Life can be tough when nobody understands us – when sometimes our good intentions or who we are, are misunderstood. It’s tough – so how do we live through that?

Last week on the program we had a look at what it means for us to live the life that God always intended. I’m passionate about that, God has a plan for your life, for my life and it’s a good plan, a plan of getting up close to Him, a plan of being blessed and being a blessing to others.

But sometimes life can be awful, life can be really harsh and tough and I’m always conscious when I’m talking about God’s blessing that someone’s sitting there thinking to themselves, “Well I don’t know whose life you’re talking about buddy,” or “Whose God are you talking about but it’s certainly not mine.”

So this week on the program we’re going to have a look at what it means to live the life that God always intended for us even when life’s tough, even in the reality of life. We all go through those tough times sometimes, I do and the real question is when the chips are down is God still going to show up?

When was the last time that you went through a difficult time in life? Conflict at home, in the family, or sickness or fear or the death of a loved one or loneliness? The list goes on doesn’t it? There’s not one of us who can’t point to something difficult or hurtful in life, even when it looks like on the surface we’re doing ok.

That’s the thing isn’t it? When we’re doing it tough people look at us on the outside, and you and I are pretty good at pretending that everything’s ok and then we live out that lie, we live out that surface existence and the feeling wells up inside, no-one really understands what’s going on in my life, nobody knows how I feel, I feel so not understood.

I recently went through a tough time with the hours that I had to work, I had several really big things going on at the same time and there was about a four month period when I literally only had three days off. And when you’re working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, now remember I’m no spring chicken, it’s really tough. I love what I do but it was a grind, it was very tiring mentally and emotionally, it was exhausting stuff.

Now that season is over but back then I remember going to Church and people would ask me, “How you doing Berni?” And sometimes I’d smile and say, “I’m fine.” and other times I’d say, “Well you know, I’m working really long hours and as much as I enjoy what I’m doing with God, it’s really tough, I’m finding it hard, it’s tough on my wife Jacqui and on our marriage.” And more often than not no-one really understood. And when we’re at that point, when something is dominating our lives and affecting our lives and it hurts and it’s difficult, it’s tough when no-one understands us isn’t it?

Because we really would like someone to understand and we get to the point and we say, “Oh, ok God, tell me, how am I supposed to live the life that you always intended for me, a good life, a blessed life when I’m doing it tough and no-one really understands or worse still, they misunderstand us, they misunderstand our good intentions, they misunderstand who we are?”

That’s a good question because when we’re doing it tough we desperately, desperately need someone to understand us, maybe not to do anything except listen and go, “Hmmm, I understand.” But that empathy, knowing that there’s someone else who just empathises with us, who is just prepared to sit and to listen and to cry with us through the difficult times is so important isn’t it?

I remember when I was going through really tough times in my life a decade ago, I was so blessed by a couple, a husband and a wife, who were prepared just to be with me and to weep with me when I wept and to laugh with me when I laughed.

Can I tell you? These days that is very, very rare indeed, to experience that true emotional empathy and support. It’s sad but true. People who are prepared to take the time and travel through the difficult times with us and be there and just cry with us when we need someone to do that for us. Everybody else is so busy, they haven’t got time. Everybody else is so busy taking; they haven’t got any time to do any giving. You can relate to that.

So often I go to Church and I’m guilty of this too, you say, ‘How you going?’ and people say, ‘I’m really busy, I’m really, really busy.’ Well that means that we’re too busy to understand people who are hurting and for Jesus the most important thing of all is that we walk in love, that we walk sacrificially.

We’ll talk about that next week on the program. When we’re too busy to do that, we’re too busy to do the thing that Jesus wants us most to do and when everybody’s busy taking and no-one’s got time for us and we’re hurting, we just want to scream, ‘God, what are you doing to me?’

Let me truly tell you, there’s only one person who always, always shows up and makes a difference, there’s only one person with true empathy, true understanding, true emotional support that can make a difference 24/7 and that person is God. Sometimes people think that prayer is like a ritual, you have to know the formula, there has to be a key that unlocks the code to God’s treasure chest.

But have a listen to what Jesus said:

Don’t be like all those other people who heap up empty phrases or who think that God will hear them because of all the great words they use, your Dad in Heaven already knows what you want even before you open your mouth to ask. Whenever you pray, just go quietly into a room on your own, shut the door, pray in secret and your Dad who sees in secret will reward you.

Don’t you love that? God already knows, He knows the hurt, He knows the pain, He knows what it feels like to be misunderstood before we even open our mouths and the promise of Jesus is, “Dad’s in that place.” When we go into that quiet room and close the door and pray and spend time with God in secret, our Dad in heaven will answer us, will respond, will be there because that’s who He is, that’s what He does, He’s God. God knows everything and He’s the God of pure love and pure grace who is always willing to listen, who knows our hearts but He also knows what we’re going through.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, He was a boy, He was a man, He grew up, He lived his life for you and me, He was misunderstood. He healed people on the Sabbath and they accused Him of being ungodly, He hung around with outcasts so they accused Him of being a glutton and a drunkard. He promised a new kingdom, the kingdom of God, so they tried to conscript Him to overthrow the Romans. He stirred up the religious hypocrites so they crucified Him.

God is a God who knows what it’s like to be misunderstood and in that secret, quiet place, experiencing something that you can’t find anywhere else, that’s where we’ll find the understanding of a misunderstood God, the very same one that was prepared to go to the cross for you and for me.

In that quiet, secret place when we experience that, it changes us deep inside, it’s an experience like no other, God shines the light of His love and His understanding and His acceptance and His grace and it’s part of His plan, there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s one of the most wonderful parts of living the life that God always intended.

One of the worst things in life is when our hopes and dreams for the future lies shattered all over the floor. It feels like we’ve lost our whole future. How do you live through that?

Let me ask you something. Have you ever dropped a glass and broken it? I think we all have. It slips from your hands or we don’t quite put it down on the bench properly and the rest is like slow motion: we see it falling to the ground but there’s nothing we can do, and in that instant it smashes into a million pieces all over the floor. Then it’s out of the slow motion and back into real-time again.

And we look at that glass on the floor and our very first emotion is regret, ‘If only I hadn’t done that. Oh why did I do that?’ And the more the glass is worth, the more we feel the pain of regret and if it’s some precious ornament we can even be moved to tears.

You know what I mean, it’s funny isn’t it? Regret over an inanimate object, but when it’s our hopes and dreams lying shattered on the floor, the pain of regret can be overwhelming.

There’s that saying, “don’t cry over spilt milk”, there’s some wisdom in that. We can’t change what’s past no matter how much we cry and no matter how much we get upset, no matter how much we regret it, no matter how much we wish we could wind the clock back. We just can’t, but at the same time when we experience the pain of regret, that sense of our dreams and our hopes lying shattered on the floor, that’s exactly what we want to do

Last week on A Different Perspective we looked at living the life God always intended, but as I said yesterday on the program, that can be hard to swallow. It can be hard when we’re going through tough times, sickness or loneliness or pressures or whatever and some joker comes on the radio and says, “Live the life God always intended.”

How can we do that in the middle of stuff that happens in life? How can we do that when our dreams are lying shattered on the floor? How can we live the life God always intended? And I think one of the worst times of all is when we lose our hopes and our dreams: a sportsman or sportswoman who’s cut down in their prime through injury; a marriage that’s torn apart through divorce; a promising career that’s cut down through retrenchment; a business that’s chopped apart through failure. What happens then.

Is it the very thing that we were sacrificing for, the hope or the dream, the thing that we had set our hearts on and we were pouring our lives into, the thing that we had been slogging our guts out for, slips out of our hands and lies shattered on the floor and we stand there and we look at it with an ache in our heart and tears in our eyes. ‘God, what am I supposed to do now? How am I supposed to live this life that you always intended when my hopes and my dreams lie shattered on the floor?’

Here’s the reality of life, I can’t put it any other way, when we place our faith in something in this world, a person, money, career, whatever. When that becomes our primary focus we have to accept the fact that sometimes that thing that we hope in will fail. People fail, careers fail, wealth fails, pets die and it hurts.

The Apostle Paul, a couple of thousand years ago was writing a letter to his young protégé, a man called Timothy, this is what he said:

We brought nothing into this world, so that we can take nothing out of it, but if we have food and clothing we should be content with those things but those who want to be rich fall into senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.

You can read it in 1 Timothy, chapter 6, verse 7-9. Now Paul’s talking about money here but it applies to all sorts of other things. We all have hopes, we all have dreams. I love my wife Jacqui and my hope and my dream is that we’ll grow old and grey together in a nursing home somewhere, sharing the same glass for our dentures when we’re old. But it may never happen. One of us may go early, it’s just the way that life is.

Everything, everything on planet earth is temporary and when we get our priorities out of balance and imagine somehow our career will be forever or somehow that our money will be forever or even that our marriage will be forever and all those things that are the main thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, I adore my wife but at the end of the day she can’t make me happy. She can’t change what’s happening inside of me. I can’t demand that of her. I can’t expect her to be the one that brings joy and fulfilment into my life. We need to have an eternal perspective. Paul, again, writes this in a letter to the Colossians:

Set you minds on things that are above not on the things that are on this earth, because you have died to those things and your life is hidden with Christ and God. When Jesus, who is your life is revealed then you also will be revealed with Him in glory so get rid of all this rubbish out of your lives.

Isn’t that great? Paul has an eternal perspective, that if we focus, if we make the main focus of our lives all these temporary things on earth, we’re going to miss the boat, we’re going to miss the point. Those things are all temporary, we’ve died to the things of this world and we’re alive to Christ and when we have an eternal perspective, the temporary things on this earth change their meanings, we hold on to them more loosely.

That’s not to say divorce isn’t devastating or retrenchment isn’t painful but everything on this earth will pass away some day, even the most wonderful marriage will come to an end when one of the party dies and then what?

If we have a perspective to say that it’s all about the here and now then when those things slip through our fingers, it’s so much more painful. If it’s all about here and now then ‘here and now’ dreams that we lose hurts so much more, but with an eternal perspective there’s some good amongst it all. Pain is kind of mixed with the blessed knowledge of God’s presence and I’m speaking from experience.

We’ve all traveled through pain and I certainly have. And there was a time in my life when all of my hopes and my dreams were shattered and that’s the time I invited God to be with me in that place. It was bitter and it was sweet, it was dark and it was light and in the middle of those tough times, when my whole future seemed to be lost, it was the most beautiful time I’ve ever, ever had with God, the most amazing experience.

To look back and to see how He has taken that over the last eleven years, if my dreams hadn’t been shattered, I couldn’t tell you this stuff today. If I hadn’t lost all my hopes and my dreams I’d be of no good to you today. God takes those things and He works them out in the most amazing wonderful way. If you’re struggling with that at the moment, if you’ve lost your hopes, if you’ve lost your dreams, right now I’m going to pray for you.

Father I pray for every person here today who knows what it is to lose their hopes and their dreams, whose dreams lay shattered on the floor. Father, You are the God who has a good plan, You are the God who has a plan for our lives and Your heart is to see us live out the life that You always intended. I pray that as we share these things today, Father you would just pour Your love and Your grace into their hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that You give us a fresh perspective, a new perspective, a different perspective of life through Your love, through Your eyes, through Your Grace, in Jesus name I pray. Amen.

We all hate to suffer – even for an hour, let alone a day or a week, or months, or years. But sometimes suffering can go on and on and on and on … how do we live through that?

Sometimes people suffer for a very long time. Nelson Mandela was in prison for almost three decades; my sister’s been suffering with Schizophrenia for almost a quarter of a century; some people are lonely it seems, for a lifetime; the elderly can be lonely and sick for a long time. People can live in war zones and when they’ve just rebuilt their homes and their lives after the last conflict the next war starts.

Sometimes people suffer for a long time and it just doesn’t seem to let up and then some joker like me gets up and says, “God meant for you to have a great life. Are you living the life God always intended for you?” And people who are in that forever suffering place go, “Hang on a minute, what are you smoking? Come on, come and visit my life and then tell me about this God. I’ve prayed but there’s never anyone home up there for me.” That’s a fair point. So where do we go with that?

Whether we like it or not suffering is a part of life, I don’t have any simple explanations but what I do know is that there’s suffering right through the Bible from the very first chapter to the end. People are being oppressed, enslaved, killed, tortured and raped and murdered and marginalised and abused, it’s all there, and it’s nothing new under the sun.

Why? I don’t have the answer to that, I can’t tell you that. All I know is that God planned and created a world of good and evil, of light and darkness, of joy and of pain, of rejoicing and of suffering and somehow without the bad bits, the good bits wouldn’t be as good. What about the tsunami’s? What about the innocent children being killed or trafficked as slaves? What about …?

It’s overwhelming and I just don’t have the answers but it seems to me that love and suffering are linked, you can’t love someone without suffering because some days they’re unlovable, some days it hurts to love them, so love and suffering are linked and we can love those who are suffering.

In fact, I wonder what love would actually mean if it didn’t involve some pain and sacrifice? And certainly God loved us so much He didn’t spare Himself, His own son, from the pain of sacrifice, from suffering. Jesus loved, Jesus suffered. Why would you do that if it wasn’t important? Why wouldn’t God just say, “I forgive you all your sins,” without Jesus dying and suffering? I don’t know.

The theological answer is God is good, God is perfect, God is Holy therefore there has to be some price paid for our mistakes, that’s the theological answer but why did He send His Son? Why did God the Son suffer and die on the cross if somehow suffering wasn’t a part of love? God, who knows what suffering is, what it feels like, how much it hurts, is the God who invented a world that includes pain and suffering.

Ok, why do some people suffer for a long time through sickness or disease or poverty? Some people live in poverty all their lives and those lives can be very short. Again, I don’t have any clever answers but as someone who has had his own share of suffering for a few years, I can share some insights, share with you what I experienced back then on the journey.

When we suffer we just want out of that place, when it’s too hot we want air conditioning to cool it down; when it’s too cold we want heating to turn it up; when we’re tired we want to sit and rest. We don’t like to suffer and so, when suffering goes on for ten minutes we think, “Ok God, that’s enough. I’m out of here, let’s stop this, turn it off.”

But it goes on for years. That’s tough and when we’re suffering, when we’re in the middle of that, it never leaves us for an instant and no-one understands, everyone else seems to be living their lives, normal everyday lives: go to work, go to school, being mums, being dads.

And suffering makes the world feel really lonely like no-one else is in that space, no-one else understands. And the longer it goes on, the more desperate we become. And what I’ve seen sometimes of people going through suffering over an extended period of time, is they give up, they resign themselves to being a perpetual victim.

And you might say, “Berni, that’s not fair. That’s such an unfair statement.” And I know it’s a hard thing to say but we do not have to be a victim of our circumstances no matter what those circumstances are. Instead of being a victim we can be a victor. Someone with terminal cancer can still touch lives; someone who is lonely can still draw close to God and ask Him to give them a future.

The saddest thing of all is when I see people, men and woman and children who are made in the image of God, with a beauty and a dignity and a wonder and a worth because they are made in God’s image, just give up on life because of the adversity that surrounds them.

The Apostle Paul knew what suffering was all about. This is what he wrote, he said:

We rejoice in our sufferings because we know suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character and character produces hope and this hope doesn’t disappoint us because the God who has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit is the one who gave us that Holy Spirit.

It turns out that God wants to turn this whole suffering thing upside down. It’s not a time to give up but it’s a time of opportunity. Some of the people I know who are suffering, I mean really suffering through illness, go all sour in life.

We had one person ring the ministry in response to a radio program just the other day and they said, “You know something? I have all the fruit of the Spirit but no-one wants to talk to me. I’m suffering, and life’s terrible.” I felt like saying to them, “Well maybe you’re a lemon tree. Maybe when people bite into you all they get is sour.”

It’s so easy for us to let the adversity of life turn us bitter and sour. What a poisonous, horrible life, people spend their whole lives complaining about how lonely they are, how it isn’t fair. You know what I’m talking about. And you look at their lot in life and you think, “They have every right to complain.”

But here’s the crunch, complaining doesn’t make things any better. Resigning ourselves to being a perpetual victim doesn’t make anything better, in fact, it actually makes things worse. Me? Here’s my decision, when I’m suffering I take it to the cross, I go to Jesus. Hebrews chapter 5, verse 8 says:

Jesus learned through what He suffered.

If it’s good enough for the Son of God, it’s good enough for me and when we’re suffering maybe there are some things that we can do to change that but maybe there aren’t. But we can make a decision to tap into the opportunity that God sets out before us: to grow and to change, and to know Him; and to become people who rise above our circumstances; to achieve things, and to love other people anyway.

What are you suffering right now? What are you doing with it? Giving up on life, complaining, or have you made a decision to grab God’s opportunity with both hands and hang on tight to see what He’ll do? Are you rejoicing in your suffering? Because suffering produces perseverance and perseverance produces character and character produces hope and that hope is a hope that doesn’t fail when we set our hope on Jesus Christ.

It seems that there are two extremes in life today – there are so many people who are so busy and so many people who aren’t. And either way, life can be desperately lonely. How do you deal with that?

They say that no man is an island but these days, it seems more and more, we are just individuals and not a community. At least around where I live people tend not to know their neighbours or talk over the back fence or get together for barbeques because life’s so busy and loneliness is on the rise.

Sometimes people who live alone can’t get out much and so they become desperately lonely and other times people are racing around, so busy, they don’t have time to really connect with other people. The result’s the same – loneliness. And so often we get into a rut we forget what it means to be part of a family or a community or a Church.

This week we’re looking at living the life that God always intended and my hunch is that He intended us to have good, real, beautiful relationships. Let’s have a bit of a poke around today in your relationship closet and mine and see what’s there.

Well, how about your relationships? Some questions: Are you really part of a community? Are you really part of a family? I tend to get three different answers from people when I ask them those questions. The first answer is, “Yep, absolutely. I’m contented, nothing’s perfect but I’m connected.” If that’s you, stick with me because God’s got a job for you to do. The second answer is, “Well, you know, sort of, but it could be a lot better.” And the third answer is, “No, I am so, so desperately lonely. I don’t have anyone.”

Increasingly people are finding themselves in the last two categories and the lonelier we get the more isolated we become, we just get the feeling that it’s just us but it’s not so. The more a society develops economically, the more we focus on things and the less we focus on people. It’s a paradox isn’t it?

You would think the better off people are, the more money they have, the more time they would have to get connected. But in fact the opposite is true because the more money we have the more options we have to be entertained, to shop, to travel – and the thing that falls by the wayside in this busy, busy, busy world are relationships. Question: are you lonely?

Today we are going to talk about living the life that God always intended for you and for me in terms of our relationship with God and our relationship with people. First things first, God is first, “Oh Berni, really …” Yes, really. When we get lonely, we get to imagining that God’s taken a holiday, He’s left us alone. But nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve all probably heard that poem, “Footsteps” but let’s have a listen to it again because it’s just a sobering reminder of who God really is.

One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along a beach with the Lord, across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonged to him, the other one belonging to God. When the last scene of his life flashed before him he looked back at the footprints in the sand and he noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints and he also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times of his life.

This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it, he said, ‘Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you, you’d walk with me all the way but I’ve noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life there’s only one set of footprints. I don’t understand. Why when I needed you most would you leave me?’ And the Lord replied, ‘My precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During your times of trials and suffering when you see only one set of footprints it was then that I carried you.’

Jesus said, “I will never ever leave you or forsake you.“ And the great deception of the devil, when we’re going through really tough times, when those tough times seem to last a long time, when we’re lonely, the great deception is God’s left you, God’s not there. But the Jesus I know is the one who prefers to be with the social outcasts, with the lonely people, with the flotsam and jetsam.

Now when we’re lonely we feel like we’re worth nothing don’t we? When we’re lonely we feel like everyone else has got a wonderful life and everything’s going well for them and I’m worth nothing because I’m not a part of that. How tough can that be? What an enormous opportunity God has for us in the middle of that lonely space.

We do need contact with other people, we do need relationships but first and foremost God is in the middle of that place with you. Are you lonely? Are you so desperately lonely that you don’t even know whether God exists anymore? Maybe that’s why we’re together today; God is in that place with you. When Jesus was in Gethsemane and He was struggling just before He was crucified, it’s said that Angels came to minister to Him. In what awe must they have ministered and it’s that God, the God who knows what it is to be desperately lonely. When all His friends betrayed Him and ran away, that Jesus is in this space with you.

The second is a contact relationship with other people. Sometimes we’re shut in and some people can’t get out, I understand that, but there are so many options. We can get into a rut of loneliness and forget to explore all the opportunities. The internet these days, we can talk across the internet, we can do video across the internet. “Oh, I don’t know the computer.” A lot of people have got enough money and enough time but they’re not prepared to get off their backside and explore.

Grandparents, you can be a grandparent and think I am so lonely and my kids, my grandkids don’t want to have anything to do with me but what if you added value to your busy kid’s lives? What if we chose to serve? “What if you let me mind the grandkids so you go out? Let me spend some time with the grandkids?” Are we still going to be lonely?

People working long hours, stop doing it, and carve out some time to build relationships. “Oh I don’t have time.” Yes you do, we make our own schedules, we decide what we do, and we can build relationships. Organise a lunch at work. There are so many possibilities and we just get into a rut and we get lazy. Come on, if God’s talking to you today, it’s time to get out of that rut.

Each one of us when we are lonely can turn to God in an instant and say, “God, I need you in this place.” And He is there and we will experience His love because He is a wonderful God and 99.9% of us, when we’re lonely, have options for looking around and creating contact with other people by serving them and getting involved in their lives.

And if you’re someone who has a life of balance of relationships and family and community and work colleagues, whatever, God has a job for you to do. Help someone, help someone who’s lonely, teach them relationships and what community is all about, be there, let them model their behaviour on you. God did not mean for you or for me to spend our lives lonely, He came to set the captives free.

Be creative, be decisive, be a builder of relationships, live the life that God always intended for you. “But, but, but.” There are no buts. Jesus is in that place with you, right now, right here; He is in that place with you.” But I don’t know any people.” The Holy Spirit WILL open up doors and give you ideas to have relationships with other people. Go on, live the life that God always intended.

None of like to think about dying much less talk about it – but here’s a fact – one day, we’ll all breathe our last breath on this earth. Question is – will we be ready?

One day, it’ll all be over, life I mean, this life. One day I will breathe my last breath on this earth and one day so will you. None of us really wants to think about dying much less talk about it but every now and then we need to.

This week on the program we’re looking at living the life that God always intended so why are we talking about death and dying? Because it’s a part of life, some people will die suddenly without much warning, an accident or a heart attack. You and me? I don’t know, but if it is will we be ready? Others will know that the end is coming near for months, years even. Will that be you or me? I don’t know, but if it is how will we cope?

Dying is a part of life and if we’re going to live the life that God always intended, I reckon we need to get ready and have a healthy outlook on death. It’s not easy so let’s spend a few minutes together exploring that very issue today from “A Different Perspective”.

Well, are you ready to die? We cope with death sometimes by joking about it, I remember a few years ago driving down a motorway in the U.K. and I saw in the distance a black motorbike with a funny looking side car. And as I pulled up next to it I saw on the side its web address – motorcyclefunerals.com. Fabulous, so here was a motorcycle hearse. I remember telling a really tall friend of mine, Hal, about this thing and we joked about how if that was him his feet would be hanging out the back banging along the motorway.

But death, death isn’t a joking matter, when we’re dying of cancer or a loved one’s lost in a car accident, or … all of a sudden it gets really serious. To tell you the truth I used to be petrified of dying. I remember once flying on a plane into a place called Christchurch in New Zealand, some years back, before I became a Christian. And a cold change had come up from the South Island of New Zealand and had just hit the airport as we were trying to land.

I tell you, we were trying to land and the wings were all over the place, up and down, it was white knuckle stuff. I was convinced I was going to die and I was absolutely petrified. A few years later, on a really turbulent flight again, I still don’t like bumps, but what I realised was there were no more white knuckles, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I thought, ‘maybe I’m ready to die’.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have so much more to live for, so much more I want to do. But if tomorrow I went to the Doctor with a sore gut and he said to me, “Berni you know, you’ve got cancer and you’ve got six weeks to live”, I’m not scared anymore. What caused that change?

Here’s the wonderful bit. There was no effort, there was no conscious working at it. It just happened to me without noticing, as the by-product of something else. Because between those two flights, the one into Christchurch and that other really bumpy one where I wasn’t afraid anymore, between those two, I gave my life to Jesus. Now, I don’t want to sound corny but I made a passionate decision in my life to live for Him, and without even knowing it the fear of dying just went away.

The Apostle Paul, a couple of thousand years ago, was on death row, in fact he wrote many of his letters, the books of the New Testament, while he was on death row. Now this guy had an amazing ministry, well over a decade with some incredible ups and downs. He planted so many Churches, he saw so many people saved and growing in their relationship with God but he also had tremendous opposition.

Riots, assassination attempts, he was shipwrecked, he was bitten by a snake, he was imprisoned, he was flogged, his friends deserted him. Paul, it turns out, was a real campaigner. And right towards the end of his life he writes a letter to Timothy, his protégé. You can read it in the New Testament; it’s the second letter to Timothy, chapter 4, verses 6-8. This is what he writes to young Tim, he says:

You take over, I’m about to die. My life and offering on God’s altar, this is the only race worth running in and I’ve run hard to finish and believed all the way. All that’s left now is the shouting, God’s applause, depend on it. God’s an honest judge, He’ll do right not only by me but by everyone eager for His coming.

Paul wrote that on death row, he knew he was about to be killed by the Romans. He lived a long life, a full life, he lived the life God always intended for him. And this Paul, who was just a guy, just a Jewish Pharisee who had done a whole bunch of horrible things but then met Jesus, was used by God in the most amazing way. He wrote almost half the books of the New Testament and we’re still reading those today, a couple of thousand years on. Yeah sure, Paul lived life to the full, a life that God always intended, but equally you can hear he was ready to go:

I’ve run hard, I’ve run right to the finish, I’ve believed all the way and all that’s left now is the shouting, God’s applause.

Paul knows that it’s time and he’s ready and then he talks about a confidence, a certain hope that God will be there for him and I guess that’s what’s happened to me.

Now I’m not ready to go yet, I’ve got more to do, not for me but for you and all the people in over eighty countries who listen to this program. But I want to live out the life that God always intended. I want to go and live and enjoy and work hard and believe and run the race and when that time comes, for me it will be a new phase, a new start, the beginning of the eternity with God that God always intended. The beginning of eternity with Jesus the way God always intended.

So what about you? Are you afraid of dying or do you have your hope set on Jesus? Because the cry of God from the beginning of the Old Testament through the end of the New Testament is this, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Here’s the ending, the new beginning that God always had planned for you and me, it comes from the second last chapter of the New Testament of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. It’s Johns vision of Heaven, this is what he writes:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the first ones had passed away and the sea was no more and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals and he will dwell with them as their God and they will be His people and God himself will be with them, He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more because the old things have passed away’. And the one who is seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’

What’s your faith in? What’s your hope in? Because the promise of Jesus Christ is that the death in this life is the beginning of a beautiful, wonderful eternity with Him forever and ever and ever. What about you? Are you ready?

Father, I pray for anybody who has not yet made a decision for Christ. (If that’s you pray this with me.) Father I’ve heard this message and I want to give my life to Jesus, I commit my life to you. Father I’m sorry for all the things I’ve done, take those things away, forgive me and I want this eternal life because I believe that Jesus died and rose again to give me exactly that. Father, I pray it in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.