I wonder if you can think of the most precious person in your life. Just picture their face. If that person, the one who means more to you than anyone else in your life, if that person were in trouble, what would you do? How would you react? YOU ARE PRECIOUS We all have someone or we’ve had someone in our lives who is more precious than anyone else. It’s probably a wife or a husband or a child or a friend or a mentor, everyone’s circumstances are different but of course if I asked you to picture the face of that person it would come to you in an instant, right? And if I asked you, how do you feel in your heart about that person then I’m sure that you’d tell me exactly how you feel. It could be that you love that precious person with all your heart. It could be that … that precious person has passed away and you miss them with all your heart. Or perhaps that precious person betrayed you and is with someone else now and all you feel is a sense of pain and loss and devastation when you think of him or her. Whatever your circumstance what I know is that … that precious person elicits a strong emotional response in your heart. That’s because they are or were precious to you and dear to you. Now you may not always have treated them the way you should have. That’s almost certainly true because none of us is perfect, I get that, you get that. But precious is precious. So imagine for a moment the response that God has to someone who’s precious to Him. Imagine what’s going on in God’s heart for someone who is precious to Him. It would completely dwarf anything that you and I could ever think or feel because the love that God has is infinitely greater than the love that you and I can ever have. Over the last few days on the program, we’ve spent some time examining grace. In fact, more specifically the grace intervention of God into the life of Israel when the nation as a whole was in a desperate place. A quick recap, through Moses and then Joshua God had brought Israel out of four and a half centuries of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and with honey, the land that He had promised to Abraham centuries before. Battle by battle they had to take it and He blessed them in the land and yet the nation of Israel rebelled against God. Despite all the good things that He’d given them they worshipped false gods so after many warnings through the Prophets of old God punished them. He allowed the Babylonians, the world’s super power of the day, to invade, destroy Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take the people into slavery, into captivity back to Babylon where they laboured under the burden of their sin, generation after generation for seventy years. But there came a point where God said, enough is enough. Let’s pick up the story, Isaiah chapter 43, verses 1 to 4. ‘But now,’ thus says the Lord, ‘he who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel, do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you, when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour’. ‘I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you because you are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you. I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life’. Now we’ve spent a bit of time lately on the program talking about the first three verses there. This is a major grace intervention, a bleak dark hopeless time for Israel. All they can pretty much remember is seventy years they’ve spent in slavery. All they can see is a future, a lifetime of slavery and exile. The consequences, as they’ve now come to understand, of their rebellion and sin against God. Sin always has consequences and yet seemingly out of nowhere, out of the blue, God shows up and does His ‘but now’ intervention. He completely turns the tables and tells Israel that He’s already redeemed them which incidentally is what He’s already done for thee and me even though our circumstances, like theirs, won’t always immediately reflect the fact. You have to ask yourself, ‘Why?’ You see they deserve the punishment of God, they were getting their just deserts and then this, why did He do this? Well in that passage I’ve just read to you He tells us why, did you pick it up? It was towards the end, verse 4 of Isaiah chapter 43. He says: Because you are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you. That’s why. Because when God looks at His people they are precious in His sight. Listen to me, God loves all people. But those who belong to Him, those in this day and age who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour are special, they’re different, why? Because they’re precious in His sight and honoured and He loves them, that’s why. Do you believe in Jesus? Have you accepted Jesus as your Saviour? The one who redeems you from the pit, the one who plucks you from the precipice and gives you a new life, have you? If the answer is yes know that He has a plan and a future for you because you are precious in His sight and honoured and He loves you. Each one of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, each one of us deserves the exile from God and the slavery to sin that we, by our own hand, have bought down upon our lives, each one of us. And yet in Jesus, through Jesus, because of Jesus the grace of God has instead fallen on our lives. Change doesn’t happen in our lives by working harder. We don’t get rid of the sin in our lives by trying harder because nothing that you or I can do can set us free from the exile and slavery occasioned by our sin anymore than the Israelites could have fought the world’s super power Babylon to set themselves free from the slavery occasioned by their sin. Change happens, transformation begins, freedom starts to take hold in our lives when we take grasp of the free, unmerited favour of God, the grace that we have in Jesus Christ. When we become so thankful for what Jesus has done for us on that cross the Holy Spirit changes our lives. It’s a grace transformation, not hard labour. And it was always meant to be. To be perfectly honest with you, I love my job because I get to share this good news with you each and every day here on the program and it is good news, right? The sin that’s ruining your life at the moment, Jesus came to take it away. Listen to this Scripture, Romans chapter 6 verse 14. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under the law but under grace. What did God say there through Paul the Apostle in His Word? That sin no longer has any dominion over you. It no longer has any power or influence over you. Why? Because no longer are you called to hard labour in trying to keep a bunch of rules, the guilt of failure is gone because you are now no longer under a law but under grace. Hard labour doesn’t work. It never has and never will. So if you’re into hard labour, if you’re into trying to be a better person, if you’re on some self-help kick at the moment, stop it, it will always end up in failure. The only thing that makes a difference is Jesus. The freedom you’re looking for from the burden of your sin is found in Christ and Christ alone. Come to me, (He said) all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11: 2...

Released on 15 Aug 2022