When things aren’t going particularly well in our lives – the things that happens, is that we lose sight of our hopes and dreams for the future. And that’s devastating. We need to know that there’s a plan.

These days’ people are saying that one of the biggest issues in their lives is stress. We stress about this, we stress about that and you know, sometimes the things we are stressing about they’re very real. There are people listening today whose very lives are in danger, there are people listening today who are facing bankruptcy or perhaps the banks foreclosed on their mortgage. There are people listening today who don’t know where their next morsel of food is coming from, who’s children are facing death because of a lack of clean water and medical services. And yet other times, we just kind of stress over the future because we live in an inheritantly uncertain world.

We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow; “Am I going to have enough money? Will I get that promotion? Will I find a marriage partner? Will my kids grow up okay?” On and on and on, I often make the observation that if one small part of our lives has some uncertainty in it, even though every other part of our life can be chugging along just fine, then we have a problem and we’re going to experience stress. What we need in this uncertain world is, well some certainty, don’t you think? We need something or someone to depend on.

I often get this thing, “Well, you know, religion is just a crux, it’s for losers” and that’s fine by me because I’m not a great fan of religion, I’m not into religious stuff. For me, most of my life, I was far from being a loser. I always used to pride myself that whatever I turned my hand to I’d try to be the very best at doing it that there was. And that was often the case.

But I have to tell you, as successful as I purported to be I always had a feeling of, well this sense of uncertainty eating away in me. Even if things were going really well in my life, stress gnawed away inside me. So many people are like that, the problem with that is that you can’t, well you can’t have peace when that’s going on, you can never rest on the inside, you’re always worrying and stressing over something.

Imagine if, in life, despite all the things that are going on because so often you know, we can’t change those things, they just happen but if, despite everything that was going on, we could have peace, real peace, you and I. Just stop and think about that proposition for a moment, isn’t it awesome? When the storm clouds are gathering on the horizon and you know a storm is about to hit but inside we have a quiet confidence that we’re going to ride out that storm.

Okay, that’s why today and over this week and next week we’re going to take a look at ten promises that we can depend on. Ten promises, promises made by God that, come what may, you and I can depend on.

I don’t where you’re at in life but I ask you to approach this with an open mind, my prayer is that over these coming days, something amazing is going to happen in our hearts. That God would put a solid foundation in our hearts, a solid ground beneath our feet as we take a hold of these ten promises of God. Promises that I can depend on, promises that you can depend on. And the first one is this, here is a promise from God; I have a plan for you.

See, when we’re stressed, so often what happens is we can’t see our way ahead to a safe and a peaceful future. All we can see is the here and now, all we can imagine is all the bad things that are going to happen to us. If you’re in a marriage relationship that’s heading towards the rocks, if you’ve got a teenager who’s going through some bad stuff, if you’re under stress at work, whatever it is, “oh, will it ever get any better?” Well, will it?

Here’s a promise that God made to Israel. Israel had mucked up in their lives, you know they’d turned their backs on God and so God let the Babylonians come and take them away into slavery. So Israel is in slavery in Babylon, completely hopeless you know and here’s the promises they lived through these impossible times of slavery. It comes from the Old Testament, Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 10:

This is what the Lord said to them, “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I’ll come to you and fulfil my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Then you will call upon me and come and pray to Me and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

Here’s what happens; you and I, we have plans for our lives, it’s a natural human thing to do. We have hopes and dreams for our lives, to retire early, to have a nice home to live in, to see our kids grow up. We’re always looking forward to something good in our lives for ourselves. We have needs, we have hopes, we have dreams, we want to have a good life and then, things happen that interrupt those dreams and you know, the things that interrupt can be so small.

One small thing between husband and wife can grow from a mole hill into mountain and you look at this couple and they seem to have everything going for them, there’s no reason for their marriage to fall apart. Or the family sitting in a refugee camp with no hope for the future, just watched one of their children die, or the dear friend of mine whose father died in a refugee camp in Africa because there wasn’t adequate medical attention. You see, there are things that come in life that interrupt our hopes and our dreams.

When we’re in that place, when our plan is interrupted, our plan for a good future, it’s tough and into that place God whispers into our hearts:

I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future and then you’ll call upon Me, you’ll come and pray to Me and I’ll listen to you. You’ll seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. I will be found by you”, declares the Lord, “and I’ll bring you back from captivity.

I’ll gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you and I will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.

Now that doesn’t mean that every time we’re sick we’ll get better. No, we’re all going to die sometime and it doesn’t mean that if I had a plan to have a 6 bedroom house with gold plated taps and an en suite, that Gods going to do it. No, no it doesn’t mean that. But sometimes our plans and our hopes and our dreams are so selfish and ‘me’ centred and they involve the things that will never satisfy us and sometimes our plans and our hopes and our dreams don’t involve any pain or suffering and yet, life always involves pain and suffering.

Come on, what if God has plans for us, plans that are good plans, good plans born in His great and mighty heart. Much richer, must more realistic and vibrant and full of life than anything you and I could ever imagine. Listen to what God is saying to us here, “I have a plan for you, a plan I made just for you, it’s a good plan, I will bring it to pass no matter how bad things get.”

If we let that promise sink into our hearts today then, you know what we know, we know that the storms and the tempest of life can come and go but nothing can interrupt Gods plan for you and me. This is a promise that we can trust in, this is a promise that we can depend on. God doesn’t make them lightly, He’s faithful and He always delivers on His plans and His promises. He sees the big picture. Plans are so wondrous and so amazing were as we only see our little bit and then we’re pretty myopic.

I have a plan for you, a good plan.

Sometimes – money can be a real problem in our lives. So many people spend so much time worrying about their financial future. We need to know that it’s going to be okay.

Have you ever been in a place where you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from? I certainly have and so many people in this world are in that place right now. I mean, where I live, mortgage foreclosures by banks are at record levels, people are stressed out over money and there’s real poverty in this world too. The sort of poverty that afflicts countless of millions across the globe and some of those people are listening today. And then there are those in wealthy countries who are feeling stress of financial pressures but the reality is that a very few of us really know what poverty’s all about.

Nevertheless, financial stress is a big issue; it’s a huge issue around the world. We human beings, we can’t cope with that sort of stress particularly well because, not surprisingly, we like to know that we’re financially secure into the future. That’s why suicide rates among business people increase sharply when there’s a stock market crash. So in those times of financial stress, who or what can we rely on? That’s a good question.

You know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about financial stress. We’ve all been there, even the wealthy, you know! Even those who have it all, they’re highly geared in debt sometimes, they’re leaking money all over the place sometimes and all that creates stress and worry. That’s why I want to take a look at a particular promise from God today that speaks right into that reality.

Here’s where I’m coming from, not from religion as a crutch thing, no not that but just the reality that you and I need to experience peace in our hearts. We need rest and we can’t live in stress all the time and some people are living in constant financial stress and it’s exactly when we’re under that financial pressure, we need to experience Gods peace. Instead of that, so many people, they just worry all the time.

Well there’s a promise from God that I’ve discovered in my life. It’s a promise that I’ve lived out for many years now and a promise that He’s never ever failed to deliver on and I, today; I have confidence in that promise. Yes, I have to be wise with the money I have, I have to be a good steward of the money that Gods given me but I have a confidence that God will deliver on this promise when I’m in difficult financial situations.

This one comes directly from the mouth of Jesus but first, first He deals with the whole problem, when it comes to money and it’s a problem of faith. Have a listen, this comes from Matthews gospel chapter 6, beginning at verse 19:

Jesus says, “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures here on this earth where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal. Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust can’t destroy, where thieves can’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. No-one can serve two masters, either he will hate the one and love the other or he’ll be devoted to the one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and money.”

What Jesus is saying here is, the problem is what you put your faith in. Money is so transient; I mean you might invest in a blue chip stock today. It’s worth $20.00 per share today and you think, “wow, it’s returning dividends, it’s doing great” then all of a sudden tomorrow, there’s a corporate scandal and it plummets down to $1.00. “Hang on, what happened? “See, you can’t put your faith in money. Moths and rust and thieves, money is temporary, in any case we can’t take it with us.

Come on, we all do this, we serve money the way we serve a god and because we take it so, so seriously it cause us so much stress. We have these expectations that grow higher and higher and higher and even chasing after things that we can’t afford and things that we don’t need. And even when we’re in truly desperate straits, when we don’t know where our next dollar is coming from, because I’ve been there too in my life, we behave as though, ‘well the world would end if we don’t get money’ and that leads to worry, worry leads to stress and none of that makes any sense.

Now have a listen to the solution, a promise to you and to me from God. Jesus goes on to say, Matthew chapter 6, beginning at verse 25:

Therefore I tell you this; don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink or about your body or what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more important than food, the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air, they don’t sow, they don’t reap, they don’t store away in barns and yet, your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you much more valuable than them?

Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to your life and why do you worry about your clothes? Look at the lilies of the field, they don’t labour, they don’t spin and yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of those. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the fire, won’t He much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

So don’t worry saying, ‘what shall I eat, what shall we drink, what shall we wear?’ The pagans run after all those things and your heavenly Father knows you need them but first, first seek His kingdom and His righteousness and all these other things will be given to you as well. Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, tomorrow will worry about itself, each day has enough trouble of it’s own.

Doesn’t Jesus nail it here, He gets back to the reality. I mean look at the birds, look at the flowers, who put them there? Who looks after them? ‘Come on, stand back’, He’s saying ‘ and look at the big picture with Me. And you, you worry as though worrying’s going to change anything’. See, that’s the crunch bit for me, the bit that worrying doesn’t work:

Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?

I know people, all they do is worry; worry, worry, worry, worry! I used to be one of them, I have to tell you. But all that worry and that stress DOES NO GOOD! It’s useless, it doesn’t make the problem better, it makes it worse.

Look, God knows what you and I need, He knows we need food, He knows we need shelter. Notice Jesus actually talks about needs not wants. “Get our priorities right!” He says. Your welfare doesn’t come from this world, it comes from where? It comes from God, every good thing that you and I have comes from God, He owns it all. First, get out there and seek out God, His reign, His kingship in your lives. “Come on, change your focus!” Jesus is saying, get off your “needs” and your “wants” and set it fully on God.

Well, what kind of answer is that Berni? What are you thinking right now? Well simple, there’s a promise attached to that step of faith, a promise that is unbreakable because God made it and He never breaks His promises.

First seek His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.

What will be given to you as well? All these things – all, and that, that takes the worry away. I can’t tell you how many tight financial spots I’ve been in, in my life. Some, in the early days, were my own doing and these days because I left a secure, high paying job, to get about Gods work by faith. Before I trusted in Jesus I had huge stress, I always had worry about money and these days, I guess I’m still prone to stress a little bit, my first instinct is to worry. That’s why I need to come back to Gods promise, time and time again, I know that my focus is on Him, on His kingdom, on His righteousness, I seek Him out in my life day by day and that’s why I can stand on this promise:

… and all these things will be given to you as well.

And each time I face that need, which you do when you’re walking by faith; I come back to this promise. It’s a promise from God!

First seek His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.

PROMISE!

There are times in life when we go through pain. When we mourn a loss. When we’re lonely and afraid. What we need is someone to comfort us – but it seems that nothing anybody does or says can make it better.

I want to spend some time talking about comfort today. Not about the sort of comfort you get from sitting in a comfortable armchair but comfort in times of distress. It’s an interesting concept. comfort. You know when we’re children we fall over and we hurt ourselves and our Mum or our Dad picks us up, brushes off the dirt, holds us close while we sob and we wail.

What they’re doing is they’re comforting us and when we grow up, we still need comforting. I think it’s about, well when you’re going through pain or suffering, it’s about knowing there’s someone who cares, who empathises. Someone who feels our pain with us, someone who’s not there to judge us or lecture us, just to hold us.

I think we’ve all felt that sense in our hearts when we see someone we love suffering, of wanting to hug them so hard that we can take their pain away even if it meant bearing their pain for them. That’s comfort, my hunch is it comes from God, all good things inevitably do but sometimes, when we’re hurting, it seems like there’s no-one there to comfort us or we’re hurting so deeply that nothing anyone says or does seems to make any difference.

I remember a time like that in my life, about 13 years ago. It was a time of deep distress and my whole being wept and I was completely alone on this earth. It was black, dark, fearful, lonely and the thing about the inky blackness is that it’s like an impenetrable emotional barrier, a brick wall 3 foot deep. And no matter what friends and loved ones tried to say or do, nothing seems to be able to take the hurt away. Now the question is; what do we do in a place where we’re desperately need to be comforted but it hurts so bad that nobody’s able to comfort us?

Over the last few days and over the remainder of this week and next, on the program, we’re taking a look at some of the promises that we can depend on. Promises direct from God, to you and me, ten of them in fact and today, I’m hoping to spend a few minutes with you looking at Gods promise to comfort us.

Now this word ‘comfort’ appears an awful lot of times through Gods word and more often than not its about God comforting us. In fact there’s a promise Jesus made it during the Sermon on the Mount. He lists all the people to be blessed, 9 different groups of people and the second of those He says:

Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.

And He also said,

I’m here to bind up the broken hearted.

He said that about Himself. Now when we’re in pain and hurt, it’s so hard for anyone else to break through but what I’ve discovered is that God breaks through, God, God has this amazing way of doing that. I remember when I was alone night after night after night and I just sat in my favourite armchair and prayed on and off, as best as I could and you know, somehow the Spirit of God got into my heart and I discovered how blessed we really can be when we mourn and God comforts us.

The apostle Paul got it too, he had a tough life this guy, he was in and out of prison, he was shipwrecked, he was beaten, he was starving. People rioted, people plotted to kill him, he was on death row. I mean you and I wouldn’t want Paul’s life for anything, ultimately he was martyred. This is what he writes to his friends in Corinth, you can read it in his second letter to the Corinthian Church, chapter 1 beginning at verse 3, he says:

Praise to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with a comfort that we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives so also, through Christ, our comfort overflows. If we are distressed it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings that we suffer and our hope for you is firm because we know just as you share in our sufferings, so you also share in our comfort.

Now, in that short passage Paul uses the word comfort 8 times. See this promise of God is something that we learn in our experience. Paul’s been through a lot and yet he is able to talk amazingly about Gods comfort because Gods comfort is something that we can rely on in those times when we need comforting. Paul discovered it in dungeons on death row and when he was on the run for his life and when he was bobbing around in a stormy ocean when his ship had been wrecked. He discovered the comfort of God in those places.

Let me try and explain what this comfort is like, well at least how I experienced it back then and how I’ve experienced it since then. Pain is like a dark storm, a tempest, a storm that rages in our souls. It’s so deep that there simply aren’t words to describe it, it consumes us and I know when I was consumed by it, it closes us off from everyone else. For me, I didn’t have it in me even raise the eyes of my soul to look towards God. Over and over again I just whispered and sobbed, “God, God help me”.

You know that story of when Jesus walked out on the water and the disciples were in their boat and the storm was raging and they were afraid of drowning and Jesus calmed the storm. No-one else could have helped them at that moment, no-one else on this planet could have calmed that storm, or in the universe for that matter. Only God Himself. And it was God, the Son of God, who walked into that storm and stilled it and that’s what it was like for me. Now if you were to ask me, “what was it like”? I’d say it was like a warm fire on a cold night, it was like a soft light in a fearsome darkness.

Do you remember when Jesus did that, walking out on the water thing and calming the storm, Peter the apostle got out of the boat and put his trust in Jesus. But as he walked towards Jesus on the water, he got that sinking feeling because he took his eyes off Jesus and he saw the water and he realised what he was doing and he started to sink. And Jesus grabbed his hand and pulled him up.

I tell you, I had plenty of those sinking feelings but in that storm I met the God of all comfort, as Paul calls Him. You know something, as much as in those times He comes walking out on the water, right into the eye of our storm; we need to respond to that. See this is a promise, a promise to comfort those who mourn, a promise that calls us to walk out towards Jesus in faith. I’ll tell you why; if we don’t we just wallow in our sorrow. I’ve seen it over again, yes we all have sorrow and we all mourn and some people just want to stay there and be victims for the rest of their lives.

When we go through some bad stuff, for a time there will be grief and you don’t have the strength but there comes a time, like Peter, where we have to step out of the boat into the middle of that ocean and walk out in faith and accept Jesus’ comfort. It’s not until we step out of the boat and put our trust in Him that He can reach out and grab our hand to stop us from sinking.

Here is the promise again:

Blessed are all those who mourn for they will be comforted.

It’s a promise to tuck away in our hearts until one day when we need it and I’m sure, then God will bring it back to us. I want to encourage you, when He does, to step out of the boat and go and live in that promise. See, this promise is a promise that you and I can depend on.

There are times in our lives when we need protection – from other people or from ourselves or from circumstances we can’t control. But where do you get that sort of protection?

Now there are times in our lives when we need protection. Sometimes its from our enemies, sometimes its from situations we find ourselves that we can’t control and sometimes it’s from ourselves, our own short sightedness or selfishness or the consequences of our mistakes. Now kings and presidents and prime ministers, they all have body guards around them to protect them but you and I, we don’t have those sorts of body guards in that way. But that doesn’t mean that we still don’t need them sometimes. But in those times, when we need protection, often there’s not a body guard to be found.

In fact, in those difficult times, so often the people, who should be there for us, just aren’t. Now let me ask you, where do you turn to? Who do you turn to? Some would say God but the problem for many is well, you can’t see God. You can see your enemies, you can feel the fear, you can look at the calamities around you but, but how do you know that God is in that place and how do you know that He’ll protect you? See, if God is going to protect us in those times, we need to know it, but how?

It’s really hard you know when people plot against us. They talk behind our backs, they plan and they scheme. It is really hard when we’re in danger, when someone is looking to do us harm either physically or emotionally or to harm our reputation, whatever it might be, it’s really hard.

Over these last few days we’ve been looking at some promises that we can depend on, you and I. God’s promises and today, today I want to look at His promise of protection and I tell you, there are so many instances of this promise throughout His word but I want to look at them today through the eyes of a man called King David. We’ll see it as he experienced it, on the run for his life from his predecessor, King Saul. You know, David was anointed king while Saul was still king and Saul figured out that everyone was looking to David to be king so Saul tried to kill him and so David spent a long time on the run.

Now have a listen to what David writes about those dangerous years, you can read it actually in Psalm 18:

I love you Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer. My God is my rock in whom I take refuge. He’s my shield, He’s the horn in my salvation, He’s my stronghold. I call to the Lord who is worthy of praise and I am safe from my enemies. The cords of death entangle me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me, the snares of death confronted me but in my distress I called to the Lord, I cried to my God for help.

From His temple He heard my voice, my cry came before Him into His ears. The earth trembled and quaked and the foundations of the mountains shook and they trembled because He was angry. Smoke rose from His nostrils, consuming fire came from His mouth, burning coals blazed out of it. He parted the heavens and came down, dark clouds were under His feet, He mounted the cherubim and He flew and He soared on the wings of the wind.

He made darkness His covering, His canopy around Him, the dark rain clouds of the sky. At the brightness of His presence, clouds advanced with hail stones and bolts of lightening. The Lord thundered from heaven, the voice of the most high resounded. He shot arrows, He scattered the enemies, great bolts of lightening routed them. The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth lay bare at Your rebuke O Lord at the blast of the breathe from Your nostrils.

He reached down from on high and He took a hold of me, He drew me out of the deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes who were too strong for me. They confronted me in the day of my disaster but the Lord was my support. He brought me out into a spacious place; He rescued me because He delighted in me.

Beautiful isn’t it? Typical sort of Hebrew picture language; the Jews loved to speak in pictures. What’s David saying here? See, all the time he was on the run for his life and it strikes me where he talks about his enemies who were too powerful for him. And he says, “all the time I was on the run for my life God, You protected me.”

Now that’s something we don’t expect, Gods protection. See, He didn’t wrap David in cotton wool, He didn’t take David out of that situation, He didn’t smite Saul and kill him on day one. God did none of those things; what He did was He kept David safe and it’s the same thing with us.

What we expect is for God to instantaneously end the threat; for God, instantaneously to beam us out of that place; for God, instantaneously to save us from that situation but so often it’s not what He does. David was on the run for years, living in caves, always looking over his shoulder. God was teaching David through those times to rely on Him. They were important lessons for David because when David ultimately became king of Israel and had to fight large and powerful enemies who were much larger and much stronger than Him; David knew that his God would protect him. God taught him this in his own experience, He taught him to believe in this promise.

Have a listen to the promise of God. It comes from Deuteronomy chapter 33, verse 27:

The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you saying, “Destroy him!

So when people are looking to stab you and me in the back or to defame us or to get rid of us, can we trust God? Absolutely! That doesn’t mean that sometimes we’re don’t have to live through some pain, it doesn’t mean that sometimes we don’t have to get the sack or to take a step backwards or to go through terrible things. What it does mean is that it will turn out just fine even if Gods definition of “just fine” isn’t quite your definition or my definition. Have a listen again to this from Psalm 31, verse 20:

In the shelter of Your presence You hide us from human plots. You hold us safe under Your shelter from contentious tongues.

See there are promises like this all the way through Gods word:

In the shelter of Your presence You hide us from human plots.

People plot behind our backs sometimes; people have contentious tongues and speak about us behind our backs. All through Gods word you see God being the protector of the people who love Him and honour Him and sometimes really bad things happen, Jesus remember was nailed to a cross. Not particularly His first preference as we learn from His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. And so far as we know, each of the 12 disciples was martyred, the apostle Paul was martyred.

The point is that no matter what the outcome we can rely on Gods protection. Those men, those men are now with God; no if’s, no but’s, no maybe’s. You know what I’ve noticed; there is no shortage of people on this planet who want to do me harm. To criticize me, to pull me down, to tell me I’m wasting my time. Sometimes I get things right and sometimes I get things wrong but my God protects me, even if it hurts sometimes because of what other people are doing and saying.

God is our protector, His heart is to hold us close and to keep us safe and you know and I know that unless Jesus returns first, we’re going to die one day. We’re going to breath our last breathe, through sickness or disease or accident or murder, they’re all possibilities. In the mean time God is our protector, He will protect us if we put our faith in Him. The eternal God is your refuge, He is your strength, He is the place where you and I can take refuge and be safe according to His mighty plan for our lives.

This is a promise we can depend on!

One day … your time on this earth will be over. Then what? If God is God – how are you going to fare when you stand before Him? I mean how can you be certain that He will forgive you?

For such a long time you know, I poo hooed any notion that I needed God’s forgiveness. I mean, give me a break! If you’d asked me, back in those days, about what I thought on that whole subject, I would have given you quite a mouthful. But deep down, underneath that confident bravado I was running away from God. Now you stand back and you think that through and you realise how stupid it is to kind of run and hide from God, if God is who He says He is. I was running away because frankly, I just knew that the stuff I was into was plain wrong.

I was greedy, I was selfish, I wasn’t frankly a particularly nice person and then when I came face to face with this Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, my biggest concern was, well that I wasn’t good enough. And even after I accepted Him for who He is, I still, for a long time, would try and run away from Him because of the deep sense that I had, that I simple wasn’t deserving of His forgiveness.

Now I don’t know where you are in your life, maybe you’re where I used to be and if you are I completely understand. But, but let me encourage you just to join me over these next few minutes and let me share something with you about this forgiveness thing.

My hunch is that the sense that God wouldn’t or couldn’t possibly forgive me for what I’ve done is more widespread and prevalent than we might think or admit. Many people like me push it away and you try not to think about it but when I talk to people, who believe that there’s a God, and I ask them, “so what’s stopping you from living your life for Him? What’s stopping you from drawing close to Him?”

The answer that comes back, time and time again, is this sense that, “God wouldn’t forgive me. I’m not good enough!” Now it comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and forms in which people reply but you boil it down, what they believe is that they are simply not good enough for God. And you know, it goes for people who’ve believed in Him for years as well as for people who have been avoiding Him for years.

Lets just assume for a minute God is God, there is a heaven, there is a hell, sorry John Lennon but there is. And one day, you and I are going to stand before Him and have to give an account for our lives. How can we be certain that it will go well? If I asked you right now, as you live out your life day by day, how certain are you of that day, that eternal future? How would you answer? You know, most people are actually pretty uncertain. They might be able to verbalise the right response but deep down they’re not sure at all.

I want to take you to another of Gods unbreakable promises today. That’s what we’ve been looking at over this week and we’ll be looking at them again next week on the program. Promises that you and I can depend on because when we have those promises written on our hearts, it changes our lives. God is a dependable God and His promises are so important, particularly in the storms of life because Gods promises give us peace.

Now this particular promise we’re going to look at today begins at a really strange dinner. Some people refer to it as the Last Supper, you maybe familiar with it. It’s the night that Jesus was betrayed to be crucified and they celebrated, if you can use that word, the Passover meal with His 12 disciples. Jesus washed their feet and, have a listen. This comes from Matthews’s gospel, chapter 26, it begins at verse 26:

While they were eating Jesus took bread. He gave thanks and He broke it and He gave it to His disciples saying, “Take it and eat it. This is my body.” Then He took the cup, He gave thanks, He offered it to them saying, “Drink from it all of you. This is my blood, the blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not eat or drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father’s kingdom.

Of course that’s the first communion service, Christians the world over celebrate that regularly but pay particular attention to one thing He said:

This is my blood, the blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

What’s a covenant? It’s an unbreakable promise of God. When God makes a covenant with people He never, never breaks it. The wine, Jesus was saying, symbolised His blood being poured out which it was soon to be when He died on that cross not 24 hours later,”…for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

And then, you want an explanation of that? You go an have a look at the book of Acts, chapter 10, verse 43 which says that:

… everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.

You put those two together and there you have the unbreakable promise of God that, whoever believes that Jesus died for them, to pay for their sins, will be forgiven. EVERYONE who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name. Now that would be hard to believe if not for the blood which was poured out. Jesus also said:

No greater love has anyone than to lay down his life for his friend.

This unbreakable promise is born out of a love of God. The one thing, the barrier that separated us from God is removed, not just from Gods side but from ours. From Gods side, because He’s holy and perfect, because His perfection, His goodness, His love is, it’s so far beyond anything that we can attain and our sin keeps us from Him. And from our side, because our sense of guilt, our conscience keeps us from going to Him as it did me many years.

See God invented double sided book keeping, this is a double sided transaction, this “forgiveness” thing; God’s side and our side. You and I are forgiven, that means God lets us into His presence, that means that we can start living our lives as though we are, because we are.

What does that mean? It means absolute certainty, freedom, no more condemnation, no more guilt, an incredible joy. I have been forgiven by God not because of what I did, what I did led to me needing to be forgiven. I’ve been forgiven because I could never meet His standard of complete perfection but because I believe that His perfect Son, Jesus Christ, died and rose again to pay for my sin and give me life, I have been forgiven.

I am free, I have no guilt and you know, every time I stumble and fall, every time I fall short and I do, every time my pride or my ego or my selfishness gets the better of me, hopefully less now than they used to, I don’t have to live under condemnation. I go to God, I say, “God, I believe in Jesus. I ask for your forgiveness. I believe with all my heart Jesus died for me.”

The whole point of this double sided transaction of grace is that I’m not good enough, that’s the point, and this forgiveness is a promise that I can stand on, every moment of every day of my life. Do you see how liberating that is? Do you see how freeing that is? Man, it’s amazing, complete certainty. On that day that I stand before God, on that day when I look Him in the eye, in my heart I will know that I am forgiven. I will stand before Him as though I had never sinned in the first place, as though I had never rejected Him or rebelled against Him in the first place because I believe in Jesus. Why? Because Jesus gave me this unbreakable promise:

Whoever believes in Me (He said) will be saved.

That’s it – unbreakable!