When we get to the end of our lives, we’d like to believe that we will have made a positive difference in this world. That we’ll be leaving behind a legacy of love in the lives of those who matter most to us. Question is, are we living the sort of life today, that’s going to achieve that goal then?

Right now there are just over seven billion people living on planet earth, a number that’s going up every day. Today, just under 360,000 babies will be born and just over 150,000 people will die. So the net population growth of people on planet earth is around 210,000 a day or about 75,000,000 additional people on the earth each year.

They’re big numbers to contemplate especially when all that you and I see is that small sub-section of that seven-billion people that live just around where we live. Granted some see more than others, I know when I’m staying at the hotel I usually stay at in Secunderabad in India I tend to see many, many more people each day than I see back home in Australia.

But wherever we live we really only see a tiny, tiny fraction of all the people living on the earth, being born on the earth and dying on the earth each day. And in all of human history they tell us that just over a hundred billion people have been born on this earth. So of all the people who have ever lived only around 7% are alive today to which when you think about it is rather a lot.

Now each of those 100-billion people have lived a life, some long, some short and each of those one hundred billion people have left a legacy. For many of them they’re most obvious legacy is the children they left behind who’ve had their own children who in turn had children and so the human legacy of people is the most obvious thing they leave behind.

You and I are descendants of an incredibly long line of people, the vast majority who we’ll never have heard of. I knew my parents of course and three out of my four grandparents but beyond that I really have no idea. I’ve seen their names on a piece of paper, a family genealogy, but I don’t know them or anything much about them.

But in a very real sense they’re legacy lives on in me as the legacy of your ancestors live on in you. The first and most obvious thing of them that lives on in you and me is their DNA. Biologically you and I have picked up DNA from an incalculably large number of ancestors. If I take you back just ten generations prior to yourself there were 2,048 parents, grandparents, great, great, great, great, grandparents and so on who are directly part of your lineage.

Go back 80 generations, say to the time of Christ, and that number becomes huge which in mathematical theory 1.2-trillion-trillion people. Of course there have never been that many people on this earth so there’s a whole science that’s grown up to explain the whole numerical ancestry thing. Its amazing stuff and we could rabbit on for hours about this, but we won’t.

Suffice to say that your DNA, the genes laid down, each strand is a complex pea soup made up of the legacy of a very large number of people. So that’s the most obvious legacy that people leave behind but there’s also the legacy of our lives, the impacts that we’ve had on the people around us. Impacts that ripple laterally across to other people and vertically down through the generations.

As an extreme example it’s reasonable to expect that both historically and emotionally Adolf Hitler has had quite a different impact on the world compared to say Mother Theresa, would you agree? Some people have left astounding legacies behind them, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton left a legacy of knowledge that science still uses as its foundation today; medical researchers, teachers, nurses, administrators, politicians, activists, people through whom the course of history has been shaped and changed.

And then just ordinary folk like you and me, we leave behind legacies too. Some of us will leave behind a good legacy, others not quite so good and yet others leave behind a terrible legacy, a legacy of abuse and hatred that reverberates down through many generations to come.

It’s worth stopping to think about these things for a while isn’t it? Because the question that all this stuff causes me to ask of myself is this. What sort of a legacy will I end up leaving behind and you, what about you, what sort of legacy will you end up leaving behind? Have you ever wondered that?

The impact that we have on people closest to us, our parents, our spouse, our children, our friends, our work colleagues, our neighbours, our community, what sort of a legacy will you and I leave behind for them? That’s the question and that’s why we’re kicking off today a new series of messages that I’ve called “Living A Life That Leaves A Lasting Legacy Of Love”.

That’s a bit of a mouthful I know but I guess my central premise here is that if we want to leave something good behind then we have to live the sort of life that’s going to achieve that outcome. And the greatest legacy that you and I can leave behind is a lasting legacy of love, the impact of our love on other people.

Problem is, you and I are a bit of a mixed bag. We have some good attributes, some particular strengths in our makeup handed down in our DNA and shaped and refined by our experience but then we have some weaknesses and not so nice things about who we are. The question is which of those is going to shape the legacy that we leave behind? The answer is the one we allow to dominate our lives.

Each of us will leave some legacy, something that we imprint on our children. If you’re a person whose say constantly afraid, you worry about things all the time, then the chances are that a great deal of that is going to rub off onto your children. On the other hand if you’re a real encourager, someone who’s always building up other people then that is going to totally change how your children see themselves and the impact of that will go down through the generations.

So it’s how we live our lives that impacts not just our children but many other people around us. The smallest act of kindness can change a life, the smallest act of service can totally transform someone’s world and that my friend is something that can ripple across the world and down through the generations in ways that we simply cannot begin to comprehend.

This isn’t just Berni rambling on, it’s exactly what God says in His Word the Bible. Have a listen. It’s in the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20, verses 5 and 6. God says this:

You shall not bow down to worship false Gods for I the Lord your God am a jealous God punishing children for the inequity of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

See it’s true, you see it all the time. Sin ripples down a few generations. A man who is an alcoholic is likely to produce a son who’s an alcoholic. A man who beats his wife or his children is likely to produce a son who does exactly the same. Our sins impact not just us and our immediate family, they impact the legacy that ripples down behind us through the generations.

But note please here the grace and the mercy and the power of what God’s saying. Our unfaithfulness to God only goes down three or four generations but if we’re faithful to Him, if we worship Him and live our lives the best we can for Him then the fruit of that faithfulness is the fact that God shows His steadfast love to the thousandth generation. It’s a way of saying forever. A thousand generations is like twenty-five thousand years.

My friend it may be that you are dealing with generational impacts of sin of your parents, of your grandparents. It may be that there’s a spiritual hold over you of violence, of low self-esteem, of fear, of timidity, of pride, generational sin that has been handed down to you from your ancestors.

But Gods Word is clear, you and I can break that cycle by repenting and turning our lives around and worshipping and honouring Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came to die for us and rise again and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this series, breaking the power of generational sin and leaving behind a lasting legacy of love.

Most of us hope that when our life here on this earth draws to a close, we’ll have touched other people’s lives in the sort of way that leaves behind a real legacy of love. And yet – so many of us are drowning in a sea of negative emotions – the sort of emotions that could well rob us of that objective.

We’re chatting this week about living the sort of life that leaves behind a lasting legacy of love. Now not just any legacy, each of the 100-billion or so people who have ever lived on planet earth will have left behind some sort of legacy. Stalin left behind a legacy, Bin Laden left behind a legacy, Hitler left behind a legacy but for 99.999% of us that’s not the sort of legacy we want to leave behind.

I mean I know that there are many things in my makeup and things in yours that aren’t perfect, things that don’t speak love into other people’s lives but on balance, come on we do want to leave a good legacy behind. When you and I have breathed our last breath on this earth we want to know that the legacy we’ve left our children, our family, our friends, our community is a legacy of love, of course we do.

I want my kids to know how incredibly loved they were so that when I’m gone and they’re helping their grandchildren they remember the love I had for them. I want the simple acts of service that I’m able to perform for them willingly and lovingly to shape their approach to their kids and their grandkids. I want them to look at the examples I set for them in serving others and serving my community in my work ethic, in my honesty, all those things, to leave a lasting legacy that’s handed down from generation to generation.

And even for those who don’t have children simple acts of love can ripple across the globe and down through other generations in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.

But and here’s the big BUT we can’t live the sort of life that’s going to leave a lasting legacy of love if we’re drowning in negative emotions. Last week on the program I spoke about just a few of those negative emotions but to get a far more comprehensive list together I went out to my Facebook friends and I asked them what sort of negative emotions do you want me to talk about on the program?

Now are you sitting down? Here is just a bit of what they came up with. Bitterness, anger, disappointment, fear, low self esteem, envy, lust, cynicism, bad body image, pride, unfaithfulness, dishonesty, greed, regret, guilt, shame, being money hungry, hate, prejudice, judgement, self pity, self loathing, worry, jealousy, possessiveness, being untrusting, being unable to share, unable to delegate, unable to open up, a fear of becoming vulnerable, inability to love.

Hey that’s not a bad list, I’m sure you can think of a few more too. Someone for instance that is caught up in continual disappointment is like someone who is carrying around their own personal rain cloud with them 24/7. Someone who has a poor self-image is likely to be untrusting and unable to share their emotions.

When we’re caught up in those negative emotions we simply aren’t going to be able to shine a ray of love into someone else’s life. When we’re caught up in those negative emotions, when we’re drowning in them we aren’t going to be able to live the sort of life that leaves a lasting legacy of love in the lives of those with whom we come in contact.

And these negative emotions feed off one another. Let me just come back to disappointment for the moment, if you’re someone who is constantly disappointed with people, with situations, circumstances, your lot in life, how you look, the things you’re not able to do, whatever it is how are you going to view the world?

Well first up you’re going to be envious of everyone who has something that you don’t. Secondly you’re going to be over critical of people, often the passive aggressive sort of person is talking criticism and discontent to themselves all the time. And when that’s the stuff you’re feeding on, when that’s the stuff that’s swilling around inside you, friend you are going to start loathing yourself, you’ll be angry with yourself and with the rest of the world. You’ll pity yourself, you worry about how you’re ever going to feel any better and you can find yourself on a path towards depression.

How’s that for a chain reaction? But it’s true isn’t it? This is the self-life, the inner life that many people are living. They’re literally drowning in a sea of negative emotions. Can I ask you? What negative emotions are eating away at you right now? What negative emotions are pumping poison through your system? What negative emotions are you struggling with wondering what’s the answer, wondering what’s the solution, wondering where am I going to turn, what am I going to do?

There’s an old Proverb that comes from the Bible, Proverbs chapter 17, verse 22, it says:

A joyful heart is good medicine but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.

It’s a terrible picture, that picture of dried up bones inside us. The hardest thing to do with negative emotions is to admit them to ourselves. I used to be driven by greed and pride and anger, I’d never admit them to myself. I kind of knew about the anger but I constantly justified it. But the greed – I didn’t even realise I was greedy; and the pride – I wasn’t prideful it’s just that I was smarter than the rest of you guys, it’s just that I was quicker than the rest of you guys, more competent than the rest of you and because I’m naturally quick and good with words and not afraid to act I was a right pain in the you know what.

My friend the hardest thing to do is to admit these negative emotions to ourselves but when we do, when we take a good hard look in the mirror and say ‘yep in that list that Berni prattled off on the radio today three of those, no, no, actually four of those describe me.’ When we get to that point now all of a sudden we can do something about them.

Do you want to hear that rather depressingly long list of negative emotions again? Here it is, maybe you can identify with one, two, three, four of them. Bitterness, anger, disappointment, fear, low self esteem, envy, lust, cynicism, bad body image, pride, unfaithfulness, dishonesty, greed, regret, guilt, shame, being money hungry, hate, prejudice, judgemental, self pity, self loathing, worry, jealousy, possessiveness, being untrusting, being unable to share, unable to delegate, unable to open up, a fear of becoming vulnerable, inability to love.

Which ones amongst that little lot do you own? Because the moment you own them, admit them, say ‘yep that’s me’, you can begin to disarm their power over your life and over your legacy. My friend Jesus came to set you free from each and every negative emotion that robs you of your life, your love and of your legacy.

The very first time Jesus got up to preach in a local synagogue at the beginning of His public ministry He unrolled the scroll to the Book of Isaiah chapter 61. This is what He read to the assembled masses, He was telling them why He, the Son of God, had come to this earth. He said:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me, he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of the vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to provide for those who mourn in Zion, to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord to display his glory. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.

My friend, Jesus came to set you free, to restore you to wholeness, to bind up your broken heart, to proclaim His favour upon you, to comfort you, to give you a garland instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. Do you get it? Jesus came for you and He can take away every negative emotion, He can plant you as an oak of righteousness to display His glory and He can restore your devastation.

Its Jesus living in and through you that gives you the power to overcome those negative emotions and to live the sort of life that’s going to leave a lasting legacy of love.

When you’re immersed – as we all are – in the hurly burly of life, just getting through the day to day pressures and things we all have to do, it’s easy to lose sight of the vision we have for our lives. Where we want to head. What we want to achieve. So – how clear is your vision?

Yeah on a clear day you can see forever just about. Have you ever been on the top of a mountain on a day where the sun is shining, where there’s not a cloud in the sky, where there’s no mist or smog to obscure the view? You can see a long, long, way on days like that from a vantage point like that.

In fact those are the two things that impact how far we can see: how clear the day is and how high up we are. For instance if you’re of an average height, say just under six-foot and you’re standing at ground level you’ll be able to see for around about 2.9 miles or 4.7 kilometres before the curvature of the earth takes that view away from you.

But if you’re up on a mountaintop say at 15,000 feet or about 5,000 metres you’ll be able to see almost 150 miles, that’s 240 kilometres. So altitude has a lot to do with it as does obviously the clarity of the atmosphere. I mean I’ve been in fogs where you can barely see from the driver’s seat to the front of your car and I’ve been on mountaintops where it appears that you can quite literally see forever.

Of course the same is true in life, and that’s what we’re going to be exploring today on the program. It all has to do with vision. If you’re an explorer travelling through unknown territory the ability to get to a mountain top and survey the land gives you a huge advantage because you can see where you’re headed, you get a vision of your journey, you can see the big picture.

I remember a few times when I was in the army we were doing navigation training. We became lost so we tried to climb the nearest hill where they taught us to do something called a resection with a map and a compass to find out where we were. The problem was all too often you get to the top of the hill and it’s covered in trees and undergrowth so you actually couldn’t see very far at all. It’s all about altitude and clarity of vision.

Often we’d go on a reconnaissance in a helicopter, you’d fly over the land so that you could see the way ahead and plan your mission. That was great stuff. Altitude and vision.

But all too often in life we don’t have all that many mountaintop experiences do we? When we’re down in the trenches battling to make it through each day with all the pressures and all the challenges and the emotions and all that stuff, it’s easy to lose sight of where we’re going and we become completely immersed in it and disorientated. You do that day after day, month after month, year in year out and you find yourself kind of wandering aimlessly around in the forest trying to remember, “now where was it that I was heading again?”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a live sporting match – football or hockey or cricket or basketball or whatever your sport you happen to follow where you live – but if you get one of the more expensive seats up in the stands even though you’re much further away from the action, because you’re looking down on the whole field of play from a good height it’s much easier to see and understand what’s going on than had you purchased one of the cheaper tickets down at ground level closer to the action.

And in fact when you’re out there on the field playing the game it’s even much more difficult, a hundred times more difficult than it looks from the stands. And that’s how it is in life because in our lives we’re down on the field, we’re in the middle of the action, we’re tired, we’re emotional, we’re confronted with challenges and positioned so it’s really hard to see the big picture and where you’re going.

The big picture for most of us looks something like this. When we get to the end of our lives we want to look back on a life that’s had an impact for good. We want to look back on a life that’s touched other people’s lives in a positive way, where we’ve used our gifts and our abilities to make a real difference in this world whatever that difference may have been. And we want to look back on a life that we know is going to leave a lasting legacy of love in the lives of people we leave behind when we depart this earth.

That’s pretty much it. When all is said and done that’s what most of us want out of life, that sense of fulfilment at having done the best we could with who we were made to be and what we were given. But down here on the playing field how easy is it to lose sight of that? How easy is it simply to plod along each day doing the things we know we have to do to get by? Doing the things we have to do to earn a living, to bring up our children without that sense of purpose or direction, without that vision from up on high, a vision for the future, a vision for where we want to end up at the end.

Because living life is like being an explorer, it’s about travelling into unchartered territory, that’s exactly what the future is. We want to think it’s mundane or ordinary or predictable but in an instant it can turn this way or that way and completely turn our world upside down right?

Each stage of our lives is unchartered territory, being born, living through childhood, the teenage years, becoming young adults, getting married, having kids, kids grow up they leave home, now we’re into middle age and then there’s old age. Each stage is new to us and unexpected things happen along the way.

We suffer from pressures, stresses, emotional conflict, illnesses, tiredness, exhaustion, loss of a loved one. Everything I’ve mentioned to you so far you’re getting right? And so there you are slogging through it all, you’re in the middle of your jungle right now, carving out your path, exploring the next thing, working hard at it.

So in the middle of your battles in life, let me ask you this, when was the last time you sat on a mountaintop and looked out and wondered, “what’s the vision for my life? Where do I want to end up?” If you’re like most people the answer is not in a long, long time because all those immediate urgent things crowd out any sense of a vision.

Altitude and clarity is what’s required. Rising up above our circumstances. Being still, thinking, looking, planning, dreaming about the sort of life you want to have ended up living by the time you come to the end of it whenever that may be right.

Come on, this is the one life you get to live on this earth and it’s time to set it on a course, to have a vision for your life. What’s it about? What impact are you going to have? How do you want to live your life? What legacy do you want to leave behind? Without vision people perish. Without vision you and I can end up wasting our lives. What an incredible tragedy that would be.

And I’m not talking here about an arrogant, self-serving vision for your life, I’m talking here about the sort of vision that comes from God who after all made you who you are and has already figured out what He wants you to do with who you are. James in the New Testament writes this, James chapter 4, verses 13 to 16:

Come now, you say ‘today or tomorrow we’ll go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a big profit’, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say ‘if the Lord wills we will live and do this or do that’. As it is you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

You see a vision without God in the picture is a boast. For me the vision for my life is all about discovering the plan that God has already set in His heart for me. He knows the plans He has for us, that’s what He says Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 11, and they’re good plans, really good plans, fantastic plans.

I live as busy a life as any. There are so many things that conspire to crowd out any sense of the plan that God has for my life. That’s why most mornings while most other people are asleep you’ll find me alone quietly sitting in my study in my favourite comfy chair reading my Bible, speaking with God, hearing from Him, hearing what He has to say, thinking about it, being encouraged by Him, being strengthened by Him, being led by Him and in my heart of hearts I know what His plans are for me, it’s a vision that’s crystal clear in my head and in my heart, it’s the plan He has for me and I wouldn’t swap it for all the tea in China.

So friend what’s God’s plan for you? Have you asked Him? Is that vision before you? Are you heading on that path because without vision people perish?

Many of us hope that our lives will leave a lasting legacy of love behind when we’re gone. But what does that actually look like? What do we want people to say about us at our funeral? And will they be able to say those things, given the way we’re living our lives today? Hmm??

I want to share something with you today that changed my life. It was the turning point for me from a life of complete selfishness and self-indulgence to a life of doing the best I can with who I am and what I have to try and serve others. When I read this short passage I’m about to read to you now my whole world caved in because I knew, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my life was on the wrong track.

You may have heard of the book, “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. It’s been a best seller for many years. I read it back in the early to mid nineties at a time when I was on a self-improvement binge and it was Habit Number Two in that book that brought me unstuck. Have a listen to what Stephen Covey writes:

“In your mind’s eye see yourself going to the funeral of a loved one. Picture yourself driving to the funeral parlour or the chapel, parking the car and getting out. As you walk inside the building you notice the flowers, the soft organ music, you see the faces of friends and family you pass along the way. You feel the shared sorrow of losing the joy of having known that radiates from the hearts of the people there.”

“As you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral three years from today. All these people have come to honour you, to express feelings of love and appreciation for your life. As you take a seat and wait for the service to begin you look at the program in your hand, there are to be four speakers.”

“The first is from your family immediate and also extended, children, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of what you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or your profession and the fourth speaker is from your Church or some other community organisation where you’ve been involved in service.”

“Now think deeply, what would you like each of these speakers to say about your life? What kind of husband or wife, father or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son or daughter or cousin, what kind of friend, what kind of working associate? What character would you like them to see in you? What contribution, what achievements would you want them to remember? Look carefully at the people around you, what difference would you have liked to have made in their lives?”

And then Covey goes on to make this point, he says:

“The end of your life is in fact the best frame of reference or criterion by which everything else is examined. By keeping that end clearly in mind you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day doesn’t violate the criteria you’ve defined as being supremely important and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision that you have for your life as a whole. To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination.”

When I read those words for the first time a couple of decades ago I wept. I wept for a few days actually because I realised that my whole life, focused as it was on myself, was going to amount to nothing. I realised that the people at the funeral would not be able to say the things about me that I would really have wanted them to say.

I was in my mid thirties at the time, outwardly successful but at this turning point in my life I realised that all the things I’d been doing up to that point simply hadn’t contributed to the outcomes that in my heart of hearts I truly wanted. And the outcome that matters at the end is to have lived a life that will leave a lasting legacy of love and I simply wasn’t doing the things that were going to achieve that sort of an outcome.

I imagined that people would struggle to say anything good about me at all at my funeral, not because I’ve wasted my life, I wasn’t a failure, I was a success but because the things I’d been doing day after day hadn’t been speaking love and showing love into the lives of others.

That one realisation, as devastating as it was, was the starting point for a completely changed life. Not a perfect life by any means but a complete change in focus, a complete change of direction, a decision to turn my life around and focus on doing things for others and in so doing discovering the fulfilment and contentment that thus far had completely eluded me.

Some of you are thinking, ‘Berni, how could you have missed these things, they’re so important?’ And my answer would be, because I like so many other people on this planet had swallowed the lie that to be happy you had to accumulate lots of stuff. I was simply being successful at the wrong things, things that at my funeral weren’t going to matter a toss.

Friend as we chat today and over the coming days about living the sort of life that will leave a lasting legacy of love in the people around you I want to ask you, have you really decided what is truly, truly important in your life? Is it getting the next promotion at the place where you work or making sure your children are getting enough time with you? Is it buying the next trinket or bauble that you can’t afford or being part of changing the people around you for good?

When those people get up and speak at your funeral will they be able to say the sorts of things that you really in your heart of hearts like them to be able to say or will they be struggling to find something nice to say about you at all? Maybe it’s time for you to sit down quietly on your own over the next day or two and write down the sorts of things you would like those people to say at your funeral and then ask yourself, am I living that life? Am I doing the things that will lead them to say those things?

It’s kind of a gap analysis of what’s important to you against how you’re actually living your life. Beginning with the end in mind, doing that exercise seriously is in fact one of the most powerful things that you can do. I can honestly tell you it’s one of the two or three things that I’ve done in my life that has brought the greatest turnaround that I’ve ever experienced beginning with the end in mind.

Now interestingly Stephen Covey who wrote that stuff is a Mormon so his theology and my theology are miles apart, that’s an understatement, but at the end of the last chapter of that book which can, I guess, be described as a self-help book, in a section that he calls “A Personal Note” he says this:

“I believe that there are parts to human nature that cannot be reached by either legislation or education but require the power of God to deal with. I believe that as human beings we cannot perfect ourselves.”

And my friend as great as the other parts of his book are that one sentence unlocked the door to change and transformation in my life. Over the coming months after I read this it caused me to seek out a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came so that I might have life in all it’s abundance.

Like Covey I will freely admit that there are still many things that I struggle with in life but through each victory, each negative emotion dealt with, through each new act of service that I have learned and am learning I’ve discovered the truth of that one sentence that Covey wrote at the end of his book. Ultimately we ourselves are powerless to change.

Jesus said this to His disciples:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. (Acts chapter 1, verse 8)

And with everything that I am as I speak to you today I can tell you that without that power, the power of the Holy Spirit who was given to me the moment I put my trust in Jesus there would have been no change, no change at all. The power to change, the power to live the life we want to live is only found in one place, Jesus.

Love always involves risk. Radical love, involves radical risk. We’re chatting on the program this week about leaving behind a legacy of love when we’re gone. The question is, are we prepared to take the risks that love involves … or not?

Over the past few days we’ve been chatting about what it means to live a life that leaves behind a legacy of love and on every level it seems to me that loving other people involves risk and loving other people in a radical powerful way involves radical risk. Mother Theresa is perhaps one of the most iconic figures in the 20th century. There would be very few people who haven’t heard of her anywhere in the world and very few people who don’t know what she did.

She was a Catholic nun who opened missions in Kolkata in India to reach out and minister to the dying amongst the poorest of the poor most of which belonged to the Dalit class or as we know them in the west, the untouchables.

From small beginnings the Missionaries of Charity movement that she founded has grown to over 4,500 sisters and is active in a 133 countries around the world running hospices, homes for people with HIV and AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. They run soup kitchens, children’s and family counselling programs, orphanages, schools, all sorts of things.

What she began was an amazing ministry of radical unconditional love that since her death in 1997 has grown into an international legacy that is touching the dying and the poorest of the poor around the globe. But Mother Theresa wasn’t always Mother Theresa.

She was born in 1910 as Anjeze Bojaxhiu in a place called Skopje, which is now the capital of the Republic of Macedonia but at the time, was part of the Ottoman Empire. Her father, a politician died when she was only eight years old. She was fascinated with stories of missionaries going off to far off lands and by the age of twelve she was convinced that she should commit her life to reaching, touching and loving other people.

She left home to join an order of nuns at the age of eighteen and from that moment onward she never saw her mother or her sister again. Some years later on the 10th of September 1946 the now Sister Theresa, which she’d been named, experienced what she would later describe as a call within a call.

While travelling to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her annual retreat this is how she described it.

“I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living amongst them. It was like an order, to fail would have been to break the faith.”

So she left the security of the convent to live amongst the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She had no income and she actually had to go out and beg for food and supplies on the street but in her heart of hearts she was convinced that she was to live amongst the poor and reach out to the dying.

Now she herself said she experienced doubt and loneliness and a strong temptation to return to the comfort and security of convent life. She experienced trials and challenges and doubts and fears beyond measure but day after day as she lived amongst the dying, tended to their wounds, held them in her arms as they died, she was building something.

I’m sure it didn’t feel like that, I’m sure that if you told her in those early days and years that one day she would win the Nobel Peace Prize and sit in the Oval Office chatting with the president of the United States she’d never have believed you. If you told her that the Indian government would issue a special five Rupee coin being the sum with which she arrived in India to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of her birth in 2010 long after she’d died she would have been totally incredulous.

I tell you this story because people who are famous, people who are successful, well all we seem to know of them is that they’re famous and successful, that’s all we see. We look at those people and think of them as an overnight success not having seen the twenty years of blood and sweat and tears that it took to get there.

Now think about this young girl from Macedonia, her native tongue was Albanian. Think of the culture, the environment she grew up in, the huge gap between that and the slums of Calcutta, it’s totally incalculable. Okay she arrived in India under the care and security of a large organisation, the Catholic Church but she chose to step out of that to become a beggar herself in order to be with dying of the poorest of the poor.

The risk was enormous, she was by any measure a foreign young woman on her own in a country where she didn’t speak the many languages spoken around her, well she was doomed to fail, this was risk with a capital R. But here’s the principle, here’s the reason that I’m sharing her story with you because radical love requires radical risk.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean leaving your home and travelling half way around the world to an unfamiliar foreign land, radical love may be required by a difficult teenager, by your neighbours whose family is being torn apart by infidelity and divorce. Radical love may be required by your friend who has nowhere to live or by someone in your community who can’t even put a meal on their table to feed their children or by a woman who’s going through depression or a man who’s struggling with alcoholism.

Loving those people involves risk because it means exposing ourselves. See we love to wrap ourselves in safety and security, we love to wrap ourselves in comfort and convenience but all that’s blown away the moment we choose to love people who are difficult to love and remember love isn’t just a noun, it’s not just something we have, love is also a verb, it’s something we’re meant to do, love is a doing word.

And so if you and I are going to leave behind our own legacy maybe not as large or as well recognised as the legacy that Anjeze Bojaxhiu of Skopje left behind but our own legacy in our own way then my friend it is going to involve risk, it is going to involve discomfort and inconvenience. The nice world that we would construct around ourselves, where everything’s arranged so as to meet our needs and our wants will be completely shattered and torn apart.

The bottom line is that at the moment we decide to leave behind a lasting legacy of love we start living a life of risk, it’s just the way it works.

Jesus said:

Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends. (John chapter 15, verse 13)

It’s exactly what He did. He gave His life freely and willingly for you and me. John 10, verses 17 and 18:

For this reason the Father loves me because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it away from me but I lay it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay down my life, I have the power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father in heaven.

Jesus came to this earth to lay down His life for the dying so that we might live. He came to this world not just for president’s and kings but for the poorest among the poor, for ordinary folk like you and me, to lay down His life so that whoever believes in Him, whoever believes that His death on the cross is the full payment of their sin, the only way to be accepted by God, whoever believes that would have a new life and an eternal life.

You see that’s radical love. It involves radical risk and radical sacrifice. It involves losing everything even His life so that you and I might live forever and yeah it often feels like that, like Anjeze Bojaxhiu of Skopje felt in those first few years while she was begging for food and resources on the streets of Calcutta. It’s often fraught with fears and doubts and pains and sufferings.

When we choose to love people radically and powerfully in a way that will transform their lives, my friend it is definitely going to cost us something. So are you someone who wants to leave behind your own legacy of lasting love, are you? Then my question is this, what risks are you prepared to take? How much are you prepared to lose in order that others might live?