Living in Hope // Becoming an Overnight Success, Part 10
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
Release Date: 12/13/2024
The Long Road Home // The Long Road Home, Part 4
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
Sometimes, we come to the conclusion that decisions and choices we’ve made – just aren’t working. But turning them around, well, it can be a long road. For years, and years, and years, I wandered around in a spiritual desert. Now the crazy thing was that I’d been a Christian in my teenage years. But when I grew up, I rebelled and I came to the point where I kind of knew that there was a God but after all the things I’d done, after the years of wandering out there, I just didn’t know whether He’d really want me back, and at what cost? What would I have to give up of the lifestyle...
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A Tough Decision // The Long Road Home, Part 3
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
Sometimes we get to a point in life where we have to admit to ourselves that we’ve taken a wrong turn. That’s not easy – and the decision to turn around – well, that’s harder still. We’ve all had that experience of trying something, committing to it, believing in it, publicly promoting it, and then flop, we fall flat on our faces. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt! It’s not a nice feeling, is it? On the one hand there’s the public humiliation but even worse than that, is that deep loss inside of having wanted something, believed in it, committed to it emotionally and then...
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Partying Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be // The Long Road Home, Part 2
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
We all love to kick our heals up every now and then. Problem is that the more you watch TV, the more they seem to tell us that life is just one long party. We all like a good party from time to time, the chance to kick up our heels, let our hair down, relax and enjoy, it’s a part of life. In fact, it’s a very necessary part of a balanced life. Now the advertising industries figured that out, that’s why they use images and stories that tap into our desire to kick up our heels, in order to sell whatever it happens to be they’re selling on any given day. And so we get bombarded with these...
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It's Time to Party // The Long Road Home, Part 1
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
There’s a streak in each one of us that wants to rebel. You know – kick our heals up and just party. But you can’t live like that all the time without there being some consequences. My hunch is that there are a lot of people on this planet who are wandering in some kind of spiritual wilderness. It’s a wilderness experience that looks something like this: I’ve been wandering around here for what seems like years. I know … I know it’s out there somewhere but I just can’t find it. Well, well probably … probably I can. I just don’t think I’m ready, I just don’t think I’m...
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Forgiving the Really Big Things // Forgive and Forget, Part 5
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
You have a son. He’s out walking one night. A car hits him. Leaves him for dead on the freeway so that a few minutes later, the next car on that dark road kills him. Imagine. This week on a different perspective we've been talking about forgiveness. In a world where we often experience emotional bumps and bruises it turns out that forgiveness is as important to our emotional well being as physical healing is to our bodies. But every now and then in life a tsunami hits, something so incredibly overwhelming that we could have never predicted it or imagined how we would cope. I always thought...
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Forgiving Brings Healing // Forgive and Forget, Part 4
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
How do you get over the hurts of the past? You know, really let go so they don’t hurt anymore. Well, today, we’re going to meet an amazing woman – Lorraine Watson – who has a real story to tell. These days psychologists and psychiatrists talk about the fact that the act of forgiving someone often results in healing. On Monday I talked about some research with some incest survivors. Fifty percent of them were asked to participate in some workshops on forgiveness. The psychologists who conducted the research concluded that the forgiveness resulted in dramatically reduced anxiety and...
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When God Forgave Us // Forgive and Forget, Part 3
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
We all know that we need to forgive people. That’s the theory, But let’s now put the shoe on the other foot and talk about God’s forgiveness. Does He really need to forgive us? Really? Forgiveness is one of those fluffy words that quite often we pay very little attention to. But when you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that without forgiveness, we can’t have effective relationships. Without forgiveness on a daily basis between husband and wife a marriage falls apart. And they do in epidemic proportion. Without forgiving our work colleagues for their shortcomings and...
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Forgiving is Accepting // Forgive and Forget, Part 2
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
Every person we will ever meet, is going to annoy us at some point. Something in their personality will grate, something they do will hurt … so what’s the secret of having a great relationship anyway? It seems that there are really only two types of people in this world: those who love getting up early in the morning and those who don’t, those who love cats and those who hate them. Or, you know what I mean. It seems that different people just come out of different moulds. We have different likes and dislikes, different strengths and weaknesses. And as much as those differences make life...
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Forgiving is Forgetting // Forgive and Forget, Part 1
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
When someone does something wrong – something that hurts us, it’s easy to say, “I forgive you”. But actually living out that forgiveness – what does that look like? In a recent edition, the magazine, Psychology Today, carried an article on forgiveness. In part, the article reports that until recently psychologists regarded forgiveness as the business of the clergy and theologians. But now, mental health experts are subjecting forgiveness to the microscope of scientific scrutiny with no apologies. It goes on to tell of 2 psychologists, Drs. Robert Enright and Suzanne Freedman, working...
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The Year of the Lord's Favour // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 5
A Different Perspective Official Podcast
Sometimes, life gets so rough and rocky and we think to ourselves, surely, surely it must get better soon. But some people give up hope completely, and just live their lives in a constant state of despair. When we think about God, whoever that is, it’s easy to get a distorted picture. The older we are the more we tend to think of Him as being judgmental, and the younger we are well, younger people, how do they see God? I saw an article published recently that reported younger peoples’ views of God, it was based on a survey that had been conducted nationally in Australia with young people,...
info_outlineWell, at some point in our lives, eventually, we come to the realisation that the idea, the promise of overnight success that the world’s been dangling under our noses is an empty promise. It happens to all of us, eventually. And at that point, what we need is hope. Not a vague, uncertain hope, but a rock–solid, absolutely certain hope.
Maybe that's what having a mid life crisis is all about, coming to the realisation that you're not going to have the overnight success that you've been chasing all your life. At some point, maybe it's in your forties or your fifties, you realise you're not the ‘bees knees’, you're not going to set the world on fire and for some it happens early, for some it happens later but that youthful exuberance that we once had, that idealism that sprang forth so naturally, that flame that burned inside us to change the world, it's quenched, it's snuffed out. It's a terrible realisation because for many it's the death of hope, for many where there was once meaning now there's only meaninglessness. King Solomon was one of the richest and wisest men to ever live. Towards the end of his life he said this, Ecclesiastes chapter 1 beginning at verse 2:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! Everything is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, a generation comes but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, hurries to the place where it rises again. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north and round and round goes the wind on it circuits the wind returns.
All streams run into the sea but the sea is never full, to the place where streams flow where they continue to flow. All things are wearisome, more than one can express. The eye is never satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing, what has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done.
There's nothing new under the sun, is there a thing of which it can be said, “see this is new”? It has already been in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered nor will there be a remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
It's a pretty sad conclusion for a rich, wealthy, powerful, wise man to come to. After all I've done, after all I've had none of it means anything. That's the stuff of mid life crisis, that's the stuff that drives people over the edge. All those years we've been sacrificing our lives for what? An ideal, an idea, an image of success that turned out to be as allusive as a mirage in the desert.
What am I living for? What am I working so hard for? They're the questions we end up asking ourselves when we've wasted half our lives, perhaps more, on the altar of success. It was that stuff, as a very successful man in my mid thirties, it was precisely this that drove me to the brink of suicide. Not everyone, thankfully, gets to that point but you'll be amazed at how many people actually think about it. Why? Because they've lost hope, because the world's promise of overnight success turned out to be a rotten stinking lie.
We talked yesterday about humility, the transformative power of having a humble heart. Well today I'd like to chat with you briefly about another word that begins with 'h', hope. The sort of hope that you need in your heart when things quite haven't worked out the way you planned them to. When hope is lost, when the future seems to have gone AWOL it's in that very place that God has something for you which goes beyond, way beyond anything that you and I could have ever imagined. Hope, real, certain, rock solid hope, writes the Apostle Paul to the Church in Rome, chapter 15 verse 13.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Paul had, by this time, been through many trials in his life, in his ministry for Jesus across the known world. He'd suffered a lot, things hadn't gone the way he expected them to. He wrote this letter to the Romans in Corinth while he was on his third missionary journey. By this time he'd been on the road proclaiming Jesus for a good many years. He'd been beaten, locked up, threatened with death, he's had people ride against him, drive him out of town, plot his assassination.
He wanted to go here and there but his plans were blocked, sometimes by God, sometimes by the devil and sometimes by people. Things hadn't always gone the way he'd planned and he knew he was probably going to be locked up when he headed down to Jerusalem and yet Paul talks here in Romans chapter 15 verse 13 about the God of Hope.
A God who will fill you with all joy and all peace, not just a bit of joy now and then, not just the occasional fleeting moment of peace but all joy and all peace, the sort of joy and the sort of peace that Paul exhibited during his times of trial, the sort of joy and the sort of peace that came to him by the power of the Holy Spirit. And his prayer for the Romans is that they would abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, do you notice this abundance language here? Abound in hope, overflow with hope and all this comes through believing. Let's read it again so that it all comes together, Romans chapter 15 verse 13:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and all peace in believing so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
In believing, in believing in what exactly? He's talking about believing in Jesus. For so much of my life I hoped for success and I hoped for wealth and all that stuff, that's what led me to the brink and it was in that place that Jesus met me, it was in that place that I discovered this God who loved me so much that He sent His Son to die for me, to pay the price of my sin, of my rebellion so that I, I could live for eternity with Him. Can you or I see eternity yet? No we can't, Romans chapter 8 verses 23 and 24:
For in hope we were saved, now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what is not seen we wait for it in patience.
And now that my hope is in Jesus God's given me the patience to wait for His promise, His promise of eternal life, His promise of sharing in His glory forever and ever and when Paul, from amidst his trials writes about being filled with all joy and all peace and abounding in hope and in believing, that's something I totally get because that's exactly how it is.
All those years I was chasing the shiny promises of the world that led me, in the end, towards death when all along the real answer was Jesus, the real answer is Jesus. The Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah wrote this, Jeremiah chapter 17 verse 7:
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
Who or what have you placed your trust in? Who or what do you hope in? Success? Then you're going to be disappointed in Jesus? Then you'll be filled with a hope that abounds in you, that overflows out of you but in believing brings all joy and all peace.
I'm so conscious that so many people are listening today around the world who haven't yet placed their hope in Jesus. So if you want to do that then please pray this prayer with me right now, don't leave it one more minute.
Father God
Today I've heard about Jesus, about the One who loves me so much that He came and died and paid the price of my rebellion against you, the one who rose again to give me a life, an eternal life with you. And today I want to put all my trust and all my hope in Jesus, in Him alone. Please forgive me for all my sins, please take me just as I am, please fill me with your Holy Spirit so that by His power I might be filled with all joy and all peace and abound in the certain hope of your blessings here in this world and eternity with you. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.