Sometimes you can be going through a bit of a rough patch in life – a bit like a famine or a drought – and you wonder to ourselves what is God up to? But sometimes, sometimes God is actually sitting there, waiting for YOU to do something.

It’s just fabulous to be together again at the start of a new week. Can I ask you, what do you want to get out of life? I mean when you stand back and survey the landscape called, “your life”, the highs and the lows, what are some of the things that you’d love to see there? Relationships, achievements, family, career, money, a promotion, holiday? We’re all different, but basically my hunch is that we kind of want the same sorts of things in life.

We want health and happiness and fulfilment and a sense of belonging and a sense that we’re needed, hope, a future. They’re the main things aren’t they? In a sense we want a harvest out of life, sure we expect to put in, sometimes we put in too much, other times not enough. But we want to get something out of life. Hmmm … a harvest!

Back to your life for a minute, your landscape, the things that you’re looking for – are they there? Are you reaping the harvest in your life that you’re really hoping for? And if not, why not?

I love going to lookouts, you get up high on a mountain somewhere and you look out over the hills and the valleys below and the green fields. There’s one in particular I have in mind that I love going to, it’s got these beautiful rolling green fields and you can see the ocean and the beaches in the distance. And yet if you look a little bit further you can see some great factory belching smog out into the atmosphere, and you can look over to the left and the sun will be shining over here and over to the right there’s a storm going.

It’s something really uplifting to look out at the good and the bad and the ugly, and it’s the same when we look at the landscape of life. When we stop and we get up on a vantage point and look across our lives, it’s like looking at this landscape from the lookout, all the bits and pieces.

Life’s like that landscape, there’s the good and the bad and the ugly and in some parts of our lives there’s sunshine, fabulous! And you look in another part of your life and there’s storm clouds and thunder and lightning and rain. All the different parts of life, family and how we feel inside, our contentment and security and the friends we have and the work we do, all those bits.

What do we want out of life? Peace, health, love, pretty basic things actually, and you look at that landscape and maybe in one or two areas those basic things can be missing.

You know what I’m talking about. Maybe marriage is not everything it’s cracked up to be; maybe work you’re so sick to death of it, it’s boring, the routine the humdrum; maybe inside you just feel a lostness or a downness that you don’t understand why. We go through these things, these are life, and they can happen right alongside, right in parallel with, right at the same time as the other good things.

I can be having a fantastic relationship with my wife and not enjoying my work, or visa versa. Or both of those are fine but one of our kids is having some trouble at the moment. We want to have good harvests in our life, but sometimes right now, it’s not what we want it to be. And before we can have a harvest we need to plant a seed.

There’s a great story, if you have a Bible you can read it later, you can go to Genesis Chapter 26, right at the beginning of the Bible. By the way if you don’t have one you can go to a website. Biblegateway is the website, and you can read all sorts of different translations of the Bible on-line, good website. Anyhow, you can read about it.

It’s a story of Isaac who was Abraham’s son, Abraham was the father I guess, of the nation of Israel. And Isaac was living in a place where there was famine and drought and he made some mistakes in his life that were exactly the same mistakes that his Dad, Abraham, had made.

Isn’t it the way sometimes, a chip off the old block? We pick up the good traits of Mum and Dad and we pick up, frankly, the bad ones too. And Isaac blew it! You know he hung his wife out to dry, which was what Abraham had done to Isaac’s Mum. And there’s a famine and there’s a drought in the land, and Isaac wants to run away.

He said, “Ah I’ve had enough of this, let’s go somewhere like Egypt, which is much better than this place that God’s got me at the moment.” But God said, “No actually I don’t want you to do that, I want you to stay because I’ve got a plan for you Isaac, and My plan is, even though there’s a drought going on, and even though you’ve made this huge blunder with your wife, I’m actually going to bless you in this place.

Now that’s easy for God to say, you know God is there in air- conditioned comfort in heaven and we’re down here in the drought and in the famine and in the mess right? And we can sometimes hear God say it, sometimes you’ll hear it through listening to a voice like mine, sometimes you’ll hear it by just sitting down and spending some time quietly with God.

And God says, “You know something I’m going to bless you, I know you can’t see it at the moment but I am going to bless you.” And I’ve felt, I’ve thought, “You know God that’s really easy for you to say but I just can’t see it at the moment, you know, my place is a mess you know, I just can’t see this blessing.”

Isaac wanted to run away and give up but he stayed, and not only did he stay but right in the middle of the drought he sowed some seed. It said, “Isaac sowed seed in that land,” that is in the land that God picked for him! And in the same year he reaped a hundred fold. A hundred fold!

Things weren’t going well; when things don’t go well for us what do we want to do? A – Give up; B – run away; C – bully the people around us into submission; D – all of the above, right? We kind of don’t feel like sowing good seed when things are not going well. But if you want a harvest we have to sow seed. It’s a basic principle of life, it’s a God principle, whatever you sow you reap. You sow good things, you reap good things, you sow bad things, you reap bad things, it’s not rocket science.

It’s not just in the Bible but its obvious to us all in life, I mean there might be a situation at work that you have with a colleague, I know that things can get really tense at work, I’ve experienced that, praise God I don’t experience it now, but I’ve been there.

I’ve seen how people get feral at work and want to rip each other apart, and when there’s anger at work, if we sow anger what do you reckon we’re going to reap? Anger. On the other hand when there’s anger and tension at work what if you and I sow peace, what if you and I sow blessing, what if you and I sow kindness? What are we going to reap then?

What if amidst the feralness of work we sow a seed of gentleness? What’s the harvest going to look like then? Can it be any worse than what it would have been if we’d have sown anger?

If there’s some part of our marriage that’s unhealthy how does it go when we sow criticism within the marriage? Come on wives, how does it go when you peck, peck, peck at your husband? Does he respond well? Does it do it for him? Does he become better when he gets hen-pecked? Not on your Nelly! He closes down, he pushes away.

When there’s tension in a marriage what if we sow anger? Well, we’re going to get anger back. Now let me ask you, what if we sow unconditional love? What if we sow kindness and gentleness and intimacy?

Sowing and reaping is blindingly, glimpsingly obvious, it’s one of God’s basic principles of life. There’s a time for sowing seed and there’s a time for harvesting. It’s at natural as night following the day. And when we look back at our lives, when we look back at the landscape of our lives the bits that aren’t working at the moment we just want there to be a harvest in there without there being a seed time.

But harvest comes from planting seeds, and sometimes we have to plant seeds in a drought, in a famine. Yes it’s a big risk, yes we don’t always feel like it, but the God I know is a God of blessing. He lets us travel through stuff, he lets us wear the consequences but He is a God of abundant blessing. Not some sugar daddy but one that involves us in the blessing.

That’s why He has seed time, it’s our bit, it’s our faith step. When we plant the seed in the middle of the famine, God comes along and says, “You know something, you obeyed me. You honoured me, I’m going to bless you.” In the midst of the famine, Isaac planted seed in that land, and the same year he reaped a hundred fold. A hundred fold!

We’ve all been misunderstood. Hey – Jesus was misunderstood. It’s not an easy thing. We have good intentions, perhaps we don’t execute those intentions perfectly, but all of a sudden the world falls down on us like a ton of bricks.

Now over the last weeks on the program we had a look at the fast, well … God doesn’t always do things quite the way we want him to do. Sometimes we feel like crying out to God, “God! What are you doing? Why are you letting this happen to me? How long, our Lord, how long will this go on?”

But you see, 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. And yet, sometimes … 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.

We live in a time of mass production.  Commodities are just churned out. People have become … just a commodity.  But not in God’s eyes … that’s what makes you so very special.

I sometime think about the times when Jesus was training to be a carpenter in his Dad’s carpenter shop. The wooden things that he made, we don’t really know but probably chairs and tables and doors and door frames, even coffins I guess, it’s ironic that ultimately he was nailed to two bits of wood. I can’t imagine he ever turned out any shoddy work, I can’t imagine he ever made a table that wasn’t straight or level or a chair that wasn’t solid or a door that didn’t fit into the door jam. Well what if he applied the same level of perfection to you and me? What if when we were created he was there? And what does that do to our view of Easter?

Yesterday and again today we’re looking at Psalm 139 because it’s about Gods motivations behind Easter. Psalm 139 is to me like a door into God’s heart, to see what was going on inside when He dreamt up this whole Easter thing. We had a look at the first part yesterday and we saw that God knows us so intimately and He’s on the journey of life with us, not way off at a distance, not disinterested but right in the middle of it with us. Everywhere we go, even when it’s dark and stormy and painful He’s light shines in the middle of all of that. That’s huge, to know that God is walking every step of the way with us, there’s know where we can go and be alone or apart from God, if we go to heaven he’s there, if we go to hell he’s there if we fly to the farthest ends to the earth he’s still there.

But how is it that God knows us so well? I mean sometimes we don’t even know ourselves that well do we? We can’t explain why we do what we do or why we reacted to something the way we did, I mean you and I are pretty complex creatures; there is so many layers to our personality and who we are. Some things are so deep inside us that we can’t ever really understand them ourselves or even talk about them. How does God know? Well, the Psalmist in Psalm 139 goes on to explain that to us, and we’re going to read that right now. We’re reading from Psalm 139 beginning at verse 13.

“For you God, you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb, God I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are so wonderful I know that full well. My frame wasn’t hidden from you when I was made in that secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed substance. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

This is one of the most precious passages in the Bible to me, as we look back on our lives what we see is a mixture of wonderful and desperate, beautiful and ugly, we’ve done some brilliant things and we done some really, really stupid things, there are great highs and there are dark valleys. But when you and I were conceived God was there, our innermost parts, who we are, our DNA blueprint, the way that we’d look and sound and all our gifts and abilities and strengths and weaknesses, all that complexity He created our innermost being. He knit us together in our Mother’s womb; you and I are handcrafted by God, one of a kind, distinctive, completely, utterly amazingly, beautifully, wondrously made. Separate and different from every other person who ever lived, and every person who ever will live, intricately woven, each strand of DNA laid down according to His plan.

And not only that God wasn’t in control just of who we are but of everything that would ever happen to us. Look at this again, “all the days ordained for me, all the days set apart for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” That’s why I so despair when I meet people who waste away there lives worrying and complaining about their lot. Yeah some people have better lives that others, some people seem to get all the breaks and the benefits and the blessings and other people seem to get handed difficult and painful lives, just like Jesus, just like the Apostle Paul. I was just talking, having a cup of coffee just recently with a couple and we were talking about just this, how come God does something mighty and powerful in this persons life and this other person God takes years to do what He’s going to do? I don’t know! But it’s about God’s plan, about God’s glory.

There’s a wonderful poem call The Weaver, you may have heard me read it once before, have a listen, it’s beautiful.

“My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me.
I cannot choose the colours as He weaveth steadily,
Sometimes He chooses dark threads and I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper and I the underside.
Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why
The dark threads were as needful in the weaver’s skilful hand
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He hath planned.”

You and I are exactly what He made us to be, you and I are living the life that He planned for us, you know sometimes we don’t open ourself to His plan, sometimes we shut God out and we wonder why life is going badly. Easter’s coming, Easter is rolling around the corner and Easter is the time when we look at that cross and we know that Jesus Christ came to die for you and me, maybe you’ve never ever excepted Jesus and put your faith in Him and what He did for you on the cross. If you haven’t now is the time to do it, let’s just pray, you might want to pray this prayer with me.

“Father, I thank you for what Jesus did for me on the cross, I believe that He is the Son of God, I believe He died for me, I believe He rose again. Father, I want to live my life in that knowledge, I give you everything I am, I give you everything I have, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve done wrong and I’ve put those at the feet of the cross right now. Father, forgive me through Jesus Christ, I want to be called a Christian, I want to follow Jesus and live my life for Him. Lord I don’t know what that means, I don’t know how that will play itself out, I don’t know what your plans are but Lord I want to live my life for the glory of Jesus Christ and today I lay my life down for Him so that in Him I cant take it up again, a new life, a fresh life. Thank you Father that I am forgiven because I believe in Jesus, thank you Father that I have an eternal life through Jesus Christ. Amen.”

You and I are what He made us to be, when we put our faith in Him we live the most incredible joy and when we see the beauty of God’s plan hand crafted by Him to live the life that He laid out before time began we get some sense of what was going on in His heart when He came up with this plan of Easter.

If Jesus really rose from the dead all that time ago, if it really, truly happened … well, what does it mean to us today? What’s the relevance? What’s the point?

This week on the program we are taking a bit of a look at this whole “resurrection” thing, because on the one hand it’s so central to everything that Jesus talked about, and everything that Christians believe. But on the other hand, well, it can be hard to relate to that. I mean, how does it fit into real life today? I’m not sure where you are in terms of believing in Jesus and in particular in His resurrection.

But let’s assume for a moment that He did rise again from the dead; that’s certainly where I’m at, it’s kind of at the centre of everything I believe. Well, if He did rise from the dead, what does that mean to you and me, here and now, what relevance is there in all of that? Can the resurrection of Jesus Christ have an impact on your life and my life, here, now, today?

Good questions! I mean why have a resurrection at all? Why did God plan it that way and why did He make it central to believing in Jesus? Yesterday we saw how the Apostle Paul said it was absolutely essential. Without faith in that there’s no point.

In Romans chapter 10 verse 9, he says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you’ll be saved.” And in First Corinthians 15:17 he says, “If Christ hasn’t been raised, then you faith is futile.” OK, well, that’s the theology, if you like, let’s take that at face value. But why is it so important? Why does God put it right at the centre of believing in Jesus – eternal life!

I’m a pesky bloke; I keep asking these questions because people never really explained this stuff to me, in terms that I could really understand and grasp. And that made a difference in my life. All these Christians were talking about this whole “resurrection” thing like it was really important and I thought, “that’s great, but why?”

Believing in Jesus for me is a process, it’s a whole life long thing. At some point I took a step of faith to believe in Him. I didn’t understand everything, but what I discovered was there were lots of different parts of my life that just didn’t fit with Him – selfishness, anger, being judgmental, all stuff that actually stunted my life.

It’s crazy how we want to hold onto that rubbish for dear life. But you know we do and it turns out all along, it’s robbing us of life. I used to spend most of my time being angry with people because they didn’t measure up to my standards – I’m a perfectionist – and they didn’t see the world my way, and so I’d be angry with them all the time. And you know it robbed me of life – instead of peace and joy I always had anger and resentment in my heart. It’s not rocket science but so many people do this stuff.

It’s one thing to believe with our head or our hearts in Jesus but it’s quite another to believe with our lives. And to do that requires change and that’s were the resurrection comes in. The Apostle Paul writes this in Romans chapter 8, he says:

If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you.

Let’s unpack that for a minute. There was the death and the crucifixion of Jesus where He paid for our sins. He paid for the fact that we turned our back on God and we went our own way, and we missed the whole point of creation which was to have a relationship with God. And before you jump down my throat and say “sin” is an old fashioned word. That the Greek word that the Bible uses for sin, literally means ‘to miss the point”, and we looked at that last week.

God is a loving God but He’s a just God and we have all fallen short of His standard and His plan – we’ve all missed the point. And when we believe that Jesus died for us, the slate is wiped clean; we are forgiven completely by God, we’re forgiven; we’ve a fresh start. And that’s fantastic! But you and I know that getting rid of that rubbish that God calls ‘sin’ is a life long process. Come on, we are naturally selfish, we naturally hang on to the things – I wanted to be self-righteous – I still have someone pull in a car in front of me and I’ll be angry with them and I want to blow my horn and I want to … you know, that’s me.

Someone does wrong and somehow we want anger and revenge and we want to pay them back, and Jesus said, “Well, you want to believe in me, believe in me with your life. Show me, go and love your enemy, in fact, go and pray for your enemy.” I don’t know about you but that way of living just didn’t come naturally to me. It’s a process of changing but changing those things is hard. It’s very, very hard, and in fact, in some areas, it’s downright impossible. We just want to hang on and hang on and hang on and let the poison get in our system and ruin our lives.

Paul bemoans that very thing in Romans chapter 7, he says, “I can will to do what is right, I just can’t do it. Who will rescue me from this body of sin and death?” Then he says, “Jesus Christ.” The resurrection is about bringing Jesus back to life. See what Paul wrote about in Romans chapter 8 – we read about it before, “If the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead with give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you.”

The resurrection of Jesus is something that’s a deep mystery but it lives on in us through the presence of the Spirit of God. If we place our faith in Jesus; we say I believe He is the Son of God; I believe He died for my sin and I believe He rose again, and then God does something amazing; something supernatural; something powerful. God puts His Spirit inside us and that same Spirit does the same thing in us – He brings life.

He starts to deal with that rubbish inside us. He starts to convict us and to heal us and to fill us and to change us in ways that we can never do ourselves. The resurrection is learning to live again. When we believe in Jesus in His death, we put the old person inside us down with Jesus on the cross but when we believe in His resurrection we have new life – resurrection life.

If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your body also through His Spirit; bringing life back into our bodies, colour into our cheeks, colour into our world.

How many people need that change in their lives today? How many people are looking for that change in all sorts of strange places, people who are broken inside, people who have been abused, people who are suffering from low self-esteem, people who are dealing with anger, and people whose marriages are falling apart?

Come on, we need the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be real in us and there is a power that comes only from God to change us. Not some theory, this is an actuality. The same Holy Spirit who breaths life back into Jesus dead body is the Spirit who will come in us and bring victory over the sin of our humanness and breathe life back into our bodies and victory over our sins.

Come on, this is great stuff; this is a great plan; it’s God’s plan. It’s here for you and me now!

We recently received a prayer request from Peter who’s struggling with his weight – it’s affecting his health, his family. It’s ruining his life. Is Jesus in that place with Peter – and if He is, can He make a difference?

Good day! Great that we can get together again. Well, it’s Friday, and on Friday we always do something different. We look at somebody’s prayer request that we have received.

This week we received a request from Peter. He said, “I’ve been overweight for a long time now and have trouble with eating too much. I’m pretty lazy; I don’t have any motivation. I’m on anti-depressants which doesn’t help either. Please pray that I will have the will to stop myself from overeating and get off my backside and go for a walk. I have a lot of health issues surrounding my weight problem, and I’m sick of it. I want to be a fit dad and a good husband, and to do God’s work to extend His kingdom. Thanks for the very powerful prayer ministry that you have in Jesus’ name.”

There’s a fine line, isn’t there, between bad habits and addictions? Let’s have a look whether God is in the middle of this weight-loss problem of Peter’s.

I’ve got another confession to make today. I love food. I always have and I always will. I grew up in a European household, and my mother cooked all these beautiful goulash dishes with cream and butter. I can’t help it. I love food, and I love cooking shows on television. I love to watch Kylie Quan and Jamie Oliver, and they cook up these beautiful meals. But what always strikes me about friend Jamie and Kylie and others like them is the amount of olive oil and butter and sugar and cream that they pour into their cooking. And I’ve said once before on radio, and I’ll say it again, if I ate that much fattening, sweet stuff, I would be the size of a house.

The underlying kind of ethos that is behind that is that you can have it all and there are no consequences. Now we’d like to believe that, but it ain’t true. My father was a diabetic. He died of diabetic complications, and it was one of the most horrible and ugly deaths I have ever seen. So if I follow wrong behavior in the area of eating, as obviously Peter is, there are consequences for me. And I am very likely to get diabetes and follow my father’s footsteps and die an ugly death.

The same is true, not just with food, but when we do stupid things or when we do wrong things or when we’re addicted to bad things, it can ruin our life. The same is true, for instance, of work. If we work too hard, we don’t have any balance in our lives, we become exhausted; people burn out. If we don’t work enough, we don’t have enough money to live. If we don’t sleep enough, we end up being really tired. If we’re lazy, if we’re unreliable – all of those things follow the same life principle, as unpopular as it is, bad behavior leads to bad consequences. Let me say that again, bad behavior leads to bad consequences.

To Peter, the consequences are health issues; there are emotional issues. He is on anti-depressants. He is sick of himself. Doubtless, his self-esteem is really low, because people look at him when he goes out. It’s an impact on his marriage, on his family, on his health, and on his ability to do God’s work all because, put very plainly and simply, Peter is putting too much food into his mouth and not exercising enough. It sounds simple, but Peter is addicted to eating.

I relate to that. I’ve always struggled with weight all my life and had to go through a process of losing over 20 kilos because I was eating too much. And even now, if I have a really heavy dinner, I feel lethargic at night. I end up not sleeping well at night. And if I keep doing it, I will probably end up with diabetes.

What to do? Peter is a man, who by his own testimony there believes in Jesus Christ. So if he dies tomorrow he has eternal life. All of these problems will go away and for eternity he’ll live with Jesus. The question is, “Does he want to live the way he’s living now between now and when he goes to be with the Lord?” And the answer from his email is absolutely no, and yet he lacks motivation.

There’s an old Chinese proverb, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” And it’s that first step that is mostly the hardest. How to get motivated? Well there are some extreme ways to get motivated. I gave up cigarette smoking 24 years ago now, because I was with someone when they died of cancer. And though I was smoking three packets a day, I threw the packet of cigarettes into the bin at the hospital. And since that day I have never had a single cigarette.

I guess it’s extreme because it takes you to the end of your life. And you look at the consequences of your behavior and you say, “Do I want to end up like that”? That’s a powerful thing to do. Do I want to end up like that?

But what about the spiritual dimension? The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Philippian church in chapter 2, verse 13, “God is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” God is at work in us. The same God, the same Holy Spirit who rose Jesus from the dead is at work in our bodies, bringing life, bringing freedom from addiction to us.

I believe if we try to do this on our own, we are prone to fail. How many of us here and now have been through diet after diet after diet – probably a lot of people because we ultimately end up failing. But listen to what God is saying. God has a good plan for your life, for Peter, for you and for me.

His plan is an abundant life. His plan for Peter is not that he feels so lethargic that he can’t go and kick a ball around with his kids in the backyard. The plan for Peter is not that he feels so overweight that he and his wife don’t have a good sex life. The plan for Peter is not that his health should be ruined because of his weight. That is not God’s plan.

But whenever we need to change, whenever we need to make a huge step that somehow seems beyond us, the promise of God is that He is at work in us both enabling us to work and to will for His good pleasure. In other words, the promise is that His Holy Spirit together with us will give us the motivation.

You know what a great prayer for Peter is? And for you and for me? Father, I can’t do this on my own. I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how to take the first step. And I’m not sure I can take the second, third or fourth steps either. Father, I need Your help.

What a fantastic prayer! What a prayer of invitation for the God of the whole universe to step in. And He always gives us the wherewithal to do what we need to do.

So, yes, it makes sense to take stock. It makes sense to look at our lives, look at the consequences, look at what ultimately will happen to us when we’re addicted to something like food, work, sex is a major addiction, drugs, alcohol.

Take stock. Do I really want this? And if the answer is no, we can paint a picture of what we want our lives to be like and go to God and say, “God, I would like to dream about what I could be with You.”

We can paint on a canvas with fear. We can paint on a canvas with doubt. And we will paint an ugly picture. Or we can paint on the canvas of our imagination, on the canvas of our hope with the love, the grace and the peace of the Holy Spirit.

We can paint a picture that together, God and us, can fulfil. God, You can do this. You can help me. You promised. Your Word says that You promised. You can help me through this problem.

Peter, I believe that God will be there, that He is there and that He can make a difference. All we have to do is lay our hands on that promise, believe it with all that we are and watch what God will do.

Do we still have to do stuff? Absolutely, I can’t pray my way out of a problem I behaved my way into. But God is there in that problem.