A Different Perspective Official Podcast

So many of the lies that the world tells us, society tells us – people tell us – end up messing around with who we are. Messing around with our lives. Racial tensions, the stigma of adoption – that'd have to affect you in your later years wouldn't it?
Exciting week this week on the program because we're following up on what we've been chatting about over the last few weeks. It's the fact that all the lies that the world throws at us about who we are and who we're supposed to be, how we're meant to conform to this model or that model of success, with all those lies, well a lot of damage gets done to us on the inside.
It's like eating bad food all the time and it makes you sick and these lies, they start pretty early on in life. In fact often it's the lies we were told when we were young, when we were children and in our teens that do most of the damage and live with us throughout the rest of our lives, robbing us of all that God has intended.
Today, I'm joined again by my special guest on the program Mike Ricchini who was the second child of a fifteen year old – I was about to call her a woman but girl really – and after abuse and stuff had a pretty rocky road in those early years. If there's anyone who has an excuse to be bitter and twisted over the past it's Mike. And the reason I've invited him to join me this week on the program is just to share his story, his journey and I guess the healing that God's brought into his life, his difficult life over recent years.
Berni: Mike welcome again to the program.
Mike: Thank you.
Berni: Great to have you here. I've heard you speak about how you came into this world, your mother was fifteen, your father was thirtyish, you were born into an abusive situation, It was a really difficult time and then pretty early on you found yourself in foster care. I guess most of us don't think too much about foster care, tell us what those two simple words mean to you.
Mike: When I look back on foster care I just see it as a transition time between the family that's supposed to love you and a family that does love you and when I remember foster care I don't remember being loved. I know they had me in their house, for the most part it just seems like families that have you in their house just because their kids have gone away to university or to college or moved out and so they want younger kids in there just to feel a sense of not being lonely anymore.
Berni: You were only in foster care for about a year right?
Mike: Yeah it was only a year. Praise the Lord I was in foster care with my two other siblings which is very rare but I don't remember getting food very much, just weird breakfasts, pancakes or syrup or donuts and I don't remember feeling like their rules or I had to do stuff, I just felt like do whatever you want, just live the life you want and there's no boundaries, it was as if they didn't care about us in a way.
Berni: That must have really impact a young kid.
Mike: Yes. When I look at my family now, there're little kids in there now and they have rules and I can't imagine living the life that they have right now without rules because there's no guidance, there'd be no direction and as a young kid you look up to those in authority over you.
Berni: Yeah. But eventually you were adopted out, what does adoption feel like? Again most of us have never experienced adoption, what does that feel like to you?
Mike: Well it was the third family I'd been in because of my birth mum, foster care and then adoption, it was the third family in four years and as a young kid you know what's going on, you know the transition, you know you're moving from house to house.
Berni: You can remember that right?
Mike: Yes and it's very hard on the inside because you often blame yourself or blame many other people. I often blamed my mum for all the bad stuff and even to this day I was blaming my mum and it messes with your head because you have that sense of rejection, that nobody cares about you. That the first family, they didn't want you anymore so they put you into foster care, and the foster care family didn't want you because they didn't adopt you, and now you wind up in a family where they're supposed to love you, that's the idea that adoption is, oh now you're being put in a new family that actually cares about you.
Berni: So how did that end up unfolding? How did that feel to you being adopted?
Mike: As a young kid I don't remember exactly everything that happened but I had the sense of being loved. I did feel love coming to the new family except for the fact there were rules now. This is the first time in my life I really had rules.
Berni: That would have been a shock.
Mike: It was a shock because I'd never been disciplined before, never been put in "time out" before so I didn't know what that was like. I felt like they're supposed to love me but they're hitting me with the spoon on my butt or they're giving me all these rules and you can't dessert until you've done all your dinner, rules I'd never even heard of before that. In one way I was loved because I felt like they cared about me but in another sense I have restrictions on my life now.
Berni: But as you went along and you finally got the idea that you were being loved, that must have been a pretty amazing experience.
Mike: Yes, it was huge for me. Growing up my entire life knowing that somebody actually cared about me.
Berni: People who have good parents take that for granted. But not everyone's had that and so the feeling of not having been loved by your parents and then being adopted into a family where you are loved even though you're not their flesh and blood right? It's a real act of grace when you think about it. It's a real kind of powerful statement, almost more powerful than being born. I mean your natural parents are meant to love you, my natural parents who I grew up with loved me, thats their job but your adopted parents, they chose to take you and you wouldn't have been easy at that time not having had rules right? They chose to take you into their family. What an act of grace.
Mike: Yeah, my adopted parents no doubt are my heroes in my life. When I look at them right now I can't believe they ended up adopting six kids, I cannot believe that they would give up all their future that they had, even money just to welcome kids into their lives. And not their natural born kids, six kids that are from rough situations, that have nobody in the world that loves them at the moment and they welcome them in and say, 'We will be your parents; we will love you'.
Berni: So when God says He destined us for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of His will to the praise of His glorious grace that He freely bestowed on us in His beloved Son, I guess that means a lot to you.
Mike: It does.
Berni: Because you get it, you understand that bit more than perhaps I do because I've never been adopted and I wonder whether sometimes I under value what God did in adopting me into His family because I wasn't particularly easy to love just between you and me quietly, I wasn't particularly easy to love when God adopted me into His family. But it wasn't all beer and skittles because at school, you're Hispanic right? And you're growing up in a white family, in fact Ricchini, your surname is Italian, so you're a Hispanic kid growing up in Italian. Those of us who don't live in America might not get the whole white/Hispanic thing. Can you just give us, what was it like at school being a Hispanic kid in a white school and a white family?
Mike: I went to a school, it was pretty much all white kids so my siblings and I were pretty much the only Hispanics in the entire school and schools in America are usually a little bit bigger than here in Australia and so you get a lot of kids saying, "Why are you here, you don't belong here, you don't look like the rest of us." I remember having to explain to kids I was adopted and I remember getting phrases, "you weren't loved by your mum" or "you're not loved" or "you look funny" or "your hair is darker than ours" and having those feelings in your head, why am I here? Why am I not with my real mum? Why do their parents love them and mine didn't? That was in my head all of school.
Berni: It really strikes me that they're playing with your self belief about who you are as a human being and it drags you so far away from how God sees you and God sees us when He adopts us into His family as totally different to those kids at school, as totally different to the way the world yells at us, we should be this, we should be that, you should have lighter hair, you should have white skin, whatever it is Gods approach is really different. I want to talk to you about that a little bit more another time. Thanks for joining me today Mike.
Mike: You're welcome.

Imagine starting out life as the baby of a 15-year-old mother, with a drug habit … growing up bumping from one uncaring foster home to the next – when you grew up that sort of a past would mess with your head wouldn't it?
Every now and then God makes a divine appointment for us, have you noticed that? What appears to be a random decision or a chance twist or turn in life, all of a sudden you run into a God moment and go, "wow".
It happened to me the other Sunday. I woke up, said to my wife Jacqui, "Hey, I feel like going and visiting the Oyster Bay Baptist Church." That's the Church I first went to about seventeen years ago now.
It seemed like a good idea; Pastor Phil is a great guy, great teacher, so off we went. Kind of to my disappointment it wasn't a regular service and it turned out Phil wouldn't be teaching, there were some young folk from YWAM - Youth With A Mission visiting and leading the service and this young guy Mike got up to preach, I thought this would be interesting.
Well can I tell you something? What he had to say and how he said it just blew me away, what a preacher! And the thing that really made my hair curl is after the service I found out this was the very first time he'd stood up to preach. Unbelievable! And his life story, more to the point. His life story is one that's going to make your hair curl.
So today, and indeed for the rest of this week we're going to be joined by Mike Ricchini who's going to share his story which I guess is like a live case study of what we've been talking about this last couple of weeks on the program which is knowing the truth because it's the truth that's going to set you free.
Berni: Hi Mike, welcome to the program. Thanks for your great message last Sunday.
Mike: You're welcome there.
Berni: How old are you?
Mike: I'm twenty.
Berni: You're twenty? I was twenty once a long time ago. So we're going to share a bit of your journey today, in fact over the coming week but today I'd like to start with the beginning of your life, tell us about that, where were you born, your parents, how did all that happen?
Mike: I was born in 1991 in Miami Florida. I was born to a fifteen year old girl, she already had a baby ten months earlier so I was her second child and I really don't know how old my father was, I think he was a little younger than thirty at the time when she had me but they never really knew how to take care of me, just a young girl and you can just imagine the stress that involved not even knowing how to take care of kids or anything like that.
So when they had me I was born two months early, premature and there was a battle whether she keep me alive or put me down just because of the inexperience that she had.
Berni: So yours was the life that almost wasn't.
Mike: Yes. So praise the Lord they ended up letting me live and I was able to talk to my mum a couple of weeks ago and she said she had made the decision to let me live so I'm very grateful for that. And then after living out of cars, motels for a couple of months they moved up to Maryland which is just east of Washington DC in the States and I grew up there for about a year before I was taken from her with my two other siblings and put into foster care.
Berni: And that's because she had a drug habit.
Mike: Drugs, abuse, malnutrition, other sorts of stuff.
Berni: It's not your perfect start in life is it?
Mike: Not really, no.
Berni: So you have met your birth mother?
Mike: I have a couple of times and she just found me the other day on Facebook.
Berni: Ah cool.
Mike: Yeah.
Berni: So what was that like, meeting your birth mother after all those years?
Mike: My first time meeting her was a few years ago and that was probably the scariest moment of my life up to that point. Just knowing that your mum was about to come in there, the lady that brought you into the world was about to step into the room and you don't have really any idea what she looks like, what she sounds like, you don't really have any idea of your past, like the stories of your past, what you looked like, pictures, I'd never seen a picture of myself as a baby.
Berni: How do you feel towards that?
Mike: Towards her at that moment? I didn't like her. It was one of those things where you want to know the lady that brought you into the world but there's resentment, there's hatred, there's bitterness, even rejection. There was a lot of rejection that drove most of my life.
Berni: Yeah I can imagine. I guess when you have a start in life like that it's going to mess with your head, it's not ideal. When you look back at your start what is that you feel in your heart? What's the thing that jumps out at you?
Mike: Rejection, hatred, just knowing you're not loved.
Berni: What's the impact of rejection? Why is that such a big deal?
Mike: You just feel like everyday, specifically for me, everyday I walked out to school or whatever setting I was in because the beginning of your life there was so much rejection, now you feel that way about everybody that interacts with you and you tend to interpret everybody's actions and how they interact with you at that point. And so for most of my life because of this huge rejection at the beginning I've always thought people hated me or didn't love me even if that wasn't their actual motive.
Berni: And I guess it's hard to trust people ...
Mike: Yes.
Berni: It's hard to have relationships, it affects everything.
Mike: Trust for me with specifically females was pretty much non existent until a few months ago. I would often fake it just to keep going in life but in my heart it wasn't there.
Berni: Yeah. It's interesting. Tomorrow on the program we're going to talk about those early years of growing up, I mean it can't have been easy but today I'd just like to stick with those early days because if anyone has an excuse from the past to get all bitter and twisted and to grow up, you have. Has getting into a relationship with God, with Jesus changed the way you look back at things?
Mike: Yeah. I grew up in a Christian home but even though growing up in it I didn't really know God and just His love and forgiveness. I didn't know what real forgiveness looked like. I knew it in my head but there's a difference between knowing something in your head and believing it in your heart.
Berni: And experiencing it, living with it in your own experience.
Mike: Right.
Berni: We're going to talk about that another day this week but it's just fascinating to me. I'd love to have a read of Psalm 139, those who listen to this program regularly will always hear me going back to Psalm 139. I guess you'll probably know that psalm pretty well where the psalmist writes to God:
For it was you who formed my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb and I praise you for I'm 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. 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.
Berni: I guess looking back on your start in life, did you have problems believing that?
Mike: Yes, I've doubted God many times, just His plan for my life, His control, just believing that He made me perfectly, believing that He made me who He wanted me to be and I often blame other people even God. I've said to God that I hated Him because of the way my life has turned out.
Berni: Yeah and then the psalmist goes on to say:
How weighty to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them. I try and count them, they are more than the sand. I come to the end I am still with you.
Berni: That's the language of victory isn't it? That's the language of someone who's totally delighted with who God's made them to be. And it seems to me that, okay you've got your circumstances and you grow up and they're quite unique and my experience is different and other people's experience is different but somehow we all have a past, right? We all have some things we look back on that are regrets that come back and haunt us and yet it's not God's plan for you to live angry, for you to live without a sense of trust, for you to live without love. And it's how God's started to turn that around that I really want to unpack with you further on this week because it's just an awesome thing what God does in our lives.
Mike: Amen.
Berni: So we're going to have a lot of fun this week. I really encourage you, you've heard Mike's story today and Mike's story is a powerful story. I mean you look back on his start in life and it wasn't a good start in life, it wasn't fair and it wasn't the kid's fault. Mike was this little baby brought into this world, it's not his fault he was born in those circumstances and yet even in his situation, as we're going to see later on this week, God's stepped in and has done some amazing things and changed the way he sees the world and changed the way he sees himself. Mike we'll chat again tomorrow.

When the people around us start behaving badly, as they invariably do, we sometimes want to use that as an excuse for us to end up stooping down to the same level.  And at the end of the day – that just doesn't work.
We pretty much all understand the concept of the lowest common denominator. You look across a group of people and you pitch your message or your idea or whatever at the lowest common denominator. TV does that all the time. It dumbs down the complex issues of life. It turns values into spin, people into stereotypes. And you know something? We do it too. We have a tendency to pitch our approach or our behaviour or our principles or our ethics at the lowest common denominator.
We can be in a group of people, say at work, and we can have the best intentions, the best ethics. But when things start getting competitive or feral, when people start tearing one another apart (as they do in work situations), we want to stoop down to that level and get involved. Principles, ethics – out the window. It's the law of the jungle buddy. Kill or be killed.
This is the last program in a four-week series that I've called, "Living the Life God Always Intended". Living life to the full, living a life of deep satisfaction, of peace and contentment, even through the bad days, and the good days. God has a plan. God has a plan for your life, God has a plan for my life. It's a good plan. It's a plan of blessing, it's a plan of peace, it's a plan of joy, it's a plan of love, a plan of grace. And for me, it's all about getting close to Him.
I used to think it was self-help, hard work, trying to change myself and it doesn't work! Change this, change that in me. It would last a while but I'd always end up going back to my bad habits. I'm as smart as they come but I discovered I couldn't change me. And then when I met Jesus, finally the penny dropped. Duh!
It's about getting close to Him. It's about drawing close to God and spending time with Him in the morning. I'm a different person after that. His living water just washes over me, it's fresh, it's life, it's peace and I can go into that jungle and you know, I don't much feel like devouring people anymore. Being first, being top dog, winning is no longer my number one priority. I love that saying that "It's a dog-eat-dog world and there's plenty of dog to go around". Some people just live to win: to beat others, to make money, to be the top salesman, whatever.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to set goals and to achieve things. But when we get this competitive spirit, this spirit that says, "I have to win at all costs and if you have to lose in order for me to win, then so be it. I'm going to devour you and chew you up." When we live life like that, it doesn't bring us peace and joy and satisfaction. Now, we may not naturally be like that but we get into that sort of environment and other people tend to drag us down. We want to become one of the pack.
I used to have a saying, "Don't get angry; get even." And finally God gave me a revelation. If you live that sort of life you won't have God's peace, won't have God's joy, and won't have God's satisfaction in life. When we tread on people and beat them and defeat them and drive them into the ground, come on, where's the joy in that? Where's the peace in that? Whatever happened to living the life God always intended?
And when other people are behaving badly we have this tendency to behave badly too; not to let them drag us down. We rationalise that. We say, "Well, I need to protect myself." Jesus said:
He who lives by the sword will die by the sword. (Matthew 26:52)
Paul the Apostle in Galatians said:
Don't grow tired of doing what's right because we will reap a harvest in due time. (Galatians 6:9)
When other people are off their rockers and behaving badly that's precisely the time to be different. One of the things I learned in seventeen years of consulting in the IT industry, is that behaviour is often situational. In other words, when people are in pressure cookers, when people are under stress they do things and they say things that will hurt us. But those things are driven by the circumstances, by what's going on in their lives, by the argument they had at home with their spouse, or the difficult kid, or the pressure they're under to make money, or the growing interest rates on their mortgage or whatever.
Situations drive people's behaviour. And so when you have a set of circumstances of commercial pressure or work pressure, that's when you will see what people are made of. And while they are all tearing one another apart, you and I can be the peacemaker. We can refuse to play that game. We can go on doing good, go on delivering, go on speaking well of people behind their backs, go on being kind and reliable and honest and frank and decent. Don't grow tired of what is right for we will reap at harvest time. God is in that place.
James writes in his letter in the New Testament:
God's wisdom, the wisdom from above is pure, it's peaceable and gentle and willing to yield and full of mercy and good fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. (James 3:17)
You know our problem sometimes? We're not willing to yield, we're not willing to come second, we're not willing for someone else to get the better of us, we're not willing for someone else to win, we're not willing to lose our reputations by not playing the ugly game. The wisdom from above is pure and peaceable and gentle and willing to yield and full of mercy and good fruits, wouldn't you want to be around someone like that in a crisis?
Imagine that you and I are that person when everyone else is doing that 'dog eat dog' thing. Now that's living the life that God always intended. That's where you get peace and joy and contentment and God honours that. The people around us mightn't, and maybe by living like that we might appear to lose. We might lose a battle, we might get laughed at, we might … everything. But it's living the life God always intended. Peter the Apostle wrote:
Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. (1 Peter 5:6-7)
When the world is having a go, when people are going berserk and tearing one another apart … in the middle of that place we put our trust in Jesus and He will give us a harvest at harvest time.
Living the life isn't about winning every battle. Some battles aren't worth winning, and some battles give us hollow victories. It's not about being dumbed down and dragged down and stooping down to the lowest common denominator. Jesus has got a plan for my life and for your life. It's a plan of victory and peace and joy and sailing through the storm with a certainty and a faith and a relationship and a trust in Jesus. That's life … that's living … that's the life God always intended.

Everyone goes through stormy times in life.  And when we're bobbing around like corks in the ocean, what we really need is a solid rock beneath our feet.  But what if God means us, you and me, to be that solid rock in someone's life?
I hate being on the water in a boat. I don't mind swimming, I don't mind being beside the water looking and I don't mind diving under the water but I absolutely hate being on the water in a boat. Up and down, up and down … I get sick! I can just feel the waves of nausea crashing over me … up and down. I've always preferred terra firma, the more firma the less terra … up and down.
Now, if you enjoy the water, God bless you but not this little black duck. No way! I like to have a rock beneath my feet, solid, firm, no movement, no up and down. To me there's nothing more terrifying than looking out over an angry, stormy ocean, grey water, white caps, wind howling. The ocean's a scary place in a storm don't you think? There are storms in life too. And today on the program we're going to spend a little bit of time looking at what it means for us, for you and me, to be the rock beneath someone's feet.
This week, and over the last few weeks, we've been looking at what it means to live the life that God always intended. God has this great plan of joy and peace and grace and wisdom for us to live through all the things – whatever they are, ups and downs – that God has planned. Life has its downs. There's beautiful poem called 'The Weaver'. You may have heard me read this before but let me share it again.
Life is but a weaving between my Lord and me,
I cannot choose the colours as He weaveth steadily.
Sometime He chooses dark threads and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper and I the underside.
Not 'til the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll His canvas and explain the reasons why
The dark threads were as needful in the weaver's skilful hands
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He hath planned.
It's the reality of life isn't it? Amongst the richness and the joy and the blessing, sometimes there's the odd dark thread as well. And so much of what we do in life is about being servants rather than being served. I spent most of my life living for "me" but I was never satisfied. And these days I'm living for Him – for Jesus and other people, and for you – and I am the happiest man, the most blessed man on this planet. I wouldn't be doing anything else because God is just blessing me through this life of laying it down so that I can take it up again in Him. Jesus said,
"I didn't come to be served but to serve."(Matthew 20:28)
And that's where the satisfaction is in life
Today, we're going to look at another practical way that we can serve someone else. One of the most wonderful things that we can be for someone is a rock beneath their feet in the midst of one of life's storms. A storm out on an angry ocean is a horrible thing but a storm when your feet are on solid ground, well it's not overly pleasant but it's not as bad as being on the ocean.
Looking back at my life, I hated Christians and everything they stood for, before I met Jesus. The important things in life were clearly money and career and the big flash car and the success. And that had consequences. They caused a storm of mammoth proportions in my life. And on the dark days I felt like a cork bobbing around in this angry ocean in the middle of a storm. And here's the funny thing, the Christians, who I hated in my life (there were three of them), they were the ones that stepped up to the plate and gave me a home to live in, gave me support, gave me encouragement and gave me Jesus. They were the rock beneath my feet. I can't much remember what they said but I will never, for all eternity, forget what they did for me.
We all need solid foundations. So many people have cracks in their foundations. So many people are living life-like that cork bobbing around in an angry ocean feeling as though they're going to drown. A storm comes and people struggle. You see it, don't you? And often those people aren't the easiest people to be around. I know I wasn't when I was like that. Often they're dysfunctional and they're not pretty and they're not nice and they're upset but we can step up to the plate and we can be their rock in a storm. What an amazing privilege!
Jesus said:
Everyone will know that you're one of my disciples if you have that sort of love for each other. (John 13:35)
Unconditional love, love that hangs in there, love that's solid, love that's immovable, love that says to someone, "Doesn't matter how bad your life gets, it doesn't matter how bad that storm blows, it doesn't matter how much you feel like you're going to drown, I will be your rock, I will be the solid foundations beneath your feet."
What about someone near you? Someone in your life – a family member, a friend, a work colleague, a neighbour, someone at your local Church or football club or dance class, or one of the parents of the other kids at school – who is going through a storm and just needs a friend, just needs unconditional love, just needs someone to put their arms around them and say, "I understand. It's okay, I'm here."
That's part of living the life God always intended. It's being Jesus to them. And it's difficult some days, it's not beautiful some days. Those people aren't pretty some days but what an incredible privilege, what an incredible satisfaction.
Those three Christians I was talking about before who were my rocks, now look at what God has done through me and is doing through me and continues to do in me and they know they were a part of that. Every time I open my mouth on this side of the microphone, their ministry is ministering to you. Their love to me is flowing to you, because I learned what the love of Christ was from them. I learned who Jesus was through them being the rock beneath my feet.
It's amazing! And when we live the life God always intended, Jesus calls us into that place to serve in a practical, hands-dirty, sleeves-rolled-up love to give them the love of Christ. Jesus said to Peter, the Apostle:
On this rock I will build my Church. (Matthew 16:18)
And Peter was this impetuous man who opened his mouth before he engaged his mind and he was a fisherman but he was passionate, he was real, he wasn't perfect but he was prepared to step out of the boat and trust Jesus and walk on the water through the storm and Jesus said:
Now this is the sort of man that I can use as a rock to build my Church on."
Get out of the boat, get out in the storm, go be a rock that someone else can stand on. That is living the life God always intended.

What's Providence? Well, it's when God goes ahead of us and prepares the way. Pretty cool. But what if – I mean, just think about this – what if you and I could do that for other people?  What if you and I could be God's providence for them?
I was looking up in the dictionary the other day the word "providence" because I wanted to know exactly what the word meant. Like most people, I'd always thought that providence was God's provision, but literally, the meaning of the word is this:
Care and preparation that takes place in advance. Foresight, wisdom that goes ahead of you.
Isn't that cool? God's providence is Him going ahead of us, with all His wisdom and knowledge and love and grace, and preparing the way, smoothing the path so that by the time you and I walk into that place everything's ready. Ah, it's awesome! That's what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote:
We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works that God prepared beforehand for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)
Well, imagine just for a minute if we could do that for other people, if God used us to be His providence for someone else. What would the world look like then?
Over these last few weeks we've been looking at living the life that God always intended. Now, sometimes when I say that, people picture one long holiday, luxury and wealth and health and happiness, but that's not it. Life's for living, all the ups and downs, all the good times and the bad times. There's this rich fabric that we call "life", and you and I, we're people with gifts and talents and unless we exercise those in life, there's no satisfaction.
And no matter what our gifts and talents are, real satisfaction comes from serving other people. Whether you're an artist or a musician or a brain surgeon or a shop attendant or a mum or whatever. Isn't it about impacting other people's lives? When you're a parent and seeing your kids grow and become wonderful and mature adults who contribute to society, as they say, to give to other people.
This week we're looking at living a life of service; serving other people, practical ways of doing that, of making a difference just like Jesus did. When Jesus came and He said:
I didn't come to be served, I'm the Son of God, I came to serve you, I came to die for you, I came to give my life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:28)
Yesterday, as a really practical way of doing that – of living a life of service, we looked at the fact that when we let people be – when we let them just be who they are with all their strengths and weaknesses, when we let people be – God sets us free. I don't think my day is meant to be ruined by other people's weaknesses. There's enough in me of my own that I have to deal with without putting up with someone else's. And so there are people who are quite different to me in my life and I value their strengths and I love them in their weaknesses.
And ninety-nine times out of one hundred those weaknesses just wash straight past, because God wants us to be mature and lacking in nothing. God wants us to have joy and peace and that comes when we lay down our lives and we say, "That person drives me nuts some days, but I love them and I'll serve them and I'll bless them."
Today, we're looking at going ahead of people, exceeding their expectations. And if we're going to live the life God always intended, what if God intended for us to be His providence in other people's lives? Remember, providence is when God goes ahead – when He sends His wisdom and His love and His mercy and His grace and His power ahead of us to get things ready – so by the time we walk into them they're exactly the way God meant for them to be.
What if God used you or me to be His providence in someone else's life? When we think about it, that's what we do for our kids. As mums and dads we have greater wisdom because of our years of experience, so we let them walk through things and experience consequences while being there for them. We think ahead for them. That's how they learn, that's how they grow in a safe, loving situation. We do that. We're programmed to do that as mums and dads.
What if we did that for other people too? What would that look like? What if we just compensated for their weaknesses before they happened? What if we covered up for them when they fail? What if we supported them when they fell over? What if we opened doors for them to other people? Pro-actively doing things that go ahead to help them? What a world, what a relationship!
Let me share a story with you. When God laid this whole radio thing on my heart I didn't know anyone in radio. I just had a call from God, "Oh God, where do I start?" The answer was, I started recording programs in a studio and not a single station had agreed to take them. We'd put down three or four months worth of programs. You had to have a few months worth done before any station would even talk to you.
One day Christianityworks, our ministry, was moving offices from office A to office B and I was carrying some really heavy boxes, down the corridor. I had recorded these few months of programs and I'm lugging this box down the hallway talking to God, "Lord, how are you going to get these programs out there? What's the plan, Lord? I have no idea!" Truly I didn't, and God spoke to me so clearly that day. He said, "Go and talk to the guy behind that glass partition."
You see our old office was in a shared office area where there were other ministries and that guy was a man called Nathan Brown. He was the Australian head of Michael Youssef's ministry, Leading the Way. Now traditional wisdom, worldly wisdom says, "Well that's kind of the competition. He's another radio ministry and they try and get their programs on radio stations." Now I don't see the world that way, didn't particularly know Nathan very well but God just impressed it on me to go and talk to him.
So I put the box in my car and came back in again and knocked on Nathan's door. And I sat down and I just shared my heart with him. Nathan was overjoyed. He said, "I would love to help you." And he opened doors for our ministry through his relationships with so many stations. Chances are you're listening to this program because Nathan was involved somewhere. Today, our programs are being heard in over 1200 radio stations around the globe.
Nathan was God's providence for this ministry and for me. This man had an open heart, a heart to serve, a heart of enthusiasm, a heart to share his wisdom and experience and relationships and to open doors. Now he looks at what God's done through that and the guy is just overjoyed at having been used by God to be a part of that. Isn't that a beautiful story?
It's hard sometimes to help people, it's difficult sometimes but God's love and God's wisdom is pro-active. That means God just doesn't sit around waiting for us to get our act sorted out. God goes ahead of us before we even think of things, and He does things for us so that when we walk into them we're blessed.
We know love by this, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
Providence is pro-active and it's not always easy to do. And sometimes people don't appreciate it and sometimes people are difficult. But when God taps us on the shoulder and says, "Go help that one. Go open a door for that one. Go bless that one", you'd better go.
Because like Nathan, you know, it's just an awesome feeling when you get a sense that God touched you by His Spirit and called us into a place just to do something little that we could do. And then God uses that and multiplies it and blesses so many people when we do that. Come on! It's not always easy but are you living the life that God always intended? Come on!