Every now and then, God calls us to do something that’s totally counterintuitive. Something we wouldn’t do, if we weren’t listening to God. In fact, the more we listen to Him, the more we hear Him calling us to do things that are, frankly, downright risky and scary sometimes.

Hey, have you ever felt God asking you to do something that's so radical, so counter intuitive that you think you're going mad? Hey, I have on more than one occasion and as I speak with great men and women of God, as I interview them, as I get to know some of the giants of the faith that I go to Church with, I work with, here's what I've discovered listening to their stories.

The more open we are to God, the more time we spend in prayer, the more we take God’s Word to heart as though it's true and as though it's actually meant for us the more God asks us to do crazy things. I have a friend who against every personal desire and aspiration that he had for himself and his family moved sheer across to the other side of the world to take on a job for four years that God had called him to do.

Now most days were a struggle, most days he was homesick, most days he didn't really understand why God had called him to be in that place. But four years on as he was heading back home again, can I tell you the impact that his presence and his skills and his wisdom and his insight and his energy and his persona has had, not just on the organisation that he worked with but in the lives of thousands and thousands of people the organisation ministers to, it's been enormous.

The more we listen to God the more we're finding Him asking us to do crazy things, radical things, things we wouldn't consider doing if it was left up to us and that's exactly what happened to Noah. We're looking today again at faith in this series that I've called, "By Faith". That's a phrase that you find a lot throughout the Bible and nowhere more so than in the New Testament Book of Hebrews chapter 11.

It's a chapter that talks all about faith, the sort of faith we need to make it through the trials and the temptations of life. The sort of faith we need to see the big picture, to get life into perspective. The sort of faith we need to please God because without faith, without the assurance of things hoped for and the rock solid evidence of faith in our hearts of things we can't see it's completely impossible to please God.

Now, I want you to put yourself for a minute in Noah's shoes. You're living a happy life, okay the world around you is corrupt but hey there's nothing new or surprising about that.

You, your wife, your family, living a great little life and God says to you, "Hey Noah, I know you live miles and miles and miles away from the nearest ocean or lake but I want you to build a honking great big boat, a big sucker, we're going to call it an ark because I am going to flood the world, I'm going to kill everyone and you and your family and two of every species of animal are going to be the only ones that survive. So get to it, start to build the boat.

Now, you and I know what happened, we know how the story turns out but Noah, poor old Noah had none of the benefits of 20/20 hindsight that you and I have. He didn't even have a Bible that he could believe through, he'd never heard of Jesus. All he knew is that God came along and told him to build a boat in the middle of nowhere. I mean talk about feeling stupid.

Imagine going home to the little missus that night, she asks you, "Hey Noah, how was work? Well, I was chatting with God and we've come up with this great plan. We are going to build a boat, a big one, an ark." And she says, "Are you crazy? A boat?"

And not just the little missus imagine what the neighbours had to say. "Hey, have you seen what Noah's up to, he's really flipped his lid this time, he's building – wait for this – an ark." Nah, not even Noah's that crazy. Yeah really, he's building an ark three hundred cubits long. The laughter, the ridicule that must have gone down at the local pub each night as Noah and his sons built that ark.

What does God tell us in Hebrews 11 about this? What's Gods summation of Noah's craziness in verse 7 of Hebrews 11?

By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen respected the warning and built an ark to save his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir to the righteousness that is in accordance with faith.

What Noah needed to do, this extreme thing, was extreme faith and it yielded extreme results.

I've had times in my life when Gods called me to do the craziest things, Berni leave your secure, high paying consulting job and get involved in this media ministry that stopped doing what it's meant to be doing, it's almost broke and it's ready to shut it's doors. Berni go and start broadcasting your Australian programs in Africa where there was only one guy I ever knew in Africa.

"Berni, go and hire a man in India to start broadcasting your programs there even though there isn't a single door open to start doing what I'm calling you to do. Berni ..." Yeah okay.

Today, there's a thousand radio stations airing these programs, today it's millions of listeners each week, today ... it kind of seems obvious to have done the things we did but each time God called me to do something crazy it was just that, it was dead set crazy. Maybe not quite as crazy as Noah's gig but that didn't help me at the time. So when was the last time God called you to do something crazy? Something happens in that place that I can't quite explain.

There are many times when I've listened to the sage advice from mature men and women around me and that's been the right thing to do, I mean plans fail because of lack of counsel but at those major turning points, the truly crazy ones, there's been a pull in my heart from God that was as scary as it was unmistakable.

And at those turning points, the Noah points as I call them, I've pretty much had to ignore the sage advice I was getting from the people I trusted and just go and do the thing that God was calling me in my heart to do.

Those times it's been scary and at those times I've made some mistakes. Not everything always worked out the way I'd planned in my head. We didn't always get everything right first time, things didn't always happen as quickly as I wanted them to happen.

You know it was eight years from when I felt the call to go and tell people about Jesus until I took on the role that I'm doing now. It was almost three years between when we hired that wonderful man in India and when God finally opened the door to a weekly radio audience on a major secular network of thirty million people and it never felt much like faith at the time.

It was uncertain, it was murky, it was unclear but off we went with this dream in our hearts and with a certain reality that we'd rather look like idiots, that we'd rather fall flat on our faces and fail than miss out on what God was doing.

Have you ever had that feeling? It's unsettling, it's scary. At times I'm prepared to admit to the people around me I look like an idiot but then again so did Noah, so did Noah's sons, so did Noah's wife and the God that Noah served, the God that I serve and the God that you serve never ever chastises us for having too much faith, have you noticed that? You never see Jesus say to His disciples, you've got too much faith.

Sometimes, not every day but sometimes faith is doing the scary, crazy, counter intuitive things that God calls us to do.

By faith Noah, warned by God about events yet unseen respected the warning and built an ark to save his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir to righteousness that is in accordance with faith.

Sometimes you and I are going to have Noah moments, sometimes God's going to call us to that place so what are you going to do?