What sort of a life are you living at the moment? Would you describe it as stunning, or disappointing, or somewhere in between. It turns out that through all the twists and turns of life, God has a stunning life planned for you.  

So back to that question that I just asked you, what sort of a life do you think that God wants for you? Well, your answer to that I guess is going to depend on two things, whether or not you believe that God actually exists and what sort of a life you’ve had so far. Those two things more than any others are going to shape your answer to that all-important question.

I thought an awful lot about the life that I’m living and the lives other people are living, you see I have more opportunity than most to reflect on the lives of other people. You can imagine that I receive a lot of feedback from listeners to these radio messages from right around the world, letters and phone calls and emails and messages on our website at www.christianityworks.com., lots and lots of feedback and the abject misery of many of those people’s lives at times rocks my faith to the core.

The woman in London who had to sell her body on the street just to get food on the table. The guy who was on the brink of suicide. The woman whose husband had just left her for another woman. The elderly man who lost his wife of fifty-four years. So many people share the deepest despair of their lives with me and at some point, you have to ask yourself the question, “Hang on is God still on His throne? Is God the God of love for real? In fact, does He exist at all?”

Am I suggesting that everybody’s life is a mess? No, not at all but it’s as plain as the nose on my face that we all go through difficult times, times of tragedy in our lives that lead us wondering about this so-called God. And in between the times of tragedy, sure there are high points, there are times when things seem to be chugging along just fine and then there’s that dull monotony of the daily repetition of the same old routine.

So it doesn’t seem to matter so much what particular cycle of life we’re in, a trough or a crest of a wave, on the up or on the down, you can come back to the question “What sort of a life am I living and what sort of life does God want me to live?” It’s why I produced this radio series, it’s called Your Road To A Stunning Life and indeed I’ve written a book by the same name because I’m utterly convinced that God wants you and He wants me to live an absolutely stunning life, difficult though that may seem for some people.

So if it’s true, if God really does want you to live a stunning life how do you actually get yourself on that road? The “what” is pretty meaningless without the ‘how’ wouldn’t you agree? Well, that’s what this series and my book are all about, how to live a stunning life, how to get on that road.

You and I have heard it a million times this life is not a dress rehearsal. We get one chance of each day and pretty soon it’s going to be over. Lao Tzu many, many years ago said:

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

So here, as far as I’m concerned, is the first step. The very first step along the road to a stunning life is simply to believe that God is God, that He exists, that He is who He says He is. I know, it sounds a bit trite, a bit too obvious, a bit too simplistic doesn’t it? “Oh give me a break Berni, I don’t need platitudes in my life, I need some real, grass-roots, how to help me to get through the stuff that I’m going through, it’s hard going you know.”

I know you do and I know it is and that’s why I’m sharing this first step with you. Let me say it again, the first step is believing that He exists, that He is who He says He is because it’s a step that has some significant consequences. We live in a world of cause and effect, you do this then that happens, sometimes the consequences are predictable, sometimes they’re totally unpredictable. In this case, the consequences of taking this first step are completely predictable.

This is what God says what will happen to you if you believe in Him, Hebrews 11:1-8:

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. Indeed by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the world was prepared by the word of God so that what is seen was made from things that were not visible. By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain’s, through this he received approval as righteousness, God himself giving approval for his gifts, he died but through faith he still speaks.

By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death and he was found because God had taken him, for it was attested before he was taken away that he had pleased God. And without faith it’s impossible to please God for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

By faith Noah, warned by God about events yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir to the righteousness that is in accordance with faith. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance and he set out not knowing where he was going.

See when we step out on that road in faith, believing that God exists, God’s Word tells us that we’re going to receive these things. First His approval and acceptance, second freedom from death, third His rewards and fourth an inheritance. That’s what that passage we just read tells us.

Like Abraham when we step out on that road we have no idea really where we’re going to be headed. Simply God’s promise to approve us, accept us, set us free from death, reward us and give us the most amazing inheritance. Come on if that’s not a stunning life I just don’t know what is.

Yeah I know, I know, you’re going through all this stuff right? It’s hard right? How does any of this make any difference whatsoever to all of that, right? But let me tell you something, when God promises us something, even something spectacular like this, He delivers and when God delivers that makes all the difference, it completely changes your life.

All He asks us to do is simply to believe, to believe in Him, to believe that He is, to believe that He rewards those who diligently seek Him out. So can I ask you this, do you believe? But before you answer let me say I’m not asking you this as a question of theory, I don’t want to know whether or not you give intellectual ascent to the existence of some supreme being, that’s not what I’m asking you at all.

Churches are full of pew warming Christians that are benignly believers in the existence of God, it turns out that the devil is entirely happy for them to take up a place there in a nice warm Church that will keep someone else out in the cold because he knows that when it comes to things that matter their lives really won’t count for anything.

The devil knows that the person that ticks the box marked ‘Yep, sure, I believe there’s a God’ will never do anything of eternal significance in somebody else’s life. Nor are they themselves are likely to spend eternity with Christ because faith without works is dead (James 12:17, 26) and Jesus said:

Not everyone who calls me Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)

So that’s not what I’m asking, what I’m asking you is ‘Do you believe in God with your very life?’ With everything that you are, with everything that you have, with every hope and with every dream are you seeking God out, are you seeking to approach Him, to be with Him, to know Him? Do you long for Him with all of your heart? Well do you?

Because when you seek Him with all your heart you will find Him and when you do, you’ll discover that He is the God who accepts you, who approves of you, who rewards you, who sets you free from death and who gives you the most amazing eternal inheritance and that’s a complete game changer, that’s why it’s the very first step on the road to an utterly stunning life.

A great life doesn’t just happen by accident – it takes some planning and some effort. And the most important thing in all that to build it on a solid foundation. So, if I were to ask you – what the foundation stone of your life is, what would your answer be?

Just recently I was invited to visit India to participate in the laying of the foundation stone for the Lutheran Central Cathedral in the city of Guntur in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Now Guntur isn’t far from the Bay of Bengal, a bustling, thriving city and the Lutheran Parish is made up of about twenty-five thousand people.

I visited just one of their Churches in the parish, St Matthew’s in the suburb Brodipet. There were, I’m guessing, I don’t know somewhere between four and five thousand worshippers there. It was a day of great celebration because we were laying the foundation stone of a ten thousand seat Cathedral to be built over the next two and a half years.

The service on the Sunday started at 9.00am and it finished around 1pm with the unveiling of the foundation stone which amongst several other names has my name chiselled in gold letters in the granite so when some young person looks at the stone in a hundred years time when I’m long gone, they’ll wonder “Who is this guy with a funny name, Sri Berni Dymet from Australia and what was he doing there?”

I had the chance to meet the architect of the Cathedral and he showed me the plans. I tell you what an amazing structure, huge as you can imagine if it’s going to seat ten thousand worshippers at one time. When the crowds had disappeared early in the evening they asked me to come back out in this wide-open space to share the Word of God with some of the young workers who’d been toiling away for the last thirty-six hours nonstop behind the scenes making the whole event possible.

You see they’d missed out on everything so it was such a pleasure and an honour for me to open the Bible with them and chat with them. We talked about their lives and their futures, the plans that God has for them and it struck me in that moment that here we were in this open field where a massive Cathedral will one day stand but it wasn’t strictly speaking an open field because part of the Cathedral was already in place.

The construction had already commenced it was of course the foundation stone which we laid. One day it will be part of the wall of the Cathedral. There it was already concreted in place and over the next thirty months this massive ten thousand-seat building would be constructed around it, on top of it. Everything set out from the beginning, this foundation stone, the place of that stone would define this whole massive structure, pretty amazing really.

So let me ask you this, Who or what is the foundation stone of your life? What pervading truth or reality defines your life, that one thing which is right at the centre around which, day by day as each brick of your thoughts and your actions and your reactions, is laid down to construct this thing which one day you’ll be able to look back on and call your life?

What’s your foundation stone, the rock on which you stand? Choose the wrong one, put it in the wrong place, point it in the wrong direction and your life simply won’t be what it was meant to be. See way too many people get this wrong and so they end up constructing for themselves lives, which are less than what they could have been.

Have a listen to this amazing piece of wisdom from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesian Church almost two thousand years ago. He said:

But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ for he is our peace, in his flesh he made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us. He’s abolished the Law with his commandments and ordinances that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two thus making peace and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross thus putting to death that hostility through it.

So he came and proclaimed peace to you who are far off and peace to those who were near. For through him both of us have access in the one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God built up on the foundation of the apostles with Christ himself as the cornerstone.

In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a Holy Temple in the Lord in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Pretty amazing! See the central truth that Paul’s talking about here is the fact that Jesus died for you and me to end the hostilities between God and us brought about by our own rebellion. Through Jesus and His death on that cross you and I finally can have peace. Is there anything more sublime than peace? Is there any commodity more valuable than peace?

And through that peace, you and I, who were once far off from God, we’ve been drawn near into His very bosom and so everything else flows from this. Christ, Paul writes, is the cornerstone of the Church, the stone from which everything else is set out. That’s what Paul is saying here and not only is He the cornerstone or the foundation stone of the Church, He’s meant to be the cornerstone or the foundation stone of our lives.

And it’s at this point where theory turns into practice, it’s at this point that a simplistic, distant, intellectual belief in some supreme being totally fails you because our life isn’t a theory, it’s not an idea. It’s as big and as tangible and it’s even more magnificent than that ten thousand seat Cathedral is going to be.

And it needs something more than a theory on which to rest, it needs a real, tangible, powerful, rock solid, foundation stone around which to be built for without it our lives go awry. They won’t end up being what we wanted them to be. The person who accepts Christ, not as an idea but as the cornerstone of their lives around which everything else is arranged and built, is the person who will be living the life that God intended them to live.

This is the person who is on the road to the stunning life, the life of impact, the life of meaning, the life of intense sacrifice and satisfaction that God means for them to live. So might I ask you this very quietly but very kindly and very directly, are you that person or not?

What I mean to say, your faith in Jesus, is it the sort of faith that causes you to arrange every aspect of your life around Him as your foundation stone or is it more the wishy-washy, insurance policy kind of faith that believes in God? Well, you know, just in case.

Perhaps you’re not quite sure, perhaps you’re wondering “How can I tell the difference?” That’s not unreasonable. When you make big decisions is your primary concern whether God wants you to decide this way or that or are you more concerned about what’s in it for you?

When you hear one of the tough sayings of Jesus, things like “Love your enemy” or “Anyone who is angry with a brother or a sister is subject to judgement” or “If someone strikes you turn the other cheek” or “If you’re right eye causes you to sin gouge it out and throw it away”. When you hear those sorts of things coming right out of the mouth of the Son of God, does your heart struggle with fear? How am I going to live those things? Or do you dismiss them out of hand as being for someone else?

This people, is where the rubber hits the road, it’s in each life decision, each relationship decision, each work decision, each financial decision, big or small that we either set our lives out around the cornerstone of Christ or we choose to go our own way? Is deciding in favour of Jesus is going His way is always easy? No, not at all. In fact Jesus promised us that it would be anything but.

It oft-times requires sacrifice and suffering but going our own way, rejecting the cornerstone, setting our lives out and building them according to our own plan is the road to destruction. Yeah sure it appears easy at the time but the downhill run always seems easy.

It’s time for each one of us to sober up and ask ourselves this one question, “Is Christ the cornerstone of my life or not?”

When you have more on your to–do list than you can possibly get done in a day, which things do you choose to do? The important ones, or the urgent ones? It turns out that those prioritisation decisions, day after day, have everything to do with the sort of life that we end up leading.  

This is a tough one for me today because it doesn’t matter who we are our circumstances influence us to a greater or lesser degree. When you lose a loved one of course you are going to mourn that loss, that’s natural. Of course when you get a promotion or a pay rise at work you’re going to feel like celebrating. When someone treats you badly you’ll be hurt, when someone treats you well you’ll be delighted. None of us are divorced from the day-to-day realities of our lives and sometimes our circumstances are for us other times they’re against us, it’s just the way it goes.

Rudyard Kipling was a well-known writer and one of his most famous poems is called If. We don’t have time to read the whole poem but it’s all about doing the right thing irrespective of your circumstances. In fact, two lines of that poem are inscribed above the player’s entrance to the centre court at Wimbledon, those two lines are these:

If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

Interesting isn’t it? Kipling calls both triumph and disaster what they are – imposters. Now Kipling wasn’t a Christian but he was the son of two Methodist ministers and no doubt his parents beliefs had a lot to do with the shaping of his philosophy on life.

Think about it, when you have a triumph, you win a race, you get a promotion or you succeed in some way, how long does that last? In Australia where I live no sooner does a Prime Minister win an election than the press and the electorate are chasing after him or her with a pick axe.

It’s so easy to be seduced by success that pretty soon you start believing your own propaganda but success is, by and large, a fleeting thing. Even for those who amass great fame and great fortune, they often find themselves struggling in their lives. So much so that many of them end up taking their own lives.

What is success really other than a narcotic, an imposter? Jesus when He was walking this planet He drew massive crowds to His rallies, four, five thousand at a time and in those days that meant the whole towns and cities would all but close down as people flocked to hear Him. They were amazed at His teaching, they marvelled at His miracles Jesus had rock star status across Israel.

So was He intoxicated by the adulation of the crowds? John 2:23-25:

When he was in Jerusalem for the Passover festival many people believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing but Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to any of them because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about him for he himself knew what was in everyone.

And just as well because just a few chapters later in the same Gospel, chapter 6 verse 24 and verse 66 we read this:

The Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven’. They were saying, ‘isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know? How can he now say ‘I have come down from heaven’? And because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.

And then of course this, John 19:16-18:

So they took Jesus and carrying the cross by himself he went out to a place that is called ‘the Place of the Skull’ which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him and with him two others, one of either side with Jesus between them.

There’s such a fine line isn’t there between success and failure? Yet we seem to have become swept up by success, when the adulation of the crowd is really just a fleeting aberration and so overcome by failure when failure is after all one of the most common occurrences in life.

We have this fairy floss, sugary expectation that our lives should always be fine, with never a cloud in the sky let alone a howling storm. It’s a complete fantasy yet we somehow cling to it like nothing else. We milk it when it’s going our way and we beat ourselves up when it’s going the other way.

You have to ask yourself, “What’s the matter with us when we let our emotions swing up and down based on a fabrication like that?” I mean really and if the truth be known some of our great so-called failures can in point of fact be the greatest time of growth and learning and development of our character that we’ll ever experience.

I mean look at Jesus, when He was hanging there nailed to that cross crying out “Eloi, Eloi, lema Sabachtani” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Didn’t Jesus look like the biggest failure in all of history? Yet the moment of His death was in fact the greatest triumph of all time. Colossians 2:13-15:

When he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with it’s legal demands, he set this aside nailing it to the cross, he disarmed the rulers and the authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.

See if we believe that God is, that He exists, that He rewards those who seek Him, if we make Christ the foundation stone of our lives, if we start making our love for God and those around us our decision-making litmus test then little by little circumstances matter less and less.

When I told people that I was writing a book called Your Road To A Stunning Life many of them immediately leapt to the false conclusion that it was just another one of those prosperity doctrine, get rich quick under God books. But that’s not what God promises. What He promises us is this John 16:33:

Jesus said, ‘I’ve said this to you so that in me you may have peace for in this world you are going to face persecution but take courage for I have overcome the world.’

See what Jesus promises us is that in the middle of the worst times in our lives we can have peace, we can have courage. What Jesus promises us is His blessing despite and irrespective of our circumstances good or bad. And that’s the real thing, it’s not an imposter.

So what circumstances are you going through? The good or the bad or the ugly that are causing you to believe in them rather than in God. If you’re riding the crest of a wave have you started to forget that God who blessed you and put you there:

When you’ve eaten your fill and you’ve built your houses and you live in them and when your herds and flocks have multiplied and your silver and gold has multiplied and all that you have has multiplied, don’t exalt yourself forgetting the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the terrible and great wilderness and arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.

God made the water flow for you from the flint rock and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors didn’t know, to humble you and to test you and in the end to do you good. (Deuteronomy 8:12-16).

And if you’re down in a dark valley what do you believe? The awfulness of your circumstances or do you believe in the might and the power and the love and the presence of your God?

For even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me, your rod and your staff they comfort me. You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies, you anoint my head with oil and my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life. (Psalm 23:4-6).

The overriding reality of your life is not your current set of circumstances, good or bad because they come and go. The overriding reality of your life is your God who poured His love out for you through Jesus Christ His Son. So which one of those do you choose to believe in, your circumstances or your God? Because your choice is going to make a huge difference to the life you end up living.

One of the biggest mistakes that we can ever make in life, is to allow our circumstances – good or bad – to be the final arbiter of the life that we lead. Because if we allow our circumstances to rule our lives, we shall forever be like a forlorn cork bobbing around on the ocean.

Yes, so how do you react to seeing yourself or hearing yourself? I used to hate seeing myself in a photo. Now part of that is the fact that I was carrying so much extra weight, that bit’s changed over the last few years as I’ve slimmed down rather a lot. But isn’t it funny how we can cringe when we see what we look like or hear how we speak?

I remember when I first started this whole radio gig way back, I think it was in 1998 so it’s been quite a few years. I’d go into the recording studio feeling quite uncertain about myself, Max my producer back then who still incidentally is my producer today, one of the most preached at people on the planet, poor fellow, he’d record what I said and then edit out the stumbles and turn it into a radio program.

I distinctly remember the first time I listened to one of them, I was horrified! Is that what I sound like? You’re kidding me! See to me my voice and how I spoke the words, it didn’t seem normal the way other people speak. When I finally heard myself played back I thought I sounded, well, weird, odd, surely people wouldn’t want to listen to this stuff.

Now of course we all do sound different, we all look different, we’re all distinctly different from one another but layered it over the top of that, when you think about it, is this sense of inadequacy through which we judge ourselves. Haven’t you ever thought about how funny that is? That we can see ourselves in the mirror bleary-eyed every morning and yet when we see ourselves in a photo we cringe.

Or the fact that when we’ve been talking all our lives, hearing our own words as we speak but then you might hear a recording of yourself and you’re horrified by what you hear. This phenomenon that ninety-nine percent of us are all too familiar speaks about a sense of inadequacy, a sense of poor self-esteem.

It’s fed a lot by the fact that we don’t match up to the images of beauty that we see in the magazines and on television. I’m frankly never likely to have one of those rippling muscular bodies like the guys plastered across the front of the men’s health and men’s fitness magazines. And for you women that sense of inadequacy can be even worse. Society tells you what you have to look like, something that is pretty much impossible to achieve.

And in fact as I’ve said a few times before on this program, it’s this gap between those ideal images of success and beauty on the one hand and who we perceive ourselves to be on the other that advertisers exploit ruthlessly to drive sales for their products. Next time you watch an ad on television watch it really carefully, critically. There’s an implicit brand promise on the ad, buy this product or service and you can look like this or have this or be this or have other people think of you like this. And then when that doesn’t work, having spent your money, they dangle the next carrot under your nose.

Is it any wonder that so many people just don’t like themselves? That so many people are so unhappy with who they are and what they have and where their life’s headed. Now just stop and think about this for a moment, when you look at you how happy are you with you? Are you falling into this trap of comparing yourself with those false, unobtainable images of success, trying to achieve them but knowing you never will?

Come on, on a scale of zero to ten how happy are you with you? How comfortable are you in your skin? Now I know that none of us is perfect and of course we need to think realistically and soberly about our flaws and our weaknesses. We should never stop growing and maturing and we should always be ready to make the changes we need to make but that’s entirely different to having this nagging sense of inadequacy that so many people, so many people live with day after day.

We’re chatting at the moment on the program about living a stunning life. What sort of life are you going to be living if you’re never happy with who you are? The Bible, God’s very Word to you and me, tells us this about ourselves, Psalm 139:13-18. The psalmist writes:

For it was you God who formed my inward parts. You knit together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works that I know very well, my frame wasn’t hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven together in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book are written all the days were formed for me when none of them yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them. I try to count them, they’re more than the sand, I come to the end and I’m still with you.

In other words the psalmist who wrote that is saying to God, ‘I’m completely amazed, totally gob-smacked at who I am, who you made me to be, I just can’t get my mind around it Lord’. What a different view that is to the one that’s reflected back from those distorted mirrors that the advertising industry holds up before us.

God made you! He didn’t make a mistake, He wasn’t churning out sloppy work that day. The same hands that flung stars into space, the same hands that worked the timbers in that carpenter’s shop in Nazareth, the same hands that were nailed to the cross for you, were the hands that laid down every strand of your DNA, every gene, every chromosome that defines who you are is the sovereign choice of the living God who sent His Son to die for you.

And you, you are utterly amazing. You are who God made you to be and you have a choice here, you can either believe what the world’s telling you about you or you can start believing what God’s telling you about you. Which one of those do you think is more reliable? Which one do you think is telling you the truth? Which one is going to set your feet on the road to living a stunning life that God planned for you to live do you think exactly?

I remember one of my lecturers at Bible College, Dr Barry Chant, talking about this to me years ago and he implored us to ditch our self-image and replace it with a faith image. Not such bad advice when you think about it. And what happens when we start doing that is that little by little we’re set free from this burden and sense of inadequacy and it’s replaced with a quiet confidence in who we are and who we aren’t and it’s that second part that’s just important.

You know how it feels when you compare yourself with someone else. You’re not as good-looking, you’re not as smart, you’re not as articulate, you’re not as wealthy or whatever it is but then you were never meant to be anything like that other person, God made you to be you.

I used to feel so inadequate because of all the things I wasn’t good at until I started to wrap my mind around who God made me to be, until I let the Word of God and let me tell you Psalm 139 is still one of my favourite passages, to let the Word of God do its mighty work in me.

I realised just how much I had changed when I started shooting TV programs and I saw myself for the first time on television. When the producer played the first program back I was steeling myself for that awkward feeling of seeing myself on the TV but it didn’t come, I really liked what I saw. Yeah okay a tweak here, an improvement there but I realised at that moment how wonderful it is for me to accept me just as God accepts me, for me to see myself through God’s eyes rather than through this nonsensical, distorted false view that the world wants to reflect back at me.

It totally transforms your life. It sets you free to be who God made you to be. Listen to me, you are fearfully and wonderfully made, you are God’s unique creation, He loves you so much that He’s prepared to have His Son die to save you so that you can spend eternity with Him.

Wrap your heart around that and you are on the road to a stunning life, let me tell you.