A Different Perspective Official Podcast

It is so easy to go from cool, calm and collected one minute into a temper tantrum the very next. Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde. But God has some really practical advice on how to handle that.
When you get a group of people together there seems to be, well, two sorts of people there. First there's the person who talks all the time, never shuts up and the other is the person who almost never says anything in the group. Somehow it seems that not many people seem to get the balance right, the balance between talking and listening and often the people who are really quiet in the group can be quite vocal even aggressive in a one on one situation.
Well take for instance when someone provokes us, you know when they do something and you can feel your blood boiling and you go all red in the face, right at that moment it's so easy to spit out something venomous, words we can't take back, words that damage a relationship. Sometimes when we're provoked we can be a bit quick on the draw when it comes to responding.
I want to share a story with you, I remember once as a consultant  (I used to run an IT consulting firm with some partners before I became a Christian. Quite a few years ago now) I was being mucked around by a large and important client of a particular ethnic heritage. I was dealing with him for months trying to kick off a project that meant a lot of money for our firm, it was a large global organisation and after months of investing time and effort with the people and with their management they pulled the plug on the project.
I remember I was sitting in my office and I received an email from one of our consultants working with me on this particular project, explaining that the client had decided not to go ahead. I just blew my stack, I couldn't believe that they had wasted so much of our time and resources and it wasn't fair and we were losing all this revenue and I tell you, I am not afraid to admit, I had a few choice sentiments that I almost expressed in a reply to that email to my fellow consultant. I even typed this angry venomous email.
I was just about to send it and I thought better of it and instead I erased all of that and I sent a fairly benign email. Well, it's just as well because I hit the "reply to all" button on the email, and the email ended up not only with my fellow consultant but also with the client. Gulp! Can you imagine, if my thoughts of anger had been included in this vitriolic angry email, what would have happened?
Now you might say, "Berni, why are you sharing this stuff with us?" It's simple because we all go through situations day by day by day that make us angry. People, organisations, circumstances drive us insane and we want to explode. Just the other day I was staying at a place and the houses were fairly close together and it was a little holiday place and a neighbour, a few doors down, had their music on really loud, I mean really loud. Couldn't sit in our lounge room and just talk so I just went down and asked them if they wouldn't mind turning it down. Well, you should have heard what came out of that guy's mouth.
Just a simple thing, their music was too loud and obviously they'd never been taught to take other people into account and the vitriol, the words, the venom that came out of his mouth and now he just ignores me and I just asked him to turn it down and I thought, "hang on, you're missing something. You were the guy who was doing the wrong thing!" And you know what I wanted to do? I just wanted to explode at him, I just wanted to tell him what I really thought, I wanted to teach him a lesson, I wanted to teach him some manners. You know the feeling don't you? And then he ignores me, he was the one that did wrong.
Now I'm really glad that I went through that experience and as hard as it was, can I tell you? Every fibre of my being wanted to tell this guy what I thought, as hard as that was I didn't say anything because exploding is never a good look, never but this feeling of anger is something we all experience. Some people more than others, some people are like on a hair trigger, anything will set them off, anger and tantrums are an ugly thing.
We're talking about anger management on the program this week and there's some really great practical input from Gods word that I want to share with you today. Comes from James in the New Testament chapter 1, verse 19. It says this:
My dear brothers take note of this, everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because a mans anger doesn't bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore get rid of all the moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you which can save you.
Isn't this really practical, it's special? God's solution to this whole anger thing, 'Be slow to speak and slow to become angry.'
Slow down! Every time someone does something that annoys us we don't have to react this instant. We don't have to rip their heads off; we don't have to send an angry email. Maybe this is where the advice comes from "count to ten" you know. Interesting, throughout the Bible nine times you'll find these words or ones very similar:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger abounding in steadfast love.
I'll read it to you again; this comes from Psalm 103, verse 8:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
What a great concept, firstly He's compassionate and gracious, He's slow to anger. Just hold on for a minute, cut this person some slack, this man who wouldn't turn his music down. If I'm behaving like God I'm going to be slow to anger and the abounding and steadfast love bit, you know what I've decided to do? I've decided to pray for this guy regularly 'cause that's what Jesus says, "Pray for your enemies."
And be slow to speak. Just don't say anything, don't defend or assert or criticise or judge or belittle or shout or scream or anything. Don't! Be slow to speak. Now that's not easy, it begins with a change of heart; it begins by deciding that my anger is my problem. It begins by me resigning from the position of "tin pot little god at the centre of the universe". It begins by deciding the world doesn't owe me anything.
Being slow to anger and slow to respond and when we do respond, what should we say? I love this, this bit from Proverbs chapter 15, verse 1:
A gentle answer turns away wrath but a hard word stirs up anger.
You know when someone's done us wrong the last thing we want to do is give them a gently answer, it just so cuts across the grain. We want to get recompense but Gods wisdom is that, 'a gentle answer turns away wrath but a harsh word stirs up even more anger'. This is Gods wisdom and it's really hard, it goes against the grain to bite our lip when someone else does something wrong.
It's so hard sometimes to respond in love, I find it hard. Each time becomes a little easier, each time heals a relationship, each time people notice and one day the relationship can be so strong that we have the ability to influence this person who hurt us with the love and the mercy and the grace of God.
It's hard to deal with anger but there's a right way and the wrong way.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger abounding in steadfast love.

Every now and then – we all throw a temper tantrum. And so often it's over the craziest little things. A hot temper isn't a good look. So – how do you deal with it? How can you conquer it?
Now when we're bringing up children we expect them to have temper tantrums. They're never fun of course but a temper tantrum is part of growing up. It's a part of the process of moving from immaturity to maturity, of discovering how to exercise the responsibilities that come with new freedoms and that's why I believe Gods plan is to put children into loving families so that mum and dad who are more mature and who love the child are there to guide the child through that growing process and the love bit helps us to absorb the pain and the inconvenience of the tantrums along the way.
It's something that I think none of us really appreciate until we become parents ourselves. Now temper tantrums are par for the course for a child or a teenager but what about an adult, what about a person who is supposed to have matured and learned how to control their emotions? And when you or I have a temper tantrum do we just shrug our shoulders and say, "oh well' or is it something we need to deal with?"
We've all been there haven't we? Having our little temper tantrum and 99% of the time they're over silly little things. If we were truly honest with ourselves we'd stand back and say, "well, that was dumb wasn't it? Why did I bite my wife's head off over something small? Why did I snap at my husband because of this tiny little thing?"
For me it's the fact that I'm a perfectionist, it's just the way I am, it was the way I was brought up. Our school motto was "Age quod agis" which means "whatever you do, do well" or "if it's worth doing it's worth doing properly". So I always fold and hang the bath towels perfectly, when I'm dusting I pick up things on the shelf and dust under them instead of dusting around them, I'm always on time and normally five minutes early, I always put the milk back exactly the same spot in the fridge not in a different place, the knives in the knife block, each one has to be in its place.
When you're a person like that God is going to make absolutely sure that He puts you in a family and into a work place into a Church where there's at least one person who's completely at the opposite end of the spectrum. Someone who's not neat and tidy, someone who's not always on time. It's an absolute dead certainty that God's going to do that.
And it doesn't matter what personality type we are He's always going to make sure that we rub up against someone who's different and that is sometimes going to drive us nuts if we let it. That's where so many people have their temper tantrums, right in that place of difference.
Instead of standing back and realising those differences we just react like Pavlov's dogs, stimulus: response, stimulus: response, stimulus: response. It's a vicious cycle that leads to anger and temper tantrums. Someone does something that flicks our switch off we go with this temper tantrum. I wonder if you can relate to this.
My daughter Melissa works part time on a check-out in a large department store and every time she comes home at least one customer had to have a temper tantrum at the counter over something. Let's get a revelation today; we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people who are going to do imperfect things. At the department store, on the road, at work, at home, at Church, everywhere we go.
And we can either have temper tantrums or decide, you know something I actually want to have some peace in my life. I want to enjoy my life and you know something other people's failures are not going to rob me of that peace. Other people falling short of my expectations are not going to rob me of that peace. You know something we want everyone to be just like us, we want everyone to see the world just the way we see the world and it's never going to be like that.
There's a wonderful little Proverb, if you want to read it it's in the Old Testament Proverbs chapter 29, verse 22:
An angry man stirs up dissention and a hot-tempered one commits many sins.
If we have a bit of a temper maybe today's the day we need to admit that and it's time to deal with it. It's time to get things into perspective. You see those little things that we get upset about 99.9% of them just don't matter, really they don't. I need this perhaps even more than you do.
Temper tantrums are a sure sign that we need to do some growing up. I tell you something God wants three things for our lives, a deep relationship with Him, the deep joy that comes from that relationship and for that relationship to bear good fruit in our lives, fruit that other people can be blessed through. It's how He works, that's how Gods economy runs and temper tantrums are a sure sign we haven't come to grips with the main currency of that economy, the currency of grace.
There's another Proverb, Proverbs chapter 16, verse 32:
Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper is better than one who takes a city.
Isn't that an interesting way of putting it because a warrior, the man who takes the city, is someone who takes things by force through fighting? And Gods saying here a patient person is better than a warrior, patience is better than taking things by force, patience is better than a temper tantrum. When we control our aggression we can be such a great influence for God in the lives of other people because they see something that they want, a peace, a quiet contentment, a joy that replaces the outbursts and that's a beautiful thing; humility, a grace, a sweet fragrance of God Himself.
We do, we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people, fact of life, full stop, end of story, never going to change this side of eternity. People are always going to be different to us, people are always going to have weaknesses that rub us the wrong way and we have a choice, either behaving like an immature adolescent and throwing our little temper tantrum or deciding, you know something I'm just not going to go round that mountain anymore.
Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper is better than one who takes a city.
An angry man stirs up dissention and a hot-tempered one commits many sins.
I'm not going there anymore. It is time to flip the switch and say, "God I just don't want to go there anymore." Can I tell you? Sometimes it is so hard just to shut up and not say anything. Sometimes we have to bite our lips so hard that they bleed. But when we draw close to God, we let Him change us on the inside as we come to grips with His grace and we do away with the little temper tantrums.
Self control and patience are hard things to learn and there's only one way of learning them, the hard way but they're fruits of the Spirit of God that grow in us as we draw close to Him and co-operate with Him and lay down our right to perfection and lay down our right to everything we expect of other people. God wants us to have peace.

Bitterness and anger can become a habit – an attitude that grips our live. It's like a venom that pumps through our veins. Fortunately though, there is an antidote. God made certain of that.
Anger is a real problem in this world, it's running at plague proportions and yet it's something you don't hear people talk much about. Psychologists have come up with a term 'the last straw syndrome'; people seem to do outrageously destructive things. The young teenager who shoots up his high school, the road rage that happens around the place, people are flying off the handle all over the place, it's an epidemic.
You and I experience anger on a regular basis, both when it grips our hearts and when we're on the receiving end of someone else's anger. Anger, fury, rage, indignation, a desire to lash out, to hurt others, a deep sense that we've been wronged and we have to set it right through revenge. It's the stuff that wars are made of. So what's the antidote? How do we deal with it decisively and end the hurt that anger causes?
Well I have to tell you I am an expert in anger management, I'll tell you why. They say once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, people who seem to have overcome it talk about themselves as being recovering alcoholics. In other words it always stays with them but it's something that they keep overcoming every day.
Well for me it's the same when it comes to anger. My big Achilles heel, the deep flaw in my character is this anger thing. Berni's a type A achiever type of personality, I set goals, I chase them down, I hit targets, I move on to the next thing, and that's okay, it reflects in everything I do, the way I drive, the way I cook, I'm always planning my time, I'm always being efficient, achieving the best that I can.
It's great but it has its down sides. Now no matter what personality type we have each one of us, we expect everyone to be like us. I expect you to be like me and when you drive more slowly than I want you to and when you're not as efficient as I want you to I have a tendency to get angry. When you have my sort of personality you can be brutal about all those other people out there who just don't meet your expectations.
It drives me nuts when the car in front of me drives just slowly enough for me to miss the green traffic light up ahead. Unbelievable, how can they do that? I just want to lean on my horn and shake my fist and find some choice words. It's the stuff that road rage is made of.
My favourite saying used to be, "it's so hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." So for the first thirty or forty years of my life I lived in an almost constant state of anger and rage. So when I talk about dealing with anger and finding an antidote to anger I'm not talking this stuff from a text book, I'm talking from a transformed life, a life that continues to be transformed because I'm kind of like that recovering alcoholic, this is going to be a lifelong process in me, a process of rehabilitation that God takes me through because that's how I'm wired.
Now I love a passage out of the New Testament of the Bible, the Book of Hebrews, it talks right into this problem and it's the place where I discovered the antidote to this venom. We had a quick look at this yesterday on the program. Have a listen. It comes from Hebrews chapter 12, verse 14:
Pursue peace with everyone and holiness because without them you won't get so much as a glimpse of God. Make sure that no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble because through it so many will be contaminated.
That root of bitterness is what takes hold of our hearts and our lives when we fail to deal with anger. It's like biting into a lemon and sucking out the sour juice, have you ever done that? Just thinking about it makes your eyes water doesn't it? I remember working with a woman and she was a senior manager in government, very competent woman but she had this attitude in life and this look on her face as though just before she walked out of her office she had bitten into a lemon, she was that sort of a person.
When a root of bitterness springs up it causes trouble. When you plant a plum seed eventually it's going to take root and produce plums, not apricots or nectarines or apples but plums. When we let goodness take root in our hearts we're going to grow good fruit. When we let bitterness take root in our hearts we're going to grow bitter fruit. The root produces the fruit and that's what causes trouble.
It doesn't matter so much what's going on around us, see we can blame everyone and everything and every circumstance but really it matters on what's happening in our hearts, that's what determines the fruit in our lives. Proverbs chapter 15, verse 15 says this:
All the days of the poor are hard but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.
In other words how we respond to things, how we react to things depends on what's going on in our hearts and if we've allowed a root of bitterness to take hold of our heart, you know when people have hurt us in the past or we've missed out on things and all of a sudden we get this bad attitude, this attitude that's like we've bitten into a lemon and we treat everything in the world as though we've just bitten into a lemon it's going to ruin our lives.
But the antidote, the antidote is also a thing of the heart; the antidote is the grace of God. God has every right to be angry with you and me; we both turned our backs on Him. In fact the Bible talks a lot about the anger of God and says, look when you get angry leave it to Him because He knows how to handle it but if we keep living in anger we're going to end up with a root of bitterness.
God handles His anger by a thing called grace, the unmerited favour of God. Grace by definition is something we don't deserve. Grace is what happened on the cross when Jesus was crucified. A place where Gods justice, the punishment that we deserve fuses with God's love because He let His Son take the punishment and it turns into this thing called grace.
He forgives us by sacrificing His Son to satisfy His sense of justice and anger and that's the good news for us, that's grace, it's the antidote for bitterness and anger. Listen again to that passage out of Hebrews.
Make sure that no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.
When we live in that grace it takes the bitterness away, it tears it out and heals it because when we come to grips with grace, when we come to grips with how much He's forgiven us and the cost to Him of doing that in His Son it produces a new root, a root of grace and mercy in our hearts and that starts producing a new fruit.
God's grace is the only antidote to this bitterness and this anger that I've come across. Instead of changing the fruit, you see sometimes we try and change the outside, because we can't, we need to change the root, we need to experience and drink in the grace of God and let Him produce a new fruit in our lives.

Bitterness is something that we sometimes carry around in our hearts. And so often we don't even realise that this root of bitterness has taken hold in our lives. What is it and what can we do about it?
I don't know if you've noticed but when a seed falls to the ground and dies ultimately it sprouts and takes root. And if it was the seed of a plum tree we can be fairly certain that the thing that's growing there is going to one day produce, well not apricots, not apples, not pears, we all know it's going to produce a plum because it's a plum tree that's taken root and in fact it's the root that ultimately produces the fruit. It just one of those basic facts of life that actually we don't have to think much about, the root produces the fruit.
And it's a bit like that in our hearts. If our heart takes root in goodness then we'll produce good fruit, in bad things and we'll produce bad fruit, in sweet things then we'll produce sweet fruit, in bitter things and we'll produce bitter fruit. It's just not rocket science is it?
This week on the program we're going to take a look at the phenomenon of anger in our society and in our lives. There's a great movie a few years ago called Anger Management. Anger is a real phenomenon in the hearts of so many people, you know how pressure builds up in life and ultimately people explode. We have at home a pressure cooker and we cook things in it and there's a vent and if the steam didn't come out of the vent that pressure cooker would explode and it's the same with us.
So many people are out there venting their anger; it's in epidemic proportions. You have road rage and supermarket rage and a call centre rage, in fact this week's program was prompted by a real life experience. At the moment I have a couple of brothers, Greek guys, doing some painting at my old 19th century terrace, just needed a bit of touching up. And they're doing a much bigger job in parallel to ours in one of the wealthiest streets in our country.
This place they're painting is a huge five storey mansion, they're using a special paint that costs, wait for it, a thousand dollars a tin – unbelievable and the houses in this street are worth between fifteen and twenty-five million, this is where the mega wealthy live. And lots of people in this fairly narrow street are having building work done and so it's pretty crowded and so even though they've got great views and lots of money and massive mansions there's quite a bit of strife in this place.
The painters have been working there now for a few weeks and they were telling me that you wouldn't believe the arguments raging between the neighbours. The house that they're working on belongs to a couple in their seventies and they haven't talked to their neighbours for twenty-five years because a quarter of a century ago they had an argument about some building works.
And all the neighbours in this street are fighting with one another. The woman who our painters are working for, they'd done some work a few years before and she was very nice, and now all of a sudden everyone is mean and nasty and horrible. Now you stand back from that and you think that's unbelievable.
I mean these people have everything in life, there's nothing they can't have or buy or own really, everything their hearts desire and yet there's a spirit, well a spirit of anger and bitterness and dissention in this place. Makes you wonder what's going on there.
These two painters, I've used them before, they are lovely people, they do a brilliant job, they're honest as the day is long. How can this woman be so nasty to them? I'll tell you what's happened, anger and bitterness has taken root in her heart, that's why. You let things get to you and you get angry with people over and over and over again and it's like, it's like bitterness takes root in your heart and the root produces the fruit.
God actually talks a lot about anger, you know it's a word that pops up three hundred and seventy-six times in the Bible which makes it one of the leading subjects that God talks about. Anger is something we all have to deal with and it springs up so often out of a root of bitterness.
The writer of the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament puts it like this, he says:
Pursue peace with everyone and holiness because without them you won't get so much of a glimpse of God. Make sure that no one misses out on God's grace so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble because through it so many will be contaminated.
See there it is, the root produces the fruit. Make sure no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble. When a root of bitterness takes hold in our hearts it springs up and causes trouble and contaminates everyone around us.
We all have a problem with anger some days, we do, some people more than others but the longer we let it go on the more it takes hold of our hearts and our lives and produces bitterness and a bitter root produces bitter fruit. A root isn't something that happens overnight, it's something we cultivate and if we don't want it to keep growing we have to stop feeding it.
The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 26. He says:
Be angry but don't sin. Don't let the sun go down on your anger and don't make room for the devil.
See he knows, God knows. We all get angry from time to time, it's not a sin. I mean sometimes people do things and it just causes us to get angry because they've wronged us but if we keep it inside, if we let the sun go down on our anger, if we keep it in our hearts and we brood over it and we work it over and over and over in our minds and we plan our revenge, that's when it grows from a root into fruit.
The right way of handling it is just to get over it, to forgive and to move on and then we won't be cultivating this root of bitterness which as sure as God made little green apples will produce fruit of bitterness because the root produces the fruit.
Now this isn't something we can do on our own, I believe we need an antidote to this venom. It's something that heals and cleanses and just gives us a fresh perspective. Let me just take you back to that earlier quote that we read before from Hebrews chapter 12, verses 14 and 15 where the writer says:
Pursue peace with everyone …
In fact that's an active thing isn't it? Pursue peace, go out of your way to pursue peace:
… and holiness because without them you won't get so much of a glimpse of God. Make sure no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.
See the antidote to bitterness that the Apostle Paul is pointing to here is God's grace. What's grace? Grace is Gods unmerited favour. We're going to talk about it a bit on the program tomorrow because it's a really important thing. God's grace is His unmerited favour. He has every right under the sun to be angry with you and me a whole bunch more than He ever is and yet He sent His Son Jesus to die on that cross.
The cross is where justice meets love and turns it into grace, God's forgiveness and when we experience that grace that's what acts as the antidote to this root of bitterness. Without it it's inevitable that a root of bitterness will spring up.

Have you ever found yourself completely at the end of your tether. You just don't have anything left. You just don't know which way to turn or what to do. It's a desperate place, a confusing place, a fearful place and a place where God is ready and waiting to touch you, bless you and bring you peace.
We get a lot of prayer requests at our www.christianityworks.com website from people who are at the end of their tether. I'd like to share one of these with you today, anonymously of course, because my hunch is that there are so many people who are just struggling with this, who are at the end of their tethers.
This is the prayer request that we received just recently from a woman.
I just had an uncontrollable anger situation between my husband and our teenage son. My husband had come to visit and a heated argument started over our son's attitude to choices of sport, and it resulted in a hard slap across my son's face. Then he left again in one of our cars whilst he'd lost his license for drink driving. I feel so confused and sad and upset and unhappy. When is my husband going to control his anger? When is he going to control his drink?
I'm so fed up. When are our three boys going to have a controllable loving father? We've been separated so often now. I know these boys are just so desperately wanting a happy and balanced and controllable family. Will you please pray that I keep falling and picking myself up? I just don't know what's going to happen this year.
It's the anniversary of my Dad's passing away, its twelve months ago and it's been so hard. I had an accident from falling off a horse, which left me immobile for the last six months. And with all of these going on, no family, no support, barely any friends, I'm so lonely. I just don't know where I'd be without God. Please pray for us.
This woman is at the end of her tether. She's nowhere to turn except God. And things are happening over and over again, like you can never break out, like you know that movie Groundhog Day. You never escape, it'll never change. Here is this man who has a drinking problem and a problem with anger over and over again back together, separated, back together, separated. The boys have arguments … you know, it is so hard when we feel that we have problems that just keep repeating themselves and we can't break out of them.
What's life look like at the end of your tether? What are the things that keep going round and round and over and over again – kids or spouse or work or addictions or loneliness or fear or pain? So many people these days suffer from multiple alienations, not just one but two or three at the same time. And it drives them to the edge; it drives them to the end of their tether.
The Apostle Peter wrote a wonderful passage in one of his letters. If you have a Bible, you can go and look at it sometime. It's in the book First Peter Chapter 5 verse 7. It's almost right at the end of the Bible, 1 Peter 5:7. He writes this, it's beautiful:
Cast all your anxiety on God because he cares for you. Cast all your anxiety on God because he cares for you.
Now, I always kind of thought of anxiety as being a twentieth century or a twenty-first century word, you know. It seems to be a symptom of the speed we live life at, the technology, the pressure, the emails, the phone calls, the here and now. I always thought of anxiety like that. But here two thousand years ago, Peter the Apostle talks about anxiety. He talks about being at the end of your tether, about being anxious and threatened and not being able to cope and just not being able to deal with any more.
"Stop the world, I want to get off", is what Peter was talking about here two thousand years ago. I'm sure there were angry husbands. I'm sure there were drinking problems. I'm sure there were alienated teenagers. And on top of all that, he was writing at the time to a Church that was being persecuted in a brutal way – Christians were being killed for their faith. And he writes "Cast all your anxiety on Him." Why? "Because He cares for you."
My hunch is that when we're anxious – when we're at the end of our tether, when we are dealing with alcoholics and angry people and all these horrible things that happen in our relationships and our lives – the last thing we ever expect is … that God cares for us. He seems to care for successful people. He seems to care for people that are doing well.
You look at other people and you think, "Well, God's looking after them. They haven't got a problem in their lives." Of course, the reality is we don't see the problems in their lives most of the time. And we look at our own little dung heap that were scratching around in, we look at our own little lot and we think, "Well, where the heck is God for me?"
I actually sent this woman an email just the other day to encourage her and say, I personally will be praying for her husband. Because you know something, the Bible says that the prayer of a righteous man achieves much. I have an enormous faith in God. I believe that as I pray for this man – I don't know where he lives, I don't know what his name is, I don't know what he looks like – but I know that God does. I know that as I sit down in prayer and say, "Father I just pray for this man, and I pray for this relationship", I know God can and will do mighty things.
Whether you're at the end of your tether now or whether this is something that you need to store away for the future, I'd ask you to let this simple truth sink in to your soul. When you have no other options; when you have no other place to turn; when you just can't take it anymore; when the past just keeps repeating itself over and over again; when everybody else is turning against you; right at that point … Jesus Christ is standing next to you waiting, supporting, believing, and calling you. Calling you with the words:
Come to me all you who are heavily burdened and I will give you rest. I'm lowly and humble of heart and my yoke is light. (Matthew 11:28)
Right at the point where you can't take any more, Jesus Christ is in that place with you to take the load off your back. That's His desire. He is a God of the practical. He is a God of grace. He is a God of love. He is a God that will reach each one of us at the lowest point, especially when we feel like God's looking after everyone else except us.
If you are at the end of your tether, I'm going to pray for you right now.
Father I pray for each person here, right now who for whatever reason, whatever their circumstances, whatever is going on in their space, because of that they are at the end of their tether.
Jesus, you are a God who specialises in the end of the tether. You're a God who comes to meet us in those dark places. Put your arms around us to pour your Spirit over us, to comfort us, to bind us up, to heal us, to lift us up, to give us a new life and give us a new hope.
Lord we believe that, we believe that you are a God of healing, a God of future, a God of grace.
Father, I pray each for person who's at the end of their tether. Lord, I pray that you would pour your goodness and your grace and your peace and your comfort into their hearts right now.
Father, I pray that in the name of Jesus, I pray that you would bring people around them, to hold them close, to comfort them, to help them in the healing process.
And I pray that right now through the words that we've spoken together today, you would give each person a sense of the wonderful future and destiny that you have planned for them.
Father, I pray that in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.