Let’s face it, people can be a pain in the neck can’t they? And so what many of us do is we isolate ourselves. Oh, we might be surrounded by lots of people, but we isolate ourselves emotionally. And yet the truth is that none of us is an island. None of us can do it on our own. And when we try living that way, it saps our strength. What if… what if friends can make us stronger?

As He walked around the dusty highways and byways of 1^st Century Israel, Jesus performed a lot of miracles. By far the majority of those were healings. But have you ever stopped to wonder – why did He do that? What was the point of all those miracles? What’s He trying to tell us through them here and now, 2000 years on?

Last week on the program we kicked off a discussion about the fact that Jesus, Jesus wants to have a relationship with you and me. The series of messages is called, “There’s A Knock At The Door” and of course they’re all available online if you’ve missed any of them at www.christianityworks.com.

Now the whole point, the crux of what we’re hearing Jesus saying to us in all this is that because we live here in a physical world with all its distractions our hearts can grow lukewarm towards Him and that’s the one thing He doesn’t want. What He wants is a close, intimate, powerful relationship with us. Let’s have another listen to this powerful word from Revelation chapter 3 beginning at verse 15. Jesus says:

I know your works, you’re neither hot nor cold. I wish you were either hot or cold so because you’re lukewarm and neither hot or cold I’m about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I’m rich, I’ve prospered, I don’t need anything’. You don’t realise that you’re wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich and white robes to clothe you and keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

I reprove and discipline those who I love so be earnest and repent. Listen I’m standing at the door knocking. If you hear my voice open the door, I’ll come in to you and eat with you and you with me.

You see the whole point here of what Jesus is saying, He doesn’t want to have a religious thing happening with us, He wants to have a relationship happening with us and our part in that is this earnest repenting thing that Jesus talks about. We’re about to unpack that some more because in a sense that’s our small part in this relational transaction.

I was reading something interesting the other day, something else Jesus said when He was walking the dusty roads of 1st Century Israel. He actually explained the purpose or one of the key purposes of all His miracles. Now of course those miracles of healing brought amazing blessing and relief to the one or two people who were involved each time, sometimes it was a lot more than one or two people.

If you’re blind and He gave you back your sight can you just imagine? If you were an ostracised outcast leper and He healed you of your leprosy, can you imagine what it would have been like to be able to go and live with your family and friends again? So there was an immediate blessing in those miracles to those who were healed.

But those miracles were meant to speak something into the wider community as well. They were meant to illicit something from the wider community so let’s have a listen to what Jesus said about this very thing. We’re reading from Matthew chapter 11 beginning at verse 20:

So Jesus began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done because they did not repent. Woe to you Chorazin, woe to you Bethsaida for if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented long ago in sack cloth and ashes.

But I tell you on the day of judgement it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you Capernaum will you be exalted to heaven? No, you’ll be brought down to Hades for if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Sodom it would have remained until this day but I tell you on the day of judgement it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for you.

At the same time Jesus said, “I thank you father, Lord of heaven and earth because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and you’ve revealed them to the infants. Yes father for such was your gracious will.”

Now Jesus is having a real go at some pretty big cities here. So what’s He on about? Well He’s saying, “Look you’ve seen with your own eyes the miracles I did in your midst and still, you wander off on your merry way ignoring my Father who sent me. You look back on the cities of Sodom and Tyre and Sidon, cities you know perished because of their evil and scorn them but if they’d seen the miracles that you’ve seen, if they’d seen the blessing of God poured out on them the way it’s been poured out on you, they’d have repented way before you.

You think you’re so clever, you think you’re an advanced community with all your commerce and your wealth and your entertainment and all the stuff that’s going on but the blessing of God came close to you and you still haven’t repented, you still haven’t had an earnest change of mind, you still haven’t turned your lives back to God.’

Well, there’s a reason for that because somehow in His wisdom God reveals Himself to those who are prepared to humble themselves and admit they’re wrong but from the proud, those who think they have all the answers, those who look down their noses from their positions of wealth and power, from the proud He hides Himself. He makes Himself available to those who are like little children not to the wise and to the prudent.

And as we’ve seen repentance isn’t some old fashioned, 1950’s religious concept. Repentance means to have a change of heart and a change of mind. To be honest enough to admit that what we’ve done is wrong, to turn away from the wrong and back to God and start living a life that’s pleasing to Him.

In fact this whole idea of repentance was right at the heart of Jesus’ message. It’s actually what He came to tell us. From the very beginning of His public ministry we’re told:

Jesus began to proclaim, repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 3:2)

Why? Is it because He’s wanting to wreak havoc on us? Is it because God is some despotic God who just wants to punish us or bind us up in a whole bunch of rules? No. Who did God send? Jesus. What was Jesus doing? He was showing kindness and love and mercy and power by healing people.

Think about it. He did a few other miracles, water into wine, feeding the five thousand with a few fish and loaves, walking on water, stilling the storm but by far the greatest number of His miracles were healing people and casting out demons. He came to bless and to save, not to punish and condemn but there was and remains a point to all this blessing.

The point is that it should bring us to our senses, the point is that we should take notice of God, this God who loves us and wants to bless us and wake up to ourselves, admit our wrongs, turn away from those wrongs and turn back to Him. That’s why He criticises those cities because they saw the deeds of power, they just didn’t turn back to Him.

The Apostle Paul gives us a really neat, powerful, executive summary of what Jesus was saying to those unrepentant cities, Romans chapter 2, verse 4. He says:

Do you despise the riches of Gods kindness and forbearance and patience? Don’t you realise that Gods kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

Now we by and large we want God’s kindness, we by and large want God’s blessing, we by and large want God to show up when we’re stuck in a mess and we need to be pulled out but more often than not the last thing we want to do is to repent, to run away from the things we know are wrong, to give our lives over, our whole lives, every part of our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our gifts, our abilities, our time, our resources, our finances, our thoughts, our sexuality, our everything, our all in all over to Jesus.

But unless we do that how else do we expect a rich powerful relationship to happen with God through Jesus? How do we expect to live in the blessing of God? The point, the whole point of Gods kindness towards us is to get us to have a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of life and bring our lives back to Him.

Does Jesus come with us and try and beat us over the head with a stick? No. He comes to us with kindness and blessing and miracles and healing and forbearance because as A W Tozer once wrote:

God doesn’t just have mercy, God is mercy. God doesn’t just have love, God is love.

But He also warns us that one day there’s a stick coming, one day it will be too late, one day judgement will fall but for the time being Jesus stands at the door and knocks.

Loneliness is such a dreadful thing. It’s a hunger – a need to be loved and accepted and connected – that goes unmet. When we travel through those lonely places … where is God exactly?

One of the hardest things in life is being alone. It happens to different people at different times, a teenager growing up might feel misunderstood, that’s a lonely place to be. Someone who’s married can feel like their husband or their wife is so distant, that’s lonely. Work and children and pressures and responsibilities conspire against marriages. In fact, we can be surrounded by crowds of people and yet still feel desperately alone.

It can even be that people are reaching out to us but somehow we feel incapable of making that soul connection. We’re like a dry sponge that somehow can’t take any relationships in just at the moment. As we grow older the children leave and they have their own busy lives and perhaps a husband dies and the widow’s left alone. Whatever its form loneliness can be a terrible place and it can go on for a very long time.

When I look back on my life there have been a couple of times in particular that I can point to when I was really lonely. When I was a teenager growing up I like, almost, I think, all teenagers feel this. They feel misunderstood by their parents and for me too, I was so different to my peers. I was short and dumpy and clever, I was a musician and not a sportsman, always a bit of a misfit you know, I was never one of the “beautiful people”. That was a lonely time for me.

And there was a time as an adult when I was on my own for several years. People, yeah sure there were people at work and people at Church but there were no real “soul ties”, you know what I mean. I’m not one to get lonely really very much at all, I have a fairly healthy self esteem, I feel good about myself, I truly enjoy peace and quiet and my own space and my own company and yet I’ve been in that deep place of loneliness, it’s like, it’s like a dark pit.

How do you put words around this, this thing “loneliness”? All sorts of different circumstances and situations and different times of our lives that it happens, what’s the common thread, what defines loneliness? I read this definition in an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia and I think it’s pretty good. They write:

Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation. Loneliness is more that just the feeling of wanting company or wanting to do something with another person, loneliness is a feeling of being cut off, disconnected and alienated from other people.

The lonely person finds it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. Lonely people often experience a subjective sense of emptiness and hollowness with feelings of separation and isolation from the world.

Oh, you know I think we can all relate to that, I think we all travel through some lonely places sometimes in life, some more than others. Some maybe have a personality that’s more predisposed to being alone than others but that sense of isolation and emptiness, the lack of connectedness, the being pulled apart from other people.

I was reading a really interesting perspective the other day, it’s something that Mother Theresa said. Have a listen, have a listen to this, I think it’s powerful stuff. She said:

When Christ said, “I was hungry and you fed me” He didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food, He also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness, He came amongst His own and yet His own received Him not and it hurt Him then, it has kept hurting Him.

The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no-one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in His loneliness and that is the hardest part, that’s the real hunger.

Isn’t that profound? It makes you think you know, there’s a loneliness, a hunger, it’s our most basic emotional need going unmet. The need to be loved, the need to belong, the need to know that there’s someone out there, just one person who misses you, who’s thinking about you, who wants you.

That’s what loneliness is and it’s really weird because Jesus was followed by huge crowds, I mean He had rock star status and yet so often He was alone and it was those crowds, those very same people, were the ones who demanded His crucifixion but all the way along Jesus knew that. Have a listen to how John puts it, in John chapter 2, verse 23:

When He was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival many believed in Jesus name because they saw that the miracles and the signs that He was doing but Jesus for His part wouldn’t entrust Himself to them because He knew them all.

See, He had rock star status, He had huge crowds and those same crowds bayed for His blood and deserted Him. He always knew public opinion, human acclamation, are a fickle thing. And Peter the apostle said, “Lord, I’ll stick by you, I’ll stick through everything, I’ll even die with you” and yet, you probably know the story, when he said that to Jesus, Jesus said, “Look here, it’s night time, before that rooster crows in the morning you’ll have denied me 3 times.” And Peter said, “No no I won’t do” that and sure enough, when Jesus was being led to trial before His crucifixion, 3 times Peter denies Jesus, 3 times.

One by one the crowds, His closest supporters, His family, they all left Him. He was beaten and mocked and crucified and they left Him completely alone but you know as impossibly difficult and painful as that was, He was prepared for it. Have a listen to what Luke says about Jesus:

The news about Jesus spread all the more so the crowds of people came to hear Him and be healed of their sicknesses but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Listen to that again:

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

See, I think that’s what’s going on here is that out there in that wilderness, out there in those lonely places, out there away from the hype and the hoop-la and the limelight and the crowds and the “oohs” and the “aahs” and the recognition, out there in those lonely places is where Jesus spent time with His Dad. There’s something in that.

In the times where I’ve been desperately lonely, feeling that isolation and that, that disconnectedness and the pain that comes with that in those lonely places, they were the times when God stepped in. How do I explain it? I was sitting once alone weeping in my loneliness and I just had this powerful sense of God’s presence in that place, an overwhelming knowledge that I was being surrounded and filled with His spirit.

In that lonely place that’s where I became addicted to God, I wanted more and more and more of Him. Somehow amidst the darkness and the pain, His light shone so brightly. I look back on those times as the greatest opportunity that God would ever give me, out there in the lonely places and I believe that’s why God lets us go to them, that’s why God lets us walk in that loneliness because it’s the opportunity He gives us to discover His steadfast and wondrous love.

I don’t think that there’s a one of us who hasn’t needed healing at some time in our lives. Physical, emotional, spiritual … healing. So – does God still heal people today? Does He? What if God is a God who heals?

A little while ago a pair of 3-year-old conjoined twins were brought to Australia for a delicate operation of separating them. Now, they were joined at the head with their skulls, brains and blood vessels all intermingled. Surgeons performed a 25-hour operation. To be frank, the chances of success were very low, very low indeed. We’re talking their brains here, right.

But to everyone’s surprise and absolute delight, the operation was a complete success. Truly amazing. The whole nation was overjoyed and yet every 3 seconds a child dies of poverty, disease, malnutrition. For every miraculous cure, there are thousands, tens of thousands of people who just die.

I was speaking with a good friend of our ministry by phone the other day. He’s 94 years old. And he was telling me how he was the oldest of four children and yet the last one to have survived. The other day my wife travelled to see a beautiful friend of hers who’s in her late 50’s who was dying of cancer. A beautiful Christian woman.

You look at all that and you look at it and sometimes you ask God, “What are you doing? Why is it that you heal some and not others? Why is it that some die young and others live to be 94 or 100? Why is it that sometimes it’s the nicest people on the planet that end up with cancer and die young? Why is it that you let a friend of mine’s teenage son hang himself through depression?”

They’re not easy questions to answer are they? One of the things we discover about God is that He is a God who heals. Psalm 103:

Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul and do not forget all His benefits. Who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit. Who crowns you in steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

See, there it is. The God who heals quote, “All our diseases”. Unquote. And in fact one of the 20 different names used for God throughout the Bible is Jehovah Rapha which means “the God who heals”. But He doesn’t heal everyone all the time.

There was a time when Jesus wandered into a place. It was the pool by the sheep gate in Jerusalem where there were lots and lots of sick people waiting for healing. You can read about the story for yourself in the New Testament, Johns Gospel chapter 5.

There were many invalids there, blind, lame, paralysed, you name it they were there. Now in those days in that place to be an invalid meant not just being sick, it meant poverty, it meant an early grave, it meant being an outcast, it meant being socially isolated from the community.

So there were lots and lots of people in this place and the Son of Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, wanders into this place and heals just this one guy. Just one. And when pressed as to why that might have been the case Jesus answers, John chapter 5, verse 19, Jesus said to them:

Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on His own but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does the Son does likewise.

God doesn’t heal all of the people all of the time from all of their diseases. In fact as I heard someone say once, a funny guy called Mark Lowry, he said, “Last time I checked the statistics were these. 1 out of every 1 of us ends up dying. It’s kind of 100%. Eventually, our bodies give way whether we’re 94, 58 or 26 or just a few months old.”

Let me ask you something, given the fact that we all die sometime, what’s God trying to tell us through this name of His Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals? What was He trying to say to His people way back in the Old Testament and the New Testament times thousands of years ago? What was He trying to say to you and me here and now?

Well, back during the time when God sent 10 plagues on Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let His chosen people go, He said this to His people Israel in Exodus chapter 15, beginning at verse 26. He said:

If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians for I am the Lord who heals you. I am Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals you.

And He protected His people from the diseases that reigned down upon the Egyptians. He set His people apart and protected them for their release. And so they crossed through the Red Sea and spent 40 years in the desert where all of those original chosen people who left Egypt, bar two, perished. It was their children and grand children who inherited the Promised Land, not the ones who left Egypt.

What does healing mean when you’re going to die eventually anyway? Well, here’s what I think. Gods healing only means something if it takes the death away. It only means something if there’s an eternal life without sickness or disease or fears or tears. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, beginning at verse 50:

What I’m saying brothers and sisters is this. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I’ll tell you a mystery. We will not all die but we will all be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will be changed.

For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality then the saying that is written will be fulfilled. ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?

The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law but thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ.

In other words, God is the God who gives His people healing through Jesus. A healing that goes on for an eternity my friend, an eternal life. Now have I seen people healed of their physical diseases in this world? Yes I have and I believe that God does heal some people when it suits His sovereign purpose to do so.

He does it through health professionals. He does it miraculously. But He doesn’t always do it and I don’t know why but this I do know. He will bring eternal healing to any man or woman or child who’ll put their faith in the death and the resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. Through His wounds we have been healed. 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 24:

He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed.

And the way that healing has worked it’s way in my life so far is that I’ve been given a completely new life, a new start, the slate wiped clean and I am living today the most wondrous, the most fantastic life even though I face all the challenges and the stuff in life that you face too.

One day, sooner or later, life here on this earth, my life your life, is going to come to an end and then I know, I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, will play that healing out in my life for all eternity.

Some people look at themselves in the mirror and think – what a wreck? What could God ever do with me? But what if He doesn’t see us the way we do? What if… He has a plan?

I was at a men’s gathering and a guy who didn’t know me from a bar of soap walked up to me and said something along these lines, he said, “Look, I know this may sound just a bit weird or maybe a bit trite but I really believe that God wants you to know how pleased He is with you, how delighted He is with you, how much you mean to Him. I really believe God wanted me to tell you that today.”

Can I tell you? That was just the release that I needed. The answer wasn’t to work harder or longer, I was already working like an idiot. The answer was to pause for a while and rest in God and so that’s something I do almost every morning now, in the cool of the morning, while the rest of the world is pretty much still asleep, I sit in a comfy chair and open my Bible and rest with God.

And it’s in that place that we discover how incredibly valuable we are to Him because unlike any other creature on this earth we have been created in His image, in the image of God we’ve been created, male and female He’s created us and when, when God created someone in His image, just stop and think about this, He’s going to move heaven and earth for us to set right the things in our lives that have gone off the tracks. When you look at it that way doesn’t it make sense?

I mean imagine, just imagine that you’re a gifted artisan. I’m not by the way, I can’t draw for nuts, I can’t sculpt, I can’t nail two bits of wood together so it’s a stretch for me to imagine that but nevertheless let’s just imagine, you and I, that we’re gifted with our hands in that way. And years ago you created this amazing violin.

You sold it to someone, someone bought it and for years you haven’t seen it and then one day you’re at a second hand auction and to your complete and utter surprise that violin comes up for auction. To everyone else it’s just a dusty old violin but to you, well you made it, you recognise it instantly beneath the layers of dirt and dust. What would you do at that auction?

It was battered and scarred
and the auctioneer thought
it was scarcely worth his while
to waste much time on that old violin
but he held it up with a smile.
‘What am I bidding good folks’, he cried,
‘who’ll start the bidding for me?
A dollar, a dollar then two only two,
two dollars and who’ll make it three?’

‘Three dollars once, three dollars twice,
going for three’. But no,
from the room far back a grey haired old man
came forward and picked up the bow.
And wiping the dust from the old violin
and tightening the loosened strings
he played a melody pure and sweet
as a carolling angel sings.

The music ceased and the auctioneer
with a voice that was quiet and low
said, ‘What am I bid for the old violin?’
And he held it up with the bow.
‘A thousand dollars and who’ll make it two,
two thousand, who’ll make it three?
Three thousand once, three thousand twice
and going and gone.’ Said he.

The people cheered
but some of them cried,
‘We don’t quite understand.
What changed its worth?’
Swift came the reply,
‘The touch of a master’s hand.’

And many a man with a life out of tune
and battered and scarred with sin,
he’s auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd
much like the old violin.

A mess of pottage,
a glass of wine and a game he travels on.
He’s going once, going twice,
he’s going and almost gone.
But the Master comes
and the foolish crowd
never can quite understand
the worth of a soul and the change that is wrought
by the touch of the Master’s hand.”

It’s a beautiful old poem that, “The Touch of the Masters Hand” by Myra Brooks Welch. And doesn’t it tell the story of what God wants to do in your life and my life. In our own eyes often we feel worthless, in the worlds eyes often we look worthless and yet under the years of neglect God sees the beauty and the wonder of the original creation in us, made as we are in His image.

And so when God touches our lives again, when He gets involved again it’s as though, it’s as though we become a completely new creation. Not new at all, it’s more of a case of back to the future, it’s more of a case of rediscovering what was always there, the potential, the artistry, the incredible wonder of who God made us to be beneath the marred, scarred layers of sin because underneath that we are made in the image of God. And that music of who we are is only released, that new creation is only reborn when we’re touched by the Master’s hand.

Now let me make something quite clear here because this is not Berni waxing lyrical, this is not about getting swept up necessarily in the emotion of that poem as beautiful and as profound as it is. This is about unlocking the truth of how God sees you and me and what God has to say about us. Here it is from His own Word, from His lips, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17:

“So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away, see everything has become new.”

I remember someone once saying to me, “You’re not one of those born again Christians are you?’”And my response to them was, “That according to Jesus there is only one sort of Christian, that’s a born again Christian”. John chapter 3, verse 3:

“Jesus declared, ‘I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they’re born again.”

The only sort of Christian is the one who is a new creation because the moment we believe in Jesus, the old me, the old you, the old things that had a hold over us pass away. The sense of reproach, regret, the hurts of the past, the moment we believe in Jesus we are a new creation, all the old things have passed away and look, take a good hard close look, everything is new.

The moment the Master lays hold of us our lives start playing a new tune, a tune that we never thought possible, a tune that the rest of the world never thought possible, a tune that’s born out of the great value that we have when we are in the Master’s hand.

The fact that in Christ I am a new creation is the truth on which my whole life rests. I look back on who I was and I look at the work in progress that’s brought me thus far to who I am now and I look forward to who I’m going to be, more and more morphed in the image of Jesus Himself and all of a sudden my weaknesses, my sin, my inadequacies, as well as my gifts and abilities and talents, they’re all of a sudden, I get in the right perspective.

I don’t have to feel guilty about the past anymore, I don’t want to forget it, I never want to go back to it, I don’t want to lose the lessons or the experience or the consequences of those mistakes again but I don’t have to carry around the burden of guilt anymore. Do you realise how many people carry around burdens from the past?

Well, Jesus said we don’t have to do that. If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, all the old muck has passed away and look everything has become new because according to God I am a new creation, I am born again, the old me died with Christ on the cross when I put my faith in Him. The new me was born again, risen again through the newness of life that the Holy Spirit has brought and is still bringing into my world.

My friend this is why they call it the Good News about Jesus and we can go on living our lives believing that the past still has a hold over us, we can go on believing that lie, living our lives believing more in our circumstances or we can make a choice here and now, today, to start believing what God says about us. We can live the rest of our lives believing the truth that we are in fact a new creation if we put our trust in Jesus.

So let me ask you, what’s it going to be?