Sometimes we get to a point in life – where we feel as though we’re under siege.  You know what I mean.  And when that happens, we can develop quite a destructive outlook.

It’s just great to be with you again this week with ‘A Different Perspective’. It seems that the faster that life gets, the more connected we become through technology, the more emotionally isolated we feel. So many options and choices and priorities and things to do but somehow deep down inside, you know where we live, the lonelier we become. It’s kind of a bizarre paradox, it’s as though the people and circumstances of life conspire around us to put our lives under siege.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not being paranoid, it’s just that somehow we get to a point in life where all of those things, even the good things, surround us and cut us off from the really important things, our sense of wellbeing, meaningful relationships. It’s like a siege; we’re cut off, ever felt like that? And when we’re under siege we develop a siege mentality.

The last few weeks on the program we’ve been looking at dealing with difficult people, looking at the faces and the masks that people put on. We’ve been looking at relationships but so far we’ve been focussing on the other guy, the other people. This week I’d like to look at the whole relationships thing from the other side, from our side, from the inside out.

So we’re going to do a bit of poking around inside and look at what happens to us in life when we end up under siege. You know what I mean, I mean life gets so busy or hectic or something gets difficult and we just feel like everything’s conspiring against us. It’s not always like that, but it can be going along a little bit like, you know, a toothache, it just starts off small and it gets bigger and all of a sudden it turns into a raging pain.

Well what is a siege? In the olden days as my children say, back in history, you know a thousand, two thousand years ago, a siege was when an army tried to attack a fortified city and if the city was so well fortified or so well sighted that it couldn’t be attacked, what the army would do is simply surround the city and if there was water running through, a creek or a river, they’d divert the water and they’d stop food from going in. And so weeks and months and even years would go by and the whole point is they couldn’t get through the defence of the city so they’d cut them off from food and water and starve them out, and it was kind of a stale mate starvation.

And the people in the city effectively had two options, they could stay there and starve and die, or they could break out and fight their way out and maybe die doing that. And it was a very difficult option because often these armies were so big that there was no way that they could break out, so the only other option they had was to surrender.

Now it wasn’t very pretty, I mean you can imagine being in a city under siege, the desperation, the sense of inevitable fate, the hunger, the fear, the brooding dread. Well, sound familiar? I mean it’s what happens when our lives end up under siege, and in fact I’d like to take you to a story, it’s a Biblical story that I believe truly happened. If you have a bible and you can go and grab it now or later, it’s in the book of Second Kings, Chapter 6. It’s a story of when a city called Samaria which is kind of north of Jerusalem was put under siege. Let me just share it with you.

Sometime later King Ben-Hadad of Aram mustered his entire army and he marched against Samaria and laid siege to it. As the siege continued famine in Samaria became so great that a donkey’s head was sold for 80 shekels of silver, and one forth of a cab of doves dung for 5 shekels of silver. Now, as the King of Israel was walking around on the city wall a woman cried out for him ‘help me my Lord King!’ And he said ‘no, let the Lord help you, how can I help you, from the threshing floor or from the wine press?’

The King asked her ‘what’s your complaint?’ and she answered, ‘this woman said to me give up your son we will eat him today and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we cooked my son and ate him and the next day I said to her give up your son and we’ll eat him but she has hidden her son.’ And when the king heard this, the words of the woman, he tore his clothes. Now since he was walking on the city wall the people could see that he had sack cloth in his body underneath, and he said, ‘so may God do to me and more if the head of Elisha the prophet stays on his shoulders today.’ So he dispatched a man from his presence.

Well you know sieges don’t get much worse in terms of sheer desperation and survival and basic instincts when mothers start killing and cooking and eating their sons. Awful stuff and you can see that the King who was supposed to be the leader didn’t react so particularly well.

Well that was a city back then, what about life now? When we’re under siege from all sorts of things, from people, from places, from priorities, from pressures, from being poor in time, what we do is we end up putting defences in place. I’ve recently been to a place where people have barbed wire around their houses, we do that emotionally, we protect ourselves.

And sometimes we don’t even realise we’re doing it, we push people away, we don’t really connect, we become superficial in our relationships, almost afraid to connect; with a quiet brooding and sometimes even a noisy sense of desperation, just surviving, just getting by, just living – only just. Come on, this is very common for a life to be under siege for all sorts of reasons, and if that’s maybe you or someone that you know it’s important that we recognise these symptoms.

So we have some choices, the first one is we can stay there and die. Now let me ask you how many years do you have left on this planet? Fifty? Twenty five? Ten? Two? One? Maybe six months, who knows? Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, life is there to be lived to the full and if we just stay in this daily tread mill with a life under siege day after day in quiet desperation, let me ask you something, is that really living?

The other choice is we can step out of the siege. In a siege, doing something about it looks to be a scary business but it’s really the only alternative to a status quo, what a decision. Let me ask you the hard question; is your life under siege? Are you just surviving, just getting by? With circumstances, or people, or work, or pressures cutting you off, am I just surviving?

The good news, the good news is that that is not Jesus’ plan for you. Jesus does not mean for it to be so, to be sure we go through seasons; we go through seasons that are kind of a wilderness experience. But Jesus doesn’t mean that life, the whole of life to be like that, that’s why he said, “I’ve come that you might have life in all of its abundance.”

They say for an alcoholic the single most important step is to admit that he or she is an alcoholic. And I just wonder whether with all the lives that are being lived right around the world with this sense of siege going on; with people who are made in God’s image who are not meant to be under siege, who are not meant to be suffering like that, I just wonder whether the first and the most important step isn’t to say. “I heard that joker on the radio the other day and that’s me he was talking about, that’s my life, my life is under siege.”

For the rest of this week on ‘A Different Perspective’ we’re going to have a look at what to do about it, but my prayer for you is that as you consider your life and your circumstances that you might identify the things that are causing your life to be under siege and go to Jesus and say. “You know something Lord, maybe it’s been a long time since I’ve prayed, maybe I don’t even know if you’re really there, but my life in under siege and right now, Lord Jesus, I need your help.”

When life’s not going along quite like we’d hoped it would be, we know exactly what to do – find someone to blame. Problem is that that whole blame game ends up robbing us of the solution to our problems.

Yesterday on the program we looked at the fact that sometimes we feel as though our lives are under siege. People or circumstances or just the break-neck speed of life means that part of us, that part of us that’s truly us, you know, deep down inside where we live, that part ends up being cut off from real relationships. And so its like life is holding us to ransom and the longer that siege continues the more desperate we become, we can end up developing a siege mentality, survival at all costs; and just forget about enjoying and living life, it’s just about getting by in a siege.

And as we sit in our bunker alone, we finally come to the conclusion that life stinks, and that’s great, that’s the first step, admitting that there’s something wrong. But then, then, instead of doing something constructive about it, we fall back on that tried and proven misery guts approach – finding someone to blame.

The blame game – life’s not going the way it should, you know, it must be someone’s fault, who can I blame? God or the government or my boss or my husband or wife or … humm… who else is there? The neighbour, the friend the work colleague, the tax system, the kids, the list is as long as our arms. There must be someone I can blame!

Yesterday on the program we looked at the siege of a city, we saw how quite sometime ago the city of Samaria, just north of Jerusalem was laid to siege by the Aramites, their army. And the whole point of a siege is when the army cant attack the city because its too well fortified what happens is the army surrounds the city, cuts off the water supply, cuts off the food supply and starves the people to death. And the King’s job is to be the leader, right, to set the example, to figure out what to do to fix the problem, what the King hears is a story of two women who’ve decided to kill their sons and to eat them. I mean can you imagine a siege doesn’t get much more desperate than killing and eating your children.

Have a look at what this stunning leader, the King, does to solve the problem. If you have a Bible it’s in the Old Testament, the book of 2 Kings, Chapter 6 and I’m reading from verse 30:

When the King heard the words of the women, (that’s the one who told him about eating the kids) he tore at his clothes. Now he was walking around the city wall at the time and all the people could see that he had sack cloth on his body which was a sign of being in morning. And he said, “So may God do to me and more if the head of Elisha the Prophet stays on his shoulders today.”

So he dispatched a man from his presence. Now Elisha, the prophet was sitting in his house and the Elders were sitting with him, and before the messenger arrived Elisha said to the Elders, “Are you aware that this murderer has sent someone to take my head off? When the messenger comes to see you, just shut the door and hold it closed against them. Is that not the sound of them coming?” While he was speaking to them the King came down to them and said, “This trouble is from the Lord why should I hope in God any longer?” Things are bad, mothers are cannibalising their children, the army is surrounding the city, people are starving to death and the King goes “I’m such a brilliant leader, I know what I know how I can fix this, I know, I’ve got it, I’ll blame God! What a strategy! Now that should do it, see, I’ve done it!”

When our lives are under siege we want to find someone or something to blame. Some of them are ridiculous, I mean blaming the weather or blaming a natural disaster or … those things, well, they’re ridiculous. Some of the things that we find to blame are justified. You know when we feel under siege because of our work pressures, maybe our boss is demanding too much, maybe we feel under siege because things aren’t going so well at home or we’ve got financial pressures, and so it may well be that someone or something directly has caused that.

And sometimes people do do things to mess up our lives, war and famine, and abuse, the past, our parents, our spouses. Those people do do things sometimes that put us under siege, absolutely. But let’s just get a revelation here, standing around blaming them isn’t, underline isn’t, going to make things better, “but I’m justified in blaming them,” well that may well be. The question I would ask is: does sitting there blaming them make things any better? Absolutely not! Underline not! In fact if anything playing the blame game can make things worse.

Now I know sometimes we’re justified in blaming people, it happens to all of us, the point that I’m making is that blaming people doesn’t solve the problem. We can become the perpetual victim, blame everything on everyone else and you know what that does? It stops us from taking responsibility for the things that we can do to make it better. It’s like an either or choice, I’ll get tied up in the blame game or I’ll actually just move on and do what I can about the situation to make things better.

Now we can’t always make everything better, we can’t always make things better when someone’s sick; you know its just one out of one people die. And maybe we have someone who’s dying of lung cancer because they smoked. And we can blame them for smoking but is it going to make anything better?

You think about a child growing up to become an adult, when a child is a child they’re responsible for almost nothing. Little children, we feed them we change their nappies, we put them to bed, we give them a roof, and as they grow up progressively the parents hand over, and the child assumes, more responsibility for themselves. Until ultimately, like my two boys who have grown up now, 26 and 24, they’re responsible for their lives, for earning an income for providing for themselves, its a transition. And as we go from childhood to adulthood we learn and we grow up as we take responsibility.

What comes out of your mouth when you’re life is under siege? Let me challenge you, do you play the blame game? And if you do is that blame game a substitute for you taking responsibility for the things that you can do to alleviate your suffering and the suffering of other people? This may be tough, this may be blunt but let me say if you are in that position it is time to grow up.

I made a decision a few years back that when my life was under pressure and under siege I was not going to criticise or blame or whinge or complain, I am not playing the blame game anymore. You know something? Life is unfair sometimes and yes it hurts sometimes, and if God lets me walk through those things I presume that he has me in that place for a purpose. God doesn’t cause all the bad things that happen in my life but sometimes he lets me, and sometimes he lets you have that wilderness experience to help us to learn something.

As for me, I would do whatever I can to make the situation better, even if I can’t do it all, because I serve a God who can do it all. The longer we whinge the longer God will keep us there, absolutely guaranteed. God talks a lot about character in His word, His heart is to see you and me grow up. His heart is to see us firstly learn to take responsibility for the things we can do, and secondly to trust in Him for the things that we can’t do.

What a God, and I would encourage you that if you feel that your life is under siege at the moment to bring that to God because He is in that space with you. As we’ll see tomorrow He will, underline will, get us out of it, if only we’ll let Him.

When we have problems in life – sometimes they loom so large, that they make God appear to be small – at least from where we’re standing. Surely God won’t help me?!

This week on the program we’re looking at our lives when we find ourselves under siege, you know, every way we turn we feel as though we’re cut off from really living life to the full. We’re surviving … just; we want to blame everyone else instead of actually doing something about whatever it is that’s causing us grief. And God, well God, He’ll help other people but, no not me, my problem is so big, it’s so real, it’s so impossible, no, no, God wouldn’t do anything about it. Well look I know that God in theory could do something about it I mean after all he is God, but in practice… no, on balance I really don’t think God’s going to show up.

Haven’t we all been down that road? Desperation when our life is under siege, when we’re dealing with one problem and maybe, maybe problems in life on multiple fronts. Maybe work’s not going well at the same time as this isn’t going well at the same time as we’re having money problems and kid problems and … And in that desperation those problems loom so large, they look like they’re bigger than God. In our head we know it’s not the case but in our hearts, where we believe, that’s where we perceive the problems to be bigger than God. It maybe an uncomfortable fact but in those times we can put more faith in the problem than we do in God. It’s true isn’t it?

Over the last couple of days on the program we’re been looking at a story from the Old Testament, 2 Kings, chapter 6 and 7. It’s about the siege of a city called Samaria just north of Jerusalem. And what happens in this siege is that the Aramite army comes and lays siege around the city and the siege is all about, well the Aramite army can’t break the defences of the city so they lay siege. They cut off the water, they cut off the food, they starve people out. And so food is so scarce it’s worth a fortune, women are killing their children and cannibalising them, the King has completely lost hope, everyone’s seen that the King has lost hope, the place is an absolute mess.

And Elisha is God’s man on the ground, he’s a prophet, he speaks for God and when the King comes and says, “I accuse God of this, this is God’s fault you know, God did this to me.” How often have we heard that? We’ve got to find someone to blame, Gods as good as any, he’s a big target, let’s blame God.

When the King comes to Elisha and says that, this is what Elisha says, “Hear the word of God today, tomorrow about this time in just twenty four hours a measure of choice meal will be sold for just a shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria. And the Captain who was with the King said to the prophet, “Come on, even if the Lord made windows in the sky could such a thing happen?” But Elisha said to him, “You know something, you’re going to see it with your own eyes but you will not eat from it.”

So here’s God’s man on the ground, this siege has been going on we don’t know how long but in the opening of that story in chapter 6 verse 24 of 2 Kings, we know that food was selling for an outrageous amount of money. We know that women were killing their children to eat them, we know that there was a desperate, desperate famine going on, and in the middle of all of that, when all is lost, God comes along and speaks into that situation through Elisha and says “in twenty four hours there’s going to be abundant food.”

Now that was completely and utterly impossible you understand. And in my experience when we feel under siege and we feel God coming along saying to us saying, “I’m going to deliver you from this siege,” His word always seems impossible. Because we’re people, we’re human, we’re focused on the problem, we’re focused on the need, we’re focused on the siege and we lose sight of the enormity of God’s love and grace and power. Isn’t that what we do?

When Jacqui and I were on our honeymoon a few years ago, we flew on a small plane over the Fiordlands on the South Island of New Zealand, beautiful, beautiful country but when we got to the airport they said, “Look you know, it’s going to be windy, a bit bumpy, do you still want to come?” And of course being the fool that I am I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course we’ll still go.” And so we got on this plane and about 100 feet off the ground it was so bumpy I thought, ‘what have we done’? And when we got up high I tell you what those mountains, those alps they looked so big and God looked so small.

The mountains that we were flying around or near were called the Remarkables and they’re not called that for no reason, they’re massive, they’re big rocky snow covered mountains. And we flew through such turbulence in this tiny little plane, when we were coming in to land it’s like you see in the movies sometimes from the cockpit of a plane in the old movies all you could see top, bottom, left and right out of the window of the plane was mountain. You couldn’t see sky, you couldn’t see ground, you could just see mountains so you lost your distance perspective, and I was sure we were going to crash into that mountain before we turned left to land.

I was absolutely certain, and in that moment, for me God somehow shrunk and became a whole bunch smaller than those mountains. I mean really did God lose His power to keep me safe right then? Did He lose His will to keep me safe? Of course He didn’t, it just felt like He did and that’s life, it’s hard in that siege, everything looks so impossible.

So we have a few choices at that point, we can sit there and grumble and complain like the King did and blame God and stay there and starve to death, in many respects you know that’s the easy option. We can try the self help program but so often we get involved in circumstances in life that we just can’t change by ourselves. Or we can take a mighty step forward to trust in God.

“But Berni, how do I trust in God when I’m scared, when the circumstances look too big?’’ That is a good question, and for me this is what happens. Sometimes when the circumstances look bigger than God I just believe with as much faith as I can, my faith isn’t perfect, in fact it’s not about how big my faith is it’s about how big my God is. Jesus said you only need a mustard seed of faith that was the smallest seed that those people knew of at the time, and that little mustard seed of faith can move mountains; even the Remarkables let me say.

And the second thing that I do, even though my faith isn’t complete and my faith isn’t perfect, is I walk out of my siege, even when I’m scared even when I’m afraid, I just take a step forward anyway. And what I’ve found is that when I do that, and God always shows up it grows my faith for next time, and next time I can believe in God a little bit more.

God isn’t looking for perfect faith; God is just looking for a heart that says, “Lord I believe you enough to take that first step in the direction you are telling me.” Faith someone once said is the opiate of the masses, not for me, for me following God in faith takes a lot of courage and some days we do it afraid and some days we do it scared but we do it anyway. What’s the alternative, stay there and die? Doesn’t matter how big the mountains are, doesn’t matter how big the siege is, doesn’t matter how big the problem is and how small our plane is, God doesn’t shrink when we’re facing a siege.

God doesn’t lose interest, God doesn’t get bored, God doesn’t wander off somewhere. Jesus said all you need is faith the size of a mustard seed and you can move mountains.

When things aren’t going so well in life – it’s one thing to believe that God has a good plan for us.  But it’s entirely another to step out and live life as though we believe that.  So what do we do when we’re afraid to trust?

When our lives are under siege one of the hardest things to do is to decide that life just isn’t meant to be like this and to step out and to trust God. A siege is when a city is surrounded by an army and they just wait until the people in the fortified city die of starvation. When our lives are under siege well, that’s a desperate time, we loose hope we blame everyone else, we just want to sit there and give up. But life isn’t meant to be like that and no matter who we are and how desperate our situation God is in that place with us and he has a future for us.

Sadly I have watched people; even people who profess to believe in Jesus Christ live their whole lives without ever taking that step of faith. Why? Because stepping out in faith, believing in God for an end to the siege is a scary thing to do. So people just sit there, what an incredible waste.

This week on ‘A Different Perspective’ we’ve been looking at what happens when our lives are under siege and in particular we’ve been looking at it through the story in the Old Testament in 2 Kings, the book called 2 Kings, Chapter 6 and 7, which is a story of how Samaria, a city just north of Jerusalem was laid to siege by the Aramite army and they were there so long that the people inside began to starve, it became so bad that the women cannibalised their children.

And the King completely lost the plot and instead of leading his people went to God’s prophet Elisha and blamed God, and the prophet said, “well you know something, here’s what’s going to happen, here’s what God is going to do. Just within twenty four hours there’ll be so much food you won’t believe how much food there’ll be.”

Now that must have been such an outrageous impossible claim that the prophet Elisha was making to the King, because I mean people were dying, people were starving, the problem was so big the Aramite army was so real. And at times like that we lose perspective, the problem looks much, much, much bigger than God, God looks quite small when we have a big problem. But God’s promise came through the prophet.

God’s promise was to do something, but you know when God does some miracles in our lives He always, always wants it to be a partnership. It’s kind of like when someone comes to us on our birthday and says I’ve got a present for you, they can hand the present to us but we have to take the present from them too, it’s a two sided transaction, and it’s the same with God doing amazing things in our lives, reaching out into our lives to solve our sieges, and fix our problems.

Sitting there grumbling ain’t going to do it, cannibalising our kids, ain’t going to do it, blaming God ain’t going to do it. God wants us to step out in faith and that’s a risky thing to do when we feel like we’re under siege as it was for Samaria who were surrounded by the Aramite army. The Samarian King was running around in ever decreasing circles but there were some lepers, some outcasts just outside the gate and I’m just going to read a small part of the story from chapter 7 beginning at verse 3 of 2 Kings. This is what is says:

There were four lepers outside the city gate who said to one another, ‘why are we going to sit here till we die, if we say we’ll go into the city there’s a famine in the city and we’ll die there, if we sit here we’ll die, so why don’t we desert to the Aramean camp, I mean if they spare our lives we’ll live and if they kill us well we’ll die maybe just a day or two earlier.’

So they got up at twilight and they walked out to the Aramean’s camp, but when they came to the edge of that camp there was no one there because God had caused the Aramean army to hear sounds of chariots and of horses, the sound of a great army so they said to one another the King of Israel has hired the King of the Hittites and the Kings of Egypt to fight against us so they fled away in the twilight and abandoned their tents, their horses, their donkeys, leaving the camp just as it was and fled for their lives. When these leprous men had come to the camp they went in to a tent and ate and drank and carried off silver and gold and clothing and went and hid them. They came back in another tent and carried out things more and they just plundered the camp.

This is a wonderful story because God had already gone ahead of them with a miracle. This was pragmatic desperation, this was, if we stay here we die, if we go into the city we die, if we walk out to the Aramites we’ve got a slim chance let’s do that. Imagine that walk, crunch, crunch, crunch, twilight, the fear, they had really a rotten choice but just sitting there was not going to do it for them. Here’s the ‘but’, God had already gone ahead of them with a miracle, God’s ready to do a miracle and half the time God’s already done a miracle but we have to walk into it. Sitting in the siege complaining and blaming God and blaming everyone else is not walking into a miracle.

I remember when I was training to be an officer in the Australian Army, we had an obstacle course that we used to do quite often and part of the obstacle course was a really narrow plank that we had to run up and then run along. And then there was a gap in the plank which was just wide enough that you couldn’t step over if, probably two or three inches too wide, the gap, so you had to actually jump, it was very much a leap of faith. Now it wasn’t very far down to the ground but I don’t like heights and so I never, never will forget the gap in the plank and the leap of faith every time I had to run over those planks.

Many a time I baulked at this stupid little gap, it’s what we do, we don’t want to take the step of faith, it’s hard, it’s scary. But God wants us to do exactly that because God has gone before us we’re His creation, we’re His workmanship and God has created us to walk into the things that He has already prepared for us beforehand to do. God goes ahead of us, God goes into the Aramean camp, God goes into the thing that is holding our lives to siege and does miracles.

Well how about it, what’s holding your life to siege? What’s robbing you of life, draining you of life, starving you of life? Are you just going to sit there? Are you just going to die? “But Berni I feel like …” Like what, a leper? Well Gods grace and God’s miracle is for lepers too. In fact God’s grace and God’s miracles are for lepers especially, ordinary people, ordinary men and women like you and me. “I feel, I feel, I feel, nothing …”

When we’re in a siege we have a choice, it’s a very stark choice, we can stay there, we can blame the rest of the world, we can starve and we can waste our lives or we can listen to God’s word and God has a good plan for your life, just like God has a good plan for my life even when sometimes my life is under siege. And impossible as it may seem, when God calls us to step out of that siege, as he may well be with you right now.

Maybe you’re in a difficult marriage, please don’t get me wrong I’m not saying walk away from the marriage by no means, but maybe you’re in a difficult marriage and God is calling you just to bless your marriage partner, to stop grumbling, stop complaining, stop arguing and just to bless them. Well you’ve a choice, you can keep blaming them or you can follow God’s leading and leave the rest to God.

As we step out, step by step by step all of a sudden we walk into what God is already doing, what God has already prepared for us, and we can walk into those miracles no matter how impossible they may seem. If it was easy faith wouldn’t be faith, but when we step out like those lepers what have we got to lose to walk into God’s miracles in our life?

When life hasn’t been going so well and we have a breakthrough – well that’s fantastic.  But the shine soon rubs off – unless of course we choose to share the blessing.

Don’t know if you’ve been able to join us during this week, but we’ve been looking on the program at what happens when our lives are under siege. You know its like everything around us is conspiring to rob us of life, we’re surviving but only just, we want to grumble and complain and give up hope. But the reality is that no matter how impossible it all looks, wait for it, God has already done the miracle.

He’s already done everything that needs doing to break the siege and He’s just waiting for us to trust Him enough to step out and walk into those miracles. Jesus came that you may have life and have it to the full, does that sound like a siege to you? No when we step out, as a good friend of mine, Barry Chant, keeps saying to me, we discover that God has already stepped in.

Over the last few days on the program we’ve been looking at a siege in a city called Samaria which is just north of the city of Jerusalem. This siege happened a few thousand years ago and it was just an amazing time, the Aramean army came and surrounded Samaria and they starved the people. This siege was so bad that women were cannibalising their children and the King completely lost the plot and he went to Elisha the prophet and went and blamed God and waved his arms and hands at him and the prophet said, “no you don’t understand, within twenty four hours there’ll be so much food in this city you won’t know what to do with it.”

What an impossible promise, when women were cannibalising children because there was so little food, for the prophet, for God’s man on the ground to say in just one day there’d be a heap of food here was impossible.

Well the King lost the plot, he didn’t do anything but whenever God does a miracle, God wants us to step out into that miracle, just sitting there complaining running round in ever decreasing circles isn’t going to do it. And what we saw yesterday on the program is there were a few lepers at the gate of Samaria and they were sitting there because they were outcasts, they couldn’t be in the city and they said, “well you know if we stay here we’re just going to die of starvation if we try and go back into the city we’re going to die in there because everyone’s starving, why don’t we walk out and defect to the Aramean’s, I mean, you know, what have we got to loose? We’re going to die anyway we might as well see if they’ll take us in and get some food.”

And they walk out to where the Aramean’s were camped laying siege and what they discovered was God had done a miracle, God had created sounds in the distance that sounded like another army and the Aramean’s fled because they thought that another army was coming. And so these lepers wandered around plundering the tents of the Aramean’s. I mean these people were so afraid they left everything, gold, silver, food, you name it they left it there and the lepers were wandering around plundering.

What a blessing for stepping out and you know when we step out in the middle of our siege and believe in God I have never been disappointed by Him, I have never been left alone by Him. It’s hard sometimes, I know, I have sieges in my life from time to time, we all do, no one’s exempt from this phenomenon because God uses those sieges and He uses those problems and He uses the adversaries that come against us, to help us to grow in maturity to trust in Him, it’s part of His plan.

So here are all these lepers the four of them out there plundering with an outrageous surplus and they know that back in the city people are still starving. I mean lepers were the lowest of low it wasn’t the King that went and stepped out into God’s blessing it was the lowest of the low.

Just ordinary guys, you and me, that’s how God works, we don’t have to be a high flyer, we don’t have to be some big name for God to do miracles in our life. And when we step out it takes so much courage sometimes to believe in Him, sometimes it’s easy to try our own self help program, but you know when it’s a big issue we can’t help ourselves, and in my walk with Jesus can I tell you truthfully? I have never, never been let down by God ever. But wait there’s more, see the blessing is great, the lepers were wandering around taking and plundering everything else but it’s even better when we share it round.

Let’s pick the story up that we were looking at over the last few days and these lepers have found all this gold and money and food and they’ve eaten, and drunk and carried off clothing. And this is what they say, they say, “What are we doing this is wrong this is the day of good news if we don’t say anything and we wait till the morning light we’ll be found guilty because someone will go and tell the King that this happened.”

So they came and called to the gate keepers of the city and told them, “we went to the Aramean camp but there was no one there nothing except the horses and the donkeys and all the food was there”. And the King found out and got up in the middle of the night and he said, “no this is an ambush. I don’t believe it they know we’re starving they want us to come out there.” But ultimately the people did go out there and they plundered the camp of the Aramean’s.

It’s funny you know sometimes God does a miracle in our lives and no one else wants to believe it; no one else really understands the miracle. But so often when God blesses us we maintain this me, me, me type mentality, wears out pretty quick, I mean true significance is when we bless other people, we’re wired in our DNA by God to do that, we’ve just forgotten somehow.

I was at a conference in South Africa of Christian Broadcasters recently and one of the first people I met was a man called Juan. Juan runs a radio station, he’s disabled, he’s in a wheelchair, but the man has a deep joy about him, he doesn’t even have full use of his hands he could sit at home and spend the rest of his life feeling sorry for himself, looking out the front window watching the world go by. But you see Juan bumped into God somewhere along the line and this gentle giant has a fire burning in his heart, does he keep it to himself? No against all the odds this guy shares the blessing around.

Was it easy? I mean it’s a faith step, he has a wife he has two young boys he has a disability and he blesses others. Come on, Juan isn’t some high flyer, he’s not one of the beautiful people, he’s an ordinary human being like you and me but with the odds stacked against him, and he chooses to step out of his siege and bless other people.

In a few weeks on ‘A Different Perspective’ we’re going to talk about true significance in life but I believe true significance is when we bless other people with the blessings that God has given to us. A siege is about when an army surrounds a city and starves it to death, and in life a siege is when we allow our circumstances or other people or some adversity to stop us from living life to the full.

The first step is to admit that that’s happening could be hard sometimes and to stop blaming everyone else for our problems. God’s promise is that he will bless us. God does amazing miracles to do that, we don’t have to have a huge amount of faith we just have to have the smallest modicum of faith. Just enough, like these lepers, to step out into the unknown, to go out and walk into the miracle that God is already doing. And when we do that when we get the blessing we take that like Juan and bless the others around us, what an economy, what a God.

Can I encourage you if you have things in your life that are stopping you from living life to the full, God is speaking to you today, and He plans not only to set you free from your siege but to use you to be a blessing to the people around you, that is awesome.