To be honest – sometimes – our problems seem bigger than God. They just do – it’s kind of natural – they feel like they’re closer than God, and so they look much bigger than Him.  That’s when we need to know how Great God really is.

Let me ask you something today. Who is God? People use that name, God, in all sorts of different ways. Some use it frivolously. I don’t know if you watch TV and have seen one of those surprise “makeover” shows.

You know, when a team comes in and does a complete makeover on someone’s garden or their house. When they bring the person along to have a look at it, to show them what’s been done, nine times out of ten, this person jumps up and down and screams, “O My God!” It always makes me wince. I ache inside that God’s name is used that way. So thoughtlessly.

Other people, they use the name of God in different ways and my hunch is, that who we expect God to be is different from person to person. Some people hear that word, God, and it brings shudders of guilt through them. They know they’ve been running away from Him. Others again see God as some grumpy old man with a big stick or at the other end of the spectrum, kind of like a sugar daddy who’s supposed to shower them with gifts all the time.

Let me ask you, when you say that name, God, who are you talking about? This God, when you hear that name, what comes to mind. This week and next week on the program we’re going to head off on a bit of a journey of discovery. Who is this God?

Interestingly, throughout the Bible there are quite a number of different names used for God. These days, we only really use a few, God, Lord, Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit. That’s about it really. But not so in the Old and New Testaments, particularly let me say in the Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible if you will. And there’s a reason for that because in Hebrew culture names were very, very important. Names had meaning, they defined who you were.

Joshua, for instance. The word ‘Joshua’ means God’s salvation and it was Joshua who led Israel into the promised land after their forty years in the wilderness. God’s salvation. Abraham, the father of Israel, that name means father of a multitude. And that was God’s promise to Abraham even though at a very old age he and his wife were still childless.

And so it is that names have a huge meaning in God’s Word, the Bible. Much more so than perhaps in our modern day cultures. And so when God allows the scriptures to use a whole bunch of different names for Him, He’s telling us something. He’s revealing Himself to us through those names in an intimate way, in a beautiful way.

The various names for God used throughout the Bible is like God gently whispering through each name, “This is who I am, this is what I’m like.” And so often in life we lose sight of who God is and what He’s like. It’s as though He’s way over there in heaven and we’re way over here living our lives and it feels as though He is a million miles away. But as we hear His gentle whisper, “This is who I am”, all of a sudden we come to know Him better in our hearts.

So the first name for God that we’re going to kick off with today is the name, Adonai. Interesting name. It’s plural to start with. They had no idea back when they first started using that name for God that He was three in one – Father, Son, Holy Spirit. But God began to reveal that through His name Adonai, the plural of Adon which means Lord, great and mighty and sovereign Lord, Lord above all. The sense of complete and supreme authority.

Let’s check it out. Psalm 8 verse 1:

O Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

There it is, God above all. Further on in verses 3 and 4:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you’ve established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals, that you should care for them.

See the God who created the cosmos, the heavens, the trillions upon trillions of stars, all this I look and see that you created it. Adonai. And yet you made us too. And not only did you make us, but you know us and care for us.

O Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth. (Verse 9.)

That’s the Lord, God Almighty, above all the heavens and all the earth. King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Sovereign, nothing big or small happens that He doesn’t notice, that He doesn’t allow to happen.

Now hold on to that thought for a moment and let me come to your life, your circumstances, your day to day, your here and now. What’s going on in your world at the moment? My hunch is that there are possible some good things happening in your life right now and then there are some difficult things. Perhaps painful or frightening things. Things that seem to be so out of control. Things that you’d love to change if you could but it doesn’t seem that you can.

Does that sound a bit familiar. And those things, those things that are so out of our control, they’re the things we think, “If only I could change that one thing or solve that one problem, or heal that one relationship, or have just enough money to … or whatever it is. If only I could deal once and for all with that thing, my life would be fantastic.”

Can I tell you something? We all have those things in our lives. I doubt whether there is a single person listening today who doesn’t have at least one of those things in their lives right now. And then mountains, so big, so immovable, so imposing, so impossible that they overshadow our lives. We may appear to be in control on the outside, but on the inside it aches.

See, this is the place where the rubber of faith hits the road. What does the name of God mean to you when you look at that dirty, great big mountain overshadowing your life. Is the mountain bigger than your God or is your God Adonai, the Lord Almighty. The Lord over all the heavens and all the earth. Is your faith in some remote distant, irrelevant, religious God, or is it in the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords who conceived and created the cosmos.

Let me take you to another place, an intimate place, where the name Adonai is used for God. Habakuk chapter 3 verses 9-10:

God the Lord is my strength, he makes my feet like the feet of the deer and makes me to tread upon the heights.

Because this is the place that God, the Lord Almighty wants to take us. He wants to be our strength. This mighty sovereign, powerful God, who is Lord of the heavens and the earth and everything that’s in them wants to take that power and impart into our very being.

He wants His strength to be our strength. Right in the middle of the pea soup of a life that we’re swimming through right now. And that great immovable, impossible mountain, He wants to life us up like a feet of a deer and make us tread upon its heights, not wallow in the depths. This God is saying, whispering to you and me today, “This is who I am”:

God the Lord is my strength, He makes my feet like the feet of the deer and makes me tread upon the heights.

Adonai, Lord Almighty. This is the God that God wants to be to you and me.

It’s easy to get things out of perspective.  We stub our toe – and all we can think of is our sore toe – everything else goes out the window.  And perspective comes when we look at the big picture – creation … the God who created it all.

There’s a place on the internet called “Second Life” I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it has this massive cult following around the world. It is in effect a virtual world. You can live there. You can buy real estate, have a job, join a church, have an affair, all with other people who live in “Second Life”. It really, truly is an amazing place.

Pastors have planted virtual churches there. People actually buy and sell virtual real estate and build houses in “Second Life”. People literally can and do have virtual affairs with others in that place. I am not saying that’s a good thing, it’s just what it is.

I kind of imagine sometimes if somehow I could become part of the “Second Life” cosmos actually, live my life inside this virtual world as the place where I actually live, well eventually, eventually it would dawn on me that someone would have had to create this virtual world. I mean, there must have been some visionaries who conceived it in the first place and then designers and developers and sociologists who implement it, maintain and build the new features.

If I were immersed in this virtual world and living out all of its benefits, at some point I want to start knowing something about the people who created it. Who are they? What makes them tick? Why did they build this place called “Second Life” in the first place? What motivated them to give them this opportunity? At some point I would want to know the creator. I mean, it’s only natural.

The Bible uses many different names for God. There’s a reason for that. In the Hebrew culture names were important because names had meaning. And so it was so it was really important to understand the meaning of the person’s name to understand the purpose that God had for them. “Moses”, that word means “to draw someone out”. He drew Israel out of captivity in Egypt. And so it is true with the names of God.

There are quite a few of them used in the Bible and you have to ask yourself, well why would God allow His Word, the Book that reveals Him to us? Why would He allow all those different names to be used of Him? I’m really quite happy with just the one name for myself, thank you very much, but God allows different names to be used. Why?

Well the answer’s this. He wants to tell us who He is, what He’s like and these different names reveal God to us. That’s important. I want God to be real in my life. I want to know Him in my ups and in my downs. I want to have an intimate relationship with Him and if He’s chosen to reveal Himself to me in part through these different names in the Bible then I want to discover what He’s trying to tell me.

Today I would like you to join me on a bit of a journey to uncover just one of those names and it’s the name, the very first name used of God in the Bible, it’s the name “Elohim”. It names God as the powerful creator of the universe. This name, “Elohim” literally means “God the creator”. Just listen to the beginning to the first book of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1:

In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth. The Earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep while the wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.

And then comes the incredible story of God’s creation. So many people get hung up on how God created the cosmos and how long it took and how did He do it. Can I be honest with you? I don’t know exactly how He did it, and I don’t know exactly how long He took. What I do know is that God did create the earth and the heavens and the universe. God is the creator of everything. The trillion, trillion or so stars that we know about, spread over such vast distances.

The astrophysicists tells us that the size of the visible universe is about 15 billion light years. That means the light which travels at an amazing speed of 186,000 miles per second, the light from the farthest star at one end of the universe takes 15 billion years to travel from that one end to the other end of the visible universe. And what lies beyond the visible edge of the universe? Only God knows. Elohim – God the creator of this massive, incomprehensible universe.

But not only did God create this massive cosmos, He created you and me, atoms and molecules and beetles and bugs and mice and cockroaches and the most incredible sea creatures and viruses and bacteria. The list goes on and on. Let me ask you something. If you were Elohim, the creator, would you have created beetles and had you conceived these things, beetles, how many different species would you have created. Five, ten, fifty, one hundred. Maybe you were feeling really creative that day and you made five thousand, well … God created 360,000 different species of beetle.

In fact the more we look at this creation around us, the more we start to realise something. It tells us a whole bunch about the God who created it. And if you’re stuck in the traffic or the train or bus on the way to work, have you ever just kind of detached yourself from the mundaneness of it all and looked around and thought to yourself, man look at this, the trees, the car, the people, the birds, the sky, the rain, the night, the day, the birth, the death … the whole thing. Just look at it. Isn’t it amazing? So massive yet so intricate; so fascinating and yet on so many levels so incomprehensible.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and realised how amazing you are? Have you ever marvelled at your memory or your reasoning capacity? I often wonder how is it I can remember so much. Where do I store it? Where does it come up from in an instant? And when I can’t remember something from the past, all of a sudden, about an hour-and-a-half later, how is it that it pops into my head?

My friend, as you stand back and look at creation, let me ask you this. What does it tell you about this God, this God who created it all? Aren’t you inquisitive? Don’t you want to know? The creation speaks to us about the Creator. That’s exactly what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1, verses 19 & 20. He said:

For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things that He has made.

And what a mighty God He is. What an incredibly creative and totally unexpected and unpredictable God He is. As I look at His creation, that creation seems to speak these things back to me over and over again about Elohim. Firstly:

1. He is so amazingly creative and inventive.
2. He’s incredibly powerful.

And those are the things that I need to know about my God when I’m stuck in a hole. Those are the things I need to know about my God when I’m confronted with problems.

This God who created 360,000 species of beetle, do I think He’s not creative enough to come up with a solution to my problems? This God who created a universe 15 billion light years across, at least, quite possible more, do I think He doesn’t have the power to solve my problems? When the devil attacks my faith and my flesh, do I somehow imagine God can’t cope. God the creator – Elohim. This is the God that God wants to be to you and to me.

With life so cluttered with stuff and stuff and stuff these days – it’s easy to get the impression that not only are we too busy, but that God’s too busy to notice what’s going on in our lives.  That somehow, He doesn’t see, He doesn’t care.

One of the most dangerous sports on the planet is rock fishing. You know these keen enthusiasts climb down to a rock ledge with the waves crashing all around them and throw their line in hoping to catch a fish.

Me, I just go down to the local fish and chip shop for my fish and I always catch one. Anyway, there they stand hour after hour, the tide comes in inch by inch – and then all of a sudden a massive wave comes from nowhere and sweeps the fisherman off the ledge into an angry ocean. Many drown each year.

Now I want to put you into that rock fisherman’s shoes for just a moment. Imagine that you’re swept off the rock into the ocean. It’s vast. Night’s falling and the current drags you out further and further and further away from land until the shore is just a distant speck. There you are, bobbing around in those dark waters. Planes and helicopters with search lights are flying around, often at a distance but they’re looking in the wrong place. They can’t see you bobbing up and down on the ocean.

A storm comes in, the waves pick up, further and further the lands disappeared by now. Eventually the lights of the aircraft, well they’ve given up for the night. There you are all alone, bobbing up and down in the rough seas. Let me ask you something, how do you feel? What’s going on in your mind?

Pretty scary isn’t it. So near and yet so far. The search planes were out there, they were shining their lights but they just couldn’t see you, and what a tragedy. I can imagine many a person’s drowned in the oceans of this world, not because the rescuer didn’t come looking for them but because the rescuers just couldn’t see them.

This week and next week on the program as well we’re going on a journey of discovery looking at the different names of God throughout the Bible. Why? Because those different names tell us a lot about who God is. And not only who God is in an objective, dispassionate kind of way, but in a practical way – who God is today, here and now in my life, in your life.

Here’s my thinking. If we can discover who God really is, what He tells us about Himself through these different names that we’re going to be looking at, then all of a sudden that’s going to lift our faith to believe not in the God that we’ve constructed in our own imagination; not in who we kind of think God might be, but to trust our lives to the God who actually is.

And today we’re going to unpack the single most encouraging name that I’ve stumbled across in His Word, the Bible. It’s the name God uses for Himself, El-Roi – and that name means literally “The God who sees me”.

And over the last two days we’ve been looking at the might, power and creativity of God. On Monday we explored the name Adonai – The Lord God Almighty – the power of God; and then yesterday Elohim – God the Creator – the God who created this massive and yet intricately woven cosmos in which we live.

And the power, rule and authority of God, those are the things that make such a difference in our lives. When the obstacles seem bigger than our God we so need to remember that He is the God above all. He is the God who created it all.

But sometimes, sometimes in our lives we’re like that fisherman bobbing around in the ocean. We can have this sense that we’re out there on our own at the complete mercy of the wind and the storm and the waves and the sharks. God doesn’t feel like He’s anywhere near us, almost like those search planes who gave up looking for us in the middle of the night because they couldn’t see us.

Ever felt like that? See this is why we need to know God. I don’t mean about Him, I mean know Him – in our hearts, in our minds, in our experience. And this is where El-Roi – the God who sees me – is the God you and I need to know.

Hagar was the slave of Abraham and Sarah. Now if you recall God had promised Abraham a son even though he and his wife were well and truly “over the hill” when it came to child bearing. And when this child didn’t come they tried all sorts of things to help God. And one of the schemes they came up with is that Abraham sleeps with Hagar – and so that happens and Hagar has a son. But the moment he’s born, Sarah, Abraham’s wife, becomes jealous and treats Hagar terribly. Have a listen. Genesis chapter 16 beginning at verse 6:

Sarah dealt harshly with her and she ran away from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai.”

The angel of the Lord said, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He shall be an wild ass of a man with his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” So she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-Roi” for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing Him?”

Now, whatever we may think about the morality of what Abraham and Sarah did with Hagar, remember she’s a slave girl, she does as she’s told and then when she falls pregnant she’s abused. This girl is in an incredibly tough spot isn’t she? The pain of the rejection, no unemployment benefits out there in the wilderness where she’s run away.

And out there in this wilderness, in her deep pain the aloneness and the misery, she has an encounter with the angel of the Lord. She wasn’t even one of God’s chosen people. If she had been, she wouldn’t have been a slave. And yet still God, God comes to her in the desert to comfort her and to guide her and to be with her in the midst of her afflictions. And so she names Him El-Roi – You are the God who saw me, You are the God who heard my cry and felt my pain and saw me in the wilderness.

When we’re in that place that Hagar found herself, the last thing, the very last thing we expect is that God should show up there out in our wilderness. And to be sure, sometimes He delays in showing up, and that doesn’t always make sense to us. But here’s the thing. He always sees. There are no circumstances in our lives that escape His fatherly awareness and care. God knows us, God knows our troubles.

When we’re in that wilderness, when we’re bobbing around in the dark ocean, we need to believe in El-Roi – the God who sees us – the God who knows even the number of hairs on our head. This mighty powerful God who on the one hand is above all; on the other hand, he hears our cries and sees our afflictions. And He is there, right there, right here in that place with us.

Not some distant God; not some theoretical God; not some religion; not some disinterested God; not some God who’s too busy with other things, bigger things; not some God who doesn’t care … BUT Elrain – the God who sees us. This is the “God” that God wants to be to you and me, even in the middle of that wilderness experience. In fact, let me say this, especially in the middle of that wilderness experience.

People dedicate their lives to all sorts of different things.  But at the heart of it all is the need for satisfaction.  For being filled up.  Sufficiency.  Contentment.  Peace.  Joy.  That’s what we’re all looking for – and the only Person who Has it, the only place we’ll find it – is in God Himself!

It seems sometimes that we live in a world where people can never get enough. I am increasingly amazed at the excess we go to, at least in the western world, to try and get enough.

One of my favourite home renovation shows comes out of the USA. They renovate old houses. The thing that really gets me so often, more than anything else, are the kitchens these people put in their houses. Massive fridges, two ovens, two dishwashers, two separate sinks for washing up, even a second kitchen area called a “butlers pantry”.

You know, I live in an old 19th Century terrace house and sure, we’ve renovated the kitchen, but as far as I’m concerned – one sink, one oven, one dishwasher are more than enough to keep things clean. At the same time people are starving. Two thirds of the world doesn’t have enough food to eat.

It’s one mixed up world in which we live. But somehow this need to be filled drives us because we need to have enough food and water to eat and drink but once people have that, they go from being filled to a need for fulfilment. If I get this promotion, if I get this pay rise, if I get this car, if I get this dress or this position or whatever it is, then I’ll be fulfilled, then I’ll have enough.

But as it turns out enough is never enough. We always want more. And the more we get, the more bloated we feel and the let satisfied we are and so we continue this vicious cycle, some people for a whole lifetime never ever experiencing the deep satisfaction and contentment that we’ve been craving for.

So, whatever our situation, whatever our circumstances there’s something inside us that drives us: a need for sufficiency, a need to have our needs met. To be sure, we often confuse “needs” with “wants”. But a need nevertheless to be full, whatever “full” looks like.

Sometimes that’s a legitimate thing. We hunger for relationships we need to be part of a family or a community. That’s why loneliness hurts so much. Sometimes we’re facing difficult or perilous situations and we need to have our needs met – food, water, healthcare, safety. And other times we go looking to fulfil our desires, thinking that when those desires are met, then we’ll be happy – only to discover that it’s not true.

Over these last few days on the program we’ve been on a journey of discovery looking at some of the various names of God – the different names given to God throughout His Word, the Bible. Because those different names tell us a lot about who He is and who He wants to be in our lives – in your life, in my life. And today the name we’re going to look at is El-Shaddai – the all sufficient one, the God of the mountains, the God almighty.

There is no better way to understand El-Shaddai than through the story of Abraham and Sarah – Abraham, the father of Israel. He was 75 years old and childless and God calls him on a long, long journey from Ur, the place where he lived, to the land of the Canaanites. God shows him this land and promises it to him. But He also promises Abraham and Sarah a child but they are getting on, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 … come on God, who are you kidding?!! For almost a century I’ve been childless, I hunger after your promise but it now it just seems … impossible.

Now have a listen to what God says to Abraham. Genesis chapter 17 beginning at verse 1:

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”

Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.

I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”

This is an utterly, utterly impossible promise. 99 years old – you shall be a father of a multitude of nations. On what basis should Abraham believe this promise? A child when they’ve never been able to have any. A child when he and his wife are close to 100 years old.
What’s the basis for this promise? Well, God gives him a basis. Have a listen again to what God said to Abraham 24 years into the journey towards the promise:

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am El Shaddai – I am the God Almighty, I am your all sufficient God – now walk before me, and be blameless.

The basis of the promise is God Himself – who God is. And here God uses this name for Himself, El-Shaddai – the all sufficient one. Nothing missing, nothing I can’t do, nothing that you have to go get for yourself anywhere else.

Sometimes when you and I are struggling with this or that, and things aren’t happening and things are taking for ever (remember 24 years so far for Abraham, almost a quarter of a century following this impossible promise from God) we give up or we take things into our own hands. Abraham and Sarah did that many a time.

We see our need and we imagine somehow that God can’t or God won’t meet it. But not long after this discussion between God and Abraham, Sarah fell pregnant and they had a son. And just the way God told them they called him Isaac – which means “he laughs”. See, God had the last laugh. They laughed together.

God is the God who is more than sufficient to meet our needs; more than capable of keeping His promises with more than enough power to crash through whatever obstacle He has to crash through. And when He spoke to Abraham here, when He said to this old man, “Remember who I Am. I Am El-Shaddai”, God was setting out the basis of the promise. It was based on the nature of God and who God is. And who God is, is meant to be a blessing to us. Listen here to the words of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, Genesis Chapter 49:

By the God of your father, who will help you, by El-Shaddai – the God Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb. The blessings of your father are stronger than the blessings of the eternal mountains, the bounties of the everlasting hills: may they be on the head of Joseph, on the brow of him who was set apart from his brothers.

This speaks of the sufficiency of God in His blessings to us. People are racing around all over the place looking to be filled; looking for joy; looking for peace; looking for enough but never finding it, never experiencing it. And all along the only place where that sufficiency can be found is in El-Shaddai – God Himself, the all sufficient One.

This, my friend is the story of my life. I looked for this stuff everywhere … everywhere. Wealth, status, position, career, recognition – I looked everywhere. And the only place I’ve been full, content, sufficient, at rest is in God Himself; in a deep intimate relationship with the All-Sufficient One – El-Shaddai.

Life’s a journey – and we’re all on different places along that journey.  And no matter – who we are, or how we’re wired on the inside – none of us can travel that road alone.  Many people feel as though they are – and that’s a tragedy – because when God is with us – we’re never alone.

Well, here we are towards the end of yet another week and already the year’s slipping by so quickly, each one of us on life’s journey. And it is a journey, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like its all uphill, other times it’s a bit easier. Sometimes it feels like we’re wandering through a swamp, other times we’re up on the mountain tops. Life is a journey.

I remember once when I was training to be an officer in the Australian army, we went on a survival exercise. It lasted for a good many days, and for most of that time we didn’t have too much to eat. We were very hungry. And to make things a lot worse, we received instructions over the radio to march to this particular grid reference on the map. That’s where they promised they would have food waiting for us.

And so we’d march like 35, 40 sometimes 50 kilometres in a day, over mountains and through dense jungle with our packs on our backs, weakened by the lack of food. And when we arrived there and radioed in they told us, oh well, they couldn’t get the food through. March to this other grid reference, another 50 kilometres over that other hill over there, almost back to where we started from.

This went on for days and days, when it rained and we were wet and cold, it was pretty demoralising, I have to tell you. But there’s one thing, one thing that made it bearable. We were a small group, five of us, and having each other around kept our spirits up. The thing that made it bearable was that none of us was alone.

Too often in life it feels like we’re alone. We can be surrounded by lots of people at work at home sometimes, at yet we can still feel as though we’re completely alone. There are a few reasons it happens that way.

Sometimes, actually we are alone. Some people live on their own and don’t have any real friends or family around them. Whether or not they go to work, they can actually in a very real sense be desperately lonely.

Other times we have people around in our lives – friends, work colleagues, husbands, wives, family – but there’s no emotional connection. The thing that stops us feeling alone is that we’re connected with someone else at a deep, emotional level. There’s someone that understands, someone that cares, someone that’s here for us. And if we don’t have that, then we feel alone.

And sometimes there are people there who want to understand and care and be there for us, but we’re hurting so badly that we can’t accept their love. The deeper a hurt is, the more isolated we feel. People who are in their last stages of life often experience that. Soon they’re going to be separated from their love ones. Perhaps they’re lying in a hospital bed and they feel completely alone on this journey.

I remember when we were out on that survival exercise, climbing up some steep slopes through prickly lantana, so hungry that we’d stopped being hungry, we just wanted to give up. And then someone would crack a joke or someone would put a hand on another man’s shoulder and say, “Come on, it’s only an exercise, it will be over in a few days.” And just that connectedness, just that simply being together is what kept us going.

We need that. And whilst I’m a person who doesn’t mind being on their own, and I naturally drive through things, I stay focussed on the end game, that’s just who I am, I need that too. It doesn’t matter who we are, what our personality type is, we can’t live life alone.

Throughout this week on the program, we’ve been looking at some of the different names used for God throughout the Bible. And whilst you and I are quite happy with the one name we’ve been given, many names are given to the One Living God in His Word the Bible, because through those names, He reveals Himself to us. He speaks to us; He tells us who He is and what He’s like.

And the whole point of looking at these different names during the course of this week and next week too, is to connect us – you and me – with the reality of who God is right in the middle of where we are right at this moment on our journey; to draw close to Him; to know Him so that we’re ready for the next part of our journey.

Too often I think, we talk about God or we learn about God. Every now and then you meet someone – someone who has something, you just know from the radiance on their face and the look in their eyes and passion in their voice – you meet this someone who’s been in the presence of God, someone who lives in God. And you think to yourself, I want what that person’s got.

And that thing, that deep life knowledge of God, that’s just not for Mr or Mrs Super Christian it’s not just for the spiritually elite, it’s for everyone, every ordinary person like you and me who puts their trust in Jesus. And so today we’re going to look at one of the names of God – Emmanuel. It comes first and foremost in a prophecy in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament about the coming of Jesus, centuries before it even happened. Have a listen. Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.

What does Emmanuel mean?

Look the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’. (Matthew 1:23)

God is with us on our journey. Up until that point the odd king or prophet had been in a deep relationship with God. But when Jesus came then, all of a sudden, God was with us. He walked the dusty roads, He sat in the synagogues and in the market place and taught and healed people. All of a sudden people could see first hand what God was like. John says this in his Gospel chapter 1 verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

It wasn’t the prophets telling the people who God was or what God had to say, it was no long mere words but now the people could see God for themselves because the Son of God had been born – Emmanuel – God is with us.

In the Old Testament God travelled with His people through the Exodus, through the wilderness, for forty years and His presence was in the Tabernacle, the Temple. Here John said, “And the Word became flesh and (literally) Tabernacled amongst us”, He came to dwell in our midst. And on that journey John writes, “we have seen God’s glory with our own eyes”. In Hebrews chapter 1 verse 3 it says:

Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being

And then Jesus ascended into Heaven. He left behind His Holy Spirit, the very presence of God in us. My friend, God is with us, with us on our journey. We can be completely without any other human relationship and yet know God with a joy and a reality that causes His glory to fill our hearts, to shine through our faces, to sparkle in our eyes, to fill our voices with His being.

And when we believe His Word over our circumstance, when we trust in what God says, when we put our faith in the Emmanuel, the God who is with us, then we will know in our own experience that God is in fact in this place. We need faith.

Without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)

Why haven’t some of us experienced this blessed assurance of the very Presence of the living God? Because we haven’t believed in Him; we haven’t stepped up to the plate and said, “You know something God, I believe what your Word says, I believe that you are indeed my Emmanuel, I believe that you are with me because my faith is in Jesus, Your Son – Emmanuel.”