, if He sent Jesus after all to die for us on the cross, then there can’t be a hell. A loving God wouldn’t send someone He loves to eternal punishment, now would He? And so as a result there are twice the number of people who believe in heaven around 70% of the population than there are who believe in hell, about 32% of the population. Now this stereotypical expectation of God is that love, supreme Godly love, cannot possibly include hell and damnation. That part of the bible… well… it must just be some old fashioned hang over from the past and out of date thinking, right?

The last 30 years or so in the west has seen a significant change in the way that we live our lives. For instance, we are much less institutional than we used to be. Institutions like the church and school, and government, used to be held in far greater esteem than they are today. We are also less hierarchical, when you think about it, doctors… I remember when we used to visit the doctor you would take whatever the doctor said as gospel. These days we question what doctors say, the same with teachers and post office managers, and bank managers. We used to hold them up in the hierarchical view of the world. We tend not to do that quite so much these days. And we’re much less formal. I remember when I was a kid and my parents had people over for meals, they would come with coats and ties on and they would sit in the formal dining room. We don’t do that sort of stuff much these days do we? We tend to come over for a BBQ and gatherings are much less formal than they ever used to be.

Now sometimes it feels like the church is trying to turn the clock back. You know, the modern era of my early life where things were more institutional and hierarchical and more formal has moved on to what we call today the “Post Modern Era” Today we are far less institutional, far less hierarchical and more flexible, less formal. And sometimes I found, and maybe you have found too, that Christians and the church the way they talk, that somehow they are trying to turn the clock back to the good old days in the 1950’s or the 1960’s.

Now when you look at history, and society has gone through all sorts of changes, amazing ups and downs and variations. Different ways of looking at things from medieval times through to renaissance, all sorts of different thought patterns and approaches and thinking about what was right and what wasn’t right. Society changed has changed all over the place. And sometimes you hear people talk about the “Post War” the after World War 2, the Golden years, the 1950’s and early 60’s, as the good old days. I guess in the sense perhaps they were. In a sense, life was maybe simpler then, but hang on; women and children were still being abused back then. In Australia we had the state take aboriginal children away from their parents. They created a whole generation that we called the “Stolen Generation”, which still has ramifications in peoples lives today. Men still drank too much and they gambled too much.

I am not one for turning the clock back frankly. I actually like the society I live in today and the way things are today. But what I love to do is to understand how we think and how we behave today, by looking at the past and looking at what has changed, and learning from the past. So I’m definitely one for turning the clock back so as to speak. So here we are, we live in a society that has more flexibility that has greater tolerance for different races and religions and beliefs and views. And some of that is really positive stuff. BUT…

There are always two sides to a coin and the flip side is that we have developed an “Anything Goes” mentality. The maxim of today’s generation is, “If it feels good… do it!” And anyone that speaks out against that, anyone that says, “Hang on a minute! Maybe there are a few problems with some of the things we are doing.” Well what happens is that society shoots them down as fundamentalists, as people who are out of date and not up with the times, wanting to turn the clock back. And yet not everything that feels good and that we do in our society is good for our society, is good for us as individuals, is good for the people around, or the children that we bring up. In fact there are enough instances in the recent past when people have spoken up about things that were popular and people wanted to shoot them down, and now that speaking up with an unpopular view has brought around huge changes. Let’s look at just a few of them.

Smoking, smoking was accepted as being fine. Even when it wasn’t. Global warming, the use of dioxins, the use of asbestos, drink driving, domestic violence, indigenous issues… the list goes on. We accepted in our society a world where people could drink drive. And we had huge rates of deaths on the roads. Today, at least where I live, drink driving is socially unacceptable, and the death rates, the road toll has come down, dramatically. The same is true with smoking. We all used to smoke, I used to smoke, and then we finally woke up and through a few scientists saying, “Hey, this is bad for you!” We turned that around. The same is true with global warming you know. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the planet is getting warmer and changes are happening.

And yet for so long the scientists who have been pointing it out to us have been kind of treated like the lunatic fringe. It is only just recently that we have started to take them seriously. So not everything that we as a society accept is good, and sometimes when you hear people speak out about something that we hold dear, sometimes we have to listen. Well, what are our expectations of God in all of this? For many people God is a God who can either fit in with the times or take a hike… “I don’t need some out of date, fundamentalist kind of God here!”

You know, this is where society’s thinking “You just have to fit in God or I am outta here…” yet we saw yesterday and the day before, God is the creator of heaven and earth. God is the creator of the whole universe. And as the creator he sets the standard of who God is, is the standard, whether we like it, whether we don’t like. Whether we accept a God or we don’t accept a God it doesn’t change the fact that God is a Holy God, God is a good God, God is a God without any darkness or badness or sin, to use that word, in Him at all. And actually there are very few things that God says, “Don’t do!” God says, “Husbands don’t try and lord it over your wives.” He says, “Don’t cheat on your marriage partner and sleep around.” He says, “Don’t talk about people behind their backs.”

Now you know, I look at that stuff and I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty obvious stuff to me God is not changing those things. Doesn’t matter how we like to describe adultery as a lifestyle choice, it doesn’t matter what we want to do, He is who He is! God loves diversity, God loves that it’s His idea but the bottom line is… He won’t change the things that He says are wrong. He calls them sin. It’s about missing the point and we have all sinned and fallen short of the Holy and perfect God. That’s why a God who loves us sent Jesus to pay for that sin. You have a choice, you can choose to believe in Jesus and accept him as the Son of God and say, “Lord, I thank you for saving me from death.” And if the answer is no we don’t want to accept him, Jesus said, “I am the only way to the Father, no one comes to the Father but by me.” And if we reject him, hell is the outcome.

God is a good and holy and righteous God. God isn’t a pet poodle; God can’t be optioned up or optioned down. He is a loving, sovereign, giving God. But He is who He is! He terms, His way. Let me ask you, “Is your God too small?”

Some day’s it feels like there is no one that really cares about who we really are, what’s going on in our lives, or how we are feeling, let alone anyone who can actually make a difference for us. You look at the people around you and not only don’t they seem to care but it hurts because well, because they should care, they just should. So we get all disillusioned and sink further into our holes. Have you experienced that? And out there somewhere there’s God. But I can’t really see him or I can’t really hear him. Besides everyone else has let me down and why shouldn’t God be any different. But then, well, shouldn’t He be different, I mean actually care for us.

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to be Jesus? A carpenter’s kid from the down market area called Nazareth, a Jew? And inside knowing, knowing who you were. Knowing that you were the Son of God, with your power and glory laid to one side. To walk the dusty roads to Israel. To turn their expectations about God upside down. To take them from religion and rules and sacrifices and stuff, and introduce them to God the Father, through God the Son. To heal the blind, to bless the beggars, to bind up the broken hearted, to be criticized and despised and hated and misunderstood and tried and beaten and crucified. And for what? For speaking up against religious hypocrisy, for loving the unlovable. I think being Jesus would have been a really tough gig. So good, perfect love, going into a world of entrenched dogma and religious politics. So many people completely missed the point of who Jesus was and what he was doing.

Just like today so many people miss the point of who Jesus is! And what He is doing. I know that on one hand God is God who knows everything. He is everywhere he never changes, He knows all. But you know that there is another side of me that says, He stepped out of that spiritual realm, he stepped out of heaven and put on a body like mine to experience first hand what it is to walk the dusty roads in Israel. I don’t know, I know He is God but part of me says it must impact on who he is.

I’ve seen poverty on television, I’ve read the statistics, you know it from a distance but it was when I walked through a village called Hale, outside Hydrabad in India, I saw for myself and smelt for myself, and touched for myself the poverty and the pain of these people. And it left me changed. Now I know God is God and not Berni Dymet, He’s much higher and He knows everything, there is something, there is something there that I can’t fully understand which for me is a part of the awe of God. A part of the wonder of this God. That he chose to put on a body like mine, Jesus the Son of God, lay His power and His glory and his position aside to walk on this earth. To taste the sweetness and the bitterness that you or I have tasted. To feel the high’s and the low’s that you and I have felt. To have been understood and misunderstood liked we’d been understood and misunderstood. To be accepted and rejected just like we have. To have good days and bad days just like we do. And of course He paid the ultimate price for you and me, a price that I have never had to pay. That hopefully that I will never have to pay. And you and I can look at Him now and know that He has experienced first hand our lives here on earth. He knows just because He is God, He knows because He has been here and done that. But not only is God someone who has taken on a body of flesh. But he is also God, he remains God, Jesus, all the time He was the Son of Man was also the Son of God. And so, with that first hand experience of who we are, He also loves us perfectly.

Now knowing that, knowing that Jesus is and was God and stepped out of the comfort and the wonder of heaven, to be a carpenter of Nazareth, to be reviled and beaten for you and me. How does that change our expectations of God on those days when you and I just need someone to hold us? Someone to make a difference. One of the books in the New Testament, the book of Hebrews Chapter 4 verse 15, if you really want to go there. It says, “We don’t have a Jesus who’s out of touch with reality. He understands because He has been through the weaknesses and the testing and experienced it all. All except the sin. So let’s walk right up to Him. Let’s approach the throne of grace with confidence and get what He is so ready to give us. To take the mercy and accept the help.”

Another translation talks about walking right up to the throne of grace with boldness, to get His help in our time of need. We can know that in our heads, but on the tough days so often we don’t expect it in our hearts. Something happens to all of us, that’s maybe why God’s put you and me together in this space today, right now, to share just in that. Jesus walked a mile in your shoes and in my shoes and then some! What the writer of Hebrews is saying here is, the reason he is not out of touch with reality is He understands because He’s been through it! Through every trial, through every test, through every experience that we experience in life, He’s experienced them the same way. Jesus knows what it is to be tired and have to get up and to speak to crowds of people in the power of God.

Jesus knows what it is like to be frustrated, He knows what it is like to be misunderstood and rejected. He knows what we go through. Because he has been through it as Jesus the carpenter from Nazareth. And that’s why we can come to the throne. You know when this was written in the first century a king on His throne could not be approached on pain of death. A king had to call for you, if you came before the king, the king could have you put to death, if you hadn’t been called by him. And that’s the impact of what the writer of Hebrews is saying here. So let’s walk right up to Him, boldly approaching the throne of grace with confidence. Because of what Jesus has done, because He understands we can come to Him with confidence and our King, because He knows. He’s tasted, He’s felt, He’s been there.

And He really is willing and able to help us just when we need Him. Right at that minute when we don’t expect Him to, that’s the minute, that’s the time, that’s the space when we can come boldly before the throne of grace and say, “Lord help me!”

What does that do to your expectations, come on what does that do to what you expect of God in a rough and tumble world. Truly let me ask you, is your God too small?