A Different Perspective Official Podcast

God has a habit of wanting to speak right into the circumstances that we’re travelling through here and now; the very issues that we each face in our everyday lives. Everything from dealing with difficult people … to discovering how God speaks to us; from overcoming stress … to discovering your God-given gifts and walking in the calling that God has placed on your life And that’s what these daily 10 minute A Different Perspective messages are all about.

Bad Fear, Good Fear // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 4 02/26/2026

Bad Fear, Good Fear // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 4 Mostly – we think of fear as being a bad thing. And often it is. But it’s also a protection mechanism. And “good fear” if I can call it that – helps us to make good choices. So – exactly how does that work? Fear is a funny thing, mostly we think of it as a negative thing. None of us wants to be afraid, I mean who wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "Gee, I hope I get to be afraid today?" No, fear is something we don't look forward to but fear is one of those funny emotions that also helps to protect us. We've all seen a little child who will chase a football out onto the street without any sense of the fear about what might happen if a car or a truck or a bus happened to want to occupy that very same piece of real estate just at the time that they're there. An adult on the other hand has learned a healthy fear of that and so we hopefully would have a good look before we ran out onto the street. Well that makes sense, the same is true when, of most things that are dangerous, an adult has a healthy sense of fear. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be a respect for the consequences and so that acts, in effect, as a protection mechanism. So as it turns out there is a right and good sense of fear in life, so how does that apply to our relationship with God? This week on the program we're taking a bit of a look at the dark times we travel through in life sometimes and we've all had them. Sadness, loss, pain, you can look back and say, "Yep! That was one of those dark times." Maybe you're even in one of those times at the moment and we've spent some time with a man, King David of Israel that had more than his fair share of those dark times and I guess because he was a man with a close relationship to God, he learns some things about God and about that relationship in those dark times. He shares a bit of that in Psalm 34 which we're having a bit of a poke around this week. Psalm 34 is written with the benefit of hindsight, looking back at some dark times, the fearful times and rejoicing because what David discovers is that God was faithful to him in those difficult times, hopefully that sets a bit of the scene. Now let me read to you the first bit of the psalm right now, Psalm 34 beginning at verse 1: I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me, lets exalt His name together because I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered in shame. This poor man called and the Lord heard him; He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Today I want to take a bit of a look at this fear element. It's a word that David uses twice in that short passage. Now I hate being afraid, I'm sure you're the same. I remember when I was in the army and we would be repelling out of helicopters or going over high things on obstacle courses. I have a fear of heights, I just don't like them, I had the opportunity to go parachuting once, I said, "you've got to be kidding me! I am not jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane." And as I said the other day, fear is what happens in those dark times too. In a broken marriage there’s a fear of the future, there's a financial fear. In retrenchment there’s a fear, will I ever get another job and we can lose hope? Fear is a big part of that, it kind of, well it immobilises us and obviously the times that David had been through he'd experienced that same fear that you and I do. Psalm 34, verse 4: I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. In a sense that fear is a bad fear, that's the fear that God wants to deliver us from. We talked about that yesterday on the program and I can't tell you the number of times that, that I've been immobilised by that sort of fear and I've gone to God and just cried out to Him and He fills me with a peace that defies any human comprehension. Now I'm not someone who naturally gets afraid, I'm a fairly positive person 99.9% of the time but we all need God in those dark places with us to deliver us from that sort of fear but it's the other mention of fear in this little passage that I'd like to spend a few moments focusing on. You see this is one of the good fears that I was talking about at the beginning of our time together today. It's in verse 7 of Psalm 34, it says: The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him. You see, this is talking about the fear of God. Now it's easy to see this as one of those bad fears, "oh God is just this old grumpy old man with a big stick and a bunch of rules and old fashioned rule based religion. They start talking to me about the fear of God, see I knew I didn't need that sort of religion in my life," but that's not what it means. The fear of God or the fear of the Lord is quite different. Proverbs chapter 1, verse 7 says: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge but fools despise wisdom and discipline. See the word fear means two things, the first is the obvious meaning, 'to be petrified; to be afraid' it's the meaning we know well, terror. The second, the second is respect and reverence. You see my Dad when I was growing up, I had both of those fears for him. I knew that if I did something really bad, when he came home from work I'd get a belting. There were consequences. Now that's just the way it was but at the same time I respected him and he's passed away now but as I look back my greatest emotion is that one of respect and yes he did punish me sometimes and that's what happened but I didn't wander around all day in terror, it was a sense, a healthy sense of respect and knowing that if I crossed him, there were consequences and it's the same with God. That's what the fear of the Lord means. You know something; if you and I reject God, if we spend the rest of our lives walking against him, one day there will be a day of judgement and one day there will be hell to pay for that. That's that kind of fear but the other part of that fear is to have respect and a reverence, a right view of God. Yes He is my friend and He is my saviour but He's also a God who's powerful and mighty and awesome and sovereign. Love and respect go together and when we have that right relationship with Him, when we get Him in His rightful place in our lives something starts to happen. This is what David says in Psalm 34: God delivers us from our fears; He protects us. And Solomon in Proverbs chapter 1 that I just read before, He gives us wisdom: The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him. God protects us when we honour Him, when we respect Him and I want to encourage you to do something. In the dark times we travel through sometimes we just get tempted to behave badly. Sometimes we just say, "well God's not in that place and I'm just going to walk my other way", I want to encourage you in your dark time to fear God for "the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him." And you know something; He delivers them. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39890240

A Simple Choice // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 3 02/25/2026

A Simple Choice // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 3 When life is really tough and when you’ve lost hope and you’re afraid – you can either lie there, completely immobilised – or you can take a really simple, obvious step. Question is – in which direction? We all have choices in life. Sometimes we make good choices, more often than not those good choices have good outcomes and we can all look back and see some of the bad choices we've made and the consequences of those choices but you know the hardest choices to make are the ones we make in the dark. You know, in those dark times, the difficult times, the times when we're hurting so bad that our sense of balance and right and wrong and up and down is all out of kilter. The whole thing about that sort of darkness is that we can't see forward, we can't see back and it's such a difficult place to be. Well today, today we're going to look at a choice that we can make in those dark times that is always the right choice. When everything else has failed, when we don't quite know which way to turn, when even the good choices we made before now don't seem to hold any promise, there's one choice that we can make that always, always pays off. To look at that choice we're going to spend some time over the coming days with a man who had more of those dark times than most of us and he wrote a lot about it. The one place we're going to go is to take a look at what he learned and he records that in Psalm 34. It's an interesting psalm, it comes out of King David’s life and it's his praise for deliverance from a time of trouble. So it's a psalm written, if you like, with the benefit of hindsight. David's been in a tough dark place and his learned something, he's learned something about God in a dark time. Now we're not quite sure when that time was, the introduction to the psalm says: A psalm of David when he feigned madness before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away. Now we don't have any other historical information about that situation. Abimelech was a judge, a leader of Israel, Gideon’s son. The fact that we don't have the exact historical details however doesn't really matter. The fact that David had to engage in this deception tells us that it was a fearful time, it was a scary time, it was a time when he needed to escape. Now let’s have a listen to the first part of this psalm as David reflects on that dark time, it's Psalm 34, verses 1-8. This is what he writes: I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will always be on my lips, my soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look at Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called and the Lord heard him, He saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them. Taste and see, the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. See David is looking back on some hard times and he starts out by praising God for His faithfulness with the specific purpose of letting the rest of us know that God is faithful in the dark times. With a specific purpose, of us who are afflicted, being able to hear this and rejoice. This psalm was written for you and for me: My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. You see David’s saying here, "You know why I'm writing this psalm? It's for you, if you're afflicted, if you're travelling through a dark and fearful time, you know what? Come and look at what God did for me." Glorify the Lord with me (says David) let us exalt His name together. In other words, so that you and I can rejoice together in our dark times we're getting the benefit of what David discovered in his darkness, in his fearful times and what he discovered is as profound as it is simple. Look at verse 4: I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. Darkness and fear seem to immobilise us. Fear somehow stops us dead in our tracks, we just kind of sit there and we ache, and fear eats away at our hearts kind of like a quick spreading cancer and in that fear. Remember David was, as he had been many times before, in fear of his life. This was real fear, let me say it this way; deadly fear and in the midst of his deadly fear, he did the thing that he had learned to do over and over and over again all those times in his life when he'd been in danger. When he was on the run from King Saul for all those years he sought the Lord, he cried out to God, he said, "God, help!" The one thing we can forget to do when we're frozen by fear is to do exactly that, to seek God, to cry out to God and what a surprise; God answered him and delivered him from all his fears. I don't know about you but I can relate to that, in life and in ministry I come up against giants of opposition all the time and can I tell you, some days they scare me, seriously scare me and we have a choice; we can sit there and tremble in fear, we can be completely immobilised or we can spend time with God crying out to Him in prayer, reading His word, listening to Him and He always delivers me from my fears. David goes on to say this in verses 5 and 6 of that Psalm: Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. This poor man called and the Lord heard him, he saved him out of all his troubles. There it is, there's that "light" word; radiance: Those who look to Him are radiant. The Hebrew word that sits behind our English translation means literally "to beam" or "to burn with light". It's an over the top kind of word, it's not a glow or a flicker or just to shine but to beam and to burn with light. Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. See in those dark times we're down cast, we're in a sense ashamed if you like but David states this incredibly simple truth. He said: This poor man called and the Lord heard me. He saved me out of all my troubles. (He delivered me from all my fears) This is such a humble and beautiful picture isn't it? David, possibly the greatest king that Israel ever had, saw himself just as some poor man who cried out to God. Don't you love how the Bible is packed full of this, this real life stuff, this stuff that's right down where we are? The word of God meant for us, here and now right where the rubber hits the road. Light, radiance in our darkness and in our fear and all this out of a simple step that David took, so simple and yet when we fear for our lives, so difficult. I sought the Lord and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39890225

God is in the Light Business // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 2 02/24/2026

God is in the Light Business // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 2 When you’re travelling through those dark patches in life – as we all do – the most important thing you need to know is that God is in the Light business – and He’s right there in that dark place with you! You may hear me talk about the stars in the sky from time to time and that’s because they just fascinate me. There are so many and they're so huge and so far away, the universe is utterly incredible. The scientists tell us they estimate that there are at least a trillion, trillion stars, well what does that mean? Lets just start with a billion, do you know how long it would take to count to a billion, once each second; one, two, three. Well a billion seconds is 31 years, 251 days, 7 hours and 48 minutes. That’s a billion. Now a trillion is a thousand billion, that means that a trillion seconds is a thousand times as long. That makes a trillion seconds, 31,688 years, 32 days and few hours. Isn't that incredible? And that is just one trillion. Now a trillion times that 31,688 years and 32 days and a few hours which would make it a trillion, trillion, seconds is just an inconceivable length of time isn't it? And I'm just talking humble little ticks of a clock – seconds. But now look out at the universe and consider there are a trillion, trillion stars out there at least, massive balls of fire and they're just the ones we know about. You can tell I love astronomy and mathematics can't you, so why this dissertation on astro-physics? Well simply this; this week we're taking a look at the dark patches we can go through in life, the difficult times, the times of depression or fear or loss or loneliness or financial crisis or retrenchment or broken relationships or sickness. That list that is seemingly endless in life and when we go through those darkness’s they are so dark aren't they? If God is God, where is He in those dark times, huh? Exactly where is He? This series of programs is called, "Dark Night, Bright Light" and today, today I just want to establish that no matter how dark the darkness gets, God is in the "light" business. I'm just going to read you the first 5 verses of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. It's the beginning; this is what it says: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light,” and there was light and God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light 'day' and the darkness He called 'night' and there was evening and there was morning. That was the first day. Now I might hear you say, "Well Berni that's well and good; you're talking about physical light here, that's fine but what about God shining His light into the darkness in my life?" We're going to talk about that shortly, the point that I'm making is this; creation tells us something about the Creator. You and I create different things because we're different. You might be artistic, you might be able to draw or to paint and so given the opportunity to be creative, you'd produce this stunning picture. Ha, I can't draw for peanuts. You might be really good with your hands, maybe building things or maybe crafting things. Well I have ten thumbs when it comes to that. So what we create tells us something about who we are, it's the same deal with God. You look at what He creates and it tells you something about who He is. In fact it's interesting to look at the order in which He creates, this God, and the first thing He creates, the very first thing is light because it was dark. That tells us something about God but what a light. We just think of the sun but that sun, as I said in the beginning of the program, is just one of an estimated trillion, trillion stars. In the greatest understatement in the Bible Moses writes in Genesis chapter 1, verse 16: God made two great lights; the greater was to govern the day, the lesser was to govern the night. He also made the stars. Ha, also made the stars. God is seriously into light and it tells us something about who He is and when you look at Him shining light into our lives there are so many references throughout the Bible about Him wanting to do that. I'm just going to look at 3 very briefly right now. The first is Ezekiel chapter 10 in verse 4: Then the glory of the Lord rose up from above the cherubim and moved to the threshold of the temple and the cloud filled the temple and the court was full of the radiance of the glory of God. Isaiah, in chapter 60 verse 19 says: The sun will no more be your light by day nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you at night for the Lord will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory. And perhaps my favourite of all where Paul seems to bring it all together in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 6. He says: For its the very same God who said "Let light shine out of darkness" that made His light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Can you see why I've called this little series, "Dark Night, Bright Light". Over these coming days I believe we're going to be transformed by Gods word about darkness and light. I'm going to share with you again from my darkness; you know in life we all have them. Thirteen years ago I had a major one; I lost everything that was dear to me. I guess in life we end up with one or two or three major ones but then we have other smaller ones along the way that don't feel that small when we're going through them. Real pressure at work, it gets us down or interest rates go up and we can't afford our houses anymore and we have to sell. You know all that stuff. And every time I have been through one of those darkness’s, every time when I've turned to Jesus and poured my heart out to Him, His gentle light has began to glow in my heart. The longer things went on because we have to travel through that stuff, the darker it became out there the more brightly His love and His joy and His peace would shine in my life. The sun will be no more your light by day nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you by night for the Lord will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory. Light is such a wonderful way to describe what happens when we turn to God in our darkness. I can't find any other word to put it than "light"; a warmth and a brilliance and a radiance that shines in our lives. If you've just been through darkness, if you're going through one right now, if you're going to go through one in the future the word of God is going to shine a light into that place. Dark Night, Bright Light. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39890200

Afraid of the Dark // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 1 02/23/2026

Afraid of the Dark // Dark Night - Bright Light, Part 1 When you’re travelling through those dark patches in life – what you discover so often is that you’re afraid of the dark. Fear is a big deal in hard times. And each one of us needs to know what to do about it. We're starting a new series of messages on the program this week, a series that I've called, "Dark Night, Bright Light". I wonder what the word dark or darkness means to you? Darkness has all sorts of connotations when we apply it to our own lives. I remember when I was a young boy, even probably well into my teenage years, I was truly afraid of the dark. At night after dinner in the dining room in the house where we lived it was what seemed like a long corridor to my bedroom, it was only 8 or 9 metres but when the corridor was dark, I tell you, it was a long scary way and I was afraid to walk from the light dining room into that dark corridor to my dark bedroom. Now we were blessed because there was a light switch at either end of the corridor, at the dining room end and at the end where my bedroom was and I always, always used that light switch. Now don't get me wrong, we lived in a safe part of town and the house was secure so there was no logical or rational reason to be afraid of the dark, I just was and it was a very real fear. It seems that darkness and fear often go together in life. Whether we're young or old the truth be known we actually need both, light and dark in this world. I love it when the sun goes down and it's time to go to sleep and again, when the sun comes up in the morning and it's time to get on with life. It's a pattern we live by, it's a cadence, a pattern of life but imagine if it were only ever dark how awful that would be. In some countries of course, far north and far south, there are many months of darkness in winter. In life, darkness and fear, well they seem to be such common bedfellows. I guess that’s because in the dark we can't see what's coming at us. I remember once when I was in the army and we were on exercise in a rainforest and the canopy of this rainforest was so incredibly thick that it was pitch black at night, you couldn't even see your hand 6 inches in front of your face. And in that sort of darkness you can't see what’s coming at you, you can't see where you're going so darkness is a scary place sometimes. Now let’s take a look at our own lives. We can look back on the dark times, those periods that we'd rather forget, maybe a broken relationship or sickness or the death of a loved one, real financial difficulties. Maybe you've been through a war and you've seen people killed or you've been in prison. Perhaps you've seen everything you worked for so hard over so many years just go down the drain or someone’s hurt you incredibly deeply, someone you trusted. Perhaps you've been through a time of depression or real loneliness or working so hard you just don't feel that you have a life. The list just goes on and on and on, life has its dark times doesn't it? Maybe you're going through one right now, maybe, who knows, there's one right around the next corner or next year or the year after that. Dark times, well they're like part of a fabric of our lives as much as we'd rather they weren't there and that’s why we're kicking off this little series over the next couple of weeks called, "Dark Night, Bright Light" because light is the opposite of darkness and when we're travelling through those dark times, light is the very thing we need. The problem is it can be so hard to find, so hard to believe in or hope for. You might only experience in those dark times, those lonely times, those times where I felt betrayed, the times of deep distress, it's a fear that’s debilitating. It's like you don't even have the strength to lift up your head and look towards God. And hope. Well, when we lose hope it's a devastating thing because there's no sense of there being a future. I once read a book about a holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel and he makes the point so powerfully when he recalls an experience from the concentration camp. Have a listen to what he writes: The prisoner who has lost faith in the future, his future was doomed. With his loss of belief in his future he also lost his spiritual hold. He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment, not for ourselves which would have been pointless but for our friends. Usually it began with a prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash and to go out on the parade ground. No entreaties, not blows, no threats had any affect; he just lay there hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness he refused to be taken to the sick bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up, there he remained lying in his own excrement and nothing bothered him anymore. It's extreme but you recognise it, it happens to all of us sometimes. We give up, we have this sense that there's no future, no hope, just darkness, just the same. Why have we spent so much time describing the darkness today? I guess for me it helps to put words around it, it helps to describe what it is because this is something that we can all relate to. Somehow we think it's just us but actually everyone goes through dark periods in their life, everyone. I have and you have and there are some real dark ones and then there are some that aren't quite so deep but they still rob us of the joy of living. Tomorrow what we're going to see is that God, God is in the light business. Today I just want to share one passage with you from His word, the Old Testament book of Isaiah chapter 9 and verse 2: The people walking in the darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. If you're walking in darkness at the moment I have a message for you from God, He plans to shine a light into that place. I remember the darkest days of my life, 13 years ago now, when I was completely alone. The darkness gets so inky black; the hole is so deep you can't imagine how you could possibly survive. In the middle of all that a man, a pastor, a man called Ted Keating shared a message of Gods hope with me just the way I'm sharing with you today and from that little message I turned around and gave my life to Jesus and in the midst of that darkness a light began to shine, a light that was so bright, so warm. Later, later I discovered that Jesus once said: I am the light of the world. Well, He got that right; just the way Isaiah puts it: The people walking in the darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39890195

Mixed Reactions // The Long Road Home, Part 5 02/20/2026

Mixed Reactions // The Long Road Home, Part 5 It’s kind of embarrassing to have to admit sometimes that we’ve made a mistake. And even when it’s the right thing to do – we still sometimes get mixed reactions. Have you ever been dreading something, a trip to the doctor’s or the dentist, or maybe a confrontation at work or a reunion after a broken relationship? You know that sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, the sleeplessness the night before, the sweaty palms and cold fingers. But then when the time arrives it turns out so much better than we could ever have hoped. We look back on the event and think, “I just don’t know what I was so worried about.” But before hand, the apprehension is so real, that’s because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and in our not knowing state somehow we imagine six different terrible outcomes as though they’re all going to happen at the same time. I wonder for someone wandering around in a spiritual wilderness, I wonder whether it isn’t the same for them, when they look at God. Whoever we are, wherever our journeys in life have taken us, we’ve all felt a sense of spiritual yearning. We may look at the glossy ads and the seductive images of success and prosperity and all those things. But it’s empty, wandering out there yearning, like we’re being called home. Something we can’t explain but we look at God, we look at Jesus with a sense of apprehension because when we look at where we are, what we’ve done and admit our rebellion it’s really hard to take a step on to that long road home. Jesus knew that and we’ve been looking this week at a story that He told, the story about the prodigal son. I’m going to read it again for one last time today because it’s a beautiful powerful story, and today when I read it we’re going to include the ending because the ending is awesome. Here’s how it goes: A man had a two sons, the younger of them said to his father, ‘Dad give me my share of the estate that I have coming to me.’ So the father distributed the assets to them. Not many days later the younger son gathered everything he owned together and he traveled to a distant country where he squandered his estate in foolish living. After he had spent everything a severe famine struck that country and he had nothing. Then he went to work for one of the citizens of the country who sent him out into the fields to feed the pigs. When he came to his senses he said. “How many of my father’s servants have more than enough food and here I am dying of hunger. I’ll get up and I’ll go to my father and I’ll say to him – ‘Dad I’ve sinned against you and in your sight, I’m not worthy to be called your son anymore, but make me like one of your servants’.” So he got up and he went to his father but while the son was still a long way off his father saw him and was filled with compassion. Dad ran and threw his arms around the sons neck and kissed him and the son said to him, ‘Father I’ve sinned against heaven and against you, I’m not worthy to be called your son anymore.’ But the father told the slaves, ‘Quick bring out the best robe and put it on him, put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, then bring the fattened calf and slaughter it and we’ll celebrate with a feast. Because this son of mine who was dead is alive again, he was lost and he’s found.’ So they began to celebrate. It was a cycle that began with rebellion, that the notion that we all have that sometimes life should just be fun. I want to go out and let it all hang out and do it when it feels good and of course, reality set in, there was an impact. Ultimately the son of this wealthy farmer found himself starving working as a laborer feeding pigs in a foreign land. And when he finally came to his senses, when he made the decision to say, "Look at my rebellion, look at the impact that it’s had on me and in my best interests it’s time to journey home again." But while he was still along way off, Dad was out there waiting and watching and straining and stretching his neck to see further, to see if his son was there, and when he was a long way off he sees his son and his heart is filled with compassion. He comes running out to meet him. Do you think that’s what the son was expecting when he was back there feeding Porky the pig on the pig farm starving? Do you think in his wildest dreams and imagination the son would have thought, "Dad will be out there watching and waiting for me. And when I come over the hill he’ll race out and hug me and put a robe on me." Would you think he was expecting that? We know he wasn’t. We know he was going back with an expectation of maybe getting a job as one of the servants just for food. The robe is a symbol of honour, the ring is a symbol of the family signet - you belong to us. And the party with a spit roast was a barbecue; it was a celebration! Because "this son of mine who was dead is alive again. The one that was lost is found again." Not a word of condemnation, no scalding, total acceptance for no other reason than this boy was Dad’s son. Jesus is saying here, ‘You have to understand something. This is what Dad’s like, this is what God’s like.’ It’s crazy, the son was there, we don’t know how long he stayed starving feeding the pigs but I’m sure he spent time putting it off. All the time delaying with the apprehension of going back to his father and what that would mean. It’s like us, all the time wandering in a spiritual wilderness and Jesus is saying, "No, no, don’t you understand, don’t you get it, this is what Dad’s like. He’s waiting on the road for you, he’s straining, looking, can’t wait to see you back with Him again." Dad, God, Jesus … "My son was lost and now he’s found, my daughter was lost and now she’s found." What about you? Have you spent anytime wandering round in a spiritual wilderness, apprehensive about going home? Come on, what rebellion is keeping us from God? What is it that’s stopping us from going back? Is it fear, is it embarrassment, is it this sense of ‘well I’m not good enough?’ Look at it, while the son was still a long way off his father saw him and was filled with compassion, he ran and threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. The son said to the father, "Dad I’ve sinned against you, I’m not worthy to be your son." But the father told his slaves, "quick bring the best robe, put it on him, put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet and slaughter the fattened calf and let’s celebrate, let’s party, my son’s back." Now the older brother was out in the field and as he came near the house he heard music and dancing so he called one of the servants over and said, "What’s going on?" And the servant said, "your brother’s back and your father’s slaughtered the fattened calf because he’s back safe and sound." This older brother became really angry and didn’t want to go in so his father came out and pleaded with him but the son replied, "Look Dad I’ve been slaving my guts out here for years for you. I’ve never disobeyed you, I’ve never rebelled against you, but you haven’t even given me as much as a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who devoured your assets with prostitutes comes back you slaughter a fattened calf." And Dad says, ‘Son, you’re always with me, everything I have is yours, but we have to celebrate, we have to rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and he’s alive again, he was lost and he’s found.’ See when we’re out in that wilderness we expect everyone including God to react like the older brother. That’s why Jesus put the older brother in the story, that’s how people react, they want to judge us, they want to condemn us. And the biggest thing he’s saying here is God is not like that at all. God is the father on the road waiting for you, waiting for you to come back and be with him. That’s the point /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39722235

The Long Road Home // The Long Road Home, Part 4 02/19/2026

The Long Road Home // The Long Road Home, Part 4 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 that I was accustomed to, in order to have a relationship with him again? For me, as it is for so many people, the road home seemed like such a long one. And what would His reaction be when I turned up on His doorstep again anyway? I remember as a child, I did something wrong after school, I can’t remember what it was, but my Mother said to me, "You wait until your father comes home." And I can still remember, I must have only been about six or seven, or eight years old. I can still remember vividly the sense of dread, of waiting at home for the consequences when my Dad came home again. Do you remember that? I’m sure we’ve all had that experience. This week on A Different Perspective we’re doing a small group of messages that I’ve called The Long Road Home because so many people are wandering in a spiritual desert and the thing that often keeps us from turning around, and going to God in the middle of that. The one person that we’re looking for, you know the one thing that can satisfy that longing that we have, the thing that so often stops us, is that sense of dread. That sense of wondering well how is He going to react? Is it going to be like Dad punishing me when I was a kid? Jesus knew that, Jesus knows that. That’s why he told a story, it’s the story of the prodigal son, the lost son. We’ve been looking at it over this week on A Different Perspective. It began with a son’s rebellion. Let’s have a read of it again. A man had a two sons, the younger of them said to his father, "Dad give me the share of the estate that I have coming to me." so the father distributed the assets to them. Not many days later the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country where he squandered his estate on foolish living. After he had spent everything a severe famine struck the country and he had nothing. And then he went to work for one of the citizens of that land who sent him out into the field to feed the pigs. This son longed to eat his fill from the carob pods that the pigs were eating but no one gave him anything. When he finally came to his senses he said, ‘How many of my father’s servants have more than enough food and here I am dying of hunger. I’ll get up and I’ll go to my father and say to him, ‘father I’ve sinned against Heaven and against you, I’m not worthy to be called you son anymore, just make me one of your servants’.” And so he got up and he went to his father. It’s a cycle that began with a desire to do it my way, with a desire to rebel, with a desire for partying and excitement, and all the stuff I guess that we look for as young people, and probably as we get older as well. But I wonder how much of this cycle parallels our lives. Whether you’ve never met Jesus before, you just have a sense of spiritual longing, or maybe, maybe once you walked with him, somewhere along the road either you wandered off, or he somehow seemed to disappear, or maybe you’re trying to walk with him but in a certain area of your life, well there’s something you’re holding back. Wherever we’re coming from, the same symptoms of spiritual hunger, of emptiness, of something missing, of something not working is what so often people feel. And what happened here for this young man, is when he finally came to his senses, what he did was this. He linked his pain with the initial cause, which was his rebellion. So often we don’t do that, so often we’re suffering and yet we go on deluding ourselves that our choices are fine and everything’s fine. Of course I can have an affair, of course I can live like this, of course I can reject God’s view on A, B, C and D. And yet, if we’re really honest with ourselves, if we really look at our predicament in our situation in this spiritual wilderness that so many people are walking through. If we’re really honest, we can see that the pain and the symptoms come back to a rebellion. I don’t know what that rebellion looks like in your life, we all rebel in different ways but it’s not rocket science to figure it out. And then this young man-made a pragmatic decision, a selfish decision, not some altruistic decision to say I’m going to go back to my father because my father is a wonderful man. It was a decision that was driven by the hunger in his stomach looking at these pigs day and night. And he made a decision in his best interests to start on that long road home. We’re not told in this story. It’s a parable. It’s a story that Jesus told to illustrate a point, the point of which we’ll see in tomorrow’s program. We’re not told what the journey on the road was like; we know that this young man went to some far off distant country. How long was the journey home? Weeks, month’s maybe-walking? He certainly couldn’t afford to pay for a lift. So as he was trudging along the dirt road step by step, days went by. On this journey, on this long road home, what was he feeling, what was he thinking, what was going through his mind? Well we’re not told but we can have a fairly good guess – anger; "it’s not fair; it’s just not fair that it’s worked out this way. Why was there a famine just when I was partying?" Maybe some remorse? "How can I be so stupid and waste all that money, and do that to my Dad?" We certainly know there was hunger; he had no money so he was living as best he could at a time of famine, off the land traveling home. What about the embarrassment? "What will my brother say? What will the other servants say?" His low expectations of his Dad; "oh I won’t be taken back as a son, I’ll go as a servant." His apprehension; "what will my Dad say, what’ll he say?" And day after day walking the dusty road. Whichever path we walk, I wonder whether sitting at the other end of that turn around decision, on the outer end of that lonely road back, we don’t experience a similar cocktail of emotions, trudging through the wilderness, it’s not working, it’s time to head towards God. Look at them all; anger, remorse, hunger, embarrassment, apprehension – they’re very human, they’re very predictable, and so often they stop us even from trying. We start with good intentions to head back towards God, but our feelings get the better of us, and the gentle nudging and the calling that’s been happening deep down somewhere in our spirits. Well, we just don’t follow it through. Tomorrow on A Different Perspective we’re going to look at the end of Jesus’ story. How it turns out, the whole point of what he was trying to say to anyone who’s walking in a spiritual wilderness. But today, let’s remember that sometimes when we take that decision, to turn around, to step out on that long road home, sometimes we can feel these things, and sometimes we want to pull off to the side of that road and stop, and give up – don’t give up! Join me tomorrow as we look at the point of the story that Jesus told. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39722205

A Tough Decision // The Long Road Home, Part 3 02/18/2026

A Tough Decision // The Long Road Home, Part 3 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 failed. Sometimes we’re angry, other times we deny it, and then we just hope it’ll go away and nobody will notice. You can tell, can’t you, that I understand this pretty well? But when it comes to our life choices, sometimes we back the wrong horse and we let the failure linger on and on, and eat away at us. Because going back to what we know is right in the first place, well, that can be a long road home. There’s something that’s fun and exciting about rebelling, about turning our backs on things and thumbing our nose at authority. Just recently we had a bit of fun in our Ministry, we redeveloped our website, www.christianityworks.com. And all of the developers, (the team there are in their early 20s), and if you go there, there’s a video image of me on the homepage. And during the development time before the whole thing went live, some of the developers put a little halo above my head! You know what I mean, it was fun, now not withstanding it was theologically correct because of course we all are saints in Christ Jesus! I had to tell him to take it off, you know a bit of disrespect but it was fun, you know we all had a good laugh. And so there are times when it can be fun but if we go on and on, and on, and we rebel, and we turn against things, life gets unbalanced, and there are consequences. There are so many people who think, "well, I can have fun all the time, I can joke all the time, I can reject all the time, I can rebel all the time, I can do what I like." And as they try and pour gratification to themselves, as they try and chase that illusory oasis in the desert, what they discover is actually, it’s a mirage. Actually as we try and pour things in, we find ourselves in a spiritual wilderness. Jesus knew that, Jesus told a story, it’s the story of the prodigal son, which we read yesterday and the day before, and we’re going to look at for the rest of this week. He told a story about this spiritual wilderness and what the road home looks like. Let’s pick up the story. A man had a couple of sons, the younger of them said to his father, "Dad give me my share of the estate that I have coming to me" so the dad distributed the assets to them. Not long after the younger son gathered all the stuff that he had and traveled to a distant land where he squandered his estate in foolish living. After he’d spent everything, a severe famine struck the country and he had nothing. And then he went to work for one of the citizens of that land who sent him out to feed the pigs. He longed to fill himself with the carob pods that the pigs were eating but no one would give him any. When he finally came to his senses he said: How many of my father’s servants have more than enough food and here I am dying of hunger. I know what I’ll do, I’ll get up and go to my father and say, ‘Father I’ve sinned against Heaven and against you, I’m not worthy to be called you son anymore, just make me one of your servants’. And so he got up and went to his father. See it all begins with rebellion. It all begins with this illusion that we can spend our lives having fun and partying and doing what we want, and if it feels good do it. I mean morals are old-fashioned and, it has consequences, life isn’t like that. There is a reality to life; enjoyment is much deeper than partying and doing what feels good. It’s an interesting cycle. It begins with rebellion, we reject something, we reject God along with it and we all do that sometimes. And then we think we can kick up our heels and do what feels good. And people do drink and drugs, and they have attitudes that are against God, and they have mindsets that are strongholds against God, and "Ah! Sure, have an affair, the world’s saying it is ok." And yet there are consequences. People go and have affairs and it hurts. There are divorces; there are kid’s lives that are often so deeply impacted by all of that stuff. And on the one hand people are saying, "No, no it’s alright, what if it feels good, go and do it." And yet this whole rebellion, kicking up our heels thing is linked to the consequences, but we deceive ourselves, we don’t connect the two at all. And that was the cycle for the prodigal son in that story. Dad and the farm, and the work, and the brother, compared to parties and an exotic far off land. Well, which one do you think looked more appealing to the young man at the time? There were consequences, he had to get up and look at those pigs in the eye morning and night with hunger in his belly and all of a sudden, it wasn’t very hard to connect the two, the rebellion and the consequences. That is when he came to his senses. That was the turning point. It was a pragmatic decision, this coming to his senses. He had choices: On the one hand he could stay here with porky the pig and starve, and look at this pig in the eye every morning and every night when he went out in the field to feed them the food. Or he could suffer the humiliation of going back home as a servant in his father’s household, and at least have some food in his stomach. That was the choice and he weighed them. Which one is more in my interest? This wasn’t some altruistic decision to return to the fold and his father, and his family, and the honour, and no, no, no … this was a pragmatic self-interested decision. That when something like this, you know something, the choice that I have made is not working, my only other choice is to start on that long road back home again, albeit that I have low expectations, albeit that I’m going to go to my father and say, "Father I have sinned against Heaven and you and I’m not worthy to be your son, make me a servant just as long as I have enough food to eat." So here we have God in one corner and us over here somewhere else. I don’t know what the shape and nature of your rebellion looks like. I know what the shape and nature of my rebellions look like over the years. As we live out rebellion in life, in this spiritual wilderness, just like this son was in a wilderness out there with the pigs, we’ve got to ask ourselves, is it working? Has the rebellion delivered what I expected it to deliver? Has it lived up to the expectations? What form has that rebellion taken? Or is it a bit like staring at Porky in the eye morning and night? It ain’t working! There’s hunger in our bellies, there’s a loss and a sense of "something’s not working, something’s missing, I know Dad’s out there, I know there’s a road back." Is it time to make a pragmatic decision about that rebellion in your life? Is it time to say ‘it ain’t working!’ I’m far better off with Dad where the riches and the privileges, and the benefits, and the blessings of God in my life, because as long as I continue to rebel, I’m not going to experience those. Or, would I rather hang on in pride to my rebellion and spend the rest of my life feeding Porky the pig? Benefit versus embarrassment, and often it’s the embarrassment that holds us back from coming to God. The price is humbling ourselves and then all the blessings of heaven can be poured out on us. I can’t make that decision for you, it’s not my job. It’s my job to present you with a choice. Your part is to look at rebellion if it happens in your life, and for you to make the choice between benefit and embarrassment. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39722200

Partying Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be // The Long Road Home, Part 2 02/17/2026

Partying Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be // The Long Road Home, Part 2 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 images of freedom and rebellion and success and leisure and partying, not just in the advertisements, but the TV shows themselves, basically tell us anything goes. So before you know it, you turn around and we’ve shifted from a post-war puritanical extreme of the 1950’s, to an anything goes "if it feels good do it" society just half a century later. But more than ever people are finding themselves in their own private spiritual wilderness. Doesn’t matter what they tell us on TV, why is that? There are so many people wandering around in a spiritual wilderness, the TV’s and the advertisers, they’re all saying, "It looks like an oasis, it is an oasis". But when we’re in the spiritual wilderness, you know something? It feels like a desert. Jesus knew that, Jesus told a wonderful story, it was a parable it’s not a real story, it was intended to illustrate His point. And it’s the parable, the story, of the prodigal son, began with a rebellion. Let’s have a look. A man had two sons, the younger of them says to Dad, "Dad give me my share of the estate that I have coming to me." So, the father distributes the assets to them. Not many days later the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country where he squandered the estate on foolish living. After he’d spent everything, a severe famine struck that country and he had nothing. Then he went to work for one of the citizens of that country who sent him to feed the pigs. He longed to eat his fill from the carob pods the pigs were eating but no one would give him anything. Here’s this young man, you know, he’s living on this farm with Dad, he’s bored, he wants to see the big smoke and do the things and have the parties. Maybe he’s been watching too much television, I don’t know. So he decides to go somewhere exotic, he decides to say, "Dad give me all my inheritance, I’m taking it with me." And he goes to some far distant land where he parties, where he does the whole "if it feels good, do it thing". Does it sound familiar to you? It’s exactly what Jesus was talking about. But not long into that rebellion reality sinks in. You know, this guy’s spending money as though there’s no tomorrow, on anything he can think of he’s spending money, and all of a sudden a famine hits the land. Now, it’s not like a famine in a rich developed country. This is like a famine in a subsistence farming country, and when his money runs out, the things that (I don’t know) this exciting living promised, the things that all these glossy ads on television promised him turned out to be hollow and empty, and he was hungry. That was a reality. Here’s the paradox, the more you pour in to fill up, the emptier and the shallower life becomes. I wonder as each one of us looks at our lives, how much they mirror this story of the prodigal son. The parable is this: A home, Dad, the farm, that’s God. Now to this young man they looked boring they were constrained, there’s something in him that wanted to kick up his heels and rebel against all of that and so he left home. The place of privilege, the place of plenty of food, the place of wealth, it was boring. He wanted to go and do it his own way. He did that. He went and partied. You know something, any life that’s out of balance will come crashing down around our ears. That’s the problem with constructing our reality from all these flashing images on the television of success, success, success; party, party, party; freedom, freedom, freedom; life’s not like that. Don’t know about you but I have responsibilities, I have a family, a mortgage to pay and food to put on the table and ministry things to do, we all have those responsibilities. Life is not about partying even though relaxing and enjoying life is a normal part of a balanced life. But when we have an unbalanced life, when it’s out of kilter, out of whack, things come crashing down round our ears, reality sets in. We all do our rebelling in a different way. But after a while, we discover that partying 24 by 7 ain’t all it’s cracked up to be right? So let’s look at our own lives just for a minute. It’s possible, you know, even for someone who says, ‘Well, I’m a Christian’ to have some form of rebellion going on in their lives. I was at a Christian Bible study some years ago and we were talking about things, there was a young woman there who was working in the church and she was doing all sorts of things and she expressed a very strong opinion. She said, "Look, I agree with just about everything that God says, but I don’t agree with this abortion thing. Like it’s a woman’s choice, you know. If a woman wants to have an abortion she should be able too." Great, that’s an opinion, that’s a view. But if we really listen to what God is saying, really go and read about what’s going on in the mother’s womb. It tells us God is putting that person together. We can’t take a part of what He says and reject the rest, that’s rebellion. People want to accept God on their own terms. I don’t agree with that bit about God. No, God can, I’ll have all of this bit of God but I won’t have that bit of God. People go to church and put on the façade and yet there’s a cold war there’s a détente going on between husband and wife. I wonder if we can just take a few minutes, each one of us, to think about what rebellion is going on in my life really? What are the areas, what’s the one thing, what are the multiple things, how am I rebelling against God? Because as sure as God made little green apples, if there is rebellion there will also be symptoms that are causing us pain. What’s hurting? What’s empty? They’re a cause and effect relationship, the prodigal rejected his Dad, he squandered the money and now he’s starving. You and I reject Dad, and that’s what Jesus calls Him, through our attitudes or through the things we do or whatever it is, and there are impacts. They’re there, they always are, they hurt, they rob us, they steal life away from us. It’s just one of those natural laws of life. God is God. God made the world, God made us to love Him and to enjoy Him and to be blessed by Him. And when we reject Dad and the family farm, when we reject our birthright and try and take a grab on our inheritance and run off in the other direction, let’s not be surprised, when there are consequences. When partying 24/7 falls down around our ears and all of a sudden, we’re in the trough with the pigs, yet we hold on to those bags of rubbish for dear life, while they eat away at us like a cancer. Come on, what are they in your life? They’re inside, is it time to name them? Is it time to shame them? Is it time for you to look at what you’re missing out on, for me to look at what I’m missing out on in this rebellion? Instead of slopping it with the pigs, tomorrow, tomorrow we’re going to look at the turning point of the story, but it all began with a son’s rebellion against his Dad. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39722020

It's Time to Party // The Long Road Home, Part 1 02/16/2026

It's Time to Party // The Long Road Home, Part 1 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 good enough. Besides, when I find Him, He’ll want me to change. He’ll want me to give up this and that and then life won’t be fun anymore. So, I’ll keep on wandering through the wilderness, that’s fun, at least it used to be. But now, now I don’t know anymore. It’s a dilemma faced by a lot of people. When it comes to God, when it comes to Jesus, some of those people may never really have bumped into Jesus out there at all. Maybe some of those people wandering in that spiritual wilderness have and they’ve walked with Him for a while, but then they went their own way. And maybe some of them, well they thought they were walking with Him but He seems to have wandered off somewhere while they were busy doing something else. And what started off feeling like an oasis, what started off feeling like it was fun, what started off feeling good, after a while it just feels a bit like a desert, it feels like a wilderness because it is. I think I’ll stay here, I don’t think I can go back, I don’t think I can go looking for Him, if I take that first step back towards Him, oh man … It could be a long road to home. And it doesn’t matter from which direction we’ve come, it doesn’t matter where we started from, we can all end up in this same place, in a spiritual wilderness. In a place where, I don’t know, there’s no fulfilment there’s something empty, there’s a hole, we’re looking for something we can put our finger on it, maybe we’ve met Jesus somewhere along the way before but we don’t know whether He’s real or whether He’s for us. We all face that dilemma at some point in our lives. What do we do? Where do we go? How do we deal with that dilemma? This week we’re going to look at that dilemma from A Different Perspective through a story that Jesus told. It was a parable, not a real story. It was a parable to illustrate what He was trying to get across. And it’s a story about the prodigal son. Maybe you’ve heard about it, maybe you’ve never heard about it. Today and the next four days on A Different Perspective, we’re going to work our way through that story and say, “What was Jesus trying to say to the people He was talking to, and what’s He trying to say to us now about this spiritual wilderness experience?” I’ve called this little series "The Long Road Home". It all starts … starts with an impulse we all have at some point – It’s time to party, it’s time to kick up our heels, it’s time to rebel against authority, against structure, against routine, against norms. Whatever it is, at some point in our lives we all want to kick up our heels. My aunty who’s something of a bush philosopher, she would always say, “You know if your kids are kicking up their heels you should thank God because we all kick up our heels at some time in life and its better they do it when they’re young than when they’re old.” You know, I think maybe she’s got a point. But we have this impulse to rebel, that’s why young folk put studs in their eyebrows and have orange or green hair. Back in my day it was jeans, you know denim jeans in the 60’s and 70’s were a sign of rebellion, that’s why most of us baby boomers, even thought we’re in our forties and fifties and dare I say it, even in our sixties, still wear jeans. It was our symbol of rebellion. As adults we rebel against authority in the workplace, maybe we rebel against a marriage relationship and people go out and have affairs. I just don’t want to play this same game over and over and over again anymore. I’ve had enough I want to stop the merry-go-round and get off and do something different. So often people go through a stage whether they’re young or whether they’re old – a stage of rebellion. You often see it strongest in young folk whose fathers have been Ministers because they’ve grown up in an environment that’s organised, it’s Godly and it’s all of those things, and they come to that point in their lives when they just want to rebel. Jesus put His finger on that in this parable, this story to explain the wilderness experience. Don’t often do this on A Different Perspective but I’d like to read you that story, if you have a Bible, if you’d like to look it up later you’ll find it in the New Testament; it’s in Luke Chapter 15. This is what Jesus said, we’re only going to read a little short part of it today and we’ll follow it through during the rest of the week. This is how the story goes: A man had two sons the younger of them said to his father, "Dad, give me my share of the estate that I have coming to me when you die." And so the father distributed the assets to them, and not many days later this youngest son gathered everything he owned together, all he had and travelled to a distant country where he squandered his estate on foolish living. (You may have heard the term prodigal living; we’ll look at what that means in a minute.) So here we have the younger of the two sons, he had enough of Dad, he had enough of the life on the farm working with his brother, day after day, the same thing. He was a young man, he wanted to go and experience what’s going on in the world, he wanted to go to some far distant land, so he rebelled and he said, "Dad, you know you’re going to fall off your twig one day well you might as well give me the money now, and I want to spend it the way I want to spend it." I often look at the decision but his father said, "Well, here is your inheritance go and do what you think." And off this young man goes, partying, drinking, wild parties, prostitutes; you name it he was into it. Now over the course of this week we’ll see how this plays itself out, but it began with a rebellion. Jesus tells this story to explain the long road back, but it begins with a rebellion. It begins with saying to Dad, "I’ve had enough of you! There is a lure of life out there of me doing it my way." As people wander through this spiritual wilderness maybe they can ask themselves a question, maybe that’s you, maybe you can ask yourself some questions. At what point did I rebel? What does my brand of rebellion look like in life? What form does it take? Because we hang on to it, there’s a pride about our rebellion, we don’t want to admit it, it ain't working. But we don’t want to let go of the things that we’ve put this emotional investment in to. We’ll talk about that a bit tomorrow that whole thing that I’ve made a choice, I’ve gone and done it my way and it’s kind of … well … it’s embarrassing when we have to say, "I got it wrong." And so often people are wandering through a spiritual wilderness, aimlessly and they have a sense that there’s some root cause that there’s some root rebellion, there’s something that they got wrong but they don’t want to let it go. And as long as they hang on to it there’s that lostness and emptiness inside, however successful they might appear on the outside. The very first step on that long road home is seeing the wilderness for what it is, seeing that original rebellion for what it is, naming it, owning it, saying it, saying, "Yep that’s me! I’ve done that, I’m the one that’s rebelled. I’m the one that told Dad to take his farm and look after it himself, I’m going to go and live my life my way." There are always consequences to that sort of rebellion. What does it look like in your life? What does it look like in my life? Over the next four days we’re going to work our way through this story and see what Jesus was saying about the long road home. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721995

Forgiving the Really Big Things // Forgive and Forget, Part 5 02/13/2026

Forgiving the Really Big Things // Forgive and Forget, Part 5 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 that the most incredibly difficult thing would be to bury your own child. To stand by the graveside and look at that wooden box and think, "It should be the other way around." What if someone killed your child? How would we get on and live life? I'm joined again today with Lorraine Watson who's going to take us through exactly that, Lorraine, welcome. Lorraine Watson: It's good to be here, Bernie. Berni Dymet: So Lorraine, your son died recently. How long ago was that? Lorraine Watson: Just over 18 months. Berni Dymet: That's pretty close; it's not that far. Lorraine Watson: No, it isn't. Berni Dymet: How did that happen? What happened? Lorraine Watson: Well, my son was running across a motorway where he shouldn't have been running in the middle of the night and the car hit him. The man left the accident without stopping and left him lying on the ground. Subsequently some minutes later another big BMW hit him and killed him. Berni Dymet: Can you remember when you got the phone call when they told you? Lorraine Watson: Yes, we got the phone call from his wife and I can still remember the absolute horror in her voice as she kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" as if it was her fault. When we heard the news it was the worst thing that you could imagine. Berni Dymet: Yes, it must be a tough thing to try and even get your mind around that. Lorraine Watson: Well, for quite a period of time we couldn't move, we just sat. It is almost impossible to imagine. He was our eldest son. Berni Dymet: He had kids himself? Lorraine Watson: He had two little boys that he left behind. Berni Dymet: How did they cope? Lorraine Watson: It was very difficult for them. They were four and five and the little boy particularly, the four year old was very, very angry and he kept saying, "I'm sick of this, I just want my daddy back!" So that was really hard. And because they look very like him it's very hard to see them as well at that time. Berni Dymet: What's his name? Lorraine Watson: Chris. Berni Dymet: Tell us about him. What was he like? Lorraine Watson: Chris was a very active person. He was a runner and just enjoyed life really. He was a businessman and a very successful one and he just liked doing all sorts of different things really. Berni Dymet: So did they catch the guy that knocked him down? What happened there? Lorraine Watson: Well, the first guy took his car and hid it at a people's place and they saw the crime watch program that featured the accident. They knew that this car had done the damage so they rang into the police. So he was found almost immediately, but he denied it. And for 12 months we had court case after court case trying to determine what had actually happened. Berni Dymet: And the outcome has been? Lorraine Watson: He admitted it at the last moment that he had used the car. Berni Dymet: So justice has taken its course presumably. Lorraine Watson: Well, he only got some hours, community service and $10,000 to his children because they couldn't, in fact they didn't prove that he killed him because he didn't. Because the second car actually did that. Berni Dymet: Wow, how does that feel? Lorraine Watson: It was really horrific. I think the worst part during it all was the thought of Chris lying on the road in the dark on his own alive waiting. Berni Dymet: So just the simple act of him having stopped and pulled Chris off the motorway would have saved his life. Lorraine Watson: The coroner said it was quite within the realms of possibility. Berni Dymet: Were you angry? Lorraine Watson: At the time, dreadfully angry. It was a needless sort of a thing for me. And if he had stopped, then he would not have been even charged. And if he could have reached out to us in any way, we would have been very happy to let that incident go. But he couldn't do either of these things. Berni Dymet: So how do you move on from that? I mean, how do you stay on the track? You obviously have been through a horrendous ride with your husband and your family. Have you done anything to move on from that? Lorraine Watson: Well, one of the first things we determined was that we were going to grieve loud and long, as we needed to do. And Allan and I both did that. In the process I thought I would go mad. It was just as if insanity was just a heartbeat away. If I hadn't chosen, I could have just flipped over. And it was a real temptation, I might say. I forgot all the rest of the children; it was only this darkness in my life really. And then what I talked about on yesterday's program came back to mind. How God had healed me through forgiveness and how He had forgiven on the cross. And it was like a light turned on for me and I knew that I needed to forgive this man, Jeremy. And so I also knew that I could not do that in my own strength. Berni Dymet: It's a big ask, isn't it? Lorraine Watson: It was huge and so I just had to ask God and the Holy Spirit to give me that forgiveness for him. And He did. And it was such a release; such a freedom came in my spirit, when I could not worry about that man's sentence or lack of sentence. That man Jeremy; he's not that man to me anymore. He's Jeremy. That I could see the pain that he was in and the fear that was in him. And so I said to God, "I would like this man as a son to replace the son that has been taken, in a spiritual sense, not in a physical sense because we have no contact with him. He does not want that. And so I pray for him and I believe the Lord will save him and bring him into the family really. Berni Dymet: There was something that you said, that when you forgave him you no longer were worrying about the sentence that he got. It's interesting to me that as we forgive someone our sense of justice, our sense of this person should be punished for leaving my son on the road to be killed by someone else. We do have a deep sense of justice, don't we? It's probably one of the biggest pains you went through; I hear you saying. Lorraine Watson: Yes, it definitely was. Berni Dymet: And yet this act of forgiveness takes away our need for retribution. Lorraine Watson: It's true. And that surprises me too. It still surprises me that I don't have that need to keep poking around and complaining about and pulling this man down really. Berni Dymet: If you could say anything to Jeremy today, what would you say to him? Lorraine Watson: I would say to him, "I care about you. I care about your life and I will go on praying for you until such time as you find the peace that you need. “ Berni Dymet: Wow! Do you think praying for Jeremy has changed you? Lorraine Watson: I think so, because when I pray now it's with a sense of almost anticipation and an excitement that God will do something that I can't possibly do. And that leads me on to a sense of victory over something that I couldn't possibly have managed myself. And the scripture that has always been mine is that "All things work together for good." And God has proved himself yet again. Berni Dymet: Amen. Lorraine thank you so much for sharing that with me; it can't have been easy. It's only 18 months ago but it's a testimony to the amazing healing that God brings when we let go of something and we just open our hearts to this whole thing of forgiveness. As we forgive others the way that Christ forgave us on the cross. Lorraine thank you so much. Lorraine Watson: Thanks Berni. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721965

Forgiving Brings Healing // Forgive and Forget, Part 4 02/12/2026

Forgiving Brings Healing // Forgive and Forget, Part 4 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 depression. I quote, "We've never seen such strong results." Abuse, sexual, physical, mental, emotional is actually much more common than we think. You probably don't know Lorraine Watson, but as someone who's traveled down that road I was interested in talking about this whole forgiveness thing through with her. Lorraine, welcome. Lorraine Watson: It's good to be here Bernie. Berni Dymet: Now tell us a bit about your earlier years. You had a tough time of it. Lorraine Watson: Yes, I was born the sixth child in a family of nine. Berni Dymet: Obviously New Zealand. Lorraine Watson: Yes, the first daughter after five sons. So that in itself was a problem. But it was an extremely dysfunctional family as well. Berni Dymet: In what ways? Lorraine Watson: We had no money and we had no emotional things going on in the family. We had no support and there was also sexual dysfunction, as well. Bernie Dymet: Now you are saying that you went through some abuse. What form did that abuse take? Lorraine Watson: It was sexual; it was within the family and without. There were people like my father's friends and other people in the area. It was a very small area and it was a very, I would say, incestuous area. Berni Dymet: How did that feel when you were growing up? I guess as a kid you don't know any different. Can you remember the sort of emotions and the feelings you were going through with all of that? Lorraine Watson: I did know it was different. I did know it wasn't safe to bring my friends home and when I went to any other person's house it was like I lived on a different level to them. There was just no recognition for me, that I was a person in my own right really. Berni Dymet: So, you grew up and you came out of that. What impact did that have on you as an adult? Lorraine Watson: Well, the first thing I think was that it was being sexually dysfunctional myself. I did not know how to relate to people on the level that was healthy. I didn't know how to form relationships. I longed for them, but what I really found was that I wanted to be loved in the way that I knew love, it was definitely sexual and nothing else. Berni Dymet: Ok, so you got married, had a husband, you had kids. Did this affect your relationship with him? Lorraine Watson: We married very young and for all the wrong reasons, but we did love each other and because of my faith, that my mother had passed on to me really, I knew that my marriage was forever. And so we worked very hard on our marriage. But we had six children very quickly and I definitely was not a good mother. I did not know how to relate to them either. I just did not have relationships skills at all. So that was very hard for me. But I worked very hard. It was what I thought that you did to get on was to work hard. Berni Dymet: So how does all this come to a head? I mean you sit here and talk about it very calmly now. What happened to you? Lorraine Watson: Well, I was always a churchgoer and my husband also had joined the church. I had a belief in God, not a personal belief, but I knew He was there. But during the pregnancy of my sixth child my body started to really dysfunction physically. So my back started to act up, I could not sit down often. They had me in a surgical corset. Berni Dymet: It must be hard when you're pregnant. Lorraine Watson: It was very hard when I was pregnant and there was a lot of pain. But if I stopped it would be worse so I pushed myself very hard. But during the later stages of that pregnancy my back stopped functioning altogether. Berni Dymet: What does that mean? Lorraine Watson: I just sat down one day and couldn't get up. And the pain was horrific but then I lost all feeling from my waist down. At this point I had cried out to God. If you are there God, and I knew He was, but it was certainly desperation, if you are there somewhere there must be something more than this. Berni Dymet: It's kind of a difference between knowing in your head and knowing in your heart, isn't it? Lorraine Watson: It was really. So when I lost the feeling in my body they took me off to the hospital in an ambulance with oxygen and all the bells and whistles. And when I did arrive there they found that I was having labor pains. Berni Dymet: It must have been pretty scary; you're losing the function of your legs and your feet. You've got five kids, one on the way. That would be exciting. Lorraine Watson: It was really bad because that's the only thing I remember about David's birth was that, how on earth am I going to look after six children from a wheelchair. Berni Dymet: OK, so you cry out to God. What happens? The baby is born… Lorraine Watson: I'm not sure of the timing really, but somewhere among that God heard my prayer and I found Him in a new way through a pray group, through a Pentecostal prayer group. And I gave my life to Him in a new way and I was baptized in the Spirit. Now that brought a lot of joy. I was very excited about that and thought that life was never going to be difficult again. But six weeks down the track everything fell apart and the first thing the Lord did with me was through His word showed me the power of forgiveness; that I needed to forgive every person in my life. Berni Dymet: How do you do that? Lorraine Watson: Well, really it was a decision to start with. But I was very sure that this was God's word and that somehow I needed to do it. So, I really, in my head really, made that decision and sat down and went through every single thing that I had gone through and consciously forgave. I said the words that “I forgave these people.” Berni Dymet: What happened next? Lorraine Watson: Then I had a real sense of God saying to me that if I was willing to forgive totally my father then he would find God, which subsequently he did forty years later. But it wasn't an emotional decision really, but there was a lightness in myself after I had done that. But then the unexpected happened that my body healed. My back was totally healed. I have had no problem with the back since then. Berni Dymet: So you forgave, how long after that forgiveness, active forgiveness did you become well? Lorraine Watson: After the forgiveness it took a long period of time because it kept on coming up, other incidents kept coming up. And so I guess the process took a few months really; gradually my back just got better and better. And then I realized I didn't wear my corset and there was nothing wrong with my body. Not only my physical body but there was something happening emotionally for me. Berni Dymet: People say, "Oh Ok, she had a sore back and it got better. Is that a real healing?" Lorraine Watson: I know it was a real healing because there was no pain at all and I can't remember not having pain in my back from a teenager. The only time I might get a twinge is when I know my stress levels are high and I need to deal with something. And it's just tiny, not an ongoing problem at all. Berni Dymet: That's really great! Thanks so much for that. I'd love to catch up with you again tomorrow. We're going to talk about a different sort of forgiveness to do with the death of you son just not that long ago. So it will be really great to catch up tomorrow. Thanks so much for that. Lorraine Watson: Thanks Bernie. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721940

When God Forgave Us // Forgive and Forget, Part 3 02/11/2026

When God Forgave Us // Forgive and Forget, Part 3 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 failures, workplaces become a sieving bed of politics and strife. And you know, they are. We can’t do anything really effective in a relationship when there’s resentment and strife. Forgiveness is the first and only real step towards really dealing with issues. But what about God? I mean, if God’s God, why is forgiveness really such a big deal for him? Surely none of us is really that bad. For me this whole issue of God forgiving us is one of the toughest issues I’ve ever had to get my mind around. Now I’m the first to admit I have faults and mistakes. Absolutely. And you can too. We all say, “None of us is perfect.” But if there is a God. If God is God, all powerful, all loving. Why doesn’t He just look at me and say, “Well there’s a guy who’s trying to live a good life. He’s not perfect, but hey, who is? He’s in. Heaven, eternal life. This guy is trying to live a good life. He’s good enough.” Have you ever wondered that? I mean, come on God, if you make the rules, if you can do whatever you want, why don’t you just accept me for who I am. And yet, we turn around and we watch the evening news. You know, the latest drunk driver who’s killed a young kid. The latest sex abuse scandal, the latest corporate executive who’s taken a short-term unauthorised loan and neglected to pay it back. And something rises up inside us . You know, they should be punished. That drunk driver who walked out of the pub and got in his car and ran over that kid. He deserves to be locked up for life. That’s our reaction isn’t it? Are you with me so far? On the one hand, we all have in-built innate sense of justice when it comes to other people. On the other hand, when it comes to us, to you and me, we want to rationalise our mistakes, explain away our selfishness, ignore some of the destruction that’s left in our wake. I remember thinking, well that’s all well and good. I’m not a drunk driver who’s killed a kid. I’m not a murderer or rapist. I’m not any of those things, so why should God have to forgive me? I’m just human. Hmm. But imagine. Imagine if His standard is one of perfect love. A love that never fails. A love that never stops searching for, caring for us. What if this God has a love so wide, so wide, so deep for us that we can never fathom it. Just imagine you go outside at night away from the smog and the light of the city and you look up at the sky and you see all the stars of heaven lighted above, and God says to you, “Compared to the vastness of the universe that I’ve created for you, you are so much more important. Those things are just a drop in the ocean in my heart. I love you. I love you with a perfect love.” Imagine if that’s the standard that God applies. Now let’s apply the same innate sense of justice that we feel when we’re watching the evening news set against this standard of perfect love. And anything short of that perfect love, well, it just falls short in this deep and mighty Father-heart of God. There are two things. There is love and there’s justice. Both need to be satisfied. It’s in our nature. So why wouldn’t it be in God’s nature? If we really, truly love someone, we won’t sweep their selfishness, their failures, their rejections, their alienations, their addictions, their anger, their resentment, their hatred – we won’t sweep those things under the carpet. If we really love someone, we’ll do whatever it costs. You know when we look at God and we say, “Well why doesn’t God just accept me the way I am? Why doesn’t He just accept me and give me eternal life and say, ‘Hey, this person is human?’” When we look at God like that, we’re judging God by the wrong standard. We really need to judge God, if I can use that term, by the standard of His perfect love. A love so great that He would send His Son Jesus Christ, the most valuable person in His life, and allow Him to be beaten, to be spat on, to be abused, to be nailed to a cross to die for you and me. God is a just God, and justice needs to be satisfied. But God is a God of grace, a God of love. And when He looks at you, when He looks at me, His heart just overflows with love. There are no words to describe this. And so He sent Jesus His Son to die on a cross for me so He can look at me, He can look at you and say, “There’s a person who has placed their faith in my Son. There is person who has said, ‘I fall short of the glory of God. I fall short of God’s standard of perfect love. Nothing I can ever do will ever bring me up to that standard. And I know that God has to judge by the standard of perfect love, and so what I’m going to do is this. I’m going to look at this Jesus who died for me on the cross, and I’m going to place my faith in Him.’” What the world says is, “Hey, I’m beautiful. Hey, I’ve got some mistakes, but go out there and have fun. Go out there and enjoy life. Do what feels good.” That’s fine, until you look at Jesus hanging on the cross. That’s fine until you encounter a love so tender, so beautiful, so high, so wide, so deep, that we just can’t fathom it. And as we walk through that love, as we look at God, as we look at the pain that Jesus suffered for us on the cross, we can do nothing but come to the realisation that we fall short of that love. And more than that, Jesus went to the cross. God sent His Son to die on a cross for you and me, knowing full well that when you and I came into this world, we’d reject that perfect love on a daily basis. While we were still out there rejecting Him, in a sense, Christ died for us. Sin is such an old-fashioned word. We talk about low self-esteem. We talk about selfishness or poor choices or whatever we use. Whatever term we use, we fall short of that perfect love, a love so great that it’s not in the business of sweeping those things under the carpet. It’s a love so great that it’s in the business of dealing with our failures to set us free, to live a life eternal, free from those things. We need to call those things in our life exactly what they are; wherever we are, whatever our circumstances, whether we’ve never believed in Jesus, whether we’ve been walking in faith with Him for 50 years, let’s call sin, sin. Let’s name it and let’s judge it by the perfect love that God has for us. And then let’s say, “Hey, I can’t do anything. I can’t please God because I know that I have sinned in my bones.” But what I can do is look at this Jesus hanging on the cross for me and say: Father I believe. I believe in this Jesus. I accept this Jesus as my Savior. And I want to experience and taste the perfect love that you have for me today tomorrow, and next week, forever. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721920

Forgiving is Accepting // Forgive and Forget, Part 2 02/10/2026

Forgiving is Accepting // Forgive and Forget, Part 2 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 interesting, they make life fun. They can also just plain get on our nerves. So how do we make sure that for our part, the differences between us and other people become a source of pleasure instead of pain, richness instead of resentment? As I’ve watched people over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that with every strength in a person, there’s an equal and opposite weakness. It’s like Newton’s Law of Physics. You know, you meet someone with really good insights. You know they see things so clearly; they articulate a situation so well. And you go, wow, you know that person’s clever. But often on the down side, they can be judgmental and blunt; they can be intolerant of other people’s opinions that differ from their own. When you meet a person with a real servant heart. My wife’s like this. They’re the sort of person that always gets up to get the coffees. When you’re out at dinner, they always get up and help the hostess and say, “Let me help you clean up.” They’re always the first to volunteer for something. It’s wonderful being around someone like that. But on the flip-side, people like that can be critical of others who don’t help as much as they do. They can be pushy or interfering in their eagerness to help. Or when you meet a strong and capable leader. You know, someone with real vision and that gift and ability to get other people just to follow them. But on the down side leaders like that can become upset with people who don’t share the same goals and visions. They can regress into using people to accomplish their goals and visions. And have you ever met the sort of person that’s got what I call a pastoral gifting? You know they’re just the sort of person that will pull alongside someone else who’s struggling with whatever. And they’ll just spend whatever time is needed talking, having coffee, visiting them in hospital. Have you met those people when you think if I was ever stranded on a desert island, that’s the sort of person I’d like to be stranded on an island with. The flip-side though is that people like that are really good managers of their time. They’re rarely people who can force a whole bunch of things into a given time because the whole point of their gift and ability is that they don’t worry about time as much as they worry about relationships. There’s a pattern isn’t there? Every strength seems to come with a corresponding weakness. I wonder if any of those ring a bell for you. For me, absolutely. My gig is insights and teaching and leadership. That’s, I guess, what I do. And as I came as a businessman, someone who’d worked in business and commerce for sixteen or seventeen years, into Christian ministries, people saw some skills and abilities and thought, well gee I could use that skill in my ministry. I could use that ability that Berni has in my ministry. And they asked me to do a whole bunch of things like pastor a church. Can I tell you something? I think I would be hopeless at pastoring a church because I don’t have the heart to do it. I don’t have the sort of pastoral giftings, the gift to want to sit with people for a long time. That’s just not me. And so it’s really easy to look at someone and only want to harvest the things that are good about them. And yet, when you interact with them on a day-to-day basis, it’s the other side of the coin. It’s the weaknesses. It’s their failures that hurt us, that grate on us, that ultimately drive us nuts. Reality? You and I are a package of strengths and weaknesses. I know I am and it’s very true of me. I have some strengths but I also have some weaknesses. And the person that knows most about my weaknesses is obviously my wife. She could sit here for quite a long time and share with you all of my weaknesses. You wonder why I never have my wife on the program! And you know if it’s true of me it’s true of you too. But the funny thing is, we are so quick to justify our own weaknesses. Well you know, it’s just how I am. I just can’t change that thing about me. But then we look at other people. And even though it’s true about them too. Even though every other person that you and I will ever meet is a package deal of strengths and weaknesses, what we want them to do is we want them to be only strengths. We don’t want to accept the package deal that comes with every person that we meet. And as we get to know their weaknesses and limitations just that little bit better, we go from boy what a wonderful person with all these strengths, to a state of mild annoyment, to a state of anger, to a state of resentment as we get to know their weaknesses better and better. Question: Who right now do you resent? I mean who’s driving you just crazy in life right now, grating on you? If you look at that person, my hunch is that you would be able to come and sit here behind this microphone and list their weaknesses down to the ‘nth detail with at least three case examples of each weakness. But probably at the same time if I asked you, “Well list their strengths as well,” maybe the way that you describe their strengths wouldn’t be as full and complete and with quite as many case examples as their weaknesses. Because when someone’s driving us nuts, we focus on their weaknesses. We don’t focus on their strength. Yesterday we talked about forgiveness as something that we do after the event. You know when someone’s hurt us or someone’s done something wrong, we know we need to forgive them in order to still have a relationship with them. In order for us to get on with it, to get over the pain, and to be able to live our lives free of the hurts from the past. But there’s another form of forgiveness that happens before the event. And that forgiveness is called acceptance. It’s saying, this person whom I know is a package deal. And you know something? Just like I accept everything I like about them, I am also going to accept their weaknesses. Maybe it’s someone at work, and before you walk into the room and have the meeting, you know exactly how they’re going to react. You know exactly what weaknesses are going to emerge. You just know because you’ve seen the pattern over and over again. And you decide to forgive them before you walk into the meeting, so that when they happen, you can let it wash straight past you. We grow and we become mature when we are able to apply the same excuses to someone else’s weaknesses that we apply only too readily to our own. Maybe wives it’s when your husband comes home, and he just doesn’t want to talk, and he sits down in front of the television, and you get so angry with him because he doesn’t communicate. And right then there’s a decision to make. You can either nag him. You can give him the silent treatment on the one hand. Or you can say, hang on, this is just the way that my husband copes with stress. And he needs my help. I might just show him some love, some affection. I might just give him a bit of space and then come and just stroke his cheek. You know how many husbands would die to have their wives do that for them. And husbands and maybe, you know, when your wife is scratchier, and she’s got PMT, and it really hurts because she’s ignoring you. And you feel like she’s emotionally not there. Well, is it her fault? Or can you say, well that’s something that I just have to love her through, and I will accept her as a package deal with that included because she’s my wife and I love her. The Apostle Paul, two thousand years ago, wrote a letter to a church in Corinth and he said: Look, we’re like a body. And a body has a foot and hand. If the foot said, ‘well the hand’s not like me. The hand can’t make the body walk around.’ And the foot said, ‘I don’t want the hand.’ And if the ear said, ‘well I don’t need the eye. Let’s make the whole body an ear.’ Where would we be? It’s a good picture isn’t it? I can point back to some clear decisions of accepting people in my life as a package deal. Can I tell you something? The people whom I have accepted as a package deal, I have a great relationship with. Because when the weaknesses surface that I know are going to surface. You know something? I can smile to myself inside and say, “I’m going to love them anyway”. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721845

Forgiving is Forgetting // Forgive and Forget, Part 1 02/09/2026

Forgiving is Forgetting // Forgive and Forget, Part 1 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 with people who have been sexually abused, found that none expressed any desire to forgive their perpetrator. So in a controlled study, they selected 50 percent of the group to participate in a series of workshops on forgiveness. So, 12 months down the track, what were the findings of the study? What happened with the 50 percent who attended the forgiveness workshops? Not only did all eventually forgive, but a year later they reported far less anxiety and depression than the non forgiving control group. Researchers concluded that they had never seen such a strong result with incest survivors. They go on to say that "forgiving is giving up the resentment that you are entitled to." "The paradox," says psychologists Enright, Friedman, "is that by giving this gift to the other, it's the gift giver who ends up being healed." You know, I wonder whether in our society today whether for too long we’ve treated forgiveness as something that's fluff. It's one of those "touchy-feely" emotions. Oh well, yeah, I should forgive someone, but it's not really important. But in reality, forgiveness is a really hard thing to do. For those who dare to take that high path, I wonder whether there's something better along that path, something that we could maybe never imagine. It doesn't matter how we look at life. Everyday, everywhere people do things that either hurt us or offend us or threaten us. Sometimes it's people we love. It's the people who are the closest to us. Sometimes it's people we work with. And sometimes it's people that we don't even know. That person behind us in the car that just beeps the horn at us, because maybe we’re just going a little bit too slow for them. And the things that hurt us, or offend us, or threaten us, sometimes they’re small things. Sometimes, they’re things that are quite important to us. Sometimes, they're really really big things. You might have heard me say once before that as a kid at school, I was never one of the beautiful people. I had snide remarks. I was ignored. I was left off the team. Sometimes at work a bunch of people go out for a drink after work and no one thinks to invite you or me. Those things can really hurt and when we feel the pain, we want to retaliate. We want to lash out. We want to pay them back. We want to get our pound of flesh from these people. “Well, if they ignored me, you know something, I can ignore them, too. Maybe those people who went out after that drink last night at work and they didn't invite us. Maybe when they send me an email today at work or need something from me at work, I might just ignore them. I might just frustrate them. I might just play hard to get. I might just completely block them from getting what they want to do.” And before you know it, something small, something that somebody did that they may not have met anything by it. It was just an oversight. All of a sudden, something small escalates just like that into something significant in an instant. You know what I mean. Then sometimes we're dealing with significant hurts. With hurts, you know, an ingrained problem with your boss at work. For some reason, the boss just doesn't want to be fair. For some reason, every time there's a promotion, he or she overlooks you and me. Maybe you feel they're lying about you or maybe there's a real problem in our marriage. Maybe the relationship between husband and wife just, you know, over the years, it’s tired. Haven't you heard people say “we've grown apart”? These are significant problems, they really get us down. And sometimes we have to deal with major hurts. You know, when people really, really hurt us. Later this week we’re going to be talking to Lorraine Watson, we are going to be talking about abuse as a child, about our own children being killed by a hit and run driver. People go through divorce. You know, every now and then in life we have to suffer really major losses. We all deal with these things. Everyday. Whether they’re small, significant or major. Whether it is with people we love, we work with, or people we don’t know. And it turns out how we respond has a huge bearing on the quality of our life. Lets go back to that study that I mentioned at the outset, of the sexually abused women. The 50% who forgave, remember what the report said, they experienced far less anxiety and depression 12months down the track. In fact that startled the psychologists doing the research. They were surprised. They thought, we have never seen such amazing results with people who have been through abuse. But you know, it’s no surprise to God. The apostle Paul, a couple of thousand years ago wrote this, “Never avenge yourselves, leave that bit to God. No, no. If your enemies are hungry feed them. If they are thirsty give them something to drink, don’t be overcome by evil. But overcome evil with good.” You know, this guy Paul has the habit of putting such profound truths into such a small number of words. Psychologists maybe have just figured out that God has known all along. That avenging yourself, getting revenge, something that we mostly do by living out an active resentment towards someone, you know the sort of thing. The silent treatment. We just ignore them. We just “Deal” with them. And we push them away. It’s not the answer. True forgiveness is laying down for good our right to punish someone. And that is really hard. Whether it is being ignored by someone or whether it is something as big as sexual abuse, hurt, hurts. And when we are feeling hurt, when we are experiencing the pain of rejection or pain of abuse or something really little, all we really experience is that pain, right then and there. And to forgive someone, to lay down our right to hurt them back. To ignore them back, to punish them back, my experience is that when I have done that, when I have made a real decision that this person who has just ignored me, I am not going to punish them. I am not going to hurt them back. When I’ve made those decisions in life, you know something, it has never felt good at the time. It has never been a fun thing to do. You know, the cupboard doesn’t open and the orchestra starts playing when I forgive someone. For me it never feels like that. And yet the paradox is that it is the only thing that really sets us free. But wait there is more… you see what Paul wrote there… he said, “Look don’t avenge yourselves, don’t try and punish people. That’s much better left to God, He is a much better judge of character, He is a much better judge of what is going to work and what is not going to work. No, no. If you have an enemy someone that is hurting you, if they are hungry feed them. If they are thirsty give them something to drink. Overcome their evil by blessing them.” 99.9% of people respond to being blessed. Maybe not straight away, but eventually they do. And when they do, a whole new world of relationship opens up for us. Not only do we feel better because we have been set free from the pain of what after all, they did wrong. But we have this relationship there to explore. People say, "Forgive and forget.” But what Paul is saying here, what I believe God is saying here is, there is a step in the middle… Forgive, it is a decision it is tough… But it is the only way to set us free. Then bless them. And I reckon that is even harder. But it is the action that reinforces the decision in our hearts. Bless them, deliberately step out and support this person when someone is stabbing them behind their back. And then forget. We never forget the thing that they did. What we end up forgetting by blessing them is the pain and the resentment, that we would carry round in our hearts like a cancer. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721810

The Year of the Lord's Favour // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 5 02/06/2026

The Year of the Lord's Favour // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 5 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, and they commonly see Him as an “online butler”. He’s nice and loving and friendly and forgiving but with a consumer mentality God’s there to fit in to my life when I need him to help me, when I need Him. Hmm. So how do we make sense of God in our lives today? Why did He send Jesus? What was the point? Does Jesus make a difference? Is this whole Christianity thing worth exploring? Is it worth pushing deeper into a relationship with Jesus? This week on the program we’re looking at those questions, and today let’s explore this whole idea of God’s favour, of God’s blessing, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but God the Butler???!!! People talk about Jesus but what was He all about, why did He come to earth? Why did He leave the air-conditioned comfort of heaven to be a little baby in a disgusting smelly little manger, to go and live in a grotty place like Nazareth and then to be crucified and misunderstood? I mean why did he do that? Well, He tells us actually, He tells us His reasons in an early speech. One of his earliest public addresses was in his hometown in the synagogue, Nazareth. And he quoted Isaiah Chapter 61 verses 1 and 2. Now we’ve worked our way through the first four of those reasons this week, looking at in Luke’s Gospel Chapter 4 exactly what Jesus said. But today we’re going to do something a little bit differently, and to look at the last reason we’re going to go back to the original text in Isaiah which was written centuries before Jesus walked the earth. And this was the text that Jesus actually was quoting, this is what Isaiah wrote: The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from the darkness for prisoners and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance of God. To comfort those who mourn and to provide to those who greaves in Zion, to bestow on them,” (this is good stuff) “to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of morning, the garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair, they’ll be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for a display of his splendor, they’ll rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated. They will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations. (Isaiah 61:1-4) Now it’s interesting, Isaiah here is writing to the nation of Israel after it’s been exiled in Babylon for almost 70 years. Israel spent about 400 years as slaves in Egypt. They then went through the exodus for 40 years where they wandered in the desert and finally Joshua led them over the Jordan into the Promised Land, and there they lived. And the promise of God was, “This is the land I’ve promised your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, this is the Promised Land, and if you obey me, if you live with me as your God you’ll be blessed, this is the land of milk and honey and I’ll bless your socks off.” “But,” he said, “if you don’t, if you go and worship other Gods, if you do the things, the very few things I tell you not to, I will punish you and you will loose the land.” And that’s exactly what happened. The Babylonians came into Jerusalem, they destroyed Jerusalem they took the nation into captivity in Babylon and there they’d been for 70 years. And this is the context that Isaiah is speaking into. That’s why he’s talking about the good news to the poor and binding up the broken-hearted, and freedom for the captives because they were captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners, because they were prisoners. And he said: This is the year of the Lord’s favour. This is the year you get to go back. So that’s what Isaiah was talking about, but Jesus took that and he said it of himself in Nazareth, but he’s also saying it to us. Those people were oppressed by the Romans, they were oppressed by the religious leaders, they were poor, they were broken-hearted, they were captives, they were prisoners, but He wasn’t dealing with a geo-political situation. Jesus was talking about lives, He was talking about individuals, He was talking about poor, broken hearted captives and prisoners that he was about to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour over. Hmm the favour of God! So what is that favour? Is it God the butler? Well, let’s have a look again, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”, and He then goes on to list five things to comfort all who mourn, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of despair, and to rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated, “they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.” God’s favour looks like this; comfort for all who mourn, we all need comfort, we all mourn some day’s we loose someone, a relationship breaks down, we’re just finding it hard, we mourn and grieve. Where do you get that comfort from? Well others can support us but it’s not the same. Jesus said: My favour, the favour of God that I’m declaring to you and bringing to you today is comfort for those who mourn, and secondly a crown of beauty instead of ashes. This is how God sees you, with a crown of beauty on, that’s how much God loves you, “That’s how much I love you, I bring a crown of beauty, you look at the ashes in Jerusalem, you see that the temple was gone, you see that everything that was destroyed.” Replace that with a crown of beauty because that is what God thinks of you. The oil of gladness instead of mourning, I mean olive oil is a real fad food these days isn’t it? But it was a symbol of God’s blessing, people would rub it on their skin like moisturizer today. And this beautiful picture of olive oil, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. You know when we feel oppressed, when we’re struggling we sometimes despair, and yet when God touches our lives, when God changes things, when we experience that goodness and that grace we just want to shout His praises. Rather than a sense of despair over our circumstances God wants a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. And the last one, he talks about rebuilding and renewing and restoring. Now that must have seemed hopeless, “these ruined cities have been devastated for generations,” writes Isaiah, it’s hopeless. But God comes along and says rebuild, renew, restore, out of the ashes will rise something better. Isn’t that an interesting cycle, the five things that Isaiah writes and then Jesus goes on to quote that make up the favour of God are: First, comfort; secondly, putting a crown on our head to say “this is what God thinks of you”, our reactions – gladness and praise. And finally the process of renewing and rebuilding and restoring. Isn’t that beautiful?And Jesus said: That’s what I came to do in your life, got it? Not some butler, not some sugar daddy but to deal with the real issues in the real lives of real people. People in his own hometown rejected him, we can do that we can reject him or we can believe him from a distance, and you know something, in practical terms that’s the same as rejecting him. Or we can embrace the passion of Jesus for us with an equal passion, with an intent to live in that promise that God wants to comfort me, to crown me, to give me gladness and praise, to renew and rebuild and restore my life and that is the favour of God. This year is the year of God’s favour in my life. Will we grab it? Because that’s what Jesus came to give us. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721760

Let the Oppressed Go Free // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 4 02/05/2026

Let the Oppressed Go Free // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 4 We tend to think of oppression in global geo-political terms. But normal, everyday people experience all sorts of oppression – sometimes, in the most unexpected of ways. Oppression is just a fact of life in this world, we tend to think of it in political and in social terms, on a national or international scale, and it is huge. But oppression happens right at home too, oppression isn’t about nations, it’s about individuals like you and me. To be oppressed means to be down trodden. A husband can oppress his wife, a mother can oppress her child, a boss can oppress their employees, and ideas about how we should and shouldn’t live our lives can oppress us without us even knowing. Oppression shatters who we are. It’s like being broken into pieces and it happens whether the oppression is political, social, economic, or personal. We all experience it sometimes, even without really putting a name to it, all we know is that we’re carrying around a heavy burden and it just seems to be crushing us. This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at the reasons that Jesus gave for coming to earth as a man. Here we have the Son of God, He could’ve lived in the air-conditioned comfort of heaven for all eternity, yet He chose to lay all his glory and power aside and become a little baby that grew up into a man, and to walk around on this earth in Galilee, and in Judea, and to tell people who God is. And right at the beginning of that public ministry when He was about 30 years old, He stood up in a synagogue in His own town Nazareth, nowheres-ville really, and He read this from the book of Isaiah about himself. He said: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. Now we’ve looked at the first three of those so far this week – preaching the good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind. Today we’re going to look at the fourth out of the five reasons – to release the oppressed. Why did Jesus come for you? Why did Jesus come for me? Well one of the reasons is to release us from oppression. This is an amazing quotation because by quoting Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 and 2, (and if you have a bible go and read it later, or we’ll have a look at that particular passage tomorrow as well on the program). But He’s really saying God has anointed Me, God has appointed Me, He is really saying to the people who were there on the day listening, “I am the Messiah”, which is whom they were expecting; they just didn’t expect Him to be a carpenter out of Nazareth. He said, “God the father has sent me to let the oppressed go free” – literally to send the oppressed away in release. And we might think, “Oh well that’s not really me, I’m not oppressed, you know I have a pretty good life, I go to work every day, earn a bit of money, come home, go watch a movie, I’m not really oppressed.” But the word that’s used there in that quote for oppression the original Greek word that sits behind our English translation means literally, to be shattered into pieces, to be broken-hearted, to be bruised. Now those are things that we can relate to, those are things that we all go through. The most common complaint of adults in the developed world is stress, we are overstretched, we are stretched to the point of breaking, and lives, and marriages, and families are consistently shattered into pieces. The world is full of broken-hearted people; the world is full of hurting people. Now when you look at some of those reasons that Jesus gave there, poverty, freedom, oppression, in a sense they sound like macro social justice issues, but Israel in the first century well, it was under Roman occupation, it was under a tyranny from religious leaders. But Jesus didn’t tend to speak into those macro social, political issues. Jesus here was talking into the lives, the inner lives of individuals like you and me, He was wanting to see people set free to have a real relationship with God. We see that right through the Gospel accounts, I mean in Mark chapter 1 verse 40 a leper comes to Jesus and the leper says: ‘Lord if you are willing you can set me free, you can heal me’ and Jesus is moved with compassion. This leper was diseased, he was oppressed, he was ostracised from society, he couldn’t go near an able bodied person like you and me, he couldn’t go into the synagogue, or the temple with other people, and this leper comes to Jesus and Jesus is moved with compassion, and reaches out, and touches him, and heals him, and integrates him back into society. The bleeding woman in Mark chapter 5, Jesus is about to go and heal the very, very sick daughter of the leader of the synagogue, and instead He spends time with a woman who has been bleeding, and again bleeding was a sign of being unclean, she was ostracised from society, and he healed her, not just from her sickness but from being ostracised, from being oppressed. The Gerasene Demoniac you know this man who’s living like an animal among the tombstones, who’s full of demons, again Mark chapter 5, this man was in isolation and Jesus when and cast the demons out, and the man said: ‘Jesus I’m so wrapped I want to come with you in the boat’ and Jesus said, ‘No go back to your family, go back to your society, stop being oppressed you’re now free’ (Mark 5: 18-19) Jesus did what He said He was going to do. Now Israel had what we call messianic expectations, Israel were expecting the Messiah because all through the Old Testament the prophets were all saying, “one day the new Messiah will come.” But here they were in the middle of a Roman occupation of the promised land, they were an occupied territory, they were expecting a King, a Messiah like David, a warrior King, someone who would fight the Romans and get them their freedom. And yet Jesus said ‘no, no that’s not what I was talking about, I didn’t come here to deal with geo-political issues. He said, “the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, and to release the oppressed”. He said, “I’ve come for the nobody’s” I mean in those three stories; the leper, the bleeding woman, the demoniac, none of their names are recorded, they’re such little people that they don’t even get names, they don’t get billing in the New Testament, you know. And the affliction wasn’t their fault and they experienced the healing touch of Jesus the Christ but at the same time (I love this), at the same time He raged against the religious leaders who oppressed people with their religious rules and hypocrisy. This Jesus didn’t come to lay rules on us, this Jesus came to set us free, and we go through times in our lives where we’re oppressed, and we’re broken hearted, and when that happens we feel so lonely, and so isolated, and we feel like no one cares, we feel like that leper, or that woman, or that demoniac. And by and large people don’t care, they walk past us day and night, and day and night, and no one does anything, and no one can do anything, and Jesus is precisely the person we would expect not to do anything because He’s God, ‘God hasn’t got time for me, God’s too busy, I’m too little’ look at who he came for! The four groups of people in that very first sermon that He talks about that he came for, the reason He came were the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. That is awesome! He came for you and me. He came precisely because when we are experiencing oppression, when we’re so stretched, when we’re broken hearted, when we’re shattered, when our lives are falling apart, he came precisely for you and me. Even though it’s dark there, even though we wouldn’t expect that, Jesus came for the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed And we’ve got a choice, we can accept him, or we can reject him – it’s our choice. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721680

Sight for the Blind // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 3 02/04/2026

Sight for the Blind // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 3 Imagine just for a moment that you’re blind and all of a sudden, your sight is restored. What would that be like? How would it feel? As a young man I used to have 20/20 vision but like just about everyone else, when you get to your late 30s and early 40s the old vision gets a bit blurred, and I needed glasses. These days I wouldn’t even think of driving a car or reading a book without the old multifocals. When you think about it, little by little without us even noticing, our vision becomes distorted. It’s like that with glaucoma too, little by little people lose their sight and by the time they notice it, it’s just too late. Being able to see clearly is one of the most precious gifts of life and if you ask anyone who’s lost their sight, ‘What would you like most in life?’ Well one of the things that would be right up there on their list, would be being able to see again. They say that seeing is believing, that’s the old saying but what we see, tends to be influenced by how we look at the world. I guess that’s why we call this program A Different Perspective. But when you think about it the glasses I wear, they give me clarity of vision that simply doesn’t exist when I take them off. And you know when I go to the optometrist to have my vision re-checked you know every couple of years, they put all these funny little lenses in front of you and they flick them and “is this one better or is that one better, is this one better or is that.” And it’s amazing how many different perspectives you get on the world, with all the different combinations and permutations of lenses that they flick, flick, flick in front of your eyes. Our view of politics for instance, is influenced by what? Well mostly by our parents and by the socio-economic group that we come from. Our view of the status of men and women in marriage and workplace, well a lot of that depends on what we’ve learned, and what we believe. I remember as young officer in the Australian army, you know I’ve been through four years of training at the Royal Military College at Duntroon and they’re all blokes, I mean women at Duntroon was just, well I mean that would never have happened – it does now of course, but not in those days. And I remember as a young officer getting my first female boss, can I tell you? I was devastated, I could not believe that I would be working for a woman, I was horrified. Now, I had the honesty to sit down with her and tell her that. I look back on that now and I think, “How could I ever have had that attitude, that’s a bizarre attitude” but yet it was a very powerful attitude as young officer who spent four years at Duntroon. Where we sit really influences what we see and how we respond to it. There’s a wonderful little story, I have used this occasionally, I have used this before but I think it’s a powerful one, written in the naval journal of the US and it goes like this: Two battleships were assigned at the training squadron and had been at sea on manoeuvres in heavy weather for several days, I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog so the Captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities. Shortly after dark the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, ‘Light bearing on the starboard bow,’ ‘is it steady or moving astern?’ The Captain called out. Lookout replied, ‘steady Captain’ which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship. The Captain then called to the signalman ‘signal that ship we’re on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees’, back came the signal ‘advisable for you to change course 20 degrees’. The Captain said ‘send I’m a Captain, change course 20 degrees’, ‘I’m a seaman second class’ came the reply ‘you’d better change course 20 degrees’. By that time the Captain was furious he spat out ‘send I’m a battleship, change course 20 degrees’ back came the flashing light ‘I’m a lighthouse’…we changed course. Our sense of reality can get really distorted by just the way that we’re brought up and the way that we’re seeing things. What was the point of Jesus coming to this planet? Well we’ve looked over the last couple of programs this week, at what Jesus said about the reason that He came as the Son of God to be a man on this earth, and the first two reasons we looked at were that He came to give good news to the poor, and release to the captives. He actually told us that, in one of the first sermons He gave when He began his public ministry. The third reason he gave was to give recovery of sight to the blind. Now he literally did that. He healed the blind physically, it’s a matter of historical record, but he also used that as a metaphor for our spiritual and emotional sight too. Now maybe you think ‘well that’s a bit patronising, the notion that we’re not seeing straight that we need someone else to sharpen our focus, my perspective is my perspective, your perspective is your perspective, they’re equally valid, why do we have to have one that is absolutely right?’ I was spending some time with some students the other night at a college where I teach and we were doing a tutorial on effective communication. Now obviously the question of listening came up and one young woman shared a disagreement or an argument that she had recently with her husband. And she said, ‘You know the crazy thing is that I agreed with what he said, we were actually in violent agreement, it was just the way he said it, the tone in his voice, I just snapped back at him.’ We talked about that as a group for a while, and we all do that, don’t we? But why do we do that? Why do we react that way? Well, because we put me at the centre of the discussion. The set of glasses that we look at that whole situation through is a set of glasses that says, ‘my feelings are more important than what that person is saying’. We all get scratchy, everyone does but what’s a more effective response? And we talked about that in the group. And one of the older men pipped in, and he sort of said, “You know everyone gets scratchy in a marriage, I think love is providing a space where my wife is allowed to be scratchy and I still love her, I accept that she can have scratchy days and I won’t bite back at her” I thought “ah wow this is some experience of wisdom with age.” Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be the servant of all.” Now we all go there, we all have our blind spots, our own weaknesses, the impact on the weaknesses that we have on our own lives and others, our prejudices, the stereotypes. You know, all Asians are bad drivers, and so we put everyone in that box and the moment you see someone who’s Asian you say ,”they must be a bad driver”. Well, come on! Sometimes we just dislike people and we just don’t give them a chance. We have misconceptions. The crazy thing though, is that we hang on to them for dear life, and should anyone criticise them, we fight to defend them. You look at how many people vote for the same party at every election only because that’s the way their parents have voted. That is called dogma. Dogma happens at a political level, at a social level, in the level of attitudes of people. And dogma happens when our attitudes are more important than getting it right. When we hang on to bad attitudes and wrong attitudes for dear life irrationally, we are blind. And Jesus said: I’m the Son of God, the Spirit of the Lord is on me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight to the blind. You know Jesus went out there and told it the way it was, that’s why they crucified him. You have a look in the Bible at John chapter 9 and 10: There’s a man whom he healed on the Sabbath, which was the day of rest for the Jews, and all the religious leaders got in his face and said, ‘How dare you heal this man on the Sabbath, you’re doing work on the Sabbath.’ And Jesus said ‘What’s the matter with you, you blind guide? You’re the blind leading the blind’. I love how Jesus brought sight to the blind physically but also mentally, and socially, and spiritually, and emotionally. One of the reasons He came is to help us to work through our blind spots. Would you ever have thought of that? Would you ever think, “Well that’s one of the reasons Jesus came to this earth? He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind?” Now we can reject that, we can say, “No that’s not me”, or we can grab that with both hands and say, “Lord I want to have a better life, show me my blind spots.” /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721650

Release to the Captives // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 2 02/03/2026

Release to the Captives // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 2 It must be an amazing feeling for a prisoner to be set free after years of incarceration. I wonder when they step out of the prison – what that freedom looks like, tastes like, smells like. I’m not sure if you every saw that movie in the mid 90’s called The Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman. But it’s about two men essentially who find themselves in jail, one played by Morgan Freeman is there because he committed murder, the other one is there because he’s been framed. Anyhow there’s a scene in the movie where the Morgan Freeman character finally gets parole after decades, and he walks out of the gate, and for the first time in a long time stands as free man. When you think about it that sort of freedom, well, it must be a huge adjustment and certainly it was for this character in the movie. Freedom is something we all want and yet somehow that sense of freedom can be so illusive, like a mirage painted by the advertising industry, you see it but when you get there it’s gone. Why did Jesus come for you and for me? What’s the relevance of his trip to earth for thirty something years? I mean the real here and now relevance, that’s the question that we’re exploring on A Different Perspective this week. It’s one thing to talk about God, it’s one thing to talk about Jesus, about the cross, about all the things Jesus did, but why did He do them? What was the point? We sometimes have a picture of God which is rules or a stain glass window or being old-fashioned but let’s go straight to the source. Let’s have a look, as we are right through this week on the program, at what Jesus said about the reason that He came. One of the very first times that He stood up to speak publicly He read from an Old Testament book called the book of Isaiah, and He read this about himself, He said: The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he’s anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind. To release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. Yesterday we looked at the good news for the poor. Today, we’re going to look at the second of the reasons which is, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. Now that Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption, if we put ourselves into his shoes for a minute he spent decades in prison, I can’t begin to comprehend one or two nights in prison, this character spent decades in prison. When you think about it, the walls of that prison, the big grey stone walls, were his world for decades. The advances over ten and twenty and thirty years on the outside in technology and society and just the way we live, you think of the things that have happened just over the last thirty years. Automatic teller machines, the way we do shopping, the way we use credit cards, televisions, DVD’s, video’s, the list goes on it’s just a massive amount of change. But he could not imagine what was going on in the outside because his world was purely the routine, the politics, everything to do with what was going on inside that prison. You’d loose sight of all of that outside stuff. Life would be dominated just by the guards and the power struggles and the grey walls. And every night when those bars locked closed in the cell and clang closed that would be just a way of life, day after day after day it’s the norm, you’d stop noticing. I mean to maintain your sanity you’d actually have to resign yourself to the fact, just to stay sane. Freedom, well what’s freedom, what does that look like, what’s that like? What about in our lives? What are the bars, the prison walls, the routine that lock us away from a full rich abundant life? Whether it’s the things we do everyday at work or at school or maybe you’re someone who stays at home, the routine, the humdrum, the relationships that we’re in day after day after day. Maybe the deep sense of our own failures. People have addictions, people have an acute sense of their own limitations. Before I met this Jesus I had it all. I was so well off with a house and a car and job and a career and future and a family, truly I had it all, but it still felt like a prison. What was it, why, what was going on? It’s not that I was a rotten person but looking back on it now from the outside looking in, it was all about me. And as I reflect on that I discover that ‘I’ was my prison, “I” the “me” was the walls that locked me away from that abundant life. The ads on TV promise freedom, cars, holidays, but when I drove the car or went on the holiday I didn’t feel free, does that makes sense? My world was inside the bars and the walls of my own selfishness, each wall had “me” written on it, me, me, me, me. And looking at the world from in there, well, what was freedom? What did freedom look like, what did it feel like, what did it taste like? Didn’t matter where I went I didn’t feel free, even though I had everything. And Jesus comes along and says, “That’s why I came for you, to set the captives free.” Later on he also said, “And when I set you free you’ll really be free, you’ll be free indeed.” And I decided I wanted that ‘indeed kind of freedom’ I wanted that real kind of freedom. I know people who call themselves Christians who believed in Jesus for years who haven’t experienced that sort of freedom. What is it, how do you? It’s so illusive. Well, I can only tell you what happened in my life. When I entered into a relationship with Jesus, the natural consequence of that was to stop living for me. It’s not something that I really had to decide on, it just seemed obvious to live for Him rather than live for me. And when that started happening, all of a sudden, brick by brick, stone by stone the walls of the prison started crumbling down. The thing that was holding me back, the thing that was my jail, my selfishness my me, me, me attitude, I started to lay those down and the walls started to come down. And what I discovered as I stepped over the rubble on the outside was, it was like that scene where the Morgan Freeman character in the Shawshank Redemption stands outside the prison for the first time. It was a strange feeling, and it took some getting used to, but it was like going from black and white TV to colour TV. It was like all of a sudden I was still me but there was a vibrancy, there was a life, there was a freedom. When I get up every morning I now feel free, still me, I’m still the same guy with the same talents and with the same weaknesses and I’m still me but I feel free. And it’s an extraordinary freedom, it’s a real freedom, ‘me’ no longer keeps me bound up, I am no longer bound up in me. Jesus said: I have been anointed, I have been appointed, I have been sent by God to set the captives free. And when we live in the prison of our own selfishness and our own self we can try as hard as we like to knock the walls down and rattle the bars but it’s not until we lay our lives down for Jesus that the walls come tumbling down. The people who listened to Jesus when He said that rejected Him. We’ve got a choice, we can accept Him or we can reject Him, it’s up to us. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721605

Good News for the Poor // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 1 02/02/2026

Good News for the Poor // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 1 Most of us like to watch the news, or listen to it on the radio, or read the newspaper. But really, there’s precious little good news these days. It all seems to be bad news, especially for the poor. But Jesus said that He had good news for the poor. So what did He mean? One of the little rituals that I love to perform every night is to watch the evening news on television. It’s just, I don’t know, my way of unwinding for the day and I guess it’s my way of finding out what’s been going on at home and around the world. But have you noticed whether you watch it on TV or listen to it on the radio or read it in the newspaper, there’s actually precious little good news. Generally the news starts with the biggest conflict or natural disaster or court case or murder or car accident and it just goes down hill from there. In fact when they drop in the odd piece of good news we say, “What have they run out of news tonight?” But we do need good news too. In fact truth be known we desperately want good news. Good news about ourselves, our lives, who we are, but where do you get that? Have you ever wondered, this whole Jesus story, this whole Jesus thing, if its true why did Jesus, the Son of God, step out of heaven, become a little baby, become a boy, become a teenager, become a man, wander around for three and a half years preaching all sorts of stuff, healing people and then allow himself to be killed on a cross and rise again? Why did He do that? I had an email recently from someone who visited our website and she said, “Look, Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed I mean they’re really all the same, just pick one and get on with it.” The big difference between Jesus and all those other guys is that firstly, Jesus made a unique claim. Jesus said, “I AM God.” The other’s pointed somewhere else, Jesus didn’t, Jesus said, “you’re looking at Him, I’ve arrived!” And the second difference is, that Jesus said, “Look being a Christ follower, being a Christian, believing in Me is not about working hard and becoming a better person so that you become acceptable to God.” Effectively, that’s what all the other religions say. Jesus said, “No, no, here look at Me, I’m going the cross to die for you so that you can be forgiven, I’ll pay for your sins, I’ll fulfil the righteous requirements of God’s law and I will pay. And all you need do is believe in me and I will help you to have a new life, and yes new life is about change, new life is about regeneration, new life is about getting rid of the rubbish, but it’s not the starting point. The starting point is the grace of God on the cross of Christ.” But is it authentic, I mean why did He come? Is there something real here and now that’s going to make a difference? Gospel, the word gospel literally means “the good news” – is it? Jesus was born in Bethlehem; He fled as a little baby with His parents to Egypt because they tried to kill Him. Then He moved to Nazareth in Galilee which is kind of “Hicksville” and at age thirty Jesus began His public ministry. One of the very first times that He spoke publicly He got up in a Synagogue in His own home town in Nazareth of Galilee, and He quoted something that the prophet Isaiah had written a long time before. He read this from the scrolls in the synagogue. He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recover sight for the blind and to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Now effectively by reading this, what He was saying to all those Jews who were sitting in that synagogue and very clearly and very unmistakably was, “I am the Messiah, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me and God has sent me to do these things. Why have I come? To preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for prisoners, the recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Now there’s an opportunity in that for you and for me. And so this week we’re going to be looking at those five reasons, those five promises that Jesus made about why He came. Then you can make your own mind up about this Jesus, do those reasons make it worth while for me to just live my whole life for God? And today we’re looking at the first of those which is, good news for the poor. The poor literally were lonely and afflicted in the first century as in many places in the world today there was no social welfare in Israel. I’ve a vivid recollection of going to San Francisco and seeing a black man with blood streaming down his head begging outside the McDonald’s store and he looked at us and he said, “Just because I’m black doesn’t mean I’m a bum.” And in India I remember seeing a woman begging and she had a little baby strapped to her, the shop keeper where she was begging came out and chased her away with a stick and beat her across the back. Two thirds of this world live in literal poverty, yet many wealthy people are still poor. You may have heard me use this quote before but it says it all for me, by a columnist called Bernhard Levin in the UK. He says, “Our world is full of people who have all the material blessings and comforts they desire, together with non-material blessings like a happy family and yet they lead lives of quiet and sometimes noisy desperation. Understanding nothing but the fact that there’s a hole inside them, and however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motor cars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it, it aches.” He’s putting his finger there on that silent desperation in so many lives. Well does that mean Jesus only came for losers? No! Jesus is speaking into a reality; a reality that Bernhard Levin here identifies is so wide-spread even in the wealthiest of societies. We have that materialistic façade but deep down the inner us, the inner you and me, there’s a deep sense of poverty. We’re made in God’s image and that hole inside us is a hole that only God can fill. And when we look at ourselves when that hole is empty, that first century picture of the beggar, the one that’s destitute of wealth and influence and position and power and honour, is so perfect. I mean today’s mantra is “you can have everything”, but it doesn’t ring true does it? Inside we still feel poor, I mean people can have people around them and yet feel so desperately alone and empty. And Jesus, the very first reason that He lists when he first gets up to speak in His public ministry, the very first reason He lists which is the reason why He came, was to bring good news to the poor, to speak directly into that reality – and boy that hits the mark! He’s not talking about harsh rules and judgement, he’s talking about good news, a gospel, profoundly good news. The good news that says that the God who created us wants to have a relationship with us, the God that says, “I will be your God and you will be my people and I will walk among you.” The good news of a God who wants that so much that He sent His Son, not just to tell us but to die for us, to pay the price so we can be reconciled back into a relationship with Him. The good news that God knows, the good news that the one person who can fill it has been anointed to come and bring that to us, Jesus Christ. We have a choice, the people who listen to that, they actually rejected Jesus, they drove him out of the synagogue, that was his own home town, and they rejected him. We can do that or we can accept from Him the good news of a life in relationship with God – not just here on earth but for all eternity. It’s up to us really! /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721575

From the Inside Out // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 5 01/30/2026

From the Inside Out // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 5 Believe it or not, God has this edgy, amazing plan to change us on the inside through His love and mercy and grace ... and then for that to work its way to the outside – in what we say and do. That’s the plan. I love meeting people where what I see is what I get. The person that I see on the outside is the person who they are on the inside even, you know, if they're a bit abrasive on the outside at least you know what you're getting. It's the people who pretend to be one thing to your face and then they go around behind your back and tell other people what they really think, they're the ones I feel really uncomfortable with. There’s a certain hypocrisy about being one thing on the outside and another thing entirely on the inside and you know something I think it's the same with our spirituality too. Telling God one thing in our hearts and then doing another thing with our hands, well it just doesn't sit well. Jesus was only really tough on two things, a lack of faith and religious hypocrisy and you know something, fair enough too. We're talking this week about the fact that what's happening on the outside needs to match what’s happening on the inside. You know if we are living one thing in our hearts and another thing out there in public where people can see us, it just doesn't work, you know there’s a disconnect, a mismatch and we can't live that out forever. If inside we worship God in our hearts, "God I lay down my life for you, I bow down, I delight in you, I love you, I worship you", but then on the outside we don't live that out, well this incongruity, this mis-match, it's called hypocrisy. What you see is not what you get. Over this week we've seen that worship begins in the heart, it's like a man and a woman falling in love and marrying and they go through ups and downs and there are good days and bad days but you know something, in my heart my wife Jacqui is always there, I love her no matter what today brings and it's the same in our relationship with God, worship begins in the heart. We saw the other day the story of Mary and Martha where Jesus came to their house and Martha was so busy racing around doing stuff she missed out on what Jesus was saying and doing, whereas Mary, her sister, just sat at His feet and listened and soaked it all in and worshipped Him. We can just run around doing stuff and doing stuff and doing stuff for God but you know if we keep doing that we end up dry and its hard work and we lose heart for the Lord. But the reverse is also true. I mean, people go to Church on Sunday and they worship God and they sing all those wonderful songs but then, if that's all we do, if we never actually get out and serve God, well that's not going to work either or if we go and tear someone’s head off at work on Monday morning. You see this incongruity between what's happening on the inside and what we do on the outside? Its adulterous, it's professing one thing and doing another and eventually we have to resolve this conflict, eventually we have to say, "well which one is it going to be? Is it going to be what I want to do in my heart and what I'm saying to God there or is it going to be how I'm living my life? I ultimately have to resolve this." So either we bring our lives into line with what's happening in our hearts or we abandon what’s been going on in our hearts, in worshipping God and we go with the desires of the flesh. It's as simple as that; it's one or the other. The apostle Paul knew that and he wrote it really well in Romans, chapter 12, verse 1. This is what he says: Therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters because of God’s mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God. This is your act of spiritual worship. Now let’s just unpack that for a minute or two. He begins with therefore and therefore always points back to something else and in this case he's pointing back to the first 11 chapters of the Book of Romans which is all about God’s goodness in coming to rescue us through Jesus Christ. You know if you are ever in any doubt that you can be forgiven by God and that God loves you and that God wants to change your life, if you ever doubt that, do me a favour, pick up a Bible and read the first 11 chapters of the Book of Romans and that's the stuff that causes our heart to get on fire for God, that's the stuff that causes us to worship Him, it's the heart stuff. So Paul’s saying here because of what He's done in your heart, because of that mercy that you've received deep in your heart, because of that, offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Here Paul is saying because of what's happened in your heart, translate that into action. Now living sacrifices, well what a gruesome picture, I mean it's definitely not a good marketing spin, these people used to sacrifice animals on altars. These people used to watch the Romans crucify men and women but they knew what sacrifice was all about. And you know when we decide to follow Jesus, it's a sacrifice. There are things we have to let go, there are things that we know are stupid and wrong and bad and not good for us and it can be so hard letting them go but because of what's happened in your heart - let them go. Live your life as a sacrifice to Him. Now get the next bit, I love this, "... because this is your spiritual act of worship". During this week we've been looking at the fact that there are two sorts of worship talked about in the New Testament. One is about bowing down, it's the sort of worship that people do on Sundays, you know, the Greek word is "prokduneo", it means to prostrate yourself to bow down but that's not the word that's used here. The word that's used here is "latreuo". In some translations it will come up not as worship but as service and"latreuo" is the word from which we get the English word lateral which means outwards and the concept is, worship through what we do. Worship and service come together here, two concepts in the one word. This is where the rubber hits the road, the "proskuneo", the prostrating worship is the worship of the heart, the "latreuo" worship, the lateral worship, the doing worship. The living worship is when I treat someone kindly and gently that really deserves to have their head ripped off today for what they just did to me. Paul's saying that's spiritual worship. When I deal honestly and fairly with someone that I could have ripped off, that's spiritual worship. Paul is talking here about bringing our lives into line with our hearts, dying to all those things that we'd rather do that we know aren't from God, sacrificing and it's hard and it's tough and the road to follow Jesus always is. It's dying to self and living to Christ. This, Paul’s says, is worship, not just off on some separate Sunday morning sacred zone, worshipping God with our hearts and our lives, clean hands and pure hearts. What begins in our hearts as worshipping God is meant to work its way out into our lives in what we say and what we do and how we live. A life that worships God is a beautiful thing, it's not proud or arrogant, it's humble yet strong, it's gentle yet confident. Almost a contradiction but it is such a beautiful thing to meet someone who just shines the nature of God from their very lives. When we worship God with our hearts and our hands it changes us to look more and more like Jesus. I want to encourage you today to think and pray about this whole worship thing. Worship has to begin in the heart, bowing down,"proskuneo" type worship and it needs to be reflected in what we do with our hands and that's hard, it's going to cost us. Bowing down and letting it work its way out through our lives is what worship is meant to be so that people can taste the sweet fruit of our worship. Worship is not just about singing songs; worship is a way of life. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721495

Connecting Inside and Out // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 4 01/29/2026

Connecting Inside and Out // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 4 Sometimes what we do on the outside reflects what’s happening on the inside. Other times, we try to hide what’s happening on the inside by behaving differently on the outside. And in the long run – that just doesn’t work. Something we love to do, it comes pretty naturally, is to have a disconnect between our spirituality or our faith on the one hand and our lives on the other. Maybe we go to Church on a Sunday, that sacred zone over there, you know you go there and you sing songs and you worship God. "Oh God, you're so wonderful, I love you so much, I exalt you above all. Lord, I worship you and I praise you", all that stuff. Brilliant, it's great but then on Monday morning we go back to work, the same old, same old. Back in the groove. If you're a Mum maybe you have to rush to get the kids off to school and then head out to work. Dad, you're on the train or in the car, on the bus doing the commute. Or maybe you're unemployed or retired or whatever, sitting at home alone and that thing we call worship that happened over there on Sunday morning seems a million miles away, somehow it's not connected to the realities of life. It was great while it lasted but now it's back to earth with a thud. Have you ever felt like that? It's like you have a disconnect between faith over in this little box and life over in that box. Worship's something that happens over here in the sacred zone but when you get back to the real world, well it's hard you know, it's tough, there's a grind, there are pressures, there are issues, people make compromises. You're not alone; I mean in the West many Christ followers experience that. The sense that their faith and their worship and their prayer and all that stuff is in one box and life is in a completely separate box. Now in the East, in Asia and places like Africa, peoples upbringing and culture, well the spirituality's a lot more connected with life but wherever or whatever, it's important that we understand what worship is all about. It's not something we put in a box and take out on Sundays; worship is a way of life. That's the name of this week’s series. When we understand what worship is in God’s heart then all of a sudden life and spirituality become inseparable. Just the last couple of days we began to look at the fact that the New Testament talks about two different forms of worship. One verse where both of these forms of worship appear is Luke chapter 4 verse 8. Grab your Bible if you have one, have a look. Jesus had been led by the Holy Spirit out into the desert, He's been there starving and fasting for the last 40 days so He's weak and He's at a low point and the devil comes to tempt Him. In fact, next year we're going to be doing a whole series on this wilderness passage but just today, I just want to look at this second temptation where the devil comes to tempt Jesus with a grand delusion: The devil led Jesus up to a high place to show Him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world and he said to Jesus, "I will give you all their authority and splendour because it's been given to me and I can give it to anyone I want. So if you would just worship me it will all be yours." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.'" Here's a standard temptation of the devil. I believe in the devil because Jesus does. A lot of people don't believe in the devil today, well I'm sorry, Jesus clearly does and so do I. And here is a standard temptation. He shows us the world and says, "Look at this wonderful world that I have control of," and frankly you don't have to look very far to see what an enormous influence the devil in fact has. And the devil says, 'What are you doing out in this wilderness for God? Why are you starving? Why is this so tough? Look, just come and worship me and all this can be yours.' Yeah right! Listen to what the devil says to Jesus: So if you worship me it will all be yours. Now this word 'worship' is the first, I guess dimensional type of worship. The Greek word is ‘proskuneo’ and it's a word from which we get the word prostrate. So to prostrate ourselves, to bow down, to kiss someone’s hand, to fall down on our knees and face to worship. It's the sort of worship people do on Sunday mornings in Church. Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 28 talks about worshipping God with awe and reverence. It's a heart worship, its expressing our allegiance and gratefulness and awe and reverence and wonder of God by singing songs of worship and the devils saying to Jesus, "Now, bow down to me as you would to God" but look at Jesus' reply. Jesus answered: It is written, 'worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone. Jesus is quoting the Old Testament, Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 13. There are two verbs in what He says, worship and serve. Now that word worship the Lord your God is the same word as the devil just used "prokuneo", to bow down but then the second verb, this doing word, is the Greek word "latreuo". It's the word from which we get lateral or outwards. This word is used a number of times in the New Testament and it is variously translated as serve or worship. To"latreuo" is to render religious service or homage, to worship, to perform sacred services, to offer gifts, to worship God and the observance of rights for worship. You see,"latreuo" is outward worship, its worship through doing and serving. For Jesus, the answer went beyond simply bowing down to God or the devil as the devil wanted Him to, it included serving God. What we do in our hearts AND what we do with our hands, inside and outside. Jesus said it again when someone asked Him, "what’s the most important commandment he said": Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind. You see, strength is what we do with our heart on the inside, with our strength on the outside. You know something; if what we do and believe on the inside isn't reflected in how we live on the outside, what we believe on the inside will die. We can't pray one thing and do one thing on Sunday morning singing songs to God and worshipping Him and then not serve Him by living that faith out in life. For God worship is a holistic thing. For God worship is what happens in our hearts and what we do with our hands. In James chapter 2, verse 26, read it. It says: Faith without works is dead. If we're going to exalt God in our hearts but not in our lives by the way we think and act and treat other people, it's just never going to work. Some people struggle to see the relevance of their faith in life. And can I suggest the reason is because they've got worship over here in a little box that they open once a week and that we haven't come to grips with the fact that worshipping isn't just what we do in our hearts, it's not just the songs we sing. When we live out that faith, when we sacrifice the things we want for the things that Jesus wants and it hurts some days, that is worshipping God. Psalm 24, verse 7 talks about having clean hands and a pure heart. In fact this linking of inside worship and outside worship,"prokuneo" worship which is bowing down and"latreuo" worship which is serving happens over and over and over again in God’s word. God just doesn't want us to worship Him once a week; God wants us to live a life that is worship to Him. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721465

Choosing What Is Better // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 3 01/28/2026

Choosing What Is Better // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 3 Some people are so busy doing stuff, they don’t have time for relationships. Other people are so relationship-focused that they never actually get anything done. So, which one is better? Most of us understand the concept of smelling roses. We're so busy, so flat out running around doing stuff that we don't take the time to smell the roses, to stop and pause and wonder and think and enjoy God’s creation. How many husbands take the time to woo their wives? How many fathers these days take the time to go to their son’s football game or their daughters dance concert? How many people take the time just to slow down and spend some quality time with God? Praying, reading, resting, letting the imagination roam, coming to grips with the wonder that is Jesus Christ. Well, when was the last time you took time to smell the roses? We're talking today about making worship a way of life. Not just some ritual or a few songs that people sing on Sunday mornings. Worship isn't a ritual; worship isn't some thing that we do with incense and incantation, that's not what it's about. Worshipping God is about having a relationship. It’s something that begins in the heart, a desire to be with Him, a desire to bow down our whole lives to Him, a besottedness where you just want to see God and to experience Him and to hear Him and worship. Worshipping God through Jesus Christ is about sacrifice. It's always about sacrifice because when we bow down to worship God, we've got to get ourselves off our own little tin pot thrones and I don't know how it was for you but for much of my life I was worshipping me, I was my own little God. Worship is about sacrifice and there are two aspects. There's what happens in our hearts and then how it's reflected in our lives. We're going to talk about that in a whole bunch more detail over the next few days but it's about connecting our faith with our day to day life realities. I just want to introduce you today to two women from the Bible, Mary and Martha. If you've got a Bible grab it, you can look at it in Luke, chapter 10, verse 38. Here's the story: Jesus and His disciples were on their way and He came to a village where there was this woman called Martha and she opened her home to Him. She had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lords feet listening to what He said but Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made, (I mean she was having the Son of God visiting). And she came to Him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me." "Martha, Martha." The Lord answered, "You're worried and upset about so many things but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better and it won't be taken away from her." I don't know what your life looks like but mine has more things in it than I have time to get through. Our ministry here at Christianityworks for me is not just about writing and producing radio programs, there's all sorts of things. There's out seeing radio stations, producing material to go with messages, administration, fund raising, managing staff, lots of things. Not to mention home and the family and Church and friends and rest and relaxation and the danger for me and many other people is that we get so busy with the urgent things we don't have time for the important things. And the important things that we tend to squeeze out of our schedule are relationships, spending time with people (that's why so many marriages fall apart) and spending time at the feet of Jesus (that's why so many people end up drifting away from God). We delude ourselves, "Well, well, you know, I'm busy out there serving God. That's what God wants from me, that's the most important thing, if I don't do what I'm doing the worlds going to cave in." Now don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we should become spiritual coach potatoes but have a listen to what happens here in this story. Martha is rushing around and cleaning and cooking and doing all that stuff, I mean after all they have guests, the Son of God has arrived on their doorstep. Her sister Mary is sitting at Jesus feet, listening, her heart being moved, being changed and strengthened and encouraged. She's worshipping Jesus. And Martha goes, "well that's not fair, she should be helping me," and what does Jesus answer, "Well absolutely! Mary, get off your backside, stop being so lazy and go and help." No, that's not where Jesus is coming from at all. He says: Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about so many things but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what's better and it won't be taken away from her. One thing! What is that one thing? It's a relationship with Jesus. One thing! To worship the Lord your God. You go to the Ten Commandments what’s the first commandment? Just worship God and no-one else. When someone asked Jesus, "What’s the most important commandment?" Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. You end up sometimes in life running around in ever decreasing circles just like Martha. I don't know what Martha was cooking that day but I bet you it wasn't kind of a sausage sizzle, I bet she didn't just throw a few snags on the barbeque and get a bread roll and some tomato ketchup. No, my hunch is she was doing some "bigger than Ben Hur" cordon bleu thing because Jesus, the Son of God had walked through her front door. We complicate things so much, a lot of people don't have other people over because they couldn't be bothered with all the effort of preparing and cooking and stuff. What's wrong with throwing a few sausages on the barbecue? You see, we make things so complicated and then we end up running around and we're worried and we're upset about so many things and the more we focus on those things and problems, the worse they become and like Martha, we blame Mary, we blame someone else. We end up buried in a mountain of problems and hurts and issues and exhaustion and uncertainties and insecurities. I wonder whether maybe you relate to some of that, I know I can fall into this trap myself and that's why we're spending some time talking about worship because worship has real impact. In my life at the moment there are pressures and issues that have to be addressed, all sorts of stuff and it doesn't go away. Walking with Jesus isn't entering into some super spiritual zone where every one of life’s problems evaporates. In the middle of that, this morning, I had some time of prayer. I went through a few of the psalms, songs of praise and worship and I just spent some time at Jesus' feet, thanking Him and praising Him and worshipping Him because, you know amidst the pressures and concerns there are so many good things going on too. We end up focusing on all the bad things and we forget to thank God for the good things. You know, something happens when we spend time doing that, it's better than just running around doing stuff. We have to do things too but pausing for a time, resting at Jesus' feet, hearing Him speak, adoring Him, telling Him how much we love Him, worshipping Him changes our lives. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721425

The Heart of Worship // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 2 01/27/2026

The Heart of Worship // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 2 Love is something that begins in the heart. So is hatred. In fact, just about everything we say and do on the outside, begins with what’s happening on the inside. The same holds true for – worship. One of the things that we all kind of know is that the great achievements that we have on the outside all start on the inside. Somewhere deep in her heart a little girl dreams of being a great athlete. She nurtures that dream. Every morning she's up at 4.00 am to go to training, day after day, month after month, year after year. It's that thing that's been going on in her heart that sustains her; it drives her to achieve her very best even when the odds are stacked against her. Everything that happens on the outside, everything we do and say begins on the inside. It has its genesis in our hearts. It's true in every aspect of our lives, work and family and social and spiritual. The heart is an important place. You know one of the most common things talked about right throughout the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, over 540 times is the heart. Several times Jesus made the point that who we are on the outside is a reflection of what's going on in our hearts. Matthew, chapter 12, verse 34: For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. And again in Matthew, chapter15, verse 18: But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart and these make us unclean. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man unclean. You see for me, here's the biggest danger in thinking about worship. "Well, I go to Church most Sundays, we sing songs therefore I worship then I go home." It's kind of like saying, "Well I live in the same house and I sleep in the same bed as my wife" or maybe your husband, "I peck them on the cheek each morning before I go to work. Once a week I make sure I tell them "Love Ya" therefore I love my wife or I love my husband." See how crazy that is? My wife is not interested in ritual, she wants to know, does my husband love me with all his heart? And secondly, do I see that love reflected in what he says and how he responds to me? That's why Jesus, when He was asked the most important commandments said: Love the Lord your God with all your HEART, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. It turns out that worship is something that begins in the heart, it lives there first and foremost but then it's meant to be reflected in our lives. If we just 'do' worship once a week that’s a sham. I've been there, I've been standing in a Church on Sunday morning singing the songs with my mind wandering off somewhere else, that’s not worshipping God anymore than a quick peck on my wife’s cheek is loving her. Worship is something that comes from the heart; King David knew that, listen to what he writes in psalm 24: The earth is the Lords and everything in it, the world and all who live in it; for He founded it upon the seas and He established it on the waters. Who may ascend to the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in this holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false. You see, David is saying here "God is above all and if I want to ascend to the hill of the Lord", what he meant there is going to the temple and worship God, "I need to have clean hands and a pure heart, a heart and a life that declare that I put Jesus first". Again in psalm 27, David writes this: One thing do I ask of the Lord, this is what I will seek: That I will dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon His beauty and to seek Him in His temple..." "...My heart says of you, seek His face and your face Lord will I seek. You see, what’s going on here for David is that something is happening in his heart. Can I tell you? It's the truth, just quietly between you and me, don't tell anyone else. I am besotted with my wife, like I adore her, I just worship the ground she walks on, you know I just love her. It's a thing that starts and lives, day after day, in my heart. Some days we're both tired, some days, just quietly I'm grumpy. Some days she's a bit scratchy but the thing in my heart just never goes away and that’s how it is for worship for me. There's something about God in my heart that overwhelms me. Like David, my heart says: Seek his face and your face Lord, will I seek." "This one thing shall I ask, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. There's this thing of the heart, a desire, a besottedness, an overwhelming urge just to be with God where He is. I was recently travelling with the ministry for almost two weeks and the ministry that God has me involved in here at Christianityworks is such a blessing and such a delight and I get to meet so many people but can I tell you? Each time I have to leave my wife it’s an incredible sacrifice. You see, I love her; I want to be with her. When we go out together, more often than not, we're wandering down the street or through the shopping mall, hand in hand. It's a closeness, there's a desire, there's a "want to be together". Sometimes you know I go along to functions, you know a dinner or something like that and I watch other married couples, many of them don't ever sit next to each other at the dinner, you know something; we always do because we're close and that in a sense is what's going on in David’s heart for God. He's saying, "God, I just want to be close to you. I just want to dwell in your house all the days of my life and gaze on your beauty and seek you in your temple. My heart says of you seek His face and your face Lord, I will seek." There it is, there's the heart of worship, a holy desire for God Himself. Not what God can do, not all the blessings, just God Himself. What about you? What does worship mean to you? You know, I went for a long time and I thought worship was just going along on Sunday morning and singing a few songs and coming home again but if that's how I treated my wife our marriage would fall apart. If that’s how I treat God, if I say, "Worship is just some ritual, some sham, it doesn't matter, there’s nothing going on in my heart", how can you expect to have a vital, dynamic, exciting, besotted relationship with God. Sometimes we get dry and we feel like we've wandered off and we feel like we don't have that desire, we all go there some days, stick with me during this week because we're going to, we're going to get together and look at what it means in our lives to worship God. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721365

Who or What do I Worship? // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 1 01/26/2026

Who or What do I Worship? // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 1 It turns out that we all worship something. Success. Money. God – whoever that might be. There’s invariably something that dominates the way we feel, think and live. I'm not much into religion per se, you know the whole structured ritual thing but one of the great spiritual concepts that sometimes gets tagged with religious baggage is this idea of worship. Well when you hear the word worship, what does it mean to you? People who don't have any particular faith in God might see it as something that religious people might do in Churches or temples, maybe candles and incense or chanting and ritual, something that happens, well over there somewhere, not something that I do. A Christian might say, "Well, worships what we do on Sunday morning at Church before the sermon. We sing songs, that’s our worship time." What about you? What would you say that worship is? My hunch is that the notion of worship from where God sits is so much broader than any narrow view that people might have about it. Not some religious ritual, not just some musical event but something much more. It is great to be with you again and we're doing a small series this week just talking about worship as being a way of life. You know, when we worship someone or something we put it above all other things. We pay homage to it, in fact it directs our lives. We will sacrifice other things, even those that are very dear to us for the sake of the thing or the person that we worship. We all worship something you know, I used to worship money and success and recognition. These were the things that made my whole life go round. My life was centred and ordered around those things, I sacrificed my health, my family, my rest, everything for these things that I worshipped and actually, when I look back, I was really worshipping myself. We can all look at our lives and ask, "What's at the centre of my life? Who or what do I worship?" We'll know the answer to that question when we look at the sacrifices we make and ask ourselves, really and truly, "Who or what am I making the sacrifices for? What's at the centre of my life? Is it my career? Is it my family? Is it earning more money and having a bigger house?" Honestly ask ourselves, "What is at the centre of my life?" And to figure it out we just have to look at the sacrifices we make and that’s who or what we're actually worshipping. We all have lots of, I guess, elements or rooms in our lives, obviously we need to make some sacrifices sometimes. Being a parent, by definition, is about making sacrifices for our children. Sometimes, to be sure, we have to make sacrifices for our jobs or careers but day after day, month after month, is there one thing that keeps rising above all of those others in terms of sacrifice? If there is, chances are that's the one that we're worshipping. The notion that sacrifice is an essential part of worship is not something new. The very first time that the word worship is mentioned in the Bible is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham was a man that God called out of his comfort zone and Abraham went on a long journey and he was an old man, it took a long time but God promised Abraham that he would have many descendants. Well Abraham and his wife Sarah were really old and they still didn't have a single child to their name. They never thought that it would happen, that they would have an heir but this was God’s promise. And ultimately, after a quarter of a century, when they were really old, God gave them a son called Isaac. You can imagine, this kid grows up and Abraham and Sarah had been waiting like a lifetime to have this child, they would dote on Isaac, they would just adore him and what God saw was that Abraham was putting Isaac before God Himself and so God went to Abraham and said, "I want you to sacrifice Isaac, you know like on an altar like they sacrifice animals." What an incredibly painful thing and on that morning when they journeyed out to that place where Abraham felt called to sacrifice his son, Abraham said to his servant, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you." Imagine the tussle that was going on in Abrahams heart, "who is first in my life? Is it God or my son?" You see, we can think we're worshipping God but then you go and look at your life and you ask some hard questions. How do I spend all of my time, my money, my energy, my passions, my dreams? And like Abraham we might get a real shock, let’s read on: Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed in on his son, Isaac and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on Isaac spoke up and said to his father, "Father?" "Yes my son?" Abraham replied, "The fire and the wood are here” Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" And Abraham answered, "God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering my son." And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took a knife to slay his son but the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven and said, "Abraham! Abraham!" "Here I am,” he replied. "Do not lay a hand on this boy. Do not do anything to him because now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." What God was doing here was testing Abraham’s heart. Abraham, who do you worship? Who do you put first in your life God or your son? Now we might think this is just a bit extreme but I have to tell you, when I had to stop worshipping myself, you know give up this whole career and wealth and recognition thing, can I tell you? That was not an easy thing to let go of. When God comes along and finally tugs on our hearts and says, "do you realise you're worshipping something else?" It's almost impossible to admit let alone let go but at the end of this both God and Abraham knew the answer to the question, who do you put first in your life? The angel of the Lord said to Abraham, ‘Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your only son’. Can I ask you quietly yet deliberately? Who or what do you worship? When it comes to the crunch, the one thing on this earth that is most important to you, would you be prepared to lay it down for the Lord your God? All our hopes, our dreams, our future, our life, our career – everything! Is God exalted above all other things in our lives? Because worshipping God is about adopting a God above all position in every part of our lives. Singing songs of worship is great but do we bow our lives down to God before anything or anyone else? In our hearts, do we truly worship God? Worship is about a whole bunch more than some religious rituals or just singing songs. The crunch question is, do we worship God with our lives? /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39721320

Physical Touch // The Five Love Languages, Part 5 01/23/2026

Physical Touch // The Five Love Languages, Part 5 If only. If only she’d want to hold my hand still. If only she’d touch my cheek like she used to. It’s funny how as we get busier in life, we become less and less intimate in our marriage. Here’s a cold, hard, statistic – depending of course in which country you live in. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of all marriages end in divorce. In California the registry of births, deaths and marriages is now known as the registry of births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Is it because people don’t set out wanting to love one another? No! Is it because 30 to 45% of people are so horrible you can’t possibly live with them? No! Is it because people don’t want to grow old together? No! So what exactly is going on here? My hunch is that one of the biggest issues that leads to divorce is that we just don’t learn how to speak a love language that our wives or our husbands, as the case may be, can understand. This week on A Different Perspective we’ve been just stepping through Gary Chapman’s fantastic book called, "The Five Love Languages". Last week we went through a series called Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have, because you know something, I believe that marriage is the most amazing gift from God. Jesus said: For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and the two shall become one flesh, they are no longer two but one flesh. Jesus was talking about a blessing of intimacy and companionship, of life long relationship. Okay, marriage isn’t for everyone. Being single or being widowed or being divorced are perfectly reasonable places to be. I’m not saying that everybody has to get married, but most people do. Last week in that series, "Having the Marriage you were Meant to Have", we laid the foundation stones and if you missed those programs you can listen to them again on our website, this week we’re going through the nitty gritty, the real life stuff. What it means for us to communicate our love in marriage. We’re different, husbands and wives, in fact we’re all different, and we all speak love and receive love in a slightly different way. That book I was talking about, The Five Love Languages talks about five. Words of Affirmation, the fact that some people the primary way they receive love is through words of encouragement. Other people for them its Quality Time, for them its just having that time to focus on one another’s husband and wife exclusively with no other distractions, and just talk and be together. For other people they experience love mostly through Receiving Gifts, it’s just that a gift is a tangible expression of a persons love. And for others it’s Acts of Service, some people just love serving and those people love to receive love by being served. And finally today another one, a primary language of love is Physical Touch. Each one of us has one or two of those which predominately we would say is the way that we would like to be loved. Do we want the others too? Sure we do, but there are one or two for each one of us that we say, “You know something, if my wife doesn’t affirm me and encourage me I don’t feel loved, or if my husband doesn’t give me the odd gift or little bunch of flowers or something I don’t feel loved”. For me without a shadow of a doubt my primary love language is physical touch. We all need physical touch, it's part of our nurture, I mean, its development as children. You’ve probably seen the experiments with primates where they isolated the young chimp at the beginning of its life and it receives no touch. And that chimp grows up to be incredibly maladjusted and violent and can’t live in a social context with other chimps. Sadly, we see that in people too who haven’t received that nurture that you get uniquely from being touched by your parents and family. But I’m not talking about the general needs, I’m not talking about sex even. I’m talking about the specific need that some people have for a primary love language of touch. The gentle touch that says uniquely, “I love you.” Now it’s hard for me to come to grips with the fact that my primary love language is physical touch. I grew up being a hard nosed businessman and I’m definitely not your touchy, touchy, kissy, kissy, sort of person. You know how some people meet you and they want to give you a big kiss and a hug. And my godmother used to do that when I was a kid, God bless her, and she’d leave this big thing of lipstick on my cheek. And I can remember thinking, “Oh yuck! That is not me.” And yet when it comes to my wife Jacqui whose primary love languages are acts of service and quality time, she can do those things to me until she’s blue in the face, but unless she holds my hand or strokes my cheek or puts herself close to me I simply don’t feel loved. Why? I don’t know, it’s just the way that God made me. And people who know me in ministry or in business would say, “You’ve got to be kidding, Berni, touch, no, no way!” It’s not always self evident. In fact a lot of people, especially men, probably wouldn’t even be aware that their primary love language, the way that they really want to experience love, is through the medium of physical touch. If you’re someone who doesn’t feel loved, ask yourself this question, “How much difference would it make if your wife or your husband, whatever the case maybe, touched you more often?” You might be surprised at the answer. There’s a beautiful picture in Mark’s Gospel Chapter 1 verse 40, if you have a Bible, of a man who was a leper. Now in the first century lepers suffered social isolation. They couldn’t go near people who didn’t have leprosy. If someone who didn’t have leprosy came close to them within 60 or 70 feet they had to yell out “Unclean! Unclean!” They couldn’t go to the synagogue with the other people, they couldn’t even live in the city walls with the other people, they had to live on the rubbish dump outside the city walls. And this leper comes to Jesus and says “Lord, lord, if you are willing you can make me clean,” because he’d seen Jesus heal other people. And Mark records it this way, he says: Jesus was moved with compassion and He reached out and He touched the leper, and He said, ‘I am willing, be made clean.’ Isn’t that awesome! The law forbade lepers from touching people who weren’t lepers, and when this leper comes to Jesus and asks for healing, the compassion in Jesus’ heart causes him to reach out and to touch the untouchable. What do you think that communicated to the leper? Maybe the lepers primary love language was touch, I don’t know, we will never know that. But what an awesome picture of God the Son reaching out and touching the untouchable. If God can touch the leper, if God can do that, why is it that if we have a wife or a husband who wants to receive touch, what is it in us that doesn’t do that? It costs nothing to touch yet it so beautifully expresses love in a marriage, the intimacy, the kindness the gentleness of physical touch. This week we’ve looked at five different languages of love, words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Can I encourage you to figure out which one or two of those are your primary love language and your soul mate’s primary love language and then the two of you sit down and talk about it, explore it. What is it that each of you need? You know we so often don’t talk about that in a marriage. We get angry with each other, we get frustrated with each other but we don’t talk about it. And when you figure out that your wife or your husband has a different way of receiving love from you let me tell you its going to be unnatural to give love that way. So it has to be planned, it has to be deliberate, it has to be learned, it has to be sacrificial. It’ll be hard some days and it’ll be inconvenient some days but the fruit of loving your wife or your husband in the way that they want and they need is the most wonderful blessing from God in marriage. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245245

Acts of Service // The Five Love Languages, Part 4 01/22/2026

Acts of Service // The Five Love Languages, Part 4 She’s flat out running the kids around, cleaning, cooking, all the stuff she thinks she should do. And he’s just lonely. She never has time for me. He never helps me! This week on A Different Perspective we’re taking a bit of a look at what it means to communicate our love for one another in the context of marriage. You know I believe that marriage is just one of the most amazing gifts that God can bless us with, but sometimes husbands and wives get so frustrated because they don’t know how to love one another. And that is just so frustrating because you’re doing your best. You think to yourself, “Man, I couldn’t possibly be trying any harder to love my husband, or love my wife and yet they say they don’t feel like I love them.” And so often it’s because we’re speaking our love to them in one language but they need to hear it in another. So this week we’re working our way through the fantastic book by Gary Chapman, it’s so insightful, it’s called The Five Love Languages and today, today we’ll be looking at the fourth of those, Acts of Service. Jesus was visiting two sisters Mary and Martha. Now these young women were really quite different from one another. If you’d like to read the story you can, it’s in Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 10 beginning at verse 38. Jesus comes into their home and Martha, well Martha is working flat out, she’s cleaning the house and cooking the dinner and doing all the things you need to do when you have a guest come into your home. Mary her sister, on the other hand, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to what he has to say, she’s glued, she’s riveted and Martha gets pretty frustrated, she says to Jesus, “Don’t you care that Mary’s just sitting there and leaving all the work to me?” Now that’s fascinating because then you see a conflict between two sisters. Mary obviously loves spending quality time; she’s sitting there with Jesus and she’s doting on what he’s saying. Mary’s primary love language is probably spending quality time with someone. On the other hand Martha, Martha’s gifting clearly is in Acts of Service. She’s just one of those people who like to do all the busy things and to serve people. Some people are just hard wired doers, they jump up, they help, they cook, they cater, they clean, at home, with friends, at church, at the club, whatever they do, they express their love by serving them. Now we should all serve. Jesus said it himself, “I’ve come to serve, not to be served” right. But Mary and Martha are clearly wired differently, somehow in their DNA, deep in their character, in their persona, they’re quite different and that’s life, we’re all different. This week so far, we’ve looked at three primary love languages, that is, that we all receive love in slightly different ways, for some people it’s Words of Affirmation, they experience love when their husband or their wife encourages them and says, “you look fantastic, that was a great meal, thank you so much for doing that for me”. The second is Quality Time; it’s what we see in Mary, some people experience love most when they and their spouse simply spend exclusive time with each other and focus exclusively on one other, and that quality time is how they drink in one another’s love. The third one, which we looked at yesterday, is Receiving Gifts. And each one of us has maybe one of the five that we’re looking at this week, which is the main way that we receive love. Today we’re looking at Acts of Service, and the picture of Mary and Martha is a great one. But imagine if they were Max and Martha, imagine if they were husband and wife. And Martha is your hard wired acts of service type. For her to love is to serve, for her to love is to cook and to clean, for her to love is to do stuff. But Max, Max is your gentle type, he’s one that loves to spend time together. He doesn’t care if the dishes don’t get done. “We’ll do that later, let's just spend some time together now that the kids are in bed and we’ll do the dishes later.” You can see how the chips would fly. Martha on the one hand would resent the fact that he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t love me because he doesn’t do stuff, he doesn’t clean up the kitchen, he doesn’t wash up, he doesn’t sweep up, why doesn’t love me? And Max would say, “you know Martha never sits down, she never stops, she’s always doing and rushing, she never has time for me.” It doesn’t matter how much Martha does for Max and it doesn’t matter how much time Max spends with Martha, neither of them will feel loved, neither of them will feel fulfilled in their marriage relationship. They can do what they do until they’re blue in the face but the other one will still feel unloved. Let’s get a revelation! That’s because they’re doing and giving the type of love that they need, instead of the type of love that the other one needs. Hello are we listening? This is so blindingly, glimpsingly obvious isn’t it? But we all naturally get this thing wrong. We all naturally try and give the type of love that we want to receive. Natural! Martha gives love by serving; she wants to receive love by serving. Max gives love by sharing quality time; he wants to receive love by sharing quality time. And if they both just give the sort of love that they want to receive, they will be like ships passing in the night and they will never connect. My wife Jacqui is hard-wired for Acts of Service, that’s her primary love language and her secondary one is Quality Time. Those are the two that are most important to her, they speak love to her. So in order to do that I have to serve her. Now, Berni is not your acts of service type of person so what do I do? I have to learn, I actually have to learn. So there are a few things that I’ve done just in the context and I’m going to share these things with you because your context’s different. If you’re married to someone who is an acts of service person and you’re not, you’re going to have to figure out your own. You’re going to have to figure out what works in your family and in your relationship. Here are some of the things that I’ve done. I thought right early on in our marriage, I could see that Jacqui is someone who serves and I thought, “How can I regularly serve her in a way that matters?” And you may have heard me say this before, so every night when we go to bed, I bring Jacqui a cup of tea in bed every night, very, very rarely we don’t do that. I make a cup of tea for her, I serve her. And in the mornings I get up very early. I work generally about 6 o’clock in the morning, I’ll go down the stairs, I’ll make her a cup of tea and bring it up to her in bed, and she is woken up with a cup of tea in the morning. Now am I saying that Berni is a fantastic guy? No, I’m not. All I’m saying is that that is one way that I have discovered, that twice a day (at least twice a day) Jacqui is served by me, and you know something? I delight in doing that. That’s from me to her, and no one else can share that, and she is served. Jacqui ends up doing most of the cooking in our family because I work very long hours. But I love cooking. I love getting in the kitchen. And so once a week I try and get in there and cook her a really nice meal, something she would never think of cooking herself. It’s fun for me and she’s being served. And every now and then I try and look at something and think, she needs a hand with this, or I can help here, or I can do this and pitch in, and help her unexpectedly. And those things are practical expressions of love that speak to her in a language she understands. Now in this society of house working kids and house working Mums and changing role of men, it’s not easy to come to grips with this whole service thing. But are you married to someone who’s like this? It’s time to look at what they do. Are they super critical of people who don’t help in practical ways, maybe this is a person who receives love through acts of service? Specific, regular and unexpected acts of service are what we need to do for a husband or wife like that, in order to say I love you. God wants us to love one another, God wants marriage to be the most amazing blessing. But we have to learn what it is that blesses the soul mate that God has given us. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245240

Receiving Gifts // The Five Love Languages, Part 3 01/21/2026

Receiving Gifts // The Five Love Languages, Part 3 That Neil Diamond song “You Don’t Send me Flowers Anymore” says it all in some marriages. What happened to those unexpected gifts? What happened to the love? This week on A Different Perspective we’re taking a look at how to express our heartfelt commitment to our soul mates, our wives, or our husbands as the case may be. Imagine; boy meets girl, she only speaks Swahili, he only speaks Japanese, they get married but they still can’t speak one another’s languages, what sort of a marriage are they going to have? Well there are two options; they either decide to learn one another’s languages or things are going to fall apart because unless they learn to communicate, the frustration and the isolation would just tear them apart. That’s how it is with different languages and love. Gary Chapman’s written a great book called The Five Love Languages, the last couple of days we’ve looked at the first two of those, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time, today we’re going to look at the third, Receiving Gifts. Anthropologists are a funny lot, they love to study human patterns of behaviour across different cultures, and in fact right down through history. And they look for common themes and patterns of behaviour. One of the most basic, one that appears in every culture is the notion that love is about giving. My hunch is that in the garden of Eden Adam used to go out looking for flowers for Eve and pick them, and give them to her, no doubt, and we know for a fact that she loved picking fruit for him to eat! Well I guess no one’s perfect! So over the last few days we’ve looked at the first few languages of love that Chapman talks about in his book, The Five Love Languages. The first was Words of Affirmation. Some people’s primary way of experiencing love is through words that other people say to them that affirm them. So a man who needs words of affirmation will need his wife to say, “Darling you look great in that suit. Darling, thank you so much for doing that.” And a woman who needs words of affirmation will need exactly the same thing from her husband. The second of those was Quality Time. It’s a happy buzz phrase isn’t it? But quality time is more than just sitting in front of the box and just being in a safe space together. Quality time is focusing our attention exclusively on one another, and there are some people whose primary way of receiving love is through the knowledge that their husband or wife spends quality time with them. The third one, which is the one that we’re going to look at today, is Receiving Gifts. Now a gift, I used to think, “Well how can someone experience love by receiving gifts, isn’t that kind of tacky and cheap and materialistic?” Truly that’s what I used to think. But when you think about it, a gift is something tangible. You can hold it in your hand, you can look at it and say “he loves me”, or “wow she loves me” and you’ll look at it again, and again, and again. It’s a tangible tactile physical expression of the giving part about love, that thing that anthropologists discover is common to every culture that they’ve analysed. It’s a symbol of a thought. We’ve heard the saying, “it’s the thought that counts.” It’s not the actual gift, it’s not how much it cost, it’s the fact that the gift represents something and it represents love, or friendship, or whatever. So this visual symbol of love is more important to some people than it is to other people. Let me tell you about Berni. A gift to me will fail to express your love or your friendship to me precisely 100% of the time. If I never receive another gift in my life it’ll be too soon. If nobody ever remembers my birthday again in my life it’ll be too soon. When we were first married, Jacqui and I, Jacqui thought, “Ah I’ll go and buy my husband a tie, or clothes, or aftershave,” and I was absolutely horrified. I buy my own ties, I buy my own clothes, I buy my own aftershave. And Mum, my last birthday, she said “Berni what would you like for your birthday?” And I said “Truly Mum, give the money to charity, I just don’t want a gift”. So actually she gave a donation to the ministry of Christianityworks. For me gifts simply don’t say I love you. Yet Melissa, our daughter, it’s one of her two primary languages of love. Gifts are really important to her. When I went to India last year, she loves silver, and so I saw an Indian silver necklace and earrings, and I bought that for her. And at night time my wife Jacqui and I go for walks and we walked past this store that has this beautiful silver beaten jewellery and I’m always thinking and planning, “now I wonder which one of those I can get for Melissa’s birthday”. And just recently, last Christmas, one of the things that teenagers in her age group in her culture, all want, is they want an iPod, right, that’s what’s happening amongst young people today, she’s 15. And so we saved up our money and bought her an iPod Nano. And on the back, if you buy them online on the Internet, they’ll actually inscribe whatever you ask them to inscribe, machine inscribed, beautifully done. And so we had it inscribed on there ‘Melissa Dymet loved, cherished and adored’. And that spoke volumes to her because receiving gifts is one of her primary love languages. The other morning I was out for a walk and she’d gone the bus stop waiting for her school bus and the frangipani’s were out,(they’re my favourite flower, they smell so nice) and I thought “you know when I come around the corner I bet you she’s still at the bus stop”. So I picked up just one frangipani flower that had fallen down and I walked up to her at the bus stop and I said, “Here, this is for you”. Just the one flower. Well, her face just lit up because receiving gifts is one of her primary languages of love. King Solomon, in Proverbs Chapter 18 verse 16, way, way back when King Solomon was alive he wrote this A gift opens the way for the giver and ushers him into the presence of the great. You see gifts to people for whom receiving gifts is their primary love language, gifts open the door into their hearts. Things are just things to me. Possessions are just servants they’re nothing more. I’m not sentimental about those things. But I’ll tell you one gift, the one physical thing that I possess that I prize above all things is my wedding ring because it’s a symbol of my wife’s love for me. And I could be starving and have no money, I still would not sell this wedding ring. So even for the most hardened anti-gift person I have my price, you know what I mean? Now when I used to think that gifts and giving were a bit superficial and a bit materialistic. Actually the symbolism of the gift is how some people experience and receive love. Have you ever heard a wife say, “He never brings me flowers anymore.” Now think about it, flowers die in a few days but they are a symbol of romantic love. Gifts can be purchased, gifts can be found, gifts can be made. “Oh but I’m not a gift giver.” Congratulations, welcome to marriage. This is a lesson of love; we need to learn to give love in a way that our husband or wife can accept love. And if your soul mate receives love through the receiving of gifts, it is time for you to make a list of all the things that seem to push their buttons and we don’t have to wait for special occasions. We don’t have to wait for birthdays, or Christmases, or anniversaries because for someone who receives gifts as love, just the little things, just the little frangipani flower that you pick up on the spur of the moment that you find on the street, can say I love you. And when you receive a gift from such a person, like my daughter Melissa did a painting at school and she brought it home and she gave it to me, that gift, that painting has pride and place in my study because when she gives me a gift she is saying something that goes beyond what I may interpret the gift to be. We do all the other things, we can work, provide, clean, cook, make love, everything but if you’re soul mate’s primary love language is receiving gifts and you don’t give them gifts, they will feel like their marriage is dead. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245235

Quality Time // The Five Love Languages, Part 2 01/20/2026

Quality Time // The Five Love Languages, Part 2 He thinks he’s doing a great job working hard, paying down the mortgage. But all she sees is that he never has time for her. He’s working flat out, she’s feeling unloved and it’s all heading downhill fast. This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at how to communicate love between husband and wife. Actually you can apply it to any loving relationship. So often a wife and a husband well, they want to love one another but they just don’t know how. It turns out that all to often they’re talking different languages. He gives her flowers but all she wants is his attention; she want to spend time with him when he’s dying inside because all he wants her to do is to stroke his cheek. These things are so deep; they’re so buried in our DNA that it even hurts to talk about these needs sometimes. That’s why this week we’re stepping our way through Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages. Because it’s not enough for us to want to love our wives or our husbands, we need to know how, and today we’re looking at Quality Time as the second of those five love languages. Time poor is the trendy expression at the moment. Time poor takes busy and elevates it to, “wow you’re important because you’re time poor.” There are so many things, you know. There’s work, and there’s entertainment, there’s housework, there’s shopping and there’s spending and there’s traveling and there’s the kids. And a lot of it, as we’ve looked at it on previous programs of A Different Perspective is about accumulating stuff. But stuff doesn’t make us happy. We can go on a flash holiday and get there and still not be happy, you can spend as much money as you like on stuff, but it still wont make us happy because its relationships that bring us that satisfaction: relationship with God, relationship with husband and wife, relationship with family, relationship with friends. And these days it seems that just keeping our heads above water takes 99% of our time, and the other 1% we’re so exhausted we’ve got no time for relationships, we’ve got no time to give anything. We’re looking through that great book, and would encourage you to buy the book and read it because it is a really good book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. The five love languages that he lists are: words of affirmation, which we looked at yesterday; quality time, which we’re about to look at today; receiving gifts, which we’ll look at tomorrow; acts of service, the next day; and finally on Friday, physical touch. And it turns out that for each one of us, one or maybe two of those are our primary love languages. In other words we need our wife or our husband, as the case may be, to speak their love into our lives using these languages. If my primary language is physical touch, which it is, then receiving gifts just never works for me. Or words of affirmation, I tell you I don’t need them much, I need my wife to stroke my face and say “I love you” and that’s how I experience her love, by and large. Sure we need all of those things, but we’re coming down to what’s the primary way in which each one of us experiences love, takes it in. Now when we look today at quality time. Quality time is not about being in the same place together. You can be in the same place with your husband or wife but not have quality time because quality time speaks about attention. It speaks about focus. A woman can be just yearning to have that undivided attention of her husband and he thinks “Ah I’ll buy her some roses, that’ll do it!” As though some how quality time and roses are equivalent. They are not to someone whose primary way of assimilating love is by spending quality time with her husband. I’ll let you in on a secret. I am not naturally good at quality time. It is not my primary love language, it is not what I do naturally. I’m a doer, I do stuff, I work hard then I rest, I’m a typical male specimen. I love to withdraw into myself and think and watch sport on television. Time is something that’s there to be managed, I have a diary, I have a to do list. The first hint, early in our marriage where I knew something wasn’t quite right, was when Jacqui sent “Don’t you ever dare put me into your diary, I never want to see in your diary ‘appointment with wife’!” I thought, “Why not, it seems perfectly logical to me, I have to manage my time. I put my wife in there at 4 o’clock to have a cup of coffee with her.” It didn’t work for Jacqui, turns out that quality time is one of her two primary love languages, acts of service is the other, we’ll talk about that another day. And for her it means exactly what I just talked about, it means focus, it means conversation, it means attention. And unless she receives my undivided attention she doesn’t feel loved. Can you see the explosive potential of this, I am outcome oriented, I’m your classic time poor guy who does lots of stuff, and this guy meets this girl who just wants to spend time with him, and his answer is to schedule the time in his diary!! How do I know if my soul mate needs quality time? How do I know if he or she is someone who really understands my love when I spend quality time with them? Let me ask you, have they ever said to you, “you never spend any time with me, you’re always talking on the phone to other people but not to me.” Chances are that person needs your quality time in order to experience your love. Email, mobile phones, we’re so connected and available to other people our soul mates miss out. So I’ve had to learn, it’s not been a natural thing for me, I’ve had to say “I married my Jacqui and she needs this and so I have to learn to do this for her.” And here are some of the things that I’ve come up with. I tend to start pretty early in the morning. I love getting up at 4 o’clock, maybe 5 o’clock at the latest and I start working. And then about 7.30 in the morning when our daughter heads off to school I try and stop, I cant always do it, but I try and stop for 15 minutes, 20 minutes and we have our morning cup of coffee together, and we have a chat. I’m a morning person, I do my best work in the morning. I love preparing messages and radio programs early in the morning because my mind is sharp at that time. But if I just get up and work and work and work Jacqui doesn’t see me until maybe 4 or 5 in the afternoon. The other thing we do is in the evening, generally after dinner, we go for a walk for half an hour. We hold hands and maybe we talk and maybe we don’t but we just share that time together. We love renovating and so we’re always talking about ideas and planning and doing this and doing that. It’s fun, it’s our hobby if you like, is renovating houses. And so we enjoy doing it that’s something that we do together, its quality time. And Friday evenings once or twice a month we find a cheap restaurant somewhere and we just go and have a cheap little meal together. They’re just the things, the very practical things that Berni has had to think about and say, “well Berni, you know you’re not natural at spending quality time with people, so here are the things that you’ve go to learn.” Its not easy, its not perfect but its what my wife needs and what she deserves. And sometimes I make mistakes and sometimes things fall through the cracks, none of us is perfect, but the point is I’ve had to learn. And we all have to learn when we’re married to someone who experiences love differently to us. We’re always so focused on getting what we need and what we want, the real issue in marriage is figuring what our soul mates needs are, and delighting in meeting those, it’s a sacrifice. What about your life, what about your marriage? Do you have a spouse who needs words of affirmation, do you have a spouse who needs quality time? What are yours and your soul mate’s primary love language? To me it is such an exciting thing to explore and to dream and to plan how we can give to our husband or our wife the love that he or she so desperately wants and so richly deserves. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245205

Words of Affirmation // The Five Love Languages, Part 1 01/19/2026

Words of Affirmation // The Five Love Languages, Part 1 Mark Twain once said “I can live for two months on a good compliment”. It’s true, when people affirm us and encourage us – it somehow builds us up on the inside. Another new week. You know last week on A Different Perspective we went on a bit of a journey to look at how we can have the kind of marriage that we were meant to have. I guess we looked at some of the really important foundation stones to a great marriage and if you missed those programs I’ll let you know at the end of this program how you can listen to them again. This week we’re going to build on those foundations by looking at how to speak the language of love to our wives or our husbands, a language that they can actually understand. A man, by the name of Gary Chapman has written a book, it’s a great book called The Five Love Languages, in which he points out that too often husband and wife are actually speaking different love languages without even realising they’re doing it. That leads to hurt and frustration and anger and a sense that “Oh, my husband doesn’t love me, or my wife doesn’t love me.” So what are the five love languages, and why are they important? Well in his book Gary Chapman says there are five different basic languages of love and these are the five that he lists: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch. So the first one again is words of affirmation, affirming each other through what we say. The second one is spending quality time together, isn’t that a happening phrase! The third one is receiving gifts, the forth, acts of service, the fifth, physical touch. Think about it, we all need all of those things in a loving relationship, after all what would quality time between a husband and wife be without some encouraging words or physical touch. But it turns out that for most of us there are one or two out of those five that are the primary ways in which we perceive that our soul mate is expressing love to us. Me, I’m odd because I’m not really a touchy feely person yet physical touch is my primary love language. (we’ll talk about that in a few days time) But if my wife Jacqui doesn’t touch me all day, I don’t feel loved, and she can say “I love you” as many times as she likes but it doesn’t feel like it to me unless she touches me. For Jacqui its acts of service, that’s who she is, she’s hard wired that way. She loves serving other people, that’s how she naturally expresses her love. Now imagine we don’t ever realise that, imagine we get married and we live our lives and we never realise that about each other. How do you think the marriage would go? How do you think it would pan out over the years? Well the answer is, not so well, because if my primary love language is touch then the natural thing that I will do is to express my love that way to my wife, but if her primary love language is acts of service, if I all I ever do is express my love by touching her and never serving her, the chances are she’ll never feel as though I’m saying I love her. And it’s the same with me, if she thinks she can express her love to me just by serving me, because that’s what she does naturally, she’s great at it, she does it with me, she does it with all sorts of people, everyone she meets. She’s just a person who loves to serve. But if she thinks that she can express all of her love that way to me and not understand that what I really need is that touch which says “I love you,” in my language, she’s never going to say I love you in a language that I can understand. So it’s important, not only to understand what is it that I need my partner to say to me or do to me, so that I experience their love in a way that makes sense to me, but more important than that is to understand our spouses language and to learn to express our love in a way that they can receive it. You know something, that’s not easy, and some days it doesn’t feel natural. And over the course of this week we’re going to look at those different love languages, starting today with words of affirmation, and I guess just share some practical insights and tips and stuff that I’ve experienced along the way. And my heart is that as we do that God will speak His grace and His love into your life, into your marriage. And if you’re not married, maybe you know someone who needs to hear these things and you can share with them the good news that marriage is a blessing from God. Marriage was God’s idea in the first place, it’s supposed to be wonderful. Not perfect everyday, not easy everyday, but it’s supposed to be a wonderful union and experience between husband and wife. Well let’s begin today with words of affirmation. King Solomon, one of the Kings of Israel, way back in the book of Proverbs in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. He wrote this, he said, The tongue has the power of life and death, reckless words are like a sword but the tongue of the wise brings healing. We do say that sticks and stones might break our bones but names will never hurt us, but that’s not true. What people say to us either builds us up and encourages us or it tears us down and breaks us. Mark Twain once said “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” We know what he is saying; he’s saying the same thing as Solomon. What people say to one another actually matters an awful lot. Now Solomon and Mark Twain are saying, well, stuff that we already know. Verbal compliments or words that affirm someone are a powerful communicator of love, and in fact children growing up, particularly teenagers, if they don’t receive those words of encouragement, it undermines their sense of identity and security. But here’s the thing, words of affirmation cost nothing to give, but they reflect what’s going on inside in our hearts. Jesus said “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” And for someone whose primary language of love is words of affirmation, when they hear us affirming them that says ‘this person loves me’. The words aren’t the important thing its what the words represent. They represent what’s going on in our hearts. The person whose primary love language is words of affirmation needs to know in our hearts that we love them and they receive that love through the words. “Gee you look great in that dress.” “Darling I know you’re working hard, you know I really appreciate it.” “Sweetheart that was a great dinner.” “Thanks so much for picking up the kids.” “You’ve got such a great sense of humour; I love it when we laugh together.” Not rocket science is it, none of that? You don’t have to have a PhD in Psychology to figure out that those words are good words. Just forget about the main love language for the moment, every marriage needs those words because the message is “I genuinely appreciate you.” And you know something when we do that we get benefits back. That’s not why we do it, but those words bear fruit in our relationship. Is my wife or my husband one of those people whose primary love language is words of affirmation? Well, have you every heard them say, “You don’t appreciate me, you never say thank you, you take me for granted?” Those are cries of love from someone who needs affirmation. Listen, answer. The Apostle Paul in Ephesians, Chapter 4 verse 29, wrote this, he said, Don’t let evil talk come out of your mouth but only words that build up other people so that your words may give grace to those who hear. Words of affirmation cost nothing, they’re free. Why is it that we let them go in our marriage? Why is it that we forget to say, “That was wonderful, you’re wonderful, I love you.” “That was a fantastic meal.” “You look fabulous.” They’re one of the greatest love gifts that we can ever give. They cost nothing, but to someone whose primary love language is words of affirmation they mean everything. /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245175

A Fresh Start For Your Soul // Spring Cleaning Your Life, Part 5 01/16/2026

A Fresh Start For Your Soul // Spring Cleaning Your Life, Part 5 How often have we all tried to change something in our lives – something on the outside – only to discover that the problem goes far deeper than that. It’s a problem on the inside. It’s just great to catch up with you again today with a different perspective on life. The soul is something that seems to get quite a lot of attention these days. Body and soul, soul food, resting the soul, soul journey. They are all phrases that get bandied around. Different people try to find rest for their souls in different ways; creating peaceful rooms in their homes, playing relaxing music; shutting out the noise and the clamour and the stress of the world out there. Now that’s all well and good, but what if all that noise and the clamour and the stress, what if that stuff doesn’t live out there. What if it’s actually a problem deep inside? Then maybe it’s time, time to spring clean our souls. This week on A Different Perspective, I know it’s not spring, I know you don’t have to write and let us know it’s not spring, but I thought that at the beginning of the year it would be wonderful to talk about spring cleaning our lives. Looking forward to the year and saying, “What is some of the rubbish I can leave behind?” And over the week so far we have looked at spring cleaning where we live, our home, our finances and getting those right. Spring cleaning our priorities and getting some balance back in our lives. Spring cleaning our relationships we looked at yesterday and getting rid of some of the poisonous people in our lives; dealing with some of the difficult issues and hanging around with some of the people worth hanging around. But they are all on the outside. Today I would like to finish up with looking at the inside the soul, the deep, the deep part of us. The danger is that we focus just on the things on the outside, the externalities. Now they do have an impact. A messy house is going to be depressing. Debt is going to put a weight on our shoulders. If we have the wrong priorities we are going to have a lack of balance in our lives. If we have some wrong relationships, ultimately that’s going to tear us apart. So they do have an impact. But if we just try and change those things, the outside, we can spend a lot of time and effort just to discover that there is something wrong in the inside, in our hearts, in our souls. You know that deep place that we live, that place that we laugh and where we cry, where we have fun and we feel sadness. That place. Jesus actually only had a go at people when he was walking on this earth about two issues. One of them was a lack of faith. The other one which we will look at today was hypocrisy. He detested hypocrisy. And when you think about it, hypocrisy is when what is happening inside us is not consistent with what is happening outside. Hypocrisy is when the outside doesn’t match up with the inside and we say one thing and do another. And in particular Jesus really detested religious hypocrisy. He said: Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and it’s fruit bad. Because a tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers. He said to these religious hypocrites: How can you speak about good things when you are evil, because out of the abundance of your heart, your mouth speaks. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure. I tell you on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word that you utter. Because by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned. He doesn’t mince his words, Jesus, when it comes to hypocrisy and there is some insight. He talks about a tree and He says, “Look a tree that has good fruit is actually a good tree inside. And a tree that has bad fruit is actually a bad tree inside.” He was yelling at these religious hypocrites who are telling the people one thing and then doing another themselves. Now you and I both know people who bear bad fruit.You can see it in their lives. We know them at work, we know them in our social lives, sometimes we know them at home. It doesn’t matter how much bravado they use, doesn’t matter how much they rationalise it and they brush it aside, you see some of the bad fruit and you have to say, "That is actually a bad tree.” And to be really honest, sometimes you and I bear bad fruit. If you and I have anger in our hearts, or malice, or envy, or hurts form the past, and c’mon guys if you are eying off every woman that walks past you down the street. Doesn’t matter how we dress them up or rationalise them, they are still there. I used to live in our house that used to back onto a really busy road, a noisy road. And after about six to twelve months we didn’t notice the noise on the road. I know my aunty who lives in a house just near a railway line, we can be visiting here and having a cup of tea, and this loud train rattles by and we’ll look at the noise and she doesn’t even notice it. And the same is true, sometimes with the bad fruit that we bear in our lives. We can live in a dung heap for six to twelve months or years and years and eventually you know what happens, we don’t notice the smell. But here’s the rub it still stinks. The bad stuff robs us of good things. If I get angry with someone all the time it robs me reaping the fruit from the relationship. If I bear malice towards someone, it robs me of joy and peace. If a man has a wandering eyes, you know what it does, it really robs him and his wife of true intimacy in marriage. If someone has a stingy nature it robs them of the blessings that happen when we stretch to give to the poor and to God's work in faith and then God steps into our lives and blesses us. Isn’t it true? Doesn’t matter how we try and rub it away, it is the way it is. There are kind of two parts to our lives that we looked at earlier this week, when we were looking at the apostle Peter in jail. Remember when the angel came to let him out and the angel said, “Listen Peter, get up, put on your sandals, put on your belt and put on your coat and follow me.” And then the chains miraculously fell of his hands, and the gate just swung open and God sprung him from jail. There were two parts to that story, the mundane, the bit where Peter had to get up, put on his robe and his belt and his sandals on and follow the angel. That was the mundane, the things that Peter could do for himself, which God wanted him to do for himself. And then there was the miraculous - the angel showing up, the chains falling off. And as you and I stand on the threshold of a new year, can I suggest something to you? Your life and my life are exactly like that. There is the mundane and the miraculous. And sometimes we just have to roll up our sleeves and deal with some of the mundane issues and some of the things that we can do for ourselves.I wonder whether part of that isn’t spring cleaning our souls. What is the mundane? Well I think it is naming the things that are wrong inside us. Owning up to them and acknowledging them, and taking responsibility for them. If you are someone that gets angry quickly at people put it on the table, and say, "God I get angry quickly with people. I am sorry I don’t want to live my life like that. I don’t want to be robbed of all the good things you have for me in this coming year and the years down the track just because I have this rotten thing in my soul.” And here is the miracle bit. It’s almost impossible sometimes for you and I to change some of those deep rooted things, right inside of us that are wrong. And the miracle bit is that as we acknowledge it and we lay it on the table and say to God, “Look, I can’t deal with this, I need a hand, help me.” As we hand them over to him, as we submit them to him, God steps in and God comes along and sometimes he does it quickly and miraculously. And at other times he does it over weeks and months and even years but he helps us to deal with those things. And it is so good to be clean, it is so liberating. There is a whole new level of life and relationship with God. Come on, as you and I look forward to this year, what is it in your soul that needs spring cleaning? /episode/index/show/32d04db5-1dff-4476-bc65-2e28e83b1760/id/39245130

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