A Different Perspective Official Podcast

They say that God is a God of Blessing.  Hmm.  So how come there's so much suffering in the world?  What went wrong?  How come I have to suffer?  Where's God's blessing then?
The classic dilemma when we talk about God's blessing is, "Well okay, so if God is a god of blessing, how come there is so much suffering in the world? How come I've had to go through this and this and that? How come there are natural disasters? Come on, how come?" And you know something, that's a very real and a very reasonable question. How come?
And it's something that's always in the back of my mind when I talk with people about God's blessing because chances are someone who is listening is going to be suffering right at the moment. And that person may well find any notion of God being a god of blessing, pretty difficult to swallow just now. So let's unpack that just a bit today. How come?
Right from the beginning God was a god of blessing. Yesterday on the program we had a look at the very, very first chapter in the Bible, Genesis chapter 1. And when God creates the first living creatures he blesses them and gets them to multiply and fill the earth. And when God creates us, male and female, he blesses us by handing over the whole creation to us. "Here, take all the birds and the fish and the beasts and have it all, it's yours to use, subdue them, fill the earth, multiply."
And when you look through the Bible, the whole concept of blessing, the word bless, appears over 350 times but at the same time there's plenty of bad stuff that happens to people right through the Bible, and plenty of bad stuff that happens to people today, here and now.
Sometimes we look at them and quietly think, "Well, you know, he deserved that." But other times they're innocent people – really bad things happen and we wonder, "Well, if God is a loving God like those Christians say that He is, this God who wants to bless us, supposedly, if that's who He is, how can He let those things happen to people like that?" That is a really good question.
One of my favourite actors, (I grew up as a baby boomer) one of my favourite television shows of all time is MASH. It's an American program and it ran for, I think, 11 seasons. And the star of MASH is a man called Alan Alda, an actor whom I just enormously admire and respect. He played Hawkeye Pearce in MASH and played a whole bunch of things afterwards. I saw him recently interviewed on a program called, "Inside the Actors Studio". The interviewer was a man called James Lipton and he asks Alan Alda a question like this, he says, "If there is a God, what do you want to say to him when you get to heaven?"
Now, Alan Alda is a really friendly, warm, engaging kind of guy and it's been a really warm and friendly and engaging kind of interview until Lipton asks this question. And Alda's face goes black and dark and serious and he says something like this, "God. God, tell me about the earthquakes and the tsunamis and the suffering. Tell me all that was just a bit of a joke."
And a lot of people feel like that about God. Christians talk about a God of blessings, Christians talk about a God of love but there's a whole bunch of bad stuff happening in this world. How do you explain that away? Okay, why? If God is a god of blessing, how come all this suffering is going on?
So we've looked at God's own account of his creation in Genesis, chapter 1. The very first living creatures he creates he blesses them and says, "Go and multiply and fill the earth." He creates us and he hands the whole thing over to us, enormous blessing. And here are you and I, joint owners in creation because God created us in his own image and he handed the whole thing over to us. And when you stop and think about that that was a huge blessing.
Right at the point of creation, God was in the blessing business. It's profound. It's a plan for us to live in relationship with him. But then something happens. Even though God has given Adam and Eve the Garden of Eden, to keep it, to till it, to be blessed there – He has this perfect plan of blessing – Adam and Eve rebel! They do the one thing that God says, "Don't do this" but eat the apple from this one tree. And there were consequences. Rebellion against God always does have consequences.
And God to the woman said, "Well, I will greatly increase your pains in child bearing. With pain you will give birth to children, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you." And he turns to Adam and he says, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field, by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Enter pain and suffering into the history of humanity and it's been there for all of humanity ever since. Now you might say to me, "Berni that is just so insensitive. What about when there's a still-born baby? What about the tens of thousands that are killed in a tsunami? What about the young teenager who gets raped and murdered? How can you say that it's sin? How can you say that it's punishment from God? How can you say that?"
Here it is, God made us in His image but when we don't like who He is, when it doesn't suit us, we try and remake him in our own image. God's a god of blessing but that blessing happens when we're in a relationship with Him. It's really well laid out in a part of the Bible and I encourage you to go have a look and read this, Leviticus chapter 26. It's one of the first books of the Old Testament. It's a perfect summary of where God stands on this. The old covenant was the promise between God and his people of Israel and he lays that out in this chapter, let's go there beginning in verse 1. He says:
Don't make idols or set up sacred stones and bow to them because I am the Lord your God. Observe my Sabbaths and have reverence for my sanctuary because I am the Lord your God. If you follow these decrees and you are careful to obey my commands, I'll send you rain in its season and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit. Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting and you'll eat all the food you want and live in your land in safety. I'll grant peace in the land and you'll lie down and no-one will make you afraid and I'll remove the savage beast from the land and the sword will not pass through your land ...
You'll pursue your enemies and they'll fall before you. Five of you will chase a hundred and a hundred of you will chase a thousand and your enemies will fall by the sword before you. I'll look on you with favour, I'll make you fruitful, increase your numbers and I will keep my covenant with you.
You will still be eating last years harvest when you will have to clear it out to make room for the new. I'll put my dwelling place with you, I'll be among you, I'll walk among you. I'll be your God and you will be my people because I'm the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you wouldn't live in slavery anymore BUT if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, if you reject me and my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out my commandments and so violate my covenant then I will do this to you. I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases, fevers that will destroy your sight and drain away your life. You'll plant seed in vain because your enemies will eat it. I'll set my face against you so that you'll be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you and you will flee even when no-one is pursuing you.
You see? God is a god of blessing. God wants to have a relationship with YOU and with me and that's the greatest blessing of all. I was talking to a man recently, my own age, he's a really good businessman. He has three adult sons and he wanted to bless his sons, form a company with them and do this and do that. One by one they rejected him, they turned their backs on him and they walked away and he said, "I wanted to bless them but I couldn't."
The greatest sadness of his life and that's what God's like. God is a god of blessing but when we reject him, when we turn away from him, there are consequences. Now, how do God's blessings still fit into this world that's turned its back on him? Well we'll look at that tomorrow on the program.

They say that God is a God of Blessing.  Is He?  I mean – does God really want to bless you and me and if He does, how does that happen?
The words "God" and "Blessing" somehow seem to go naturally together. In fact, God is a God who wants to bless us … or is he? Each one of us can look back on our lives and point to some times of great joy and blessing, and times of hurt and disappointment and sorrow and loneliness. When it seemed that if there is a God who blesses, well he must of deserted us or at least that's how it can feel. What do you think?
If God is God, is He a God of blessing or is that just some unbalanced kind of secular view of God that's crept in? Or is God a god who really doesn't care about us? For me at least getting a real handle of what God's up to in my life, what his plans are, is kind of where the rubber of faith hits the road of life.
Why is this whole thing of God's blessing so important? I think, at least I see a lot of misunderstanding about God and his heart and where He stands on blessing us. There seems to be two extremes, two opposite ends of the spectrum where people take extreme views.
At one end it goes something like this, "God wants to bless me therefore I should believe him for the next new Mercedes and the next million dollars and the next bigger house". In effect, "God is some sort of sugar daddy, it's all about me, I am at centre stage, I name it and I claim it". And you know something? Lots of Christians teach it and lots more believe it!
The problem I have with that is, when I compare that on the one hand to Jesus on the cross – He lost everything for you and me, even the clothes on his back; beaten and brutalised, he lost his life. And this sort of 'God is a sugar daddy' end of the spectrum really jars with the cross, doesn't it? And it leads to some of the worst excesses – the telly-evangelists pressuring people for money and flying around in private jets. Is that where this understanding of blessing should end up, do you think?
Now the other end of the spectrum says you have to be poor to serve God. Money is evil! We just had someone ring up at midnight the other night and leave a message on the phone to say, "How dare you sell a CD and then how dare you ask for support for your ministry. Money is evil; people who have money are evil." I was talking to a man in India recently and of course India is a land of huge extremes; you have the very rich and you have many, many very, very poor people. And he was very critical of this particular Christian leader who just had a nice house in a nice suburb, he believed it was wrong.
You see, I look at that end of the spectrum and I go to the Bible and I read about Abraham. Abraham was the man that God chose to engage with first. Abraham was rich, King Solomon one of the wisest men that ever walked the earth, he was very rich, he was full of God's wisdom.
You can see the problem. At the one end you can have people getting these extreme prosperity views in their heads. Thinking it's all about them and their material wealth and it plays right into the hands of the world – me, me, me! The next plasma TV; the next big car; if you don't have that then well ... obviously you don't have enough faith. On the other hand this perception that you have to be poor to be a Christian, well if that were the case, who would ever fund the work of the Lord on this planet.
I mean, God has always chosen to fund his work through his people. I know some very, very wealthy Christian business people who do an enormous amount to fund the work of the Kingdom of God. Talk of the pure monetary thing is the reality of tragedy and pain and suffering and a lot of times it's indiscriminate. Earthquakes, tsunamis, a young person who loves Jesus and dies at the age of eighteen with cancer, car crashes and divorce and retrenchment, all that stuff of life, we all experience those things, are you with me?
So what's Gods plan? Does God want to bless you and me or not? Is it okay for us to ask for his blessing? Is it okay to expect his blessing or is that just presumptuous? This is an important question because it is where the rubber hits the road. You get up in the morning and you maybe pray and you look forward to the day, how do you pray? What do you give thanks for? What do you ask for? Is it okay to ask for God's blessing in this difficult situation that's going to happen at work this afternoon? God, where are you in all of that?
That's why we're having a little series this week on the program that I've called 'Blessed to be a Blessing'. I'm a simple man. I just open the Bible, I see what God's saying on the subject, get it in balance. God's Word empowers us and the problem that I often see when people look at this subject of God's blessing is that you can take just one verse and say, "Oh, that's it." And you end up with one of those extreme positions that I was talking about before. But over the course of this week, on the program, we're going to get to look at the whole thing from God's perspective.
Is God a god who blesses? What does blessing mean? The main connotation is God's divine favour – God intervening to make something better or to give us something that will bring joy or happiness. There's financial blessing of course, there's spiritual blessing, there's physical blessing like healing, anything and everything, God's divine favour, his blessing becoming active in our lives. Question is, is God in the blessing business?
When I see the word "bless" or "blesses" or "blessed" or "blessing", 358 times in the Bible and the very first time it appears is in the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, verse 22. Let's go there and have a bit of a look. This is where God creates all of creation. He makes light out of darkness and the heavens and the earth and the oceans and the dry land and the plants and the first time he creates a living creature, this is what He says:
So God created the creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teams according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind and God saw that it was good." Now look at this, "God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water and the seas and let the birds increase on the earth.
And the second time the concept of blessing happens in the Bible is just a few verses on in that same chapter, that first chapter of Genesis, verse 26:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female, he created them.
God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish in the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
And then God said to them, "I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They'll be yours for food and to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground - everything that has breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food. And it was so.
Let me ask you something: Do you think God is in the blessing business? The whole creation thing, the whole idea of creation is that God created this wondrous, wondrous universe and then he kind of comes along and makes you and me and he makes us part owners, joint owners in the whole of his creation. He gives the whole thing over to us and says, "Look it's yours, you own it, you subdue it, you use it, it's my blessing to you." But as we'll see tomorrow on the program there was something we did that interrupted that blessing, that broke that blessing. And even after we do those things, even after we rebel and turn our back on God, you know something, it doesn't change who God is.

Insecurity. It's out there in plague proportions. Ruined relationships.  Ruined lives. If you know someone who suffers from insecurity – what's the greatest gift that you can give them?
Over the last few days on A Different Perspective we have been looking at this whole issue of insecurity. We all have some insecurities, some areas in our lives, work or personal, or emotional that we are sensitive about. When someone treads on that spot it hurts and we withdraw or we come out punching.
Over the last twenty years or so I have worked in about 200 organisations across Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand right across a lot of cultures and I am here to tell you that insecurity is universal problem. I have enough stories and examples to write a book on the subject, a really thick book.
Over that time I have come to the conclusion that our failure to deal effectively lovingly, sensitively, kindly with insecurity, other peoples and our own, is one of the biggest sources of pain, conflict and disappointment on this planet. If there were just one thing that you and I could do to alleviate that, what would it be.
Insecurity is actually about fear. Often it is quite narrow and specialised in people's lives. And it's different for each one of us. Different people have insecurities in different parts of their lives. Some of them are worried about what people think, others feel insecure about how they look, or what they sound like. And insecurity features differently in terms of magnitude. Some people are really insecure. Others just have the odd little bit of insecurity here and there. But when we have fear, fear is real. My fear is real to me.
When I was in the army one of the things that we did in training was to repel out of helicopters. And you were flying along in the helicopter sitting on the floor. You got the signal to go out onto the skids, which meant you had to roll over on your stomach, dangle you legs out of the helicopter while it was still flying along. And then you had to stand on the skids.
But Berni's little legs were too short so I had to jump out onto the skids. And that was a scary thing and standing there on the skids and then going down into the position where you would repel out of the helicopter. I have to tell you it was kind of counter-intuitive to my understanding of heights.
And I was pretty scared each time that I had to do it. Not withstanding the fact that when I had done it, it was quite a buzz. And no matter how you dismiss my irrational fear of height, it's real. It forms a part of my reality.
You can talk to me about me, you can get me to the point of accepting that the fear is irrational, you can get me to agree that I need to something about it. But I tell you that the next time in that helicopter, the next time I get in to that situation again, the insecurity and the fear can be there. And when we experience fear, we have a natural instinct to protect ourselves. I believe that there is a gift that we can give to someone around us who suffers from insecurity. A gift worth more than gold. A gift that they will treasure for the rest of their lives.
The gift comes in two parts. Part one: is to understand their fear. I read a quote once, I can't remember who said this but they said something like this:
If we only knew and understood the hurts and the pains in the past in the lives of our enemies, it would be enough to disarm any intention of hostility in our hearts.
Think about that … as we are walking through life and relationships, and we run into someone's insecurity and they react and they blow up like a land mine, that we could never have seen or predicted, and these people explode in our faces. We have a choice to make, we can pull them apart, we can talk badly of them, we can cut them off, we can have enough with them. We can just stop and choose not to react.
We can choose to regroup, to investigate, to figure out, to understand, to discover what their insecurity is. When people are afraid, when people are feeling pain, no matter how irrational you and I think it might be, right. But when that person is feeling pain or feeling threatened, their natural instinct to protect themselves is going to come into play.
An instead of punishing them maybe we should understand them. Jesus said,
Love your enemy.
It not a platitude, it's not a rule, it's not some anachronistic thing written in a book 2,000 years ago. It's real. And I believe that a big part of loving your enemy is doing exactly that. When someone reacts badly to us and attacks us, or talks behind our backs, or does what ever it is they do. We can choose to punish them by cutting them off or doing exactly the same back to them.
Or we can say, "Hmmm, I wonder why they did that. I wonder what it is in their make up that caused them to do that." And we can take it as an opportunity to get to know them. So that we can understand what little insecurity in the recesses of their hearts and minds causes this sort of behaviour.
The second part of this gift of life, is now supporting them through that fear. If insecurity is about fear and reacting to irrational fears, maybe it is a bit like a car accident. You know when someone has a car accident, and they have to go through rehabilitation, sometimes, months just to learn to walk again, or to learn to use their arms again. They do exercise over and over and over again.
It's challenging, it's painful, they need people who's specialise in rehabilitation. And sometimes they feel defeated. Sometimes they need support. So often insecurities come from emotional car crashes. They come from bad things that have happened to people in the past. They come from ineffective behaviours they have learned from their parents or their teachers or their work colleagues.
When someone reacts badly because of an emotional car crash, is it any different. If low esteem is about dealing with fears and insecurities should we punish and reject people for that? Or should we suffer through it with them. Help them to get over it. Help them to get through … just accept them just as they are. And love them unconditionally. Love your enemy. What a gift, what a breath of life that would be!
Now, there is a warning here, don't try this at home. You need to be an expert … c'mon, there is a cost. Rehabilitation is a long haul thing. And along the way an insecure person is going to hurt people. An insecure person is going to lash out at people. An insecure person will have a go at us and try and hurt us and probably will hurt us.
But steadily day by day, week by week, what they get from us is love. Straight talking, faithfulness and love. How many times, how long? Seven times? No seventy-seven times! A hundred time, a hundred and seventy-seven times! It's hard, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of guts. But what a gift.
Insecurity is about fear, about reacting and protecting ourselves from harm. It can be irrational, it can be unbalanced, and it ruins lives and ruins relationships. What's the one thing, the only thing that can rehabilitate someone from that place. Love, faithfulness, unconditional acceptance day after day, so that deep in their soul, they learn for themselves that there is no reason to fear.
God's like that. He is slow to anger, full of compassion, and abounding in love. In our fast food culture, hanging in there with someone, accepting them, and helping them through their insecurities is grossly counter-intuitive. There are so many people, so many relationships, so much entertainment, so many things that we could be doing that instinctively the moment someone displays bad behaviour through insecurity we just cut them off.
And yet, Jesus said love your enemy. Hang in there with them. Be that source of perfect love for them that teaches them through life that they don't have to be afraid anymore.
If we search deep inside, if we really think about that … go on … tell me God's got it wrong.

Relationships – at home, at work, with friends – well they can be like walking through a mine field.  Everything's fine – and then you step on a mine…..
It's a funny thing, but a relationship can be going along just fine, work, home, friends, just ticking along. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, this person comes out punching.
Whoa! I didn't see that coming. Like a curve ball to the solar plexus, they just attack us or spit out some angry words or say something that just blows us out of the water.
And as we pick ourselves off the floor we are thinking, "I just didn't' see that coming. What was that about, I mean what did I do to deserve that?" And sometimes it's the other way around we just lash out at someone and afterwards we think, "Why did I do that?" you know what I mean.
I was visiting a radio station recently, an executive in a different country. And I had a morning meeting scheduled with him to talk about a few issues. And while I was on the way in, in the car, and he range me and he said, "Look, I still really want to meet with you but I have this problem, there is this really big human resources problem that has blown up in my face at work. Can we meet at a little bit later?" Well I had some flexibility that day, my plane had been delayed so we were able to meet later. Turns out that he was having some real conflict with one of the staff there. Something, it just exploded, and if I told you the issue you would fall of your chair, so I won't. It seemed so minor, so small, so insignificant and yet there was a huge conflict over the issue.
Do you enjoy conflict? Most of us don't. I certainly do not enjoy conflict. Yet so often it is a bit like that movie, "The Truman Show". You would be walking along on a sunny day, along the road and someone movie director somewhere presses a button, and without warning a bomb goes off right next to us!
Have you ever wondered why? Well there are a lot of reasons, but one, one happens time and time again. It is the issue of insecurity in peoples lives. This week on A Different Perspective I have called this little group of messages, "Getting over it!" we are looking at the subject of insecurity. Have you ever asked yourself, "What is it? What is insecurity? We need to stop and thing about that.
We bandied the word around, but what exactly, what is it? We all have as people a life preservation instinct. If we are driving along in a car and all of a sudden a car pulls out in front of us. We slam on the brakes and the adrenalin pumps through the veins. And we try and save ourselves. And the same is true emotionally. When something comes out of the blue that we find threatening, we either decide to fight it and come out punching or we've run away. We avoid it, we don't confront it. We just stew inside and it eats away at us.
There is something built into each one of us. Which is about self preservation. And that's ok, that's normal, but sometimes there are things inside us that create irrational fears. Fears that don't make any logical sense.
I don't so much as have a fear of heights, but I know that when I am standing on a balcony several floors up, if there is no roof above me and I look up at the sky, I find that really scary, unsettling thing. I feel as though I am about to fall off the balcony. It doesn't make sense, it is just there.
Some people have an irrational fear of spiders or sharks. We all know that there are far more chances of being run over by the proverbial bus than there is by being killed by a spider or a shark or a snake. Some people are petrified about flying in planes. None of those fears are rational. But they are very real. And these irrational fears can go into our emotional dimension as well. We can be unduly concerned about what people think of us. What they say of us. We can be really touchy about people stepping on our turf. Maybe we are bucking for a promotion. Maybe we are worried about job security. Maybe we are a bit touchy about being overweight. The list goes on an on.
Whatever it is outside when people look at us they don't always know what things we are precious about. Where in our lives we are insecure. Either that or they know and they think it is stupid, I mean, they just dismiss it. "Ah she's just worried about what the boss will think."
Insecurities in other people well they are like a minefield. We can be walking along through this field, through a relationship, everything is ok. BANG! And there is no sign to say, "Don't put your foot here, there is a mine under this bit of dirt." So what can we do about it. The minefield picture is a useful framework to have in our hearts and our minds. One of the things that we can do is to watch people, to observe them, to get to know them, to start to figure out where their insecurities are.
I was doing some consulting work as I used to do over many, many years, with a government department. And the man that I was working with was a really cool, balanced, intelligent man. But as I saw him in meetings and working with other people in the organisation, there are a couple of things that he reacted really badly to. I thought, "That's really interesting" I mean on the surface he is so competent, he is so intelligent, he is so well collected and has himself sorted out. He has been around this organisation for a long time. He knows the people, he knows the terrain, he knows the issues. Why did he react so badly to those issues in those meetings? As I got to know him and had coffee with him and worked with him, one day it came out. The organisation had just had a restructure, and as a result of that restructure the one job that gave him a promotion after all these years in the organisation, had been restructure right out of the organisation. So his career path was gone. After 25 years, his hopes, his dreams for promotion were gone.
Well would you be cheesed off at that, I would. That would get me going I think. And so I just found a land mine. And once I knew where it was not only could I avoid stepping on it, but I could also behave and act and help through that little bit of insecurity.
Because it's not always possible is it? Sometimes you are just walking along and … BANG! This person blows up in your face. And then we go, "Alright, now I am threatened." I remember once having a client yelling down the mobile phone, yelling abuse down the mobile phone at me. Well what do we do? We can either, run and hide, or we can go BANG right back. There is actually a third option. We can not react at all. We can just let them go, take it on board and resist the urge to rip their heads off their shoulders.
The apostle Paul in a letter that he wrote to the church in Corinth, almost 2,000 years ago. It's a verse that is really well-known, often quoted at weddings, he wrote this:
Love is patient and kind, it is not rude, it is not self interested. It is not easily angered. And it doesn't keep a list of wrongs. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5)
Elsewhere throughout the bible in fact throughout the whole of the Old Testament, 8 times it says that God is slow to anger. And each of those 8 times it finishes the sentence with this, "and He is abounding in love and faithfulness." God is slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness.
The flip side of that is being quick to anger. And when we get angry quickly at people who have reacted badly to something we don't understand we are doing the opposite of abounding in love and faithfulness.
I wonder if the next time someone blows up in our faces, I wonder if we remembered, "Hmm maybe something or someone has just trodden on some insecurity that I can't see. How about I just let it wash by me. And then try and understand it a little bit later."
I wonder if we responded that way if we were slow to anger when someone goes off in our face like a cracker. I wonder how much better life would be.

Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. Not much.  In fact the things people say can leave lifelong scars. People say – just get over it?  But can we?
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." So the saying goes. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. When people call us names. When they hurt us. Or reject us. Or abuse us. Or talk behind our backs. Those things can really hurt us. And for many people, they carry those old injuries around with them. Often not really knowing it. And it robs them of the life that God always intended.
If your Dad didn't encourage you, chances are you'll have low self esteem. If you were abused as a child, chances are you'll feel like a victim for much of your life. So is it possible to be set free from the hurts of the past?
There's something really important that we need to know about the past. It's past. It's gone. There are lots of things out of our control. The past is one of the biggest ones of all. Doesn't matter what we do. How much we wish we could change it. How much we try. What's done is done. We can't change the past. We can only change from hereon forward.
Well why is this so important? I mean it's blindingly, glimpsingly obvious. Yet so many people live in the past. They live today constrained by the hurts of yesterday. "I didn't have a happy childhood. I was abused. I was hurt. The kids at school weren't nice to me. The teacher …"
I mean, recently I was overseas with my wife. We were in Canada and we were talking with our daughter who was staying with a friend for the couple of weeks while we were gone. Our daughter Melissa is 14. And there was one particular teacher who said something really hurtful to her. And so, of course, I rang the principal and I talked to the principal and dealt with it. But just one harsh word from an adult when we're growing up as teenagers, just one, can leave a mental scar.
It can happen from parents. It happened to me when I was growing up. It's just the way I am. And we look back and we lament. We wish it was different but it's not. And we turn it over and over in our mind. Like a cow chewing its cud.
Here's this crazy idea that I have. When Jesus died on the cross for me, He purchased for me a new future. If anyone believes in Him, they are a new creation. Everything old is passed away. Have a look. Everything else is new. And Jesus said,
If I set you free then you are actually free. (John 8:36)
You listen to the apostle Paul:
We are more than conquerors if we believe in Jesus.
I can do anything through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.
Okay, so there are some words on a page in a book called The Bible, that tell us some things but what do they really mean for life? Well, here's the crunch. And if you are someone who is struggling with the hurts of the past you may not like what I have to say. But I have to say it to you anyway.
Here is the crunch. You can live your life with the hurts of the past and believe that you can't change it. Or you can decide to believe what God says about you. You've got a choice.
I often joke. I mean I would not make a good counsellor, you know. It's not my gift to sit with people. One of the people who helps me on this program, Max Harding, who is a great guy and as well as being a fantastic producer, he also works in a counselling ministry. And he has a wonderful job at that but that is not what I do. And I often joke that my form of counselling is to listen to people for 30 seconds then say, 'that is great, just get over it'.
In a sense that doesn't help. And of course when we have issues and hurts and problems from the past we do have to bring them out and talk about them and deal with them. But some people talk about them and talk about them and talk about them and talk about them for the rest of their lives.
They whinge and complain about some bad things that happened to them when they were children. Even people, let me say, who have said, "look I've seen what God did for me through Jesus Christ. I believe in Him." And yet somehow, these same people still want to live in the hurts of the past.
The past is past. It's over. It's gone. Can't change it. Can't undo it. Can only come to grips with it and leave it behind. If it's past, shouldn't we leave it behind?
Do you have some hurts? Let me ask you really kindly but yet very directly, are you still wallowing in those hurts? If that's you, I have a word from God for you today. And that word is this: get over it! It is time to move on. I don't say that lightly, I don't say that with a smile on my face. It is time to move on. Let it go.
Jesus bought you and me an eternal future. And it doesn't matter where you go in the Old Testament or the New Testament, what you see is a God who wants to bless us. Now, a lot of Christians in the New Testament went through a whole bunch of persecution, and you could say that they were victims in a sense. But when you look at Paul, locked up in jail, singing and praising God, writing letters of encouragement to his friends in Philippi, you think, I don't think Paul was really a victim here.
Would he have preferred to be doing something else? Probably, Paul would probably have rather not been in jail. But there was no way that the Apostle Paul was living his life as a victim. He'd come to grips with what was happening to him very, very quickly. And quickly he got over it.
When we have hurts from the past sometimes it's time to take the garbage out and let it go. If the past is past maybe we need to get over it! If Jesus bought us a future.
Of course the devil, well he's happy for us to live wallowing in the pains of the past. He's only come to steal, kill and destroy. But Jesus said
I have come that you would have an abundantly blessed life. (John 10:10)
So which one will it be? Will we continue to wallow in the pain and the hurts of the past or will we decide to believe what God says about us and get over it? But hang on Berni, you don't understand my past. You don't understand how much it hurts, you just don't understand. Well maybe I don't, but here are the things that I do understand.
You are an incredibly beautiful person in God's eyes. And when he sent Jesus to die, he had you in mind. He had me in mind. He had his love focused on us. And maybe some tough things have happened in our lives, but listen, show me just one person, just one person, who's had a perfect life. Without any hurts, without any disappointments, without anything to look back on and regret. I don't know anyone like that do you?
Now look at this Jesus on the cross. The price that he paid to purchase a future for you and me, and tell me that there is something to be gained by hanging on to the past that he dealt with on the cross for us.
Today I believe you and I are together for one reason, Jesus has an invitation for you to live this abundant life. We all have decisions to make, and today I challenge you to make a decision. Either choose to wallow in the past and let it rob you of your future, or choose to accept once and for all the abundant blessed life that He came to give us.
The decision is yours. Which one will it be? And if you're tempted to hang on to those past hurts, if they're hard to let go, give me just one good reason for you to hang on to them. I believe we've each been made to live an incredible life. Maybe today you can take that simple step of faith, and say that's exactly what I'm going to do.