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.
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A Lonely Journey // Old Story, New Twist, Part 6
12/22/2025
A Lonely Journey // Old Story, New Twist, Part 6
Over the last thirty years, I’ve done a lot of travelling. It’s hard work. The wear and tear on your body is quite a thing. But it’s even harder when you’re not fit and well. And that is the very journey that Mary had – almost full term in her pregnancy – heading into that first Christmas. Now I know that this is not going to come as any great surprise to you but I have never been pregnant. Something (by the way) that I've often given thanks for because I'm your typical male – the idea of going through childbirth is something I can't comprehend. Which is why, I guess, God didn't leave it up to men to be mother's – wise move God, wise move. Anyway, back to Christmas, I'm trying to imagine what it was like for Mary who was pretty much full term to travel from Nazareth the Bethlehem for the census. We don't think too much about it because these days the drive from A to B would take, umm, two to three hours I'm guessing; maybe four, if you took it slowly and you had a break for lunch along the way. You'd probably do it in a comfortable air-conditioned car although even then, let’s say a three to four-hour car ride wouldn't be particularly the most delightful experience for a woman who was close to full term, would it now? But back then it was a one to two-week journey. Tradition has it … if you believe all the paintings and drawings that Mary rode on the back of a donkey, of course, there's no Biblical evidence for that, we're not told how she got from Nazareth to Bethlehem. But for her sake, I'm hoping she was on a back of a donkey or riding in the back of a cart somewhere rather than walking the whole way because one thing's for certain she wasn't riding in an air-conditioned car. My point is this … we often look back on the old, old Christmas story as though it’s a fable or a pantomime or, I don't know what. It was so long ago and we've heard it so many times that we just have this two-dimensional view of what went on. Yeah, yeah Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, wise men, Bethlehem, manger, yeah all that jazz. And when we look at Christmas that way, it's almost as though we're closing our hearts off to the wonderful real, gritty, here and now things that God’s wanting to speak into our lives. Mary and Joseph didn't have an easy run of it. It was time for a census. The Roman emperor had decreed that it was time to do a people stocktake. And the way they did it back then (before marks sensing, computer readable census forms distributed to each household) was that you had to head back to your ancestral home and for Joseph that meant Bethlehem. In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea to the city of David called Bethlehem because he was descended from the house and the family of David. He went to be registered with Mary to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. (Luke 2: 1-5) See, the Romans were nothing if not efficient administrators. They, in fact, had a huge impact on the distribution of the Gospel after Jesus' resurrection and ascension because of the road and port infrastructure that they'd built and the relatively peaceful and homogenous Roman Empire that dominated the known world at the time. But on this occasion, as far as Mary and Joseph were concerned, they were being a right proper pain in the backside. Quite literally for Mary if she was fortunate enough to have travelled the journey on the back of a donkey. I imagine that if you or I had been Mary or Joseph, we would have had a few choice words and thoughts about the timing of this rotten, lousy census. Why now? What a pain! How inconvenient! Mary is almost full term and she and Jo are travelling with a sea of humanity in all different directions heading for their ancestral homes, in their case that was Bethlehem. Isn't that how it feels when circumstances and events beyond us seem to dictate the course of our lives? Pretty frustrating, isn't it? – inconvenient and sometimes, downright dangerous and hurtful. But this census wasn't just some random event. It wasn't a happen chance thing. As with everything, God was in it because centuries before through the Prophet Micah, He had spoken to His people about their Messiah whom He would send who would be born in, yeah you guessed it, Bethlehem. Let's take a look, Micah 5: 2-3: But you O Bethlehem of Ephratah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel whose origin is of old, from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labour has brought forth, then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel. See, God had a plan. His plan was that Jesus, the bread of life as He later referred to Himself as, would be born in the town of Bethlehem, a word which literally means 'the house of bread'. God’s plan was to speak powerfully to His people through the Words of Micah's prophecy and through the fulfilment of that prophecy in the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. My point is this … events are never random. Events that seem to roll over the top of your plans and your hopes and your dreams even never just happen by chance. Sometimes the most difficult and devastating events are the most powerful moves of God in our lives and through our lives and into the lives of other people around us. Of course, it never feels like it at the time. And rarely (if ever) does God give us the big picture if you will to explain what's going on and what He's up to when He's doing that and letting these things happen to us. But that doesn't change the fact that God's sovereign will is playing out right there and then. Psalm 135 verse 6 says: Whatever the Lord pleases he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the deeps. So whatever that looks like in your life right now, remember your God is up to something good. I mean really good just as He was with Mary and Joseph even if they didn't have the full picture. I've called this series of messages leading up to Christmas – 'Old Story, New Twist'. I did that for a reason because I know that this Christmas story, far from being some distant archaic tale of which pantomimes are born, is a gritty, real story of the journey of the Creator of the universe into the lives of men and women, into the lives of you and me. And when we look at that old, old story from His perspective (from the vantage point of heaven’s balcony if you will), when we allow God by His Spirit and through His Word to guide us on that journey over the dusty trails that Mary and Joseph trod, we discover a God who is on that same dusty, difficult journey with you and me today. Peter the Apostle in 1 Peter 5 and verse 7 said that we should: Cast all our anxieties on God because he cares for us. So whatever anxieties and discomforts and fears and disappointments you happen to be carrying around on your rocky road towards this Christmas – this God who is above all your circumstances, this God who is in all your circumstances, this God who sent you His Son to lighten your load wants to take your burdens from you. So how about it? Is it time to hand all that stuff over to Him and to get on the journey and head towards Christmas with joy and anticipation and excitement in your heart? Because Jesus came for you, He came to set you free, He came to bring you forgiveness and a future and a certain hope and an eternity with Him. That's what He ushered in on that very first Christmas. And that, I reckon, is something definitely worth celebrating – Christmas.
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A Father's Heart // Old Story, New Twist, Part 5
12/19/2025
A Father's Heart // Old Story, New Twist, Part 5
The other Sunday, the pastor at my church was talking about dying. He made the point that people’s greatest fear is to die alone. I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. So … what does this have to do with Christmas? Well, as it turns out … everything! I know, it's kind of a weird perspective from which to come at the story of Christmas. But hopefully as we chat together, it will start to make sense. Death … dying is pretty much the one taboo subject left in our society. We can talk about pretty much anything else but not dying. And the last thing that you and I really want to think about is dying. But humour me because I want you to put yourself on your deathbed. Hopefully, quite a few years away from now, and imagine how you'll feel. Would you be afraid of dying alone? I'm guessing you would particularly in a hospital room, sterile, white, disinfected, clinical, with tubes coming out of you, those squeaky sounds the nurses shoes make on the floor. The idea of being completely alone at the end is a terrible thought. Now and then, you hear about an elderly person who died all alone in their home and their body wasn't discovered for seven or eight years. That's frightful. Imagine how the end must have come for them. Of course, you don't have to wait to die in order to be alone. So many people are desperately alone, sometimes through circumstances but mostly as a result of their sin. That may sound a bit weird but sin – turning our backs on God and going our own way usher's in death very quickly. That's what God promised Adam and Eve would happen if they ate from that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that he forbade them to eat from. The Lord commanded the man, 'you may eat freely of every tree in the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it you shall die. (Genesis 2: 16) The result of that apparent minor transgression? Well, God said to them: I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers, he will strike your head and you will strike his heel. To the woman he said, 'I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing, in pain shall you bring forth children yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And to the man he said, 'Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and you have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you 'you shall not eat of it' cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground for out of it you were taken, you are dust and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3: 15 – 19) The immediate result of that sin was broken relationships, a broken relationship between God and Adam and a broken relationship between Adam and Eve. And broken relationships mean loneliness and strife. So … what was God's solution to that distance that we put between Him and us through our sin? How did He address that? Well, it's simple really. It was a complete no brainer for Him. All He had to do was to follow the longing of His heart and we know what that is because He tells us what it is over and over again in the Old Testament. Let's have a look at just one example, Leviticus 26: 11 – 13, God said: I will place my dwelling in your midst and I shall not abhor you and I will walk among you and I will be your God and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be slaves no more, I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you to walk upright. The longing of God’s heart is to be close to His people. He's our Father, He loves us, of course, that's the longing of His heart. And yet, through the whole of the Old Testament we see how God's people struggle to honour Him. In fact, the name Israel literally means 'to struggle with God'. They failed, all the time, over and over again. And over and over again, He forgave them. It was this constant merry-go-round and it wasn't working so here was His plan, a plan that, as I said yesterday, wasn't some fall back, it was always His Plan A. Are you ready for it? Here God's plan, John chapter 1 beginning at verse 10. Speaking about Jesus, it says: He was in the world and the world came into being through him yet the world didn't know him. He came to what was his own and his own people didn't accept him but to all who received him, who believed in his name he gave them power to become children of God who were born not out of blood or out of the will of the flesh or of the will of a man but of God and the word became flesh and lived amongst us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and of truth. (John 1: 10-14) The plan was for God to take a giant step towards us even though we'd drifted so far away from Him that we really didn't know Him anymore. This God who had an intimate personal relationship back then in the beginning with Adam and Eve, the Word (that's Jesus), the Word became flesh and lived amongst us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas But can I give you the literal meaning of that verse because when you have that, it makes a lot more sense. It literally says that Jesus became flesh and tabernacled amongst us, set up His home amongst us, it's the language of the Exodus where God's presence travelled on the forty-year journey through the wilderness with His people in that tent, in that tabernacle. Jesus coming to this planet is Jesus stepping out and coming close to you to travel on your journey with you on your exodus. That's what makes this Christmas thing so amazing – to set you free, to make sure that you are never alone. Not through the problems of this life, not through the fractured relationships and the enmity that exists in this world through our sin, not through that time where we come to the end of this life and not for the rest of eternity. Christmas is Jesus coming close, Christmas is God following the desire of His heart to be close to you and me by sending His Son to be on our journey with us. Are you getting this? Is this touching your heart as I tell you this age old story with a new twist? That new twist is that Jesus came for you. Jesus came to be on your journey. Jesus came to bring you comfort to bind up your broken heart, to bring release from captivity of your sin, to be on this journey every step of the way. And what a terrible price He paid for that so that we could see His glory and know Him and experience a one on one intimacy with Him. Now let me bring you back to your death-bed … what if, instead of being terribly alone on your deathbed you experience the very presence of Jesus right there with you on your journey with His love and His forgiveness and His grace and His peace and His mercy? What if instead of being terribly alone, you come to know as each second ticks by on that clock, you are drawing closer and closer to that time that you will see that Jesus face to face? I don't care what bad things have happened to you in your life. I don't care how lost and alone you may feel. It doesn't matter because Jesus is in this place with you and He will never leave you and never forsake you because on that starry starry night in Bethlehem, He came for you. He came to say, "I love you", He came to suffer and die for you. He came to rise again and give you a completely new life with your slate wiped clean. He came to set you free. He came to bring you peace. He came to be with you for every minute of every day for the rest of eternity. That's Christmas. That's what God was doing by sending us His Son. That's what we're celebrating or at least, what we're pretending to celebrate over this coming week. Do you get it? Jesus came for you and if you have nothing else to celebrate this Christmas then celebrate that. It's all you need to make your Christmas the best one ever. And remember, I'm praying for you that this message, this incredibly Good News of Jesus, will light up your heart with a joy unspeakable.
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Christmas is a Crazy Idea // Old Story, New Twist, Part 4
12/18/2025
Christmas is a Crazy Idea // Old Story, New Twist, Part 4
I don't know if you’ve ever thought of this, but on the surface of things, Christmas is a crazy idea! I mean, what exactly was God thinking by sending His Son to become a man – and to be born in some drafty, smelly shed out the back of Bethlehem. Yeah, absolutely, on the surface of things, Christmas is a crazy idea. I mean stand back and think about it … God's God, He created the whole universe. Okay, He's Father and Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one, something that's not that easy to wrap your mind around. But let's just leave that to one side for the moment. God is God. God creates everything. We read about it in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. It's pretty straightforward description of what He did and it was amazing. And the crowning glory of all His creation is humanity – you and me, male and female. And the very last thing that He does before He rests to enjoy His handiwork of creation is that He hands the whole thing over to us. God said: Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind, cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind and it was so and God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind, everything that creeps along the ground of every kind and God saw that it was good. Then God said, 'Let us make humanity in our image according to our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humanity in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ God said, 'See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to every thing that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life I have given every green plant for food' and so it was. God saw everything that He'd made and indeed it was very good and there was evening and there was morning of the sixth day. (Genesis 1: 26-31) So far, so good. Adam and Eve go and enjoy all of this amazing creation but God does one thing, just one thing that is so crazy, inexplicable. The Lord commanded the man, 'you may freely eat of every tree of the garden but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it you shall die. (Genesis 2:16) Well, you know the rest. They couldn't help themselves, Adam and Eve, they just had to try to be like God. They ate from that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the rest as they say is history. Sin entered the world, sickness entered the world and just as God had promised them death entered the world. Life became hard. That's something you and I can attest to – life is hard and all because God had to forbid them that one tree and they just had to try it anyway. Could it be all of your misery and mine hangs on just that one crummy apple? For Pete's sake, that's nuts! And then as humanity spirals ever downward, as we become ever more debauched and depraved, after that moment God mounts a rescue mission – He sends Jesus to save us. What's that about? Why didn't He just give them access to every last tree? Why did He have to hold that one tree back from them and why did they have to blow it for the rest of us and after all that, why did God mount that rescue mission and send Jesus? It defies human logic until you realise that love and logic have nothing more in common than their first two letters. Love isn't logical. Have a listen to this: But the free gift is not like the trespass for if the many died through one man's trespass, Adams, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift and the grace of one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man's sin for the judgement following the one trespass brought condemnation but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If because of the one man's sin death has exercised dominion through that one much more surely will those who receive the abundance of the grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man's trespasses lead to condemnation for all so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. But the law came in with the result that the trespass multiplied but when sin increased grace abounded all the more. So just as sin exercised dominion in death so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. (Romans 5: 12-21) There you have it. There you have the reason that God did what He did. If you love someone you give them free will, right? He gave Adam a free will by excluding that one tree and Adam chose against God and so sin, with all its consequences, entered the world for you and me. Now, before you think to yourself, "I am going to punch Adam in the nose when I see him in heaven." Ask yourself, if nobody in all of history before you had sin and ultimately you were living in that garden, would you have resisted the temptation? So sin entered the world through one man and forgiveness came though one man as well, Jesus. God sent Him into this world as that little babe we remember each year around this time so that we could be forgiven. And notice how that 'grace' word comes in. Forgiven by the free, unmerited favour of God so that we could know what? God’s love. What greater expression of love is there than to forgive someone who doesn't deserve it? I guess only one, to do it and to take his or her punishment on their behalf, to give your life to suffer in order to purchase their forgiveness and their freedom. To step out of heaven into this hurly burly of a sinful world and be punished even though you'd never done anything wrong. And this is not as some Plan B because Plan A didn't work. This was always Gods Plan A. God always knew Adam would blow it. He always knew that you and I would blow it. None of that was ever a surprise to Him and yet out of His great love, He gave us a free will to accept or reject Him. And out of His great love, He came to purchase us back from death by offering up His Son as His sense of justice demanded – to take all the fall for you and for me, to pay the price, to die the death. Now, I know you have a lot going on in these days leading up to Christmas – those last-minute presents to buy, the things to clear off your desk perhaps before you have a few days off, the turkey to buy, the decoration to get up, all that stuff. Now I know that you may not have a lot of time to think about this Christmas stuff but at the heart of Christmas lies a Father's love. The heart of Christmas in the most unhygienic, feed trough called a manger, in that even more unhygienic stable filled with animals, right where that child was born and lay and cried and gurgled – is a love so sublime that there are not enough words to describe it. There are no words ever invented that can really explain a love so great. So as you hurtle towards yet another chaotic Christmas, let me say to you quietly, kindly, gently, "Take a moment to wrap your heart around that love. Just let that love touch you deep inside and change you and change your life and change your world." After all, what do you have to lose?
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The Realities of Life // Old Story, New Twist, Part 3
12/17/2025
The Realities of Life // Old Story, New Twist, Part 3
One of the problems that many people have is reconciling the supposed wonder and joy of Christmas, with the humdrum realities of their lives. How … how do you do that? How do you take this Christmas message and make it real in your life? That’s what we’re going to be chatting about today on the program. There is something incredibly powerful about 'business as usual'. If you think about how your life has played itself out, so far, I suspect that it's been ninety-nine percent humdrum and about half a percent of wonderful mountain top joy and another half a percent of tragedy and loss. Sure, some people seem to have better lives than others. Some are born rich, some are born poor and very sadly for some people life is one long tragedy. I wish I could wave a magic wand and take all that away for those people who find themselves in that boat. But I just can't and yet for most of us, most of our lives are occupied by the normal every day, business as usual, monotony which consumes most of our time, most of our attention and most of our focus. Am I right? But beneath that monotony there is always, always, always a sneaking suspicion that there must be more. You've had that feeling, right? This sense that something is oppressing you, something is didling you out of the sort of life that you think you should be living. There are in fact very few people on planet earth today that don't have that feeling. I used to have it but I don't have it anymore. I've always been someone who's tried to get out there and live life to the full. And all along, as hard as I tried, something was missing, things weren't quite right and I couldn't put my finger on it. I want to wind the clock back to what was going on in the history of Israel around when Jesus was born. Not just the history of the nation but the lives of the ordinary people like you and me. In fact there's a particular bunch of guys I want to focus on because they, to me, exemplify this 'business as usual' but something was not quite right in their world. What am I yabbering on about here? I'm talking, of course, about the shepherds who were out watching their flocks by night. Now, no doubt you've sung the Christmas carol many times and heard their story many times. By the way, the fact that they were out there watching their flocks by night makes it pretty certain that Jesus wasn't born in December, Israel's winter. Average December maximums of fifteen degrees Celsius or around sixty degrees Fahrenheit and of course nights were quite a bit cooler. So in winter they generally brought their sheep into town where there was a communal pen where they were cared for overnight. So even though we celebrate Christmas in December, it probably didn't happen then on the first Christmas. Anyhow, here were these guys living out their 'business as usual' tending their flocks by night but they weren't living as free men, they were living as men in an occupied country. The Romans of course had occupied and ruled most of the known world back then. And in fact, the Romans had been the rulers for the last sixty or seventy years in Israel. Now, in the overall history of Israel that's pretty short but for those shepherds it was all that they could remember. The Romans were tough task masters and what made it even harder for the Israelites is that they knew they were God’s chosen people. They knew they were meant to be free and so they expected, kind of, sort of, maybe one day for God to send them a King – a Messiah, as He was called back then, God’s anointed King – in order to boot the Romans out and restore the kingdom of Israel, to set God’s people free. After all, God had done it before. He'd set them free from captivity in Egypt. He'd set them free from captivity in Babylon. He'd set them free from the Seleucid Empire through the Maccabean Revolt only a century and a half before. That was their simplistic understanding of what should be going on. So there they were, business as usual. But something wasn't quite right, they were oppressed and that simply wasn't the way it should have been. They were being robbed of the freedom, the life that they knew they were entitled to as God’s chosen people. Does that sound vaguely familiar to you? Does that sound like anyone that you know? Now, people back then were kind of expecting this Messiah to come. But when you and I used this term 'Messiah' we think of Jesus, right? That's not who they were thinking about at all. They were thinking more about a strong warrior king, someone like King David of old who could muster an army, defeat the Romans and set the people free. After all, isn't that what God promised to David years before? 2 Samuel 7: 12 and 13, He said to David: When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors I will raise up your offspring after you who shall come forth from your body and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. So in effect, they were looking in the wrong direction for a saviour because they misinterpreted what God was on about. They thought they were going to get another King David. Again a bit like, in fact a lot like people today, that's what was going on in the popular consciousness of ordinary people like those 'business as usual' shepherds back then and in many respects it's what’s going on in the popular consciousness of ordinary people today. People are looking for someone or something to set things right. They know that life is not all it should be so they turn to money or career or reputation or luxury or holidays or friends, you name it. They turn to it expecting ‘it’ to make things better but it never does. People have been looking in the wrong direction for a Saviour for thousands of years just like those shepherds and then God breaks into the world with such power and with such might and in such a surprising way that we can't even begin to imagine what He's up to. In that region were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night then an angel of the Lord stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified but the angel said to them, 'don't be afraid for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. To you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is the Messiah, the Lord. (Luke 2: 8-14) This Messiah, this Saviour, He wasn't what they expected Him to be – He still isn't what we expect Him to be. What are you expecting Jesus to be? As we roll inexorably towards Christmas, yet again, what are you expecting to discover or are you so busy looking in a different direction that you're going to miss this amazing surprise in Jesus? Or are you running away as I was for many years because like the shepherds I was kind of afraid? This idea of God breaking into history by becoming one of us is too startling and too incomprehensible to begin to make sense. Just listen with me quietly to what the angel went on to say to those startled, frightened, 'business as usual', confused shepherds. This will be a sign for you, you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. And so ... When the angels had left them and gone into heaven the shepherds said to one another, 'let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place which the Lord has made known to us'. So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and a child lying in a manger. When they saw this they made known what had been told to them about this child and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told to them. (Luke 2: 15 – 20) Seems to me that you and I, like the shepherds, have a choice. We can continue to get on with business as usual, stay in our field and ignore Jesus. Or, we can go and check Him out for ourselves. The only question that I'd ask is this; so how well has your 'business as usual' worked out for you so far?
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The Prophecies of Old // Old Story, New Twist, Part 2
12/16/2025
The Prophecies of Old // Old Story, New Twist, Part 2
You know that first Christmas … it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t like God hadn’t told His people that He was going to send them a Saviour. It’s just that … well, they were so focused on the here and now, they really hadn’t stopped to consider the big picture. I guess when it comes to this whole Christmas thing; we see it from where we sit. And for most of us, our perspective (our take on Christmas) comes through the ritual that surrounds it – a ritual that we've acted out year after year for as long as we can remember. Sure, it's changed a bit. When we were kids it was all about the excitement of presents. But you know the deal, you know all the things that you do in the weeks leading up to Christmas, you know how Christmas Day is going to pan out. You know the carols you're going to sing and the food that you're going to eat and the people you're going to celebrate Christmas with. If it's at all possible, this exciting celebration of Christmas has become something of a routine for you. A bit of a contradiction but it's true for most of us, life is full of contradictions right? When it comes to Christmas we kind of narrow our view, we lower our gaze and focus on the well-worn familiar path of the Christmas ritual. Whatever that looks like for each one of us, we narrow our perspective and like Pavlov's dogs we get on with that part of life and in many respects, that's how it was on that very first Christmas two thousand odd years ago. Although it wasn't called Christmas back then. In fact, the first record of there being some celebration of Christmas doesn't appear until 354 AD, three and a half centuries after the birth of Jesus. And of course many of the modern-day traditions of Christmas that we celebrate on December 25th – for instance, eating turkey, having a Christmas tree, Santa Claus, presents, tinsel, lights, all of those are much, much more recent. In fact, the Christmas ritual that you and I take for granted today, as though it's been around forever, is little more than a hundred years old, it's a bit of a surprise, isn't it? But let's wind the clock back even further to that first Christmas. People by and large were just going on with their daily business. The big news in town was of course the census. The Romans had ordered a stock take of all the people and in the absence of the technology we use today, the way you did it back then was to go back to your ancestral home. And in the case of Joseph and therefore Mary, his embarrassingly pregnant betrothed, that meant going back to Bethlehem. The inns were full, the shepherds were out doing what shepherds did, tending their flocks in the field by night. Other than the disruption of the census, it was pretty much business as usual. And then wham, the light show in the skies in front of these shepherds. God broke into that 'business as usual' in a spectacular way. You know what, I'm praying for this Christmas, God is going to break into your 'business as usual' in a spectacular way too. All these people were just living their lives, just like we do, head down, doing stuff that they did day after day when all along God had promised a Saviour. There are quite a number of prophecies in what we now call the Old Testament (the Scriptures to the Jewish people) of the coming of a Saviour and principle among them is that He would be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5: 2-5: But you O Bethlehem of Ephrathah who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel whose origin is of old from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labour has brought forth then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel and he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God and they shall live secure for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth and he shall be the one of peace. The prophecy of the coming of the Saviour in great power in this tiny humble little village of Bethlehem and by the way the word Bethlehem means literally 'the house of bread'. Remember how Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life’. How appropriate that He should be born in Bethlehem – the house of bread. And then there was the prophecy that He would be born to a virgin, now that's pretty outrageous when you think about it, Isaiah chapter 7:14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look the virgin woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel which means 'God is with us. And that is, of course, exactly what happened. There are quite a few more prophecies about the birth of Jesus that were given centuries before that He fulfilled – His lineage, the slaughter of the infants by Herrod, His need to flee to Egypt. The bottom line was that there were plenty of signs, plenty of prophecies, plenty of predictions. Okay they were cryptic. I mean God revealed His Son in mystery and wonder. We always try to analyse God and put Him in a box. We try and figure out how He operates and then make a bunch of rules about Him. But you can't do that with God. He does startling, creative, outrageous things like sending His Son, Jesus as the son of a carpenter in humble circumstances in some shed out the back of Bethlehem. But the picture was always there, the big plan was always there. God had given some predictions about what was going to happen even as way back as His promise to Abraham. Right back there in the first Book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, God said to him, "Through you all nations shall be blessed" pointing forward to Jesus. But the people were just chugging along, business as usual and it was difficult (if not, impossible) for many of them to see, to perceive, to understand. Not all of them had the light show like the shepherds and the wise men. As I look at the world today, it seems to me that still today most are asleep to what God did back then and what God is doing now. The only difference is that we know the whole story, we know what was going on and how it ends. So as this Christmas approaches, you find yourself asleep to the wonder of what God is doing then let me say to you with all love and with all care, "Wake up. Don't be asleep through yet another Christmas." The wonder and the power of what God did back then, the doors that He opened for you through the coming of Jesus, the joy of what He brings to you today, the unspeakable glory that He opens up through His Son for you to spend eternity with Him, why would you want to sleep through that? Why would you want to be blind to that? Those prophecies of old which is the faintest hint of what was to come. But now we know, now we can see the sheer wonder that is Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy and full of acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen. (1 Timothy 1: 15-17) Man, why would you want to ignore that, to sleep through that, to replace it with trite Christmas rituals that don't come anywhere close to what that's all about? Why would you do that? Because, well, that's just what people do, that's how it goes. It's Christmas again so let's roll out the Christmas tree and the tinsel and the lights and play it again Sam. That's not what Christmas was meant to be. That's not what God the Father had in His great and mighty heart as He gazed down upon the birth of His Son in that horrible dirty little stable. It never ceases to amaze me how readily we're prepared to accept cheap imposters when the real thing, the real deal is available to each one of us. Christmas, what will it mean to you this year, hmm?
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The Problem of Christmas // Old Story, New Twist, Part 1
12/15/2025
The Problem of Christmas // Old Story, New Twist, Part 1
Well … here we are again. It’s December. It’s almost the end of another year … and it’s almost Christmas time. Again! Happens year after year. Christmas. Question is … what do you make of it? What do you do with it? It’s an age-old problem. Christmas. I don't know if you've ever thought of this but Christmas is a real problem for guys like me, preachers I mean. Year after year, we have to crank out yet another Christmas series. And for the first few years, that's pretty easy but then after a while you start thinking to yourself, "Well, how am I going to put a new twist on Christmas this year?" Last year, I approached it from this perspective, the year before from that perspective, the year before that from ... well, you get the picture. There are only so many different perspectives on Christmas. Well, we've all been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Yeah, so it's Christmas again, so what? If you live in the Northern Hemisphere it’s an excuse for a few days off. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere as I do, it's probably the summer holidays that you're looking forward to more than Christmas itself. A chance for a decent break, a bit of a much-needed R and R and sure Christmas is part of that but the Christmas bit can be a bit of a hassle. Buying presents, figuring out who has Christmas lunch with whom and then perhaps scooting off to Christmas dinner with another part of your family. Kids, uncles, aunts, grandparents – it all gets complicated. And then there's the fact not everybody in the family gets on. You know Christmas day is one of the peak times of the year for domestic violence. Even if it doesn't get that bad you know there are going to be clashes or you're going to have to smile sweetly at someone that you don't really like or you just know that so and so is going to have too much to drink again this year. Those are the burdens that many people carry into Christmas, it's just the reality of life. So as things turn out, Christmas isn't just a problem for preachers like me who have to dream up something fresh and new each year, it's a problem for many, many people. I heard someone say once, a Bible believing Christian she was, "I hate Christmas, I wish we could just skip over it." It's pretty sad but it's the reality for many people even those who actually believe in Jesus. So Christmas gets something of a bad rap, I wonder how many people who are out there who would just love to skip Christmas. I wonder? Well, as you look ahead to the next ten days or so in the run up to Christmas, I wonder how you're feeling about it all, exhausted, frustrated, anxious, stressed. What are the emotions that generally accompany this thing we call Christmas in your heart in your life? What are you feeling? Is Christmas a problem for you? Can I be honest here? I struggle with the kids pantomime version of Christmas. I struggle with the whole Carols by Candlelight phenomenon around Christmas where people get together in parks and sing Christmas carols as though they believe them, when most of the entertainers up on the stage and on our television screens don't have the remotest faith that Jesus is actually the Son of God. It's like we wrap this whole Christmas in tinsel and lights and tie a neat bow around it. And we make it out to be this happy time, when the truth is, for many people, well, they struggle with Christmas. Now I don't mean to be a Christmas Grinch here. Personally, I love singing Christmas carols because they mean something to me but what I really want to know is why don't we sing Christmas carols all year round? Why don't we celebrate the coming of Jesus all year round? I remember hosting a Christmas in July service at our Church some years back. It's a bit of a phenomenon down under as many restaurants put on Christmas dinners in the middle of winter when it's cold and at the service we actually sung Christmas carols. I can't tell you the number of people who came up to me afterwards and told me how weird it was singing Silent Night in the middle of July. Yeah, we wrap a whole bunch of rituals up in a nice neat package in December and we call it Christmas. And it's all supposed to be sweetness and light and yet how much of it really, really, really speaks into our hearts about the wonder of what God did on that first Christmas? What I want to do today is to unsettle you, to drag you out of your Christmas ritual comfort zone and ask you: Why do you do what you do at Christmas time? Why are you racing around buying presents for people who don't really need anything? Why do you put tinsel and Christmas decorations around your house and maybe even a Christmas wreath on your front door? What are the candles and the Christmas tree and presents and all that food really about? What do you do it for? If you stripped away all that packaging and paraphernalia what would Christmas actually be for you? In that region there were shepherds living in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terrified but the angel said to them, 'don't be afraid, for see I am bringing good news of great joy for all people. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is the Messiah, the Lord." "This will be a sign for you, you'll find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger' and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly hosts praising God and saying, 'glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favours. (Luke 2: 8-14) So if you took the packaging and the paraphernalia and the ritual and the racing around away, is that what Christmas would mean to you? Would you in your heart shout out, 'Glory to God in the highest heaven. Glory, glory, glory. Hallelujah?' Because if not, don't you think you just might be wasting your time with all this Christmas nonsense that you go through each year? All this pressure you put yourself under, all these presents you buy and the money you spend and the decorations you put up and the food that you stuff yourself with – is that what Christmas is all about? Or in your heart, is it about the coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of God to be the Saviour of this world? The biggest Christmas gift of all history – the Son of God given to all humanity, given to you and given to me. So let me ask you, what is your Christmas all about? It's something I've thought a lot about over the last few years, maybe that's what you do as you get a little bit older. You start to reflect on some of the things that you've done over and over again without thinking too much and you ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" So why are you doing this? In your life, in your family, in your situation, in your home, in your place, in your community, why are you doing this thing that we call Christmas? What does it mean to you? What does it benefit you? What lasting difference does it really make to you? And when you come to December 25th, do you wake up in the morning with this overwhelming sense of joy in your heart that unto you a Saviour is born? Or do you lie there and wonder, why am I doing this again and how's the day going to pan out? I want to challenge you today, that if you're going to actually celebrate Christmas and that word 'celebrate' is one that I use rather loosely around this time of year to describe a whole bunch of different things. If you want to do that again this year, is it going to be worth it or not? Because this whole crazy idea that God came up with to send His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born into that stinky draughty stable, into a stinking hurting world, is meant to mean something to you and me. It's meant to touch our hearts deep, deep inside somewhere. And unless it does, then to be perfectly frank about it, this thing in your life that you call Christmas is a complete waste of time. Completely!
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God Values the Heart // The Best of the Best, Part 10
12/12/2025
God Values the Heart // The Best of the Best, Part 10
We people are very much into surface things – things we can touch and feel. Someone dresses well or performs well or looks good – and we judge them to be successful. But God’s interested in something else. Something quite different. God’s interested in our hearts. I don't know if you've ever watched the Oscar's on TV. You know, the movie awards they give in Hollywood, in "Tinsel Town" each year. Look I think it's great that they award the best movies and actors and directors. But sometimes, as I see people prancing down that red carpet and accepting their glory when they get their awards. Well I can't but help have this sense that it feels just a tad superficial. It's about being beautiful. It's about being the best. It's about winning. And that my friend is pretty much what our world's like. If you're rich or beautiful or entertaining, we value you. But if you're not, we don't. We tend very much to judge the book by its cover. Now, it's not always true. Sometimes we form closer deeper relationships but in a world where there are so many options to consume and to be entertained, hey, you have to choose somehow. And we tend to choose a book by its cover. We tend to value outward symbols of beauty and success. And that's good because that's what makes the economy grow. That's what gets us to buy things. That's what gives people jobs. So it's a good thing, isn't it? Well, we know it's not but it's just the way the world is. This, of course, is nothing new. It's been around for a long time. The apostle Paul, a couple of thousand years ago, wrote about people who boast in outward appearance but not in the heart. You can read that if you like in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 12 in the New Testament. And another thousand or so years before that, God had this to say through the prophet Samuel when he was looking for a new king for Israel. God said: Man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart. (1 Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7) I was watching a show on TV the other day, it was out of the UK. About a woman who goes in to show shops how to turn their business around. So she goes into this struggling little boutique and she's helping this little boutique in Doncaster in the UK and she decided that their target market was, listen for this, the disciples of Beckham. People who wanted to be like and look like Victoria and David Beckham. Now sure, they're celebrities and there's nothing wrong with that. But this whole idea in turning this boutique around was to stock and promote clothes and the look that celebrities were sporting. To be seen to mimic the celebs. Do you see what's going on here? I don't knock the business. They're doing stuff to get money. But what they're chasing after is our desire to be all about appearances. But outer appearances aren't actually that important to God. See He's much more concerned with our hearts and to tell you the truth, when I started doing a bit of research in the Bible I was actually quite shocked with how much God has to say about our hearts. And how concerned He is for our hearts. Have a listen to 1 Chronicles chapter 28, verse 9. Listen to this: The Lord searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. Listen to that again. He searches every heart. See we race around doing things. Thinking things. Imagining no-one notices. Imagining that people can only see us on the outside and they don't know the rotten things going on on the inside. We can be angry, revengeful, deceitful, dishonest in our hearts. But we stick a smile on our face and have soft word on our lips and we think we're kidding everyone. We may well be. But we're not kidding God because He searches every heart and understands every motive behind our thoughts. And God tests our hearts too. Have a listen to these few verses. The first one comes from Deuteronomy chapter 8, verse 2. It says: Remember how the Lord your God lead you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what is in your heart. Whether or not you would keep His Commandments. And this one, it's a little bit longer. 2 Chronicles, chapter 32, verses 27 to 31. Have a listen, it's about a king called Hezekiah: Hezekiah had very great riches and honour and he made treasuries for his silver and gold and for his precious stones and spices and shields, all kinds of valuables. He also made buildings to store the harvest of the grain, new wine, oil and he made stalls for various kinds of cattle and pens for the flocks. He built villages and acquired great numbers of flocks and herds for God had given him very great riches. It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channelled the water down the west side of the City of David. He succeeded in everything that he undertook. But when the envoys were sent by the rulers of Babylon to ask him about the miraculous signs that had occurred in the land, God left him to test him to know everything that was in his heart. See this king, he's rich, he's powerful, he's successful and it's all happened through Gods blessing, under Gods hand. Because the king turned away from his pride and so God blessed him. Everything he touched turned to gold. But then, with the ominous threatening envoy's were sent by the rulers of Babylon and they showed up to check out all his successes, what did God do? Did God perform more miracles and wonders? Did God show up with some flashy display of power? No. God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart. God searches, tests and probes our hearts. Now probe is a very strong word. It's an invasive word. I had to go to the doctor recently and he put a telescope in through my right nostril and it went down the back of my throat to look at my voice box. That's probing. It was very uncomfortable, very unpleasant, very invasive and I couldn't wait for him to stop doing it. Psalm 17, verse 3 says that God probes our hearts and examines us. Jeremiah chapter 20, verse 12 says that God examines the righteous and probes the heart and mind. Now this is pretty 'in your face' kind of stuff and there's a reason for that. Because God is so concerned about our hearts. The heart is the well spring of life. If we have a diseased heart, our life is going to be diseased. And God aches for us to have a healthy heart. God looks at the inner person. The inner man. The inner woman. 'Cause He wants to heal us. He wants to set things right in our hearts. Listen to me my friend. We go through life setting our hearts on all sorts of things. We go through life with our hearts torn and divided. We want to serve God. We want to love Him. But there's attractive, beautiful, external things that everyone else can see. They beckon us and that means our hearts are torn. Did you know that when our hearts desire wealth or fame or recognition, they become diseased with envy and pride? Have a listen to what Solomon writes, a great piece of wisdom from God, in Proverbs chapter 14, verse 30: A heart of peace gives life to the body but envy rots the bones. See God wants you and me to have peace. That's why He's concerned about our hearts because God has a plan to heal our hearts. Yours and mine. When we seek after God with all our heart. When our heart if full of His peace and His joy. Then we don't lose heart. Then we see Him just as He is. God wants the very, very best for you and me and He reserves the very best for those with a pure heart. That's why Jesus said: Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.
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The Power of the Prophetic // The Best of the Best, Part 9
12/11/2025
The Power of the Prophetic // The Best of the Best, Part 9
A prophet is someone who speaks the will of God. So let me ask you something – are there still prophets in this world today, or not? Does God still speak prophetically through some of His people today … or not? Well there’s only one way to find out – what does His Word have to say on the subject? It’s just fantastic to be with you at the beginning of another week and yes, we’re continuing again this week in our look at how it is that God speaks to us today, right here and now in the 21st Century. It’s interesting, way back in the Old Testament God spoke to His people through prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and all those Old Testament prophets – men who God called to speak His message to His people. Then in the New Testament He speaks to us, first and foremost through His one and only Son, Jesus Christ, and through the Apostles and the other writers of the New Testament books. And He’s still using those to speak to us today by His Spirit. He speaks to us today through the Word of God. But it’s interesting, the New Testament in particular tells how His Spirit speaks to us today. Sometimes it’s easy to ignore that. It’s easy to get all dull and boring about the way God communicates with us. But God is a stunningly creative communicator. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing dull and boring about how God communicates with you and me. And one of the ways He does that is through the power of the prophetic. So today, that’s what we’re going to take a look at on the program. Now in embarking on this today I acknowledge that there are some amongst God’s people who simply believe that there are no more prophets today; that this is something that belongs to the past and not the present. What’s a prophet? Well, quite simply a prophet is someone who speaks on behalf of God; someone who speaks the will of God into the lives of God’s people. Some people believe there are no prophets today, and yet other traditions and denominations really emphasise the prophetic dimension of God’s communication and sadly some do so to the point of abusing the prophetic. What do I mean by that? Well, I don’t carry any particular denomination baggage or tradition around this whole thing, my heart is simply to open up God’s Word the Bible and figure out what is God saying and go with what God says. So that’s precisely what we’re going to do today. Let’s take a look. This is the Apostle Paul writing to the church in Corinth, after Jesus has died and risen again and ascended into heaven. This is the fledging New Testament church that the Apostle Paul is writing to. I’m going to read to you from 1 Corinthians chapter 12 beginning at verse 4. Have a listen: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. So here Paul’s talking about supernatural gifts that are given to people in the family of God, and not just the special super-Christian leader people. Have a listen again to verse 7. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To each person, to each believer is given one or more of these supernatural gifts. Now I’ve heard people say, "Wow, wow, that was for back then not for now." This passage, 1 Corinthians 12, rolls straight on into 1 Corinthians 13, that famous passage about love that kind of says, you know you can have all the gifts under the sun, but unless you use them in love those gifts are useless. Now these same people love to quote 1 Corinthians chapter 13 but somehow, perhaps because, particularly in the west with our western mindset, we’re uncomfortable with the idea that there might be supernatural gifts, things we can’t explain rationally, we sometimes want to deny that this bit of the New Testament actually applies to us but accept other bits that make rational sense to us. I don’t know what it is, but I find nothing – when we say nothing in the New Testament – that tells me that this theme of spiritual gifts, supernatural gifts was meant for then and not for now. Nothing. And the gifts? Words of wisdom, words of knowledge, extraordinary faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of the Spirit, speaking in different kinds of tongues, interpreting different tongues. One of the arguments against words of wisdom and words of knowledge and prophecy is that these so called modern day prophets set themselves up above the Word of God. They can say things that don’t agree with the scripture, God’s Word. So what do we do with that? Well, I have to tell you. Like anything else good that God gives us, you can take it and you can abuse it. Absolutely. I’ve seen it happen in this area, where people go for emotionalism and they go for manipulation where they claim to be speaking on behalf of God but in fact they aren’t. They are just operating out of their own flesh and their own desires. Is that a reason to believe that God doesn’t use prophets? Just because something good from God can be abused doesn’t mean that it’s not a good thing from God. I mean, back in the Old Testament there were false prophets. Back in the New Testament we see that there were some false prophets. Just because men and women abuse a gift from doesn’t mean that gift doesn’t exist. There are several times in my life when someone has given a specific prophecy just for me, and all of those barring one, and that exception simply didn’t ring true as being from God to me and to the other people that were there at the time, but the rest of those prophecies in fact, had a huge impact on my life. I look back on them now and they were major turning points. And you know, they weren’t proud people coming to me with a "thus-sayeth-the-Lord" proclamation. One of the most powerful was from a man called Denis Adams. He works for a large Christian radio network called HCJB. It was at a conference. I had just taken over the reigns at Christianityworks here in this ministry and my predecessor had taken all our radio programs off air. There was almost no financial support and the ministry was almost dead and I didn’t know what to do. I met Denis for the first time at a Christian Media Conference. He looked at my name tag, we didn’t know each other, but he’d heard some of the short radio messages I’d put together in the past. And almost immediately tears welled up in his eyes, and with such passion and such conviction he said to me. “You have to start doing those radio programs again, you just have to." Well I tell you, Dennis’ words pierced my heart that day and because of that we spent the last few thousand dollars the ministry had on producing the first series of these programs. At the time we had no idea how we were going to get onto any radio station anywhere. That was only six years ago, and today these programs are heard by millions of people each around the world. I know with all that I am that those words that Dennis Adams spoke to me that day were from God. That they were a prophecy, that without them I wouldn’t be here today. Should we discern prophecies? Absolutely! Should we think them through and pray them through? Absolutely! Should we reject any that don’t ring true? Absolutely! But, my friend, God’s Word says that He’s still speaking to us today through prophets. Why, oh why would we want to deny that? Why would we not want to hear when God has something specific to say to you and to me from His heart into our lives?
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The Satisfaction of Being Full // The Best of the Best, Part 8
12/10/2025
The Satisfaction of Being Full // The Best of the Best, Part 8
Ever been so thirsty you think you’re going to die. And then – then you have a deep drink of fresh, cool, clear, living water. Awesome. In fact Jesus talked a lot about water. I remember when I was training to be an officer in the Army we used to go out on exercises for weeks at a time, war games and we'd be fighting this imaginary army and learning, I guess, how to fight battles. Back in those days the Army was heavily into water rationing, two water bottles per man, per day, perhaps. That was for shaving, washing, cleaning your teeth, cooking and drinking. In those hot summers with all the heavy physical work that a battle entails it was never enough, many a time we'd finish an attack up a steep hill in the middle of the noon day sun or be digging a trench and all I wanted was to guzzle down a whole bottle full of water. Of course you couldn't do that, then I'd close my eyes and imagine that I'd be swimming in a nice cool river with stacks and stacks of water. When you're that thirsty, what you really want is water in abundance, you want to be filled to overflowing. This week on the program we're looking at what it means to be filled by God to overflowing. Not just half full, not just full to the brim, filled so that we overflow all His goodness and His blessing. When we're really thirsty and we have a deep long drink, it is such a satisfying thing isn't it? I mean our need for water is one of the most basic of all needs. 70% of our body is water and after oxygen, water is our most important physical need. You can't go for very long without water. The body starts closing down some of it's functions and depending on the conditions, we can be dead within a couple of days. Or if you're stuck in a hot car without water, you can be dead in a few minutes in extreme heat. It's interesting that when Jesus was talking about His plan for our lives, He uses 'thirst' and "water" to explain what He means. I think it's because it's something we really can relate to. He meets a woman, a Samaritan woman, at a well and He says to her: Everyone who drinks out of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them, a spring of water gushing up into eternal life. Life gets thirsty and this week on the program we've been looking at what it means to be filled to overflowing because that's Jesus' plan, no ifs, not buts, "oh well, that's not my experience." Maybe not but it's Jesus' promise: Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them, a spring of water gushing up into eternal life. I wonder sometimes whether in life we don't make things just a bit too complicated. For me, faith is a simple thing, I read what Jesus said, I hear what God has to say and then you say, "well okay, if that's from God, that's what I'm going to believe even if my circumstances are screaming at me saying, that's never going to be possible, you're never going to have a fountain of spring water gushing up in you." And every time my feelings or the things that are going around me scream at me, "God's a liar," I'm just going to pick that book up again and read what Jesus said again. I'm just going to believe Him and not them. Now you might say to me, "but Berni, that is unrealistic, I've been trying to have a life of peace and of joy and abundance, it seems like forever and it's just not happening for me." Look at His promise again, John chapter 7, verse 37, "If anyone is thirsty let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, rivers of living water will flow from them. By this He meant the Spirit whom those who believed in Jesus were later to receive." There are 3 parts to that promise. The first one is "if you're thirsty - get a drink". When life is dry and parched and empty, if ANYONE is thirsty (anyone means anyone) come to Jesus and He will fill us full of His water, a water that when we drink it, a living water, we'll never be thirsty again. And the second thing is He says, "whoever believes in Me", you see, it's a faith thing. When He says "whoever believes IN Me", that word "in" means literally 'into', so it says, 'whoever believes into Me'. You may have heard me say this before, I can look at a chair at a distant and believe that it will hold me and I'm believing in 'it' but if I want to believe "into" the chair, I walk over and I sit down and I say, "you see, the chair can hold me. I put my faith "into", my trust "into" the chair." And so Jesus says, "whoever believes in Me, whoever believes what I say, whoever reads what I said and says, 'you know something, like a little child I'm going to accept that from Jesus.' Whoever believes in Me, from their belly rivers of living water, not a trickle, not a stream, not a river, river's plural. Get the picture, an abundance, a flood tide of blessing of the Holy Spirit, "whoever believes in me, from their belly rivers of living water will flow out from them."' The last couple of days we've looked at some of the things that can stop that from happening, the blockages, our own rejection of God, the compromises, the sin, the devil in the spiritual realm robbing us of what God wants us to have and you might say, "Berni, I think you're being unrealistic. Well, I have problems and stresses and strains in my life." Absolutely, Jesus promises those too. Look at how He trained His disciples. He promised them all those things and He never promised them that He would somehow lift us out of those and exempt us from suffering. He promised the opposite, He said, "In this world you will have tribulation" but in the middle of all of that He promised that He would fill us to overflowing in this thirsty, parched, dry land. He would let us experience the incredible satisfaction of a deep drink of His spiritual water, of Him himself. Now we might be spiritually or emotionally thirsty or parched or dry and Jesus says, “Come to me and I will give you the Holy Spirit, I will fill you to overflowing.” We're all different; we're all close to God in different ways. Some people do it by singing, other people like me get up early in the morning and pray, other people love to read, other people find Jesus just most in the middle of life and there are combinations and permutations of those. But the consistent message of Gods word is, when we draw close to Him; He draws close to us and that’s a special thing and there is an incredible satisfaction in being filled full of Him and being filled full to overflowing with the Holy Spirit. He fills us in ways that nobody else can. The problem is so many people have been living so dry for so long they've accepted that as being normal. I meet so many spiritually dry people. We think everybody else is like that, we can't imagine how God could ever fill us with His spirit, how He could ever make a fountain of living water bubbling up but that’s what He wants to do, that’s the normative of Christian life. Don't accept anything less; don't settle for anything less than the fullness of God in your life, the very presence of Jesus through His spirit in us. Thirst, then wait to be filled by Him and just don't accept anything less
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Christ on the Outside // The Best of the Best, Part 7
12/09/2025
Christ on the Outside // The Best of the Best, Part 7
There’s nothing worse than a hypocrite. One of the things we’re called to be, if we believe in Jesus, is Ambassadors of Christ. But if how we live our lives – what we say, what we do – if our lives don’t measure up – then what sort of Ambassadors are you and I going to make? When people look at us – what do they see? An Ambassador, or a hypocrite? Let me ask you a question, if you're someone who believes in Jesus and who drives a car, do you have some sort of Jesus bumper sticker? One of those fish stickers on your bumper bar. Maybe, maybe not. It's okay even if you don't, that's okay, I don't either. But if you had to put one on your car, let me ask you, does your behaviour on the road as a driver match up to the message of the sticker? I mean, are you a courteous driver who obeys all the road rules or do you break the speed limit, honk your horn at people and yell at them from the inside of your car? I guess if you're a courteous driver it will be okay to have a fish sticker or a Jesus sticker on your car because your behaviour is a good advertisement for God. In effect because what you advertise on the sticker and how you behave, they match up and so the message works. On the other hand, can you imagine a rude impatient driver who's constantly breaking the road rules, identifying themselves as a Christian by some sticker they put on their car. Not a very good ad for God is it? And it turns out that who we say we are, who we hold ourselves out to be and who we actually are, in what we say and what we do, if those two don't match up, well there's a name for that. We call those people hypocrites. Over this past week on the program we've talked about living our lives as ambassadors of Christ. The key Bible verse that I've been quoting and forgive me if you've been with us each day and you've heard it before but I'm assuming some people haven't. The key Bible verse I've been sharing this week is 2 Corinthians chapter 5; verse 20 where the Apostle Paul writes: We are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. In other words, God, just as He used the Apostle Paul, wants to involve you and me in the business of making His appeal to the rest of the world. Now, what we've seen over the course of the week is that we don't all have to be Paul's to do that. Diplomacy, which is the role of an ambassador, mostly happens in one on one relationships where trust is built, so governments have relationships and a place and a forum to resolve difficult issues. That's the point of diplomacy and it's the role of an ambassador. I think sometimes we're mislead into thinking, "Oh wow, an ambassador of Christ, well that would have to be the Pastor's role, not me 'cause it sounds like flashy up front kind of title'. And yesterday we saw that in order to be an ambassador for say India, we have to be Indian. If we're Swedish no one's going to believe we're the Indian ambassador, right? Who we are on the inside really counts, that's why God promised us something new. Ezekiel chapter 36:26: A new heart, God said, I will give you. A new spirit I will put within you. I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Now we can't change who we are on the outside until we've had a change of heart on the inside. I've tried it, you've tried it, it doesn't work. If something first happens in our hearts to change us on the inside, then changing on the outside is kind of a natural progression of that, it's much easier. That's what we talked about yesterday. Today we're going to follow on with a natural continuation of that. Today we're going to look at how important it is, who we are on the outside is consistent with whom we say we are on the inside. And that's why I kicked off with that story of the bumper sticker. It's kind of obvious isn't it? Now I'm not suggesting that you or I are ever going to live a perfect life. I pretty much make mistakes every day, you probably do too and no one expects us to be perfect. But either how we live declares that our heart and our life has been changed by God or it doesn't. And if it doesn't then without putting too fine a point on it, we're being hypocrites. That's something that Jesus identified in the religious leaders of His day. They pretended to be O so holy on the outside but on the inside, well have a listen to what Jesus said to them. Matthew chapter 23, verses 25 and 26: Woe to you Scribes and Pharisee's, you hypocrites. For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate but inside they're full of greed and self indulgence. You blind Pharisee's, first clean the inside of the cup so that the outside may also become clean. Pretty in your face isn't it? But you know, I'm comforted by that. I like it that Jesus is concerned about both our hearts, who we are on the inside, and our hands, who we are on the outside. If someone came to me and said to me, "You know Berni, I've heard what you've been saying, I've decided I want to be an ambassador of Christ, what do you think is the most important thing?" Well, this is how I would answer. "The first thing is your heart and your relationship with God, being completely sold out to Him. If you don't have that then you can't pretend." "And the second thing is how we behave because if you say that you're one thing and you do completely the opposite, people will pick you as a phoney (Berni clicks his fingers) like that. And then, instead of shining Gods light into the world, you've just turned people off." Let me give you an example. My country, Australia, has a strong relationship with the United States, has had for a good many years. Now imagine that the US government appoints a new ambassador to Australia and sends him across the pond to our country and within a few months we discover he's a lecherous drunk who can't keep his hands off women, whether or not he happens to be any good at his trade of diplomacy. And scandal after scandal involving this new ambassador hits the news and the press. How do you imagine such a person would influence the view that we Australians have, not only of the US government but of the American people? It wouldn't be good for the relationship, it would be devastating wouldn't it? Not only would this so called ambassador hurt the people around him but he'd bring his nation and his people into disrepute. And that’s why the lives we lead as Christians are so important. Come on, let's get real. Does hypocrisy display the glory of God? No, it brings God and Gods people as a whole into disrepute. 'Oh those Christians, they're just a bunch of hypocrites.' And God, God doesn't like hypocrites. Listen again to Jesus, Matthew chapter 23, verse 25: Woe to you Scribes and Pharisee's. You hypocrites for you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate but inside you're full of greed and self indulgence. People talk about missional living, living out our lives as missionaries in this world. You know, I think the biggest thing that we can do to live missionally is to live a holy life. What's a holy life? It's a life where the cup and the plate are clean on the inside first as well as the outside. Peter the Apostle sums it up like this. 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 14-16: Like obedient children do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead as He who called you is holy be holy yourselves in all your conduct. For it is written, 'You shall be holy for I am holy'. My friend, there is something wonderful and utterly sublime when we roll up our sleeves with God and we get to clean the inside as well as the outside and here's the thing, people notice. People sit up and take note and think to themselves, "You know, there's something different about that person. Something good. Something I trust. Something I want." And there, right there in that place, clean on the inside, clean on the outside we have an ambassador of Christ.
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Christ on the Inside // The Best of the Best, Part 6
12/08/2025
Christ on the Inside // The Best of the Best, Part 6
Imagine having a job where you had to try to convince people of something you yourself didn’t really believe. That’d be a tough gig, don’t you think? And yet that’s how many a Christian feels when it comes to telling others about Jesus. Because if they themselves haven’t experienced the powerful difference that He can make in their lives – on the inside – how can they possibly tell others about Him? One of the things that we know is, that you and I we are what we eat. So if what we do is pig out on chocolates, man I love chocolate, but we know that too much is bad for us. And fatty foods and sweet and sugary drinks and lots of cakes and sweets, all that stuff, if we pig out on that stuff then who we are on the inside is going to change. We're going to put on weight. Our emotions will take a down swing, that's what too much sugar does. We become lethargic and tired and won't be able to cope. Our heart will have to work harder to get the blood around the larger body and our coronary arteries are going to get clogged up and the sugar will go up in our blood. On and on and on the list goes. The impact is that we have less of life to live now because we're always tired and not feeling well and our life expectancy is going to be reduced. On the other hand, if we get a great mix of healthy cereals and grains and brightly coloured vegetables and lean meat, all that stuff which actually tastes fantastic, the complete opposite is going to happen. What happens on the inside has a huge impact on what happens on the outside. Who we are on the inside, whether it's physically, emotionally or spiritually, has a huge impact on who we are on the outside. And the up shot of it all is we simply can't be one thing on the inside and try to be something else on the outside. You know what? It just doesn't work. This week and next week on the program we're having a bit of a chat about living our lives out here on earth as ambassadors of Christ. Because that's what anyone who believes in Jesus is called to be. We are citizens of heaven, not of this earth and as Paul the Apostle writes, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20: We are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. But as I said, you can't be one thing on the inside and pretend to be another thing on the outside. You can't be Swedish on the inside and pretend to be the Indian ambassador on the outside. We can't be the devil on the inside and pretend to be an angel of light on the outside. Well maybe we can for a while but I suspect it's incredibly hard work carrying on that sort of a deception and it doesn't take long for who we really are to make it's way to the outside. As Jesus Himself said: It's out of the heart that evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander actually come. (Matthew chapter 15, verse 19) So if we're going to be ambassadors of Christ then first we have to be citizens of heaven on the inside. Just as the Indian ambassador has to be Indian and not Swedish on the inside. Interesting how God talked about this through His Prophet Ezekiel to His people. He talked to them about what was going on in their hearts. Have a listen, Ezekiel chapter 18, verse 31: Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die O house of Israel? A new heart. I think we know what God means but that’s not so much an expression that we use these days. The expression we might use is a change of heart. You and I know what that means. Unless something happens deep inside our hearts on the inside we can't change on the outside. But you know there have been issues, transgressions, sins in my life that try as I may I couldn't change my heart myself. I'm guessing you've had that experience too, we all have. And that's why God made this promise too to His people through Ezekiel. Ezekiel chapter 36, verse 26. He says: A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. In fact, perhaps you want to be an ambassador of Christ but there's something, right now, going on in your heart. Something that you can't change for yourself that you need God to do for you. If you have that why don't you pray this prayer with me right now. Our Father God This word of yours well you're putting your finger right on one of the deepest needs in my life. You and I both know what that is and you know how I've struggled to change my heart. I've tried my hardest but I can't and so I come to you in faith and I pray for your will as Ezekiel chapter 36, verse 26 for a new heart, a change of heart. Take out the heart of stone O God and replace it with a heart of flesh. Take out of me the spirit that is causing me to sin and fill me with your Holy Spirit. I come to you in faith; I believe that what I've asked you, you will give me because I'm asking you in the name of Jesus. Amen. I encourage you, if you prayed that prayer with me to believe, just simply to believe that God will give you the good thing that you have asked for. And He will, that's what He says He will do and He never, ever, ever fails on His word, ever. When the Apostle Paul was sharing the good news about Jesus with the folk in Athens he quoted a poem about a Greek god and applied it to Jesus. This is what he said in Acts chapter 17, verse 28. He said: For in Him we live and move and have our being. You know, for me that says it all. It's about being totally, totally immersed in Christ, about being drenched in Him. That's actually the literal meaning of the word 'baptised' or 'baptism'. The original word is baptidso. When a boat was lost in a storm and it went under and sank it was said to have been baptidso'd. When a fabric was dyed in new colour it was plunged into the dye and completely drenched and completely changed to a new colour when it came out. It was said to have been baptidso'd. That's exactly what the Apostle Paul writes to his friends in Rome. Romans chapter 6, beginning at verse 3: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ were baptised into His death? Therefore we've been buried with Him in baptism into death so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. It means death to the old life and living a new life, literally to be born again. A whole new heart filled with a new spirit, the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. It means that goodness replaces evil. Not so much because we work hard at it but because we've had a change of heart and now we want to honour God and that's a gift from God. We want to live a life that brings glory to Him and it's that new life that we're going to talk about a bit more tomorrow. It's that new life that wins people over to Christ. It's that new life that shines a light and brings flavour into people's lives like salt. But just as a well is dry it can't bring forth water, so a life that is empty of Christ, His very Spirit, His very presence within us, so that life simply can't be an ambassador of Christ. If there are things that you've been struggling with in on the inside, things that are holding you back from taking up your commission as Christ's ambassador in your little petunia patch then here's what I encourage you to do? Get with God. Get in prayer. Open His Word. Ask Him to fill you to overflowing with His Holy Spirit. Ask Him again and again to give you a new heart. And just as we prayed before, just as I said before, He surely will. Because He wants to. Because as you bear much fruit in your life, it will bring glory to God. A new heart, a change of heart filled with a new spirit, His spirit. That is God’s will for my life and that my friend is God’s will for your life.
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Real Life Blessings // The Best of the Best, Part 5
12/05/2025
Real Life Blessings // The Best of the Best, Part 5
A while back, we received a prayer request from Peter, who’s been struggling with his weight – it’s affecting his health, his family. It’s ruining his life. Is Jesus in that place with Peter – and if He is, can He make a difference? Good day! Great that we can get together again. Well, it's Friday, and on Friday we always do something different. We look at somebody's prayer request that we have received. This week we received a request from Peter. He said, "I've been overweight for a long time now and have trouble with eating too much. I'm pretty lazy; I don't have any motivation. I'm on anti-depressants which doesn't help either. Please pray that I will have the will to stop myself from overeating and get off my backside and go for a walk. I have a lot of health issues surrounding my weight problem, and I'm sick of it. I want to be a fit dad and a good husband, and to do God's work to extend His kingdom. Thanks for the very powerful prayer ministry that you have in Jesus' name.” There's a fine line, isn't there, between bad habits and addictions? Let's have a look whether God is in the middle of this weight-loss problem of Peter's. I've got another confession to make today. I love food. I always have and I always will. I grew up in a European household, and my mother cooked all these beautiful goulash dishes with cream and butter. I can't help it. I love food, and I love cooking shows on television. I love to watch Kylie Quan and Jamie Oliver, and they cook up these beautiful meals. But what always strikes me about friend Jamie and Kylie and others like them is the amount of olive oil and butter and sugar and cream that they pour into their cooking. And I've said once before on radio, and I'll say it again, if I ate that much fattening, sweet stuff, I would be the size of a house. The underlying kind of ethos that is behind that is that you can have it all and there are no consequences. Now we'd like to believe that, but it ain't true. My father was a diabetic. He died of diabetic complications, and it was one of the most horrible and ugly deaths I have ever seen. So if I follow wrong behavior in the area of eating, as obviously Peter is, there are consequences for me. And I am very likely to get diabetes and follow my father's footsteps and die an ugly death. The same is true, not just with food, but when we do stupid things or when we do wrong things or when we're addicted to bad things, it can ruin our life. The same is true, for instance, of work. If we work too hard, we don't have any balance in our lives, we become exhausted; people burn out. If we don't work enough, we don't have enough money to live. If we don't sleep enough, we end up being really tired. If we're lazy, if we're unreliable - all of those things follow the same life principle, as unpopular as it is, bad behavior leads to bad consequences. Let me say that again, bad behavior leads to bad consequences. To Peter, the consequences are health issues; there are emotional issues. He is on anti-depressants. He is sick of himself. Doubtless, his self-esteem is really low, because people look at him when he goes out. It's an impact on his marriage, on his family, on his health, and on his ability to do God's work all because, put very plainly and simply, Peter is putting too much food into his mouth and not exercising enough. It sounds simple, but Peter is addicted to eating. I relate to that. I've always struggled with weight all my life and had to go through a process of losing over 20 kilos because I was eating too much. And even now, if I have a really heavy dinner, I feel lethargic at night. I end up not sleeping well at night. And if I keep doing it, I will probably end up with diabetes. What to do? Peter is a man, who by his own testimony there believes in Jesus Christ. So if he dies tomorrow he has eternal life. All of these problems will go away and for eternity he'll live with Jesus. The question is, "Does he want to live the way he's living now between now and when he goes to be with the Lord?" And the answer from his email is absolutely no, and yet he lacks motivation. There's an old Chinese proverb, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." And it's that first step that is mostly the hardest. How to get motivated? Well there are some extreme ways to get motivated. I gave up cigarette smoking 24 years ago now, because I was with someone when they died of cancer. And though I was smoking three packets a day, I threw the packet of cigarettes into the bin at the hospital. And since that day I have never had a single cigarette. I guess it's extreme because it takes you to the end of your life. And you look at the consequences of your behavior and you say, "Do I want to end up like that"? That's a powerful thing to do. Do I want to end up like that? But what about the spiritual dimension? The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Philippian church in chapter 2, verse 13, "God is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for His good pleasure." God is at work in us. The same God, the same Holy Spirit who rose Jesus from the dead is at work in our bodies, bringing life, bringing freedom from addiction to us. I believe if we try to do this on our own, we are prone to fail. How many of us here and now have been through diet after diet after diet - probably a lot of people because we ultimately end up failing. But listen to what God is saying. God has a good plan for your life, for Peter, for you and for me. His plan is an abundant life. His plan for Peter is not that he feels so lethargic that he can't go and kick a ball around with his kids in the backyard. The plan for Peter is not that he feels so overweight that he and his wife don't have a good sex life. The plan for Peter is not that his health should be ruined because of his weight. That is not God's plan. But whenever we need to change, whenever we need to make a huge step that somehow seems beyond us, the promise of God is that He is at work in us both enabling us to work and to will for His good pleasure. In other words, the promise is that His Holy Spirit together with us will give us the motivation. You know what a great prayer for Peter is? And for you and for me? Father, I can't do this on my own. I don't know where to begin. I don't know how to take the first step. And I'm not sure I can take the second, third or fourth steps either. Father, I need Your help. What a fantastic prayer! What a prayer of invitation for the God of the whole universe to step in. And He always gives us the wherewithal to do what we need to do. So, yes, it makes sense to take stock. It makes sense to look at our lives, look at the consequences, look at what ultimately will happen to us when we're addicted to something like food, work, sex is a major addiction, drugs, alcohol. Take stock. Do I really want this? And if the answer is no, we can paint a picture of what we want our lives to be like and go to God and say, "God, I would like to dream about what I could be with You." We can paint on a canvas with fear. We can paint on a canvas with doubt. And we will paint an ugly picture. Or we can paint on the canvas of our imagination, on the canvas of our hope with the love, the grace and the peace of the Holy Spirit. We can paint a picture that together, God and us, can fulfil. God, You can do this. You can help me. You promised. Your Word says that You promised. You can help me through this problem. Peter, I believe that God will be there, that He is there and that He can make a difference. All we have to do is lay our hands on that promise, believe it with all that we are and watch what God will do. Do we still have to do stuff? Absolutely, I can't pray my way out of a problem I behaved my way into. But God is there in that problem.
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Living a Resurrected Life Today // The Best of the Best, Part 4
12/04/2025
Living a Resurrected Life Today // The Best of the Best, Part 4
If Jesus really rose from the dead all that time ago, if it really, truly happened….well, what does it mean to us today? What’s the relevance? What’s the point? This week on the program we are taking a bit of a look at this whole "resurrection" thing, because on the one hand it’s so central to everything that Jesus talked about, and everything that Christians believe. But on the other hand, well, it can be hard to relate to that. I mean, how does it fit into real life today? I’m not sure where you are in terms of believing in Jesus and in particular in His resurrection. But let’s assume for a moment that He did rise again from the dead; that’s certainly where I’m at, it’s kind of at the centre of everything I believe. Well, if He did rise from the dead, what does that mean to you and me, here and now, what relevance is there in all of that? Can the resurrection of Jesus Christ have an impact on your life and my life, here, now, today? Good questions! I mean why have a resurrection at all? Why did God plan it that way and why did He make it central to believing in Jesus? Yesterday we saw how the Apostle Paul said it was absolutely essential. Without faith in that there’s no point. In Romans chapter 10 verse 9, he says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you’ll be saved.” And in First Corinthians 15:17 he says, “If Christ hasn’t been raised, then you faith is futile.” OK, well, that’s the theology, if you like, let’s take that at face value. But why is it so important? Why does God put it right at the centre of believing in Jesus - eternal life! I’m a pesky bloke; I keep asking these questions because people never really explained this stuff to me, in terms that I could really understand and grasp. And that made a difference in my life. All these Christians were talking about this whole "resurrection" thing like it was really important and I thought, "that’s great, but why?" Believing in Jesus for me is a process, it’s a whole life long thing. At some point I took a step of faith to believe in Him. I didn’t understand everything, but what I discovered was there were lots of different parts of my life that just didn’t fit with Him - selfishness, anger, being judgmental, all stuff that actually stunted my life. It’s crazy how we want to hold onto that rubbish for dear life. But you know we do and it turns out all along, it’s robbing us of life. I used to spend most of my time being angry with people because they didn’t measure up to my standards - I’m a perfectionist - and they didn’t see the world my way, and so I’d be angry with them all the time. And you know it robbed me of life - instead of peace and joy I always had anger and resentment in my heart. It’s not rocket science but so many people do this stuff. It’s one thing to believe with our head or our hearts in Jesus but it’s quite another to believe with our lives. And to do that requires change and that’s were the resurrection comes in. The Apostle Paul writes this in Romans chapter 8, he says: If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you. Let’s unpack that for a minute. There was the death and the crucifixion of Jesus where He paid for our sins. He paid for the fact that we turned our back on God and we went our own way, and we missed the whole point of creation which was to have a relationship with God. And before you jump down my throat and say "sin" is an old fashioned word. That the Greek word that the Bible uses for sin, literally means ‘to miss the point”, and we looked at that last week. God is a loving God but He’s a just God and we have all fallen short of His standard and His plan - we’ve all missed the point. And when we believe that Jesus died for us, the slate is wiped clean; we are forgiven completely by God, we’re forgiven; we’ve a fresh start. And that’s fantastic! But you and I know that getting rid of that rubbish that God calls ‘sin’ is a life long process. Come on, we are naturally selfish, we naturally hang on to the things - I wanted to be self-righteous - I still have someone pull in a car in front of me and I’ll be angry with them and I want to blow my horn and I want to … you know, that’s me. Someone does wrong and somehow we want anger and revenge and we want to pay them back, and Jesus said, “Well, you want to believe in me, believe in me with your life. Show me, go and love your enemy, in fact, go and pray for your enemy.” I don’t know about you but that way of living just didn’t come naturally to me. It’s a process of changing but changing those things is hard. It’s very, very hard, and in fact, in some areas, it’s downright impossible. We just want to hang on and hang on and hang on and let the poison get in our system and ruin our lives. Paul bemoans that very thing in Romans chapter 7, he says, “I can will to do what is right, I just can’t do it. Who will rescue me from this body of sin and death?” Then he says, “Jesus Christ.” The resurrection is about bringing Jesus back to life. See what Paul wrote about in Romans chapter 8 - we read about it before, “If the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead with give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you.” The resurrection of Jesus is something that’s a deep mystery but it lives on in us through the presence of the Spirit of God. If we place our faith in Jesus; we say I believe He is the Son of God; I believe He died for my sin and I believe He rose again, and then God does something amazing; something supernatural; something powerful. God puts His Spirit inside us and that same Spirit does the same thing in us - He brings life. He starts to deal with that rubbish inside us. He starts to convict us and to heal us and to fill us and to change us in ways that we can never do ourselves. The resurrection is learning to live again. When we believe in Jesus in His death, we put the old person inside us down with Jesus on the cross but when we believe in His resurrection we have new life - resurrection life. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your body also through His Spirit; bringing life back into our bodies, colour into our cheeks, colour into our world. How many people need that change in their lives today? How many people are looking for that change in all sorts of strange places, people who are broken inside, people who have been abused, people who are suffering from low self-esteem, people who are dealing with anger, and people whose marriages are falling apart? Come on, we need the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be real in us and there is a power that comes only from God to change us. Not some theory, this is an actuality. The same Holy Spirit who breaths life back into Jesus dead body is the Spirit who will come in us and bring victory over the sin of our humanness and breathe life back into our bodies and victory over our sins. Come on, this is great stuff; this is a great plan; it’s God’s plan. It’s here for you and me now!
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Precious in His Sight // The Best of the Best, Part 3
12/03/2025
Precious in His Sight // The Best of the Best, Part 3
We live in a time of mass production. Commodities are just churned out. People have become … just a commodity. But not in God’s eyes…..that’s what makes you so very special. I sometimes think about the times when Jesus was training to be a carpenter in his Dad’s carpenter shop. The wooden things that he made, we don’t really know but probably chairs and tables and doors and door frames, even coffins I guess, it’s ironic that ultimately he was nailed to two bits of wood. I can’t imagine he ever turned out any shoddy work, I can’t imagine he ever made a table that wasn’t straight or level or a chair that wasn’t solid or a door that didn’t fit into the door jam. Well what if he applied the same level of perfection to you and me? What if when we were created he was there? And what does that do to our view of Easter? Yesterday and again today we’re looking at Psalm 139 because it’s about Gods motivations behind Easter. Psalm 139 is to me like a door into God’s heart, to see what was going on inside when He dreamt up this whole Easter thing. We had a look at the first part yesterday and we saw that God knows us so intimately and He’s on the journey of life with us, not way off at a distance, not disinterested but right in the middle of it with us. Everywhere we go, even when it’s dark and stormy and painful He’s light shines in the middle of all of that. That’s huge, to know that God is walking every step of the way with us, there’s know where we can go and be alone or apart from God, if we go to heaven he’s there, if we go to hell he’s there if we fly to the farthest ends to the earth he’s still there. But how is it that God knows us so well? I mean sometimes we don’t even know ourselves that well do we? We can’t explain why we do what we do or why we reacted to something the way we did, I mean you and I are pretty complex creatures; there is so many layers to our personality and who we are. Some things are so deep inside us that we can’t ever really understand them ourselves or even talk about them. How does God know? Well, the Psalmist in Psalm 139 goes on to explain that to us, and we’re going to read that right now. We’re reading from Psalm 139 beginning at verse 13. “For you God, you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb, God I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are so wonderful I know that full well. My frame wasn’t hidden from you when I was made in that secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed substance. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” This is one of the most precious passages in the Bible to me, as we look back on our lives what we see is a mixture of wonderful and desperate, beautiful and ugly, we’ve done some brilliant things and we done some really, really stupid things, there are great highs and there are dark valleys. But when you and I were conceived God was there, our innermost parts, who we are, our DNA blueprint, the way that we’d look and sound and all our gifts and abilities and strengths and weaknesses, all that complexity He created our innermost being. He knit us together in our Mother’s womb; you and I are handcrafted by God, one of a kind, distinctive, completely, utterly amazingly, beautifully, wondrously made. Separate and different from every other person who ever lived, and every person who ever will live, intricately woven, each strand of DNA laid down according to His plan. And not only that God wasn’t in control just of who we are but of everything that would ever happen to us. Look at this again, “all the days ordained for me, all the days set apart for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” That’s why I so despair when I meet people who waste away there lives worrying and complaining about their lot. Yeah some people have better lives that others, some people seem to get all the breaks and the benefits and the blessings and other people seem to get handed difficult and painful lives, just like Jesus, just like the Apostle Paul. I was just talking, having a cup of coffee just recently with a couple and we were talking about just this, how come God does something mighty and powerful in this persons life and this other person God takes years to do what He’s going to do? I don’t know! But it’s about God’s plan, about God’s glory. There’s a wonderful poem call The Weaver, you may have heard me read it once before, have a listen, it’s beautiful. “My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me. I cannot choose the colours as He weaveth steadily, Sometimes He chooses dark threads and I in foolish pride Forget He sees the upper and I the underside. Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly Shall God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why The dark threads were as needful in the weaver’s skilful hand As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He hath planned.” You and I are exactly what He made us to be, you and I are living the life that He planned for us, you know sometimes we don’t open ourself to His plan, sometimes we shut God out and we wonder why life is going badly. Easter’s coming, Easter is rolling around the corner and Easter is the time when we look at that cross and we know that Jesus Christ came to die for you and me, maybe you’ve never ever excepted Jesus and put your faith in Him and what He did for you on the cross. If you haven’t now is the time to do it, let’s just pray, you might want to pray this prayer with me. “Father, I thank you for what Jesus did for me on the cross, I believe that He is the Son of God, I believe He died for me, I believe He rose again. Father, I want to live my life in that knowledge, I give you everything I am, I give you everything I have, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve done wrong and I’ve put those at the feet of the cross right now. Father, forgive me through Jesus Christ, I want to be called a Christian, I want to follow Jesus and live my life for Him. Lord I don’t know what that means, I don’t know how that will play itself out, I don’t know what your plans are but Lord I want to live my life for the glory of Jesus Christ and today I lay my life down for Him so that in Him I cant take it up again, a new life, a fresh life. Thank you Father that I am forgiven because I believe in Jesus, thank you Father that I have an eternal life through Jesus Christ. Amen.” You and I are what He made us to be, when we put our faith in Him we live the most incredible joy and when we see the beauty of God’s plan hand crafted by Him to live the life that He laid out before time began we get some sense of what was going on in His heart when He came up with this plan of Easter.
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When Nobody Understands // The Best of the Best, Part 2
12/02/2025
When Nobody Understands // The Best of the Best, Part 2
We’ve all been misunderstood. Hey – Jesus was misunderstood. It’s not an easy thing. We have good intentions, perhaps we don’t execute those intentions perfectly, but all of a sudden the world falls down on us like a ton of bricks. Now over the last weeks on the program we had a look at the fast, well ... God doesn't always do things quite the way we want him to do. Sometimes we feel like crying out to God, "God! What are you doing? Why are you letting this happen to me? How long, our Lord, how long will this go on?" But you see, God has a plan for your life, for my life. And it's a good plan, a plan of getting up close to Him, a plan of being blessed and being a blessing to others. And yet, sometimes ... sometimes ... life can be awful, life can be really harsh and tough and I'm always conscious when I'm talking about God's blessing that someone's sitting there thinking to themselves, “Well I don't know whose life you're talking about buddy,” or “Whose God are you talking about but it's certainly not mine”. So this week on the program we're going to have a look at what it means to live the life that God always intended for us even when life's tough, even in the reality of life. We all go through those tough times sometimes, I do and the real question is when the chips are down is God still going to show up? When was the last time that you went through a difficult time in life? Conflict at home, in the family, or sickness or fear or the death of a loved one or loneliness? The list goes on doesn't it? There's not one of us who can't point to something difficult or hurtful in life, even when it looks like on the surface we're doing ok. That's the thing isn't it? When we're doing it tough people look at us on the outside, and you and I are pretty good at pretending that everything’s ok and then we live out that lie, we live out that surface existence and the feeling wells up inside, no-one really understands what's going on in my life, nobody knows how I feel, I feel so not understood. I recently went through a tough time with the hours that I had to work, I had several really big things going on at the same time and there was about a four month period when I literally only had three days off. And when you're working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, now remember I'm no spring chicken, it's really tough. I love what I do but it was a grind, it was very tiring mentally and emotionally, it was exhausting stuff. Now that season is over but back then I remember going to Church and people would ask me, "How you doing Berni?" And sometimes I'd smile and say, "I'm fine." and other times I'd say, "Well you know, I'm working really long hours and as much as I enjoy what I'm doing with God, it's really tough, I'm finding it hard, it's tough on my wife Jacqui and on our marriage." And more often than not no-one really understood. And when we're at that point, when something is dominating our lives and affecting our lives and it hurts and it's difficult, it's tough when no-one understands us isn't it? Because we really would like someone to understand and we get to the point and we say, "Oh, ok God, tell me, how am I supposed to live the life that you always intended for me, a good life, a blessed life when I'm doing it tough and no-one really understands or worse still, they misunderstand us, they misunderstand our good intentions, they misunderstand who we are?" That's a good question because when we're doing it tough we desperately, desperately need someone to understand us, maybe not to do anything except listen and go, “Hmmm, I understand." But that empathy, knowing that there's someone else who just empathises with us, who is just prepared to sit and to listen and to cry with us through the difficult times is so important isn't it? I remember when I was going through really tough times in my life a decade ago, I was so blessed by a couple, a husband and a wife, who were prepared just to be with me and to weep with me when I wept and to laugh with me when I laughed. Can I tell you? These days that is very, very rare indeed, to experience that true emotional empathy and support. It's sad but true. People who are prepared to take the time and travel through the difficult times with us and be there and just cry with us when we need someone to do that for us. Everybody else is so busy, they haven't got time. Everybody else is so busy taking; they haven't got any time to do any giving. You can relate to that. So often I go to Church and I'm guilty of this too, you say, "How you going?" and people say, "I'm really busy, I'm really, really busy." Well that means that we're too busy to understand people who are hurting and for Jesus the most important thing of all is that we walk in love, that we walk sacrificially. We'll talk about that next week on the program. When we're too busy to do that, we're too busy to do the thing that Jesus wants us most to do and when everybody's busy taking and no-one’s got time for us and we're hurting, we just want to scream, "God, what are you doing to me?" Let me truly tell you, there's only one person who always, always shows up and makes a difference, there's only one person with true empathy, true understanding, true emotional support that can make a difference 24/7 and that person is God. Sometimes people think that prayer is like a ritual, you have to know the formula, there has to be a key that unlocks the code to God’s treasure chest. But have a listen to what Jesus said, "Don't be like all those other people who heap up empty phrases or who think that God will hear them because of all the great words they use, your Dad in Heaven already knows what you want even before you open your mouth to ask. Whenever you pray, just go quietly into a room on your own, shut the door, pray in secret and your Dad who sees in secret will reward you." Don't you love that? God already knows, He knows the hurt, He knows the pain, He knows what it feels like to be misunderstood before we even open our mouths and the promise of Jesus is, “Dad’s in that place.” When we go into that quiet room and close the door and pray and spend time with God in secret, our Dad in heaven will answer us, will respond, will be there because that's who He is, that's what He does, He's God. God knows everything and He's the God of pure love and pure grace who is always willing to listen, who knows our hearts but He also knows what we're going through. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, He was a boy, He was a man, He grew up, He lived his life for you and me, He was misunderstood. He healed people on the Sabbath and they accused Him of being ungodly, He hung around with outcasts so they accused Him of being a glutton and a drunkard. He promised a new kingdom, the kingdom of God, so they tried to conscript Him to overthrow the Romans. He stirred up the religious hypocrites so they crucified Him. God is a God who knows what it's like to be misunderstood and in that secret, quiet place, experiencing something that you can't find anywhere else, that's where we'll find the understanding of a misunderstood God, the very same one that was prepared to go to the cross for you and for me. In that quiet, secret place when we experience that, it changes us deep inside, it’s an experience like no other, God shines the light of His love and His understanding and His acceptance and His grace and it's part of His plan, there's nothing else quite like it. It's one of the most wonderful parts of living the life that God always intended.
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Planting the Seed // The Best of the Best, Part 1
12/01/2025
Planting the Seed // The Best of the Best, Part 1
Sometimes you can be going through a bit of a rough patch in life – a bit like a famine or a drought – and you wonder to yourself what God is up to? But sometimes, sometimes God is actually sitting there, waiting for YOU to do something. It's just fabulous to be together again at the start of a new week. Can I ask you, what do you want to get out of life? I mean when you stand back and survey the landscape called, “your life”, the highs and the lows, what are some of the things that you’d love to see there? Relationships, achievements, family, career, money, a promotion, holiday? We’re all different, but basically my hunch is that we kind of want the same sorts of things in life. We want health and happiness and fulfilment and a sense of belonging and a sense that we’re needed, hope, a future. They’re the main things aren’t they? In a sense we want a harvest out of life, sure we expect to put in, sometimes we put in too much, other times not enough. But we want to get something out of life. Hmmm … a harvest! Back to your life for a minute, your landscape, the things that you’re looking for - are they there? Are you reaping the harvest in your life that you’re really hoping for? And if not, why not? I love going to lookouts, you get up high on a mountain somewhere and you look out over the hills and the valleys below and the green fields. There’s one in particular I have in mind that I love going to, it’s got these beautiful rolling green fields and you can see the ocean and the beaches in the distance. And yet if you look a little bit further you can see some great factory belching smog out into the atmosphere, and you can look over to the left and the sun will be shining over here and over to the right there’s a storm going. It’s something really uplifting to look out at the good and the bad and the ugly, and it’s the same when we look at the landscape of life. When we stop and we get up on a vantage point and look across our lives, it’s like looking at this landscape from the lookout, all the bits and pieces. Life’s like that landscape, there’s the good and the bad and the ugly and in some parts of our lives there’s sunshine, fabulous! And you look in another part of your life and there’s storm clouds and thunder and lightning and rain. All the different parts of life, family and how we feel inside, our contentment and security and the friends we have and the work we do, all those bits. What do we want out of life? Peace, health, love, pretty basic things actually, and you look at that landscape and maybe in one or two areas those basic things can be missing. You know what I’m talking about. Maybe marriage is not everything it's cracked up to be; maybe work you’re so sick to death of it, it’s boring, the routine the humdrum; maybe inside you just feel a lostness or a downness that you don’t understand why. We go through these things, these are life, and they can happen right alongside, right in parallel with, right at the same time as the other good things. I can be having a fantastic relationship with my wife and not enjoying my work, or visa versa. Or both of those are fine but one of our kids is having some trouble at the moment. We want to have good harvests in our life, but sometimes right now, it’s not what we want it to be. And before we can have a harvest we need to plant a seed. There’s a great story, if you have a Bible you can read it later, you can go to Genesis Chapter 26, right at the beginning of the Bible. By the way if you don’t have one you can go to a website. is the website, and you can read all sorts of different translations of the Bible on-line, good website. Anyhow, you can read about it. It’s a story of Isaac who was Abraham’s son, Abraham was the father I guess, of the nation of Israel. And Isaac was living in a place where there was famine and drought and he made some mistakes in his life that were exactly the same mistakes that his Dad, Abraham, had made. Isn’t it the way sometimes, a chip off the old block? We pick up the good traits of Mum and Dad and we pick up, frankly, the bad ones too. And Isaac blew it! You know he hung his wife out to dry, which was what Abraham had done to Isaac’s Mum. And there’s a famine and there’s a drought in the land, and Isaac wants to run away. He said, "Ah I’ve had enough of this, let’s go somewhere like Egypt, which is much better than this place that God’s got me at the moment." But God said, "No actually I don’t want you to do that, I want you to stay because I’ve got a plan for you Isaac, and My plan is, even though there’s a drought going on, and even though you’ve made this huge blunder with your wife, I’m actually going to bless you in this place. Now that’s easy for God to say, you know God is there in air- conditioned comfort in heaven and we’re down here in the drought and in the famine and in the mess right? And we can sometimes hear God say it, sometimes you’ll hear it through listening to a voice like mine, sometimes you’ll hear it by just sitting down and spending some time quietly with God. And God says, "You know something I’m going to bless you, I know you can’t see it at the moment but I am going to bless you." And I’ve felt, I’ve thought, "You know God that’s really easy for you to say but I just can’t see it at the moment, you know, my place is a mess you know, I just can’t see this blessing." Isaac wanted to run away and give up but he stayed, and not only did he stay but right in the middle of the drought he sowed some seed. It said, "Isaac sowed seed in that land," that is in the land that God picked for him! And in the same year he reaped a hundred fold. A hundred fold! Things weren’t going well; when things don’t go well for us what do we want to do? A – Give up; B – run away; C – bully the people around us into submission; D – all of the above, right? We kind of don’t feel like sowing good seed when things are not going well. But if you want a harvest we have to sow seed. It’s a basic principle of life, it’s a God principle, whatever you sow you reap. You sow good things, you reap good things, you sow bad things, you reap bad things, it’s not rocket science. It’s not just in the Bible but its obvious to us all in life, I mean there might be a situation at work that you have with a colleague, I know that things can get really tense at work, I’ve experienced that, praise God I don’t experience it now, but I’ve been there. I’ve seen how people get feral at work and want to rip each other apart, and when there’s anger at work, if we sow anger what do you reckon we’re going to reap? Anger. On the other hand when there’s anger and tension at work what if you and I sow peace, what if you and I sow blessing, what if you and I sow kindness? What are we going to reap then? What if amidst the feralness of work we sow a seed of gentleness? What's the harvest going to look like then? Can it be any worse than what it would have been if we’d have sown anger? If there’s some part of our marriage that’s unhealthy how does it go when we sow criticism within the marriage? Come on wives, how does it go when you peck, peck, peck at your husband? Does he respond well? Does it do it for him? Does he become better when he gets hen-pecked? Not on your Nelly! He closes down, he pushes away. When there’s tension in a marriage what if we sow anger? Well, we’re going to get anger back. Now let me ask you, what if we sow unconditional love? What if we sow kindness and gentleness and intimacy? Sowing and reaping is blindingly, glimpsingly obvious, it’s one of God’s basic principles of life. There’s a time for sowing seed and there’s a time for harvesting. It’s at natural as night following the day. And when we look back at our lives, when we look back at the landscape of our lives the bits that aren’t working at the moment we just want there to be a harvest in there without there being a seed time. But harvest comes from planting seeds, and sometimes we have to plant seeds in a drought, in a famine. Yes it’s a big risk, yes we don’t always feel like it, but the God I know is a God of blessing. He lets us travel through stuff, he lets us wear the consequences but He is a God of abundant blessing. Not some sugar daddy but one that involves us in the blessing. That’s why He has seed time, it’s our bit, it’s our faith step. When we plant the seed in the middle of the famine, God comes along and says, "You know something, you obeyed me. You honoured me, I’m going to bless you." In the midst of the famine, Isaac planted seed in that land, and the same year he reaped a hundred fold. A hundred fold!
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Experiencing God's Deliverance // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 5
11/28/2025
Experiencing God's Deliverance // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 5
We all end up in tight spots at sometimes. Big or small. Just annoying – or tragic. And if God’s God – well shouldn’t He show up on those days? If He loves us – wouldn’t He help? Every now and then, we find ourselves in a tight spot. Sometimes we've behaved our way into a problem; maybe a wrong diet or no exercise and we get diabetes. Or a neglected relationship and we end up with tension and strife. Or just a day-to-day thing, a difficult "what do I do?" kind of situation. Lots of people have lots of different spiritual beliefs and practices, meditation, yoga, crystals but when it's crunch time, what difference can they really make? When we need help surely help comes in the form of someone not something. When you or I are in a tight spot, can we have the confidence that someone will deliver us out of it? This week on "A Different Perspective", we're looking at the whole question of experiencing God as King David wrote back in Psalm 34, three thousand years ago, "We need to taste and see for ourselves that the Lord is good." And over this last few days we've been looking at the fact we need to come to God just as we are, trusting that all the rotten stuff in our lives – the stuff that God calls sin, is dealt with because Jesus paid for it on the cross. And then we need a desire, a God-given desire, to have a relationship with Him and then enjoy walking in God’s plan for our lives. But as we do that, as we walk in God’s plan for our lives, and if that sounds a bit strange, I would really encourage you … if you are seeking an authentic spiritual experience; if you've been looking around, shopping around in the spiritual market place; if we want real, authentic, loving, powerful spiritual experience that makes a difference – try Jesus. But as we walk in God’s plan every now and then, we hit a crunch time. We hit a time where things are difficult … there's a pressure. There's something that we don't seem to be able to get through. There's something that scares us. There's something that unsettles us. Maybe it's sickness, maybe it's physical, maybe it's spiritual, maybe it’s financial. Well, from where I sit; if God promises that He will be my God, if He loves me so much that He sent Jesus, His Son, to die for me; then the real proof of the authenticity is in those crunch moments. Where's God? If God says to me through the Son, "Taste and see that the Lord is good", then when I'm at that pressure point, where pressure is coming in from all sides, surely God should be in that space too. Now, I'm not talking about having a perfect life, I'm not talking about God taking all those pressures and problems away. I'm not talking about some sugar-coated unreality. When you're a kid, a perfect parent is someone that gives you lollies whenever you want them and we all know, as a parent, that’s not the right thing to do. So it's not some unreality that we're talking about, it’s God being in the middle of that reality with us. There's a great story in the Old Testament, in the Bible about David and Goliath. Most of us will know that story. The army of Israel and the army of the Philistines were having a stand-off. And the Philistines had challenged a soldier from the Israelite army to come to dual with their soldier and their soldier was Goliath. He was a big, big man and it turns out there was not a single soldier among the Israelite army that was prepared to go and fight this man. And then this young David, young kid, comes along to the battle scene – not because he was a soldier, not because he's been invited but because he was bringing food to his brothers who are soldiers. He's the runt of the litter and his job is just to be a courier. And he goes and sees what’s going on. And he sees this Philistine over there and he says, "Hang on a minute, how is it that no one is going to fight Goliath? I'll go and fight Goliath." So he went to see the King, Saul and they all laughed at him. But this is what David said to them: I've been a shepherd tending sheep for my Father, whenever a lion or a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I'd go after it, knock it down and rescue the lamb. If it turned on me, I'd grab it by the throat and wring its neck and kill it. Lion or bear it made no difference, I killed it and I'll do the same with this Philistine who's taunting the troops of the living God. God who delivered me from the teeth of a lion and the claws of a bear will deliver me from this Philistine. (1 Samuel 34-37) And Saul was amazed and said, "Well go. God help you." Now, just consider this David for a minute. The youngest of all these sons. His dad was Jessie and the prophet Samuel had come to see Jessie because he felt that God had a new king for Israel amongst all of these sons. And so Jessie, dad, lined up all his sons in front of the prophet Samuel except one, little old David because little ol' Dave was out tending the sheep and surely he wouldn't be a king. And Samuel looked at one after the other and said, "I don't know, it's someone else." And ultimately he chose David. What would that do to your self-esteem if you're David? Out in the back blocks, lonely, no-one to see you, just David and God tending some useless sheep. Every now and then a lion comes and a bear comes and somehow you get the courage and God gets you through that. This David spent time alone experiencing God on those lonely nights, on those nights when he felt insignificant and unrewarded, and the beautiful mornings and the sunrises and those dangerous times. And I'm sure he used to sit there with his slingshot practicing over and over and over again, hundreds and thousands of times being accurate with that sling shot. And so when he goes out now and he fights Goliath who, let’s remember had a full set of body armour on and only had one small part of his forehead exposed, and the whole army of Israel didn't have the guts to get out there and do this. This young, small, insignificant David, who in God’s presence had learned to fight lions and bears. And use his sling shot and experienced God’s faithfulness in the tight spots, it's this young David who'd experienced God that went out and did the job. You get it? When we experience God’s faithfulness through the tough times. And we see that God is good in the tough times, our faith and our belief and our trust in Him grows and so often we're hidden, the tough times aren't public, no-one else sees except God and us and it's lonely. As I look back, I could quickly rattle off several dozen of those times in my short ten-year walk with the Lord. And each one God was there and was a part of it. And it was like each one built on the last one and out faith and our confidence in God grows. Just recently I was sitting with a CEO of a large Christian radio network of 350 stations in the USA and as I was sitting talking to this lovely man, I felt like David. I thought 'what am I doing here? Who am I to be sitting down with this man and with these people?' What we do, is we look around at all these other people, all the people that were in that army that had ranks and they were officers. David wasn't even a private. He was bringing food to his brothers and we look at these people and we say, "Gee, I'm not as clever as they are or as big or important. I'm just a nobody; I'm just some young stupid kid out there in the back blocks of nowhere minding a bunch of useless sheep." David became the greatest king that Israel ever had because David learned through experience – through fighting lions, through fighting bears, through being alone and trusting in God. That right when he needs God, God is in that place with him. And it’s when we're alone and it's when we're going through those tough and difficult times that we experience God’s faithfulness. And we get to look back afterwards and see how God worked it out and see how He was there in all of that. When we've done that, we can look back and we can say with everything that we are, "You know something … I've tasted it for myself and I know that God is good."
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Walking in God's Plan // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 4
11/27/2025
Walking in God's Plan // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 4
If any sense of spirituality that we have in our lives is going to be any good – well it has to be relevant. Useful. In day to day life. Jesus can’t be just a stained-glass window. He has to be a part of life…. I don't know about your life but mine's pretty hectic: ups and downs, joys, disappointments, stresses, and strains. In a way, all our lives are different. But in another sense, well, they're pretty much the same. And if we're going to consider any form of spiritual belief or experience, well, that spirituality has to be relevant, useful, (I mean), it has to help along the way. Otherwise, it's – it's just a candle or a stained glass window or a crystal, or whatever it is – but in the cut and thrust of daily life, pretty useless. So when it comes to experiencing a relationship with God, coming to believe that this Jesus is who He said He is, does it help? I mean does that faith make a difference here and now? It turns out that there are kind of two ways of knowing something: knowledge, head knowledge, you know, a bunch of facts or precepts that we believe in; And experience, actually living that out day by day and experiencing it. Three thousand years ago King David of Israel wrote this, He said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 3:48) As I've said over the last few days, it's a bit like knowing that we should eat more fruit because it's good for us versus really enjoying the taste and the experience of eating that rock melon or watermelon or orange or mandarin. And sometimes we can have this kind of stained glass window churchy image of Jesus that can be the set of facts that we have in our head. And yet, we therefore can't experience in our lives, really know and taste and see that God is good. It was a real surprise to me couple of decades ago when I gave my life over to Jesus, when I said, “Yes, I want to follow this God, I believe that Jesus came for me.” It was an incredible surprise how beautifully and how sweetly and how intimately that relationship began to develop. Over the last few days, we've been looking at the whole subject of having that experience and that relationship. And we talked about the need for there to be a desire in our hearts that I believe is a God-given desire. And then to come to God, just as we are and have that relationship with God. But today, I'd like to ask the question, but what about that relationship in the heat of battle? If we should taste and see that the Lord is good, if we should experience the goodness of God, well, shouldn't that happen in life? I mean, day-to-day in the ups and downs? That whole quote from King David, "Taste and see that the Lord is good," comes from Psalm 34, where David had just been through a really tough spot. I'm going to read all of what he said because I think the context is really important. He said this: I live and breathe God. If things aren't going well, hear this and be glad. God met me more than half way. He freed me from all my fears. Look at Him, give him your warmest smile. Never hide your feelings from Him. When I was desperate, I called out to God, “'God get me out of this tight spot.” His angels set up a circle of protection around us when we pray. “God, get me out of this tight spot” (Psalm 34:4-7) See, His angels set up a circle of protection around us when we pray. Open your mouth, taste that God is good because those who do, those who run to Him, they are blessed. Isn't that great? I mean David was in a tough spot. And out of his experience, out of that experience of God's goodness and faithfulness, in that tough spot, he was able to write something as beautiful as that. Well, that was David then but what about you and me, here and now? Well, I know that twenty years ago I was in a tight spot. It was the toughest time of my life. Everything came crashing down - finances, relationships, everything. It was just awful. And it was in that space, in that dark, scary space that I came to faith. You may have heard me tell the story before about a car boot sale (that we had at the church) that I had just started going to. Well, you'll have to bear with me. The car boot sale. It was just a fascinating time for me because I've always been very wealthy back then, and at this time in my life I was flat broke. I mean I didn't have enough money to buy groceries for the next week because of the things that had been going on in my life. I had just recently come to faith in Jesus Christ and I’d just recently joined this little church in a little suburb called Oyster Bay in Sydney and we had a car boot sale. And so everyone went up there and I had a whole bunch of things that I didn't need anymore and opened my car boot, a chess set and some scuba diving equipment, as I recall. I sold everything I had by 11 o'clock in the morning. And the other people around haven’t sold a single thing. And they all went, "Hang on, how come Berni sold all his stuff and we didn't sell anything?" Well, they didn't know (what I knew), I was on tight spot. God knew it. God knew I didn’t have enough money for the next week for groceries and I needed that money. But it doesn't have to be a disaster. I had a difficult situation with a person just recently, someone who really matters to me. And it was an angry situation and this man was just, you know from where I sat, being difficult. And I stopped and I just turned to God (just for a fleeting second), in the middle of all of that and I was flooded with a joy and a peace; and the anger in my heart, it disappeared like that. The harsh words that I wanted to say, they stopped like that. And I was firm, but there was a wisdom, there was a measured, loving approach that I have to tell you simply couldn’t come from me. This is real stuff. This is real day-to-day stuff. Just this morning I was praying and God gave me just a glimpse of something that He's planning for me in the future. Now, I get these sometimes. It's just a gift that God's given me where I can see into the future, something through the Holy Spirit. It's not a “ooh, hey” thing, it's just a natural thing that happens. And it's happened so often over the last couple of decades, that when God speaks to me in that way I just – I know that it's Him. I know that I know that I know. You know when we launched these radio programs that you’re listening to now, we had to step out in faith. But we just felt that God was calling us to do this. This was the future He had planned for us. And here we are (all these years on), ten years later, on 1,100th station across 160 countries, including this station, broadcasting the very same program that you’re listening to now. I was thinking just about one region and how to take our programs into that region. I prayed a little bit about it. And God just gave me some ideas that created a win-win between some radio stations and some other organizations, and off it went. It just took off. When we have a relationship with Jesus, when we sit down and pray and ask, God knows before we ask everything that we need. And before we sit down and ask, He's already planned the outcomes. He's already there. He's already started doing things that we can't see that are going to bless us. I believe that when we desire God, when we draw close to Him – not through our own good works, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, forgiven because He died and paid for our sins on the cross – when we spend those quiet and intimate times, it kind of ends up exploding your view on life. It certainly does with me. This walk of life that I now walk in faith in relationship with Jesus Christ, it's a whole new walk, it's a whole new life. God in this mix, guiding and helping and intervening, this is where the rubber hits the road. It's exciting. It's powerful. And on those really bad days, there's a joy and a comfort and a peace you just can't put into words. It's like biting into a piece of sweet fruit and go, “Man, that is sooo good!” It’s not just me; it’s everybody who believes in Jesus, who puts their complete trust and faith in Jesus. And by the way, that includes YOU. Especially, it includes YOU.
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The Path of Simplicity // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 3
11/26/2025
The Path of Simplicity // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 3
We all try to put our best foot forward in life. Fair enough. But eventually, we can find ourselves trying to impress people rather than being ourselves. So – should we try to impress God – or is it come as you are? One way or another, we all try and put our best foot forward. When we go for a job interview, we make sure that we’re dressed well and our hair is combed and we go in with a smile and we say the right things. When friends come over to visit, we tidy up the house. And in one sense, there’s nothing wrong with that. But we live in a world, well, it rewards us for how we look or what we do or the size of our pay packet. You know what I mean. And so we can end up on this treadmill. Whatever that looks like in our different circles or cultures, way deep down inside, we end up believing that life is about – impressing people. That’s why so many of the experiences available out there in the spiritual marketplace are about getting off that treadmill – relaxation, massage, meditation, aromatherapy, feng shui to design a tranquil home. But what about God? Is having a relationship with Him about keeping up appearances or getting off that treadmill? This week on "A Different Perspective", we’re looking at the whole subject of experiencing God. If you were with us the other day, we talked about the fact that there are two ways of knowing something. We can know it as fact, as head knowledge. And we can know it in experience. We can know that we should eat more fruit because it’s healthy for us, it’s good for us and it will reduce heart disease and diabetes. We know that. But it’s not until we experience the fruit that we go, "Wow! That’s really good!" Three thousand years ago, David said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 32:8) In other words, experience Him for yourself in a relationship. Yesterday, we spoke about desire. The need for us to have a God-given desire to want to have a relationship with Him. Any relationship needs to have an element of desire, a spark, a flame. Without desire a relationship goes nowhere. As the deer pants after streams of living water so my soul pants after you our God. (Psalm 42:1) Some psalmist wrote that three thousand years ago. Today, I’d like to talk about one of the biggest obstacles to experiencing and enjoying a relationship with God. It’s the feeling that deep down inside (somewhere), "Well, I’m just not good enough. I have to get my act together before I can go and talk to God." It’s that idea that somehow sitting down with God to pray is … well, it’s like a bit of a job interview. You put your face on. You wear the right clothes. You say the right things. You smile. It’s about appearances. There’s a formula, you know, we need to impress God Well, is that right? Do we need to put on good clothes to talk to God? Do we need to impress God? Well, let’s see what Jesus said. If you’re interested, you can find this quote in the very first book of the New Testament, Matthew’s gospel, chapter 11:25-26. This is what He said. He said: “Father, Dad” He loved calling Him Dad. “I praise you because you have concealed your ways from the know-it-all(s); from the people who think of themselves as being sophisticated and intelligent. But you spelled them out clearly to ordinary people.” Question: What sort of people do you like to socialise with? I mean, do you like to hang around with hoity-toity people, the know-it-all(s), the people who always have a face on and they’re part of the set? Or would you rather hang around with plain, ordinary people, no face, no pretence, what you see is what you get, no effort to impress. Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean it’s much nicer to be around people, who are just themselves, who just relax, who don’t have a need to always compete. And put their best foot forward. Well, so why wouldn’t God feel exactly the same? It turns out that He does according to Jesus. And so we go to God, when we stand before God and say, "Lord, here I am". There are some really good things in our lives, some things that we do well, some things that we’re enjoying. And there are some pretty lousy things sometimes in our lives. Things that in our heart of hearts we know that we’re doing the wrong things that we know we could do better – failures, hurts. And we have a choice. We can either stand in front of God and try to impress him and put a face on. And what Jesus said was, “Father I thank you that you have hidden and concealed all your ways from the know-it-all(s)” – the people who think of themselves as sophisticated. So, if we go to God like that, here’s a promise from Jesus, God will hide Himself from someone who comes to Him like that. Or we can go to God just as we are. But here’s the crunch and you see it in the Apostle Paul as he was writing and as he grew in his maturity in his relationship with God. The closer we get to God, the more the light of His love and His presence shines into our hearts. The more painfully aware that we become of the blank inky spots on our hearts, the things that are wrong, the things that God calls sin. The closer we get the harder, the more heavily they weigh on us. That’s what Paul said, "Wretched man that I am! I know that there is nothing good that dwells in me, that’s in my flesh. Who will save me from this? Who will set me free from this?" And then he comes up with the answer. "Thanks be to God, Jesus Christ who died on the cross for me." If we would come before God and have a relationship with Him in a way that’s real, in a way that’s, aahh, so warm, so close, we’re going to have to deal with our sin. I’m sorry if you find that word offensive. I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m being judgmental but it’s not my word, it’s God’s word. Sin is sin. The closer we get to God, the blacker it seems. And ultimately there’s only one way of dealing with that sin and it’s not putting a face on. How can we ever think that we can hide anything from God if God is, after all, God? The closer we get, the more acutely we become aware of our need for forgiveness and our need for someone or something to deal with that sin. And we know that … that’s why Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we could go before God and say, “Father, forgive me not because of what I’ve done, but because of what my Jesus did for me.” We can either do that or we can never come close at all. We can ignore our sin and live out its consequences and say, "Well, yeah. I believe in God from a distance. I believe I’m a pretty good person and I know that, um, yeah I’ll hang out here at a distance and I won’t deal with my sin." But you see people who do that are the ones who never enjoy their relationship with Jesus. They never know that wonderful sense of His peace and joy just flooding out of them. Yesterday, I was flying on a plane; I was up really, really early in the morning. So my usual prayer time that I usually have with God, I just couldn’t have. And I was sitting on the plane flying to where I was flying and I have to say that I was pretty tired because it was so early in the morning. And without me saying anything, without me doing anything, just kind of closing my eyes and looking at God with the eyes of my soul – this peace, this joy, this Holy Spirit just filled my whole body. And that can only happen because I believe that Jesus has paid for my sin. That’s why I can stand before God. And that’s the only way that you can stand before God too. There’s the choice. Hang out there at a distance and never experience it. Come to God and try and impress Him and the promise from Jesus is, you try and do that and God will hide himself from you. Or come to God, just as we are, and say, "Lord, I know there are some rotten things in my life but I’m going to experience you because Jesus died to buy that right for me."
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The Spark of Desire // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 2
11/25/2025
The Spark of Desire // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 2
Any relationship needs a spark of desire to make it fire. Friendships. Marriages. Families. Work. Desire is a key ingredient of a lasting relationship. Well – what about God? Relationships, they’re a funny thing – boy meets girl, courtship, romance, engagement, marriage, honeymoon – what an exciting time! This passion, this desire, they enjoy each other to the full. Then they have kids. Sleepless nights, there’s the mortgage, paying off the credit card, arguments, pressure and almost half, end in divorce. Of course, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. But somewhere along the way (somewhere), the fire goes out. The flame, the passion, the desire to be together – they evaporate. Not that relationships are all about passion and desire. But on the other hand it’s pretty important. Wouldn’t you agree, in making a marriage hang together? Well, what about our spirituality? Does desire, does passion have a role to play in our spiritual lives? When it comes to our spirituality, I believe that experience has an important role to play. Yesterday, on A Different Perspective we talked about the fact that there are two ways of knowing things. There’s like head knowledge, a series of facts, a series of dot points and head knowledge is really important. But it’s not until we marry that with experience that we can really say that we know something. Remember, if you were with us that we talked about fruit. It’s one thing to know that we should eat more fruit because it’s good for us. It’s another thing entirely to bite into a banana or a mandarin or a peach and go, "Wow, that fruit is really nice!" Three thousand years ago, King David of Israel wrote this. He said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 32:8). When we look at the spiritual marketplace in the twenty-first century, crystals, eastern design of religions (you know, design your own), astral travel, the all-called "crossing over", "feng shui", you know, people designing their houses to be tranquil according to what they believe to be spiritual principles. It’s all about taking spirituality and trying to experience it in life. And so sadly those same people will look at Christianity, they look at Jesus, they look at the cross and think, "No, no, no, no. That’s boring, that’s … I know the public image of that, that’s just a set of rules." But what if God’s plan is that we can have the most amazing experience of Him, here and now. I mean an authentic spiritual experience. All those other things; crystals and feng shui and the eastern design of religions; they involve things or forces or notions or feelings or idols. And yet, with God, with Jesus, it gets really personal. We forget sometimes … God isn’t a stained glass window. He’s not a book. He’s not a bunch of rules. He’s not pew, He’s not a hymn. God’s a person and we forget that. Deep in His mighty heart, God thinks, God wills, God feels, God suffers, God laughs, God cries. And if God’s a person, then it follows that we can have a relationship with this person. Not a "thing" not a "concept" not a statue, a person. Jesus is the very image of God. It’s Jesus who loved and laughed and cried and wept. That’s God, that’s what He looks like. There was a man by the name of A.W. Tozer who wrote in the mid twentieth century. He was a great writer. And at the time that he was writing, it was that whole time of science and post-war. You know, science was going to make things better. And it was all that head knowledge, it was all the go. And there the space race was starting and modernization and we were all getting kitchen gadgets and so on. He was writing straight into that and have a listen what he wrote into that space. He said: Look, where the modern scientists have lost God amid the wonders of His world, it’s a real danger that we could lose God amid the wonders of His Word, the facts, the things we believe. We’ve almost forgotten that God is a person and as such we can have a personal relationship with Him. In this hour of all but universal darkness, one cheering gleam appears. Within the fold of conservative Christians there are people, increasing numbers of people, whose spiritual lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They won’t be put off with words or shallow logic. They won’t be content to busy themselves with nervous activity. And yet to still to know an inner emptiness. These people have a thirst for God. They won’t be satisfied until they’ve drunk deep at the fountain of living water. There are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, they’re just unable to reconcile themselves with this continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. There’s a thirst to taste for themselves this piercing sweetness at the love of Christ about whom the prophets wrote and the psalmists sang. They want to taste. They want to touch with their hearts; they want to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God. I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our spiritual lives, it’s a result of a lack of holy desire. Complacency is the deadly foe of all spiritual growth. What we need is acute desire to be present, or there be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. It’s too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long in vain. I love that! Three thousand years ago, in one of the spiritual songs, the Psalms, that’s recorded in the Bible, someone wrote this. It’s Psalm 42:1, if you’d like to look at it. As the deer pants for streams of living water so my soul pants for you my God. Maybe you’re someone who has never met Jesus. You’ve never put your trust in Him; you hunger for some authentic spiritual experience. Maybe you’ve been going to church for thirty, forty years and in your heart of hearts, you know that you’ve never experienced sort of desire – passion for God. Or maybe that’s the sort of flame that used to burn in your heart once upon a time. But like a couple with kids and a mortgage and credit cards and responsibilities, somewhere along the line, that flame went out. I’ve got some good news! Doesn’t matter who we are or where we’re at or what we’ve believed in the past or not believed or what we’ve done or not done. God longs for us for a close, intimate, personal relationship. An experience so real, so authentic, it’ll blow your socks off. Isn’t that what you want? Because in a minute I’m going to pray, I’m going to pray a prayer that A.W. Tozer wrote at the end of the first chapter of his book, The Pursuit of God. I believe that desire needs to be present in our hearts and I believe that God can put that desire there. If you want that, pray this with me: God, I have tasted Your goodness and it satisfied me but it has made me thirsty for more. I’m so aware, I’m so conscious of my need for further grace and I’m so ashamed of the lack of desire that’s in my heart. God, I want You. I long to be filled with longing. I thirst to be made more thirsty (still). Lord, show me Your glory so that I may know You for real. Begin in me a mercy, a new work of love. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up my love! Come away!’ and then give me the grace to rise and follow You up from this misty lowland where I’ve wandered for so long. Father, I want You. Give me that desire. Light that flame. Spark that fire. Not by might, not by power, but by Your Holy Spirit. Father, I ask that specifically of You today, in the mighty name of Jesus Christ.
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Tasting and Seeing // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 1
11/24/2025
Tasting and Seeing // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 1
We should eat more fruit. We know that…..but it’s not until we taste the banana and smell the mandarin – that we go – oh, that’s good. It’s the experience that seals the deal. But what about God – how do we know that He’s good? We’ve all heard that nutritionists say that we should eat more fruit. It’s good for us. There’s the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals and the colorful fruits have antioxidants in them that reduce the risk of cancer. The more fruit we eat, the lower the risk of heart disease and on it goes. We know all that stuff. But somehow it doesn’t sink in, we keep eating chocolate, biscuits, cakes. It turns out that all the head knowledge under the sun won’t change our behavior, even if it’s a life or death issue. Staggering, isn’t it? Even though we could avoid diabetes or add even five or ten years to our lives by simply applying what we know, nothing much changes. So what will change our behavior? That’s a good question. It turns out that there are kind of two ways of knowing something. The first is head knowledge. We go back to the fruit – there are a whole bunch of nutritional and health facts that are very important, but they’re kind of uninspiring. On their own, facts are dry. And indeed, the facts can be a source of guilt and fear. I’m somebody whose father died of diabetes and so I’m prone to diabetes. I know that I should eat more fruit and more bran and all of those good things. And if I don’t, the facts become a source of fear and dread and lurking guilt knowing that I’m eating my way to death. The other way of knowing something is through experience, experiencing something in real life. The way to experience the benefits of eating more fruit, well, is to eat more fruit. It’s something that I’ve had to do given the risk that I have of contracting diabetes as I become older. It has been a really important source of motivation for me. But when you pick a banana up out of the fruit bowl – you know that beautiful, ripe and yellow. And it has that smell and you peel the back and you bite into that soft but firm texture of a banana – you can only get that taste, that sensation in a banana. Or mandarins – mandarins where I am are really good at the moment. You know, one of those mandarins that’s soft and the skin’s kind of bubbling away a little bit and you just put your finger nail in to break the skin and immediately this pungent odor fills your nostrils. I love mandarins, or a crisp juicy apple, or plums, sweet grapes. I love the Isabella variety; they have muskiness to them. They’re made just to pop in your mouth. Is your mouth-watering yet? Do you feel like reaching for a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl? Experience is a way of knowing. So on the one hand, we have a pile of chips and chocolate and biscuits and cakes and junk food. And over here in the other pile (in the fruit bowl), we have all those beautiful fruits: mandarins, nectarines, apricots, bananas, apples and pineapples. And the way we go from a habit of junk food to a habit of good food, there are two parts to that: First is the important part – we kind of have to know that we need to do it. We need to know some of those basic nutritional facts to motivate us. But the second part is experience. The second part is tasting and seeing that the fruit is good. It’s the good taste of the fruit. It’s the pleasure that we get out of the fruit – it makes it habit-forming. I have to tell you, I’m going to have a mandarin when I go home today because I know there are a couple of really nice ones sitting in the fruit bowl at home and I know I’m going to enjoy them. When you look at it historically, over the last, well, umpteen centuries, the pendulum has always swung in the way that we know something. Back in the 1940's and 1950's and in the early ‘60's the emphasis was on head knowledge. It was on dot points. I remember at school we used to memorize things by lists of dot points. These days, however, the pendulum has swung almost completely the other way and we’re not interested so much in the knowledge as the experience. We like to experience things, to taste life to its full. And it turns out that knowledge on its own is dry. Experience on its own, well, it’s kind of vacuous, it’s kind of empty. It’s great for a while, but without the knowledge, there’s no anchor. There’s no foundation. People feel empty and skeptical. Look at Christianity, look at how we believed in God. Back in the ‘50's and ‘60's, it was a series of creeds. It was knowing the facts, it was the head knowledge. It was knowing the information that we believed in. And don’t get me wrong, I think that’s actually very important particularly today. I think it’s important to know what it is that we believe. But if it stops just there, if it’s just a series of dot points on a page or a series of chapters in a book, well, you can separate that right from life. You can take the book and put it on a shelf. You can take the page and leave it on a desk. And in reaction of that dry way of knowing God and believing in Jesus, in the ‘60's and ‘70's, there was quite a reaction in some denominations against that dryness and some became very experiential. Now, I’m not criticizing experience. Experience is good particularly when we’re having a relationship with God. If God’s God, if God is as good as what they say He is, wow, wouldn’t it be great to have an experience of God, experience a relationship? But some denominations reacted so far; they kind of left the facts behind. And when you take experience to such an extreme and leave the facts out of it, well, it fizzles out because it becomes vacuous. And to some extent, the public image of Christianity today is at those two extremes – those two poles. Either people see it as being a dry set of precepts and rules. Or they see it as being, "Well, you know, you see these Christians on television sometimes and they’re praising God and they’ve got their hands in the air. Well, that’s a bit wacky. That’s a bit ooh, that’s weird!" And yet, just like fruit – just like knowledge and experience are what gets us into good habits. And remember like eating fruit, our lives depend on this stuff! Well, I think the same is true of believing in Jesus. Now seventy percent of us believe in God. We may not all believe in Jesus, but seventy percent of us believe in God. And most of those people would say, "Well, yeah, I believe that Jesus was the Son of God. I believe He died on the cross and I believe He bought me eternal life." But so many people look at this Christianity gig and go, "Well, yeah. But maybe it’s dry, maybe it’s rules, I hunger for experience." We live in a society and a psyche that hungers for experience – good coffee, good restaurants, good food, travel, five-star resorts, health resorts, feng-shui design for our houses – we want to experience our spirituality in real life. We hunger for some sort of authentic spiritual experience to know God and Jesus. Not just as a series of facts but in our experience. Three thousand years ago, David, who was the greatest king Israel ever had, wrote this. He said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 34:8) Taste and see that the Lord is good. What if God is there to be experienced? What if there is an intimate, authentic spiritual reality and experience that we can have here and now? I’m not talking about ditching the knowledge. I believe that the facts about faith are important for us to have in our heads. But I also believe that if God is good, shouldn’t we taste and see for ourselves that the Lord is good? The world is full of people who want to believe in Jesus but think that Jesus is a dry bunch of rules. And sadly, churches are full of people who have never really experienced the joy and the wonder and the awe of a relationship with God. I believe that we need to taste and see that the Lord is good.
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Joy in His Presence // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 5
11/21/2025
Joy in His Presence // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 5
You know how there are some people, when you hang around with them; they’re just such a joy to be with. Hmmm. Wonder if God’s like that? There are some people in life who can really get you down. And yet there are others you just love to get together with them. There is something about them. They get it. They understand us. They encourage us, they engage with us, you know the sort. You look forward to having a cup of coffee or catching up with them for lunch. There is a real joy to the encounter. Being in their presence fills us with something that well, there is probably just one word for it – JOY. If that is true with people, imagine what it must be like with God. Let me tell you about a friend of mine, his name is Tony. Tony is a tall, gangly sort of guy, with curly red hair. He is someone who is so full of the joy that comes through having a relationship with Jesus. And Tony and I somehow just click. He understands me. He understands the call that God has put on my life, the gifts that I have and my limitations as well. And he spends time with God. He spends time praying. He understands who God is and Tony lets that change him inside. Tony and I get together, probably, once every two or three weeks for a cup of coffee or a sandwich. And we might sit for an hour, an hour and a half and just talk together. Just share what’s going on in our lives and our work. And I come home and my wife, Jacqui will often ask, “So what did you two talk about?” And I always say, "I don’t know, stuff … nothing, everything.” You know women seem to be able to get together pretty well for cups of coffee from time to time. And we men seem not to do that so much. It is just wonderful to have a friend like Tony, who I can spend some time with and it’s so encouraging. It’s so much fun. And we may not talk about anything substantial at all. It’s a joy! Somehow he ministers something into me, and I know he feels the same about our relationship. The relationship brings real joy to my life. Okay, none of us is perfect. But this guy does something for who I am. It’s kind of the same idea with God's presence. I often ponder about God being God – Spirit and creating the universe and the stars and the world and putting you and me here in the middle of this world full of joy and pain and laughter and tears. And (I don’t know), it’s His way, His space He has chosen for us, to put us on this world. And He brings Jesus onto this world, God's Son. And His twelve disciples followed him around for three and a half years. And you can see that it was a real joy in their lives to have a relationship with Jesus. But Jesus said to them, “I am going to die.” And He did, He died on the cross. He was crucified to pay for my sins, my weaknesses and yours. And then He rose again. He met with them again and He ascended into heaven. And He said, “I won’t leave you as orphans. I will send someone else just like me.” And His promise was and still is for anyone who places their trust in this Jesus that He would send His Holy Spirit. And that Father, Son and Holy Spirit would dwell inside each one of us. It is an exciting thing. Now, just after this happened for the first time (just after Jesus ascended and a little while later), for the very first time God poured his Spirit out on Jesus’ followers. They were touched in an amazing way (for the first time the Holy Spirit), when they experienced the presence of God in a real tangible way. The way I experience Tony’s presence when we sit down and have a sandwich or a cup of coffee. And other people who are watching, they look at this and, “Wow, I wonder they have been smoking, maybe they are drunk. What is going on here? What’s the matter with these people.” And Peter the apostle got up and he said: Listen they are not drunk, it’s only 9am in the morning. (Acts 2:15) Then he quoted a Psalm that was written about 1,000 years before and in part he said: God, your presence fills me with joy! (Psalm 16:11) He said to the people, “That’s what’s going on.” God’s presence, His reality, His very being has fallen on these people and has come to dwell in them, for the very first time. And now (as I said before), everyone who says, "Jesus is mine. I believe Jesus died for me to pay the price of all my failures and to give me eternal life.” Everyone who places their faith in Jesus receives that same presence – the very presence of God. And yet, you know, a lot of people kind of deny that in their lives. A lot of people don’t connect with God dwelling in them. Maybe it never sinks in. Maybe … I don't know what it is but this is such an opportunity. God reached into the world, into history, in the person of Jesus. And He is still doing that today, in His Presence, inside of everybody that believes Jesus – the spiritual presence of the Holy Spirit. This week on A Different Perspective, we have been talking about the fact that we all need times of refreshing. Here we are in life – with all its ups and downs, and all its noise and everyone screaming out for our attention and the cacophony of sound, and all the stuff that is going on in my life and your life. And seventy per cent of people (in the west at least) believe in God. And so often and so sadly, people hold those two things separately in their lives. This is my life, God lives in church, God doesn’t belong in my life. Over these last five days on 'A Different Perspective', we’ve gone through five different places where God talks about the fact that He wants to refresh us by His Spirit. If you have a pen and paper, quickly jot these down. They are Bible references … “Oh Berni, why are you talking about the Bible again?” I’ll tell you why … because in that book God tells us how much He loves us and how much of a difference He wants to make in our lives. The first thing we talked about was Acts 3:20, where it says: That times of refreshing come from God’s presence. Then there was Psalm 46, where God says/; Be still, in all the noise and all the drama and everything that is going on… Be still and know that I am God. And then we look at what Jesus said in Matthew’s Gospel chapter 11 verses 28 to 30: “Come to me,” He said, “If you're tired, if you are carrying heavy burdens, come to me. Let me give you rest for your soul”. And then yesterday we looked at Isaiah chapter 40 verse 30: Wait on God. Those whose wait on God, will renew their strength. They will soar like an eagle. And today, Acts 2:28, it’s in the New Testament. The book of Acts where Luke writes: God your presence fills me with joy. If you have a Bible, go and look them up. If you don’t and you are on the internet, go to a website called biblegateway.com, all one word – . What are we waiting for? Why is it that we hold these two things so separately in our lives? My life’s over here and my God is over there. When over and over and over again God is saying this, “I want to make a difference for you. I want to make your life better. I want to make your life richer. I want to give you peace. I want the relationship that we can have, because of what Jesus did for you on the cross. I want that to give you a stunning life. A life that is really worth living.” What are we waiting for? Why don’t we spend more time with God? Why don’t we ask Him to fill us, give us a double helping, fuller than full of His presence – overflowing with joy and with peace? Jesus is waiting to meet our deepest needs – to fill us with joy and peace, to refresh us, to renew us. Come on! What are we waiting for?!
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Soar Like An Eagle // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 4
11/20/2025
Soar Like An Eagle // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 4
Some days, it feels as though everybody around you is cruising, but somehow we’re down in the trenches. Wouldn’t it be great to soar like an eagle? Have you ever been through a time in your life where, I don’t know, it seems like everyone around you is doing it easy and somehow you’re down in the trenches doing it tough? I remember when I was training to be an officer in the Australian Army. We’d be on exercise digging trenches, fighting pretend wars, in the rain, and the snow, sometimes in the heat in the drought. And often, in an area quite close to an airport. I used to see these planes flying over. I was thirsty and hot, or cold and wet. And I’d think, what I wouldn't give to be sitting up in one of those planes, instead of digging a trench down here? Almost thirty years on, I fly in and out of that airport several times a year now. And every time I look down at where I used to dig the trenches it's such a good feeling. Life’s not always like that. But some days, it does feel like trench warfare, doesn’t it? I remember when we were out there on military exercises; often we had very little food and very little water. Hunger wasn’t so bad for me; I mean ultimately hunger just becomes a dull pain. But thirst, thirst is always acute and I remember so often in the heat of the summer being so thirsty and not having enough water. And most of the time, we never had enough sleep. It was often broken. And when we were out on an exercise, we were fighting pretend wars. Every night you had to do gun duty for an hour or you’d be out on patrol fighting battles all day. And the moment you were able to settle down, the first thing you had to do was dig a trench just in case there was a mortar or artillery attack. And so we were sleeping on cold, hard ground. And amidst all these discomforts and the tiredness, when you’re worn down and your emotions are down and you’re under stress, it can be tough. Of course, the training was deliberately aimed at taking us to those places. And seeing how far we could go, and teaching us how to act under stress. But sometimes, we look around at other people and we feel like we’re the ones doing the trench warfare and they’re doing it easy. But actually, they're going through stuff as well, we just can’t see it often. This week on A Different Perspective, we’re looking at our need for times of refreshing. I don’t know if you’ve been able to join us this week, but on Monday we talked about the fact that times of refreshing – I mean real refreshing – like when you’ve got a deep thirst and you drink that clean water. Those times of refreshing come from the presence of God. And then on Tuesday, we looked at the fact that God says, "Look even when everything seems to be falling down around you, be still, be still in the middle of all of that, and know that I’m your God." And yesterday we looked at what Jesus said, He said, "Look if you’re carrying heavy burdens come to me and you’ll find rest for you soul. Let me help you push, let me help you with your burden." Today, I’d like to share something else that God says about meeting us right where we’re at, right in that place in life were the rubber hits the road. It was written a few thousand years ago by a man, a prophet called, Isaiah. He wrote this, he said: Even though youths will grow weary and faint, and the young will fall exhausted, those who wait on God will renew their strength. They will rise up with wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary, they’ll walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40: 30-31) Man, I remember when were out on exercise with a pack, a rifle, a machine, gun tired and hungry and thirsty … having to run and falling over and grazing your elbow, it’s such a real (I don’t know), parallel metaphor for life. It's how we feel sometimes when we're carrying around things like packs on our back. And how is it how can you rise up in the middle of that like wings of an eagle, how can you soar? I remember once in the town where I grew up which is a place called Wollongong. There’s a boat harbour. It's beautiful little harbour where the fishing fleet comes in and out and on the headland and there’s a white lighthouse. And standing there on the headland is one my favourite places on planet earth. You look north up the coast and you see the beaches and it just goes on and mountains. And you look south and you see this big steel works belching out pollution. It’s lovely to be there in the summer when the sun’s shining. You see the little boats chugging in and out of this beautiful little blue harbour. But I actually like it in winter. I like going there when there’s a storm blowing when the southerly winds are whipping up the ocean and there’s the foam. There’s something scary about an angry ocean. I was there once and I saw some pelicans flying, and a gale was blowing from the south. And it was really interesting to watch what they were doing. Now pelicans have these, I don’t know big beaks, and they’re ungainly birds but when they’re flying they’re an awesome bird to watch. As I watched them, what they were doing was this … they were ducking around behind the headland end of the harbour where there was no wind and they were resting. And all of a sudden they would race around the headland and almost go up vertically and be caught up by this gale and be blown back into the harbour again. And they’d drop down there and have a rest. And they’d come round the headland again and go up and be blown back into the harbour and drop down and have a rest. I watched them for an hour; they were doing this time and time again. And ultimately I understood what was going on. These guys were having fun. They were in the storm that was blowing. It must have been pretty rough up there, they were playing a game and they were really enjoying it. They were riding the storm. And if you can imagine being there with the pelicans doing what they were doing, it must have been really exhilarating to be able to ride the storm like that. The God I know, the one who sent Jesus, His Son, to walk on this earth as a man to experience first hand your reality and mine. That Jesus suffered pressure, and expectations, and misunderstandings and crowds mobbed Him, and He was persecuted, and He was ultimately killed. And yet, as you read about Jesus in the books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s Gospels, He kind of did what those pelican did. Time and again, He drew away into a quiet place to pray, away from the crowds, away from other people, away from everything and then He’d come out and ride the storm. He’d deal with the misunderstanding and the criticisms with such grace, such wisdom so wonderfully. And then He’d go back and pray again. Whoever we are, wherever we are in our spiritual journey, I think we have something to learn from what Isaiah was talking about. He said, "If we go and wait on God – if we do what those pelicans did or what Jesus did, go into that safe harbour (that harbour of some time with God), sitting in His presence just waiting, just taking our problems and resting them on Him – we can then come out around the headland and rise up into the storm, and ride the storm." I love Isaiah’s words, "Even youths will grow weary and faint" (I know what that was like) “and the young will fall exhausted”, (boy, I know what that was like) “but those who wait on God will renew their strength.” It’s like God fills you up again. It’s like we’re giving out all the time in life, in relationships at work at home we’re giving out. But when we come and rest in God’s presence, He renews our strengths. He refreshes us, He does something to us that no one else can do because He’s God. And Isaiah says, "They’ll rise up with wings like eagles, they’ll run and not be weary, they’ll walk and not faint they’ll ride the storm, they’ll enjoy their lives." If God’s God, don’t you think He means us to enjoy our life? God has this gift to give us, this love, this energy, this renewal, this strength. So that we can live the lives that He intended, so we can soar like eagles, so we can do the things that God made us to do. Those who wait on God will renew their strength. They’ll rise up with wings like eagles!
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Come to Me // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 3
11/19/2025
Come to Me // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 3
Have you ever noticed that people are busy racing around looking after Number One? Very few of them ever stop to give us a hand. In fact, when someone does, it can be so refreshing. In this clamorous, competitive world that we live in (you know what I’m talking about), this world where everybody seems to be looking after number one as their priority one, two and three in life. In that kind of world, it seems so rare that we meet someone who, I don’t know, who just comes out of the wood work out of nowhere to help us, to lighten our load, to open doors. Not because of what they can get out of it, but just because they see our need. In fact on the rare occasion that somebody just blesses us like that, out of the blue, it’s almost startling. I don’t know about you, but with me when someone these days just gives me a leg up – for no other reason than the fact that I need a leg up, well, that speaks so deeply to my heart. It motivates me, it encourages me. It’s just so refreshing. I was in the UK recently at a conference, and I don’t know how much time you’ve spent at conferences. This happened to be a radio conference, a Christian Radio conference. And conferences are not only about going and listening to the speakers and learning (I did that and it was great). But they’re also about building relationships, networking, talking to people during the breaks, finding out about what other people are doing, making connections, meeting people and getting to know them. And actually three days at a conference is really hard work. It’s great opportunity, but it’s hard work. I met so many people at this conference, probably seventy or eighty different people (at some stage). But there were two that really stood out for me. One of them was called, Andrew; he is a New Zealander, a 'Kiwi' as we call them. The other one, Joseph, a young African man. Andrew was interesting. He works in the UK. He’s a really senior guy with a radio network. And in the world's eye, in my eyes (well you know), he’s an important person. He’s an executive in a large radio network and yet somehow this Andrew made a point of connecting with me, of just encouraging me. We spent an hour and a half together. And he shared what was on his heart, what was his vision for his radio network, and he listened to me and after the meeting when we went our different ways. Andrew acted and because of him and because of what he did, one of our radio programs is now heard right across Europe just because Andrew was there and we connected. The other one was this young man, Joseph. Joseph heads up a radio school and a media organisation in South Africa. I was really keen to meet his boss while I was at the conference. I wanted to connect with her and discuss some things, but she was really busy. She was talking for most of the conference, she was leading the television sessions and so we just couldn’t connect. One morning (the last morning of the conference), Joseph and I ended up sitting next to one another at the breakfast table. I shared with him what I wanted to share with his boss, and he was so encouraging, so enthusiastic. He went back home to Africa (in Cape Town where he lives) and he sent me an email saying, “I really loved what we where talking about, I’m here for you, I’m here to make connections in Africa for you.” The guy follows me up; we talk regularly over the internet. I mean what wonderful people – Andrew and Joseph are. In contrast, so many of the other people that I met at the conference – everybody that I met, I got their business card and sent them an email and said, “It was great to catch up with you, nice to meet you.” You know some of the people didn’t even respond to that email! It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and yet Andrew and Joseph were the sort of people that said, “Look, come to me. Let me listen to you, let me help you. I’ll be there for you, I’ll push with you." Wow! Those guys really stood out head and shoulders above the other people. That doesn’t mean there weren’t other people that where were just as clever or more talented than Andrew and Joseph. The point was that these two young men decided to connect with me and to help me, to serve me. Jesus, 2000 years ago said: If you’re carrying a heavy load come to me and I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, learn from me and you’ll see I’m genuine. I’m humble of heart and with me you’ll find rest for your souls, because my yoke’s easy, my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30) This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at our need to have times of refreshing. It’s fantastic to get away from the grind and go on holiday. As I said the other day, my wife, Jacqui and I are just about to go and do that. To have some time on a place called, Lord Howe Island, which is the most beautiful and idyllic setting. We need that. But we can’t spend our lives trying to escape from reality, always wishing that we could run away. I believe we need times of refreshing right in the middle of life. We have this deep need for rest and for peace, for refreshment. On the other hand, over 70% of people (at least) in the West believe in God. And yet somehow, a lot of us never make that connection between this deep need for rest and for peace, and for renewal and for refreshment; and the belief that we have in this person Jesus, this God who sent his Son to die for us. For Jesus the two aren’t separate. For Him, He came to make a difference in our lives and with this statement, “If you carrying a heavy burden come to. Come to me and I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke and learn from me and you’ll see I’m gentle. I’m humble and with me, you’ll find rest for your souls.” And Jesus is connecting this beautiful reality of God with the difficulties and the trials and the realities of what we go through in life. Okay, He said that 2000 years ago and the world was a slower place. It didn’t have all the pressure and the speed and the hype and the travel and the entertainment gizmos that we do today. But they had their burdens. They had their stresses. They had their heavy loads – they live in an occupied territory. The Romans were brutal, sometimes in the way that they administered their form of justice. They lived a subsistence lifestyle; food, money, famine, poverty. You know, it turns out that the burdens in life – heavy loads – are timeless. They're global, they exist right around the world. It doesn’t matter what our version, our brand of burden happens to be, like Andrew and Joseph in my life just a couple of months ago, who were so real and so practical and so decent and so loving. Jesus said, “Come to me, come to me and let me help you. Let me give you some rest. Let me give you a leg up.” The picture of the yoke, He says, “Take my yoke upon you.” Here’s the picture, the picture is of two beasts of burden, two bullocks dragging forward a cart and Jesus says, “Look, come take my yoke. I’ll be on the other side. Let’s join together with this yoke and I’ll push in the same direction as you.” And when we do that, Jesus said that when we join in the same yoke, we’ll discover that He can teach us some stuff. You know (traditionally), in that day when there was a new beast of burden being trained, they would yoke that beast with a beast that had been doing it a long time – with an experienced steady, strong bullock. And Jesus is saying, “Come on, I'll be on the other side of this yoke. That load that you’re dragging forward, let me give you a hand. Let me push for you too. And you’ll find some rests as you and I are yoked together, shoulder-to-shoulder and we experience one another in life. You’ll find rest for your soul.” You know something, I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that Andrew and Joseph reached out to help me because these are both men who have a relationship with Jesus. And I believe that Jesus brought them to me and that through them He has helped me It’s awesome!
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Be Still and Know // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 2
11/18/2025
Be Still and Know // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 2
The last thing that most of us suffer from is a lack of information – the whole world is screaming for our attention. Sometimes, the quiet assurance that comes from a bit of peace and quiet just eludes us. Sometimes, it feels like we live in our world where everything and everybody seems to be screaming for our attention. Take advertising – armies of creative people who think up new, (often), very clever ways of getting you and me to buy their client’s products. The supermarket where Jacqui and I go shopping has large advertising stickers glued to the floor in some of the shopping aisles. So many people have the TV blaring every minute of every waking hour. So many people go to work, lurch from one meeting to another, without a break, without time to stop and reflect. Our senses are being bombarded with thousands of messages and signals and … ideas and requests and directions, EVERY DAY! And without knowing it, it ends up being a huge weight that we carry around. No wonder so many people are so exhausted. If only we can only put the weight down and take a break for a while. And then keep on going. It’s true, isn’t it? The more that technology – like phones and then mobile phones and PCs and internet, TVs, DVDs and radio, all that stuff has made entertainment and information so accessible – the more we become slaves to them. The more the cars replace public transport; we do this point to point rushing thing instead of, I don’t know, standing waiting for a bus for 5 or ten minutes at the bus stop. There is some real upsides to all of those things. I mean I love the fact that I can watch T.V. and people can contact me on my mobile phone, it’s so convenient. But we’ve lost something … we’ve lost the time. I don’t know, just to stop and think, to rest the senses, to rest the mind, to rest the spirit, to reflect, to imagine, to dream. And the problem with so much of the stuff that we take in as entertainment or communication, a lot of it is really negative. You watch the news at night and 95% of the news is pretty negative. A lot of it is really frivolous (in sitcoms) on TV at night. Well, there’s nothing wrong with one sitcom, but if 70% of our entertainment is a diet of sitcoms, is it any wonder that people feel empty? That there is shallowness, that there is something missing? Some of the stuff that comes across as fact or entertainment, to put it bluntly, is downright destructive. It’s like eating bad food or sweets all the time. Now that’s our condition, that’s what’s going on. But there’s a flip side. So many people, so many of us believe in God. Surveys in the west say, 70+% believe in God. But I wonder whether it’s a real relationship, a real thing in life. Or whether for a lot of people, it’s a kind of, (I don’t know), a pie in the sky, when I die type – of distant sort of faith thing. And we have this belief or this faith, on the one hand. And we have this whole need for rest and for peace and for joy and for wholeness, on the other. But a lot of people just never connect those two things. Never occurs to sometimes ask, to connect those two things in life. One of the things I love about the Hebrew culture is that they think and they speak in pictures. A few thousand years ago, there was a little passage written in book of Psalms in the Bible, Psalm 46. And the writer wrote something like this: Even when the earth is shaking and the mountains are falling into the sea. Even though the waters are roaring and foaming. Even though the nations are in uproar and the kingdoms are tottering. Even in the middle of all that, God has something to say. The beautiful picture, and the Hebrew nation, those people were not a sea fearing people. So the idea of mountains falling into the ocean and waters roaring and foaming, well, that was a real fear – turmoil thing. And the writer says, “In the middle of all the fear and turmoil that life brings, God has something to say with a voice that melts that all away.” It is like a river of gladness running through a city, with a power that stops wars and calms oceans. God has something to say into that condition and it’s this … “Be still and know that I am God.” In that big cacophony of noise that we call life – where everyone is screaming at us and yelling at us. And things are happening and mountains are falling into the ocean, and people are criticising us and the entertainment is blaring at us, in the middle of all of that … a still, small, powerful voice, whispers into our hearts with unmistakable power ... “Be still and know that I am God. Just stop and pause for a minute. And in the depths of your soul, right, right, deep down where you live, know that despite all the turmoil that you see around you, I am God and I am in control. I am here. I am with you. And I have the power to bring you peace.” With that one small statement, God connects one of our deepest needs – the need for peace, for quiet, for assurance – with the spiritual reality of who He is ... of his love and his power. It seems so crazy to me that there is so many people who believe in God, who believe in Jesus and their idea is that, you kind of go to church on a Sunday and that’s it. You worship God in a sacred zone and that’s it. But that’s not in the Bible, that not what God says, that’s not what Jesus was talking about … “Be still and know that I am God." So often when the nations are raging around us, when people are raging, when things are difficult, when the babies crying, when there is tension in our relationships … we focus on those circumstances. That’s all we can see. It’s the stress, it’s the pain, it’s the fear, it’s the hurt and we react to them. Because we see the mountains falling into the sea, because we see the oceans roaring and foaming. And God says in the middle of that, “Be still and let me speak to you, just in that little space and Know that I am God.” In practice, I think that comes out in two parts. The first is carving out some time with God everyday to connect with him and that’s a decision. It’s your time. It’s your space. But it can be such a foundation, such a rock; to pray, listen and look. And then we go and live life out there. And the stuff that people and life throws at us, well, in the middle of all that we can experience, we can taste a peace that surpasses all understanding. A peace that guards our hearts and our minds because we know who God is in Jesus. And my experience has been that in situations where (by rights), I shouldn’t have any peace, I look at it and I have the deepest peace and sense of security. Because earlier on in the day, in the morning (when it was still and calm and everyone was asleep), I took time to be still, to rest my spirit and my mind, my heart and my soul in God’s hands. And then sometimes during the day when it is difficult, or I’m having a tough meeting; I just glance towards God (just a split second). I grab some stillness in a stressful moment. And in my soul, in my heart, somewhere I look at God and I get this quiet assurance, “Be still and just know that I am God. Just know that I am with you.” Or I’m riding the bus into the city, or I just take a break and go for a short walk, or whatever ... a quick glance at Jesus, a pause, a look, a smile in the soul … God wants us to know something … “Be still, be still and know that I am God.”
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Now's the Time // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 1
11/17/2025
Now's the Time // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 1
Getting some balance back in our lives is a challenge for a lot of people. Either we’re doing too much or not enough and somehow, life’s out of kilter. What we need is some refreshment for our souls. I don't know about you but one of the things that many people struggle with is getting a sense of balance in their lives. Either life's just so crazy and hectic that we seem to be burning the candle at both ends and eventually we burn out or for other people life's really, really quiet, lonely perhaps. All lifestyle magazines push this whole "life balance" thing, great cooking, meals with friends, exotic holidays, happy families. And then you go and look at that stuff and go, "hang on a minute, my life doesn't look like that" and we feel even worse. What we all need at some point, in fact daily I think, is a time of refreshing, you know to renew our strength, to lift us up, to breath some joy into our souls. My wife Jacqui and I, we're a bit like that, we're working really hard at the moment and just the last few months have been really tough from a ministry and a work perspective. Now on the one hand it's a real joy and a pleasure. We get to work together, we get to do something that touches peoples lives and it's great. But when you're working long and hard, day after day after day, it takes it's toll doesn't it? In a sense ministry should be easy, well in a sense it is. So often I'm really tired. And in fact as I was preparing for today, to share this message with you, I was really tired. I was overseas last week in the USA so the time difference was knocking me around and yet God put a real holy ease, He was there. He blessed me and He just made it work for me. But the flip side of that is running a ministry, it's a tough gig. There's fundraising and managing staff and producing content and I'm writing a book at the moment and reporting to the board. All of these things that people don't see and yet they're essential to doing what it is that I do. You have the same, you have things in your life that people see and there's a whole bunch of other things that they don't see but that are grinding, that are hard work sometimes and so Jacqui and I said, "Look it's really time for a break". Now every now and then, maybe two or three times a year, we grab a weekend away somewhere just to have a rest. But we thought, "no, we really need a break". So just recently we booked a holiday in a place called, Lord Howe Island. If you haven't heard of Lord Howe it's a beautiful island about two hours flight from Sydney in Australia. It's world heritage listed, only 250 visitors are allowed on the island at once. There are no theme parks or theatres or tacky pinball parlours. It's a world heritage listed spectacular island. Soaring mountains, (I think the mountains soars six thousand feet up out of the ocean bed), beautiful beaches, virgin forests, lagoons. It's hard to think of a more, well idyllic setting and I have to tell you something, we are really looking forward to it. There's something about rest and beauty, a sense of anticipation, a change in scenery, getting away. We all yearn for that and there’s nothing wrong with that. You bring rest and real beauty together and you know, it just refreshes the soul. It brings us back to life. It does something that renews us inside. And if we have a busy life, we actually need to plan those things. We need to decide to set aside the time, to invest the dollars and go and have a holiday and maybe if we have a quiet, lonely life, "I won't go on my own, it's not worth it", what rubbish. Maybe if you're in that camp you just need some motivation. When I was coming back from America last week I flew via Tahiti. It was just the airfare I was able to get and I was sitting next to a woman between Los Angeles and Tahiti and she was going to Tahiti on her own. and she said, "Look, I've been working hard. I've been really busy and I've just decided to take a holiday and have a rest". Good on her, I think that's what we all need to do at some point. This week on A Different Perspective we're looking at this whole issue of refreshing. We all need times of refreshing so we're going to look at it over the next few days, just from different angles, different perspectives. It's great to plan a holiday but what about refreshment right in the middle of life. I mean in the daily cut and thrust, in the grind, in the every day, here and now. If we spend all of our time looking forward to escaping, "I hate my job, I hate the grind…" Here's a thought, if God is God, if God put us here, shouldn't day to day life be, I don't know, something to enjoy? I don't mean a 24x7 cocktail party, that’s not realistic, life’s not like that. It's not all bubbly and fruity and wonderful every day. But as we live our life through our family, through our responsibilities, through our work, through our recreation, shouldn't there be, I don't know, a deep sense of joy and satisfaction? I often get to Friday nights and Friday night is a time I really enjoy because I know I have the whole weekend ahead of me. And often I'm really tired on Friday nights. But Friday nights are time for me. Well it's a joyous tired. It's a happy tired. It's a tired looking back on the week saying, "I had a great time even though it was hard work and there were some challenges." I think that's right, I think God wants us to enjoy the lives that He's given us but it does come down to balance. If we're always giving out, you know we get up in the morning, we get the kids off to school, we engage with the family, we deal with issues and problems. We go to work, to school, to home, we're giving out, we're always delivering. Where's the inflow? So many people watch television every night and they wonder why they're empty. So many people are running on empty. The human eye is such an interesting organ. I know a little bit about the eye because I suffer from glaucoma which is a condition that is very treatable as long as it's been diagnosed. And the whole issue of glaucoma is that there has to be a right inflow and outflow of fluids through the eye. The problem with glaucoma is often the outflow is blocked up so the pressure builds up in the eye and that causes ultimately, you to go blind as the optic nerve at the back of the eye is damaged. But the problem with a lot of us is there is a lot of outflow, we're delivering but there's no inflow. There's nothing that's coming in that makes us healthy, that fills us up. Let me introduce you to a man called, Luke. Luke is a Doctor; Luke was a physician in the first century. Luke wrote two fairly long books in the New Testament, the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. In fact Luke has written more of the New Testament than any other writer. In the book of Acts which is the story after Jesus ascended to heaven, of over about twenty to twenty five years of all that the Apostles, Paul and Peter and John, all that they did and all that God did through them. That's the story of the book of Acts. In the third chapter of Acts, in verse 20, the physician, the Doctor Luke writes this. Times of refreshing come from the presence of God. Maybe you already know that. Maybe in your head you know that but sometimes we can forget it in our hearts. And maybe for you it's a totally unexpected concept but something that we all discover, if we'd only spend some time quietly in Gods presence. For me it's a half an hour, somewhere between a half and hour and sixty minutes in the morning that I spend with God, praying and reading and sitting and thinking and just listening to what God has to say into my life. It's my daily "Lord Howe Island"; it's my daily "holiday". It's the beauty of God and its mental and spiritual rest. It’s food for my soul. It's a time that I really, really look forward to. I believe that Luke was right, there are times of refreshing that come from the presence of God. Just spending time with Him, it's not a chore. For me, spending time with God is like, well it's like going on a holiday every morning.
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The Skilled Surgeon // The Spirit and The Word, Part 5
11/14/2025
The Skilled Surgeon // The Spirit and The Word, Part 5
It’s amazing how thoroughly we manage to delude ourselves about our own failings and weaknesses. We’re actually pretty darned good at it. But God is a skilful surgeon capable of performing radical surgery. This week on the program, we've been looking at intimacy with God through His Spirit and His Word. And when you think about it, those are the two things of Himself that He has left here on this planet for you and me. His Spirit – God Himself, with a promise that if we believe in Jesus, He will make His home in us, dwell in us when we put our faith in Him. And His word – the Bible. I so often see people cringe when I mention that book. But as we've been exploring this week, this is the most amazing and awesome love letter God’s left here for you and for me. Through His Spirit (we open that book), He speaks to us in the most direct and intimate and extraordinary way. And sometimes when we open that book and read it through His Spirit, it's like holding up a mirror to who we are. And I don't know about you but sometimes I don't actually like what I see in that mirror. Let's not kid ourselves. When things aren't going well, when we're under pressure, we blame everyone else. He did this; she said that; if he hadn't done this, I wouldn't have blown up in his face, you know the sort of stuff. It's amazing how much more quickly we'll forgive ourselves than we forgive other people. We are so quick to rationalise our own failures and yet to blame others for theirs and even ours. And the longer we delude ourselves about the things that we're doing wrong or our bad character traits or our bad habits or our anger or our fear or our insecurities, the more they're going to ruin not only our lives but also the lives of people around us. There's a great passage in Hebrews in the New Testament. The book of Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, says this: The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides the soul from the spirit, the joints from the marrow. It's able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and before God no creature is hidden but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. Boy, that's bad news isn't it? Who wants to read God’s word? Sharper than any two-edged sword, it pierces, it divides the spirit from the soul, the joints from the marrow, it judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. No, thanks. I'll give that a miss, I think. I'll pass. But it's only bad news if we want to hang on to the bad stuff. If you or I want to hang on to our dishonesty, our critical spirit, our nasty attitudes or whatever, then this bit about God’s word is bad news. But if we want to be set free from this stuff, it's fantastic news. In other words, we read God’s word and it's like a mirror, it judges the intentions of the heart. It lays everything bare, it lays everything open. We can see in there where our intentions are wrong – where the way we think is wrong or hurting us or hurting other people and it happens to me all the time. When we let God do that, when we go to God’s word and open it up and say, "Dear Holy Spirit, you wrote this thing. Will you now open it up for me, will you now hold it up, will you pour into my heart, will you show me who I am through your word”? When we let God hold His mirror up to our faces it changes us. Let me give you an example …there’s a story about a woman caught in adultery. And the religious leaders whip up the crowd and they drag her out in front of Jesus for a good old-fashioned stoning. And it wasn't because of what she did; they were trying to trick Him. Jewish religious law prescribed that a person caught in adultery should be stoned to death. But Roman law, (remember at this point in the first century Rome had occupied the land of Israel), Roman law said, they weren't allowed to do that anymore. So whichever way Jesus answered, He'd lose. So Jesus pauses and squats down and doodles in the sand. Then He looks everyone in the eye, one by one, and He says: Whichever of you has never sinned, you pick up the first stone, you cast the first stone. (John 8:7) And one by one they all drift away. They all go embarrassed because they know that none of them can say that they have never sinned. And He's left alone with her and He says: "Woman, is there no-one left to condemn you?" And she says, "No-one sir.’ And He says, ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go, go and sin no more." (John 8:10-11) That is brilliant isn't it? But I remember reading that and it was as though God’s spirit was holding a mirror up to my face. God's spirit spoke to me and said, "You know Berni, the way you think, the way you act, you would have been one of the people in that crowd." And it was true ... I was so judgemental, I was so critical, I was so ready to jump down peoples’ throats and tell them what they were doing wrong. And here I was reading God’s word and through this beautiful story of Jesus' wisdom and the way He protected this woman and yet He dealt with her sin. The spirit of God said to me, "Berni, there's something I want to change in you." My favourite saying used to be, "It's so hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." And the Holy Spirit took that and said, "Now I'm going to do something in you”. And He really challenged me. God used that story. And He's still using that scripture in my heart and in my life today, and He's done a radical work. I used to be so judgemental, and now other people’s weaknesses and failures (by and large), I just let them go. And the more I've been able to do that (not in my own strength but because I opened the Bible and read the story and the Spirit of God did this work in me), you know what's happened? He set me free … from me! God is good. God through His word and His Spirit give us the power to change. That's what God's word does and that's what God does through it, through His Holy Spirit. He lifts the words off the page. He breathes them into our hearts and into our souls and into our spirits. He makes things happen inside us. He changes us in a way that we could never even begin to contemplate. It's not just about believing in Jesus, but about letting Him change us. Jesus said, “I have come to set the captives free." That's you and me He's talking about day by day. For me, that wouldn't have happened thus far. And it wouldn't still be happening if I wasn't spending time in His Word, letting His Spirit breath His life into me. Awesome stuff – God’s plan! God’s Word is sharper than any two-edged sword. And He is the skilful surgeon who cuts out just as much as He needs to – through His word and His spirit – and leaves us healthy and whole and free. Pretty good plan, huh? God’s Word … God’s Spirit … God’s way.
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Understanding the Letter // The Spirit and The Word, Part 4
11/13/2025
Understanding the Letter // The Spirit and The Word, Part 4
Once people get over the fact that the Bible isn’t a bunch of do’s and don’ts, the biggest thing that stops them from reading it is that it doesn’t makes sense. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is, I guess, just being here with you today and knowing that through our time we've spent together (somehow), God's used that time to draw you closer to Him. Life's too short to live it without a passionate and a dynamic and a real and a beautiful relationship with Jesus. Some people may scoff at that. But deep down – right deep down in our spirit – we all hunger for God to touch us, for God to fill us, to give us His peace and His joy and His abundant life. And what's so sad for me is to see people living their lives as though all of God's blessing, as though God Himself is somehow a million miles away. When all along, He's closer, closer than even their deepest secrets of their hearts. This week on the program, we're looking at intimacy with God through His spirit and through His word. People make a mistake and say, "God is all about a bunch of rules and it's all about a bunch of doctrine and logic and so I've got to get all this head knowledge to know God." And hey, knowing God's word is fabulous. I make a living out of doing that. I try and let God use me to bless you by doing that. But there's more … there's God’s Holy Spirit. If I just pick up His Bible and read it as a bunch of words and a bunch of rules and don't let God’s Spirit work in me and lift the words off the page and put them into my heart, what I end up with is some sort of legalistic – religiously thing. Here, you and I are in the world that God created. Jesus in the flesh has been here and gone, He's promised to come back. But in the mean time God has actually left two things of Himself behind. Now sure, the world and the universe and all that’s in it are God's but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the two things of God Himself that He's left here for us, here and now. What are they? The first is His Spirit, the promise of Jesus to His disciples and to you and to me (here and now) is to pour His Spirit out on us, to come and dwell in us. Through His Spirit God has left behind God Himself, the Spirit of God. And the second thing that God has left behind of Himself is His word, the Bible. Now many people cringe at that. But His word is His love letter to us, His story, His promises, His wisdom, His grace. And it's so sad to see people want more of God, to hunger for Him, to thirst for Him and they have a Bible on a shelf or in a cupboard somewhere and it's gathering dust. I often meet people like that and they see my enthusiasm for God, or they hear it in my voice and they say, "I wish I had that." No! I'm nothing special. In my own way, I'm just like you. Where do you get that real relationship with God that just bubbles over? And so I say to them, "When was the last time you read your Bible?" Hush … silence. The Bible (in my neck of the woods) is looked at with mistrust and negative connotations, fundamentalism, conservatism. There are more 'isms' poked at the Bible that we could poke a stick at. And so I say to people, "If God wrote you a love letter, wouldn't you want to read it?" Well, He did and it's called the Bible. "Yeah well, I don't understand the Bible. The Bible's hard to read. It's all over the place, who's Ephraim, what was Babylon all about? And who was Paul? And why did Jesus tell a story about a Samaritan? None of it makes sense to me so I just gave up. It was too hard." I understand that … so I'm going to share just four practical tips with you that anyone can implement and do in their lives to read God’s love letter. And the first one is – to pray in the Spirit. The Bible says of itself that the Holy Spirit inspired every word that it contains. If the Holy Spirit inspired and wrote the thing through men and women, then the Holy Spirit can open it up and speak it into your heart and into my heart. And I tell you the truth, I never open that book without first asking Him, the Holy Spirit, to open it up for me. Dear Holy Spirit, I'm about to read your word, and I need you to open it up. And I need you to lift the words off the page. And I need you to feed them into my spirit because if they're just words, they're useless. But these are God’s words and God I need you to feed me with your word. That’s the first thing, to pray in the spirit to ask God himself to open the book for you. The second one is nowhere near as spiritual – get a Bible dictionary. What's that? You can get a Bible dictionary that’s thin and small paperback. You can get one that's 27 volumes. I've got one that's 27 volumes but I've also got one that's one volume and it's called, "The Holman Bible Dictionary". And I just had a look online and it's under $50.00 or less than a pair of shoes. And it has pictures and diagrams and maps so when you come to read about Ephraim you can read two paragraphs and you know who or what Ephraim is. And when you come to read about Samaria or the Temple or David or Ruth, you can go a look those people up or those places up and just in a short time, all of a sudden we know what it's talking about. A Bible dictionary is a wonderful tool. As I said I use the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. It's under fifty bucks and there are stacks of them online. You can go to . It has a whole bunch of Bible dictionaries online to help explain things and issues and concepts that we may not understand because the Bible was written in different times and different cultures. Pray in the spirit, get a Bible dictionary. The third one, – get a Bible translation that makes sense to you. People sometimes ask me, "What's the best translation? Which one should I have?" The one that you'll read is my answer. I have several. I love the New International Version. I love the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version). I love the Contemporary English Version. I love The Message By Eugene Petersen, I love that, it's really contemporary. So I have a few, I rely on the NRSV as my favourite translation but hey, that's me. It may not work for you. You may prefer an NIV. And one of the things that we can do is get a study Bible. A study Bible has an explanation about each book and what the context was that it was written in … about the author, it explains situations and has word references and maps and cross-references. They're really helpful. Get a Bible translation that makes sense to you. And the fourth one is – get serious, do this every day. Just twenty minutes, some prayer time, reading God’s word, listening to Him, praying again. Read it through book by book. We have on our website www.christianityworks.com some 'read me' plans. You can read from beginning to end. You can read in chronological sequence, you can read the Old Testament, the New Testament in parallel. Go to our website www.christianityworks.com and have a look at the Bible 'read me' plans. Come on – get serious! This is God wanting to talk to you. Let me ask you a question, are you hungry for God? Are you thirsty for God? Do you want to be filled with His Spirit? Well, get serious! Open His love letter and enjoy.
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Love Letter from God // The Spirit and The Word, Part 3
11/12/2025
Love Letter from God // The Spirit and The Word, Part 3
When you think about it God’s gone to amazing lengths to preserve His love letter to us down through the centuries. You know the Bible. Yeah – that’s it – His love letter. Sadly, these days we tend to send and receive very few letters. I mean personal letters, letters of friendship, and letters of love. There's something about receiving a personal letter in the mail. It's so much better than email, it has a stamp and a post-mark and you have to open it and then you sit down with a cup of tea and you read it. That friend who wrote it, you can see their handwriting, it's so personal, it's so wonderful! So much better than all the emails that flood in my in-tray. I wonder if you can ever remember receiving love letters. Well, what if we received a love letter that was thousands of years old, written by God himself and preserved down through the ages just for you, just for me, what if? That's what the Bible is; it's a love letter from God (sixty-six different books). Some of them stories, some of them songs and poems, some of them letters written to different groups of people at different times. Each one of them, written by someone that God handpicked – someone in whom He breathed His Spirit, someone to whom God spoke and was just the right person at the right time – this someone who listened to God and wrote one of the books, one of the sixty-six. Paul, the Apostle, wrote letters to Churches while he was in a dungeon on death row. Matthew and Mark and Luke and John wrote the four Gospels to different groups of people to tell them about Jesus. And God preserved them all over thousands of years from the first to the last with an incredible degree of historical accuracy. Before the printing press they were copied out by hand, by people called scribes. You know how thick a Bible is; it's a pretty big book. And you can imagine hundreds and thousands of scribes copying the Bible over and over and over again. It wasn't until the 30th of September 1452 that Johan Gutenberg’s printing press published the first book on mass and that book was the Bible. Now, these days, when we look at all those different copies and translations and manuscripts there are almost no discrepancies in the hand copies and any that there are there are really minor and not very important. The Bible is this vast, amazing, confusing book, and story that begins right at the beginning with God creating the heavens and the earth. And tracks through the story of Israel in Egypt and their departure through the Red Sea and their forty years in the desert, into the promised land and all the turmoil and war, the exile and the return. And there are stories of people, Moses and David and Ruth and Esther and Paul and Timothy. And it's an account of God's Son, Jesus. And of the fledgling Church and the Book of Acts, the letters of Paul and Peter and John and others. This amazing array of God's stories spread over thousands of years, preserved for thousands of years more, now here, in your hand, in my hand to read. God’s amazing love letter! Not a text-book, not a theological text, not a book of dry rules, not a book of dot points – but of stories and poems and people in pain and agony and fear, crying out to God. And people praising God and worshipping God, seeing God’s hand in delivering them and protecting them. God's a heartbeat through it all, loving them. God's word's there for you and me, God's story there for you and me. God crying out through it all, ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ God's promises, God's power, God's mercy, God's wisdom all laid out in this vast story. This huge canvas which is a story of God touching people. It's the story of God revealing Himself. It's history; His story and not in a dry text, not just in words but through His Spirit. Every part of the Bible was inspired by God’s Spirit. If we open that book and just read the words, we miss the point. But if we approach this love letter in prayer, in the Spirit of God and say, "God open it up to me. God, as I open it up speak to me today." The most awesome amazing spiritual reality happens as God pours His love and His spirit out through those pages into our hearts and our lives. People who stare at the Bible as some fundamentalist doctorial statement like Karl Marx's communist manifesto or Hitler's Mein Kampf, you miss the point or people who call themselves Christians who have a Bible or two or three or four that they never open, just collects dust. It's too hard to read or hard to understand, we miss the point. God's written a love letter. God’s taken men and women and told their story and had them write it down and preserved it and put it in our hands to tell us about His love for us, “I love you.” God is speaking to someone today; I believe that God today is crying out to you, reaching out from His heart into your heart saying, "I love you, read my love letter." Can I ask you a question? Do you want to know that love, deep in your spirit every minute of every day? Do you want to live through the turbulent and difficult and uncertain days knowing the promises of God in your spirit? Do want to have so much of that love in you that you can't contain it? That His love and His spirit just overflows from you into the lives of others? Are you so hungry for God that you ache? Are you so thirsty and parched and dry that you just have to drink? Then pick up His love letter for yourself, pray, "Lord, where do you want me to begin?" Follow His lead, follow His spirit. "Lord, now show me, now speak to me, now feed me because I need you." And He will show up and in those words of His love letter, you and I will experience and know and hear Him through His spirit. Father, I pray for each one of us today, pour your Spirit into us, give us a passion to open that love letter. And as we do, as we read the words, lift them up off the page and speak them into our hearts. Bring life, bring refreshing, bring peace, bring joy in Jesus Christ’s name, we ask. Amen.
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The Law of the Spirit // The Spirit and The Word, Part 2
11/11/2025
The Law of the Spirit // The Spirit and The Word, Part 2
No matter how much we want to believe that God is a God of grace, we all at some point end up living life as though He’s a God of rules……the law of His Spirit and life can seem a long way off. When we talk about God, well that name "God" means so many different things to so many different people. Yesterday on the program, we looked at the notion that God is kind of a bunch of rules and sometimes people want to reduce Him down to being just that but that's not it. If God's a bunch of rules, then He's bad news not good news. It's an easy thing to do and some people do it, to pick up the Bible and read it as though it was a book of rules. And that’s where people get this sort of Bible bashing, accusing, condemnatory form of religion. But that's not it. Jesus said: "I've come to set you free and if I set you free’ said Jesus, ‘then you're really free." (John 8:36) So how do we make sense of all that? If we read this book, the Bible, as the letter of the law then it's full of condemnation. But what about the spirit of the law? What does God mean by it all? And what about the law of the Spirit, which is what the Apostle Paul talks about? Is there really freedom in all of this? The way I try to understand that is looking at the three different ways that we can be a parent. To me there are three models: The first model is the model of being the tyrant dictator. I'm the dad or I'm the mum and these are the rules of the house. And if you don't like it, go and live somewhere else. It's rigid, it's inflexible, it's dictatorial and it doesn't work. We can force kids, I guess, to comply with rules but we can end up losing their hearts. We lose the relationship, we lose what it means to be a mum and a dad and a family. So that's one model, the tyrant dictator where being a parent is all about enforcing rules. At the other end of the scale, the second model is what I call the anarchistic model. No rules, anything goes. Messy room – fine. Stay up late – fine. Let the boyfriend or the girlfriend sleep over in the same room – fine. Smoke, drink, get drunk, be rude, be disrespectful, be lazy – fine. And that’s the model where the parents abdicate responsibility, where there are no rules. Is that good for our kids? Is it a fun way to live as a family? The third model is the model that God always planned, the model of being a good parent. It's about love and relationship and affirming our kids, and caring for them, and honouring them, and respecting them. But at the same time setting some boundaries. Setting some rights and wrongs, saying, "No, in this house there are some rules". And letting them bump into those rules and live the consequences of bumping into those rules. Under those circumstances home is a place to live and to love and to learn. It's a place where it's okay to make mistakes and live out the consequences and still be forgiven and held and affirmed and nurtured. So the three models: the tyrant dictator, the anarchistic model and the good parent model. Which one makes sense? No one would advocate totalitarianism, no one would advocate anarchy, and it’s pretty obvious, really. So why do we think that God is any different? Why do we say God is a dictator, God is a bunch of rules? It's easy to look at God that way but to do that is to miss the point. On the other hand, people try and see Him as a god of no rules, as a god who's being a sugar daddy and that's misses the point too. God's a good dad. God’s a good parent, one that loves and wants to be in relationship with us, and wants to affirm us, and care for us, and honour us, and respect us. But still set boundaries of right and wrong. God's a good dad. And that's what the Apostle Paul’s says when he writes: There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because the Law of the Spirit of life in Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8: 1-2) There's no condemnation because God has replaced the rules of law and said, “It's different now in Jesus because in Jesus you're one of my kids. In Jesus you're one of my family and I want to breathe my spirit of life into you. I want you to know that I honour and respect you and care for you." And in that relationship you get to grow because God did what the law, what a bunch of rules couldn't do – by sending His Son as a man to pay for sin on the cross. He did away with sin through Jesus so that the just requirements of the rules and the law could be met. And then He said, “Now that you're forgiven, walk in the Spirit. Here, let me breathe my Holy Spirit into you." Says God, "Be one of my kids." There’s no condemnation because the law that God wants now is the law of the Spirit, the law of life, the law of being set free from rules and regulations dominating our lives. The law that says, "Jesus paid for our failures, we're forgiven." God’s approach is the good dad model, not the tyrant, not to say there are no rules. God's a god that's a good dad. He's wiped the slate clean. I don't know whether you have stopped to let that sink in. But in Jesus, He's taken all our failures and all our sins and every mistake we've made, are making and will ever make. And He's wiped the slate clean and said, "There's a different law. There's a new law, there's a law of my Spirit of life and goodness and relationship with me." How does that work? You know when we have kids who are teenagers and they might be lazy, or they might be disrespectful, or they might be doing something wrong, or they mightn't be working hard enough at school. And when we put boundaries in place and part of that is, if they step over the boundary, there are consequences and there's punishment. It's painful for a while but when we accompany those boundaries with love they respond and they grow. It's amazing how relationship with them, honouring them, kindness, and gentleness affects them and they grow and they actually want to please. God knows that, that's what we're like, that's how He made us and that is why He forgives us and brings life and love rather than rules and regulations. Further down in that passage we just read, in Romans chapter 8, He says, For all who are lead by the Spirit of God are kids of God. You didn't receive a spirit of slavery and fear but a spirit of adoption so that we can cry out, "Dad". (Romans 8:14) God’s word, the Bible, does set some boundaries; don't lie, don't steal, don't talk behind people’s backs, and don’t yell at people. Don't get angry with them and let that anger fester. Don't be critical. But when you look at those boundaries, you look at any of them and you say, "You know something, those boundaries make sense." And God even, somehow, sets these boundaries for our hearts that are designed to set us free. He says, "Go and forgive people." In a sense it's a boundary because He says, "If you don't forgive people, I'm not going to forgive you." But on the other hand it's an enormous freedom, when our hearts forgive other people, we are set free from what they've done. Yeah sure, God's word sets some boundaries but not many and they're good boundaries. And at the same time God's Spirit brings forgiveness. If you believe in Jesus, you are forgiven. And His spirit comes into our lives and ministers that forgiveness into our spirits, into our souls, into our hearts. God’s Spirit comes into us and brings God’s very presence into our lives, to change them, to make this faith real. That's why Paul talks about the rules and the regulations as the law of sin and death and the law of the Spirit as life. What a great Dad!
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