Let’s face it, we all model our lives on something … or on someone. We just do. The sad thing is when we pick the wrong role model, it can take us in a terribly wrong direction. So where do we find the sort of role model that will lead us to live … and extraordinary life?

Hey, beginning of a great new week, love it, love it, love it and welcome to the program today. Over the coming few weeks we’re going to be looking at how to live an absolutely extraordinary life. I mean we all wish we could, some people are, some people, well, and some people not so much right?

But just stop and think about this for a minute, what if you and I could live a totally outrageously extraordinary life? I mean a life that really impacts other people for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones; a life that people would remember with fondness, with gratitude; the sort of life that will have people queuing up at your funeral to deliver your eulogy. Let me, no me, I want to tell people about the impact he’s had or the impact she’s had.

And I know there’s one or two people listening to me rabbiting on thinking to themselves, ‘Yeah well that would be nice but …” You see it’s always the “but”. Well here’s my challenge, no “ifs”, no “buts”, no “maybes”, do you want to live an extraordinary life, yes or no? And if the answer is yes then let’s have a chat.

So what stops us from leading an extraordinary life? We can blame all sorts of things. We can blame our circumstances, we can blame our parents, our DNA, our personality type, the place or the family or the time we were born into and grew up in, the bad things that happened, and okay, just perhaps maybe a few of the mistakes we’ve made along the way.

But who we are, the abilities and limitations we’ve been given, how tall we are, the colour of our hair or our skin, how smart we are or aren’t, all of those things are things we just can’t change. I mean I can’t change who I am and you certainly can’t change who you are but what we can do is make the most of what we’ve been given.

The problem is with a lot of self help rhetoric, a lot of the motivational speakers, all that genre of stuff is that what they tell you is you can be whoever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do, you can have whatever you want to have and my answer to that is, well actually no you can’t, it’s just not true.

I mean I’d love to be a great artist but I can’t draw or paint for nuts. I’d love to be a great photographer but I just don’t have the eye for it. I’d love to be a basketball player but you know what, I’m too short. I’d love to be … Do you get it?

It doesn’t matter how positively I think, how hard I strive, how focused I am, I am never ever, ever going to be tall enough to be a great basketball player. Forget the fact that I’m just a little bit old for it anyhow.

So it’s not about being or doing or having anything our little heart desires, I mean come on that’s fairyland stuff, it’s about being realistic about who we are, what we’re capable of and saying to ourselves, you know something I want to make my life count given the obvious constraints, we all have them even though they’re different, I want my life to count. I want my life to make a positive difference in this world because if it’s not then we’re sort of living a meaningless existence, an unfulfilling life.

I’ll tell you what I think the biggest reason that most people don’t live lives that count, it’s because we’ve modelled ourselves on wrong principles, on wrong beliefs and on wrong behaviours.

We go to school to learn how to read, how to write, how to do arithmetic but there doesn’t seem to be a formal school to teach us life, how to live, how to be affective, how to be gracious, how to forgive. That bit of learning, the most important bit of learning of all when you think about it, is pretty much left to chance in most cultures and so we pick things up by, I don’t know, watching our parents and mimicking them. Some of that’s good, some of it’s not which is why the bad traits like anger and abuse get handed down from one generation to the next and on to the next.

We watch our teachers, we pick things up in the school yard and on television and advertising billboards and somehow that all goes in the blender and out pops who you are, who I am, good, bad and sometimes frankly ugly. I mean that’s about it and when you look at things that way it’s just a little bit scary. No wonder we’re not living lives that count, lives that make a positive difference in this world.

We’ve picked up some good habits and lots of bad habits, some good attitudes and lots of wrong ones and the bad stuff we’ve picked up, that’s the stuff you might hear Christians talking about and calling it sin, that bad stuff holds us back from realising our potential to do good, our potential to make a difference, our potential to experience the satisfaction of using who we are and what we have to help other people.

Okay so what’s the answer? Do we need a classroom? Do we need teachers? Do we need a curriculum on how to be the best person we can be? Yeah well maybe in small doses and in a sense that’s what these programs are about but you know that old Chinese proverb,

Tell me and I’ll forget, show me I might remember, involve me and I’ll understand.

That’s exactly what Jesus did and you know what, He’s still doing it with His disciples.

Consider those first twelve disciples, they hung out with Him for about three and a half years, He taught them, He listened to them, He dealt with some of their wrong stinking attitudes, He admonished them, He encouraged them but above all He involved them.

See they got to watch Him to see how He responded and He reacted, what He said when He was kind and gentle, when He was tough as nails, when He protested and when He was silent. They got to model themselves on Jesus.

Hey now there’s an idea do you think? What if instead of soaking it all up without thinking, what if instead of assimilating selfishness and loneliness and all that stuff from our culture, what if we deliberately followed Jesus around for a while and watched Him and listened to Him and let Him guide us and involve us and teach us and disciple us and mould us and shape us into something that looks a lot like Him? Hey now that will be cool.

Well my friend that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing on the program over the next few days and indeed over the next few weeks. See often we’ll take on a little thing that Jesus said or did. We’ll study it, we’ll read the passage, we’ll go over and over and over it again in the Bible. We’ll learn from it, we’ll squeeze it, we’ll turn it upside down and then we’ll move on.

But what if we took a look at His life, how He lived His life and soaked it up on the basis that there simply is no better role model on any planet in any galaxy in any universe than Jesus? What if we looked at some of the really familiar stories perhaps from a different perspective, from a slightly different angle, as a student looking to his mentor?

What if we saw when Jesus was angry and we thought ‘now Jesus was angry, why was He angry, how did He handle anger, how did He speak to people? Wow I could learn something from that. Jesus was silent when He was accused, why was He silent, what can I learn from that?’

See that would be cool and you know the amazing thing that happens when we start doing that is that all of a sudden Jesus starts involving us in His work, all of a sudden He starts discipling us. He starts teaching us and He starts speaking to us through what’s going on in our lives because that Jesus isn’t dead. He’s alive and anyone, anyone who would believe in Him and follow Him, to that person He sends His Holy Spirit to be our counsellor, our advocate, our guide, our personal life coach.

Want to know how to live an extraordinary life? Just take a look at Jesus.

Question – are you living an extraordinary life? A life that really counts for something … or not? And if not, why not? Well one of the reasons is that sometimes, the things of the past are ruining your present and robbing you of your future. It’s time to change that.

Now there are plenty of people in this world who want to blame the past for where they are today. Maybe you think that sounds a little harsh. You may have had a tough start in life, perhaps you were born into very humble circumstances or a difficult family environment. Maybe like my parents you had to schlep through a war or two, perhaps you lost your parents when you were really young. Someone who’s listening today may have been abused. Another person has suffered from depression and yet another has been through divorce.

None of those things are very pleasant. None of those things are things you’d wish on yourself or even your worst enemy for that matter. What is it in your life? What circumstance? What relationship? What start in life did some damage to you along the way?

You’ll know in an instant what I’m talking about so let me ask you this, to what extent are you still using that as an excuse today not to be living an extraordinary life?

We Australians tend to be fairly blunt and direct so I’m going to ask you a blunt and direct question. Not to ruffle your feathers so much but to force each one of us to face facts and the fact is that the majority of people walking around on planet earth today have something in their past that’s ruining their present and robbing them of their future. So question, what is it with you?

The reason I’m asking this is that we’ve just kicked off a series of messages that we’re going to be spending some time in this week and over the next few weeks called, “How To Live An Extraordinary Life”. And the way we’re going to discover how to live an extraordinary life is to look at the most extraordinary life that’s ever been lived on this earth – the life of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

Each day we’re going to grab just a vignette, a small snapshot if you will of Jesus life and use it to understand Him better because of all the people who’ve ever lived Jesus is the best mentor and the best role model there is, right?

If you and I could model our lives on Him, if you and I could adopt Him as our life coach and mentor, if we could learn to live a life that looks a whole lot like Jesus’ life well man O man imagine what a life that would be huh?

So why are we talking about the past and then talking about Jesus at the same time? Because this whole thing of the past ruining our lives is one of the greatest scourges and epidemics of our society today. Billions of lives are being ruined because people let their past rob them of their future.

What do we learn from Jesus about that? What was His past? What was His start in life? What did that look like and how did He handle it? Well I guess most people know the story. Jesus had rather a rocky start in this world. If you’ve ever heard me speak around Christmas time you’ll know I love remembering that wonderful little Christmas pantomime from a slightly different perspective.

Mary fell pregnant out of wedlock. Now according to her the Holy Spirit did it, yeah right, who was going to believe that? And then she had a long painful journey in her last weeks of pregnancy from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea.

And then to top it all off the travel agent had lost their hotel booking and they had to bunk outside in a shed with the sheep and the goats and the cows. With the very first breath of air the little baby Jesus took was filled with the stench of cow dung and sheep’s urine.

In a pretty rough world where Israel was under Roman occupation, how easy would it have been for Jesus to blame His childhood circumstances? But there was something else in His past, something much, much worse than that birth, something that could have left a horrible mental scar that marred Him for life and hamstrung Him from living the life that He lived.

So what was it? Have a listen with me, I’m starting at Matthew chapter 2 beginning at verse 13:

After they had left an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘get up and take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.

Then Joseph got up took the child and his mother by night and fled to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘out of Egypt I have called my son’.

When Herod saw that he’d been tricked by the wise men he was infuriated and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘that a voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be consoled because they were no more.

So there you have it, infant genocide, ethnic cleansing all on account of Jesus. You don’t think He knew about this when He was growing up, you don’t think people blamed Him, you don’t think this played on His mind and tore at His heart, you don’t think that this one thing could totally, totally have derailed Him and pushed Him off course and kept Him from living His extraordinary life.

Just stop and think if hundreds perhaps thousands of children under the age of two had been killed because of you, what would that have done to you psychologically? And then being brought up as a refugee in a foreign land?

See we don’t often think about this stuff but this was in Jesus past, this could have completely robbed Him of His sanity and of His extraordinary life. But instead He overcame it, instead He declared, Mark chapter 1, verse 38, He said:

Let us go into the neighbouring towns so that I may proclaim the message there also for that is what I came to do.

Jesus was focused totally on His mission, on what God had sent Him to do. Now I’m no psychologist but I have friends who are and from them I know what a complex and difficult process it can be for someone to let go of something in their past that’s been holding them back. And hey, not just from psychologists, I know from my own experience of my own life how difficult it can be to let go of the past.

So here are my three essentials for letting go, for stopping the past from ruining your present and robbing you of your future. The first one is just deciding to change.

When I went through a major loss in my life there was a time of mourning and grief. Now that’s normal but there comes a point when you just have to decide to say, ‘Look the status quo isn’t an option. It is time for me to move on, it is time for me to lay hold of the extraordinary life that God’s planned for me, it is time for me, like Jesus, to get focused on what God has called me to do’. Some people today need to take that decision today.

The second essential is believing what God says and He says that if anyone is in Christ Jesus, anyone, then they are a completely new creation, all the old things have passed away and everything is new (2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17).

In other words your faith in Jesus according to God is meant to set you completely free from the past, now that’s worth believing. And thirdly for those people who have hurt me, those who have caused the loss in the first place I have learned to pray.

Can I tell you that was the single most important thing for me. I prayed constantly and still do that the Lord will bless them, that they too would find Jesus. Pray for your enemies, bless those who curse you, that’s what Jesus said.

And now I’m living the extraordinary life that God planned for me. So how about you? Jesus didn’t let the past hold Him back and neither should we. It’s time for you to live the extraordinary life that He planned for you.

By and large most of us don’t have a problem with authority … most of the time. Until we disagree with the person who’s in authority over us. Then it’s a problem. And yet learning to submit to authority is – surprisingly – one of the first steps to living an extraordinary life.

One of the greatest joys in my life is being able to work with people of many different cultures. I do a lot of work with the British, the Poms as we Australians affectionately call them. You know those people way over there who shipped our forebears to this far flung colony on convict ships back in the 18th century.

I work with Americans, Indians, Africans, Sri Lankans, I even work with New Zealanders, ah well we all have our cross to bear, just kidding, I love my Kiwi brothers and sisters. And when you spend some time working across different cultures like that you become acutely aware of the differences between those cultures, you start to become aware of your own culture.

See most of the time we aren’t aware of our own culture, we’re so immersed in it, it’s the reality in which we live and move and have our being, so we don’t notice it because it’s our frame of reference, our culture is the lens through which we see the world and it’s not until you work with different cultures that you begin to be aware of your own.

And one of the things we Australians are known for around the world is our lack of respect for authority. We’re not good at submitting to authority, well by and large most people aren’t but we Aussies are in particular behind the eight ball because it’s in the DNA of our culture to flaunt authority.

A good friend of mine, in fact he’s my mentor, Graham, was an officer in the Australian army during the Vietnam War and the lads, the Aussie soldiers over there decided that tonight was going to be party night. No particular reason, we’re Australians we don’t need a reason; they just wanted to let their hair down and have a great night.

So Australians being Australians, the soldiers decided to declare that that day would be a celebration of Ho Chi Min’s birthday, now it’s not really politically correct but if you’re an Australian you’ll smile, you’ll get it. It taps right into this innate desire that we have, as we would say, to take the mickey out of things. Ho Chi Min of course was the head of the North Vietnamese independence movement who our lads and the Americans and the South Vietnamese were fighting against.

So they drove around to all the different units that day declaring that today would be declared as Ho Chi Min’s birthday but (and Graham loves telling this story) when they arrived at the American compound and rather loudly and boisterously, as we Australians do, announced “Ho Chi Min’s birthday party was happening tonight back at the Australian compound”. Well there was kind of a blank look on the American’s faces, they didn’t get the Australian humour. What planet are these Australians on?

Why was there such a disconnect? Because by and large Americans are a pretty patriotic bunch, they believe in truth and justice and the American way (sorry to borrow that from Superman) and they respect their leaders even when they disagree with them which they can and they do when there’s a democracy. They kind of respect authority, Americans. Often I’ve been dealing with an American and they’ll refer to someone more senior to themselves in their organisation as Mr So and So or Dr So and So. Well we Australians would almost never do that.

Whichever culture we come from, however much we do naturally respect authority, deep down I mean come on, I mean really deep down most of us do struggle with authority from time to time.

You see authority is always fine, I don’t mind having a boss at work until you disagree with the person in authority. I mean it’s fine to have a boss but then you want to go in this direction and somehow she’s kind of saying, well no actually I want you to go in that direction, and so what do we do? Well we have our little silent protest don’t we? We resist, we pout, we undermine and we back stab. We behave like a two year old and sometimes, I mean sometimes it breaks out into open warfare.

Does that sound vaguely familiar? Because our base position is “I’m right and she’s wrong”, “I’m always right and she’s always wrong”, “it’s my way or the highway”. Now we have a problem. We struggle, we complain, we become demotivated.

This week and over the next few weeks on the program we’re looking at how to live an extraordinary life. A life that matters, a life that counts, a life with impact and satisfaction and contentment because most people, let me even say most people who follow Jesus aren’t living that sort of life.

So here’s a vignette, a short segment of Jesus life on this earth and it speaks into this whole thing about authority, about submission to authority because if we want to live an extraordinary life then Jesus is our mentor, He’s our case example. Have a listen, Matthew chapter 3 beginning at verse 13:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptised by him. John would have prevented him saying, ‘I need to be baptised by you and you’re coming to me’. But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so for now for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ So John consented.

Now these days we kind of understand what baptism is, it’s an outward sign that we’ve died to self and risen to Christ. It’s a public expression of laying down our lives for Jesus and putting our faith in Him.

But back then the only people who were baptised were proselytes. Now these were people who weren’t born into the nation of Israel, Gods chosen nation, but who would put their faith in the God of Israel. Baptism was a sign that even though they weren’t Jewish by birth they had become one of Gods people through faith in Him and that they would, wait for this, they would obey the Law of Moses. That’s the crux of baptism.

And the reason that John the Baptist had been out there in the wilderness baptising not proselytes but Jews was a sign of repentance, of turning away from their sins, coming back to God, submitting to Gods law, get it?

So John was right to protest, hang on a minute Jesus, what are you doing? You’re the Messiah, you’re Him, what am I doing baptising you for crying out loud, if anything you should be baptising me. And Jesus’ answer, ‘Let it be so for now for it is proper in this way to fulfil all righteousness’.

Jesus had come to die for us, the perfect sacrifice so that you and I could have and could become the perfect righteousness of God. So that when you and I put our faith in Him have a complete perfect and forever right standing before God.

Why did Jesus submit to John’s baptism, the baptism of repentance even though as the one man on earth who had never, ever sinned, He had nothing to repent from because this was the single most public, most visible thing that He could do to declare His submission to God through the law of Moses.

He wanted the world to know that He, although being the Son of God, had fully submitted, fully placed Himself under the authority of the Word of God. It was the very first step He took in His public ministry.

So how did Dad react? His Dad in heaven. What was Gods response? Matthew chapter 3, verse 16:

And when Jesus had been baptised, just as he came up from the water suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him and a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

What an endorsement. I mean just imagine for a minute that you and I live for that, for God’s endorsement, to please Him, to delight Him by putting our lives under His mighty hand, by heading His voice, by loving Him, by obeying Him.

Imagine if that’s the first thing we did, the very first thing before stepping out into what God has planned for us. Imagine the extraordinary impact our lives would have. Not such a bad start for an extraordinary life is it?

Other people can be such a pain in the neck sometimes. Well, it’s true, isn’t it? They can. So the temptation is to go it alone, do things ourselves. Pride sets in – you know what I’m talking about. And yet it’s that very attitude that nobbles people – that stops them from living an extraordinary life.

Hey, other people can be such a pain in the neck, have you noticed that? Now I don’t mean you, I mean other people. It’s always those other people isn’t it? It’s never you, it’s never me, we always blame someone else. They’re the one that’s being difficult, they’re the one who’s getting it wrong.

We are so full of ourselves aren’t we? We imagine, you and I, that we’re indispensable, that no one can do it as well as us. If you want a job done you have to do it yourself right? Oh please.

And to some extent part of that’s true, other people are a pain in the neck sometimes and deep down we’ll even admit that sometimes, okay, okay, sometimes it’s me, sometimes it is you, all the more reason to just do it yourself. It’s so much easier without other people, sure you don’t get quite as much done but there are far fewer headaches.

Now we don’t all think like that all the time but working with other people, while it can be rewarding it can also be a challenge. We’re looking this week at how to live an extraordinary life and we’re doing that by following Jesus around, a bit like one of those twelve disciples and watching Him, listening to Him, learning from Him about how He lived His extraordinary life.

Yesterday on the program we saw that the very first thing He did in His public ministry was to submit to Gods authority through baptism. One of the next things He did was to build a team.

He was baptised, He suffered out there in the wilderness, He was tempted by the devil and then He began proclaiming the Good News and the Good News went like this:

Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.

Now that’s all well and good but the reason that there were no telly evangelists back then is because there were no telly’s. There were no newspapers, there were no radio’s, no TV, no internet, no mass medium of any sort. In fact there weren’t even sound systems or bull horns for speaking to large crowds. Nothing. Just Jesus, this carpenters son from Nazareth, self styled Messiah who had come to save the world.

I’ve just recently put in a new Twitter ‘follow me’ button on the blog site but the only way that Jesus was going to be able to tell people to follow Him was to meet them, to speak with them and to say, ‘Follow me’.

I can sit in the relative comfort of my study at home and peck away at the keyboard and through a blog site and through Twitter and through Facebook, and through a web site reach hundreds of thousands of people in a key stroke.

I can sit here behind a microphone in the radio studio and tell millions of people at the same time the good news of Jesus. Jesus had none of that, follow me meant walking the dusty highways and byways of 1st century Israel and building a following. That was the reality and to do that He was going to need some help so here’s what He did, Matthew chapter 4 beginning at verse 18:

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen and he said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.

Immediately they left their nets and they followed him. As he went from there he saw two other brothers, they were called James the son of Zebedee and his brother John in their boat with their father Zebedee mending their nets and he called them. Immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

Now this was totally extraordinary in two regards. Firstly the Rabbi went and called His followers. See generally it was completely the other way round. Some Rabbi’s were a bit more prestigious than others, so young men, only men by the way, would try to social climb by following the highest pegged Rabbi in the social pecking order that they could possibly follow.

And Rabbis would sometimes reject people because they weren’t the right sorts of people. So they would have to apply to follow a Rabbi, a bit like trying to get into Oxford or Harvard to study a PhD. They’re far more prestigious establishments than where I studied, you have to apply, lots do, only a few get in.

That’s how it was with the most recognised of Rabbis. Whole families would court them to try and leverage their social network to get their sons in as followers of this particular Rabbi as disciples, that’s what they were called, of the most prestigious Rabbi because that would advance their prospects.

First extraordinary thing about Jesus’ team building approach was that He called the disciples to follow Him instead of the other way around where the disciples applied for an apprenticeship with Him.

And secondly He went for fishermen to start with. Salt of the earth blokes to be sure but very working class, very down the social order, very … well you know, they were fishermen. Smelly, not educated, certainly not well regarded and they came not from Judea, not from Jerusalem but from Galilee. Like Jesus, well really? You can just see how the religious establishment in Jerusalem, the chaps, the chaps trust would look down their noses at these uneducated bumpkins.

I hopped on a bus the other day and ran into a man I had known years before. So I sat next to him. For the next twenty minutes he told me all the important people he’d been having dinner with. He was about the head off to the US to attend Harvard, he’d just had this well known politician staying at his house. He went on and on and on. He didn’t ask about me once so I guess I didn’t offer.

Sometimes I think we think that a team, if you can have one at all, have to be classy people. People who have their act together, people who are well known, people who are just a rung or three above us on the social ladder, a few rungs higher so that by associating with them we can climb up a bit further but not too far so that they’re out of reach.

Sometimes I think that we think we have to go and chase after people and grovel to them to follow them. Surround ourselves with winners not losers.

Jesus turned that whole thing completely on it’s head. He didn’t have people grovel to Him, He went and chose His team. He surrounded Himself with real salt of the earth people, almost deliberately picking the anti-establishment team, tax collectors too, sinners the lot of them.

He didn’t pick the A team, He built the A team and what makes the Jesus model of team selection and team building so amazing is that this rag tag team of uneducated bumpkins founded the Church to which a couple of billion people still belong today two thousand years on. Now that’s extraordinary.

Did having those twelve disciples have its moments? Absolutely, remember once when the disciples failed to heal a boy Jesus exclaimed, ‘How long must I be with this faithless and perverse generation’. Yeah sure it was frustrating, these twelve guys required Jesus to pour Himself into them and sure one of them even betrayed Him and sometimes they drive Him mad but Jesus life was made all the more extraordinary by His down to earth heart desire to be part of, to lead, to disciple a team no matter what it would cost Him.

His life still lives on today through His Church all because He was passionate about a team, passionate about community, passionate about sacrificing Himself for the people around Him. Does that sound like the makings of an extraordinary life? What do you think?

Living an extraordinary life is about … well, it’s about having a positive impact in this world, in other people’s lives. It’s challenging, but satisfying. So why do some people live extraordinary lives, and others … ordinary lives? Sometimes, it’s about focus; it’s about what we set out to do.

What are we talking about on the program today? The same thing we’ve been talking about all week, “How to Live an absolutely Extraordinary Life”. Now it’s easy to get the wrong impression when you hear me say that. I’m not talking about a luxurious life, I’m not talking about a comfortable life, I’m not talking about a safe life, a life without risks, a life without hurts or a life without disappointments. I’m talking about living an absolutely extraordinary life despite all those things, in the midst of all those things.

The Bible says that Jesus was a man of many sorrows and yet He lived and continues to live as the risen Christ a compellingly extraordinary life; a life that’s impacted billions of people since the first century until now.

So it makes sense doesn’t it that if we’re going to look at us living an extraordinary life that we should look at how Jesus lived His extraordinary life. That’s what we’re going to be doing again on the program today.

So far this week we’ve seen that Jesus overcame a pretty rocky start to life. He kicked things off in His public ministry by an act of submission to His Father through His baptism. Jesus suffered and then He went and built a team in a way that was totally counter to the culture of the day. Today we’re going to take a look at the very next thing He did in getting about His Father’s business.

Jesus set His whole life on course to do His Father’s will, to do what He came to do, let’s take a look.

How do you kick off a career as a preacher? That was the challenge for Jesus. He was a complete unknown, He was poor not rich, He came from rural, not very up-market Nazareth not Jerusalem, He was a carpenter not a highly qualified credential Rabbi. He had all those rumours of an illegitimate birth hanging over Him from childhood and then there was the stigma of Herod killing all those innocent children under two around Bethlehem because of Jesus.

Yeah, you know, He had a lot to contend with. He had three and a half years to tell the world the good news. To build a team that would go on to become the foundation of the Church which would last for several millennia and to die and to rise again for you and for me. Hey it’s a pretty tall order in a short time.

So how do you go about being an unknown to becoming a respected teacher? Well oddly enough in my own little way that’s something of a journey that I’ve been on and I can tell you it’s not easy. It involves a lot of hard work and a lot, I mean a tonne of help and anointing and provision and empowerment by God.

So let’s have a look at how Jesus went about it. Matthew chapter 4 beginning at verse 17:

From that time on Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near’. Jesus went through Galilee teaching in their Synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness amongst the people.

So His fame spread through all Syria and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics and he cured them all. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and from way beyond the Jordan.

How did He do it? Well to put it bluntly He hit the road, He put Himself out there. He started to proclaim, to declare, to preach. What was He preaching? What was He declaring?

Anyone who’s a Christian will have heard these words over and over again so they won’t be anything new:

Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

But you see to the people He was preaching and proclaiming and heralding and saying and exhorting these things to this was outrageously radical. Here they were in this backwater of the Roman Empire, now this is nowheresville if I can call it that, miles, light years away from the seat of power in Rome.

These people were less than pawns on the emperor’s chess game. Had it suited him he would have had them all wiped out in an instant and turned their precious farm land into car parking and shopping malls. That was their reality, they were nothing in the scheme of things.

They’d been living the same subsistence lifestyle just surviving, boring, insignificant little lives somehow believing that because they were God’s chosen people perhaps one day He’d send another king like David, a messiah to set them free.

Or if not when they died they might go to a better life although the Sadducees who were the religious and social elite, they didn’t believe that so who could be certain if you were one of those poor farmers or carpenters living in Galilee.

And along comes this lunatic albeit an articulate lunatic and starts crying out ‘repent’ just like that John the Baptist guy and look what happened to him, they chopped his head off.

Repent. What does that actually mean? It means change your mind. It means turn around. It means stop living the way you’re living. When you think about it that’s just what the prophets of old had been telling God’s chosen people. But other than perhaps John the Baptist, God hadn’t sent one of them (a prophet) for three or four hundred years. Repent, the kingdom of God has come near.

Hang on a minute, God’s in the temple in Jerusalem, how could He come near? Only the High Priest gets to go into the Holy of Holies and then only once a year and that’s a big deal on Yom Kippur on the Day of Atonement. How could the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God possibly have come near? That was outrageous, that was impossible.

And yet they listened, He got their attention; He was pulling massive crowds, why? Because not only was He proclaiming this good albeit unsettling and confusing news He was healing every disease so they brought their sick and lame from far and wide.

The thing that got Him noticed was the power of God, God’s anointing on His ministry. Without that there’s no way He could have done what He did and certainly not is such a short three and a half years.

So what do we learn about Jesus? Something that made His life extraordinary. He left the confines of His safe little carpenter shop in Nazareth, He hit the track Jack and went and did what God had called Him to do and what God had anointed Him to do. Was it safe? No, it got Him killed. He always knew that that’s how it would turn out but He did it anyway.

I saw a great Tweet the other day, it said this:

Many Christians worship on the altar of safety. Before they ask ‘Is this the will of God’, they ask ‘Is this safe’?

You and I aren’t called to do precisely what Jesus was called to do in precisely the same way and yet in our own way, according to the gifts and abilities that God’s given us, according to the place He’s planted us in, we are called to do exactly that. To get out of our safe little comfort zone, our safe little comfortable carpenters shop, whatever that is and hit the track Jack and go and tell people about Jesus.

Maybe you’re a builder, an accountant, a cleaner, a counsellor, a web designer, whatever you are, well using that, you and I are called to get out there into that dangerous place to tell people the good news. Not necessarily as preachers, perhaps as servers or encouragers or as people who pull alongside someone and proclaim Christ not with their mouths but with their hearts and their hands and their lives.

What sort of life would Jesus have lived if He’d stayed silent in the confines of the carpenters shop in Nazareth? Extraordinary? I don’t think so.