Sometimes – we wander on through life head down, beetling along and all of a sudden you look up and things are – well – they’re not what we expected.  You’re lost…and, well, you don’t know the way back home.

How ya doin? It’s fantastic to be with you again at the start of a new week and this week on the program we’re going to experience some, well close encounters, close encounters with God. Let me explain. One of my favourites stories, as a child, was the story of Hansel and Gretel, that wonderful fairy tale about the brother and the sister that get lost in the woods and stolen by the wicked witch who wants to cook them in her oven. And they escape and the way that they find their way home, in this dark forest, is that Hansel had dropped little pieces of bread along the way and they were able to trace their way back and eventually their dad finds them.

It’s a great story. Now sometimes in life, well it feels as though we’re lost in that dark and dangerous forest and we look around and we start wondering, ‘Where the blazes is God? And if I’m lost, how am I going to get back home to Him?’ Well, what I discovered, because I’ve been in that forest, is that there are plenty of markers around us to show us the way home and in fact, the more I look the more I realise, they’re not like little Hansel’s and Gretel’s pieces of bread, they’re actually thumping great neon signs that you just can’t miss.

I was talking with someone the other day going through some really tough times in life. Now we should never trivialise that, when you’re in that place, when you’re in that dark forest, it’s just plain tough, it just is. The question is what do you do with that? Do you just sit down and cry and give up? And no doubt tears will be shed, no doubt fear will set in, absolutely they will, you can’t deny that, that’s life. But the question is, what do you do with that? Because that’s the question that really matters in those times.

The problem that we face is, that in those times, see conventional thinking doesn’t work, logic and reason and what makes sense. How do you apply those when nothing makes sense. When you’re hurting so much and it’s so dark and you can’t see which way is which. How do you apply those when, well it’s that thinking that got you there in the first place? Now you might say to me, ‘Berni, that’s not fair. So often things happen in our lives, they’re not our fault.’ That’s true, absolutely.

This person I just mentioned, she’s the carer of a disabled person and she’s having a tough time with the health system and she’s tired and there’s no support and she’s despondent. That’s not her fault, it’s not. She faces a system that’s against her, a system based on conventional thinking, a system she can’t fight and win against. There are no answers in that system, there’s no help in that place. You see conventional thinking – the conventional approach won’t work. And that’s what I want to explore today, unpack that a bit.

What do you do when the obvious doesn’t work anymore in that dark and dangerous forest. Hmm, Jesus talked a lot about this and there’s one passage in particular that I want to share with you in the few minutes that we have together today. Matthew chapter 11, have a listen. Matthew 11 and it begins in verse 16, its really good stuff. He says:

To what can I compare this generation, they’re like kids sitting in a market place and calling out to the others, ‘we’re playing the flute for you but you are not dancing. We sang a dirge and you didn’t mourn.’ For John the Baptist, he came neither eating or drinking and they said, ‘Oh that guys got a demon’ and I came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Here’s a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ Then Jesus began to announce the very cities in which His miracles had been performed because they didn’t turn back to Him.

Woe to you Korizin! Woe to you Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashe. But I tell you, it will be more bearable for them on the day of Judgement than for you, and you Capernaum, will you be lifted to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths. If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained this day but I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of Judgement, than for you.

At that time Jesus said, Father, “I praise you. You are the Lord of heaven and earth because you’ve hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to the little kids. Yes Father, for that was your good pleasure.” (Matthew 11:16-26)

See, what He’s saying here is, you bumble along in what you’ve always known in your conventional way of thinking, in whatever city or town or suburb you happen to live in and you’re completely missing the point. God sends along someone different, John the Baptist, you know, he came before Jesus and he ate locusts and honey and wore camel hair clothes. He was different but he was from God and Jesus said, ‘You rejected him and you rejected me’.

You see how different Gods ways are from our ways. God sends Jesus who’s so different to what we expect but we get set in our ways and no matter that they’re ruining our lives, we just get set in our ways of thinking.

We accept the worlds ways of thinking and behaviour and someone tells us long enough that the earth is flat or square and no matter whether it’s true or not, we just end up believing that stuff and so what we do is we reject God. We reject Him in our patterns of thinking and our patterns of behaviour, we do it like Korizin did, we do it like Bethsaida did, we do it like Capernaum did. Instead of turning to Him, we like lemmings leap off the cliff. We fight fire with fire; we go for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

We’re lost in that forest, all of a sudden we’re starting to live out the fruit of our wrong behaviour and what do we turn to, we turn to conventional patterns of behaviour and thinking, the stuff we’ve always known, the stuff that these people and these cities turned to that Jesus criticised.

And Jesus said, “No, there’s an alternative. If you’ve discovered that all this stuff isn’t working.”

Come to Me all you who are weary and burdened and let Me give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me because I am gentle, I’m humble in my heart and you’ll find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

When we’re in that forest, that dark and lonely and dangerous place, tired and weary of beating our heads up against a brick wall, carrying heavy burdens and we see that there’s no way out, that there’s no answer, wow Jesus is saying there’s an alternative.

We looked at this passage just recently, here on the program and again here today because it’s an important one. His ways, His yoke, He’s calling us to Him, He’s calling us to get close to Him because He is in that place there with you and with me. How long are we going to beat our heads up against a brick wall? What was His criticism of Korizin and Capernaum? He says, ‘You’ve seen me. You’ve seen My miracles and yet, in the face of that evidence, you don’t turn back to me’.

Wake up! We can get so clever we think we can do it all and then we can’t. In the face of all that evidence we just sit there when Jesus is in that place all along, with answers, on the other side of that yoke, to pull with us, to put His strength behind us. Come on! Jesus is in this place.

If God walked into the room right now, what would He look like? And how would it feel?  And how would you respond?  Well, we’re going to meet someone on the program today … who’s been there.

I’m not sure if you ever saw that Steven Spielberg movie back in the late ’70’s called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. It starred Richard Dreyfus and he played a man who came into contact with aliens. Now it was such a powerful experience for him and yet everyone else around him thought he was stark raving mad. Perhaps he was. And frankly, that’s a bit how people treated me when, all of a sudden, I had a close encounter with God, the Living God, Jesus Christ. People thought, ‘What’s the matter with this guy? Has he got religion or did the Moonies get him?’

It’s not that I necessarily exhibited any weird or strange behaviour, nothing weirder or stranger than I normally was, it’s just that, well being close to God changed me, profoundly. In fact, being close to Him is still changing me, every minute of every day.

There are so many people out there in this world who kind of hunger to be close to God and yet never discover that sort of intimacy with Him. It’s almost as though we’ve lost our way and we don’t know how to get back. Well today on the program, I’d like to take a look at one mans close encounter with God and that mans name is Isaiah.

Each one of us is different somehow and God kind of always figures that out. He figures out a way to reach us and touch us that, well it just fits with who we are and the place that we find ourselves in. This man Isaiah that I was talking about, is a man called by God to speak for God, to call Gods people back to God. He’s called a Prophet, a guy from the Old Testament.

Being a prophet was a tough gig I have to tell you, lots of prophets got stoned to death. So God comes to him in a most powerful and amazing way. Have a listen to Isaiah’s own account of his amazing experience of his vision of God. If you ever want to read it, it’s in Isaiah chapter 6 in the Old Testament, this is what he writes,

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above Him were seraphs, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces and with two they covered their feet and with two they were flying and they were calling to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.” At the sounds of their voices the door post and the threshold shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe to me” I cried. “I’m ruined, because I’m a man with unclean lips and I live among people with unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand which he’d taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here I am Lord, send me!” (Isaiah 6:1-8)

God goes on to tell Isaiah what he is to do. Now I don’t know about you but this has never quite happened for me like this. I never saw the visions of seraphs and all that stuff. I’ve never heard the audible voice of God but my encounter with God has been no less powerful and no less life changing than Isaiah’s. I had a close encounter with God, for the first time, thirteen years ago, in a difficult time of my life. And I had a sense that somehow God was on my case, a sense that somehow I should start to pray and, kind of, it was really a weird feeling for me at the time.

On and off I started to pray, nothing fancy I have to tell you, no sort of theologically well formed, understanding and structured prayer. Just stuff, from my heart, from me to Him. And when you look at this account of Isaiah, what you discover is that God reveals Himself powerfully to Isaiah when? When Isaiah was in the temple on his knees praying. Hmm.

Maybe there’s something in that and Isaiah’s immediate reaction was to pull back to say, ‘I’m not good enough’ and you know whenever we encounter God for the first time, we almost always have the same reaction; I’m not good enough for this because God is God and I’m me and well, I know, like Isaiah, that I’m a man or a woman of unclean lips. I know all the stuff I’ve done wrong and … And so our reaction is to recoil.

God’s response was what? To agree with Isaiah? No! God’s response was to forgive. Have another listen.

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away and your sin is atoned for.” (Isaiah 6:6-8)

I want to tell you something, getting close to God can be a fearful thing because what we expect is His judgement and yet, what He gives us instead, is His forgiveness and His love and His mercy and His grace. I know people who have attended Church all their lives and yet have never had a close encounter with God. Now that’s not to say that God isn’t close to them, He is because in Jesus Christ, He’s closer to us than we can ever imagine. But He waits to be wanted.

But people who are going through really tough times or lonely times, sometimes are the people who have never gotten on their knees so as to speak and said, ‘God, God I want to be close to you. I don’t deserve it and I don’t know how but I believe Jesus died for me to pay for my sins so that, so that You can rightly forgive me so that You and I can be close. I don’t know what that means. I just want it. I just want to be close to you.’

‘Hmm’, you might say, ‘That’s a bit simple. Surely that sort of a feeble prayer won’t summon up the sort of God that Isaiah was talking about’. And I would answer you like this. ‘Too simple it may well appear but I can tell you that when such a prayer comes from the heart, when such a prayer is accompanied by the smallest spark of faith, God will respond, He just will. And the glory of God, which is what the whole vision of Isaiah was all about, the glory of God will fall from heaven and fill your heart’. I can say that with absolute certainty because that’s exactly what happened to me and it’s still happening.

Don’t you think that just because I get to be on the radio that I don’t have tough times in my life. Don’t you get to thinking that just because I’m doing what I’m doing, I don’t make mistakes and I don’t have hard days and yet, ever since I prayed that very simple, and let me say, very lonely prayer at the time, the glory of the Lord has filled my heart. And each and every day I know I’m not good enough but that’s the whole point of Jesus paying the price for all my ‘not good enoughs’ on that cross. That’s the whole point of God’s mercy and Gods grace.

Let me leave you with this one thought; maybe, just maybe it’s time in your life for, for a close encounter.

Sometimes, it feels as though we’re in a place where God is not.  Spiritually, physically or emotionally.  We just know He’s not in that place with us.  I mean – He couldn’t be…here!  Or could He?

Have you ever faced a challenge that looks like –… well, some great big hairy monster – and thought to yourself – I can’t do this?  I just can’t go this alone.  Hmm – turns out there’s a reason for that.

This week on the program we’re taking a look at some real close encounters. Close encounters between God and His people. So often we seem to get kind of, I don’t know, lost in the jungle of life and we’re doing and we’re walking and we’re talking and we’re doing more stuff and coping with this and that and the other thing and then, all of a sudden, we look up and think, ‘hang on a minute, where am I? Where’s God?’

Or we feel as though we have something really difficult ahead of us and we wonder, ‘Is God going to be with me through this?’ Perhaps we’ve seen God do some mighty things in the past but this next thing, well it looks so hard, it’s so daunting, it’s so ‘I can’t do this on my own‘.

And that’s what we’re going to have a look at today through the eyes of a man called Moses. A man in his ’80’s who had been through some real wilderness experiences in his life and now, God was calling him to lead his people through the wilderness for 40 years to the Promised Land. Now that was a really tough ask and not surprisingly, Moses wanted to know, ‘Well God, are you going to be with me in this because this is really, really hard’?

Have you ever had that experience, that the thing that lies ahead, it looks so daunting, so impossible, so scary? Maybe we have seen God do some mighty things in the past and yeah, we look back at those and we draw some strength from them, that’s where we get our faith from. We go through some difficult things, God shows up, He does some really amazing things and our faith grows and so the next time we face a challenge, well we’ve got more faith to cope with that because God put it there.

But you know, sometimes even that isn’t enough because, well okay, God was in that last thing, He did show up, I know that but is He going to be in this next thing. Because this next thing is like a great big hairy monster of a thing that I’ve got to get through and I just can’t do this one.

Perhaps you can tell from the tone in my voice, I know this stuff first hand because I seem to spend my life in this place. I used to look at people like Joyce Meyer and Bayless Connolly on the TV and these are great and mighty preachers and they look so successful and I never gave it a thought, that for God to put them in that place, they’d have to go through some really tough faith challenges along the way.

When we stepped out into this ministry, Christianityworks, doing these programs, I never imagined how hard some of the times would be. There seemed to be faith challenge after faith challenge after faith challenge and either, you collapse under the weight of all that stuff or there’s got to be another way.

We’re going to spend some time with a guy called Moses now, to look at that ‘other way’ because it’s not about going it alone. Moses had been through some really miraculous things, I mean he was the man that God used to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, out of slavery and God did some miracles against Egypt and against a Pharaoh. He did an amazing miracle to part the waters of the Red Sea and then to drown the Egyptian army, so amazing things happened and Moses had seen all of this stuff.

Now when we meet Moses in this story, he’s been through that but he’s also been in the desert for a while now, with the people of Israel and he’s discovering that this is an incredibly difficult task. These people are really tough to lead and manage and Moses is starting to wonder whether he’s up for it. And so he goes to God, lets have a listen, Exodus chapter 33.

Moses says to the Lord, “You’ve been telling me, ‘Lead these people’ but You haven’t let me know whom you will send with me. You’ve said to me, ‘I know you by name and You found favour with me’, if You’re pleased with me, teach me Your way so that I may know You and continue to find favour with You. Remember this nation is Your people God.” And the Lord said, ‘Moses, My presence will go with you and I will give you rest.’ And Moses says to Him, “Well, if You’re presence doesn’t go with us, for goodness sake, don’t send us up from here. How will anyone know that You are pleased with me and with Your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and Your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?“

And the Lord says to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” Then Moses said, “Show me Your glory God.” And then the Lord said, “I will cause all My goodness to pass before you and I will proclaim My name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I’ll have compassion on whom I will have compassion, but…” He said, “You cannot see My face for no-one may see My face and live.” So the Lord God said, “There is a place nearby where you may stand on a rock. When My glory passes by I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed. Then I will remove my hand and you will see My back but My face you must not see.” (Exodus 33: 12-23)

So what’s going on in this story? Moses is starting to get the wobbles. ‘Okay, You’ve said all this stuff, You made all these promises God but who’s going to help me? I can’t do all this, this is too much for me to carry’. And God says, ‘I am the answer. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you’. This is powerful stuff because Moses is looking for someone to help him and God says, ‘Well actually, I will be your helper, My very presence’.

And you read the story and the presence of God travelled with them those 40 years. A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, over the tabernacle, the tent, the visible presence of God. And then God says, ‘I will be with you’ and Moses says, ‘Okay, I hear You God but will You show me? Right now, will You show me your glory, will You show me Your presence’? And so God says, ‘Look, I’ll pass before you but you can’t look on Me and live’.

See, if you read the story of the exodus, you discover that God was on that journey with Moses and his people every step of the way. But Moses here is caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s seen the miracles that God’s done. He’s discovered that leading the Israelites through the desert is a pretty tough gig and he doesn’t want to go forward unless God is with him. And Moses is so typical of what you and I go through.

Will God be with us in the future? See, this is a question that can only be answered in one way. Can I experience God, Your glory and Your presence right now? I know You’ve done things for me in the past but Moses wanted to see the presence and the glory of God, then and there, so he would have the assurance in his heart that God was going to be with him. That’s what this was about, Moses was looking for the present assurance of Gods future power and if he couldn’t have that he said, ‘Well God, just don’t send me, let’s not go’.

What a great attitude, so often we want something whether or not God wants it but here, Moses is saying, ‘Unless You’re in this God, I just don’t want it. I don’t care what the other people think about me, I’ll walk away but if You’re not in it, I’m out of here. If You’re in it, I’m in it too’.

You know what I learn here about God? He is going to ask me and ask you to do some scary things. There are going to be times when we doubt our ability to do them and that’s not a bad thing and it’s in those times that the only place of assurance is the presence of God.

“Lord, show me Your glory,” was the cry of Moses. We want to either know that we have the strength in ourselves to do it or we just give up but Moses, on the other hand, said ‘Well God, so now what? How am I going to do this’? And God said, ‘I will do it,’ and Moses said, ‘What I need right now is a close encounter with You God’.

You know what; I reckon Moses was on to something.

If you’ve ever had someone you trust desert you – you know how painful that is.  But – well, what if it’s God who seems to have deserted you?  Then what?  He promised so much, but…well, He’s missing in action!

It’s kind of hard to imagine growing up without having played the game of Hide and Seek as a child. It’s just one of those universal kid games that starts out with mum or dad playing Peek-a-boo with the baby and then, as we grow into children, we just love to play Hide and Seek with our friends. Brings back some fond memories doesn’t it? But I remember a couple of times when I was ‘in’ and I just couldn’t find the others. They disappeared and left me and afterwards they’d laugh at me and I have to say, it was pretty hurtful stuff.

Funny the things you remember, I mean I look back on it now and I could put words like ‘betrayal’ on those few experiences but back then, when I was the kid that was left behind and laughed at by the others, all I knew was, it hurt. And those experiences, seemingly trivial though they may have been, they leave scars. I mean imagine, as I started thinking about hide and seek, that those memories would come flooding back after over 40 years. When someone deserts us, well it’s just plain hurts doesn’t it?

So many people I talk to have been deserted by someone they trusted over the years, I know I have and it’s an indescribably painful experience when trust is broken. I mean, it’s almost worse than not having had any trust at all, whether as children or as adults. I mean parents abandon their kids, sometimes physically, sometimes just emotionally. Husbands abandon their wives, wives their husbands. Even as I talk I’m sure that it will bring some memories flooding back for you, painful memories no doubt.

So what’s it like when we feel as though we’ve been abandoned by God? I mean God promises so much. King David in Psalm 27, verse 10 says:

Even if my father and mother forsake me the Lord will take me up.

See, God promises an enormous amount and yet, well it’s easy to feel as though God has left us on the scrap heap. Things can be going along just fine and we think to ourselves, ‘Well, you know, Gods pretty good’ and then, all of a sudden things in life take a turn for the worse. We all know what that’s like. So often we just can’t explain it, so often it’s not our fault, why is this happening to me?

I had a prayer request, just the other day, from a woman. Have a listen to what she wrote, she said, “I feel so lonely. Please pray for God to give us or me some friends. I feel so desperate for friends, I’ve never had any. I was married by 17 with a baby, I feel like a failure in every area of my life.” Now if I got up and preached some message about how wonderful God is, how do you think this woman would respond to that? It’d be pretty tough for her, wouldn’t it?

These last few weeks on the program, we’ve been looking at what it means to get close to God. Well today I want to have a bit of a look at exactly what it mean when we feel as though we’ve been deserted by God. Hhmm. Well life’s like that, isn’t it? That’s the reality, so often our circumstances scream at us, ‘See, see, God is really no good, believing in Him is useless’ and that’s exactly what was going on for Israel when they’d been in captivity in Babylon for almost 70 years.

See Israel were God’s people, they were His chosen people. Abraham had a son called Isaac who had a son called Jacob, who had 12 sons and from those 12 sons came the 12 tribes of Israel And they ended up, for centuries, in slavery in Egypt and one day God used Moses to get them out of there through the Exodus – 40 years in the wilderness – to the Promised Land, the land we now know as the land of Israel but notice what God calls it. He calls it the Promised Land. See, God promised it to them.

God promised them a whole bunch of things actually, a whole bunch of good things yet they turned their back on God. And so, eventually, after a long time God punishes them. The Babylonians come in, they destroy Jerusalem, they destroy the temple, they kill so many and the remnant end up in slavery in Babylon for 70 years. Happened about 586-587 B.C. And their circumstances after 70 years almost, in captivity, must have been screaming out at them, ‘See, see, Gods no good, believing in Him is useless’. And towards the end of this punishment time – 70 years – the prophet Isaiah comes to them and this is what he says on behalf of God. He says:

Why do you say and complain O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord. My cause is disregarded by my God.” Don’t you know, haven’t you heard, the Lord your God is everlasting. He’s the creator of the ends of the earth. He won’t grow tired or weary, His understanding is something that no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths will grow tired and weary. Even young men will stumble and fall but those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” (Isaiah 40:27-31)

Wow, how must that have felt to them when Isaiah spoke those words into their slavery, a slavery which appeared to come from a broken promise of God? It wasn’t actually a broken promise, see God had made a contract or a covenant with Israel. And basically the contract said this. If they honoured Him, He’d bless them. If they didn’t, He’d punish them. They didn’t and so they spent 70 years in slavery in Babylon and yet most of these people in slavery, towards the end of the period, they were a generation or two on from that original punishment, 70 years is a long time. Back then it was a few lifetimes.

See, things aren’t always what they seem; we don’t know sometimes why God lets things happen the way that they do. We don’t know why that woman who sent us that prayer request had to go through what she went through. But there’s one thing we do know; God is love, He understands the stuff that we can’t fathom. He doesn’t grow tired or weary and He gives strength to the weak. Everyone, everyone grows tired, even the young and the energetic, we all do. But those who wait on the Lord, those who, in their misery and their adversity, just wait on Him, they will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)

See this word ‘wait’, waiting on the Lord doesn’t mean to sit there and wait and grumble. It means ‘to wait, to look for, to eagerly hope for and expect’. It’s an expectant waiting, it’s sitting there saying, ‘I know this stuff going on but you know God, I’m just going to believe in You and I’m going to wait on You and I know You’re going to deliver me from this thing’. That sort of waiting is about putting our faith in God into action. When all our circumstances are screaming that there’s no point, that sort of waiting and expectation is faith at work.

I have to tell you, God always, always answers those who put their faith in Him – He always does. Sometimes it’s not what we expect but He always responds. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things we can’t see and without faith, it’s impossible to please God ’cause if we were to approach Him, first we have to believe He exists and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him.

I want to encourage you today, if you feel that God has deserted you – He hasn’t. He is closer than you could ever imagine and it’s time to wait on Him, to wait with expectation, with joy, and with just the smallest spark of faith. Can I tell you? He will answer; He will show up – He just will!