Well, here we are in that funny little week of what often feels a bit like suspended animation … this week between Christmas and New Year. For many, it’s a time of rest. But also a time for looking back and reflecting on the year that’s been. So – looking back on it, how did this year go for you? 

It’s great that you can join me again today, right here, on “A Different Perspective”. I always think that this week between Christmas and New Year, it’s an interesting week. The big rush leading up to Christmas, well, that’s over. Christmas Day is gone and New Year’s Eve is almost upon us. The days are ticking down and another year’s over with yet a new one just about to begin.

For many of us this week is a week of rest – a time to reflect on the year that’s just been. Where did the time go? Here we are at the end of another year, already.

If I were to ask you, “What sort of a year did you have?” How would you answer? I mean looking back, really, what sort of year did you have? If you had to sum up your year and compare it to all of the other years you’ve lived, where would it land on the scale of things?

My year, well, it started off for me in India. It was in a dusty, poor village, visiting a school there for the Dalit children, the untouchables. Kids who would never had received an education except for the Christian ministry that gave it to them. Beautiful, wonderful kids and I had a great privilege to baptise fifteen new believers in Jesus right there in the middle of India.

The thing that really sticks with me from that trip right at the beginning of this year was standing in the middle of one of the poorest parts of this village. It was dusty. There were little huts. The floors were of dirt. The bathroom was this black little plastic thing wrapped around a few sticks with bucket right in the middle of the village. And when I said, “Where’s the toilet?” Well, the answer was, “This”.

At a certain time of the day, the men would go out and use the fields as a toilet. And at certain times of day, the women would go out and use the fields for toilets. There was an old man there with a crutch and he had sores on his leg. The people were so poor – no water, no health, an incredibly low life expectancy. And I stood there in the middle of this little village trembling, shaking. It was all I could do not to cry at the condition these people lived in.

That set the scene for me for the New Year, the context.

On a global scale, this year has been a year where millions of children have died of starvation. It’s been a year of terrorism, of wars, of bombings – people dying needlessly because of their hatred of others and not just hatred but neglect.

While those of us who live in the affluent west, by and large, have plenty, countless others are going without. I wonder how people would feel who lost a loved one this year in a war through terrorism? My heart goes out to them.

What I’m talking about here is the whole issue of balance and perspective, millions of children. Imagine being a parent of at least one of the kids that died or the brother or the sister or the aunty or the uncle of just one. Now, multiply that misery by millions – it’s just inconceivable; the amount of pain and suffering and hurt and loss.

Now, it’s one thing to talk about that global scale, that macro, the big geopolitical forces that are out of our control. But the global scale is the sum of seven and a half billion or so individual stories, isn’t it? People just like you and me, people who’ve had a good year or a bad year or maybe an appalling year.

So how was your year? On a scale of one to ten, how will you rate this last year for you? The question is: what scale or measure should you use?

The first one that we could always use is the scale of pain.

If you’ve suffered the loss of a loved one, if you’ve suffered some terrible injustice, if you’ve seen someone die in your life, if you’ve been retrenched or if your marriage has fallen apart or if your kids have ended up on drugs, if something like that has happened in your life this past year, it doesn’t matter how well everything else in your life went, chances are, you’d rate this year as pretty terrible.

It’s a funny thing. A job could be going well, we can have enough food to eat, we can be healthy but we lose a loved one or a relationship breaks down, just one bad event and grief overwhelms us. I mean, who knew something like some of these bombings in Iraq would be going on? If you knew someone who was killed in a car accident, that sort of really bad event that makes for a terrible, terrible year, doesn’t it?

But what about if we don’t have that really bad event? What if we didn’t have one of those, praise God, this year. What measure would you use then to assess how your life has gone this year?

It’s a funny thing. It’s a general level of satisfaction, maybe. We kind of look at our relationships and our family and our work and our finances, some really exciting things may have happened. Maybe we renovated the house or you bought a new car.

Then there’s the spiritual dimension. We somehow lump all those things together and then we say, “Well, on a scale of zero to ten, I had a six or I had an eight or I had a two.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Berni, why are you looking back?” Well, my hunch is that mostly, we live life day-by-day and we don’t really think about it. It just ticks by. The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, then the years and then it’s the end of the year. And all that time when we’ve been doing what we did just to get by. We shouldered our responsibilities. We went to work, we brought money in, we put food on the table, we kept the house running and then we reacted to situations.

Good situations, we reacted with joy. Bad situations, we reacted badly (sometimes) and we lump all of that into a bit of a holiday and entertainment and escape and rest and that’s it. That’s life, isn’t it? This is kind of how it all plugs together.

But hang on, where is it all going? What does it all mean really? Is life just slipping away like each little grain of the sand in the hourglass or is our life meant to make a difference?

This week on “A Different Perspective”, I think we need to look back before we can look forward – to take stock, to take inventory.

If you’ve got a piece of paper and if you drew a line down the centre and if on the left hand side, you had a column for all the pluses, all the positives, all the wonderful things. And on the right hand side, you wrote all the negatives, the red side of the ledger, all the bad things that happened. I wonder what that would look like. I wonder whether that wouldn’t be a useful exercise for you to do.

Tomorrow on the program, we’re going to be looking at the things that maybe we would have done differently. So I encourage you to get that bit of paper, to list down the good, the bad and the ugly. And let’s have a chat again tomorrow about some of the things that we could have done differently.

The Apostle Paul, a few thousand years ago, in one of the letters that he wrote that’s recorded in the New Testament called 1 Corinthians. He says this, chapter 7, verse 29.

Our time is short.

His point is that we really need to make it count. We need to use our time wisely. We need to have a life that makes a difference.

I think this funny little week between Christmas and New Year, when we have one eye looking back and one eye looking forward. Isn’t it a great time to sit down, to take a blank piece of paper, to draw a line down the centre and have the pluses on one side and the minuses on the other? And just think about the life that you’ve been living this last twelve months. Just think and reflect upon the year and what’s gone.

We can’t change what’s been. We can’t go back and undo something that we did or redo something that we would have loved to have done differently.

But I will tell you that looking forward – time is short. How long do you have left on this earth? Ask yourself, how long do I have left, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years, fifteen years, twenty, forty years? How many more Christmases? How many more New Years? How many more birthdays? Answer is: we just don’t know.

Time is short! Your life – the way that you live, the things that you do, the stuff that you spend your energies on – will they count? Will they make a difference? And what measure do you apply to say, ‘Well, last year was a great year’?

My theory is that as each of us reflects on the year that’s just been, we’ll all discover some blessings that God gave us along the way.

Well here we are, almost at the end of another year. Doubtless we can each look back on some things, that with the benefit of hindsight, we might have done rather differently. 

Well, here we are in this week between Christmas and New Year. It’s a funny kind of week, really, looking back on the year that’s just been and with the other part of us looking forward at the year that might be. But sometimes the thing that stops us from really getting on and living this next year to the full – is the regret of the year that’s just been or maybe the year before or maybe the year before that. We all do things that later we regret.

I wonder if I were to ask you to look back over this last year and pick just three things that you regret. What would they be?

I truly believe that sometimes we need to look back before we can look forward. Now, I’m not one for living in the past and wallowing in regret. But regret is a funny thing. Regret is about lost opportunities.

If only I hadn’t done, if only I’d done this and a related word is reproach. It’s a sense of blame or guilt that hangs over us from the past because of the mistakes we made, the things we should have done but didn’t, the things we could have done but didn’t and the things we did but we shouldn’t have done. And those three things they bear bad fruit in our lives. They cause pain.

It’s interesting. There’s a prayer in the Old Testament of the Bible, 1 Chronicles chapter 4. It’s called The Prayer of Jabez and one of the things that Jabez prays is:

Lord keep me from evil that I would not cause any pain. (1 Chronicles 4:10)

When you and I do dumb things which we do from time to time, it causes pain, either to us or the people around us or in fact, to both.

And as we sit here looking forward to a new year, let’s just cast our eyes back on the year that’s been and think, what are the things that bring that sense of reproach, that sense of regret on our lives?

And truly unless we deal with the regret, the reproach of the past, we just can’t move on and enjoy – I mean really enjoy the future. Actually this is quite a common problem. All sorts of people spend their lives carrying around all sorts of baggage that is best left in the past.

Yesterday, on A Different Perspective, we talked about taking stock of the year that’s just been. On the one side of the page, listing all the positives, all the wonderful things that have happened in life. I don’t know about you but I look back on my life and I think, “Gee! This last year has been a wonderful year”. It’s been a tough year, it’s been a hard year too but there are so many things I can look back on and think, “God’s blessed me here and this has been wonderful and that’s been wonderful.”

And then on the other side of the page, listing the negatives, the downers, the bad things that have happened either outside of our control that has impacted on us like the London bombing. I mean imagine sitting on the bus at Taverstock Square and all of a sudden the bomb goes off. Nothing that anybody other than the bomber himself could have done about that.

Sometimes bad things happen to us that are completely beyond our control. Other times, bad things happen to us because buggerlugs me or buggerlugs you, do some stupid things. And there are a whole bunch of different areas in our lives where we could be harbouring regret.

Maybe you’ve worked too hard this year and haven’t spent enough time with your family. Maybe there’s been a relationship breakdown, just not enough time invested in that relationship. What opportunities did we miss last year?

It’s a funny thing how this regret just hangs over us. And you know what we then try and do? We try to deny the root cause. We all do that. We don’t want to acknowledge that maybe we had a part to play in this thing. We don’t want to own up, we don’t want to be frank and open and say, “Hang on, if I had done this better, if I hadn’t been so selfish, if I hadn’t been so critical, you know maybe it wouldn’t have been that bad, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all.” And then we rationalise it away and we blame other people. We blame circumstances.

One of the things I always have to do is watch my weight. I have to watch what I eat, just my genetics, who I am, who my father was, who my grandfather was, I have to watch what I eat. And often, when I’m travelling as I do for the work and ministry that I do, it’s easy to say, “Well, you know I’m travelling and I can’t really control what I get served on the plane. And I have to eat where I have to eat”. It’s really easy to blame everybody else.

Actually, it is possible to watch what I eat when I am travelling. And I had to come to a point in my life when I said, “I’m going to stop blaming everybody else and I’m going to take responsibility for this”.

Sometimes we have to do some radical surgery, we have to say, “I’m sorry, we have to clear the air. We have to decide that what we are doing is wrong.”

I can hear what you’re thinking, “Berni, I wish you wouldn’t go there. Just leave this alone. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year. I’m having a break. Stop poking around inside me.” Let me say this lovingly and plainly and very clearly, if you are suffering from regret, I believe that God wants to set you free from that today.

And the first step is acknowledging it and naming it and calling it what it is. If it’s your selfishness or my selfishness, we have to own up to that. If it’s our short sightedness, if it’s our laziness, if it’s our imbalance we have to own up and say, “There is a root inside me. There is a root that is bearing bad fruit.” And the only thing to do with a root that is bearing bad fruit is to pull it out and throw it away. If we’re still doing the stuff that caused the pain, in the first place, we need to decide to stop.

Paul the Apostle, a couple of thousand years ago, wrote this. If you want to find where it is. It’s in the Bible, 2 Corinthians 7:10. He said:

Pain and distress that drives us to God, it turns us around, it gets us back in the way of salvation, it never leads to regret. But those who let distress drive them away from God end up on the deathbed of regret.

I love that! It is so realistic. It is so here and now, for you and for me even though it was written a couple of thousand years ago. Pauls saying, “Look, we’re all going to have pain and distress, that’s the reality”. It happens (he did). You have it. I have it. Everybody else around us has pain and distress from time to time in their lives.

And he’s saying that if we let that pain and distress drive us towards God, well that will turn us around. It gets us back on the way of salvation that is on the way of having a relationship with Jesus. But this is the bit that I really like: it never leads to regret.

Why is that? Because if you and I choose to take the high road – if you and I choose to let our pain and distress and our weaknesses and our failures and the consequences thereof, turn us around and head us towards God, there’s something that God can give us that no one else can. That is called unconditional love, acceptance and forgiveness. And that is the one thing on planet earth that will take the pain of my regret and the pain of your regret away.

Then we could choose the low road. We can choose to let the pain and the regret drive us away from God. And this is what he says, I’ll read it again:

Those who let distress drive them away from God, end up on the deathbed of regret.

If there’s some part of your life you want to turn around – a difficult marriage, a troubled child, some problems at work – we need to decide to turn it around. And then we need to let it drive us towards God, to involve Him, to pray.

Why? Because He can heal, He can touch, He can love. He can fill us with the peace that heals the wound of regret. And hand in hand with God, who by the way delights in this stuff, this is what God wants to do for you and me – to heal the pains of the past. We can see our lives change. Or we can go on with this dull ache of regret right to our deathbeds.

So this next year, what will you do differently?

As we look forward to a new year, we all have things in our lives that we’d like to – you know – turn around for the better. So what are things that you’d like to see turn out better in this coming year.

Here we are in this funny week in between Christmas and the New Year and I thought (together) we might look back on the year that’s been and forward at the year ahead. It’s a bit of a turning point, I guess, between what’s been and what’s going to be.

Over the last couple of days, we’ve looked at the year in review – what’s been. In particular, yesterday, we had a chat about dealing with the pain of regret. Today, I’d like to take one step further. We’re going to look at turning things around. Just looking at your life, here and now – where you’re at? What in your life would you like to see turned around?

Probably since calendar’s were first invented, people have been making New Years’ resolutions. You know the ones: “I’m going to lose some weight this year, I’m going to give up cigarettes and smoking, I’m going to achieve this, I’m going to work harder at that, I’m going to go to the gym every day.” You know because you’ve been there. I’ve been there. We’ve done that, we’ve got the t-shirt. It’s a natural thing to do in this funny little week between Christmas and New Year.

A lot of people, whether they’re in the Northern Hemisphere in a cold winter or in the Southern Hemisphere here in a warm summer, a lot of people have this week off. And we like to look back at the things that have been and think, “Well, you know, it wasn’t a bad year or it’s a lousy year or I would have done this differently”. And we also look forward – we dream, we hope, we plan. There’s something, I don’t know, wonderful about contemplating the next year in the New Year.

But it’s also true that by and large, the resolutions that we make in this quiet Christmas/New Year period, well, they normally don’t last. By the end of January, most New Years’ resolutions have been broken at least a dozen times. And what we do after we break them because it’s such an incredible sense of failure, “I didn’t even get to the end of the first month of the year”, you know that feeling – we bury them. We don’t want to actually even remember that we made them because it’s such an embarrassment that we failed so early.

Are you with me or am I the only one going out on a limb here?

But as we look back on this last year, there are some good things that happened to us and I guess there are some not so good, some bad things that happened. And you look at the bad things, some of those things are completely out of our control but some of the bad things that happen to us are within my control. They’re because we do silly things and New Years’ resolutions are generally about changing those things.

If someone’s overweight, the reason (normally) that they’re overweight is because they eat too much and they don’t exercise enough. And so a New Year’s resolution is taking those things that are in our control that are causing us grief or pain or just things we want to change and making a resolution of short-term pain for future gain.

Losing weight is about sacrificing in the short-term, not eating the chocolates and the biscuits and the cakes and all of those sorts of things, right? So that we can fit into our clothes again and we can feel better and we’re healthier and we have more energy. The formula of the New Year’s resolution is the same every time – short-term pain for future gain.

It’s about achieving something. And you know when there are things that are in our control that are bearing bad fruit in our lives like over eating, like drinking too much, like smoking, like being super critical, like gossiping, like … the list, you know the list. We all know the list. We all have some of these things in our lives.

On the one hand, we can look at them and be really depressed and think, “I can’t change that.” On the other hand, we can look at them and say, “There is an incredible opportunity that awaits me here, to change my life for the better.”

Thomas Edison I think, the man who invented the light bulb, said this, he said:

Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and it looks like hard work.

You love that? I love that saying. Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and it just looks like hard work.

When we want to turn something around in our lives, it requires effort and commitment as well as the decision. It’s something that we need to stick with.

And that’s the reason that we fail. That’s the reason it can be tough. “I’m going to lose weight” and the first time we get hungry in the afternoon, we go and reach for the chocolate bar or we’re going to reach for a piece of cake in the fridge.

I’d like to talk about this whole “turning things around” with a twist. You know something in our lives is heading on the down and here we are at rock bottom. Maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s our behaviour, maybe it’s work, maybe anything and turning around is about heading it back up again. It’s about moving upwards.

Maybe someone’s spiritual satisfaction has low ebb. Maybe you believe in Jesus but you think, “Well, you know there’s nothing really happening in my spiritual life.” The twist in this whole turn around thing is involving God. Strange as it may seem, God is in the turn around business and He actually uses some words. Jesus used some words about turning things around in our lives.

When we’ve got stuff happening in our lives that we know is dumb, we know it’s stupid, we know we’re making mistakes, that’s called, in Jesus’ words, sin. And it heads us on a downward slide. And what happens when we have sin in our lives – dumb things that we’re doing wrong – is that they bear bad fruit. Good trees bear good fruit, bad trees bear bad fruit.

I was listening to a man on television just last night. He was sitting there with his wife and they were talking about when he went off and had an affair with another woman. You know what he said? “I knew it was wrong, I did it anyway”.

You don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong in your life. I don’t need you to tell me what’s wrong in my life. We actually kind of know. We don’t need somebody to beat us over the head. What we need is someone to help us out of the mire and up the slope again.

What’s the one thing in your life that you would like to turn around? The thing that’s within your control? This isn’t theological babble. This isn’t some irrelevant, you know – sin, repent, victory thing.

Okay, some of those terms are used by Christians and they’re in the Bible. But if you bring them into the here and now, this is about real life blessing and transformation. This is about making life better.

And here’s the key to turning something around in my life, the key to seeing a turn around in our lives … is turning our lives around. One more time, the key to seeing a turn around in our lives is turning our lives around.

Yesterday, we looked at something the Apostle Paul wrote a couple of thousand years ago and he said that grief and pain that leads us towards God is a good thing because it results in blessings and we don’t have any regrets. But if we let that same grief and pain take us away from God, we end up on the deathbed of regret.

Whether you’re someone who has never ever had a relationship with Jesus or whether you have been walking with Him for years and years and years, it doesn’t matter where we are on that scale, this is a profound thing because our human condition is to turn our face away from God. And it’s not until we turn our face around and we look Jesus in the eye that we experience “turn around”.

Now, the theological term for that is repentance. It just means turning around. It means turning away from some of the stupid things that we do and turning and facing Jesus and saying, ‘Listen God, I need your help’.

Paul actually wrote in his letter to the Romans 2:4:

God’s kindness is meant to lead us to that turn around.

That’s what comes first – God’s goodness, God’s kindness. It is astounding how people allow things to go on and on and on in their lives.

I know that in my life when I made that big turn around. When I turned around from facing away to facing at God – all the other things followed, all the other, little turn arounds in all the other areas of my life. Wherever we are on that spiritual journey, He calls us to turn around and face Him and let Him own the little turn arounds in our lives.

The key to seeing the turn around in our lives – is turning our lives around.

It’s funny how our little foibles and failures can rob us of the good things in life. Sometimes, it’s almost as though, well, we’re enslaved to our bad habits. We want to break them. We want to live differently, but man that’s hard, isn’t it?   

This is just such a wonderful time of the year. The last year is almost over, the New Year’s about to begin. The sense of a new start, a new beginning and yet, as we’ve been reflecting this week on “A Different Perspective”, it’s so easy for the hurts and regrets of the past to haunt us, to hold us back in the New Year.

And we can literally be enslaved by behaviours, habits and things that we think and do but if we truly thought about it, we’d admit to ourselves, “Well, they’re wrong.” But somehow they can hold us captive and rob us of a life worth living.

I wonder if I asked you to look at your life, what are those things? What are the chains that hold you back? What are the things that enslave you?

Slavery, being enslaved is not something we think much about these days. I mean really, isn’t it a thing of the past? Sure Negro’s were taken to the United States and to the United Kingdom and that’s all over and done with. That’s the past. We don’t have slavery anymore.

Well, actually that’s not true. The estimates are … there are about 27 million people living in slavery in the world today – 27 million people. That’s more than at any other time in history. Add to those official slaves, if I can call them that, people living and working in the export processing zones of Indonesia, of Malaysia, right across South East Asia. Millions of people being paid a few cents an hour in almost slave like conditions to make the clothes and the runners and the shoes and the toys that we in the West take for granted.

And what about the people that are enslaved by poverty? The number is probably in the hundreds of millions. When you look at it like that it’s a startling, painful, horrible reality.

Slavery is flourishing if I can put it in those terms but I would like to suggest to you that it’s much, much bigger than even that.

Over this last week on “A Different Perspective”, we’ve been talking about the things that hold us back – the regrets, the thoughts, the behaviours, the habits, the negative things, the things that if we were really honest with ourselves we’d say, “I know they’re wrong.” Those things bear bad fruit in our lives and you know something? They’re just like the chains that the Negro’s had around their ankles when they were being shipped from Africa to America.

Jesus made that point. He talked about it in terms of sin. I’ll talk about what sin means in a minute but listen to what He said for a bit. He wants us to have an abundant life and He said, “Look, if you are involved in sin it’s like you’re a slave to sin,” and He said, “I’ve come to give you an abundant, rich and full life.”

He never denied that we’d have tough times but the whole subject of sin was something He talked a lot about. And the word sin means something very specific. We load it with a whole bunch of cultural and theological baggage I think sometimes. But the word “sin” means literally “to miss the point”, to miss the point of life, to miss out on the share of what’s on offer.

When you look at it in that sense you think, “Well, it does make sense, I know that when I get angry with people, I’m ruining my life and I’m ruining theirs. I know when I talk behind people’s backs, I know when I stab them in the back when they’re not there, I know that’s not good. I might want to do it, I’ve been used to doing it but I know that actually what it does is that it robs me of a life worth living.”

Jesus said this:

I tell you the truth, anyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family but a son or a daughter belongs to it forever. (John 8:34-35)

I have met people who live in the biggest houses in the most affluent suburbs and have the flashiest cars sitting in their driveway. And those people are no less slaves than someone who is living in chains. They’re slaves to bad behaviour. They’re slaves to their consumerism. They’re slaves to building a bigger house and spending more money and trying to get their hits that way. They’re slaves to power, slaves to money, slaves to position, slaves to status in society.

And our behaviour ends up causing hurt and pain and suffering to us and to other people. We end up missing the point of life. We end up missing out on what really is on offer from God. That’s why it’s called sin.

But here’s the crazy thing for me, each one of those 27 million official slaves and the hundreds and millions like them right around the world, there’s one thing that they want more than anything else in life – they want freedom.

I was reading the autobiography of a man called Josiah Henson recently. Josiah Henson lived in the late 1700’s, early 1800’s and he was the man about whom that great book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written. He was a real life slave in the southern states of America. And he wrote this, he said:

From my earliest recollection freedom had been the object of all my ambition, a constant motive, exertion and ever-present stimulus to gain and to save.

He wanted nothing more than to be set free. It’s actually a wonderful book and a wonderful story.

And you know those old Negro spirituals, remember Swing Low Sweet Chariot? Swing low was a code word amongst the slaves for ‘come down south’. The sweet chariot was the underground railroad, the network of illicit safe houses where slaves were smuggled from one house to the next, further north and further north until they went over the border. And it says, “Coming for to carry me home”, that meant “get me to freedom in Canada”.

And the next verse says, “I look over the Jordan and what did I see?” The Jordan was a code word for the Ohio, the Niagara and the Detroit rivers. They were the lines. Once the slaves crossed those lines they were free. These slaves wrote songs about freedom, they sang about freedom so beautifully and so wonderfully because in their hearts they wanted to be free.

Yet, there are so many wealthy slaves content to rot in their slavery to sin. No less destructive, no less something that robs them of the freedom and the lives God gave them to live. Content to miss the whole point of life. Content to miss out on their share of the abundance and the grace and the love and the joy and the freedom and the peace that Jesus came to give us. It’s crazy, don’t you think?

Our Sweet Chariot is Jesus, our underground railroad from slavery to freedom is Jesus. God became man, a lowly carpenter who trod the dusty roads, who healed, who loved, who gave. Jesus Himself said, “God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, to the slaves, to let the oppressed go free”.

We have a choice, we can keep living out a cycle of failed New Year’s resolutions – I’m going to change, I’m going to change, I’m going to change. You know something? We never will on our own. Or we can say, “Hang on a minute, there is a point to life and the whole point of life is to enjoy the richness of what’s on offer through a relationship with Jesus”.

And we, like Josiah Henson, can decide to have an abiding, desperate hunger for freedom, as real as any slave and invite Jesus into that space and see what happens.

Sin, it’s a word with a lot of cultural baggage. But when we say, “Hang on, sin is missing the whole point of life. Sin is missing out of the blessings on offer from God,” it takes on a whole new meaning.

If we have a behaviour that revolves around sin, we’re no more and no less a slave. The choice is ours really.

As we each look forward to the new year – we all have hopes, dreams and plans for our lives. But what are God’s plans for our lives. What’s He looking forward to … in your life? Have you ever wondered that?

So, what are your plans for this year? Maybe you’re planning on changing jobs or studying or maybe you’re planning a great holiday or planning on buying a new home or renovating or a new car. What’s the plan? Companies spend a small fortune on creating their strategic plans. But a down turn in the economy, an accident, sickness, those things can bring those plans unstuck in an instant.

So what is the plan? I mean if God has a plan for my life, for your life, what would it look like?

I don’t know if you’re a parent but what does a parent’s plan look like for their children? Well, we want them to be healthy, we want them to be happy, we want them to discover their talents and to use them and to be fulfilled. But also we want them to experience and taste life. You know as parents we do want them to be allowed to make mistakes, to learn for themselves, to grow for themselves and to have a great life.

The last few days on A Different Perspective, we’ve been looking at the things that can hold us back from living a great life. You know – the habits, the behaviours, the bad ways of thinking, the anger, the dissent, all those things that yield lousy fruit in our lives. It’s almost like sometimes we’re enslaved to them. We’ve broken so many New Year’s resolutions over the years, we just can’t get free from them.

Now, if that was your kid would you want them to be enslaved to some bad habit? Would you want them to be on a treadmill all their lives trying to get power or money or success? Or would you want them actually really to enjoy their lives? Come on! Really, what would we want for our kids? Pretty obvious, isn’t it? We want them to have a full, wonderful, satisfying life that they would look back on at the end and say, “Mum and dad gave me a great start and I have enjoyed my life.”

There was a time in Israel’s history where in their relationship with their God, God their Father, well, they rebelled. God had brought them into their Promised Land. God had given them everything, abundance of the land and they decided that they were just going to live their lives their way and do all the things that God said don’t do.

They worshipped idols, there was injustice in the land, they did some bad things. And as a direct result of that, God allowed the Babylonians to come and invade Israel – to destroy Jerusalem, the Temple, to kill a whole bunch of people and then take the rest into slavery in Babylon. And that slavery lasted for seventy years in the history of Israel. It began in 587 BC and for the next seventy years they were enslaved in Babylon.

And while they were there, this is what He said to His children, Israel, through the Prophet Jeremiah. He said this:

When the seventy years is over I’ll be there and I’ll bring you back because I know what plans I have for you’ said God ‘plans for your welfare, not for your harm, to give you a future with hope. Then you’ll call on me and I’ll hear you, you’ll pray to me and I’ll answer you. When you search for me with all your heart you will find me. (Jeremiah 29: 10-13)

Beautiful, isn’t it? Here are these people who are in slavery because of the things that they have done wrong in rebelling from God. And as we were talking yesterday about this whole slavery thing, I was watching someone in a workplace recently and they have a habit of being really, really critical of other people.

Other people can never match up to their standards. They’re always wandering around behind everybody’s back criticising person A to person B and person B to person A. And I think, you know, this person is like a slave to this spirit of criticism that they’ve got going on inside. Because all of that criticism is it healthy, does it bring joy, does it bring collaboration, and does it bring teamwork? No. What it does is that it brings hurt and dissention and pain and anger and people throw rocks at each other, you know what I mean. And I thought, “This person is a slave to that spirit of criticism going on in their lives.”

So the things that we do wrong end up putting us in slavery just the way that when Israel rebelled against God, they ended up in slavery. You might think it’s stating too strong a point. Look at the number of marriages that fall apart because people are enslaved to having affairs, drinking too much, going out, working too hard, not having relationships between husband and wife, the worlds full of it, isn’t it?

And here we have this beautiful statement from God, “When the time’s over, I’ll be there and bring you back because I know what the plans are that I have for you – plans for your welfare not for harm to give you a future with hope. You’ll call on me and I’ll hear you. You’ll pray to me and I’ll answer you. When you search for me with all your heart, you’ll find me.”

I get three things out of that, I read that and I think, “God our Father He’s just like we are as parents in a sense.”

The first part is, that He allows His children, in this case Israel, to wear the consequences of their mistakes. I thing that’s one of the hardest things to do as a parent, to give our kids space to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes. There are consequences – if you’re lazy, you won’t get on at work. I mean if you get to work late all the time and leave early all the time, that’s going to have consequences. And we as parents want our children to learn from the consequences of their mistakes. There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says:

Every generation has to learn; the stove is hot.

It’s good, isn’t it? It’s true, sometimes you can tell your kids, you can tell your kids, take out the garbage bin, take out the garbage bin, TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE BIN and they never do. It’s not until they get their own house and they figure out there are consequences to not taking the garbage out on Thursday night.

So the first thing I get from this, Dad, God – He wants His children, His kids to learn from the consequences of their mistakes.

The second thing though is, while we’re doing that, while we are in our Babylon living out those consequences He comes along and says, ‘Hang on, I have some good plans for you, plans for your welfare and not for your harm’. Isn’t that wonderful?

Right in that space where we’re living through those consequences God comes along and says, “I have a plan for you, a future with hope.” Do you want one of those? I sure do, a future with hope.

And then the third thing is that that future involves having a relationship with Him. “Then you’ll call on me and I’ll hear you. You’ll pray, I’ll answer you when you search for me with all your heart.”

It turns out He wants exactly the same for us as any parent wants for their children. “Sure, go and learn from your mistakes but in the middle of all that I’m there for you. I am here and I have wonderful plans for your life and those plans involve a relationship between you and me.” And on top of that God has something that sometimes we don’t have – the power, the love, the grace, the patience to see it through with us, to make it happen in my life, in your life.

Now for a long time I was living my plan for my life – it involved a lot of money, it involved reputation, it involved career, it involved big cars. But there came a point when it was time for me to get onto God’s plan. To get out of my comfort zone, to use the gifts and talents that He’s given me for His glory, as it turns out, in your life and that’s where the blessing is. The blessing is when we’re living out God’s plan.

Right now, probably you and I are looking forward to the next year – planning, thinking, turning it over in our minds. Can I encourage you as a part of that process to say, “God what is your plan in my life because I know that’s where the blessing is?”

“God, what’s your plan?”