Few of us ever give too much thought to the fact that God has gone to a lot of trouble to make us who we are today, to get us ready for what He has for us to do. But let me tell you God actually has gone to an enormous amount of trouble to make you who you are today.

Every morning you and I get up, we look in the mirror, we men have a shave looking at ourselves each morning at that mirror bleary eyed, I guess you women no doubt are putting a bit of make up on your face because somehow that’s what society has conditioned you to do. And as we stare at ourselves in that mirror, every morning, day after day, we give precious little thought to how incredibly we’ve been made, how wonderfully we’ve been made.

Without you ever having to think about it, through a complex set of neuro-transmitters, programming that has never been achieved by humans, chemical reactions and feedback loops so complex that endocrinologists are only just beginning to understand how it all works, your body keeps you alive. It controls your temperature, nourishes every cell, manages waste, fights off infections, allows you to stand upright, gives you reflexes to catch a ball moving over a hundred miles an hour and that’s just the beginning.

You have desires, emotions, thoughts, memories so complex as to defy comprehension and understanding. Behind those drooping eyes staring back at you from the mirror each morning lies an incredible human being. Well may the psalmist write:

For I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Absolutely you are. You’re incredible and I for one simply don’t have enough faith to believe that I evolved out of some primeval amoebic slime to be what I am today. I don’t have enough faith to believe that, if you do good luck to you but I don’t.

Just the information coded on our DNA, the complexity of that, the uniqueness of that, this complex data set that’s been bio-engineered into every cell of your body that makes you who you are, each one of us is different, I mean that’s incredible. I can only look at that and whisper ‘God’.

As I said most of us don’t give any of that a second thought these days. Our self image, somehow how we see ourselves is influenced predominantly by social feedback, what other people say about us, what other people think about us, how we see ourselves compared to other people. The degree to which we in our own minds match up to the images of beauty and success and wealth that are commercially driven advertising industry with a strong profit motive dangle under our noses.

So many people on the planet today don’t think all too much of themselves but I’m here to tell you that God has gone to an enormous amount of trouble to make you who you are today and to put you where He’s put you today. And not just you and me.

We’re going to kick off today looking at Moses in the Old Testament. Look here’s the picture; because of Joseph, you know the one of technicolour dreamcoat fame, the Hebrew nation has ended up in Egypt. It all started with a famine, you can read about it in Genesis chapters 37 through 50. I mean it’s a cracking yarn and a fascinating read.

But now Joseph is long dead, there’s a new Pharaoh on the throne in Egypt and the Hebrews, well they’re breeding like rabbits so the Egyptians are getting really worried, concerned that the Hebrews might end up taking over the country. So Pharaoh comes up with a brilliant idea to kill all the baby boys born to the Hebrews.

That’s where Moses story begins, let’s have a look at it, Exodus chapter 2 verses 1 to 10.

A man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw that he was a fine baby she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him and plastered it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it up she saw a child, he was crying so she took pity upon him. “This must be one of the Hebrew’s children” she said. Then his sister said to the Pharaohs daughter, ‘shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?

Pharaohs daughter said to her ‘yes’. So the girl went and called the child’s mother and Pharaohs daughter said to her, ‘take this child and nurse him for me and I will give you wages’. So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and she took him as her son. She named him Moses because she said, ‘I drew him up out of the water.

Now quite possibly you’ve read this story before and like your own story never thought all too much about it but just stop and think. Moses goes on to become one of the greatest leaders that Israel has ever had leading his people, God’s people, out of slavery and oppression in Egypt to the threshold of the Promised Land, the land that God had promised to the father of the nation Abraham almost five centuries before.

So in terrible circumstances where babies were being slaughtered on mass God not only saves Moses with the help of his sister herself a child but He positions young Moses in Pharaoh’s household. Experience that will become very important when he’s eighty years old, when Moses goes to Pharaoh to negotiate Israel’s release.

See this isn’t just some story, it’s a part of Gods incredible plan to bring Israel to the Promised Land and then centuries later to bring Jesus into this world. My point? There’s a big picture here and even someone as prominent as Moses is just a bit player in God’s plan. The point is God does have a plan and God creates people and positions people in incredible ways.

Now if you believe in Jesus, if you’re one of Gods people then let me tell you you’re part of that plan. If you don’t believe in Jesus yet and you’re not one of God’s people you know what, you’re still part of His plan because God has a passion to fit you into His plan. You’re not a descendant of some primeval amoebic slime, you’re a descendant, you’re a child of the living God who created you and He has a plan.

Jeremiah chapter 29 verse 11;

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare not for your harm to give you a future with hope.

And this reality, this story, your story is intertwined with God’s story. That part that God already has for you to play as He draws humanity towards Himself is the scene, the backdrop, the context of your life and where you are at the moment it’s the big picture, the big story of your life and it’s time for you to get a grip of the incredible trouble that God’s gone to to make you who you are, to put you where He’s put you.

To give you the gifts and the abilities and the experiences and the insights that He’s bred into you through your DNA and nurtured you through the experience on your journey thus far.

Do you get it? You are fearfully and wonderfully made and God has a plan for you, God has a purpose for you. It’s all summed up beautifully in a single verse that the Apostle Paul penned over a thousand years later when he was writing a letter to his friends in Ephesus. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10.

For you are Gods workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for you to do.

That God prepared beforehand. Literally in the original Greek ‘for you to walk in to’. The good works that God prepared beforehand to be your way of life. God has a plan for your life, an incredible powerful plan to use all the good things and even all the bad things that have ever happened to you, to bless other people. But the sad reality is that so many people miss that plan. They look in that mirror day after day and they end up wasting their lives.

We all like to receive gifts, our birthday, at Christmas time. I mean who doesn’t like to unwrap a gift and get a pleasant surprise? But if only, if only we realised the abundance of the gifts that God has already given us, if only.

You know how it goes; you compare yourself to other people and invariably in your own mind you find yourself coming up short. Everybody else seems to be smarter, better looking, more articulate, more successful, better off than you. They seem to have a better marriage, more perfect children, a perfect marriage, a perfect job and so it’s all too easy to come to the conclusion that you just don’t make the grade.

You’re something less than all those other people out there but actually what we tend to do is we create this composite picture of perfection by plucking the best bits out of the lives of the people around us, mixing in with that advertising industry fairy dust and you know all those images of beauty and success that they dangle under your nose and then creating this unrealistic set of expectations that no human being could ever live up to.

But there you have the formula of low self esteem. See that’s what people do and if that’s how you see yourself, as someone who just doesn’t measure up, then what sort of a life are you going to end up living do you think, huh?

There’s a quote going around that’s attributed to Einstein but actually he didn’t say it, nevertheless it’s a good one.

Everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will forever live it’s life believing that it’s stupid.

I mean its true isn’t it? If we establish our self worth by comparing ourselves with other people then chances are we’re going to come off second best every time. And it’s that wrong image of ‘self’ that’s ruining many a life, it’s that wrong image of ‘self’ that’s causing people en mass to waste their lives.

See as far as I’m concerned there could be nothing worse than getting to the end of my days and looking back on a wasted life. Paul, not the Apostle Paul but the owner of one of my local cafes has come to know me reasonably well. I wandered in for breakfast at about 9 o’clock one morning, obviously dressed for work and he said, “ah, you’re off to work are you?” And I said, “well no I’ve just finished a four hour TV shoot”.

We’d started you see just before five in the morning, anyway he went off to go and get me my usual cup of coffee, smiling and shaking his head as he muttered, “you’re not going to die wondering are you Berni?”   The answer is “no, I am not going to die wondering.” I intend to live my life absolutely to the full. I intend to get to the end having completely spent my life on what God has called me to do.

See I don’t want to be lying on my death bed looking at a life of wasted opportunities. Now I know what some people are thinking at this point, “well that’s all well and good for you Berni, God’s given you some gifts and some abilities to go and do what you’re doing, good for you but I don’t have those gifts and abilities.”

If that’s what’s rattling around through your head at the moment then here’s my answer to you. “Of course you don’t have my gifts and abilities, you were never meant to be me. God’s given you your own set of gifts and abilities.” And at this point, to keep this conversation going there are some people, perhaps you’re one of them thinking, “but I don’t have any gifts and abilities.”

Well that simply isn’t true because that’s not what God says, 1 Peter chapter 4 verse 10 says this;

As each has received a gift use it to serve one another as good stewards of Gods very grace.

In other words, we have all received at least one gift from God. Again the Apostle Paul writing to the Church in Corinth about spiritual gifts that God has bestowed on us, 1 Corinthians chapter 12 verses 4 to 6.

Now there are a variety of gifts but the same Spirit and there are a variety of services but the same Lord, there are a variety of activities but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

See there it is again, to each one has been given a spiritual gift it’s just that they’re all different. In verse 11 of the same chapter it says of those gifts;

All these are activated by one of the same Spirit who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

So do you see how completely futile it is to compare yourself to other people. I mean God has sovereignly decided what gift He was going to give each one of us but the point is that He does give us a particular gift or ability that we’re meant to use, to exercise for the common good.

I would have loved to have been given the gift of healing but instead God’s given me a gift to tell stories. What sort of a gift is that? You might ask. Well the one thing that I can do really well is to take complex things and synthesize them, bring them together in a way that not only people understand and relate to but in a way that moves them to do something about what they’ve just heard.

Now that’s not a boast, that’s not a statement I make out of pride, it’s a simple statement of fact. There are lots of other things that I’m not good at. If I compare myself to friends of mine like a good friend of mine Pastor Greg Holder, he’s so pastorally gifted. If I compared myself to him I’d come off thinking ‘well you know what, I’m uncaring, I’m unloving’. I’m not by the way, I care deeply about you which is why I’m doing what God made me to do.

Listen up, God has gifted you in a special way and His plan for you is to use that gift for the common good. Now you don’t always find your gift listed in the Bible. I mean storytelling is not listed as a gift in the Bible but here we are. See there are three places in the New Testament that talk about gifts or gifting, Romans chapter 12, 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and Ephesians chapter 4 but when I read them, as I said I don’t read storytelling as one of the gifts.

I don’t read about conceptualising and synthesising complex issues into simple explanations as one of the gifts. You have a gift, at least one, possibly more and comparing yourself to other people ain’t going to do it for you. God has given you a gift or an ability and something that you love doing, something that you can do better than just about anyone else you know.

And in that gift you will discover your calling, you’ll discover the part of Gods plan that God has called you to play, to do with the gifts and abilities, the natural talents and motivations that He’s given you and nobody can take that away from you. Romans 11, verse 29.

For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

There’s no turning them around, there’s no taking them away. Perhaps that’s why people so often talk about destiny. God has a destiny for you, God has a plan for you and He’s given you everything that you need to fulfil that destiny, He made you with your destiny in mind.

Back to one of my favourite passages of Scripture, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10;

You are Gods workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for you to do.

In other words God’s handcrafted you to do what He’s ordained you to do even before time begun. You are a one off piece of workmanship made perfectly fit for purpose, the purpose that God has for you and so here it is, my definition of a wasted life drawn straight out of this verse, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10.

A wasted life is when we don’t do what God has made us to do. A wasted life is when we squander the gifts and the abilities that God’s given us by spending them on ourselves instead of spending them on others in honour of the God who gave them to us in the first place and for someone who before coming to Christ over twenty years ago now, turned wasting his gifts and abilities on himself, I can tell you it was a hollow pursuit.

As much as we think gaining worldly success will fulfil us it doesn’t, in fact it left me so empty, so lost that I almost took my own life. Do yourself a favour, don’t waste your life.

When we were young we all had dreams for our lives, that’s what we do when we’re young, we dream but pretty soon the reality of eking out an existence takes over and the dreams die. Hey that’s sad because what it means is that all too many people miss out on the amazing things that God has in store for them. Dreams, as things turn out, are incredibly important.

Dreams come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. Of course we all daydream and you know something that’s a really important thing to do. You see often we think of daydreaming as something of a negative but one of the great attributes of leaders, in particular, is the ability to dream, the ability to let the mind wander, to roam free, to explore possibilities, to visualise the future.

In leading this ministry of Christianityworks that I’m involved in I consider it really important to dream, to take the time quietly to think about possibilities, to weigh options, to picture what some new opportunity might look like when we get there and so often I’ve walked into the office with that look on my face that the staff have come to recognise and someone whispers, “oh no, Berni’s come up with some other crazy idea, I wonder what it is this time.”

Not all of them come off, not every dream turns into a reality. Sometimes they’re not practical, sometimes the timing isn’t right, sometimes God closes the door but there are many times that those dreams have become a reality. There’s many times when God’s been in them and done amazing things.

Taking the ministry to Africa when we didn’t have anywhere near the resources to do that but where now millions of people each week are listening to this program. Redeveloping our website to become really friendly, to serve up teaching resources in innovative different ways when again we didn’t have the funds to do that but now a few years on it’s completely revolutionanised the reach and the impact of the ministry.

I want to take you today into Gods Word to show you a particularly odd, a particularly weird manifestation of someone’s dream. We’re going to join Moses again, he’s grown up now, just under forty years old and something happens that really upsets his life. Exodus chapter 2 verses 11 to 15.

One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and he saw their forced labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way, he looked that way and seeing that no one was there he killed that Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

When he went out the next day he saw two Hebrews fighting and he said to the one who was in the wrong, ‘why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?’ And the man answers, ‘who made you a ruler and judge over us? Did you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ Then Moses was afraid and thought surely this thing is known. When Pharaoh heard of it he sought to kill Moses but Moses fled from the Pharaoh, he settled in the land of Median and sat down by a well.

So remember the story, Moses is born a Hebrew at the time when Hebrew’s were slaves in Egypt but they were becoming so numerous that Pharaoh decides to kill all the baby boys that are born to the Hebrews, a terrible genocide murdering babies, can you imagine? But Moses’ mother puts him in a basket that floats down the Nile and is found by Pharaoh’s daughter who decides to adopt him and bring him up as her own child.

So for the last forty years Moses had been living a life of incredible power and privilege but you know the saying, ‘blood is thicker than water’ and when, as a Hebrew, he kills an Egyptian his life is in danger and he has to flee to Median which is way out beyond the back of nowhere when you compare it to the thriving metropolis, the centre of world power, where he had lived such a privileged life for the past forty years.

So what does this have to do with Moses having a dream? Well you see it wasn’t exactly a dream, not quite yet, Moses had no idea that one day forty years later aged eighty he would lead Israel out of Egypt, out of slavery towards the Promised Land and in such a spectacular fashion.

But what he did have in his heart was a love for his people, an anger at the way they were being mistreated. In him was beating the heart of God for His people and that’s what caused him to lash out and kill the Egyptian oppressor. You see that’s kind of how dreams begin, they begin in the heart with motivations, with natural inclinations.

That’s why the gifts listed in Romans chapter 12 verses 4 to 8 are often called motivational giftings, they spawn from gifts that God has engineered into your DNA. I remember when I first became a Christian, age thirty six, I started dreaming about preaching to large groups of people, millions of people. I couldn’t tell anyone about those dreams because they would have thought that I was self deluded at best and prideful at worst.

They were crazy dreams, they were irrational dreams particularly given the pain and the difficult circumstances that I was travelling through at the time and when we have those dreams there’s one of two things we can do with them, we can get all rational, we can tell ourselves they are ridiculous which clearly they are and close them down and more and more that’s what people do amidst the hectic ‘here and now’ focused lives that we lead.

The other thing we can do is to nurture them, to turn them over, to develop them, to kind of set them free in our hearts and in our minds and see where they take us. To see whether God opens some doors to step through and start to realise those dreams. And it seems to me hanging onto those dreams during the dark times, the difficult times, protecting them, nurturing them until the sun shines again is one of the most important things that we can do to live the life that God has called us to live.

Moses must have wondered on many occasions over the ensuing forty years that he was spending tending sheep in the wilderness what that day had been all about, why he lashed out, whether it was worth it. But then, one day, when God was ready, when Moses was eighty years old God called him to do the ‘thing’ that He created him to do.

I have seen the suffering in my people (said God) go and tell Pharaoh to let my people go. See those motivations that God has placed in your heart, those dreams that you keep dreaming, protect them because one day God will be ready and it maybe sooner than you think.

You know for me it was eight years from when I first started dreaming those dreams of sharing the good news of Jesus with millions of people until God finally called me into this ministry of Christianityworks and when He did the ministry was a wreck, it was ready to fold, it wasn’t ministering to anyone much and as a result it had no supporters and therefore no funds.

But over the last decade and a bit we have seen God do so many amazing things. I’ve seen so many of the things that I dreamed about all those years before come to fruition. When I get an email from an African terrorist who’s killed goodness knows how many people, who hears this program on the radio and gives his life to Christ and lays down his gun, I think back to those dreams, then they were just dreams, now we’re living that dream.

When I get an email from a woman who was about to swallow some pills and take her own life in the UK and she’d written her farewell letters to her husband and her daughter when this program came on air and I happened to be talking that day about her favourite Bible verse, God pulled her back from the brink and has changed her life.

Now I am so glad that God didn’t let the dream die during the dark days when all I could see was storm clouds. Listen to me, don’t stop dreaming, don’t lower your gaze to the here and now and making more money and buying the latest gadget and all that stuff. Let the Holy Spirit nurture those dreams in your heart. Set your mind free to roam and to wander because God wants to use the gifts and the abilities that He has engineered into your DNA to make a difference in this world.

God wants to use your experiences, all the things you have been through, good and bad to help you minister His love into this world. Anything else is a waste of life.

I guess most of us believe in some sense of destiny, some sense of calling. Of course that’s all well and good in theory but in practice, life, you know, just grinds on and the reality is that most people have lost any sense they may have had that God has some sort of calling on their lives.

It’s true isn’t it? We all love to think that there’s some, I don’t know, destiny for our lives, some call that there is to fulfil, that somehow there’s a point to life that when we’re gone we’ll have left our mark, that our lives would have had some significance, some purpose. That’s what we’d like to think. But the cold harsh reality for most people is that the sheer grind of daily life obscures any altruistic narrative that we might have had for our lives.

I remember as a young man, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I had all sorts of hopes and dreams for the future but by the time your mid twenties are over and done with and you’re married with a mortgage with children, trying to carve out a career, dealing with the pressures of work and family and finance and all that stuff, it’s head down, ploughing through it all, expending all your energy on just getting through each day.

So you get to the weekend, you flop on the lounge exhausted, you have to do the shopping and cleaning and run the children around here and there and everywhere else, mow the lawn perhaps, just so you can get back to it again on Monday.

And so day by day, week by week, month by month and even year by year life just slips inexorably by until all of a sudden you look up and ten years has gone by and then another ten years and then another and before you realise it you’re looking back on a life of what exactly? Just eking out an existence, just making it by?

That’s the reality for most people isn’t it? Living a life that doesn’t seem to count for much. A life that doesn’t seem to make much of an impact in this world. The reality is that dragging ourselves out of our comfort zones is not at all easy. When the ordinariness of life appears to be so demanding and yet strangely at the same time so alluring. There’s an inertia about your life when it comes to stepping out and following God, isn’t there?

That’s certainly what Moses found. Forty years of living in Pharaohs house in privilege and in comfort, then forty years living in wilderness tending the sheep so by the time God comes to him and calls him to step up to the mark Moses is a burnt out old wreck without any self confidence whatsoever in his own abilities and giftings and the call of God.

By the time God comes to him to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh ‘let my people go’ Moses, well you’d have to say he’s pretty well convinced that he’s over the hill. You’d think he’d be jumping at the chance to do something of significance but not so. Have a listen, Exodus chapter 3 verses 1 to 10.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law Jethro, the priest of Median. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush. He looked and the bush was blazing yet it was not consumed.

Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush isn’t burned up’. When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses’ and he said, ‘here I am’. Then God said, ‘come no closer, remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you’re standing is holy ground.

He said further, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’ and Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry on account of their task masters.

Indeed I know all their suffering and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hitites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.

The cry of the Israelites has come to me. I have also seen how the Egyptian’s oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt’. But Moses said to God, ‘who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, ‘I’ll be with you and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt you shall worship me on this mountain.

So there was a pressing need, it spoke right into Moses heart for his people and yet his first reaction was, in effect to say, “God you’re kidding me right?” And if you read on you’ll see that he came up with a least four more excuses why it wouldn’t be a good idea for God to send him of all people despite the miracles of power God showed him, to the point where God became angry with Moses. Have a listen, Exodus chapter 4 verses 13 and 14.

But Moses said (this is excuse number five) ‘oh my Lord please send someone else’. Then the anger of God was kindled against Moses and he said, ‘what of your brother Aaron, the Levite?

And see that’s often the way with us too. Sure it’s fine to dream about the amazing things that God’s going to do through us one day, one day a long way in the future and oh, by the way in our dreams there are never any challenges or obstacles, it’s always plain sailing. But when that day comes, when God finally comes along and taps you on the shoulder, when dreaming goes from comfortable soft sofa to getting out there on the dusty hard road with Jesus, what, me….. God surely you should send someone else, someone far better qualified than me.

1 Corinthians chapter 1 verses 26 to 29.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth but God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

See that’s the truth of the matter, God calls simple people like you and me to do the things He wants done on this earth, bog ordinary people like you and me to do and to achieve absolutely extraordinary things through the extraordinary power of an extraordinary God. Don’t miss out on that day, don’t ignore God’s call on your life because if you do one day you’ll be looking back on a wasted life and what a tragedy that would be.

I distinctly remember when God was in the process of calling me out of my comfortable affluent IT consulting career into full time ministry. You know it wasn’t an easy step to make. It was about going from lots of money to a ministry that was ailing and failing at the time. It was about leaving my career behind, my reputation behind, everything I’d worked so hard for for over twenty years behind.

And a dear friend of mine, Dave Hansen who now lives in Kansas City serving the Lord there sent me a book called Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. I read that book and was so deeply convinced of the horror of a wasted life, the horror of coming to the end and looking back on a life of regret, a series of ‘what if I had….’ decisions, that I took the step.

Now look, not everyone, praise God, is called into full time ministry. Some people are called to sacrifice in other ways, to give generously, to serve as leaders at their Church, to help the poor, the needy, the homeless, the hurting, each according to the gifts and abilities and the resources that the Lord our God has entrusted us with.

But let me come back to my definition of a waste of life. It’s a life where we don’t do what God has called us to do. A life where we waste our resources and our gifts and our energies on ourselves rather than as God had planned. It is the most unfulfilling life, it’s a waste. Remember Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10;

We are Gods workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to walk in to.

So how are you going to spend the rest of your life?

One of the reasons that so many people who love Jesus, who believe in Jesus, don’t go on to live the life that God has planned for them is that there are obstacles on the road. Obstacles that seem completely insurmountable and that stops them dead in their tracks.

For many people and I’ve been in this space too from time to time, there seems to be a yawning gap between what they hear being preached on Sunday morning and how their lives play themselves out Monday through Saturday. You see there seems to be a huge gap between the powerful statements about faith and Gods plan and overcoming obstacles on the one hand and actually living life on the other.

How often have you heard or read these words from Jesus in Matthew chapter 17 verse 20?

Truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you’ll say to this mountain ‘move from here to there’ and it will move and nothing will be impossible for you.

Well that’s just fine and dandy, thank you Jesus but that doesn’t seem to be how my life works. There are these obstacles in the road and they don’t seem to be moving and so I’m stuck in this rut. Here I am, I want to serve the Lord but things just aren’t happening. And then Jesus comes along with His very high statements about faith and prayer. Here’s another one, John chapter 15 verse 7.

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

You see the dilemma don’t you? The Bible, in fact Jesus, seems to promise one thing and yet our cold hard experience in life seems to declare the complete opposite. How often have you asked God for something and it hasn’t happened? The answer for anybody who’s been praying for any length of time is lots of times, right?

And it’s this dilemma that discourages so many people from stepping out and living the life that God has planned for them. You see it’s this yawning gap that has many people turning back in droves, back to their old lives, back to their comfort zones, back to living for themselves rather than pouring out their lives for others in Jesus’ name. Fact: Obstacles make us want to turn back.

Over the course of this week, over the last couple of weeks we’ve been talking a bit about the old Moses, this man whom God called from obscurity to go tell Pharaoh ‘to let my people go’. I’m going to fast forward just a bit from where we were the other day, Moses goes and confronts Pharaoh, Pharaoh says no, so now God sends ten plagues on Egypt.

Eventually Pharaoh relents and the Israelites flee through the Red Sea which God has miraculously parted for them and then the Egyptian army is destroyed as the sea comes back and drowns them. The greatest military machine on earth was completely destroyed by God. I mean that’s all pretty miraculous wouldn’t you say?

If you or I had been one of the Israelites following Moses out of Egypt, I mean you would have been totally amazed. Wouldn’t it have completely changed your perspective of God having seen that? Sure it would but listen to what happens the moment the Israelites discover that there isn’t any food to eat or water to drink out there in the desert.

So God’s done these amazing miracles and now they need food and water. Exodus chapter 16 verses 2 and 3.

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘if only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the flesh pots and ate our fill of bread. For you have brought us out in the wilderness to kill us, this whole assembly with hunger.

The moment they run into their very first obstacle they hanker to return to the safety and the predictability of Egypt even though back there they were oppressed as slaves. Why is that? Because the obstacle confronting them, the lack of food and the lack of water for a million or so people out in the desert appeared to be completely insurmountable and in human terms it was.

A wise person once said ‘when God is about to do something great He starts with a difficulty but when God is about to do something truly magnificent He starts with an impossibility’. Would you like to know what God did next for the Israelites? It comes in the very next verse, Exodus chapter 16 starting at verse 4.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘I’m going to rain bread from heaven for you and each day the people will go out and gather enough for just that day. In that day I will test them whether they will follow my instructions or not. But on the sixth day when they prepare what they bring in it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.

So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘in the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord because yes He has heard your complaining against Him. For what are we that you complain against us.

And Moses said, ‘when the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning because the Lord has heard the complaining that you have uttered against Him. What are we? Your complaining is not against us but against the Lord.

And then God did what He said, He rained food down from heaven because that’s what God can do. What seems impossible to you and me is simply an opportunity for God to display His power and His glory. Jeremiah chapter 32 verse 17;

Ah Lord God, it was you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm. Nothing is impossible for you.

And all that you and I need is just a mustard seed of faith, that’s all. Just stop and think about it. To move a mountain you don’t need faith that’s bigger than the mountain, that’s what we normally think, the laws of nature, the laws of physics that we understand and live by require the force that moves the mountain to be bigger and more powerful than the mountain.

So we get to thinking that we have to be bigger and more powerful, that our faith has to be bigger and more powerful when all along simply a mustard seed of faith will do. Why? Because God created the universe and nothing is impossible for Him. To Him that mountain, that massive obstacle on your road is less than a speck of dust.

When are we going to finally wake up to the fact that obstacles are par for the course, obstacles are the opportunity for God to do the miraculous, obstacles are simply no excuse for a wasted life.

When I stepped out into the ministry of Christianityworks back in 2004 the ministry was dead broke, we weren’t producing any radio or TV programs which is our reason for being and everything looked impossible. Fortunately I was still young enough as a Christian to have child like faith, simply to believe that God would do it.

I didn’t have a clue about anything much really. No idea on how to produce radio messages, no idea about how to approach radio stations even if we had something to put to air. No idea about how to get people to support the ministry so it could go on, nothing, not a clue. But God had all He needed. He had a mustard seed of faith in my heart and that is all He needed.

These days people look at the ministry of Christianityworks, the ministry that produces these daily programs and they smile at how successful it is, millions of listeners around the world each week, wow – amazing. Yeah but you have no idea how many mountains have been moved along the way each time testing our faith, each time taking us to the edge, each time having us down on our knees imploring God to intervene.

There have been so many impossible situations, so many times when this ministry should have folded since it was founded in 1957 but each time God showed up. Not in the way we had planned, not always to make it easy but to take us to the next level and the next level all the time growing our faith, all the time testing our resolve, all the time walking with us, going ahead of us, preparing the way even though we couldn’t see it.

Obstacles are no excuse for turning back. Obstacles are no excuse for a wasted life because nothing is impossible for God.