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.