When she walked out on the stage the audience just sneered at her. The judges rolled their eyes. She was 48 years old, never been married, never been kissed, unemployed and still looking. Her hair was a mess. Her eyebrows looked like a forest. She was frumpy at best and her dress looked like something my mother used to wear back in the sixties.

She’d been singing since she was 12 years old and always wanted to sing in front of a large audience. After she pranced out onto the stage – she was really odd you know – one of the judges asked her what she dreamed to be.

“A professional singer”, she answered. The judges and the audience were incredulous. “And why hasn’t it worked out for you so far?” A judged asked. They all poked fun at her. They were brutal. But she stood her ground.

“What are you going to sing for us tonight?” One of the judges asked patronisingly. “‘I dreamed a Dream’ from Le Miserables,” she answered. And on the thumbs up, the audio pressed the button. The music began to play and she opened her mouth and began to sing … with the voice of an angel.

Her performance brought the house down. Her name is Susan Boyle. And within just a few weeks over 100 million people had watched this video clip on YouTube on the Internet.

I’ve watched that video – seven minutes and seven seconds. I’ve watched it online several times now and not once have I finished with a dry eye. The world wanted to judge this book by it’s cover but before she walked out on stage she told the interviewer “I’m going to make this audience rock!”

No one believed her, no one believed her, until she opened her mouth to sing these words. I can only speak them, I can’t sing them but have a listen anyway:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life was worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted.
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted.

But the tigers came at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame.

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Those beautiful words from the stunning musical La Miserables are the story of many a life. We start off with dreams and so often those dreams are crushed. So often we don’t end up living the life that we thought we should be living.

Susan Boyle knew something about herself before she walked out on that stage. Thirty-six years she had been singing and had never had the opportunity to perform like this. But she knew who she was and nervous as she was she sang so beautifully, so powerfully that she was like a mirror into our souls.

When we looked at her we saw ourselves. We saw our hopes and dreams even when the audience laughed and sneered and she was crushed by an unforgiving world. Why did over 100 million people watch this video clip online. Why is it that you just can’t watch that performance without getting misty eyes and a stuffy nose? Why?

Because it reminds each one of us deep down that the need we have to be who we are created to be. It reminds us of the pain of a world that doesn’t know who we are. As a life, a life that doesn’t know where it’s going. It hurts. It hurts so deeply for so many people.

And there is not a sane of person among the 100 million who doesn’t wish Susan well. There’s not a one who’s not inspired. There’s not a one who doesn’t ache to experience just what she experienced.

My friend, so many people of the 6.5 billion people alive on planet earth today are like travellers who’ve lost their passports. Men, women, children are on a journey to somewhere without really knowing who they are and where they’re headed.

And the tragedy amongst all of this is that this life we have to live down here on earth, it’s a one time thing. It’s not a dress rehearsal and we don’t get a second chance. There’s one chance to make it count. One chance to live it to the full. One chance. And all too soon the spring of our youth turns into autumn. All too soon we find ourselves heading toward the last act of this drama that we call life. All too soon …

I don’t know about you, but I want to look on the life that I’ve lived when I’m old and incontinent and toothless, I want my heart to glow in the knowledge that not only did I discover who it was that my God made me to be, but that I lived out the identity that He gave me, the personality He gave me, the life plan that He gave me, to the absolute full!

You can’t ask much more of life than a life lived where you know that you know deep in your heart, that you lived it to the full when you’re on your death bed.

Let me ask you something. As you contemplate the remainder of your life, the time between now and when you breathe your last breath here on planet earth, will you ask yourself these basic questions? Have I discovered who I was created to be? Am I living that out to the full in my life? Am I singing the song of my dreams that God planted deep in my DNA before time began? When you ask yourself those questions what’s the answer? Yes or no?

If your answer is ‘yes’ then you talk about some profound sense of joy, peace and contentment, the sort of stuff I was talking about before. If the answer is ‘no’ then probably there’s this nagging sense that you’re missing out on something. Is this all there is? Surely there must be something more?

You know, my experience with most people, by far the majority are in the ‘no’ category. They have some sense of destiny but also they have this sense that they’re not living it out, at least not to the full. And for me the starting point of all of that is an understanding of who I was created to be. Understanding my nature. People often talk about personality type.

So over the next 4 weeks on the program that’s what we’re going to be unpacking. A dear friend of mine, Keith Henry, will be joining me next week on the program. He and I have just finished writing a book together on this very subject. It’s called ‘Personality GPS Living Life to the Full By Knowing Who I Am’. And the whole point of that book and what we are going to be talking at on the program over the next 4 weeks is to discover who we are. Who you are. Who I am. What personality did God give Me? And what’s the plan for using that personality in this world. It’s all summed up in a nutshell by the Apostle Paul who wrote this in a letter to a bunch of friends in a church in Ephesus in the First Century:

“For we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works that God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians Chapter 2, Verse 10)

In other words, who we are and the destiny that He’s mapped out for our lives, those two fit hand in glove. That’s why it’s so important for us to know exactly who it is He’s made each one of us to be. It’s important for me and it’s important for you.

Now over the years something I’ve thought a lot about is weather the idea that God has a plan for my life, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, on the one hand the idea that a good God would have a good plan for my life, well, that feels good.

On the other what if I don’t like His plan. What if I want to make some changes and go my own way. Is the idea of God having a plan for our lives an awesome thing or is it just a crutch or worse still, a straight jacket?

Well today on the program that’s what I would like to explore with you. To look at it from A Different Perspective, from God’s perspective. Then it’s up to each one of us to make up our own minds.

Do you remember the old Frank Sinatra song ‘I Did it My Way’? Well Frank can sing it better than me. It was the time of the 1970’s I think where every talent quest on television, some man, it was always a man, would get up and sing ‘I Did it My Way’.

And now the end is near
I face the final curtain,
My friend I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.
I lived life to the full,
I’ve travelled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way.

I don’t know about you and your experiences of life but I’ve got to tell you I tried doing it my way, and as we talked early in the week on the program and what I discovered it didn’t work so well. You know what I thing? I think God designed it that way. Yesterday on the program we looked at the fact that we really are made in the image of God. We’re made to have a relationship with Him.

I think there is something inside each one of us that God would enliven to get us to reach out to Him. It’s like marriage in a sense. I mean, I was made to have a wife. I’m just not one to be on my own. I mean, I enjoy my own space, but I’m not one to be single.

Now I’m married to Jacqui and she’s a wonderful wife and I enjoy marriage but you know, there’s a cost to marriage. You have to lay things down, you have to sacrifice. The Bible talks about becoming one flesh. That’s great. But the ‘becoming’ bit, coming to grips with being one rather than two … well that requires sacrifice and it hurts some days.

But somehow even though I’m an individual, there’s something there’s something that makes me complete in my soul in my marriage relationship with Jacqui, my wife. It’s how God made me to be.

When it comes to God, I don’t think that I can be the me that I was meant to be, I don’t think that I can live out the life that I was given to the full unless in the same way I have a close and dynamic relationship with Him. Lord knows, I spent 36 years trying to do it the other way. Money and recognition and career – I had it all I Did it My Way’. But there came a time when I had to admit that my way was kind of empty, that I needed more, I needed him and you know something, He knows that because He knows us.

The other day we looked at Psalm 139. We actually looked at the second half. I’d like to go back and have a look at the first half. Have a listen. The Psalmist, probably David, writes:

“Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit down, when I rise up; you know my thoughts from a long way off. You discern my going out and my lying down; you’re familiar with all of my ways. Before even a word is on my tongue you know it completely Lord. You hem me in – behind me before me; you’ve laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go to heaven, you’re there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the farthest side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me and your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light will become night around me, even the darkness won’t be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, because darkness is as light to you.”

That’s profound; you know what David’s saying here? (It’s King David who probably wrote that Psalm) That God is on this journey with us.

We can flee, we can wrestle, we can fight, we can run, we can do what we like but He is on this journey with us. One of the things I wrestled with in the early days of being a Christian was jargon. Sin was one of them, repent was another.

I don’t know. I must have seen an old western movie, black and white, when I was a kid and I remember some fire and brimstone preacher on one of those covered wagons standing on the top yelling, “Repent!” I thought ‘Oh yuck’. But as I come to grips with that concept this is what it ended up meaning to me. Admitting somehow that my way and my choices as good as they looked at the time ended up being hollow, admitting somehow that my way was empty.

I remember buying this really expensive, I mean really expensive huge car, it had everything. It had this beautiful burgundy duco, this lustre and it was a lovely shape and it used to turn heads. It had four wheel steering, you know the front at the low speed would turn in a different direction to the back wheels so the whole thing would pivot on a pin head. And inside the smell of the new car and the leather and the look of the dashboard – I have to tell you, it was awesome.

And I remember sitting inside this car which cost me a bomb and looking at it and smelling the new leather smell and somehow that thing I wanted to be a real joy to me was empty and hollow and I had to come to grips with the fact that my way wasn’t working for me. Repenting, turning back to God, meant admitting that. Turning and saying, “You know something God? I’m done trying my way, I want to get with your plan and yes, I know that there are some things I’ll have to give up, I know that”.

But you know there were actually very few things that we’re asked to give up and they were really rubbish things. The pride, the selfishness, the backstabbing, the greed. It meant putting God into the drivers seat. And when I started doing that day after day, do you know what happened?

I’ll tell you. This is what happened. I had this growing sense that I was becoming the person I was always meant to be. That I was starting to live my life to the full because my frame wasn’t hidden from Him when I was made in that secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth, His eyes saw my unformed body. All the day ordained for me were written in His book before one of them yet came to be. And so now I can say how precious to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them!

That turning, coming to that decision, coming to that conclusion in my life, no matter where we are, no matter what we say we believe, that turning can be a very hard thing to do because it’s not just a single turning point, it’s then living that new decision out in life. Living out the decision to have God as our Lord, as our Number One. That can be hard. But if we’re going to do that, if we’re going to be the person that God meant us to be that’s where it’s at.

And so tomorrow on the program we’ll look at what it means actually to live that out. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Come back to that verse that we looked at the other day. It’s in the New Testament written by the Apostle Paul. It’s kind of an executive summary if you like of the whole long Psalm 139. Paul says this in Ephesians Chapter 2 Verse 10. He says:

“We are God’s workmanship, created and crafter in Jesus Christ to do good works that God prepared beforehand for us to walk into.”

And if that’s true, doesn’t it make an enormous amount of sense to discover who we are – who He created us to be and then to seek out, to hunt down the good works he prepared in advance for us to do? I mean, it’s blindingly, glimpsingly obvious isn’t it?

As I look around at people – big, small, black white, young, old – what I see is an awful lot of people who aren’t happy with their lot in life. And as you talk to them what it often comes down to is, not that their not happy with their lot and the things that are going on, although that’s sometimes part of it, there’s something much deeper than that. More often than not they’re not happy with who they are.

Yesterday on the program we chatted about the fact that often we feel we don’t measure up to what the world expects of us. But today I’d like to go even deeper than that again.

Let me ask you, forgetting everything that goes on around you, when you’re alone in a quiet room, completely alone, do you like who you are? Are you excited about who you are, you’re potential. Do you enjoy your own company or are you one of these people who can’t stand to see themselves in a photograph or in the mirror. Because it turns out that what we think of ourselves has a huge impact, a huge impact on the life we’re going to live.

Every now and then I think to myself, it’s time to get right in your face about something. And today’s one of those days. I mean, I don’t mean to shove anything down anyone’s throat, that’s not my intention. But I don’t know, I just feel that today it’s time to really challenge you about how you see yourself.

I’m someone who for many, many years, in fact, for the first 36 years of my life, appeared so confident on the outside. I have to tell you, everyone who every met says, “Oh this guy’s so confident”. But on the inside (which after all is where we live and where we feel where we laugh and where we cry) I just wasn’t happy with who I was.

People would never have guessed it, because in my confidence I used to roll over the top of people. I’m not talking about the things that I do, I’m talking about who I really am, or at least was. I didn’t like my “who”, I didn’t like myself. And the more I tried to pump myself up in my own eyes and the eyes of other people, somehow the lower I sank in my estimation of myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I was so blessed in so many ways, there were plenty of things I was good at, but I just never like myself. And you know when that changed for me, it was the day, the very day, I gave myself, my whole life, every hope, every dream, everything to Jesus Christ. From that moment onward, on a bright sunny day at about 11.30 in the morning on the 15th October 1995 under a gum tree outside a church in my hometown aged 36 I knew I was okay.

Now, I thought a lot about that, and I thought why did it happen like that? It was one of those things that changed in an instant for me. Why? There’s only one answer, because on that day I accepted how much God loved me. I heard Him calling me from the cross of Christ. Out of His suffering and out of His Pain I heard Him cry out, “Don’t you realise how much I love you?” And that perfect love cast out all my fear.

That sacrifice was about paying for my sin. All the things I’d done wrong all my life and I have to tell you there were plenty to pay for. But the thing that did it for me was the whole point of Him dying on the cross was to pay the price for my sin, to make me whole, and that’s the one thing that no ne else could do for me. He did it for me. And sure, I will spend the rest of eternity coming to grips with the magnitude or His love – the greatest love of all.

But I began to wrap my heart around that. I just knew it was okay. If He loved me that much, maybe it was time to see myself through His eyes and not through the world’s eyes. Don‘t get me wrong. I didn’t become Mr Perfect overnight. And all my faults and all my failures and all my weaknesses didn’t disappear in an instant. That’s not how it works. It’s a process.

I was this tough, hard-nosed, brutal businessman and when you’re that, it takes time to develop compassion to learn to forgive and to learn to understand other people. That didn’t happen overnight. But the thing that happened for me, I knew He accepted me just as I was. And even though I couldn’t see all the things I had done wrong, that I was completely forgiven.

He came to me and said, “Now that you have a new beginning, let me help you to change.” That’s the thing. If God sees me that way, maybe it’s time for me to see me that way. Maybe it’s time for me to see myself through God’s eyes. And still today there are some things I’m really good at and other things I am not so good at and I may never be. Some of the things you can do, I’ll never be able to do.

But His love brought me to a point with all my heart I’m delighted to be who I am. I often say to my wife Jacqui, I’m so glad I’m me and I never want to be anyone else. That’s a gift from God, because I never liked me before that. And that gift was purchased at a price – the life of Jesus Christ.

Let me get in your face and ask you, is it time for you to ask yourself “Do I see myself the way God sees me?” Have a listen to this passage again from Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10. We’ve looked at it a couple of times this week. It says:

“For we are God’s workmanship created, hand crafted in Christ Jesus, to do the good works which God prepared in advance for us to walk in.”

Imagine, you and I, we are His workmanship, handcrafted lovingly by Him to be the person we are. And He loves who we are so much that He sent His beloved Son to the Cross to die for us. Do I love me the right way? Not a proud and arrogant way but in a humble delight in who He’s made me to be and how much He loves me. Because how can you and I possibly ever be the person we were meant to be and live our lives to the full if we don’t like who we are to start with.

“God, you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother‘s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are so wonderful. I wasn’t hidden from you when I was made in that secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth Your eyes saw my unformed substance. All the days were deigned for me, they were already written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious are your thoughts oh God, how vast is the sum of them.”

Father, We just want to pray right now and say that we need to know how much You love us. We want to see ourselves through Your eyes, because as we put our faith in Christ Jesus, dear God we believe that He died to pay for our sin on that Cross and that He rose again. And so we put our faith in Him and we know that we are whole and clean and pure and perfect in your sight because that’s what Jesus purchased for us on the Cross.

Father, it can be such a huge leap for us to see ourselves that way and we need your help, we need your spirit to open our spiritual eyes so that we can see ourselves just the way you see us. Father I pray in Jesus name that you would make each one of us so delighted with who we are because that’s what you chose us to be and Lord, we know we’re making mistakes and we know that we need your help in those mistakes, but right now Father God, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, that each one of us here today, that you by the gift of the Cross, would make us so delighted with who you made us to be.

I don’t know if you have ever noticed this, but living an average, normal everyday life creates dirt. I mean, just eating and drinking and living, just the basic things create waste. Carbon dioxide that we all breath out with every breath – if we didn’t get rid of that it would poison us. Perspiration of course and we excrete waste. If we kept all of those things inside they would kill us in a pretty short time.

And then there’s our home. If you don’t tidy up on the way it becomes a mess. If you don’t clean it each week it gets dirty and for no other reason than we’ve been living life in it. All good, all normal but life creates mess and dirt. It’s inexorable. You have to wash out the shower or the soap scum builds. Even cleaning ourselves makes a mess.

On a global scale we call it pollution. It’s a perennial problem. It’s just the way it is. Now just living life creates a whole bunch of dirt and waste and if it’s true physically then it’s also true emotionally and spiritually. And that emotional and spiritual dirt and waste that we produce is just as toxic as the physical waste. It can poison us, it can rob us of life unless we do something about it.

For so many years I have to tell you, I used to hear Christians talk about sin, thinking “Go on, get a life. I mean, I don’t need this guilt trip. I don’t need to go to confession or to be absolved of anything or any sort of stuff like that. I mean I am basically okay. I haven’t killed anyone, I haven’t robbed a bank. Leave me alone”. The notion of sin had no place whatsoever in my reckoning. It was a dog eat dog kind of world. There was plenty of dog to go around. “I’ll tread on whoever I want to, I’ll do whatever I want to as long as I don’t break the law. I’m right Jack.”

That was the kind of attitude I had. That’s okay while life’s going along basically okay, but you don’t build many relationships and friendships that way. And you know as I was sharing this program the other day I found that there was no joy or satisfaction or contentment in that sort of life.

Now today’s psyche is basically this: “Anything goes”. But in the “anything goes” psyche not everything works. There’s an article in my local newspaper recently on pornography. The pornography industry was trying to make pornographic videos more widely available to reduce their level of restriction and classification. In the “anything goes” philosophy well, what people do in their own bedrooms is their own problem. But there are consequences. There is very clear research out there that pornography leads to less intimacy in marriage and as a result more marriages are breaking down.

When I spend on me, me, me. That’s great. But real satisfaction comes when we give of ourselves, of who we are, and what we have. It’s not until we give sacrificially to someone, to someone in need, that we really get satisfaction in life. And that’s where we really discover who we are and what life’s all about.

For many, many years I just kidded myself I was okay but it actually didn’t work. Just living my life created waste and mess and dirt and pollution. And here’s the rub, when we live the “I am the centre of the universe – me, me, me,” model we want everything to flow in. And that stuff includes the waste and the mess and the dirt. And it stays inside with everything flowing in and it poisons our systems. It ruins our lives. Do you get it?

Maybe you’ve heard me talk on the program about sin, and you think “Why does he keep labouring this point?” I tell you why, because it poisons our lives. It robs us. It means instead of being the me I was meant to be, instead of living my life to the full, I let cancer creep into my soul and rob me of being the person living the life that God planned for me. And the same is true of you.

Here is the plan from the beginning:
“God said, “Let us make man in our image and our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over all the stock and over all the earth and over all the creatures that move on the ground”. So God created us in His own image, male and female He created us. And God blessed us, and said “Be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth, subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground”.

0Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the earth. Every tree that has fruit on it will be yours for food. Then all of the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that’s got a breath of life in it I give every green plant for food”. And it was so. And God saw everything that He had made and it was really good. And there were the evening and the morning and that was the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

Now this is the initial plan. He made us in His image to be like Him, to have dominion over everything. He gave. Have you noticed He gave everything to us. But then we rebelled. We all have. Adam and Eve did, you and I have. We’ve all sinned, we have all fallen short of the glory of God.

Now just think over the last 24 hours, things that you and I have done in our heart of hearts that we know are wrong. We keep doing those things. We keep holding onto them. The poison is septic. It just ruins our lives. Have you seen an infected wound. It can kill you. Well that’s what an infected soul does. It’s ugly and at the end of the day it kills you.

The word for “sin” appears 421 times throughout the Bible. That means a big deal to God. And I’ve said this many times before and I’ll say it again, I was astounded when I learned the true meaning of the word “sin”. The Greek word that’s used in the New Testament that we translate as “sin”, it means literally “to miss the mark” or we might say “to miss the point”. To live a life of sin means to live a life that misses the whole point.

You know, we have this sense of destiny. We want to be the person we were meant to be. We want to live life to the full. Well the one way to miss out on that, the one way is to turn our back on God and say I’ll do it my way. I’m just going to do what I want to do, I’m going to live the “anything goes” model. And then when it falls in a screaming heap we get surprised. We’re surprised when we don’t have any satisfaction. We’re surprised when our life is a mess. I’m sorry, but it’s time to get in your face about this. I’m needing this just as much as you are needing this.

When I talk about “sin” I’m naming something for what it is. I was talking to a couple of smokers a while back. I used to smoke heavily and you know, as I talked to them about their smoking you know what their response was? “Oh we know it’s wrong, we know we’re stupid, we just can’t stop.”

We get addicted to this stuff. We get addicted to the poison in our systems. We know it’s wrong but we can’t stop. We rationalize. We say it doesn’t matter. We look at people that say it’s wrong and we say, “Come on, stop moralising. Get off the grass. None of your business what I do with my life.” I guess it’s not! But if you want to live the life that God intended you to live, if you want to live it to the full in all it’s abundance, we need to deal with this. We need to deal with the sin.

When we come face to face with Jesus Christ we know in our heart of hearts the things that we’ve done wrong. You know there was that woman, you can read about it in John’s gospel chapter 9 if you have a Bible. She was caught in adultery and they dragged her out to stone her in front of Jesus. And they were just about to trap Jesus. And Jesus said, “If any one of you is without sin, let Him be the first one to cast a stone”. And you know what happened? Those who heard Him began to go away, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left with the woman.

When we look Jesus in the face we know the stuff that’s wrong in our lives. The question is, how do we fix that? How do we deal with that? Well, we’ll look at that next week on the program.