are we hiding in the wine press?

God wants us to experience encounters with Him, through these encounters God comforts, challenges, heals and forgives us. 

He changes us. 

We cannot manipulate these encounters but we can make ourselves available, to be attentive to His voice and to follow His guidance.

We need to set aside time to meet with Him daily, to commune with Him and seek His plan for our lives.

We read about many encounters with God throughout the Bible, many men and women who have had their lives changed through these confrontations with their heavenly Father.

The Israelites were being oppressed by the Midianites, they cried out to God and He demonstrated His mercy by raising up a man named Gideon. 

The Israelites had disobeyed God and this was the reason they had fallen into a dangerous place. Gideon was hiding in a wine press threshing his wheat when he encountered God. This encounter left him a different person, he had gone from hiding from his enemies to being called a 'Mighty man of valour'. 
He had been transformed.
Are we hiding in the wine press or do we want to experience an encounter with God? 

We need to be attentive to His voice and follow His commands

Lindsey Toms

-The `undo` button on my laptop! Ron White

The `undo` button on my laptop!   

This is my favourite button. It is the most used and necessary of my laptop`s features. Edith Piaf used to belt out a stirring song 

“Non, Je ne regrette rien”(“No, I regret nothing”). 

I don`t know if she lived by it, but the morphine and alcohol addiction of her later years and an early death when only 48 years old suggests all was not what it might have been. When I look back I can think of many occasions when I wish life had an undo button. But it has not. What has been said and done cannot now be unsaid or undone. But God has provided something better, at huge cost to himself, because he loved us he has provided a way that can put us right with him. The Bible says if we admit the wrongs we have done, God is faithful and just and will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). This is real because Christ died on the cross to take the penalty for all the wrong things we have done.  More than that if we trust in Christ then God will make us a new creation! Wow! Not an “undo” but a “make new” feature: that is grace.