So many people who believe in Jesus are wondering – why isn’t my life all that I expected? Why isn’t my life everything that the Bible promises that it should be? Well, it turns out that those people, probably aren’t living the important stuff.

So many people who believe in Jesus find their lives are falling well short of what they expected. And all too often that’s because they’re so immersed in their culture that they believe more of what the world has to say, than what God has to say. It’s easy to do.

DON’T LET CIRCUMSTANCES CONTROL YOU

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’re 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 is divorced from the day-to-day realities of our lives, and sometimes our circumstances are for us; other times they’re against us. That’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 players’ 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 and life.

Think about it. When you have a triumph, you win a race or 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 pickaxe. 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 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 that 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 (6:24, 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, ‘Hang on. 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, there’s 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 on either side, with Jesus between them.

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

We have this fairly 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 in our character that we’ll ever experience. I mean, look at Jesus. When He was hanging there, nailed to that cross, crying out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani” (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 its legal demands, He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the end.

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 for 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):

I have 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 the God who blessed you and put you there? Deuteronomy 8:12-16:

When you’ve eaten your fill, and you’ve built your houses and you live in them, and when you have herds and flocks that multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is 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.

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? Psalm 23:4-6:

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.

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 that you end up living.

BE DELIGHTED WITH WHO YOU ARE

Yeah, so how do you react to seeing yourself or hearing yourself? I used to hate seeing myself in a photo. Now part of that was the fact that I was carrying so much extra weight. That bit’s changed over the last few years as I’ve slimmed down by 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 do all sound different; we all look different; we’re all distinctly different from one another, but layered 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 with 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 with the images of beauty that we see in the magazines and on television. I frankly am 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’s 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, unattainable images of success, trying to achieve them but knowing that 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 a 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:

For it was You, God, who formed my inward parts; You knit me 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 were written all the days that were formed for me when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are Your thoughts, o God; how vast is the sum of them. I can’t count them; they are more than the sand. I come to the end, and I am still with You.

You know, the Psalmist who wrote that, he saying to God: “I’m completely amazed, totally gobsmacked at who I am, at who You’ve made me to be. I just can’t get my mind round 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’s the more reliable? Which one do you think is telling the truth? Which one is going to set your feet on the road to living the stunning life that God planned for you to live, do you think exactly?

I remember one of my lecturers at Bible-college, Doctor Barry Chan, talking about this to me years ago and he implored us to ditch our self-image and replace it with a faith-image. Well, such great 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 as 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) do its mighty work in me.

I realised just how much I’d 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, ok, a tweak here; an improvement there, but I realised in 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.

FAITH + LIFE = LIFE

You see, 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? And before you answer that question, let me say that I’m not asking you this as a theory-question. I don’t want to know whether or not you give intellectual assent to the existence of some supreme being. No, that’s not what I’m asking you at all.

Churches are full of pew-warming Christians that benignly believe in the existence of a God. It turns out that the devil is entirely happy for them to take up a place there in that nice, warm church that’ll keep someone else out in the cold, because he knows that when it comes to the things that really matter, their lives won’t count for anything. The devil knows that the person who ticks the box marked: “Yeah, I believe that there’s a God’ will never do anything of eternal significance in someone else’s life, nor are they themselves likely to spend eternity with Christ, because faith without works is dead” (James 2:17-26), and Jesus said:

Not everyone who says to 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 am asking you, is do you believe in God with your very life, with everything you are, with everything you have, with every hope and with every dream? Are you seeking Him out? Are you seeking to approach Him, to be with Him, to know Him? Do you long for Him with all your heart? Well, do you? Because when you seek Him with all your heart, you will find Him, and when you do, you will discover that He is the God who accepts you and approves of you and rewards you, and sets you free from death, and gives you the most amazing eternal inheritance. That’s a complete game-changer. That’s why believing in Jesus with your life is so important in living an utterly stunning life.

What I mean to say is, 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. Well, here’s how to tell the difference. When you make a big decision, 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’s angry with a brother or sister is subject to judgment’ or ‘If somebody strikes you, then turn the other cheek’ or maybe ‘If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away’, when you hear those sorts of things coming out of the very mouth of the Son of God, does your heart struggle to figure out: ‘How am I going to live that out’, or do you dismiss them as being for somebody else?

This, people, is where the rubber hits the road. It’s in the decisions, the life-decisions; in 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 always easy? No, not at all. In fact, Jesus promises that it would be anything but. It oftentimes 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, it’d be as easy at the time, but the downhill run always seems easy.

The reason that so many people aren’t living the stunning life that God has planned for them is that they believe in Jesus with their heads; maybe even with their hearts, but not with their very life. How about you?

I believe – in fact I know – that God has a stunning life planned for you. Problem is that you and I have this amazing ability to work against Him and when we do that, we miss out. So, I’d love to share some practical, rubber-hits-the-road tips with you, for cooperating with God’s plans for your life.

START LIVING YOUR GIG

When I was young, finishing high school and making my career choices, I came very, very close to making a couple of major mistakes. I was blessed to be fairly academically inclined, so I basically had my choice of whatever university course my heart desired.

There were three on my shortlist, medicine, law and an information technology degree. Now back in those days, medicine was by far the favoured career. It was seen as the pinnacle of achievement and certainly, my dad wanted me to study medicine.

Law was right up there as well. Both of those professions appeared pretty much to guarantee a big income.

This whole IT thing though was pretty new. The question was: which one to choose? As things turned out, I’d been accepted to train as an Army Officer, undertaking a four-year IT degree along the way, and I guess it was that sense of excitement of a military career which, as a young man, to be honest with you, swung me to that decision.

As I look back on that choice, I thank God that I didn’t choose medicine or law. I can’t stand the sight of blood pretty much, which is not exactly the sort of prerequisite you want to have a career as a doctor. And the law, as I discovered later, is all about detail. Lots and lots and lots of detail, and whilst I can handle detail from time to time, it’s just not my first love. I would have ended up drowning in all the detail.

I think back to that pivotal career decision that I made way back when I was just seventeen and a half years old, with not a lot of life experience to draw on exactly, and I shudder at how easily I could have chosen something that I just wasn’t suited to.

I literally could have found myself living my life as a square peg in a round hole, and that I imagine, would be an incredibly uncomfortable position to find myself in.

There’s a basic rule or life principle if you will, that goes something like this: square pegs belong in square holes, and round pegs, well … they belong in round holes. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out now do you? And yet, as I said at the beginning of the program, so many people are living life as a square peg in a round hole.

A large survey conducted in the US not so long ago revealed that only 19% of workers were satisfied with their jobs; which means that 81% weren’t satisfied with their job. Of those, 16% were somewhat dissatisfied, and the rest were really unhappy. That’s pretty much Pareto’s 80/20 law right there, with the vast majority, the 80%, going to work unhappy.

Another global survey found that over half, 56% of people, actually were looking to find a new job.

Now, there can be a lot of reasons for those terrible statistics. Pay and conditions, poor management, they are just two. But if I were a betting man (which I am not), I would put money on the table that one of the major reasons is that people are doing jobs that they’re just not suited to do.

You yourself know that there are some things in life that give you enormous satisfaction, and other things that leave you completely drained. Now that I’m getting older, I watch people who are grandparents. We have one couple who lives a few doors away on the same floor in our apartment block, who look after a different set of their grandchildren almost every day of the week, while their parents go to work.

Other grandparents, they just can’t stand the thought of having to look after children, because it’s just not what they enjoy doing. They’ve brought up their own kids, and now they want a break from all that.

And so wherever there is this mismatch between the requirements of a role and the natural motivations and talents and abilities of the individual – right there you have a square peg, in a round hole. And it’s generally not the hole that feels the pressure. The role is what the role is. The requirements of the position don’t change. It’s the individual who has to squeeze themselves into a role that they’re just not suited to.

When I was at Bible College many years ago, the Principal of the College, Dr Barry Chant, made us memorise one particular Bible verse. In fact, he used to joke, although I’m not sure it was so much of a joke, that unless we were able to recite this one verse, we simply wouldn’t graduate from the College.

At the time, I thought it was rather an odd choice of Bible verses. Why this one from among the 31,102 verses in the Bible? Well, here it is. Ephesians 2:10:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared beforehand for us to walk into.

The older and hopefully the wiser I’ve become since those days, the more I’ve discovered the wisdom of Barry’s insistence that we memorise this one verse. Because what it says, is that God made us; God handcrafted us; we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus and He made us, you and me, with a purpose in mind.

He in fact made us in order to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to do, literally for us to walk into. So picture your life – this journey over hill and dale. Just as you turn round the next corner, or come over the next rise, waiting for you right there is one of the good works that God made you to do, one of the ones that He prepared before time even began for you to make happen.

Now, do you imagine for one moment that God made a mistake? That He made you to do things that you weren’t good at doing? Or things that were impossible for you to do? Now way!! God knows exactly what He’s doing when He makes you. God knew, He handcrafted you to be a perfect fit to do what He made you to do. So why is it that we go and live a life we were never made to live?

You see it all over the place, you see people going and trying to do jobs that they are simply not good at doing. There are so many jobs that if I chose to try and do them, I would ultimately be a failure at, because I simply wasn’t made to do them.

Well sometimes its stubbornness, other times its ignorance, that’s why people do this. Or perhaps you’ve allowed circumstances to sweep you along in life, without ever taking a stand and saying to yourself: Hang on a minute; what I really want to do is … is this! My real dream in life is to go and be this and do that.

The most common question I am asked when I talk on this, which I do rather a lot these days, because like Barry Chant I’ve come to believe that being the me I was meant to be is absolutely critical in life … the most common question I’m asked is this: How do I know what it is that God made me to do?

Now that’s a fair question. Well, the answer is dead simple. Each one of us has something that gets us enthused in life, something that we’re passionate about. Something that we’re really good at, probably better at than anyone else that we know.

For me it’s doing what I’m doing right now. I love to tell stories. I get up mostly at three or four o’clock in the morning to prepare these radio messages. Why? Not because I have to, but because I love to! I love telling stories; I love seeing people’s lives transformed through those stories.

So let me ask you this: What are you passionate about? What do you absolutely love doing? What is it that you’re better at, than just about anybody else that you know? Maybe you love working with your hands and making things, or maybe you are great at looking after kids, or organising lots of detailed things, or … whatever it is that you are good at that you really enjoy doing, there is your pointer to what God made you to do.

No. It’s not always going to be easy, or convenient, or fun, or comfortable. Nothing worthwhile ever is. But there, right there, is the thing that God made you to do. Start walking in that direction and all of a sudden a whole bunch of new opportunities are going to open up.

Those opportunities are in fact the good works that God prepared beforehand for you to do. Get it?

PRAYER IS EVERYTHING

If you believe in Jesus, then you know that God is all-loving God and all-powerful. He is this God who can completely transform your life. If you don’t believe in God, then just humour me for a bit. Let’s assume that Jesus is who He said He is, that God is all-powerful and all-loving, the God who Jesus came to tell us about.

Then what follows from that is this: if God is all-loving and all-powerful, then surely He wants to make a powerful difference in your life and mine. And not only does He want to, He actually can.

Yet the lives of so many Christians simply don’t bear that out. There are so many people who love Jesus and want to follow Him with all their hearts, but for them, God doesn’t seem to be making any real difference at all, let alone a powerful difference. Why is that exactly?

In the first few months after giving my life to Christ at age thirty-six, I discovered something that greatly disturbed me. Not something that I uncovered only after years of study, but as a simple man with just a plain grasp of the obvious and a heart that was open to receive. It was something that rocked me to my core.

The discovery was this: that prayer that yields powerful results is normal in God’s sight. It sounds so simple and yet, the more I dwelt on that simple truth from God, the more it rocked me and it disturbed me.

Why? Because my prayer wasn’t yielding powerful results. I’d been through a cycle of delighting in prayer and then dreading it. In the first few months of giving my life over to Jesus, my prayer life was just awesome. I couldn’t wait to spend time with God.

It was a devastating time in my life, so much had fallen apart, that my times in prayer with God were the highlight, in fact the only light, of my life. But as can happen in any relationship, when the day-to-day post-courtship, post-honeymoon reality sets in, my communication with God had sunk to lows that I never expected.

I avoided Him. I prayed out of no more than a sense of duty. I would have been embarrassed in those days to tell anyone about my prayer life, if you could even have called it that. I was in every sense of the word, a pauper in prayer, absolutely bankrupt, so it seemed to me.

My prayer life was not what God set out in His Word as being the normal reality of the Christian life. If anything, it was the exact opposite. I felt so weak; I felt so inadequate; so sinful; so condemned. And over and over again I read about the powerful things that happened to people as they prayed.

In the Bible, the word pray (together with its derivatives: prayed, prayer, prays) appears around 350 times throughout the Bible. The very first appearance is in Genesis Chapter 20 which simply says:

… He will pray for you and you shall live. (Genesis 20:7)

So what happens in response to this prayer? What was the result of this prayer? Well, Genesis 20:17-18:

Then Abraham prayed to God; and God healed Abimelech, and so also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For the LORD had closed fast all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.

Hey, it’s a pretty powerful outcome don’t you think, for the first recorded prayer to God in the Bible?

And the second story about prayer just a few chapters later, Genesis 24:12-21 (we don’t have time to read it all now) has a similarly powerful outcome.

So, what about the third story about prayer in the Bible? Well, let’s take a look; just one verse, Genesis 25:21:

Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.

Now, call me crazy, call me whatever you like, but to me, there’s a definite pattern emerging here; a pattern that repeats itself over and over and over again right throughout the Bible. It is quite simply this pattern: prayer that yields powerful results is absolutely normal in God’s sight.

In fact, prayer that yields powerful results is the only sort of prayer that the Bible actually teaches us about. Sure, there are a couple of examples of ineffective prayer, but God hardly endorses those. In fact quite the opposite.

And the whole of what God has to say about prayer, from beginning to end, culminates in these few words from Jesus’ own lips. John 15:7, Jesus says to his disciples:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

Let me tell you something. I am not a natural pray–er. I want to race off and do things, not sit around and talk to God. I want to get up in the morning and answer my emails or start working on a radio program script or do something. But what I’ve discovered over these last twenty years or so in walking with Jesus, is this: the more I pray and the less I try to do things in my own strength, the more powerful things I see happening in my life.

You want to hear me say that one more time? The more I pray and the less I try to do things in my own strength, the more powerful things I see happening in my life. It’s that simple. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but to many of us, it is because we just don’t live our lives that way.

In fact, I became so passionate about this, that I wrote a book. It was the first book that I wrote many years ago now, called “Unlocking the Power of Prayer.”

Now, what this doesn’t mean is this: God is not some lap dog of ours that performs tricks on demand. God isn’t some sugar-daddy who, upon request, will give us every comfort and desire that we ask for. “Oh God please make me rich” is not a prayer that gets answered all that often I’m telling you.

The key to what Jesus said is our relationship with Him. Listen to it again:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

In other words, if we’re close to Jesus, if we know what He wants and we listen to what He says, we’ll know what to ask for and how to ask. If His Word abides in us, we’ll be asking things in accordance with His will. And at that point let me tell you, the power of God starts to manifest itself in your life.

The sort of power that helps you love the unlovable and touch the untouchable and forgive the unforgivable. The sort of power that gives you patience when you don’t have any. The sort of power that helps you to hold your tongue when all you want to do is to rip somebody’s head off.

The sort of power to walk the difficult road with Jesus, carrying your own cross and sacrificing your own life. The sort of power you need to change the things you can’t change and to suffer through the things that you’re called to suffer through.

That’s the sort of power, my friend that changes our lives. That’s the sort of power that transforms us and restores us back into the original image in which God created us; His image.

Prayer changes everything. Prayer changes the most important possession that you have – your very life. Prayer changes your heart. When you do what Jesus said: pray for your enemy, Matthew 5:44, He doesn’t just change your enemy, He changes you.

Prayer isn’t some duty that we have to drag ourselves to. The more you pray, the more you want to pray, because you experience the joy of fellowshipping with God. You experience the peace that comes from resting in Him and waiting expectantly on Him. And you see things happen in your life and around you and through you, that you never thought were possible.

Listen to me, please listen. Prayer… changes… everything. The sooner you realise that, the sooner you start believing that, the sooner you start living that, then the sooner you’ll find yourself on that road to the stunning life that God has planned for you.

POWER + LOVE

As our time together draws to a close there’s one final thing that I want to share with you today. This God of ours, the same one who sent Jesus to die for you, is the God of the most amazing power. And like any loving dad, He wants to use all that He has to make a powerful difference in the lives of His children.

Have a listen to what the Apostle Paul writes to his friends in the church at Ephesus. Ephesians 1:17-20, he says:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance amongst the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

God put this same power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all the rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

So, what’s God got for us? According to Paul, certain hope, a glorious inheritance and the very same power for you, and for your life, that raised Jesus from the dead. That is simply stunning, right?

But the difference between what He has for you, and what the world has for you is that He knows how He made you. What your strengths are, the weaknesses and what suits you best. He knows what it is that will make you function and tick. He knows that it is only in a relationship with Him, only in His loving embrace, that you can ever find yourself and all that He has for you.

That sometimes means trials and wilderness experiences. That sometimes means great trials and long wilderness experiences. But when you and I trust ourselves in His loving hands, then it’s in that place that we discover and we experience the faithfulness of God.

It was when Jeremiah was going through a terrible trial, when all around him was destroyed, when all hope seemed to have been lost, that he wrote these words. Lamentations 3:22-24:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’.

It’s only when we get out there, taking God at His Word, believing that God is who He says He is and that He will do what He says He will do, in His Word, that we can discover firsthand the truth of those words.

That’s the context in which you and I live our lives – our specific gig in life. That’s the context in which we come to the Lord our God in prayer. Right there even in the middle of the trials and the devastations if life, the certain hope that you have in Christ, the glorious inheritance that God has prepared for you, and the immeasurably great power – the very same power that raised Jesus from the dead – these are all there for you, right there, as you put your trust in Jesus they are available to you.

And so right now, let me close our time together today with a prayer for you:

Father I know that there are so many people who are listening to Your Word today who are struggling with stuff in their lives. Broken relationships and health worries and financial pressures and any number of things that cause us to take our eyes off You.

So we thank you Lord that we can come to You in prayer, knowing that You love us beyond measure, knowing that our hope in You is rock solid. Knowing that this inheritance that You’ve laid up for each one of us is imperishable and undefiled and unfading and knowing that Your power is available to us here and now.

Father, please comfort and encourage and strengthen all those today who are struggling with things in their lives. You know who they are, You know where they are and You know what’s causing them pain.

Bless them Lord. Empower them. Fill them with Your Holy Spirit and fill them above all with and a peace and joy that is simply beyond anything words can describe. We ask this in Jesus’ mighty name. Amen.

Would you like to live the stunning life that God has planned for you? Well, it’s not going to happen by listening to what the world has to say and chasing after worldly baubles and trinkets. It’s only going to happen by listening to what God has to say.

FORGIVE AND FORGET

So, when was the last time someone hurt you? Come on, think back. For probably the majority of us, we don’t have to go back even twenty-four hours. A harsh word, being left out, being ignored, being passed over, being misunderstood.

It doesn’t take all that much to get hurt. And they’re just the small things. Then there are the big things like the unfaithfulness of a spouse, physical and emotional abuse, theft and violence. There are plenty of people listening to this message today who have some of those in their lives. In fact, there are more people listening to this message around the world today, who are living in poverty or without basic housing or clean water or sanitation and safety, than there are those listening in the comfortable affluent west.

So, back to you, back to the people who have hurt you in your life – can I ask you, how easy do you find it to forgive them? Is it something that comes naturally, or do you struggle to forgive? Well the answer for most of us is that forgiveness is one of the most unnatural acts of all.

Because when someone wrongs you, that innate sense of justice that you have built into you, because you’ve been created in the image of God – who is, after all, the God of justice, your God. Given that sense of justice, well, what it demands in you, is that things be put right, correct?

When you are wronged, things should be righted. When someone causes you to suffer a loss, then justice demands that they should recompense you. That’s why people sue each other.

But forgiveness is the exact opposite in a sense. Forgiveness is me giving up my right to hurt you, when you’ve hurt me. Forgiveness is me giving up the recompense that justice demands that I should have. And for God, forgiveness is rather a big deal.

Jesus once said this, Mark 11:25:

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.

So us forgiving others, as it turns out according to Jesus, is a precursor to God forgiving us. Have you ever wondered: how is it that this God of justice, is so focussed on forgiveness? How is it that justice and forgiveness can live side by side in the one person? Isn’t there a conflict between the two?

Well, the answer is yes, there is a conflict between these two, justice and forgiveness, they are opposed to one another.

Imagine if you will, the murderer who is found guilty by a court and it comes time for the judge to sentence him. Imagine if the judge said, “Look, young man, I know that you’re guilty of this terrible crime, but I have decided to forgive you today. You can go free.”

It’s inconceivable, isn’t it? We as a community would be completely outraged if something like that transpired in a court of the land, because we demand that justice should be done; that the person should be punished for their crime.

But God’s call on our lives is to forgive one another. Ephesians 4:32:

… be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

The problem with unforgiveness, other than the fact that it offends God, is that it continues to hurt us. Let’s say that someone hurts you and you decide not to forgive them. What happens then, is that you keep living through the hurt over and over again. You keep planning on how to get revenge.

You see, when we fail to forgive, the hurt just keeps on hurting. It’s like giving that person who hurt us, rent-free space in our hearts and in our minds, so that they can keep causing us pain. And when you look at it that way, it just doesn’t make sense. Sure, our sense of justice always says, hang on, I deserve justice, justice has to be done.

But common sense, says, let it go. Forgive them, without any expectation that the person who hurt you will apologise, or mend their ways or ask for your forgiveness. Because when we let it go, we end up free from the hurt. When we forgive and choose to forget, the pain starts to dissipate.

You’ve seen this and you’ve probably even done it yourself – when you fail to forgive someone and you just keep on throwing it back in their face over and over again. Is that good for you? Is that good for them? Does it change them in any way? Is it good for your relationship with that person or with God?

Marlene Dietrich once said this: Once a woman has forgiven her man, she should not reheat his sins for breakfast. It’s not bad is it? And how true. And it’s just not about women forgiving men; it’s about men forgiving women and other men.

Listen, this conflict between justice and forgiveness is nothing new. God is the God of justice, absolute justice. Nothing sways Him; He is completely impartial. And yet He is also the God of love, in fact the Bible tells us that God is love.

So what does this God of justice do with His love? What does this God of justice do when He comes across you and me who’ve sinned against Him, who’ve offended Him, and we deserve punishment?

Come on, the Bible says we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It’s true about me, it’s true about you we just know it. We’ve all turned our backs on Him in thought, word and deed at some point in our lives and probably the last time is not that long ago.

We deserve His wrath and His punishment; and yet He loves us so much. How does He satisfy His absolute sense of justice and love when it comes to you and me? John 3:16, 17:

God so loved the world, God so loved you, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that when you believe in him you won’t perish but you’ll have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world or to condemn you or me, but in order that the world might be saved, in order that you would be saved.

Forgiveness is the supreme act of love. It always, always costs us something, but it’s always, always worth it in the end. Because it sets us free from the hurt, and free to get on with our lives.

TAKING GOD AT HIS WORD

I want to share a story with you today. It’s something that really opened my eyes to the power of God’s Word and how easy it is to dismiss that power that God means to give to you and to me.

There I was, I’d just become a member of a new church and after a few months, we joined one of the small home groups of the church. Each week, on a Wednesday night, we’d head over to the leader’s place, about eight or ten of us, and we’d have a time of fellowship, a time of studying God’s Word, and a time of talking about what we’d learned.

It was a great way to get connected with people, and to learn a bit more about what God had to say to us.

It’s week two or perhaps week three of attending this small home group and we’re studying Philippians chapter 4, in particular this verse, verses 4 to 6, Paul writes:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone for the Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus.

Now, we read this passage and then a discussion ensues about worry. We all have some worry in our lives, and what God is saying here through the Apostle Paul is that we should never worry about anything.

Well, the discussion went back and forth and to and fro. People shared some of their worries in their lives and some stories of what was going on. All good, all understandable. And then, in summing up the discussion as we came to the end of it, the home group leader said something along these lines:

Well, yes, that was a good discussion. But I guess we all have worries in our lives and we just need to learn to live with them.

He was about to move on, and at this point, I just couldn’t help myself. Out of my mouth came a rather loud, a rather emphatic and insistent:

NO!!

Well at that point, I’m pretty sure my wife Jacqui was hoping the floor would open up and swallow us both up. She was embarrassed. There was dead silence in the room and everyone was starting at me, waiting, I guess, for an explanation of my outburst. So this is what I said, something along these lines:

Guys, what this passage actually says to us is quite simply this: we’re not meant to worry about anything! Nothing!! And in fact, if instead of worrying, we take the time that we would have spent worrying and we spend that time instead in praying, with thankfulness in our hearts and letting God know what’s going on – then what God is promising us here (if we’ll actually do that) is that instead of worry in our hearts, it’ll be replaced with a peace that is completely beyond our understanding, as God actually guards our hearts and our minds through Christ. Do you believe that’s true for you or not? Do you believe that that is going to work if you do it or not? Do you believe through this scripture that God is speaking to you or not?

See here were these Bible-believing, Jesus-loving, faithful, kind, gentle Christian people, reading God’s Word – what God is saying to us today, and yet, they couldn’t accept this truth into their hearts for them. They weren’t prepared to take God at His Word. They weren’t even prepared to give it a go, vaguely kind of expecting it to work.

Now, that might seem a little bit harsh. Maybe it was more that no one had ever taught them to take God at His Word. Maybe no one had ever taught them to expect God to make a powerful difference in their lives through what He says in His Word.

And you see this isn’t unique, this is not an isolated case. The Kingdom of God is full of people who don’t take God at His Word, because they’re not expecting God to do mighty things in their lives.

Now, of course, it’s easy to take a Scripture out of context and make a doctrine out of it. That’s why there are so many people preaching the God-will-make-you-rich-and-comfortable kind of Gospel. That’s not, I hope you realise, what I am talking about because it’s a distortion of the truth.

But what I am talking about is taking the powerful, often counter–intuitive things that God says in His Word and believing them with our lives. And by that I mean, acting on them. Stepping out, prepared to fall flat on your face if God isn’t true to His Word, but stepping out anyway, expecting God to honour what He says.

I mean, I’m talking about this in real practical areas of need and in living out your faith through your life. Have you ever worried about your finances, let’s say? Well, listen to what Jesus says on that front. Matthew 6:25-33; He says:

Look, I’m telling you, do not worry about your life or what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to drink, or about your body or what you are going to wear. Isn’t your life more than food, and your body more than clothing? … For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows all the things that you need. So strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well, or added to you.

Living out your faith means stepping out on the basis that God means what He says, and He’ll do what He says, and that He’ll show up when He says He’ll show up.

Living out your faith means being prepared to abandon the so-called wisdom of this world, and instead trust in God’s wisdom, in God’s truth, in God’s promises even when, especially when, there is no concrete evidence to support making that decision … other than the Word of God.

So many Christians want to live a safe and cautious life. But that’s never the life that Jesus called us to live. He called us to live a dangerous life; a risky life; a life where we take Him at His Word as being the God who is faithful beyond measure and beyond anything that we can possibly comprehend.

The only time we really experience the faithfulness of God in a powerful way, is when we’re between a rock and a hard place, and instead of playing things safe, or instead of going the world’s way, we decide to take God at His Word. We decide to step out and experience for ourselves the incredible faithfulness of God.

DON’T EXPECT THE WORLD

I don’t know about you, but I’m one of these people that loves to live life to the full. I want each and every day to be something special; and most mornings when I wake up, I have this sense of opportunity and anticipation of what the day is going to bring.

Not every morning of course. Some mornings I’m tired, especially if I’ve been travelling, and speaking til late in the evening and then I have to stump up the next day and do it all again. Some mornings it’s hard to face the next day, isn’t it?

But by and large, to me, each new day is a new opportunity. That’s exactly what the Bible teaches us. Psalm 118:24 says this:

This is the day the Lord has made, let’s rejoice in it and be glad in it.

That doesn’t mean that everything is always going to be going swimmingly well in our lives. It just means that whatever is going on, whatever our circumstances are, there’s something to look forward to today, this very day, because it is the day that the Lord has made and He has a plan for your life today.

I can say that, in fact, I know that, because again, that’s what the Bible tells us and the Bible is, after all, God’s very Word, His living Word to you and me. The Bible is God speaking directly and unequivocally to you and me today.

This is what the Lord has to say about your day today. Psalm 139:16, 17:

In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them.

So, the Lord your God knows what your today holds. He planned it an eternity ago. And it’s a good plan. It’s a plan made by this God who loves you beyond measure. But the problem is that God’s plans and our expectations are often misaligned, they just don’t match up.

So, let me ask you, what are your expectations of today and tomorrow? What are you hoping that they’ll hold? What do you want them to bring to your life?

Well, often our expectations revolve around what we think is going to be good for us. In fact “often” is something of an understatement, isn’t it? We always expect and anticipate that things should be fantastic … for me, right?

You see, our expectation generally revolves around success. Success in relationships, success at work, success in our finances and in our health and in pretty much every sphere of our lives.

We want to be healthy, wealthy and wise. Just perfect! We’d like everybody to love us and to always agree with us. We’d like lots of money in the bank so that we don’t have any financial worries. We want our marriages and our families to be perfect.

And, oh, by the way, a nice, sunny, warm day would be just perfect to top it all off Lord. Yep, that’s what I’d like today to be. And tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day and pretty much, Lord, for the rest of my life. Can you make it like that?

And Lord, I’d like to live to a ripe old age as well. Forever would be good. Nice and comfortable and safe and happy and content without any stresses or strains or arguments or ill-health to ruin my day.

That’s pretty much it isn’t it? That’s what we, by and large, expect out of life. In fact, our hopes and expectations revolve around the things of this world. We’re expecting the world of God.

But have a listen to what Jesus says about you and me, in His final prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before He goes off and gets Himself crucified for you and for me. John 17:11, 15-17:

And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world (that’s us), they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as you and I are one … I am not asking that you should take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is the truth. As you have sent me into this world, so I have sent them into the world.

So according to Jesus, we don’t belong to the world and the world doesn’t belong to us. His prayer to His father for you and me, just before He gets crucified for us, is that God should protect us and keep us safe in the truth. Protect us from what?

Protect us from the enemy, protect us from the world, because when we believe in Jesus, believe you me, the world isn’t going to like that. It’ll try to seduce you, discredit you, and stomp on you, aided and abetted by Satan and his army of demons.

Is that what you’re expecting, today, tomorrow, the next day and for the rest of your life? Because that’s exactly what Jesus promises will happen. John 16:33:

I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will face tribulation. But take courage; be of good cheer; for I have overcome the world.

What we should be expecting, what we should be hoping for is that the Father will answer Jesus’ prayer for us in our lives. What we should be hoping for is that the victory that Jesus won for us will bring courage to our hearts. And what we should be hoping for, and looking forward to and expecting is the prize that comes at the end of all of this. Philippians 1:22, 23 Paul says:

For me, living is Christ but dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me; but I do not know which one I prefer. You see, I am really hard pressed between the two: my real desire is to depart and to be with Jesus, because that is much better; but to remain here in the flesh is probably more necessary for you.

Paul is torn! What are you hoping for? The world? Or are you hoping for Christ? Are you expecting the world of God, and all the baubles and trinkets that it offers but will one day perish? Or are you hoping in this certainty of life everlasting with Jesus, forever and ever and ever, amen?

Which one? God’s plans are God’s plans. He is not going to change them for you and for me. So we can either hope for the world and struggle for the rest of our lives against God, or hope in Him and live out His plans. The question is… which one is it going to be?

What is it that makes us expect life to give us this fairy-floss dream that we know is completely and utterly unrealistic and then we get all disappointed when it doesn’t work out that way. Which it never was to start with, right?

God’s promise is not that He’s going to take away all the pain and suffering. In fact, when you listen to Jesus, it’s exactly the opposite. His promise though is, that in the midst of the pain, in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of the loss and the tears, we will know His unspeakable joy; His peace which passes all understanding, the certain, rock solid hope of an eternity with Jesus.

His promise is that with our eyes firmly set on the Author and the Perfector of our faith, we will be transformed from glory to glory into His image. The power of sin being washed away and the freedom that only comes from Christ, becoming the most abundant reality in our lives.

Come on! Is that a stunning life or what? But we can’t grab hold of that stunning life, we can’t live that life, when we’re always chasing after the trinkets that that the world dangles under our noses.

Perception is reality, and for many a Christ-follower, their wrong expectations are what is robbing them of this absolutely stunning life that God wants them to live.

Stunning on the one hand and sacrifice and suffering on the other, don’t seem to go together do they? They seem to diametrically opposed. Until you look at the Cross of Christ … the most stunning life and sacrifice of all time. That’s the life that He has for you. A stunning life.

So, will you take up your Cross and follow Him? Will you?