A Different Perspective Official Podcast

Most of us want to be safe and comfortable. In fact, some people make that the central purpose of their lives. But you know what I’ve noticed? Whenever God calls me to do something for Him, my safety and my comfort seem to be the last thing on His mind. Hey, it's great to be with you again on this Friday. Almost the weekend. We've been chatting this week about faith, not in a theoretical sense but in a "rubber hits the road" sense because faith is that thing that we need to get through the things that we, on our own, can't handle. Faith is what we need to move that great big obstacle that's blocking our way, when it's way too big for us to climb over or crash through or get around. Faith is what we need to overcome that one nagging sin in our lives that keeps on coming back to rob us of the joy and the peace that Jesus came to give us. And faith is what we need to go and do the difficult things that God sometimes calls us to do, the inconvenient things, the uncomfortable things, the things we'd just rather not do thank you very much Lord. Well that's the sort of faith we're going to chat about today, uncomfortable faith because no one ever had an impact in this world by playing it safe right? When Jesus calls us into a place to make a difference in someone's life it's so often because that persons life is in a bit of a mess and it's going to hurt us to have to be in that place with that person. When Jesus calls us out of our nice, safe, comfortable existence to go and do something for Him I can guarantee you it's not always going to be convenient and it's not always going to feel comfortable, that requires faith. People sometimes ask me, "Berni why is it that even though I believe in Jesus, I don't know, somehow it doesn't feel real? There's no passion, there's no fire, there's no excitement." And my response is always the same. I ask them two questions. Question one: How much time do you spend quietly each day alone with Jesus with the door closed and your Bible opened? And question two: What are you doing with your faith? How are you living it out? Now question one is really important because, unless we're spending time alone with Jesus each day, growing in a dynamic relationship with Him, well, shazam, shazam, there's not going to be a relationship. But today, I want to take a moment to focus on the second question, what are you doing with your faith? And when I meet someone who has that vague unsettled feeling about their faith, this sense that there should be something more, there should be power, there should be impact, I can almost guarantee you that in effect they're a spiritual couch potato. And by that I mean they're not really living out their faith, they're not getting out there and making a difference in this world, taking risks, putting it all on the line for Jesus and just like someone who spends their whole life sitting on the sofa channel surfing cable TV, drinking sweet soft drinks and eating chips, that person's going to end up feeling lethargic. Well, the Christian who isn't exercising their faith is going to feel precisely the same. You don't believe me? That's exactly what the Bible tells us, James chapter 2, verse 26: For just as the body without the spirit is dead so faith without works is also dead. So as we come to look at faith again today we're going to do that from a different perspective, from the perspective of Abraham. A man who was called out of the comfort of his ancestral home in Ur which is around about where modern day Baghdad is today, have a listen, Hebrews chapter 11 beginning at verse 8: By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance and he set out not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land that he'd been promised as in a foreign land living in tents as did Isaac and Jacob who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received the power of procreation even though he was too old and Sarah herself was barren because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person and this one as good as dead descendants were born, as many as the stars of heaven, as innumerable as the grains of sand by the sea shore. Now maybe you remember the story, Abraham is the father of the nation of Israel. He and his wife Sarah were in their mid seventies and childless, a source of great anguish and shame because they equated God's blessing with having lots of children and having your own land to live on. And so what's God's solution? To promise Abraham and Sarah many, many, many descendants if only they'll leave their ancestral home behind and go out on a journey through the wilderness, through all sorts of strange and weird and wonderful places, only God knows where. A familiar story I suppose and yet what we often miss is the context. Let me say that again, by definition God's blessing in that time and in that culture, in fact, you see it over and over and over again in the Old Testament, is that blessing equals: 1. Lots and lots of children 2. Your own land. If you had both of those then you were considered to be blessed by God. The more children you had and the more land you had the more, quite obviously, God was in the business of blessing you. But if you didn't have them then you were considered to be cursed of God, obviously you'd done something wrong, obviously you must have been a bad person. That was the thinking. Now Abraham was a wealthy man, he had lots of flocks of animals which meant he had lots of land. So when God called him out of that onto his journey with a promise of a new land, a promised land and lots of children, do you see what God was asking him to do? God was in fact asking Abraham to give up the one half of the blessing that he already had in the can. The one half of the blessing that he already had which was the land in order to get some new land somewhere he didn't know and also a lot of descendants. And what made this so crazy was that he and his wife, Sarah, were in their seventies. I mean Sarah was way past her child bearing age. Abraham and Sarah had to let go of the bit of the blessing that they had in order to step out in faith in order to receive the next blessing. My friend that is so often how God works. So long as we think our lives are about being comfortable and safe. No risk, no need for faith, no need to rely on God for food or shelter or provision or protection and so long as we make our comfort and our safety the priority, friend our faith is going to be dead. God’s main aim isn't to make you and me comfortable, His main aim is to grow our character by making us part of His plan to touch a lost and hurting world with His love. Gods plan isn't that we have some huge superannuation or pension fund so that we can spend our retirement indulging in our senses in food and travel and luxury. His plan is to use us to reach out to our neighbour with His grace and His mercy. And so the solution for the spiritual couch potato, the answer to get rid of that lethargy and bring in a new vigour and anticipation to our faith, it's always the same. The one who would live a vibrant exciting faith, a life where there's power, when the power of God is manifested before their very eyes is the one who goes to God and please Lord show me where you want me to go and what you want me to do, what sacrifices you want me to make, what risks you want me to take so that the name of Jesus would be lifted up in this world? O Lord wherever you call me, whatever it costs me I want to go. Give me the courage, fill me with your Spirit, show me where and how and when I can lose my life for you dear Jesus in order that I might find it. Start praying prayers like that my friend and I guarantee God won't take long to answer you, I guarantee that before you know it you'll be in a place where you see Gods power in your life because frankly without it you'll be in trouble.

Over these last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at what it means to live out our big dreams in life.  But what about your dream? The one that God’s created just for you.  What does that look like? Good to be with you again today on this Friday, end of another week. These last two weeks we’ve been chatting about living out the big dreams that God lays on our hearts, and I’m always conscious when you talk about dreaming, that, well, we’re all at different places in life. Some people are on top of the world at the moment that might be you. Your life might be going on just wonderfully well. On the other hand, you may be in the depths of despair. You may be coming out of it, on the way to being on top of the world. Or well maybe you were on top of the world last month and you feel like life is slipping a bit. We’re all at different places on that roller coaster of emotions and life. I heard from the vice president of a large, successful, global organisation recently, it’s based in the U.S.A. And he said this, “Berni, I have ten years left in the job and I’m kind of laying out my priorities. I want to do a bit of dreaming. What should I achieve? What do you think?” He asked me the question. So I gave him an opinion that jolted him, it was something he didn’t expect. And so it’s Friday. We always like to look at the subject that we’ve been talking about during the week from the perspective of someone who’s asked a question. And today we’re doing that in relation to this man who is the vice-president of international operations in a large, global, very successful organisation. Now this man is a mature Christian I’ve known him for many years. He’s been walking with the Lord all his life, serving God. And he asked my opinion in the early stages of a process of dreaming. And it’s a good thing to do. He said, “Look, I’ve got ten years before I retire. I’d like to map out what’s my dream for these next ten years. I just don’t want to sit in the chair. I’d like to achieve some stuff. What’s my dream, what are my aims? When I retire what would I like to look back on over these ten years?” A really good thing to do. But as is often the way in the early stages. We don’t have all the pieces. We don’t know how all of the pieces of that dream fit together. We need to deal with the ambiguity and the uncertainty. When I looked at his dream, I read through some of the things he had there. Somehow to me the pieces were too small. They were too operational. They were too much about his organisation rather than the people that he was wanting to help. So this is how I answered his e-mail. In helping you put some of the pieces of the puzzle in place, I’d first like you to tell me what sort of a dream do you have in mind? I mean, is this a dream of relative safety, bite sized in achievable chunks? Flags outside the office, notches on the belt as it were to help you ride out the last ten years of your job with satisfaction? Or is it a big dream? One that’s so large and so unachievable without the Lord that it lies utterly outside your personal comfort zone? It’s exciting and terrifying all at once. I don’t mean to be unkind in asking the question, but I think that when we’re dreaming it’s an entirely healthy question to ask. In fact, it’s the question. Psalm 2:8 says: Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. Now for someone in your role, there’s one heck of a dream. Tell me, what sort of a dream do you have in mind? He sent me an e-mail back saying, “I wish you’d stayed in bed this morning.” But he said, “You know something? You’ve asked me exactly the right question.” And so now he’s gone away to think about his dream. Big dreams are always outside our comfort zones. We have a big God. We have a huge God. A God who loves this world so much that He has huge plans to use small, ordinary, fallible people like you and me to touch the world with his love. What about your dream? Let’s just focus on your dream for a minute. What does that look like? When you look back at the end of your life on the time between this moment and that, what would you like to have achieved? What would you like to have done? That’s an interesting question and it’s a question I believe that we should all ask. But let’s begin with the here and now. First question. Are you satisfied with life right now? The way that life is going, what you’re doing, how you’re spending your time, how the energies are being spent? How satisfied are you with your life right now? The chances are that if you’re living out that one thing that God made you to do, you’ll have a sense of deep satisfaction. But if you have a dream out there somewhere, and you’ve never stepped towards it, you’ve never said, ‘I’m going to live that dream.’ My hunch is that your level of satisfaction is pretty low. The statistics say that 85% of people in this world do not enjoy their jobs. 85%! Are you one of those 85%? My second question is, are you walking this path with Jesus Christ? Is He your Lord? Is He your Friend? Is He the One who guides everything in your life? Because if He’s not, my hunch is the satisfaction won’t be there for you either. In fact, maybe you’ve been listening to this stuff over the last couple of weeks thinking, “I wouldn’t actually mind having Jesus as my Lord.” I’m going to pray a prayer right now, and you might want to pray that prayer with me to invite Jesus into your heart. Father, I believe that You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ to walk this earth and to be nailed to a cross and to die for me, to pay for my sins so that I could be forgiven. Father I am sorry for all the things that I have done wrong in my life, and today I make a decision to turn away from those things. Lord I accept you into my heart to be my Lord and my Saviour, and I want to live the rest of my life for you, living out the plan that you have for my life, I want to know you, I want to touch you, I want to experience you. I pray this in Jesus Name. The third question is: Have you embraced the dream that He’s laid on your heart? Think back, what’s the one thing that has always burned in your heart that you want to be or want to do? Have you embraced it? Have you said, “Yes I’m going to follow Jesus in that dream?” Do you have the courage to step out of your comfort zone to a big dream, a scary dream? And then lay it down at God’s feet and say “Lord, this is the dream, if you’re in it, if its your dream, if its your will for me I will follow it no matter what the cost to me, but if its not your dream, if I’m on the wrong track, if I haven’t got this right, Lord I lay it down I don’t want to go down that path.” Have you had the courage to do that, and are you prepared to pay the price? Because there’s always a price, there’s always a cost to following a dream. Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me.” It’s a picture of sacrifice, satisfaction comes in sacrifice and when you step out and you follow Jesus into this dream are you prepared to walk through a wasteland? Are you prepared to feel lost some days and put all of your faith, put all of your hope in Him and trust Him to bring the dream about?” And when you come across opposition, big bits of opposition that frustrate you, that scare you, will you go and attack them with your faith in God’s word? And when you see people whose God shaped need fits your God shaped dream will you love them, will you touch them with Gods love? In this entertainment age where we have larger than live celebrities and we see people succeeding and living out the plan that God has for their lives, we look at their success and we conclude, “well that cant possibly be for me, no it cant be for me.” But truly, truly I tell you God is calling you today, God’s plan is to take ordinary old you, just the way you are, just with the one or two gifts or abilities you have, and to mix his love and power with those and to do something extraordinary through you. Is the aim to make you a celebrity? No that’s not Gods aim. But to give you the exquisite and unique pleasure, a pleasure that can only be found in Jesus Christ to live your God shaped dream out in your life, meeting the God shaped need of the people around you with His love. That is awesome, that is so exciting, now will you go? Will you grab that dream and hang on to Jesus and live that dream no matter what the cost? Its an exciting life, it’s a scary life, and I believe that when you come to the end of this life and look back on that you will look back with great satisfaction.

Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  But sometimes – we feel so inadequate.  And that dream – well it looks so big! Great to be with you again today. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about living out the big dreams for our lives. We’ve been doing that because I believe that God has an amazing plan for each one of us and He has an amazing plan for this world. And His plan is to use ordinary, fallible people like you and me to reach other ordinary, fallible people with the love of His Son, Jesus Christ. Who me? Yes, you. Most times He communicates a little bit of His plan at a time by laying a dream on our hearts. Something that burns inside us, something that we lose sometimes or forget. But a desire that comes back again and again. So many people live their lives but forget to live God’s dream in their hearts. And one reason for that is that God’s dream can be so big, it can seem so far beyond us, that it’s scary. Let me read to you something that a woman called Marianne Williamson wrote back in 1992. She wrote this: “Our deepest fear is not that we’re inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, or gorgeous, or talented, or fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You’re a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing in writing about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure about you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to manifest the glory of God that’s within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Do you find that thought provoking? I certainly do. The notion that we aren’t good enough, the notion that I couldn’t possibly ever live out a dream as big as this. It’s a notion that a lot of us have. I often wonder about Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years, 27 years in jail because of his opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Have you thought about that? 27 years is a very long time. And it must have been the dream in his heart one day to lead his country. One day to see apartheid abolished. And I’m sure, when he was sitting in that prison cell, in fact if you read his book, we discover this. There were times when he felt that he wasn’t adequate. People often ask me, “How do you know that the dream that you have for your life is from God?” Well one sure way to tell is that it’s way beyond anything that you or I could do, it’s so outrageous. That unless God’s in it, we can’t succeed. Now in a sense that’s scary. But when you think about it, that’s also really good. If God’s not in something, frankly I don’t want it to succeed. I don’t want to get two-thirds the way down a path and find that I’m carrying a huge and heavy load and God’s not in this to carry that load with me. This was never God’s plan for my life. So I don’t want to succeed in anything that isn’t God’s plan. All right. But then are you saying that we all have to end up doing high profile things that make us famous? No, I’m not saying that at all. Sometimes beyond a young mother with a young child that has nappy rash, that’s teething, there are dirty nappies all over the lounge room, it’s a mess, you’re tired, the whole breast-feeding thing isn’t working and your dream was always to have a little baby and be a Mum and see this child grow up. God is in that place too. We live in this entertainment world where we have larger than life celebrities and we see people, and even Christians, succeed at their dreams. And we look at them and think , “Ah, I could never do that. God’s not in my world the way that God’s in that person’s world.” That is such wrong thinking. Look at who Jesus hung out with when He walked on this earth. Who did Jesus hang out with? Jesus hung out with prostitutes, He hung out with lepers, He hung out with tax collectors, He touched lepers. Yet all the people, the society said, “These are flotsam and jetsam. These are nobodies.” They’re the ones that Jesus spent His time with. Not the famous people. The little people. Paul writes this to the church in Ephesus. He says: God is able to do immeasurably more than all that we can ask for or even imagine according to His power that’s at work in us. (Ephesians 3:20) Do you have a dream that seems so far beyond anything that you can do? You can imagine the dream. You can picture it. You can see it. But there’s just no way that you can get there. Let’s have a look at that little verse again. God is able to do immeasurably more than all that we can ask for or imagine. So let’s take your dream for a minute and say, “That’s all that you can ask for or imagine.” That’s the dream. Paul says, “God is able to do immeasurably more ... infinitely more God is able to do” Not because we’re wonderful and clever, not because we’re strong, not because we’re adequate but through His power that is at work in us. That’s the operative phrase. A dream that we pursue for our lives, if this is God’s dream, is a partnership with Jesus, and He gives us His power. Sometimes we think Well, I’ve got God here, but God seems so far away...” and what we end up doing is we put God in a really small box. And the moment we put God in a small box, all of a sudden I have to be big and strong to make this whole thing happen. Because my God is small, He’s in a small box. So I can’t rely on Him to do stuff. But we serve a God who is able to do immeasurably more than anything that we can ask or imagine. So we serve a huge God, a powerful God, and little old me. And we struggle to try and make that connection. But that’s the perfect connection. A big God and a little me. That is a powerful combination. I mean, here’s Moses, one of the greatest leaders in all history, and God calls him to lead Israel out of Egypt. He says, “You’ve got to go and tell Pharaoh to let My people go.” Moses came up with five excuses. He said, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh? Who will I say sent me? But what if no one listens to me or believes in me? But I’m a lousy public speaker. Oh, God, please send someone else.” See Moses thought it depended on him. Moses said, “Who am I? What if they don’t believe me?” Moses forgot he serves a massive God. Now I look back in my own life and I look at the progression of walking through despair and going to Bible college and doing some practical ministry here at Back to the Bible and doing some short radio spots for commercial radio and they said to me on my first assignment when I was at Back to the Bible was “Produce some short radio spots for commercial radio.” So off I went and did it. And all the radio stations in Sydney played those commercial spots. And afterwards they told me that they’ve never been able to achieve that before. It’s probably just as well they didn’t tell me. And then I did 5-minute programs and then I gave up my job and today I’m doing these programs and other programs. Tens of thousands of people every day are listening to them. I look at that and think If it were up to me, that could never have happened. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Oh, right, that’s you Berni. That’s you. That could never happen to me.” Well that exact thing couldn’t. But the pattern’s a very familiar pattern. It’s the way that God works. See how God takes an ordinary person like me. In fact, a broken down, hurting person, puts a dream in their hearts and uses them for His glory. You have a different dream. You have different skills, different abilities, different gifts. But the principle is the same. Are you a Jesus follower? Do you believe in Jesus? Then you have a God-shaped dream in your heart. Out there somewhere is a God-shaped need. Now it might be right where you are or it might physically be somewhere else. Will you join hands with Him and go? This God Who is able to do immeasurably more than all that we could ask for or even imagine, according to his power at work in us. Will you go? Not in your own strength. Not doing just things on your own, but in His strength. Seeing Him doing miracles along your road, bringing His love into the lives of other people. Will you go?

Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  But how do we know if we’re actually living the dream?  I mean, how do we know when we’ve arrived? How are you doing? Great to be with you again today. This week and last week we’re talking about living out the big dream that we have for our lives. I have one and you have one, even if it’s hidden down deep inside somewhere, maybe long forgotten. And if that dream is a part of God’s plan for your life, (all dreams aren’t of course), then somehow, somewhere it’s going to fit into God’s bigger plan touching the people in this world with His love. It may not be immediately obvious. Often He only shows us one piece at a time, but eventually, as we find ourselves living out our dream for our lives, whatever that is, it’s going to involve just that, touching other people with God’s love. But how do we know when we’ve arrived? I mean, how do we know when we’ve actually started living that dream? It’s a good question. Over these last couple of weeks we’ve been having a bit of a look at a book called, "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson and David Kopp. It’s a book that I would really encourage you to buy. If you go to our website, and we’ll give you that address at the end of this program, you can go to a link where you can buy that book. It’s a book about a man called Ordinary. He’s a nobody from the land of Familiar. And this book traces his journey where he embraces his big dream, where he leaves his comfort zone, where he deals with the bullies along the way and ends up in a wasteland and spends time with God in a sanctuary and travels through the Valley of Giants and finally he arrives in the land of promise, the land where he believes his dream lies. But it kind of doesn’t look very much like his dream. So what does it look like? How do we know when we’ve actually started to live our dream? How do we know when it’s gone from being a dream to being an actuality? It wasn’t what Ordinary expected and sometimes, when we get to a point where we’re living our dream, it doesn’t look like what we expected. Let’s have a listen to this little excerpt from the book: In the days that followed Ordinary walked through every street and every lane and every path of this dismal city of Anybody’s. He talked to young anybodies and old anybodies. And what he saw and heard filled him with sadness. The needs of the anybodies were great and their hopes were few. Ordinary’s heart began to ache in a way it never ached before. One day Ordinary took a stroll near the city gates. As he walked he talked with the friendly anybody children who followed him. And then he heard the Dreamgiver say, ‘What do you see?’ Ordinary stopped. He looked down into the children’s faces. ‘I see beautiful anybodies in great need,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ the Dreamgiver said. ‘What else to you see?’ Ordinary looked up. He could hardly believe his eyes. Carved on the inside of the gate was the name of his dream. ‘Your big dream lies here,’ said the Dreamgiver. Could it be true? Instantly he knew it was true. He’d arrived. Then Ordinary understood why he hadn’t recognized his big dream when it was right in front of him. The lovely city he’d imagined all along wasn’t his dream but a picture of what his dream would accomplish. The big needs of these anybodies matched perfectly to the big dream in his heart and it was time to do his dream. Ordinary was so excited that he let out a whoop of joy much to the delight of the anybody children. Isn’t that the way? We say to God, “I’ve got a dream. I want to be a nurse or I want to be a teacher or I want to be a preacher or I want to be a Mom or I want to be a husband. I have this dream to help other people. God use me to help other people. Use me Lord.” But somehow we imagine that God will take us to a beautiful place full of nice, well-adjusted, wonderful, lovely people. And we imagine that when we get there, those that will work with us on our dream, will share every aspect of our dream. They’ll see the world completely our way. Come on, we know life’s not like that. But we have these idealized, unrealistic pictures in our heads of what the land of our dreams will look like. Listen, if we have a God-shaped dream in our hearts, then that God-shaped dream is going to match a God-shaped need out there somewhere. And people who are in need generally aren’t beautiful people by the world’s standards. People in need are hurting. And hurting people often hurt others. When God called Moses out of the desert to go and lead Israel out of Egypt where they were in slavery into the Promised Land, what he found was several hundred thousand grumbling Israelites that he spent forty years with in the desert. When God called the apostle Paul to go and minister to churches in Corinth and in Ephesus and a lot of the books of the New Testament are letters from Paul to those churches. We can see from those letters that Paul dealt with a whole bunch of maladjusted, irritable people who didn’t appreciate what he was doing for them. The picture that we often have in our mind, that idealized picture, is of the end game. It’s what the world will look like when we’ve lived the dream that God has called us to live. When we get there we expect it to be easy and it’s not. The journey to our dream can be so hard as we have opposition and giants and people who criticize us. So this unrealistic picture in our heads means we can often miss the fact that we’ve reached our dream, like Ordinary. You might have heard the term, “Bloom Where God Has Planted You”. I spoke last week about a woman who dreamed about having a coffee ministry. I asked her “Who do you know today, neighbors, acquaintances, friends, people at your church, who do you know here and now who could just use someone to talk to over a cup of coffee?” She listed several and I said, “Why don’t you start there?” And so her dream was born. We sometimes think that our dream lies miles away. We sometimes think, Well, if only I could get in a good relationship, if only my marriage was better, if only we could move somewhere else, then I could live God’s dream. But most times that’s not the case. Sure, sometimes, to live God’s dream, we have to move to another city or another country. But most often God wants us to bloom where God has planted us. And most often, when we look at the dream in our hearts, that God-shaped dream, and then we look out at the people around us, what we will discover is that there is a God-shaped need out there which matches perfectly with the dream that we have in our hearts. If a dream is from God, ultimately it will always end up meeting a God-shaped need because God’s plan is to express His great love to people in need on this earth.

Each one of us has some dream for our lives.  Maybe you’ve stepped out to follow that dream – but then all these obstacles come out of nowhere.  C'mon God, what are you up to? Glad to be with you again today. Everyone who’s ever lived out a big dream for their lives has met at least one giant. In fact most dreamers meet several along their road. With an elite athlete well it might be an injury that sidelines them for several months. They think How can I ever come back from that? With someone who decides to go and work with the poor it might be a lack of funds and they think How can I ever do what God’s called me to do without the money? I was talking with a really successful businessman the other day and he was telling me how his warehouse burned down just a couple of years into his big dream. Here’s a question: If you and I have a dream for our lives, and if we believe that God is in the dream, why does He allow those big giants to get in our road? That’s a good question. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at this whole subject of living out the dreams that we have for our lives. There’s a great book which I’ve referred to a couple of times called, "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson & David Kopp. I’d really encourage you to get a copy of that book. It’s a parable about a nobody from the land of Familiar. His name is Ordinary and he leaves his comfort zone to pursue his big dream. One day he finds himself in the Valley of the Giants. Have a listen: Ordinary hadn’t gone far up the Valley when he met his first giant. It was enormous all right and it completely blocked the path to his dream. When it noticed Ordinary, the giant yawned in his direction. ‘Where do you think you’re going, little nobody?’ Ordinary recognized the giant towering over him. It was Moneyless. ‘I need to get past,' said Ordinary. ‘Sure you do. Everybody does,’ said the giant. Ordinary tried to think of a plan but none came to mind. ‘So I need you to get out of my way,’ he said. ‘I’m not moving,’ said the giant. ‘I guess you’ll have to move me yourself.’ For a moment Ordinary hesitated. Then he cried out, ‘Dreamgiver, help me. Please give me the power to move the giant.’ And the Dreamgiver did. Then He told Ordinary what to do and what to say. Ordinary looked up at this big giant called Moneyless and shouted, ‘I challenge you in the name of the Dreamgiver.’ Then he attacked the giant with all his weapons and armor. At first the giant didn’t move. But Ordinary kept reaching for the truths that he’d learned. He took courage, he believed what the Dreamgiver would provide. He relied on wisdom. He fought on, he endured. And with every advance he felt the Dreamgiver’s pleasure. Finally the day came when Moneyless did retreat. Ordinary’s cry of victory rang out through the Valley. ‘Great and good is the Dreamgiver,’ he cried. After that victory Ordinary was never in doubt again. He was a warrior. How many of us would like to see God do an amazing miracle in our lives. We all would, wouldn’t we? I mean we’d love to see God do a miracle that we can look back on and say, “Look at what God did there.” Well every giant, every massive problem that gets in our road, that sits on the road between us and our dream is an opportunity for an amazing miracle from God. When we see one of these giants, the first thing we feel is fear. We look at this great big giant, in this case it was Moneyless, in this case it was a person who had a dream that needed some money but he didn’t have the money. Well, it’s easy to sit down in the road and say, “Well, I’m out of money. I can’t go any further.” We look at those giants and we see an opportunity for God to do a miracle. Our dreams always start off really exciting and then we walk along and we say, “Yes, I believe that God is my Dreamer. I’ve prayed about it and God is here.” And we walk along and we go, “I think God is here.” And then we walk along a little bit further and we see a big giant in our road and we think God can’t possibly be here. I mean if God was in this dream, that giant wouldn’t be in my road. If God was in this dream, I’d have enough money to get along to my dream. And a lot of people give up. They look at the giant and they say, “I can’t go on. I’m going to give up.” Let’s just follow the logic for a minute. You have a dream for your life. It burns in your heart. It something, no matter what you do, it won’t go away. I was talking to a woman recently and her dream was to be a nurse. She dreamed and she wanted to be a nurse all her life. It seemed impossible and it was something that just wouldn’t go away for her. A dream that’s from God is like that. It just keeps coming back. We misplace it sometimes. We forget it sometimes. But it just burns in us. So we had this dream. But then we go to God and we pray it through and we spend time listening to God and we say, “Lord, I only want this dream, I only want to live this if it’s Your will. If this is part of Your plan for my life, I want to live this, I want to go with this. But if it’s not, I’m not going to travel down that path. I’m not going to follow a dream that ultimately I will have to carry in my own strength.” Now they are all really good things to do. So we’re convinced, we think God is in this, so we step out and off we go. Then we face one obstacle after the next, after the next and sometimes it seems like each obstacle is bigger than the last one. And finally we come to this make or break, massive giant sitting on the road to our dream that we can’t possibly get past. And how many people give up? In the early exploration of the country of Australia they found a lot of diamonds. And people thought that diamonds were so hard that if you tried to hit them with a hammer, they wouldn’t break. And so many people found these large diamonds and they hit them with a hammer and they broke and they thought Oh, they’re not diamonds. But it turns out that they actually were diamonds and they’d made the wrong assumption about the strength of diamonds. We can look at giants in exactly that same way. We can say, “I’m here, my dream’s over there and in between me and this dream is this great big giant. Ah, well, God mustn’t be in my dream. I’ll go home.” That’s a really sad thing to do. To give up a dream that’s burning in our hearts that God has planned for our lives. So follow the logic through. I’ve laid the dream down, I believe God’s in it, I’ve stepped out, I see the big giant ... Isn’t this a partnership? If God says, “I am in this dream with you.” If you and I believe that God is in this, is this not a partnership? If it is a partnership, shouldn’t God have a role to play in the partnership? Shouldn’t God have some part to play? It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Each of us has some big dream for our lives.  The thing that we really want to do or to be.  Some sense of destiny. But how do we know whether God is in that dream?  Good Question. Just great to be with you again on a Monday. Last week we talked about the dreams that we have for our lives. We all have them. Hopes for the future, something that burns in our hearts, something I want to be or I want to do. So few people ever seem to live out their dreams, to embrace them, to leave their comfort zone, to travel down that hard road to live that dream out. Over the weekend someone asked me, "What do you mean about all this dreaming stuff? Is it some kind of self-help program, is it being an achiever, thinking positive, achieving success"? "No," I said, "that's not what I mean." "Then what do you mean"? How does God fit into the picture? Now that's a good question. That's a very good question. Almost every morning I get up quite early between 4:30 and 5:00 o'clock. Apparently, I have been like that since I was a little kid. My mother tells me that from the first time I could climb out of my cot, I was up at 4:00 to 4:30 out raiding the cookie jar. So it's been a lifelong thing for me; I'm just one of those morning people. As I grew up and became an adult, before I became a Christian, I started getting up early again, and the whole day would begin with work. It would be work from beginning to end. Work! Work! Work! Work! Work! These days I've changed my approach. I still get up really early, but I spend the first hour or so with God. I pray, I read the Bible, and when I do that I hear God speak. I sit and wait on Him. You may think I'm crazy. Come on, Berni, read the Bible, give me a break. But that's what I do. And as I sit and wait on Him, I hear Him speak to me, not in an audible voice. But I get a sense when I read the Bible, I'm reading His Word, and I wait on Him of what God's plans are, not just for that day, but also for my life. It's an awesome time, that time of waiting. It's when I do a lot of my dreaming and planning. Now dreaming and planning are two separate things. Dreaming is a higher order of function. Dreaming is about saying, "Where is life going? Where's the ministry going? Where's my marriage going? What are my plans and hopes and dreams for the future"? Planning for me is something much more nitty gritty and detail. It's a lower order of function. It's about saying, "How am I going to run my day today? How am I going to fit everything in? What's the priority for today"? And it's a habit that I've come into early in the morning when everyone else is asleep, and when all we hear outside through the window is the old bird waking up. Something I do with God. Now I have lots of ideas and plans and hopes and dreams. Lots of them! Not all of them fit with God. In fact, I would say, on average, somewhere between half and a third, in my view, end up being in God's will. The rest were just good ideas that Berni dreamed up sometime because we're creative people. We all are. You are. I am. We dream. We think. We create. And then we go and act on those things. The question is: "When we dream a dream, when we hope a hope, when we look forward into the future, and we visualise what that future should look like for us, is God involved in that process or do we do it on our own? In those quiet hours of the morning, I share my hope and my dreams with my God. And the thing that I love to do is to lay them down at His feet. And say, "Lord, I don't want to live a dream, I don't want to live a hope, I don't want to live a plan that isn't your dream, that isn't your hope, that isn't your plan. I want your guidance. Here is my dream. What do you think of it? And in that quiet time in that sanctuary with Him, a still small voice speaks. During the day I have ideas too, and some build into dreams. But during the day I'm on the phone, I'm in the studio, there's emails, there's people, there's noise, I spend time with my family. It's not always possible to hear God's still small voice. Do I receive guidance during the day? Is that God's plan? Yes, I believe we do. If we're walking closely with Jesus, if we're living our lives for Him that in the middle of the day, in the middle of a stressful situation, we can quickly turn to Him, and He'll give us guidance. But when it comes to the big things, the big dreams, the things that you want to do with your life, do you want God involved? I know I do, but do you? And do you want God involved so much that if the dream isn't part of His plan, you'll lay it down. You say, "Lord, I actually don't want any part of this dream. I don't want to live this dream, because it's not one that's come from you." In one of the Psalms, it says even though the mountains are falling into the sea and the nations are raging around you, be still and know that I am God. The mistake that I've made in the past, I think the mistake that is common to all of us is - sometime we think, "Wow, this is an exciting dream; I'll go and live that; I'll go and do that. We don't stop. We let the noise guide what we do. We see the mountains falling into the ocean, we see people raging around us, and we let those things guide the way in which we behave. They guide what we do. They guide our plans and our hopes and our dreams, instead of doing what God wants us to do. In that same verse it says, "Be still and know that I am God." In your life, how much time do you spend just being still? Just sitting quietly without any other distractions, without the TV blaring or the radio going, or the music on, or the newspaper or the magazine or all these other forms of entertainment? Just quietly on your own with God. The mistake that a lot of people make in marriage is that they don't do that with each other. They don't have those quiet times when they just spend some time together. And we can make the same mistake in our relationship with God. For years, people have been asking me, "When are you going to write a book"? It seems the obvious thing to do. You're on the radio, you should write a book. I remember as a new Christian being in a large library at a Bible college and looking at so many good books and thinking, "I don't want to write books. My passion is to speak and not to write. But I've always had a sense that one day God would call me to write a book. And so my answer is always, "When God calls me to." And the last few months, burning inside me, has been this passion to write a book. And yet there's a tension for me between this emerging dream and that image I had of those books way back at that Bible College, thinking, "How can so many people write so many good books on such a good subject which is God's love. But people ultimately don't read much. So I'm torn, is this from God or it just from me? Is something that God is calling me to do or is it something that I have dreamed up? And so I have spent many hours in the sanctuary early in the morning sorting, sifting, and laying it down. Abraham when he had his son, Isaac, was called ultimately to lay him down, to take him and offer him as a sacrifice to God. Now that's really extreme. But that's the picture. God wants us to sacrifice the things that we love the most to Him. And so my thing with God now is that I'm prepared to lay this dream down if it's not from you. Because I know if it's my idea, and I pursue it on my own, I will have to do it in my own strength. If it is God's plan, and it's God's idea, and I pursue it in His strength, He's on my side. It's a partnership. I don't want to do things that aren't in His will. Down the track, walking through the difficult times in the wasteland when all the giants come against you in your dream, when most dreams die for most people, it's during those times that I've discovered. It's the dreams that I've laid at God's feet, it's the ones that I'm prepared to give up for Him, they're the ones that stay alive. That's why I get up early in the morning. And sometimes I'm afraid, I've got doubt, and I'm feeling lost and I'm wondering whether this dream was ever the one that He gave me and why is it so hard? And I wait on Him, and He renews my strength. He lifts me up. It's like soaring on the wings of an eagle. And somehow, I can run again without being weary. And all from the simple act of laying each and every dream and plan at His feet, and saying, "Lord, your will, not mine."

I was asked recently by a woman – if I have a big dream for my life, how do I know it’s from God?  How do I know if it’s real?  Isn’t this whole living your dream thing just a bit dangerous?  Now – she asks some very, very good questions. It’s just great to be with you again on another Friday heading to another weekend. This week we’ve been looking at the subject of living out the dreams that God puts in our hearts. It’s an exciting time because I believe that God puts a dream in everybody’s heart. God gifts us and creates us and makes us for a certain thing in life. And that dream often burns so deeply in our hearts. What I think is really sad is when people get to the end of their lives and they look back on their lives and they realise that they missed the one opportunity that they had to live the dream that God has given them. I was lecturing about this at a Bible college recently. A woman came up to me afterwards and she asked a question. It went something like this, “What is a dream? I mean, how do you know that it’s real? What if it’s just something that I dreamed up and it’s not God’s dream for me? Isn’t that dangerous?” Now, I think that’s an excellent bunch of questions. I heard someone say recently that God is a bit like your American Express card. You should never leave home without Him. I like that. You know, it’s interesting, all sorts of people dream dreams and some of them achieve greatness without ever once believing in Jesus Christ. I believe that’s because we’re all made in God’s image. We are made to be creative. We are made to dream. We are made as ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Is it possible to achieve a dream without believing in Jesus? Absolutely. You just look at some of the great artists and some of the great adventurers and some of the great business leaders down through history and even today. Many of them don’t believe in Jesus. But, if we want a dream that satisfies us, I mean really deeply satisfies us, if we want to be God’s man or woman in the place where He’s called us doing the things that He’s gifted us to do, then the questions that woman asked me about dreaming are very, very good questions. The world is full of successful people who are unsatisfied by what they do. They get to success, whatever success is, and they discover that it’s empty. They discover that when they buy into sweet success, it tastes bitter and sour The only way that we can find fulfilment is in the Person of Jesus Christ. God gifts us, God creates us, God calls us to be ordinary people who do extraordinary things. The questions that woman asked me are these - “What is a dream? I mean, how do I know if it’s real and what if it’s just something that I dreamed up and it’s not God’s dream at all? That’s dangerous,” she said. I think she’s right. So there are four markers that, for me, point to whether a dream is from God or whether it’s something that we dreamed up. I mean, for fifteen or sixteen years of my life I lived my own dream. I was very successful at my dream. It’s just that it never satisfied me. The first marker is this: I believe the Bible teaches us that it is normal for us to dream God’s dreams. In Acts, chapter 2, we read about Pentecost. Pentecost was an amazing time because just as God had promised way back in the Old Testament, that was the day that He poured His Holy Spirit out on all believers. In the past the only people who had the Holy Spirit were certain prophets and certain leaders. And then Jesus came and those who were close to Jesus had a close relationship with God. But this day, after Jesus had risen from the dead and after He’d ascended into heaven, this day of Pentecost is when Jesus poured His Holy Spirit out on all the believers. The people watching saw the believers speak in other tongues, they heard the believers talking in all different languages, they could hear the gospel, the good news, in their own language and they thought the believers were drunk. But Peter the apostle, the one who had stood against Jesus and said, “Lord, You can’t possibly go to the cross.” Jesus had also filled Peter with the Holy Spirit on that day. And the very first sermon that was preached on Pentecost went like this, it was from Peter. And remember Peter is preaching to the Jews in Jerusalem. These are the same people who lynched Jesus, who caused Jesus to be crucified. So this is a gutsy sermon to preach a few weeks after Jesus was crucified. This is how the sermon went - “But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed the men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem. ‘Let this me known to you and listen to what I say. Indeed these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only 9 o’clock in the morning. “No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel. In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour My Spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. And your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out My Spirit.” In other words, the dreaming of dreams and the seeing of visions is a normal manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit in us. It is normal to dream dreams, the dreams that God has for us. The dreams that God has for the people around us. Sometimes when we talk about dreaming dreams, people who believe in Jesus say, “Well, hold on a minute. I don’t that that’s biblical. I don’t think I should be dreaming dreams.” A normal manifestation of the Holy Spirit, here it is in Acts, chapter 2, is that we should dream dreams. Let’s not be afraid of that. God has made us as creative people in His image. We’re people made to dream, we’re people made to achieve extraordinary things. We’re people made with certain gifts. To dream a dream and believe that it’s from God is a step of faith. And without faith we cannot please God. That’s the first marker. It’s normal for us to dream dreams. The second issue is: what are my gifts? Normally our dreams are things that really make us tick, are related to the things we’re good at. It’s often other people who can tell us what we’re good at. It’s often really hard for us to judge what we’re good at. Different people are good at different things. I think of the financial director in our ministry, David Green. David is just the best financial director, the best accountant that I have ever met. And I say to this guy, “I need a cash flow, a need a spread sheet, I need a budget, I need you to do this.” And David loves to do that and he’s so good at it. I could never do what he does. He is gifted to do that. I think of Max Harding, the guy that sits in the studio with me day after day, week after week, recording and putting these programs together. I could never do what Max does. But he’s so good at what he does. You know the problem is sometimes we think of something that we’re good at and we think this doesn’t sound very spiritual. I mean Berni talked about having a dream and his dream is to teach the Bible. That’s pretty spiritual. My dream isn’t spiritual. It can’t possibly be a dream from God. I remember speaking to a woman who was in her 40s and I said to her, “What’s your dream?” And she said, “I really don’t know what my dream is.” And I said, “What do you enjoy doing?” And she said, “Well, I enjoy having coffee with people. Doesn’t sound very spiritual, does it?” And I sort of joked and laughed and said, “Maybe God has a coffee ministry planned for you.” Guess what she’s doing? She’s living out her life caring for people, meeting with them one on one and she laughs to this day saying, “I’m doing my coffee ministry.” It may seem radical. I remember speaking to a young woman when I was a student at Bible college. I said, “What’s your dream?” And she said, “I want to work at a holistic medical center. And when I do that and help people, I want to see healing come to their lives and I want God to use me in that area.” Doesn’t sound very conventional does it? Another man that I was talking to just recently, this man is a very, very successful entrepreneur. And over the years he has poured millions of dollars into God’s work. Just given the money so that God’s work can be done across this world. It may not sound very spiritual to say I think my dream is to be an entrepreneur, but look how powerfully God has used this man. The third point is that your dream will always burn in your heart. It will never leave you, it will never forsake you, it will just burn. And the fourth one, when we start walking as we must do, our dream lies where God opens the doors. God opens some amazing doors for us to live out our dreams. We serve an awesome God.

Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  Some of us actually step out of our comfort zones to live the dream.  But inevitably when we do, the hard times come.  We find ourselves in a wasteland. I’m so excited to be with you again today because this week and next week we’re talking about the subject of dreaming dreams and living out the big dreams that God has put in our heart for our lives. Maybe your dream is to be a nurse or a teacher or wife or a mother or a scientist or a physicist. Whatever that dream is, it tends to revolve around the things that we just love to do. It burns inside us like a fire that we can’t quench. Sometimes people take a risk and step out but they find themselves in a wasteland, in a desert, where it looks as though the dream has evaporated. Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the USA. He was a progressive reformer and the son of a Presbyterian minister. He said this, “We grow by dreams. All big men and women are dreamers. Some of us let the dream die but others nourish them through the bad days ‘til the sunshine and the light which always come.” During the week I’ve mentioned a couple of times the book called The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson and David Kopp it is just an outstanding book. I would encourage you to think about buying it. It’s only $14 or $15 but an outstanding book. The first half of the book is a parable about a man called, “Ordinary” and it’s the story of when Ordinary left the land of Familiar to follow his big dream. He walked through that invisible wall of fear and where he expected to find himself in the middle of his dream, in the middle of the place where he would be satisfied, he found himself in the inevitable wasteland. I’d just like to read to you a short part of that parable from Bruce Wilkinson’s book. Again and again Ordinary lost his way. Again and again he cried out for the Dream Giver to show him the way, but no answer came. Why had he ever trusted the Dream Giver to guide him in the first place? The day came when Ordinary finally gave up. He sat on his suitcase and refused to move until the Dream Giver showed up with a plan. But the Dream Giver didn’t show up that day or the next day. Ordinary had never felt so lost and alone before. He became angry. He got angrier and angrier and then a hard, hot wind began to blow. The wind blew all day and all the next and sand blew into Ordinary’s eyes. It blew into his teeth and ears. When the wind finally stopped, Ordinary stood to his feet but as far as he could see there was only sand. The path to his dream had disappeared completely. Obviously his entire trip through the wasteland had been a waste. Hot tears coursed down his dirty cheeks. ‘You’re not a Dream Giver,’ he shouted. ‘You’re a Dream Taker. I trusted you, you promised to be with me and help me and you didn’t.’ “Then Ordinary stumbled in despair across the sandy waste, dragging his empty suitcase behind him. His dream was dead and now he wanted to die too. Weak, under a scraggly tree, he lay down in it’s scraggly patch of shade and closed his eyes. That night he slept the sleep of a dreamless dreamer. The next morning Ordinary heard something. Startled he peered up to see a shimmering somebody sitting in the branches of the tree. ‘Who are you?’ he asked as she climbed down to the ground. ‘My name is Faith’ she said. ‘The Dream Giver sent me to help you.’ ‘But it’s too late,’ cried Ordinary. ‘My dream is dead. When I needed the Dream Giver most, he was nowhere in sight.’ ‘What do you need that you haven’t received?’ asked Faith. ‘Well if it weren’t for those few springs of water I found,’ answered Ordinary, ‘I’d be dead of thirst by now.’ ‘Yes, and...’ she asked. ‘And if it weren’t for the fruit I found, I’d be a walking skeleton. Wait! I am a walking skeleton. I could die of starvation any minute.’ “‘Oh, my,’ Faith murmured. This parable is closely linked to the story of Israel. Israel was oppressed in Egypt. They were slaves. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of them. And God sent Moses, through a series of ten amazing miracles, to convince Pharaoh to set Israel free. “Let My people go” was the cry. Eventually, after the last devastating miracle, where each of the firstborn children of the Egyptians, right across the country, died under God’s hand. Pharaoh changed his mind and let them go. But no sooner had Israel left Egypt than he sent his army after them to destroy them because he was so angry. God protected Israel. God put a pillar of His presence between Egypt’s army and His fleeing Israelites. And then God parted the Red Sea and Moses led the people through the Red Sea on the other side. And as the Egyptian army followed them, God let the Sea fall back into place and they were all drowned. But no more than a few days had gone by. Remember Israel has seen miracle after miracle. The ten plagues that God sent on Israel. The presence of God in the pillar of fire, which stood between them and the Egyptian army. Moses, parting the Red Sea, for goodness sake, so that they could walk through. They’d seen amazing miracles, but a couple of days in the desert, listen to what the Bible says, this comes from Exodus, chapter 16, verse 3. The whole of Israel complained to Moses in the wilderness. ‘If only we’d died in Egypt where at least we had enough food to eat, you brought us into the wilderness to kill us all with starvation.’ Isn’t that the way? We decide to step out and follow the dream that God’s put on our hearts ... I remember when I stepped out to follow the dream that God had put in my heart and I lived that dream for a time. Then all of a sudden I found myself in a wasteland. It was a wasteland that lived on for two, long years. Two years may not seem a long time, but when you’re walking around in a wasteland, when the path to your dream has been obscured by the hot wind blowing and the sand, and you look in every direction and you don’t see your dream anywhere. You feel like complaining. I’ve got to tell you, you feel like having a big winge to God. But God is faithful. Just as in that story that Bruce Wilkinson wrote, God sends faith and faith, the Bible says, is a gift from God. Faith isn’t something that we muster up. Faith is a gift that God gives us to trust in Him when everything seems lost. Sometimes it seems like our dream is gone. Sometimes, in fact inevitably, when we step out to follow the dream that God has put in our heart, it looks as though it has totally evaporated. And the miracles that God has done along the way for us, well we kind of forget that it was God. Just like Ordinary. You know, he said, “Oh, if it hadn’t have been for the water I’d have died.” Well, Ordinary, who put the water there? If it hadn’t been for those few bits of fruit that I found, I would have starved. Well, Ordinary, who do you think put the fruit there? God is a faithful God and when He calls us to a dream, a dream which plugs into His big dream, a dream which meets a need out in the world, God needs to make sure that we’re ready for that dream. And we need to be sure that we’re ready for that dream. And that’s why, when we follow that dream, when we follow God’s call, we need to expect that we will spend a time in the wilderness. It is part of God’s plan. Jesus, when He was baptised and He was filled with the Holy Spirit just before He began His public ministry, it says that God took Him and threw Him out into the desert for forty days and forty nights after which time He was tempted by the devil. When God tests us when, we feel lost and hungry and alone and betrayed and angry, just like Ordinary did, all that time God is in that place with us. All that time He is there and by the power of His Holy Spirit, if we’ll reach out to His Son, Jesus, and say, “Lord, I cannot do this on my own,” He will send His Spirit to fill us with faith. With faith in the One Who called us to the dream in the first place. With faith to stand in that place, and believing God no matter what comes, no matter what life throws at us, no matter what the devil throws at us, to stand in that place and say, “Lord, I will stand in this place for you even if I die here.” God blesses that. God takes that and God uses that. Not for us. Not to give us a career, but to pour His love out to other people through us. We serve an awesome God.

Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  But sometimes, when we expect those closest to us to be excited and supportive, they’re anything but!  Why is that? It's great to be with you again today. You know, this week and next week we are doing something that's really exciting. I'm excited by the teaching that we are having on the program over these next two weeks. We are looking at the dreams in our lives. What's the dream that God has planted in your life? Are you living that dream or is it, maybe, a lost and forgotten dream? Or is it maybe a dream your heart burns after but, somehow, you are stuck in a rut-you are stuck in a comfort zone. Sometimes, we have a dream; we step out of our comfort zone through an invisible wall of fear (that often accompanies our dream) and on the other side, in that zone between our comfort zone and our dream, in that border land, we can find bullies, people who don't want us to live out God's big dream for our lives. Bruce Wilkinson in his book, The Dream Giver, calls them border bullies. I wonder who are the border bullies in your life? Jesus knew what dream God had put in his heart; He knew that He was on this earth to love people, to show people what God is like through His words and through His actions. But Jesus also knew that He was put on this earth to die on a cross to pay for our sins. He was telling His disciples about that second part one day. You can read about it in Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 16. It goes like this: Jesus began to show His disciples that He would have to go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and the scribes and be killed and on the third day rise again. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke Him saying, "Lord, God forbid that this should happen to You." Isn't that interesting? Jesus, the Son of God has a dream that God has put in His heart. For as long as Jesus can remember, He has been the Son of God. And for as long as Jesus can remember, Jesus the boy, Jesus the teenager, Jesus the young man, for as long as He can remember, He knew that He would have to go to the cross to die a grizzly and ugly death to pay for my sins and for your sins. Now, we have the benefit of looking back on 2,000 years of history and looking back and saying, "I understand why Jesus had to go and do that; I understand that my sins are forgiven because Jesus paid the price for me on the cross." Peter, on the other hand, Peter did not have that benefit. Peter was living a life where he was following Jesus around in ministry. And he saw Jesus Christ do some amazing things. He saw Him bring people back to life. He saw Him heal lepers. He saw Him heal blind people. He saw Jesus rebuke the religious establishment for their hypocrisy. He saw Jesus teach people with the amazing power of God's Word. So, why does Peter take Jesus aside and say, "Lord, I'm going to rebuke You; You can't be talking like this, this is not positive words coming out of Your mouth. This is not the way I expected it?" Why does Peter take Jesus aside and rebuke His Lord? Is it that Peter doesn't want Jesus to do God's will? I don't think that's what motivates Peter's here. The thing that motivates Peter is that Jesus' dream of going to a cross is a radical one. And you know something? It's threatens Peter's own comfort zone. All of Peter's hopes and dreams for the future are wrapped up is this Jesus. Peter's like us. We never want to take a step backwards to go three steps forward. We never want to suffer pain. We never want to struggle. And so when Jesus is talking about suffering and dying and rising again on the third day, Peter is thinking, Well, if that happens to Jesus, what is going to happen to me? What is going to happen to my comfort zone? I have all these plans. I have plans to be with Jesus all the time. If one of these things happens, what is going to happen to me? Isn’t that often the way with those who are closest to us? We have a dream; we have a dream to do something that's radical, that's different, that doesn't fit with other people's concept of who we are or what their relationship is with us. And we talk about our dream. We talk about the dream to become a teacher. We talk about the dream to become a nurse. When I was a little kid, I talked to my mother about the dream that I had to become a minister. I didn't quite know what a minister was, but I had that dream. And she said to me, "Ah, Berni, you won't become a minister. You wouldn't be able to get married" because I grew up in a Catholic household. Now, it wasn't that she wanted to push me down; it wasn't that she wanted to pour cold water on me. But it didn't fit with her concept of what her son would grow up to be. So, when we share our dreams and our hopes for the future with those we love, and when those we love don't exactly jump up in support; but, on the other hand, they point out the risks and they stand and they try and stop us, it really helps to understand a couple things because we really expect those who love us, those who are our closest friends, our closest allies, we expect them to support us. And when they don't, it hurts. So, we need to understand a couple of things. The first thing is this: What's their motivation? Why is it they stand against our dream? If anyone is going to bully us, if anyone is going to oppose our dream, shouldn't it be someone we don't know?, shouldn't it be someone out there somewhere. It certainly shouldn't be my wife; it certainly shouldn't be my parents; it shouldn't be my best friend. But sometimes it is. What motivates them? Well, I believe that it's the same as with Peter. They look at you and your dream doesn't fit with their concept. When we talk about stepping out of our comfort zone, it rattles other people's comfort zones. That's the point Wilkinson makes in his book, The Dream Giver. People get uncomfortable when they see someone close to them walking out of their comfort zone. Just like Peter. Jesus was talking about doing something out of his comfort zone; it was more than that, it actually threatened Peter's own life and existence because he was afraid that he would be persecuted. He was afraid that he would be crucified too. So, the first thing is, when the people closest to us don't support us in our dream, it's not because they don't love us. Most of the time, it's not that at all. It's because when we talk about leaving our comfort zones, it shakes their comfort zones up. The second point that Wilkinson makes in his book The Dream Giver, which I totally agree with is this: Some of their concerns will help us along our way. They see the things that we can't see. They point out the risks that we can't see. You know what we can do? We can take their wisdom; we can take their insight; and we can put them in our travel bag to use later. Often other people's criticism can be used to sharpen our focus, to shape our dream. Isn't that wonderful? When we are talking about border bullies, there is one person in my life and, perhaps, in your life, that stands in a class of their own. If you are married, as I am, then your husband or wife stands in a class of their own. When I was dreaming the dream of leaving a high paying consulting job for the risk of a ministry which involved radio and Internet and media, we were excited my wife and I. And, some days, we were scared. And you know what happened? One day she was excited. And that same day I might be scared. And the next week, I might be excited, and she's scared. It was really interesting to see how we went through the excitement and the fear thing at different times. You know what happens? Sometimes the enemy uses that to pull us apart. Sometimes the enemy tries to use that to stop us from following our dreams. But we came to a decision: This was a dream for both of us. We both had to be a part of this. So, we decided to let God bring us closer rather than let the devil pull us apart. Husband and wife is God's smallest fighting formation. It is a team.

Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  But most people realise that to live out that dream they’re going to have to leave their comfort zone.  And that … that’s scary. We all have a dream, something that we really want to do. It’s not only something we’re good at, it’s not only something that really excites us. Sometimes we had the dream a long time ago and through the pressures of life we’ve forgotten them. But God weaves those dreams, His purposes, into our DNA. The things we’re really good at, that we really enjoy doing. We all have the dreams, but there’s something that stops us sometimes from living them. And that something is fear. Our big dream in life is scary because it’s about leaving the familiar. It’s about leaving our comfort zone. Leaving your comfort zone can be really scary. If you know someone who’s living out their dream, you know, someone in whom God has planted something and they’re out there living it and loving it, and you go and ask them and you say, “What were the early days like? What was it like at the beginning?” You’re likely to get an answer something like this: “Before I stepped out into my dream every time I thought about the dream it made me whistle. Every time I thought about the dream it made me soar like an eagle. But when I took my first step, all I felt was fear. And then I took a few extra steps and it didn’t feel like a dream any more and I started to focus on the things that really scared me.” But if we could go to the end of our life, a life lived with a dream in our hearts that we never pursued, how would we feel? How would we feel if we looked back on that life and said, “Man, I know God planted that dream in my life. Why didn’t I ever chase it? Why did I waste my life?” The words I am about to read you were written by an elderly woman looking back on her life and she says this: “If I had my life to live over I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax, I’d limber up, I’d be sillier than I’ve been this trip, I’d take fewer things seriously, I’d take more chances, I’d climb more mountains and swim more rivers, I’d eat more ice cream and less beans. I’d perhaps have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. “You see I’m one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. I’ve had my moments and if I had it to do all over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to do nothing else. Just moments one after the other instead of living so many years ahead of time. “I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, hot water bottle, raincoat and parachute. If I had it to do again, I’d travel lighter next time. “I’d start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the autumn. I’d go to more dinners, I’d ride more merry-go-rounds, I’d pick more daisies.” Isn’t it interesting how someone can look back on their life and say, “I let the fear of chasing my dreams override that dream. And so I lived a very measured life, a very ordered life, but I have a sense that I didn’t live the life that God wanted me to live. What about you? Let me ask you really plainly and directly, but in love. Has God put a dream in your heart? Is there something eating away at you that you’ve always been too scared to try? Maybe it’s a career thing. Maybe it’s a vocation thing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a ministry thing. But there’s a dream there that you’ve always wanted to find. But you’ve just been too scared to go. If you looked at the Lord straight in the eye and said, “Lord, what’s the dream that you have for my life? What would that be? What would that look like? Maybe your dream is to become a nurse. Maybe your dream is to travel overseas and minister to the poor. Maybe that dream is to be a tennis player. There are so many dreams and not all of them look spiritual. Not all of them look conventional. Joshua had a dream. After Moses died, his dream was to take God’s people into the Promised Land. Listen to what God said about him and listen especially to what God said about fear. This comes from the first chapter of Joshua’s dream. After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord spoke to Joshua, son of Nun, Moses’ assistant saying, "My servant, Moses, is now dead. Now proceed across the Jordan, you and all the people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites. Every place the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you as I promised to Moses from the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the River Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory. No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not fail you or forsake you but be strong and courageous. For you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them. Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with the law that my servants commanded you. Don’t turn from right or to the left so that you may be successful wherever you go. I hereby command you, be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened or dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." How many times does God say to Joshua, “Be strong and courageous? Be strong and very courageous? Only I say again to you, be strong and courageous and do not fear?" Why do you think God had to tell him that? My hunch is Josh was afraid - because Joshua had to go and take this people across the Jordan, into the Promised Land and fight a whole bunch of other peoples to bring them into possession of the thing that God had promised them. But God said to Joshua, “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have already given to you.” Do you notice the tense? When you go, if this dream is God’s dream, it is already done for us. And when we walk out there sometimes, it looks really scary. Last year we bought a cat. This beautiful, little kitten, her name is “Dog”. Now you might say that’s a silly name for a cat. But that’s the name the cat had, so we call her “Dog”. And as she’s grown up (she’s almost a year old now) she plays in the house and she plays in our back yard. We live in a terrace house, that’s a very small block and a very small back yard and we leave the front door open all the time. But do you think that cat will go out that front door? Absolutely no way, because her territory in her mind, stops at the door. There is an invisible wall of fear between her and the front yard. She cannot bear to even go near that front door. It’s funny, isn’t it? She has this view in her head, in her little head, of what her territory is and she ain’t going beyond that view. How often are we like that with our comfort zones? How often are we afraid to step through that invisible wall of fear? In following the dream that God’s put on my heart, I’ve had to step through that invisible wall. What I discovered when I took that one step is I was still alive on the other side. If it’s God’s dream “No weapon formed against us will prosper or stand” and we know it’s God’s dream. As we dream dreams in our hearts, it burns so strongly. It might be hard to leave our comfort zones, but you know something? I think it’s harder to forsake our dreams. Sometimes we just don’t feel worthy but God says, “Take courage, take courage because I have gone before you. Take courage because it’s my dream too. Take courage because no one will be able to stand against you for all your life. “When you experience setbacks, when you’re afraid, when you’re alone, take courage, because I am with you in that dream.” My big dream was on the other side of that invisible wall of fear. So is your big dream. What’s holding you back from living God’s big dream-filled life? Is it fear? Are you like our kitten, afraid to step through the front door? We don’t have to be afraid. How many times does God say in the Bible, “Fear not?” How many times did God say to Joshua, “Don’t be afraid. My dream. I am with you. No one, no one will be able to stand against you.”

Each of us has a big dream for our lives.  Sometimes it’s forgotten.  Sometimes we’re afraid of it.  And sometimes we’re just too busy for it.  But that God-given dream is woven into our DNA. It’s great to have your company with us today. I want to begin by asking you three distinct questions. The first question is this: how many people do you know who are living out their dream? When they’ve discovered who they are and what they’re good at and what God made them for and they’re out there, living it and loving it. Second question: how many people do you know who get up every morning, go to a job that they hate, come home, have dinner, watch the box, go to bed, just to do it all again tomorrow? And the third question is: which one are you? A dreamer living out your dream or someone in a life that you just don’t like. Now that’s a very good question. It never ceases to amaze me how many people end up in the wrong job or the wrong career. But I guess, when you think about it, we tend to make those choices when we’re young. Often we make those choices when we’re teenagers or in our early twenties and it’s probably a time when we’re ill-equipped because we don’t have the maturity. We don’t have the level of understanding of ourselves to make those choices. If I look back, in my case, I had a choice of three basic careers when I left school. One was to do medicine and become a doctor. The other was to do computer science at the Royal Military College. And the other one was a career as a Lawyer and to do law at a particular university. I chose the middle one. The second one would have been fine too but, with the benefit of hindsight, I now look at the medicine choice and I think what an absolute disaster that would have been. I hate the sight of blood, the notion of cutting people up or listening to their ills and woes in the doctor’s surgery. I mean, I can’t imagine doing that. So we make those choices and sometimes they become like prison walls. We feel as though we‘re locked into them. Yet, when we are young, sometimes we had dreams. We had dreams about what we wanted to be and what we wanted to do, but we forget those dreams as we grow up. We grow up and the dream becomes lost, it becomes - oh, well, I could never do that. Funnily enough, when I was 11 or 12 I had a dream to become a minister. Now I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But that was my dream. I remember it lit up my life for a time because for a short time when I was young God had an impact on my life. I then grew up and went completely in an opposite direction for the next 25 years. Forgotten dreams, though, have a way of nagging us. They have a way of coming back. Somehow, even though they’re forgotten, they’re there. The great Australian poet, “Banjo” Paterson wrote an evocative and famous poem about a man who followed his dream and another man who didn’t. It’s a beautiful picture. The poem is called, “Clancy of the Overflow”. Now if you’re an Australian, you’ll know that poem really well. If not, have a listen. It paints a really beautiful picture, a beautiful contrast that we’re going to come back to between one man who wishes he’d followed his dream and another man who actually did. Here it is, “Clancy of the Overflow”: I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better knowledge, sent to where I’d met him on the Lachlan, years ago. He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him Just on spec, addressed as follows, “Clancy of the Overflow”. And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar). T’was his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving and we don’t know where he are.” In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where Western drovers go; As the stock is slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars. I am sitting in my dingy, little office where a stingy ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all. And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways, the buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste. And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal and the cash-book and the journal -- But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of the Overflow.* It’s a great poem, isn’t it? It’s beautiful. It’s this contrast of a man sitting in his nasty office that he obviously doesn’t enjoy, thinking about another man, Clancy of the Overflow, out there following his dreams. What’s your dream? You do have one? You know. Psalm 139 says this of God: It says, “He created our innermost being. He knit us together in our mother’s womb. We’re fearfully and wonderfully made. We weren’t hidden from Him when we were made in that secret place. When we were woven together in the depths of the earth. His eyes saw our unformed bodies and all the days were deigned for us were already written in His book of life before even one of them existed.” When we were being made in that secret place, God created our DNA. He created the things that we would be good at. I believe as we were born He planted dreams in our hearts. I was listening to one woman recently and she said, “Ah, Berni, I don’t have a dream. I just want to be a mum.” I thought, how sad. I said, “Don’t you understand that is your dream. What a fabulous dream to want to bring children in this world and nurture them and see them grow and see them become powerful Christians living their lives out for Christ.” Billy Graham had a mum. The apostle Paul had a mum. Jesus had a mum. So maybe your dream is to be a mother, a wife. Maybe your dream is to be a business man, maybe it’s to be a doctor or a minister or to be a tennis star or to work with the poor. We all have such different dreams. What’s the dream that God has woven into your DNA when you were in your mother’s womb? What’s the dream that you dream for your life when you were a child, when you were a teenager? Are you like Clancy? Do you see the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended? And at the night wondrous glory of the everlasting stars? Are you someone who is living out your dream or are you sitting in your dingy little office where a stingy ray of sunlight struggles feebly between the houses tall? Over these next couple of weeks, on A Different Perspective, we’re going to be looking at the subject of Living Your Dreams. Imagine getting to the end of life. Imagine being old and sitting and looking back at life and remembering a dream that God placed in our hearts when we were young and realising that we hadn’t lived it. Yet so many people go through life dissatisfied, doing things that they don’t enjoy, struggling with who they are and not living out their dream. There’s a wonderful book called, “The Dream Giver” written by David Kopp and Bruce Wilkinson. If you go to our website to this program, you will see a link so that you can purchase that book. It is about living your dreams. It is one of the best books I’ve ever read and we’ll be referring to that over the next couple of weeks. Whatever you do, stick with us because we are going to be talking about you and me living out the dreams that God has put in our hearts. What does it look like? What are some of the oppositions that we’re going to come across here on A Different Perspective. *"Clancy of the Overflow” by A.B. “Banjo” Paterson

One of the greatest things in life is when you sow a good seed and one day you get to reap a good harvest.  That’s probably why so many cultures have harvest festivals.  But – what do we do with that harvest? What we get out of life depends pretty much on what we put into it. It's a self-evident piece of blindingly, glimpsingly obvious wisdom isn't it? That’s why this week we've been looking at the whole idea of sowing and reaping in our lives. We're confronted by a tough or a difficult situation and if, instead of running away or kicking and screaming, we actually sow some good seed into that place and nurture it and weather the storms, we'll end up reaping the most amazing harvest in time. It’s just a God thing really. The question is, what do we do with that harvest? I mean harvest time is a time for rejoicing; it's a time for reaping the reward. You go through a tough patch in your marriage and you decide to sow good seeds of kindness and love and encouragement even when its hard and you both come out the other side with a most amazing relationship. What a harvest, what a blessing. Well ok, now what? It's great to enjoy the harvest, we should do that but is there more? Is there something else that we can do with that harvest? I mean, can we spread it round? This week's been a great week, I've really enjoyed this week with you on A Different Perspective because we've been looking at reaping God's harvest in my life. You know when you get up on a lookout and you look out at the landscape and you see all the rolling hills and the fields and the cows and maybe the beach and the ocean and the factory down there belching out smog, you see the good and the bad and the ugly. And it's wonderful. And on one part of the landscape the sun can be shining and the other part can be bucketing down rain and our lives are a bit like that aren't they? Parts of our lives can be going so well and other parts, well you know, they're just not coming together and those bits that aren't coming together we can avoid them or run away or we can complain or we can sow a good seed into them. This week we've been looking at sowing and watering and weathering and waiting and harvesting and that whole thing takes time, it's not God’s  plan for it to happen overnight. But good seed gives a good harvest, bad seed gives a bad harvest. And I know, when we look at that bit in our life that isn't going so well at the moment and we hear some joker on the radio say, "Go and sow some good seed into that." We can say, "Well that's easy for you to say buddy but you're not here in my little version of hell." I encourage you, if you have something bad going on in your life, something that's difficult, something you just can't get over, I encourage you to look at that and go, "What good seed, what kindness, what love, what mercy can I sow to that particular situation even though I don't feel like doing it." It's hard but we do that and we weather the storm and it's a God thing, we trust and we will reap in due time if we don't give up. It's tragic to see people giving up when they've done 95% of the hard work and they just lose faith. Bringing kids up is like that, you know, when they're teenagers, you can go through some difficult, difficult times and you think, "How am I ever going to get out of this, how are they ever going to grow up to be reasonable people." And I look at our boys, you know our boys are now 26 and 24 years old and we went through some tough times. We had a blended family and let me tell you, the Brady Bunch is a big con and it doesn't work. And some days Jacqui and I despaired and we thought, "How are we ever going to get through this?" And today, those difficult teenage boys are two of the most wonderful young men. We are so proud of them, they're doing so well and they're just delightful human beings. It is harvest time with those boys, you know it's just a fabulous, fabulous thing. Boy it can take some time though from being a difficult teenager to a well-balanced adult, that definitely doesn't happen overnight. The question is, "How do you spend a harvest like that?" We should enjoy some of it ourselves, that’s right and proper. The boys and Jacqui and I have put in a lot of effort into that relationship and for us now to have a great relationship, it's just fabulous and we do enjoy it but I wonder whether some of the harvest isn't for other people. There's a great little verse which when you first read it seems a bit simplistic but it's really deep. It's actually in the Old Testament Law, the book called Leviticus and it's Chapter 19, verse 9 if you'd like to have a look at it. This is what it says about harvesting, "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not ...” Now remember, sorry before we go into this, remember this is the Law, this is like a statute on the books, it is the Law: When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip the vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes on your vineyard floor. You shall leave them for the poor and the alien for I am the Lord your God. Isn't that an interesting Law to have? You think, 'well hang on, it's the farmer’s field, the farmer sowed it, the farmer paid for the seed, the farmer did the work, the farmer harvested, why shouldn't the farmer reap to the edges of his field? Why shouldn't the farmer be able to pick up all the grapes off the floor and use them all to make wine?' Well, God says, "Don't do this because I want you to leave some for the poor and for the alien for I am the Lord your God." In other words, don't consume the harvest all for yourself. Use some of it to bless others. Why? Because God's God. That’s the answer and that's God’s  heart. We can say it's the farmers farm and the farmers harvest but actually it's God that gave the increase. If your finances are in a mess and you sowed some seed and you disciplined yourself and you're now debt free, enjoy that but maybe your kids need a hand to buy a house or maybe there is some poor people or maybe you need to give some money away to some friends. The pastors of our Church, Mark and Joy, husband and wife, they're the senior pastors. Early on in their marriage they had a tough time but they sowed seed and they harvested and they have a wonderful marriage. And we're just doing a marriage seminar at Church at the moment, on a Wednesday night. We're just getting together over 5 weeks to give some of it back. Somehow if we try and keep all of the blessing for ourselves it runs out. Yet if we give some of it away, not only does it go on and on and on, the blessing somehow gets richer. If God has blessed us, if we have been through some difficult times and we've sowed seed and we've been blessed by God's increase; you look back on that and just the fact you've been through that process is awesome and fantastic. But then to take some of that blessing and to give it someone else, either emotionally or physically or monetarily, the blessing rolls on. It keeps going. And you might say, "Hang on Berni, that’s tough. I sowed, I watered, I waited, I weathered – its my harvest." But it was God who gave the increase wasn't it? God is the God of harvest, why do we give some away? Because he wants us to. As we sow, so shall we reap. It can be a tough gig sometimes but sowing and reaping is God’s  plan. What a plan! What a harvest!

We pretty much know that to reap a good harvest, we have to sow a good seed – but I’ll tell you sometimes it’s a long way between sowing and reaping – waiting, waiting, waiting…. I'm not a farmer but I've often imagined what it must be like, you know you spend the money, you buy the seed, you prepare the soil, you plant the seed and then you wait. So many things can go wrong, too much rain, not enough rain or it rains at the wrong time and pests and disease and fire and hail. Sometimes it can be a different one each year but eventually after some hard work, the investment and the wait; it's harvest time. When is harvest time? When the crop is ready and not a day before. It must take a really special person to wait that long. My hunch is that farmers have a really special heart, a heart weathered by disappointment and incredible patience and wonderful, wonderful times, harvest time. Harvest and time go together; harvests are essentially about two things, planting seeds and waiting. Planting seeds and time. And it doesn't matter how much we wish it would come earlier, doesn't matter how impatient we get, harvest only happens at harvest time, at the right time and I guess that’s why harvest time is such a special time for the farmer and I guess when we plant some good seed into the ground and eventually that harvest comes, well harvest time is a wonderful time. We want to get something out of life, a harvest, and so in different situations we know that if we want to get a harvest out of life, we need to plant some seed. God might put a dream into our heart to go and do something. It's not going to happen until we go and do it, until we put the effort in, until we put the sacrifice in. Sitting on the couch is not going to bring the dream into a reality we have to get up and do it and plant some good seed. It's a basic principle of life; you want to reap you got to sow. Patience hasn't always been my strong suit I'd have to say, you know I have drive, I like to get things done and I like to finish things off. That's good but we need patience along the way. This week on A Different Perspective we've been looking at the idea of sowing seed. You know when we look around at our lives and we see over this side of our lives things are going fantastically well and in this one area, or maybe there's two areas, well, things are not going so well. What do we do with those? Do we ignore them? Do we run away from them? Do we complain about them? Do we get angry with people? The best thing we can do, as we've seen on earlier programs this week, is to sow good seed into those places. When we're in a tough spot in life, in our finances, in our relationship, in our career, in health and we want to run away, Gods plan is that we should sow some good seed and we sow good seed in a difficult relationship, we sow kindness. In financial difficulties we sow giving, maybe giving to the poor. We sow a good seed and we wait and we nurture and we watch it grow and we weather the storms but it all takes time. The seeds, time and harvest. Sometimes planting those seeds is very difficult. In difficult times when someone’s not being nice to us we don't want to plant kindness into their lives, right? We just don't want to. But if we've got half a brain, we will because there's a Godly principle that says, "You plant good seed, you'll reap a good harvest." So it’s hard enough, we plant the seed, then, we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait and nothing happens and we wait some more. Great, now that’s a good plan God, thank you so much for that plan but God's harvest rarely happened in an instant. Time is a process, it’s a journey. It allows us to mature and to grow and to believe and to heal and to grow and to learn and to mature and to heal. You know good cheese spends months in the cellar, curing. A good wine can spend years in the cellar maturing and it's like that with us, you know, when we're going through this time, this time between planting a seed and harvesting the results, it feels like we're in a cellar sometimes. No one really understands, no one can feel what we're feeling, we just have the frustration and the hurt and the fear sometimes. But time is the hardest bit of all and today, I want to encourage you, enjoy the time, keep sowing good seed, keep watering the ones you've sown. A mate of mine, Paul the Apostle, a couple of thousand years ago, he wrote this, "Don't grow tired of doing good because at the right time, you will reap the harvest if you don't give up." Why shouldn't we grow tired of doing good? Because at the right time, at harvest time, when the crop is ready, when God is ready then we will reap the harvest if we don't give up. It's so easy to miss out on the harvest. The marriage is rocky, we're busy and tired, she's pick, pick, picking and he's closing down and they're drifting apart, one of those two decides to sow a good seed. It doesn't get any better right away, in fact, maybe it gets worse and time goes on and it gets worse and they still argue and it hurts, "I sowed the seed, I watered it, God what are you doing?" Time goes on and on, we keep sowing, we keep watering and we keep sacrificing, we keep blessing and loving but it doesn't get any better. "God what are you doing?" Why is it like that? Because God has a plan. His plan of sowing and reaping involves time. That’s the plan. When you think about the farmer who prepares the field and sows and fertilises and weeds but actually the crop grows naturally out of that. He doesn't grow it, that’s Gods thing and a harvest, out of a couple who are having difficulties in their marriage and one of them decides to sow good seed into that relationship, the harvest is a rich marriage, the harvest is a soul mate, the harvest is intimacy and joy and love where once there was conflict and pain and void. Harvests are worth waiting for. Harvests are worth rejoicing over and when we get to that harvest, we thought we never would, and we get to that harvest we think, "Man, imagine if I'd stopped. Imagine if I'd lost interest. Imagine if I'd given up just because it took time. That’s why most cultures have harvest festivals; it is such a long wait. If you've ever watched soccer, I mean I love soccer but it can be a long wait until someone scores a goal, so when they do score a goal, man; everyone goes mad because they scored a goal. It’s like that with a harvest; don't give up. God's plan is that time should go by. God's plan is that in that time, when we feel like we are in the cellar like a bottle of wine, don't grow tired of doing good because at the right time we will reap the harvest if we don’t give up. God means for you to have a harvest time in your life, no matter where you are, no matter what you've done, no matter how bad the situation is, whether you're at the point of famine or sowing or waiting or waiting or waiting or waiting or reaping. The harvest is coming. Don't grow tired of doing good and you will reap a harvest at the right time if you don't give up.

Have you ever noticed – when you take a good decision to plant some good seed in difficult soil – all of a sudden, a dirty great storm whips up.  Hey, I’m trying to do the right thing – God what’s going on? We all like sunshine and warm weather. You know when the weather forecaster comes on and says it's going to be cold and wet tomorrow, we go, "Augh yuck," but of course without the rain we'd all be dead. It's as simple as that, and sometimes it comes down in torrents, storms blow, the rain pelts down. Have you ever noticed the plants and the trees and the bushes in all that? They sway and bend in the wind and under the weight of the water. They've been incredibly engineered with a perfect structural tolerance for the forces of the weather. Only in the most extreme circumstances will a tree go over. There's a lesson in that. When we plant a seed, a good seed, into a difficult situation and that seed grows, the storms will definitely come. They're never much fun but they are a necessary part of life. So we plant the seed and it grows into this beautiful new thing, full of life and then a storm comes. And so we think, "God, what’s going on?" And he says, "Look at the trees, look at the plants; I've engineered them for the storms." Let’s unpack that just a bit today. Storms well, storms are a fact of life. I'm a great fan of sun, surf and sand. I love summer, I love the seafood, I love the shorts and the t-shirts and the thongs - I love summer but you know something, you know what makes it more fabulous for me? The other half of the year is fireplaces and pastas for lunch and stews and jumpers and warm clothes. That makes the sunny, hot days so much nicer, I enjoy them so much more because I know there's another part of the year that’s going to be cold and windy and stormy. As we survey the landscape that we call "our lives", as we look across this vast vista of life, we can see some bits that are sunny and warm and we can see some bits that are stormy and cold and all we want to do is get the most out of life, right? And so in different situations we know that if we want to get a harvest out of life, we need to plant some seed. God may put a dream in our heart to go and do something, its not going to happen until we go and do it, until we put the effort in, until we put the sacrifice in. Sitting on the couch is not going to bring the dream into a reality; we have to get up and do it and plant some good seed. It’s a basic principle of life - you want to reap, you've got to sow and depending on what sorts of seed we sow, we might reap a good harvest or a bad harvest. We go into a situation and we sow seeds of anger and resentment into a relationship, well its not rocket science to figure out what sort of harvest we're going to get. If we go into that same situation, that same relationship and we sow kindness and gentleness, what sort of a harvest are we going to get ultimately? It can be a very hard choice to sow a good seed into a bad situation; we've talked about this throughout the week on the program. We don't always feel like sowing a good seed in the face of adversity. When someone does something bad to us we want to react instead of respond. We want to rip their heads off instead of responding with love and maturity and kindness and sowing good seed in a place that was bad for us. So to sow that seed, to do good, is a tough choice. Let’s imagine we do it, I have someone in my life and they're being difficult, it’s been confrontational and I just make a decision. From now on I'm not going to react to them. From now on I'm going to bless them, I'm going to love them, I'm going to be good to them. I'm just going to sow good seed into that relationship. I guarantee you, when you and I make a decision like that, a storm will come. There was a guy called Job in the Old Testament, you can read about him. I remember when I first found that book in the Old Testament I thought 'Job' (employment), I wonder if that’s who they're talking about - I still read of it as Job. Anyway this guy is called Job and if you read the Book of Job, chapter 1, you'll see that Job was one good dude. He just obeyed God and was a good and Godly man. He did the right stuff and yet some horrible things fell on him. The devil came after him with an axe and he lost everything, his home, his family, his fortune, his health – EVERYTHING Job lost. In this book you can read about it, Job chapter 30, verse 22. He said, "God you've gone feral. What are you doing hounding me? You kind of lift me up in this gale and you toss me around in a storm." It can be a hard enough decision on its own to plant a good seed and it seems sometimes forever 'til that little sprout comes out of the ground. You know, you've been watering it and you've been nurturing it and you think, 'My, I've been good to this person, nothing is happening' and eventually something does, eventually you start seeing some good signs. I guarantee you a storm will come. Just starting to come good and this massive storm hits. Maybe that relationship takes a huge dive downhill. I find it really useful to see what God does with his trees and his plants in a storm. You know when it's blowing a gale outside and you look out the window and trees bend and shake and they even break off the odd branch before they go belly up. And the next day you go outside and yeah, there a few leaves on the ground and there might be a few branches on the ground but the tree's still standing. The tree is still there and the storms gone. Storms don't last forever. It’s very rare that a tree's destroyed, very, very rare. Storms go away. The disciples found that out when they were on the water in a storm, in a boat and they were scared. You can read about it in Matthew, chapter 8, towards the end, verses 24 to 26. And they were petrified and they said to Jesus, ‘Jesus, calm the storm.’ And he said, ‘What’s the matter with you? I'm Jesus.’ And he calmed the storm. We, when we're in the middle of a storm, it feels like it's going to last forever, doesn't it? All you can feel is the storm and the wind blowing and you think, "but ... I've been sowing good seed. Why is this happening?" Because it always happens 'cause that’s life. Storms are a part of life and you plant that seed and a little seedling comes out and it becomes a sapling, it becomes a tree, maybe it's an older tree, maybe you do really well and this trees been around for a while, it's going well, it is engineered to withstand the storm. The good seeds that we plant under God’s  hand are engineered to weather the storm. And what I've noticed is, if it's a difficult relationship and we plant seeds of blessing into that relationship and we believe that God will give the increase, it almost always gets worse to start with. The enemy comes along and there's opposition. Today, together, let’s get God’s  Word, his gentle, powerful, perfect Word into us. His plan is for us to weather the storm. God has engineered us that way. God has engineered our seeds and our dreams that way. Don't grow tired of doing the right thing because just at the right time we will see that harvest. It's funny how we can miss this stuff in life, something difficult happens and instead of running away we say, ‘No I'm going to plant a seed.’ And we plant the seed and it takes forever to grow up and we want to give up but we hang in there and the seed grows and all of a sudden a storm hits and we want to panic and we want to run away. You notice how the older trees have that weathered look, its part of their beauty, its part of why we look at an old tree and go, "Isn't it a gorgeous thing." Because it has weathered the storm. NEVER get tired of doing good. NEVER give up because God is the God of harvest. God is the God of blessing and he honours us when we go and plant good seed into a bad situation. God is the one that will give the increase and the harvest will come.

Sometimes, when we go through a bit of a rough patch, instead of running away (which is always our first instinct) instead, we make a good choice and decide to plant a good seed in that place. But then for a while, it feels like nothing’s happening. Have you ever planted a seed into some dirt? There’s something that, well frankly, is unnerving about this simple transaction. You take the seed and invariably it costs you something, you put it into the dirt and you cover it up and it's gone. There's a little kid inside each of us who wants to sit there and say, "Ok, well. I planted you, I watered you, where are you?" Now we're patient, we give it thirty seconds, a minute maybe. "Come on, grow you little sucker." It's true isn't it? We expect instant results. When something in our lives isn't quite right sometimes we have the good sense to sow a good seed into that place. A broken relationship – we sow a small act of kindness, a boring job – we throw ourselves into a project with new vigour, a rebellious teenager – we do something that says, "I love you" and then we expect instant results but life’s not like that. When we plant that little seed in the dirt it disappears for a while and that "while" can seem so excruciatingly long can't it? And all we seem to be doing is watering the dirt and so we have a problem. We plant a seed and we wait. Let’s explore that time of waiting just a little bit more today. A seed is a simple little thing but it might look simple but it has a complex DNA soup inside and this dry, brown, little thing is a container of life, of potential, of reproduction. A seed doesn't look like much but every flower that will ever grow already exists in a seed somewhere. When we survey the landscape of our lives we so often see parts of our lives that are going so well. It's like being at a lookout and you look out and you see the valleys and the fields and the trees and way over on the left it can be sunny and you can look over on the right and there’s a storm happening over there and life can be like that. Some parts of our lives can be just fantastic but one or two areas of life might be, well a little less than what we expected, we might be missing out on something. Maybe we're in credit card debt and our finances are a mess or maybe, I don't know, something’s going wrong at home with the kids or the marriage relationship or maybe at work or maybe emotionally. Some relationship, some situation is not producing a healthy harvest and when that’s happening, got to tell ya, I don't know how you are but I don't feel like planting a good seed into that particular space. When I have a relationship with someone that's not working well the last thing I naturally feel like doing is planting a seed of blessing, of kindness. We don't want to do that, you know, when we've got problems with our finances and we're starting to sort them through and God says, "You know something? I want you to plant a seed of financial blessing over here into this ministry or into this person’s life." We don't want to do that but God, God wants us to plant seeds in faith even when the going is tough, in fact, especially when the going gets tough and especially when we don't feel like going and planting a seed. Now, lets say its our finances and lets say we decide to start disciplining ourselves with our finances and paying off the credit card debt because we just know we can't go on like this, we've prayed about it and that's what God’s calling us to do, let me ask you, the day that we decide that, the next day is the debt gone? Of course it's not, we don't end up debt free overnight, it takes time doesn't it? And it's like that when a farmer takes a seed and plants it into the ground. It's a tense time, farmers spend a huge amount of money on seeds and everything has to be just right and there's nothing else they can do. They plant the seed into the ground and they just have to believe that it's going to come out. When you and I sow a seed into a difficult situation, that waiting, you know you put the seed into the ground, it disappears, it's like it's gone, it's like almost it never happened. A seed in a sense, a physical seed is different because you know you planted the seed into the dirt. But when we plant an emotional seed or a spiritual seed, when we show someone some kindness or faithfulness or we do something to someone who is not nice to us, a week later, a day later it can seem like it's gone because they're back to their old behaviour again and having a go at us again. And we think, "oh well, that didn't work, did it? I knew this seed planting thing would never work." Yesterday we saw how Isaac, and you can read about it in God’s Word the Bible, in Genesis chapter 26, sowed a seed in the midst of a famine. You and I can sow a seed into a difficult relationship, right now, sow that seed and nothing happens and we sow another seed and nothing happens and we sow another seed and nothing happens, we do it again and nothing happens. You know what we want to do? We want to give up, we just want to say, "this stupid seed sowing thing just isn't going to work, blah ... " and we walk away in disgust and we give up prematurely. But just a few centimetres under the surface that seed hasn't given up. I have this picture of a farmer planting all his seed in his fields and the seeds not coming up so he goes broke and he walks off his land and he's just driving down the dirt road with his family and they’re crying because they're leaving the farm forever and they just turn the corner. Just as they turn the corner, behind them, little green shoots are starting to come up through the ground. Wouldn't that be a tragedy? Wouldn't it be a tragedy to give up just before the little green shoots started appearing? We live in such an impatient world; we walk away before the shoots come forth. We plant, we nurture, we water and God gives it life. That difficult teenager, that marriage, that work situation, we sow good seeds into them in radical faith and we have a choice, at that point when we've sown the seed and we see nothing in return, before the little green shoot comes up out of the dirt, we can get impatient and walk away or we can water it and nurture it. Sometimes we sow that seed and we water it and we believe and we nurture it. And months and even years can go by and we see nothing or worse still, things get worse. But God sees them. You see, that's the amazing thing, when it's hidden, those hidden things, we can't see them in the natural. But God sees them just like that little seed of wheat that’s under the ground there that the farmer has planted. But the farmer can't make it grow, only God can make it grow and it grows naturally. When we plant good seed in soil it grows naturally and when we plant seeds into the lives of difficult people, we can't see it but it grows naturally. God is the one who that makes it grow even when you and I can't see it. That is such an exciting thing to understand. God sees, God blesses and under that surface in a dark place where we can't see the seed, it's putting up a little green shoot. Wait for it - it's happening. We can be so discouraged that we stop watering, we stop nurturing, we stop planting seed. We're going to talk tomorrow about the time it takes to get to the harvest but right now in that really initial point let me encourage you. If you are planting good seeds into difficult situations, into your finances, into your relationships, into your marriage, into your family, into your work, into your Church, wherever it is, if you are planting good seed do not expect the little green shoots to come up in thirty seconds or a minute or a half an hour or a day or even a week or even a month. It takes time. There's a reason why it takes time and we'll talk about it on the program later on this week. But while that time is happening there's something else growing - our faith. Believing that God will do it. It's a good prayer point, it's a good thing to pray, when we've planted a seed and I have to wait, ‘change my heart.’ It's happening, the seed is germinating, just wait for it, wait for it!

Sometimes when you’re going through a bad patch – all you want is for it to get better. But actually, sometimes, what we need to do is to plant a good seed while we’re waiting. 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. Biblegateway 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!

One of the things that nobody ever really tells you when you’re a teenager, is that the tough lessons you learn now are going to be so important later on in life. Is that really true? There's a great film that was produced back in 1984 called, “The Karate Kid”. It's about a teenage boy who had just lost his father and who ends up studying karate under an older Japanese man called, Mr Miagi. And for the first few months, all Mr Miagi does is to get this young Daniel Laruso to do menial chores – polish the car, paint the fence, sand the deck and after months Daniel has had enough. He feels that he's been taken advantage of and has a go at Mr Miagi. But what he discovers, all of a sudden, is that the constant repetitious boring motions of polishing the car in round motions, wipe on/wipe off and the up and down motions of painting the fence, those things have drummed into him the very reflexes he needs for his karate moves not to mention the self discipline. I think that “The Karate Kid” is one of the movies that all families should watch together because it explains something important to the impatient teenager. The other day on the program we talked about that saying, "you can't put old head on young shoulders." In other words you can't expect a teenager to understand the bigger picture; they won't until they grow up. Well, in part that’s true, I mean I never really appreciated my parents until I had my own children but at the same time I don't think we talk enough about the future with our kids. All they've ever known is home and school and home and school and home and school. What they really want to know is, what is life going to like after school? How will it be? I had this idealised picture of this most amazing freedom and sure it was great finally to finish high school. But I could never have anticipated the struggles and the issues ahead of me probably because we never talked about that stuff. And like Daniel Laruso in The Karate Kid, I simply never appreciated that the boring mundane chores and boundaries that my parents put into my life were such an important learning foundation for growing up into an effective adult. When you look at our children, they are a wondrous creation, you watch them grow up and develop. You know the time I enjoy most is when they develop a sense of humour and you can banter with them and start talking to them more as adults than kids, that's a great time. It's amazing but parents know that there are things that they have to learn, discipline, self motivation, dealing with the routine and the humdrum and the pressures and the unfairness of life. So what parents do is we put things into place that causes them to learn those things. Problem is, as a teenager, I couldn't see that because no-one ever explained it to me and what teenagers do, because they don't understand, is they rebel. We looked at this passage the other day; it comes from Hebrews, chapter 5 listen to it: During the days of Jesus' life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could have saved Him from death and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Although He was the Son He learned obedience from what He suffered and once made perfect He became the source of eternal salvation for all who believed. Jesus learned obedience from what He suffered. Obedience and suffering are linked, they always are and there's only one way to learn self discipline, it's the hard way and here's the thing, different parents use different approaches but they all have one thing in common. If we parents are doing our jobs properly we put certain non negotiable boundaries in place. In our home it looks something like this for our daughter Melissa who is 16 years old. Every night, no matter what, she cleans up the kitchen after dinner. Every week by midday on Saturday, no matter what, her room has to be cleaned top to bottom otherwise she loses her internet access for a week and that, I have to tell you, is devastating for a teenager. Another boundary is, she will not answer back or argue with me or with her mother. And when she moves from schooling into work in a few years time, she will pay board to cover some of her costs at home. Now there are others, about her social life and stuff, why do we do this? Because these are bottom lines and they are absolutely non negotiables and having some non negotiables in your life when you’re growing up as a teenager, is critical in the development of the teenager. If you don't have the boundaries the child will grow up without basic skills that he or she needs for adulthood. Is it fun for her to lose a week’s internet? Well, no it's not. Is it fun for her, every night, to have to clean up the kitchen? No it's not. But these are the things that teach our children the skills that they need later in life. If you're a teenager, because you actually can't see into the future, in a sense you have to accept this on trust. I mean, when you leave school it brings challenges and responsibilities and ultimately setting up your own home. You have to pay the rent, you have to pay the electricity bill, you have to pay the car registration, you have to front up to work on time every day. So these seemingly restrictive and mundane and boring and horrible things that parents do to ruin a teenager’s social life turn out to be amongst the most critical things in building a solid foundation for adulthood. This is God's idea. Listen to what He says in Hebrews, chapter 12: My son, do not make light of the Lords discipline and do not lose heart when He rebukes you because the Lord disciplines those whom He loves and He punishes everyone whom He accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father. If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness. No discipline ... Listen to this bit: No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. This is God’s word, this is God’s wisdom. God’s talking about how He disciplines all of us but He also brings in the parents discipline of their children. This is God’s plan and none of us likes being disciplined, it's never fun but unless we learn through the discipline of our parents we are not going to be equipped to be effective adults and in turn parents ourselves. I want to encourage you in your family whether you're a parent or a child or a grandparent or a friend of people who have teenagers, where ever you fit in, to talk about this constantly. Without this discipline the boundaries and the chores and all that stuff, a child simply won't become an effective adult, it's just the way it is, it's the God thing. Parents naturally want to bless their children. If you're a teenager and if you're a child, if you want to walk in the blessing, the abundant blessing of your parents: Honour your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land that the Lord has given to you.

One of the things I did when I was a teenager is that I wanted to act like a child and yet, to be treated like an adult. So what are parents looking for in their teenagers as key indicators that they’re actually growing up? Can I ask you a question? How would you define maturity? I mean, you look at two people, similar ages, similar backgrounds and you think that one, well she definitely has it but that other one over there, he just needs to grow up. So what’s the difference between the two? What sets them apart? What makes one person mature and the other one immature? Interesting. We often think of maturity as a real issue amongst teenagers and to be sure, they're in a natural transition from the immaturity of childhood to the maturity of adulthood. What about amongst adults? Aren't they all mature? What sets a person apart as being mature? When we look at someone, what are we looking for as the indicators of maturity? This week on the program we're doing a little series that I've called, “How to get More out of your Parents”. The idea kind of spawned out of a situation when I was asked to speak to a gathering of high school students and I just wanted to talk about something that they'd be interested in rather boring their socks off. Now I operate on this basic premise that 99.9% of parents are hard wired to bless their children. We want to see them happy and healthy and well adjusted but there's this one thing that stops the flow of blessing from parents to children. It's like a cork in the line that completely blocks the blessing and that thing is rebellion. Rebellion is something that happens, well it happens at all ages, but it particularly happens in the teenage years. You know when teenagers kind of roll their eyes and ignore their parents and disobey their parents and that in the end robs the teenager of the blessing that the parents wanted to give them. I've been there as a parent, you make a silent decision, you take your teenage kids out for a meal, it's a nice meal and you get an attitude problem. You know, you get one of these moods from them and you sit there and think, "Well you know, the next time we got out for a nice meal I'm not bringing a teenager with attitude with us." So you wait until they're off doing something else and then you go out for dinner without them. Now without even knowing it, their failure to honour their parents has robbed them of blessing. It happens a thousand times a day in some households. That's because there's a natural order that God has put in place. We looked at it yesterday on the program. Honour your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land that the Lord has given you. It's the 5th commandment, you go to the Ten Commandments, the first four are about our relationship with God and that's fair enough, the very next one is: Honour your father and your mother ... And it comes before: Don't murder; don't commit adultery; don't lie; don't steal. Obviously God takes this as really important and the struggle for teenagers is that they want to be grown up, they so much want to be grown up. I remember I did. I wanted to shed this whole childhood thing once and for all and be done with it and be an adult and yet, you're not really, you don't have independence from your parents and it's so frustrating and so our natural reaction, as teenagers is to rebel and when we rebel, instead of setting us free our parents would close us down. When we rebelled it didn't have the desired affect, it actually made things worse and there’s this downward spiral. Why is that? Well because parents are looking for signs of maturity in their children before they'll remove some of the boundaries. Let me say that again, parents are looking for signs of maturity in their children before they'll remove some of the boundaries. You see it with young children; you don't let a young child use a sharp knife until you know that they're not going to hurt themselves with it. Now if you're a teenager, I'm going to share with you the top three signs, the marks of maturity, the things that your parents are looking for and to make it easier to remember they all begin with an "A". The three are acceptance, appreciation and anticipation. It's one thing to say you should honour your parents, bottom line is we all know that we should but the question is how do you honour your parents? Well if you're looking for some really practical advice on the "how" front here it is, this is my top three list of "hows" if you like. Let’s start with the 1st one: Acceptance. Acceptance just means that while we live under our parents roof we accept their authority over us, it's a heart decision, you flick a switch inside, “They are my parents; they've done everything from wipe my bottom to suffer my tantrums; they are the ones that God gave me and from now on my decision is, I am just going to accept their authority over my life. I know it won't always be easy, I know I won't always get it right but that's the decision.” And when they see the outworking of that decision they are going to be delighted with you, it will expand their hearts. It's an amazing thing to see your teenage child just accept the authority of the father and the mother, THAT is honouring your parents. Acceptance. Accepting that they have a Godly right and a role to have authority over you. The 2nd one: Appreciation. Parents do so much for their kids, they drive you here and there and everywhere and give you money for this and a lot of what they do is pretty thankless. They put dinner on the table every night, there's food in the fridge, we can all make a list of what our parents have done for us and it's longer than we can ever imagine. Now by and large they don't mind doing it all but what they hate is being taken for granted. What they want to see is just simply that you appreciate it. Next time, if you're a teenager, your Dad picks you up from a party at 11.00 pm on a Saturday night and it's bucketing rain, why don't you look him in the eye and say, "You know something Dad, I really appreciate this, thank you." Not some "tick in the box" mumble thank you, he wants to know that you appreciate it and he may never show it but I guarantee you his heart for you just grew by 50% inside. They just want to know that you really appreciate all the things they do for you. The 3rd one: Anticipation. This is the biggie and in growing up terms it's one of the hardest. It's looking around and seeing that your parents need a hand and just helping without being asked. You just get up from the table and instead of going back to your room to watch television, you start cleaning the kitchen or you see that the bin in the kitchen needs emptying so you just empty it without expecting to be noticed or thanked or anything else, you just pitch in and help and do it quietly. You anticipate other people’s needs and then you serve them. That I have to tell you if you're a teenager will blow your parents socks off. You know what my wife and I say to each other quietly when our 16 year old daughter does something like that? We sit back and say, "you know something, she is growing up." It's the surest sign of maturity when a teenager all of a sudden begins to do things for people in the home for their parents, for their brothers, for their sisters without being asked, without expecting a big "hoo ha" pat on the back. Just quietly pitching in and doing it. There are three things, acceptance, appreciation and anticipation, they are the marks of maturity. And when parents start seeing those things consistently in their teenage children’s lives, boundaries will start to come down because they know that their teenager is growing up and they know that their teenager can be trusted. Honour your father and your mother that you may live long in the land that the Lord has given you. When you do that the blessing just flows. You see you can't act like a child and expect to be treated like an adult.

It’s an amazing thing – but God places a very high premium on children honouring their parents. And that’s not always easy. I mean for starters – what does “honour” actually mean here in the 21st century, mm? I asked my 16 year old daughter Melissa, the other day what she thought the word “honour” means. She immediately responded, "It means obedience." "Mmm," I said, “That's part of it but not the whole lot." "What do you mean?" She asked, "Well," I said, "Your Mum and I honour you, don't we?" She hadn't quite thought of it that way. She looked around the room and said, "You're right, you do." Honour is a two way thing, parents honour their children by loving them and caring for them and doing things for them and driving them to where they want to go, providing for them. The list is as long as your arm and children are supposed to honour their parents but exactly what does that mean? We've all heard of the Ten Commandments I guess, it's an interesting list. Moses, in the Old Testament, (you can read about it in the book of Exodus) went up to Mount Sinai and received the Law, the Jewish Law from God. And the Jewish Law is the first five books of the Old Testament; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and there were 613 commandments and prohibitions in the Jewish Law. And I guess the Ten Commandments that Moses received up on Mount Sinai are kind of like an executive summary of all of those 613. You can read the Ten Commandments in Exodus, chapter 20. Now let’s just take a moment to go through the list. The first commandment is that: You shall have no other Gods before me. That’s fair enough. The second commandment says: Don't make any idols. The third one is: Don't use the Lords name in vain. And the fourth one is that: The 7th day, the Sabbath, is a day of rest, and you have to set that apart for the Lord. Now you think of those first 4 commandments and they're all about our relationship with God. They're about loving and honouring God and resting in Him. Those first 4 commandments define our relationship with Lord our God. Okay, what's the fifth commandment? The very next one is: Honour your Father and your Mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord has given you. Isn't that amazing? The very first thing He does after defining our relationship with Him, the very first thing is to say, "Honour your Father and your Mother." And it's the only commandment with a blessing attached to it. "Honour your Father and Mother so that you may live long in the land that the Lord has given to you." Mmm! And this one comes immediately before the ones that we might consider to be the real biggies. Don't murder. Don't commit adultery. Don't steal. Don't lie. Don't be jealous of what your neighbour has. Do you think that God thinks this is important? There are 613 prohibitions and commandments in the Jewish Law. The executive summary is the Ten Commandments, the first 4 of those is about us and God, number five is about honouring your parents and there's a blessing attached. Mmm, I think God's got it very high on His priority list. Well, what does it actually mean to honour your parents? Let’s just unpack this commandment, this 5th commandment just a little bit. What does honour your parents actually mean? Well I guess there are 3 dimensions, firstly to prize them highly. If you read Proverbs, chapter 4 and verse 8 it uses this word honour, it says: Wisdom when sought above everything else and prized more highly than all else will bring honour to its seekers. You know, as kids often we, I know as a teenager I didn't prize my parents highly, I didn't value them and parents do so much for their children. When the kids, just kind of in their hearts, are grateful and value and prize them that brings honour to the parents. I just wish someone had told me that when I was a teenager. The second dimension is caring, showing affection for them. If you read psalm 91, verse 15: God's honouring of individuals is shown by His care in being with them and delivering them from trouble. You know something I never did as a teenager; I never actually showed affection to my parents. I never actually cared for them, I never actually looked and said, "You know something, my Mum is tired, I might make her a cup of tea." I know when my daughter, Melissa, sometimes she'll say, "Can I make you a cup of tea?" and I think that is SO nice that she sees that I'm tired and that she offers to make me a cup of tea. What is says is she cares about me and that brings honour to me as her father. And the third dimension is showing respect or fear or revering them. I mean, you know something; parents need to be respected by their children. I know I often didn't agree with the decisions my parents made. I often didn't want to do the things my parents told me to do but something that we so often fail to do, as teenagers and I know I did, was simply to show respect for the authority that my parents had in my home. Ephesians chapter 6, verse 1 says this: Obey your parents. But immediately and necessarily it qualifies that and says: In the Lord. In other words, parents are to be shown honour but nowhere is there word to rival, to be a substitute for God’s word. Isn't it so opposite of what teenagers want to do? The notion that they should prize their parents highly, the notion that they should care and show affection for them, the notion that they should show respect and fear or reverence for their parents is so against where society is going at the moment. "Oh, they don't know anything." I remember not even wanting to be seen in public with my parents. You remember what it was like growing up? Moving from this complete dependence on our parents to independence and its hard because we're trying to make our own way and we're trying to set up who we are and so often we want to rebel against our parents but it seems to me that there are two ways of growing up – the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way is using our growing independence, our desire for independence as an excuse to rebel against our parents. And the right way, the right way is to learn to honour them second only to God Himself. I'll take you back to the Ten Commandments. The first four are about our relationship with God, the very next one is that we should honour our father and our mother. I heard a Christian psychologist on the radio recently who was saying that it's natural for boys to hurt their mothers, it's part of growing up. They need to cut the umbilical cord and that's going to involve rebellion. Well I agree that boys need to separate from their mothers to become men, it's actually a very important stage of development but in doing that, they should always honour their mother. You know why? Because if a teenage boy doesn't learn to honour his mother, he will never know how to honour his wife. Some people never grow up; some people never learn to honour their mother and their father. When we learn to do that there are huge blessings in that. When we honour our parents, their natural desire is to bless us, that’s what they want to do and when we honour them the blessing flows naturally from parent to child as it's meant to do and when we honour them, God blesses us because it's the way that God set it up. When we honour our mother and our father the blessing just flows.

It seems par for the course that at some point, teenagers want to rebel. I know I did. So, why is that? What’s going on in their hearts when they get this urge to rebel? Now I remember when I was a teenager it was a time of anger and tension and conflict with my parents. You see, I knew that I knew everything and I knew that they knew nothing; I mean they were so old fashioned. They made me have my hair cut short when all my friends had long hair. They made me clean my room every Saturday morning, I mean come on! All my friends were allowed to have messy rooms. I had to learn the piano whether I liked it or not, I mean who did they think they were? Hm, does that sound familiar? I really remember those days; I remember slamming my door shut with anger in my heart and with tears in my eyes and my fists thumping the door. Through gritted teeth I swore I would never do that to my children what they did to me but you know something; years later I saw the wisdom of their ways. I just wish that someone could have explained to me, back then, what I know now. Well you know the saying, "you can't put an old head on young shoulders" and I guess to some extent that’s true but you know something, I think sometimes we as parents use that as a bit of a cop out too, where we kind of abdicate our role of teaching our kids to grow up because teaching them to grow up is just plain hard work. There's conflict and parents stop talking to their kids, they give up on them, they let them have a messy room, it's just all too hard you know, and you know what happens then? We stop talking and life becomes a series of flash points and blow ups and the relationship deteriorates to a point where there isn't one. I believe that young people today hunger for a sense of family and community and the whole conflict thing is something that we have to discuss and work through. Yesterday on the program, we looked at the whole process of growing up and when you stand back from that process, growing up really is about moving from complete dependence when we're little bubs, (you know, and we need our nappies changed and we need to be fed) to the ability to be independent of our parents and when we walk out that door for the last time or we go and make our own lives in this world, we have to have the skills and the abilities to do that. Growing up is moving from being incapable of looking after yourself to being capable of looking after yourself. It's a big deal, there's lots of things involved, just basic physical things, there's managing with money, there's working, there's dealing with our emotions, there's caring for other people, there's serving people. All that stuff is hard to learn and the way God planned it was for us to learn it in our families but somewhere along the way our children go from being little kids to being adults but as teenagers they're kind of in that "not quite yet" spot aren't they? Those teenage years are in between years and they're so hard. I mean it's natural for our kids to go from being little children to being teenagers and they develop and they learn and they become more independent and there comes a point when they know that they're not kids anymore and they kind of know that they're not adults yet but they really, really want to be. Yep, those in between years are really tough and they're typically years that involve quite a bit of conflict. I remember rebelling against my parents and my Father sat me down one day and he said, "Son, this is the way it is. As long as you live under my roof and you eat my food, you'll do what I say. If you don't like it”, He pointed at the door and he said, "there is the door." In effect he said, "I provide – I decide". I hated him for saying that, how dare he! But you know something as much as I hated it, he was right. Rebellion is when we want our own way. Rebellion isn't unique to childhood or teenage years, you see it in adults all the time because some people have never grown up, some people have never learned to accept authority, "I want it my way!" Well get a revelation, you can't always have it your way. And as a teenager I used to think, "when I'm an adult I won't have to put up with this." Well wrong, I mean when I left high school I went to train as an officer in the army, I became an army officer, I became a senior manager in a corporation, I owned my own business, I mean I had made it. Then I became a Christian, I went to a Bible College, we had to do chores there, can you believe it? I had to vacuum people’s carpets and clean the toilets. That was really, really good for my ego and now I'm a C.E.O. of this ministry called Christianityworks and I speak to millions of people each week through radio but even today, at age 48, I am subject to a Board of Directors. Godly men and women who exercise authority over me and you know something; that is the way it should be. Obedience is hard and there's only one way to learn obedience, the hard way. It hurts to be obedient, it hurts when you're a teenager and your parents tell you to do something and you don't want to do it. Jesus went through exactly the same thing. Hebrews, chapter 5: During the days of Jesus' life on earth he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could have saved Him from death and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Even though He was the Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and once made perfect He became the eternal source of salvation for all who obey Him. Do you get that? Jesus, the Son of God, learned obedience from what He suffered. Obedience is only obedience when we do something that we're told to do that we don't want to do. I mean, let's face it, if it's something we want to do that's not obedience. If a Dad goes to his teenage daughter and said, "Darling, let's go to the shop, I want to buy you an ipod." And she says, "Yeah, sure Dad, I'll come to the shop." That's not obedience. But if a father says to his son, "Son, clean up that mess in the kitchen that your sister made" what's the son’s reaction? "I didn't make that mess." That's hard! If you're a teenager listen to me, sometimes what your parents ask you to do doesn't seem fair, you know why? Because it isn't, it's not what you want to do, its inconvenient, especially cleaning up something that your brother or your sister did. And if you do it, if you obey your father and your mother, it's going to hurt like hell inside. Do it anyway, do it with a good heart. You know what happens when we do that? We grow up inside. People, as a teenager, people think growing up on the outside is growing up. You know you see young teenage girls at the shops with make up plastered on and low cut dresses and they think they look so grown up. No they don't, they look like young girls who are trying to look grown up. And you see boys swearing with their mates and acting tough, they think they look grown up. No they don't, they look like boys trying to look grown up. Look at the example of Jesus again; Jesus learned obedience from what He suffered. Growing up is about learning to lay your life down, it's hard. Growing up is learning to be obedient. When we are obedient to our parents, get this, it matures us like nothing else. It prepares us for life like nothing else. Part of Gods plan, that's why God gave us parents. When you're 35 and you're 40 and 50 we still have other people exercise authority over us. I know obedience hurts – do it anyway.