Have you ever had a brilliant idea? It could be anything from baking a cake that you’d never baked before, to, I don’t know, writing a book or changing careers. New ideas are exciting, but turning that idea into reality, well, that’s another thing. Good ideas usually need hard work.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, said this: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.” Talent won’t, nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius won’t, unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education won’t, the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Now, that’s an interesting thought. What do you think?

Have you ever watched a really good tennis player in action? Now, tennis is a tough game. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! The ball goes across the net, they smash that ball over the net – especially the men – so hard, it comes across so fast, and it’s hot out there on the court. My goodness it’s a tough game.

And the career of a tennis player is just a series of tournaments, and every tournament involves some matches and every match involves a few sets and every set involves some games, and every game involves some points. Fifteen-love, thirty-love, thirty-fifteen, and every point involves hitting a number of balls. Sometimes it’s a short rally, sometimes it’s a long rally. But if you look at the whole career of a tennis player, it comes down to thousands and thousands and thousands of times of hitting one of those balls back over the net.

Now, the best players have some ability, but they train and they learn how to do a top-spin lob. They learn how to do a back-hand down the line; they learn when to run forward to the net, how to judge that. And they take those principles, the things that they’ve learned, and they apply them in this fast, unpredictable tough game called tennis.

A bit like life. Life is a series of decisions and consequences. When you and I look back on our lives, what we will see is a whole bunch of decisions that we made along the way, and those decisions had consequences.

Last week we looked at a bunch of principles, three in fact: love, integrity, and balance that we might be able to apply when we make those decisions. It’s hard to make the decisions in the heat of the moment. It’s hard to make good decisions and right decisions all the time, but if we have some principles inside, some things that we fall back on in difficult times, some things that guide how we behave, those principles over time, over weeks and months and years and decades can make a difference to the sort of life that we lead.

Today I’d like to look at another principle, it’s called persistence. It’s kind of an ugly word, isn’t it? The message on the box is, “You can have it all today! Buy today! No further payments until March, 2035.” But life’s not like that. Whenever we have any sort of good idea, marriage or music or art or work or relationship, we’ll study any good idea always requires hard work.

I remember when I was learning the piano about, I guess when I was 14 or 15, I really started to take it seriously, I really enjoyed it. And by the time I was doing my exams in piano in the eighth grade, as it’s called, there were so many scales and arpeggios that I had to learn and practice. In fact, all the different combinations and permutations of scales and arpeggios – which are really just things to get your technique going – there were seven and a half thousand different scales and arpeggios.

So what I did was I wrote each one out on a small piece of paper, put it in a big four-liter ice cream container and I had another ice cream container on the other side of the grand piano, and every two days I went through all of the scales arpeggios. And when all of them had moved from the left-hand side to the right-hand side, the next day I’d start the other way and I’d go through them. And so every day I practiced just over three and a half thousand scales and arpeggios. It could drive you to distraction.

But now people look at me – I’m in my 50’s now – and I can play the piano. I can’t play the way I used to, but I can still play and enjoy and worship God through the music. And people look at me and go “I wish I’d stuck with it. My parents got me to learn the piano, but I stopped. I wish I could play the piano like you can play the piano.”

The only reason that I can play the piano the way I can is because of the persistence. It’s sticking with those rotten scales and arpeggios week after week, month after month, until my brain and my fingers learned how to play. Any good idea always requires hard work. It’s been like that for thousands of years. The Apostle Paul 2000 years ago said this:

“I know I’m not really there yet, but this is what I do: I forget everything that lies behind and I strain forward to what lies ahead. I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me Heavenward in Jesus Christ.”

These days, some people talk about St. Paul, you know. They have statues, they have they have big cathedrals built called St. Paul’s Cathedral. But hang on. Paul, the Apostle, was just a person like you and me. Yeah, he was a saint, but the Bible says if you believe in Jesus, we’re all saints. Paul was called to an extraordinary purpose by God, but maybe you’re called to an extraordinary purpose by God.

And Paul had so many disappointments along the way. He persecuted and executed Christians before he himself became a Christian. When he became a Christian, he started to preach. He caused riots, he was thrown out of towns, people wanted to kill him. He wanted to go to certain places, but people prevented him from going there.

And he had this big dream, he had a dream to go west, after ten years he wanted to go west to Europe, and he ended up instead in a Roman dungeon on death row. Paul had a lot of disappointments in his life, but here we are 2000 years on talking about what Paul wrote on radio. Isn’t that amazing?

There are some great principles: love, integrity, balance. I think persistence is one of the most important ones. Persistence means you just keep going. With all the disappointments, all the setbacks that the Apostle Paul had along the way, God used him to write almost half of the books in the New Testament, and here we are, a couple thousand years on, still talking about what Paul wrote.

What if every time that you and I feel like giving up, pulling off the freeway of life, parking the car and just sitting there and watching everyone go by; what if every time we were so dejected with our work; what if every time in a relationship we were being hurt we just persisted. We just kept going with love, with integrity, with balance, with that idea, that original vision that we had burning in our hearts? What would our lives look like?

You know, even Jesus just before he was crucified was in a garden called Gethsemane and he knew that they were coming for him and he knew that he would be judged, beaten, flogged, spat on, nailed to a cross and that he would die for our sins. And he was struggling so much with this inside, and he said, “Father, if there’s any way that this cup of suffering can pass from our lips, if there’s any way, take it away from me. But Lord, not my will, your will be done.” What if Jesus had given up at that point?

Doesn’t matter what it is, persistence pays dividends. If you were looking for some principles, something to guide your life, where would love fit? Where would integrity fit? Where would balance fit? Now, let me ask you seriously today: Where would persistence fit? Just keep on loving, just keep on going, just keep on going through those tough times until the sunshine comes!

I’ve got a question for you. Imagine for a minute that you’re God and you’re creating the universe, the earth, the sky, the stars. Then you get to making the animals – you know, cows, sheep, dogs, cats, monkeys, beetles. Would you have created any beetles? I mean, would you have dreamt those up?

Let’s say that you did. How many species of beetles would you have created – five, ten, a hundred, five hundred maybe? How many did God create? Three hundred and sixty thousand species of beetles. And did you know that we have an awful lot in common with the humble tomato? Ninety nine point nine percent of our genes are the same as the tomato’s genes. Excuse me, so what was God thinking? I mean, God, what were you actually thinking when you created us?

Life is an accumulation of choices and consequences, by and large. Last week and this week we have been looking at some principles, some things that we can think about beforehand to help us to make good choices. So far we’ve looked at love, integrity, balance, and yesterday we looked at the subject of persistence. Today I’d like to think about the principle of creativity.

Now, if you and I go to Genesis chapter one, it says, “In the beginning, God created.” He created a whole bunch of things – the light, the sky, water, dry land, animals, sea creatures, birds, land animals, people. Hang on. What about the whole evolution-creation thing? It’s interesting how this man, Moses, 3,300 years ago listed the order of creation in exactly the same sequence as scientists, with all their research and technology, list it today. How did he do that, if not by God’s spirit?

What I do know is that God created the heavens and the earth and the universe, the animals, you and me. What I don’t know is how and over what time. I’m not an expert. There are plenty of other things that you and I don’t know for sure but we accept as fact, so the “how” is not something that I’m hung up on. I know the “what.” I know that God created the heavens and the earth and everything in it. Those beetles we were talking about just before, do you know that one quarter of all named species of animal on this earth are beetles?

So God created all this, and as we saw earlier, he’s an extravagant, lavish creator. He creates this world teaming with life, a world of variety and abundance and beauty. And then there’s cosmos, the universe, this vast, massive, incomprehensible universe. Listen to this; this comes from Nikki Gumble’s book Searching Issues.

“When we pray, we’re speaking to the creator of the universe. On the 20th of August, 1977, Voyager II, the inter-planetary probe launched to observe and transmit to earth data about the outer-planetary system, set off from earth traveling faster than the speed of a bullet, about 90,000 miles per hour. Twelve years later on the 28th of August, 1989 it reached the planet of Neptune – 12 years, 2.7 million miles from the earth.

Voyager II then left the solar system, it will not come within one light year of any star, wait for it, for 958,000 years. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are one hundred million stars like our sun. Our galaxy is one of one hundred million galaxies that we know of. In a throw away in Genesis the writer tells us God also made the stars.”

That blows me away! What a stunning creator! But hang on, then he goes on to say something stunning about you and me. In that first chapter of Genesis, after he’s listed all of the creation, God says something stunning about you and about me. It says this:

“Then God said, let us make humanity in our image and let them have dominion over everything else that we’ve created. So God created humanity in his image, male and female he created them.”

You can’t help but make a link here. This creative God that we’ve spoken of so briefly just over the last few minutes who created all these animals and these amazing creatures and this amazing universe, this amazingly creative God – and remember, the first thing the Bible says about God is in the beginning he created – this amazing God says, Now, now I’m going to make men and women – you and me – in my own image, is what God said.

What’s the link? If God is a stunning, lavish, extravagant, brilliant creator and he created you and me in His image, what does that mean? Doesn’t that mean that you and I are meant to be creative, too? I think it can only mean one thing: we are meant to be creative, too. If He’s this stunning, brilliant creator, then that’s what we’re meant to be like, too.

I don’t know about you, but I used to suffer from a syndrome that I called Ugly Duckling Syndrome. We look at other people, we look at all these other brilliant people around us that don’t seem to have the problems that we do and they seem to have skills and gifts that we could never even dream of or imagine, and here’s me living my mundane, ordinary life. So much of life is mundane, living a busy life, yet deep inside each one of us there’s this most amazing creative streak.

We can compare ourselves to others and say, I’m not as good as him. I’m not as good as her. We’re not meant to be like them. God created each one of us differently. Here we are, 99.9% of our genes are identical to the tomato which we squash up and put in a can and call it soup, and yet, look at the things that people can do. Not one of our fingerprints is at all the same.

God is a God of abundant variety. They’ve picked up 360,000 different species of beetles. God loves variety and he made you to be different from me, and he made me to be different from the people around me.

How stupid are we when we compare ourselves to other people and we see the good things? We don’t even seem to notice those good things when we’re comparing. We see the good things that God puts in other people and we go “Oh, I don’t have one of those”. But God’s given us different things; things that we can excel in, things that we just so enjoy being creative in. It never ceases to amaze me, I have never met a person where I haven’t discovered somewhere deep inside, this creative streak that just blows me away.

We can rush around and do things, we can forget to be creative, but God has called us to be creative beings – creative in love, creative in the arts, creative in building relationships, creative in speaking, creative in inspiring other people, creative in team-building, comforting people, blessing people, creative in work, creative in relaxing.

I was just talking just the other night at a Bible college where I teach about this whole subject of creativity and a man came up to me afterwards and he said, “I have been struggling so much with problems at work and you just gave me the solution.” I said, “What?” He said, “God’s made me creative. God’s given me the ability to think through those problems.”

You know what it is to be creative? It’s to take something ordinary and do something extraordinary with it. A painter looks at a couple tins of paint, an artist says, “Wow! I can paint this beautiful picture.” The paint is ordinary, the picture is extraordinary. We imagine, we create. We can make a decision, we can decide from this time forward to leave a mundane, routine ordinary life or we can decide to be like God and His 360,000 species of beetles. We can decide to live an outrageously creative, exciting life where we lavish His creativity, His blessings, the things that He’s put in us on other people.

Creativity, is it one of the principles that you’re interested in?

Have you ever noticed how good some people are at certain things, things that you and I could never attempt in our wildest dreams? A few years ago when my daughter was only two years old she said, “Daddy, draw me a cat.” So I drew a cat and this two-year-old looks at me horrified and said, “Daddy, that doesn’t look like a cat.” It can be so depressing, can’t it?

So what’s the issue here, is it that everything everybody else does is better? Are they better than you, are they better than me, is that it, or do we miss the fact that we’re good at things too, things that are quite different from the gifts and abilities of the people around us? I wonder.

Over these last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the fact that our lives – after days, after weeks, after months, after years, after decades – our lives are really, by and large, an accumulation of the decisions that we made along the way and the consequences of those decisions. Some other things happen, things happen that are outside our control. Some good things, some bad things happen that we seemingly have no control over, but a lot of our life is about the decisions that we make day to day and how we respond to the things that happen to us.

We’ve been looking these last few weeks at the principles – the things that we can have that we carry around in our hearts; the things that we’ve thought about beforehand, before we make decisions in the heat of the moment – that can guide those decisions, that can help us to make good decisions. So far we’ve looked at love, integrity, balance, persistence, creativity.

Now, if you’ve missed any of those, at the end of this program I’ll give you a website where you can go and listen to them over and over again. Today though, I’d like to move on to another principle that’s important to me, it’s kind of like a coin with two sides. It’s the principle of gifting on the one hand and collaboration on the other.

Let me share a story with you. Quite a few years back now in this ministry we launched a new website where people can explore for themselves the person of Jesus Christ, who He is, and so it’s called whosjesus.com. Now, we thought, “What are we going to do here? How can we make this an innovative, creative website?” So we want a place for people to explore who Jesus is, to question that, but we want it to be radical and different and exciting. So we got a whole bunch of really creative people together in a room, and for half a day we just kind of brainstormed and, they came up with some great concepts.

After that meeting, I walked out and the next couple of days I was so depressed or so dejected. All these incredibly creative people had come up with all these good ideas. How were we ever going to deliver? How are we ever going to create this website? But then, over the next few weeks and months, God brought a whole bunch of other creative people into our zone.

People who are good at negotiating copyright with some of the content providers; a graphic artist who’s only 21 at the time but just brilliant; an overall producer for the site; some script writers; some actors who did voice work. In fact, about 25 people were involved in the production of this website. Each one was so different with different strengths and with different weaknesses, each one was so talented and gifted and so necessary, but so different.

I learned a lesson out of that. We don’t have to do everything on our own. God gives us other people with different skills, different talents, different gifts. And if I have one gift and you have another, God’s plan is that we should work together, that we should complement one another.

There’s a part in the Bible, in the Old Testament where God talks about the fact that a cord of three strands is not easily broken. Have you ever thought about it? A piece of rope that’s one strand, if it wears through it falls apart, but if it’s three strands woven together, if that one strand breaks or it’s a little bit weak in one spot, then the other two strands compensate and hold the whole thing together. It’s God’s great plan that we should each have different gifts and then collaborate to use those gifts. The Apostle Paul uses the analogy of a body. He says:

“Look, a body is made up of eyes and feet and heart and hands and ears and nose, all different bits and all necessary, and some of the bits actually aren’t very attractive”.

I mean, have you looked at your feet lately? Feet are not a particularly attractive appendage to the human body, but without feet, we just don’t get around so well. Paul goes on to say:

“Well, what if the eye said to the foot ‘You don’t look much at all, we don’t need you’.

That’s ridiculous isn’t it? We need all of the parts of the body to work together. In fact, there are some parts of our body – if I lose my liver, I have about six hours to live. But you know something? It’s exactly what we do so often. Different people who have different gifts get different talents, different strengths, also have different weaknesses.

If you have someone who’s really outcome-oriented, they tend to be such a good time manager – bang! bang! bang! – one thing after the next, always managing their time, they’re always achieving things. And you have another person, someone who’s more of a people person, someone to whom relationships are more important.

Well, those people have a totally different approach to life, to the use of time. Often they’re not very good at using their time, they’re not very good at prioritizing. And the reason is because it’s more important for them to spend time in relationships; to pull alongside people; to take however long it takes to help a person.

Now, in this world I think we need both sorts of people, don’t we? We need really outcome-oriented people and we need those sorts of people who pull alongside others and love them and help them. So often, though, the different strengths which have different weaknesses result in tensions. It drives me nuts! I’m an outcome-oriented person and it drives me nuts when someone in front of me in a car in the traffic drives slowly enough just so that I miss the green light that’s a hundred meters down the road – absolutely drives me crazy! That’s the realities of life.

We look at people with other gifts and sometimes we’re threatened by the gifts and sometimes we’re so annoyed by their weaknesses we don’t end up collaborating at all. People say that in order for us to collaborate – for you and me to get on with our different gifts and to achieve something together – we each have to be comfortable with who we are and who the other person is.

But I’d like to look at it from a different perspective. I think for starters we have to be comfortable with who we aren’t. We have to be safe in knowing that there are some things that we just can’t do and that we just never will be able to do.

When I first became a consultant in the information technology industry, I thought, Boy, these people are paying me a lot of money; I have to be an expert in everything. But no one’s an expert in everything. Get real! I needed to set my own expectations and then set the expectations of other people, and all of a sudden I was off the hook. People knew what I was good at and what I wasn’t good at.

What are the things that you’re really good at? I mean, compared to other people around you, honestly, what are the things that you’re really good at? Now, pick them up and put them in a pile on the table for a minute.

Now, honestly again, what are the things that you’re not so good at? Some of the things that others really need to do that you just can’t do for yourself. Now put those things that your not so good at in a pile next to the things that we’re good at.

Now draw a box around those and say, ‘This bit’s me, this is what I’m good at. I’m comfortable here and I’m comfortable with what I’m not as well. And those other people, those people that are good at those other things I’m not good at – I’m really happy with that. Now I’m free to celebrate and enjoy the gifts that I’ve been given and the gifts that other people have been given because I’m comfortable with who I am and who I’m not. And I’m comfortable with who they are and who they’re not.

This is so important. God has made us different. He’s done it for a reason and sure, the differences annoy us sometimes but I need you and you need me. We’re gifted differently and God means for us to be a body together, to collaborate together to do things that we can’t do on our own.

For a lot of people these days, prayer is a place of last resort. We pray at times of national disaster. We pray when someone close to us dies. We blurt out a prayer when we’re in danger or maybe when we’re afraid. And we pray when we’re so down, so alone, there’s just no where else to turn.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those kinds of prayers. Jesus, well, he accepts all comers just the way we are. But Ralph Waldo Emerson, well, he looked a prayer from a different perspective where he said this: “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.” It’s an interesting thought.

When we we’re in a rush, when we make these quick decisions on the fly, they’re often decisions that we can regret later on, often because those quick decisions – the ones we make on the fly – aren’t the best decisions. What if we had a battle plan ahead of time, some principles in our heart to guide our decisions, to get better outcomes?

Over these last few weeks, I’ve just been sharing a few principles and values in my life. Ones for you to think about to consider, to turn over in your heart and your mind, as you put together your principles – the things that you base your life on. The ones we’ve talked about over the last couple of weeks are love, integrity, balance, persistence, creativity, and, yesterday, gifting and collaboration.

Today, I’d like to talk about the last one of the principles. Now, remember, these are my principles, things for you to think about when you put your ideas together, principles that guide the way I live – at least, I try to have them guide the way I live.

The last principle that I’d like to talk about today is prayer. Now, hang on. Isn’t prayer that something that you do? It’s not a principle? Well, I guess, yes, it is. Prayer is something that you do, but prayer is also a decision. It’s a commitment. It’s a joy. It’s something that can under gird our whole lives.

From where I sit, there are two types of prayer: proactive prayer, and what I call “pressure prayer.” Have a listen to this story:

“Three ministers were talking about prayer, in general, and the appropriate and effective positions for prayer. As they were talking, a telephone repairman was working on the phone system in the background. One minister shared that he felt that the key was in the hands. He always held his hands together and pointed them upwards as a form of symbolic worship. The second suggested that real prayer, well, real prayer was conducted on your knees. And the third suggested that they were both wrong, the only position worth its salt was to pray while stretched out flat on your face.

By this time, the phone man just couldn’t stay out of the conversation any longer. He interjected, and he said, “I found that the most powerful prayer I ever made was when I dangling upside down by heels from a power pole, suspended 40 ft. above the ground.”

Now, that sort of prayer, that’s what I call a “pressure prayer.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Every circumstance and every problem, Jesus is there. And it’s a great habit to get into, right at the most difficult part of our day, right at the tough times. You know, the times we’re scared or the times we just don’t have time to sit down and spend some time with Jesus and say, “Lord, I need to pray this through.” At those times, just a quick “Lord, help!” is the only invitation that Jesus sometimes needs to step in to help us with our problem.

But Jesus taught his disciples to pray proactively too. Not just when they’re in trouble, and not through some formula. I guess, when I was growing up in a really structured church environment – I wasn’t a Christian, mind you, I was just dragged along by my parents – prayers seemed to be formulas. You know, you had to do it in a certain way or at a certain time or, as that little story, in a certain position with your hands folded or whatever it is.

But Jesus said it’s not a formula. It’s not about going through a ritual. He said, “Look, pray like this,” and then He taught people to pray The Lord’s Prayer. And again, He didn’t say “Pray these words”. He said “Pray something like this: My Father in heaven hallowed be your name…” and so The Lord’s Prayer went on.

Jesus taught that we should honestly, simply, openly, with the door closed, in secret, go and spend some time with God, loving Him and adoring Him, honestly laying out our feelings. You know, God’s a really secure kind of person. God is not going to fall off His twig if we’re struggling with something. He’s seen it all. He knows it all. He wants us to come openly and honestly and pour our hearts out to Him just the way we are.

That’s why Christianity is different from every other form of religion. It’s based on grace. It’s based on the fact that, even though you and I have made mistakes – and, you know something? Let me let you in on a little secret: tomorrow or the next day or next week, we’re going to make some more mistakes. Even though we get things wrong from time to time, if we believe that Jesus died on the Cross for us, if we accept Him as the one who pays the price for our mistakes, then we can come to God just the way we are. There’s a word for that: it’s called grace. It’s just so much a part of God’s love.

God wants us to come safely, openly to Him and share our needs, s our feelings, our problems; to ask Him for specific help when we need specific help; to worship Him; to adore Him; to ask Him for forgiveness.

I remember in my last church there was an elderly lady with a hip problem. And whenever we went for a barbeque somewhere and there were a lot of cars and parking was difficult, she would always sit in the front of her car with her husband driving and say, “Father, you know that I can’t walk very far. Can you please give us a park close to where we’re going have the picnic?” And sure enough, Jess would always get her car parked just meters away from where we were having our barbeque or picnic.

God is interested in the little things, as well as the big things. He wants the sort of loving, open, honest, direct conversation that a husband and wife might have, sitting together on the lounge at night, with just a candle burning.

“But Bernie, why are you making this a principle for your life? I mean, love, integrity, balance: I can understand those things. But why is prayer a principle?” Well, let me give you a simple, straightforward, direct answer: because it works. Because there are problems that I sometimes can’t deal with – and you know, I’m a pretty self-reliant sort of individual. I’ve been taught over my life, and working as an officer in the Australian Army, to be pretty direct and pretty hard-working and pretty self-reliant.

But it doesn’t matter how good we are at anything, it doesn’t matter how strong we think we are, there are always times when we have problems that we just can’t deal with. And there are times when we don’t know which way to turn. And there are times when we don’t even know what God’s up to. And unless we sit down and spend some time with Him and pray, we’re never going to hear. There are times to tell Him how much we love Him. There are times to open the Bible and to hear Him speak. When I do those things, I am stronger. I have a closer relationship a closer fellowship with my God. When I do those things, I can deal with the things that I struggle with from day to day.

But above everything, above all the help that God gives me, above the peace that I get during the day, above the strength that I get from spending time with God, the thing that I get more than anything else is the most amazing sense of joy. The most amazing experience of the presence of God in my study with me early each morning. Listening to me, fellowshipping with me, enjoying my company, and me enjoying His company.

Jesus taught His disciples to pray proactively. Actually, He didn’t teach His disciples how to preach, but he taught them how to pray.

What about you? Where does prayer fit in your scheme of things? Is prayer maybe one of those principles, one of those values that you need to plug into your life?

The lives we lead through life, well, they’d be like a house with different rooms. There’s a work room; there’s a family room; there’s a dining room where we eat; there’s a bedroom where we sleep; there’s a lounge room where we entertain our friends and guests – all these different aspects of our lives.

The reality is that if all of those rooms, all of these aspects of our lives are functioning well, life’s good. But let there be something wrong in just one of the rooms, it can feel as though the house is on fire. It turns out that every part of our life is important. The whole is important. It’s not just good enough for some thing to be working fine.

Over these last two weeks, we’ve been looking at the principles that underpin our lives. We make decisions, and each of those decisions has consequences. The sum of those, by and large, makes up our lives. Sure, things happen out of control. Sometimes really good things happen; sometimes bad things happen.

But if we look back on our lives, the majority of our lives is made up of the choices that we’ve made and the consequences of those choices. I believe we need a plan of attack, some principles and values in our hearts, some things that we carry around, which we’ve decided on ahead of time – things that will guide our choices.

There seem to be three ways that we can live our lives. There’s the high road. We can have some good principles. Good principles lead to good choices. Good choices, mostly, lead to good consequences. Then, there’s the low road. We can have some bad principles. Bad principles lead to bad choices, and most of the time, bad choices have bad consequences.

Then, we can have what I call the “no road.” No principles. It’s kind of a lottery; depends on how we’re feeling that day. The outcome, the consequences? Well, who knows? We just spin the chocolate wheel.

I mean, it’s a good to have a set of values around love. If we have an argument with someone, if someone attacks us, we can choose to love them. We can choose to let the attack go through the keeper. We can choose to build the relationship.

A bad set of values, well we can end up destroying relationships if we don’t have love, if we have a principle of selfishness. I could put my time and my work before my daughter, before my wife, and neglect the relationships and see the relationships and the family fall apart.

And no values? Well, it just depends how I’m feeling on the day. Nobody knows. It makes sense, doesn’t it? We should have some good principles and good values that underpin our lives.

What I’ve shared over the last couple of weeks are my values, the ones that are important to me. They’re godly I believe. And today … today’s a special day – it’s Good Friday. And that’s timely in terms of what we’ve been chatting about because it lets me share the most important thing of all in my life. The thing that all my values, all my principles for living are drawn from.

When I look at the pride that I’ve live out of over the years on the one hand, and then Jesus hanging there, dying on the Cross on the other, you know, I want to be sick. The two just don’t compare. The Son of God, the King of Kings, hanging on the Cross there for me. And me, a nobody really just prancing around like goodness knows what. They just don’t go together, do they?

Have a listen … have a listen again to this familiar story, Mark chapter 15 beginning at verse 25:

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!”

In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.”

And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

The Son of God – nailed to a cross – and not just nailed to a Cross, but beaten and spat upon and then abuse and taunts and derision hurled in His face as He hung there and suffered. And my friend this … this He did for you and me. He did it so that all the things we have done against God might be paid for – once and for all – so that you and I can spend an eternity with God. Complete forgiveness – through the price paid by Jesus as He suffered there and died on that Cross.

Many people know this famous passage – John chapter 3, verse 16:

– for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

But let me ask you – have you in the same way committed 1 John 3:16 to your memory? No? Well here it is – it goes like this:

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

See, there’s no room for pride there. Getting over ourselves means dying to ourselves, it means humbling ourselves, it means giving up what we’re entitled to – even when it costs us everything. That’s how we get over ourselves … and that’s how we discover what it is to live a life that counts.

The blessing comes when we sacrifice what we think we’re entitled to. Everything. I love this passage from the great wisdom book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 3 verse 9:

Honor the LORD with your substance and with the first fruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.

Honour God with our substance and our first fruits, everything that we are and the first and the best of all that we have. My friend I looked all my life for something worthwhile – I worshipped everything under the sun … but I never, never found it.

Until I met this Jesus who died for me. This Jesus who suffered me … and I heard Him say …follow me. Following Him hasn’t been easy a lot of the time. It just hasn’t. But it was in following Him that I’ve been learning to get over myself. And it’s in following Him – by the way of that Cross – that I’ve discovered what it is to live a life … that counts.

There’s something about this thing that happened upon that Cross a couple of thousand years ago that powerfully turned my life upside down. There’s such power in the fact that the Son of God – the King above all Kings, chose to lower Himself to die for me – that’s – well, upside down.

And it’s in living my life upside down – living my life for Jesus, taking who I am and what I have and giving it to God – not perfectly mind you, just the best way I know how – that I’ve discovered a life that I absolutely love living.

And when that upside down thing happens in our hearts, God’s values start to take hold naturally. Love, integrity, balance, persistence, creativity, gifting and collaboration – at the Cross, there’s a way of living that comes together and it just happens. And for me, let me say, it’s absolutely fantastic!