A Different Perspective Official Podcast

You know – when we're travelling through one of life's dark patches, it's so easy for someone else to say – "Well, just take the problem to God."  But there's only one way to find out if that's good advice. Suck it and see.
Over these last few days on the program we've been looking at those dark patches in life, those times that we all travel through that we'd rather not and we've been sharing in some of the experiences of King David who had more than his share of dark times in life and as he writes about that in Psalm 34, looking back on what he's leaned in those times, he makes this simple yet profound statement:
I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.
And maybe, maybe you've been travelling through one of those dark times and you hear what David has to say and perhaps you've heard the little that I've shared of my own darkness's and you think to yourself, "Well that's okay for someone like David or for that guy on the radio. Maybe God would show up for them but I don't think this stuff is for me." Well here's the rub; unless we seek we never find out whether it is or not and so today I want to share a very specific invitation from God, an invitation that is seriously for you.
This week on the program we've been looking at some of the debilitating darkness's we travel through in life, you know those really tough times when we're hurting or we've lost something or someone's hurt us. You know those dark times in life and we've discovered that God is very much in the "light" business, He's in the business of shining His light into our darkness's, taking our fear and replacing it with His radiance. Perhaps that's why King David writes – it's in Psalm 18, verse 28:
It is you O Lord who lights my lamp. The Lord my God lights up my darkness.
And again in Psalm 139, verses 11 and 12. He writes:
If I say, 'Surely the darkness will hide me and the light will become night around me', even the darkness will not be dark to you O God. The night will shine like day for darkness is as light to you.
See, you get this impression that David is an incredibly seasoned traveller through the darkness's of life and we know that he spent years on the run from King Saul who was trying to kill him, we know that David went through so many wars and battles where he could have died and where he would have been afraid and the people grumbled and sometimes turned against him.
He's been through dark places and then some and he's learned some stuff that God would have us learn, each in our own way because you're not David, I'm not David. So let's head back to this psalm that we've been looking at, Psalm 34, verses 7 and 8 just to see what it is that David learned. This is what he writes, he says:
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.
Now there are two things in here that we need to get into. The first is that bit about the angel of the Lord, look at verse 7 again:
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them.
Angels have a bit of a funny symbology these days in our society, we stick them on our cards and they're fluffy little creatures with wings but you just take a short study of the angels that God describes in the Bible and what you discover is they are a fearsome lot.
Often God uses them as messengers and He sends them to talk to someone and invariably when an angel confronts a person the very first thing they say is, "Don't be afraid." And then they deliver a specific message to Gods people to protect them from trouble and often they appear as fearsome beings to protect Gods people. I'm going to read you a little passage from 2 Chronicles chapter 32, verse 20. It says this:
King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz cried out in prayer to heaven about this and the Lord sent an angel who annihilated all the fighting men and the leaders and the officers in the camp of the Assyrian king. So he withdrew to his own land in disgrace and he went to the temple of his god and some of his sons cut him down with a sword.
See, get it? This angel equals serious protection. You see presidents and prime ministers and kings and queens, they get around with their bullet proof glass cars and they're security contingents. They got nothing on an angel of the Lord and you might say, "Berni, do you seriously believe in angels?" Absolutely! We can't see them but when we fear God, when we reverence Him and we belong to Him, He sends His angels, listen to what David says:
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.
He sends His angels literally to lay siege around us to protect us. How does David know that? Because he's experienced it and that's exactly what he says in the next verse. He says:
Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.
This is an often quoted scripture and often out of context, this "taste and see", "suck it and see" scripture. When you're in the darkness, when you're afraid try this thing, this thing that David is talking about. It's like an invitation to you and me from God today. For goodness sake taste and see that the Lord is good. You can stand back in your darkness and say, "Well you know I just don't believe that God's going to do anything for me."
David said, "I turned to the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all his fears and now He is giving us the invitation of God." Go on, taste and see for yourself that the Lord is good. You will be blessed when you take refuge in Him. "Come on try it!" I can hear the spirit of God saying through His word today. "Come on try it because when you take refuge in Me you will be blessed", is what God's saying.
I don't know about you but God has seriously spoken to me and I encourage you to take Him at His word today. He is in the light business and it's something that David discovered through long hard experiences in darkness. You know the last thing we want to do is to turn to God. "Taste and see that the Lord is good", He is in the light business and David knew that and David travelled through dark times and he cried out to God and God always delivered him and that's why he comes out the other side of that singing Gods praises specifically for you and me to hear.
I will bless the Lord at all times (he sings), His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in God; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Come and glorify God with me; let's exalt His name together. I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. When we look on Him our faces are radiant; never covered in shame.
This poor man called and the Lord heard Him and He saved him from all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. (Come on) Taste and see that the Lord is good for blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him."
I want to encourage you to join me in taking God at His word. If you're going through a dark time at the moment, cry out to God, go and see Him and He will answer and maybe one day you'll be travelling through a dark time and the Holy Spirit will just remind you of what you heard today. You see it's no coincidence that you and I are together today. When He does, follow that call, open your heart.
I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.

Mostly – we think of fear as being a bad thing.  And often it is.  But it's also a protection mechanism.  And "good fear" if I can call it that – helps us to make good choices. So – exactly how does that work?
Fear is a funny thing, mostly we think of it as a negative thing. None of us wants to be afraid, I mean who wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "Gee, I hope I get to be afraid today?" No, fear is something we don't look forward to but fear is one of those funny emotions that also helps to protect us.
We've all seen a little child who will chase a football out onto the street without any sense of the fear about what might happen if a car or a truck or a bus happened to want to occupy that very same piece of real estate just at the time that they're there.
An adult on the other hand has learned a healthy fear of that and so we hopefully would have a good look before we ran out onto the street. Well that makes sense, the same is true when, of most things that are dangerous, an adult has a healthy sense of fear. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be a respect for the consequences and so that acts, in effect, as a protection mechanism. So as it turns out there is a right and good sense of fear in life, so how does that apply to our relationship with God?
This week on the program we're taking a bit of a look at the dark times we travel through in life sometimes and we've all had them. Sadness, loss, pain, you can look back and say, "Yep! That was one of those dark times." Maybe you're even in one of those times at the moment and we've spent some time with a man, King David of Israel that had more than his fair share of those dark times and I guess because he was a man with a close relationship to God, he learns some things about God and about that relationship in those dark times.
He shares a bit of that in Psalm 34 which we're having a bit of a poke around this week. Psalm 34 is written with the benefit of hindsight, looking back at some dark times, the fearful times and rejoicing because what David discovers is that God was faithful to him in those difficult times, hopefully that sets a bit of the scene. Now let me read to you the first bit of the psalm right now, Psalm 34 beginning at verse 1:
I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me, lets exalt His name together because I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered in shame.
This poor man called and the Lord heard him; He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.
Today I want to take a bit of a look at this fear element. It's a word that David uses twice in that short passage. Now I hate being afraid, I'm sure you're the same. I remember when I was in the army and we would be repelling out of helicopters or going over high things on obstacle courses. I have a fear of heights, I just don't like them, I had the opportunity to go parachuting once, I said, "you've got to be kidding me! I am not jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane." And as I said the other day, fear is what happens in those dark times too.
In a broken marriage there's a fear of the future, there's a financial fear. In retrenchment there's a fear, will I ever get another job and we can lose hope? Fear is a big part of that, it kind of, well it immobilises us and obviously the times that David had been through he'd experienced that same fear that you and I do. Psalm 34, verse 4:
I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears.
In a sense that fear is a bad fear, that's the fear that God wants to deliver us from. We talked about that yesterday on the program and I can't tell you the number of times that, that I've been immobilised by that sort of fear and I've gone to God and just cried out to Him and He fills me with a peace that defies any human comprehension.
Now I'm not someone who naturally gets afraid, I'm a fairly positive person 99.9% of the time but we all need God in those dark places with us to deliver us from that sort of fear but it's the other mention of fear in this little passage that I'd like to spend a few moments focusing on.
You see this is one of the good fears that I was talking about at the beginning of our time together today. It's in verse 7 of Psalm 34, it says:
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.
You see, this is talking about the fear of God. Now it's easy to see this as one of those bad fears, "oh God is just this old grumpy old man with a big stick and a bunch of rules and old fashioned rule based religion. They start talking to me about the fear of God, see I knew I didn't need that sort of religion in my life," but that's not what it means. The fear of God or the fear of the Lord is quite different. Proverbs chapter 1, verse 7 says:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
See the word fear means two things, the first is the obvious meaning, 'to be petrified; to be afraid' it's the meaning we know well, terror. The second, the second is respect and reverence. You see my Dad when I was growing up, I had both of those fears for him. I knew that if I did something really bad, when he came home from work I'd get a belting. There were consequences.
Now that's just the way it was but at the same time I respected him and he's passed away now but as I look back my greatest emotion is that one of respect and yes he did punish me sometimes and that's what happened but I didn't wander around all day in terror, it was a sense, a healthy sense of respect and knowing that if I crossed him, there were consequences and it's the same with God.
That's what the fear of the Lord means. You know something; if you and I reject God, if we spend the rest of our lives walking against him, one day there will be a day of judgement and one day there will be hell to pay for that. That's that kind of fear but the other part of that fear is to have respect and a reverence, a right view of God. Yes He is my friend and He is my saviour but He's also a God who's powerful and mighty and awesome and sovereign.
Love and respect go together and when we have that right relationship with Him, when we get Him in His rightful place in our lives something starts to happen. This is what David says in Psalm 34:
God delivers us from our fears; He protects us.
And Solomon in Proverbs chapter 1 that I just read before, He gives us wisdom:
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him.
God protects us when we honour Him, when we respect Him and I want to encourage you to do something. In the dark times we travel through sometimes we just get tempted to behave badly. Sometimes we just say, "well God's not in that place and I'm just going to walk my other way", I want to encourage you in your dark time to fear God for "the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him."
And you know something; He delivers them.

When life is really tough and when you've lost hope and you're afraid – you can either lie there, completely immobilised – or you can take a really simple, obvious step. Question is – in which direction?
We all have choices in life. Sometimes we make good choices, more often than not those good choices have good outcomes and we can all look back and see some of the bad choices we've made and the consequences of those choices but you know the hardest choices to make are the ones we make in the dark. You know, in those dark times, the difficult times, the times when we're hurting so bad that our sense of balance and right and wrong and up and down is all out of kilter.
The whole thing about that sort of darkness is that we can't see forward, we can't see back and it's such a difficult place to be. Well today, today we're going to look at a choice that we can make in those dark times that is always the right choice. When everything else has failed, when we don't quite know which way to turn, when even the good choices we made before now don't seem to hold any promise, there's one choice that we can make that always, always pays off.
To look at that choice we're going to spend some time over the coming days with a man who had more of those dark times than most of us and he wrote a lot about it. The one place we're going to go is to take a look at what he learned and he records that in Psalm 34. It's an interesting psalm, it comes out of King David's life and it's his praise for deliverance from a time of trouble. So it's a psalm written, if you like, with the benefit of hindsight.
David's been in a tough dark place and his learned something, he's learned something about God in a dark time. Now we're not quite sure when that time was, the introduction to the psalm says:
A psalm of David when he feigned madness before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away.
Now we don't have any other historical information about that situation. Abimelech was a judge, a leader of Israel, Gideon's son.
The fact that we don't have the exact historical details however doesn't really matter. The fact that David had to engage in this deception tells us that it was a fearful time, it was a scary time, it was a time when he needed to escape. Now let's have a listen to the first part of this psalm as David reflects on that dark time, it's Psalm 34, verses 1-8. This is what he writes:
I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips, my soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look at Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor man called and the Lord heard him, He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see, the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.
See David is looking back on some hard times and he starts out by praising God for His faithfulness with the specific purpose of letting the rest of us know that God is faithful in the dark times. With a specific purpose, of us who are afflicted, being able to hear this and rejoice. This psalm was written for you and for me:
My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice.
You see David's saying here, "You know why I'm writing this psalm? It's for you, if you're afflicted, if you're travelling through a dark and fearful time, you know what? Come and look at what God did for me."
Glorify the Lord with me (says David) let us exalt His name together.
In other words, so that you and I can rejoice together in our dark times we're getting the benefit of what David discovered in his darkness, in his fearful times and what he discovered is as profound as it is simple. Look at verse 4:
I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears.
Darkness and fear seem to immobilise us. Fear somehow stops us dead in our tracks, we just kind of sit there and we ache, and fear eats away at our hearts kind of like a quick spreading cancer and in that fear. Remember David was, as he had been many times before, in fear of his life. This was real fear, let me say it this way; deadly fear and in the midst of his deadly fear, he did the thing that he had learned to do over and over and over again all those times in his life when he'd been in danger.
When he was on the run from King Saul for all those years he sought the Lord, he cried out to God, he said, "God, help!" The one thing we can forget to do when we're frozen by fear is to do exactly that, to seek God, to cry out to God and what a surprise; God answered him and delivered him from all his fears.
I don't know about you but I can relate to that, in life and in ministry I come up against giants of opposition all the time and can I tell you, some days they scare me, seriously scare me and we have a choice; we can sit there and tremble in fear, we can be completely immobilised or we can spend time with God crying out to Him in prayer, reading His word, listening to Him and He always delivers me from my fears. David goes on to say this in verses 5 and 6 of that Psalm:
Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called and the Lord heard him, he saved him out of all his troubles.
There it is, there's that "light" word; radiance:
Those who look to Him are radiant.
The Hebrew word that sits behind our English translation means literally "to beam" or "to burn with light". It's an over the top kind of word, it's not a glow or a flicker or just to shine but to beam and to burn with light.
Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
See in those dark times we're down cast, we're in a sense ashamed if you like but David states this incredibly simple truth. He said:
This poor man called and the Lord heard me. He saved me out of all my troubles. (He delivered me from all my fears)
This is such a humble and beautiful picture isn't it? David, possibly the greatest king that Israel ever had, saw himself just as some poor man who cried out to God.
Don't you love how the Bible is packed full of this, this real life stuff, this stuff that's right down where we are? The word of God meant for us, here and now right where the rubber hits the road. Light, radiance in our darkness and in our fear and all this out of a simple step that David took, so simple and yet when we fear for our lives, so difficult.
I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.

When you're travelling through those dark patches in life – as we all do – the most important thing you need to know is that God is in the Light business – and He's right there in that dark place with you!
You may hear me talk about the stars in the sky from time to time and that's because they just fascinate me. There are so many and they're so huge and so far away, the universe is utterly incredible. The scientists tell us they estimate that there are at least a trillion, trillion stars, well what does that mean?
Lets just start with a billion, do you know how long it would take to count to a billion, once each second; one, two, three. Well a billion seconds is 31 years, 251 days, 7 hours and 48 minutes. That's a billion.
Now a trillion is a thousand billion, that means that a trillion seconds is a thousand times as long. That makes a trillion seconds, 31,688 years, 32 days and few hours. Isn't that incredible? And that is just one trillion. Now a trillion times that 31,688 years and 32 days and a few hours which would make it a trillion, trillion, seconds is just an inconceivable length of time isn't it? And I'm just talking humble little ticks of a clock – seconds.
But now look out at the universe and consider there are a trillion, trillion stars out there at least, massive balls of fire and they're just the ones we know about.
You can tell I love astronomy and mathematics can't you, so why this dissertation on astro-physics? Well simply this; this week we're taking a look at the dark patches we can go through in life, the difficult times, the times of depression or fear or loss or loneliness or financial crisis or retrenchment or broken relationships or sickness. That list that is seemingly endless in life and when we go through those darkness's they are so dark aren't they? If God is God, where is He in those dark times, huh? Exactly where is He?
This series of programs is called, "Dark Night, Bright Light" and today, today I just want to establish that no matter how dark the darkness gets, God is in the "light" business. I'm just going to read you the first 5 verses of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. It's the beginning; this is what it says:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light and God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light 'day' and the darkness He called 'night' and there was evening and there was morning. That was the first day.
Now I might hear you say, "Well Berni that's well and good; you're talking about physical light here, that's fine but what about God shining His light into the darkness in my life?" We're going to talk about that shortly, the point that I'm making is this; creation tells us something about the Creator.
You and I create different things because we're different. You might be artistic, you might be able to draw or to paint and so given the opportunity to be creative, you'd produce this stunning picture. Ha, I can't draw for peanuts. You might be really good with your hands, maybe building things or maybe crafting things. Well I have ten thumbs when it comes to that. So what we create tells us something about who we are, it's the same deal with God. You look at what He creates and it tells you something about who He is.
In fact it's interesting to look at the order in which He creates, this God, and the first thing He creates, the very first thing is light because it was dark. That tells us something about God but what a light. We just think of the sun but that sun, as I said in the beginning of the program, is just one of an estimated trillion, trillion stars. In the greatest understatement in the Bible Moses writes in Genesis chapter 1, verse 16:
God made two great lights; the greater was to govern the day, the lesser was to govern the night. He also made the stars.
Ha, also made the stars. God is seriously into light and it tells us something about who He is and when you look at Him shining light into our lives there are so many references throughout the Bible about Him wanting to do that. I'm just going to look at 3 very briefly right now. The first is Ezekiel chapter 10 in verse 4:
Then the glory of the Lord rose up from above the cherubim and moved to the threshold of the temple and the cloud filled the temple and the court was full of the radiance of the glory of God.
Isaiah, in chapter 60 verse 19 says:
The sun will no more be your light by day nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you at night for the Lord will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory.
And perhaps my favourite of all where Paul seems to bring it all together in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 6. He says:
For its the very same God who said "Let light shine out of darkness" that made His light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Can you see why I've called this little series, "Dark Night, Bright Light". Over these coming days I believe we're going to be transformed by Gods word about darkness and light.
I'm going to share with you again from my darkness; you know in life we all have them. Thirteen years ago I had a major one; I lost everything that was dear to me. I guess in life we end up with one or two or three major ones but then we have other smaller ones along the way that don't feel that small when we're going through them. Real pressure at work, it gets us down or interest rates go up and we can't afford our houses anymore and we have to sell.
You know all that stuff. And every time I have been through one of those darkness's, every time when I've turned to Jesus and poured my heart out to Him, His gentle light has began to glow in my heart. The longer things went on because we have to travel through that stuff, the darker it became out there the more brightly His love and His joy and His peace would shine in my life.
The sun will be no more your light by day nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you by night for the Lord will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory.
Light is such a wonderful way to describe what happens when we turn to God in our darkness. I can't find any other word to put it than "light"; a warmth and a brilliance and a radiance that shines in our lives. If you've just been through darkness, if you're going through one right now, if you're going to go through one in the future the word of God is going to shine a light into that place. Dark Night, Bright Light.

When you're travelling through those dark patches in life – what you discover so often is that you're afraid of the dark.  Fear is a big deal in hard times.  And each one of us needs to know what to do about it.
We're starting a new series of messages on the program this week, a series that I've called, "Dark Night, Bright Light". I wonder what the word dark or darkness means to you? Darkness has all sorts of connotations when we apply it to our own lives. I remember when I was a young boy, even probably well into my teenage years, I was truly afraid of the dark.
At night after dinner in the dining room in the house where we lived it was what seemed like a long corridor to my bedroom, it was only 8 or 9 metres but when the corridor was dark, I tell you, it was a long scary way and I was afraid to walk from the light dining room into that dark corridor to my dark bedroom.
Now we were blessed because there was a light switch at either end of the corridor, at the dining room end and at the end where my bedroom was and I always, always used that light switch. Now don't get me wrong, we lived in a safe part of town and the house was secure so there was no logical or rational reason to be afraid of the dark, I just was and it was a very real fear.
It seems that darkness and fear often go together in life. Whether we're young or old the truth be known we actually need both, light and dark in this world. I love it when the sun goes down and it's time to go to sleep and again, when the sun comes up in the morning and it's time to get on with life. It's a pattern we live by, it's a cadence, a pattern of life but imagine if it were only ever dark how awful that would be. In some countries of course, far north and far south, there are many months of darkness in winter.
In life, darkness and fear, well they seem to be such common bedfellows. I guess that's because in the dark we can't see what's coming at us. I remember once when I was in the army and we were on exercise in a rainforest and the canopy of this rainforest was so incredibly thick that it was pitch black at night, you couldn't even see your hand 6 inches in front of your face. And in that sort of darkness you can't see what's coming at you, you can't see where you're going so darkness is a scary place sometimes.
Now let's take a look at our own lives. We can look back on the dark times, those periods that we'd rather forget, maybe a broken relationship or sickness or the death of a loved one, real financial difficulties. Maybe you've been through a war and you've seen people killed or you've been in prison. Perhaps you've seen everything you worked for so hard over so many years just go down the drain or someone's hurt you incredibly deeply, someone you trusted.
Perhaps you've been through a time of depression or real loneliness or working so hard you just don't feel that you have a life. The list just goes on and on and on, life has its dark times doesn't it? Maybe you're going through one right now, maybe, who knows, there's one right around the next corner or next year or the year after that.
Dark times, well they're like part of a fabric of our lives as much as we'd rather they weren't there and that's why we're kicking off this little series over the next couple of weeks called, "Dark Night, Bright Light" because light is the opposite of darkness and when we're travelling through those dark times, light is the very thing we need. The problem is it can be so hard to find, so hard to believe in or hope for.
You might only experience in those dark times, those lonely times, those times where I felt betrayed, the times of deep distress, it's a fear that's debilitating. It's like you don't even have the strength to lift up your head and look towards God. And hope. Well, when we lose hope it's a devastating thing because there's no sense of there being a future.
I once read a book about a holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel and he makes the point so powerfully when he recalls an experience from the concentration camp. Have a listen to what he writes:
The prisoner who has lost faith in the future, his future was doomed. With his loss of belief in his future he also lost his spiritual hold. He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment, not for ourselves which would have been pointless but for our friends.
Usually it began with a prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash and to go out on the parade ground. No entreaties, not blows, no threats had any affect; he just lay there hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness he refused to be taken to the sick bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up, there he remained lying in his own excrement and nothing bothered him anymore.
It's extreme but you recognise it, it happens to all of us sometimes. We give up, we have this sense that there's no future, no hope, just darkness, just the same. Why have we spent so much time describing the darkness today? I guess for me it helps to put words around it, it helps to describe what it is because this is something that we can all relate to.
Somehow we think it's just us but actually everyone goes through dark periods in their life, everyone. I have and you have and there are some real dark ones and then there are some that aren't quite so deep but they still rob us of the joy of living.
Tomorrow what we're going to see is that God, God is in the light business. Today I just want to share one passage with you from His word, the Old Testament book of Isaiah chapter 9 and verse 2:
The people walking in the darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
If you're walking in darkness at the moment I have a message for you from God, He plans to shine a light into that place. I remember the darkest days of my life, 13 years ago now, when I was completely alone. The darkness gets so inky black; the hole is so deep you can't imagine how you could possibly survive.
In the middle of all that a man, a pastor, a man called Ted Keating shared a message of Gods hope with me just the way I'm sharing with you today and from that little message I turned around and gave my life to Jesus and in the midst of that darkness a light began to shine, a light that was so bright, so warm. Later, later I discovered that Jesus once said:
I am the light of the world.
Well, He got that right; just the way Isaiah puts it:
The people walking in the darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.