Imagine that you’re driving along in your car and one day you look across and you see this car swerving all over the place. Why? Because behind the wheel in the drivers seat is a gorilla with a crazed look on his face. Would you be shocked? Yeah, me too.

Driving a car, as it turns out, is a serious business. The moment we get behind that wheel we’re in control of a lethal weapon but how often do people actually think about that before they unlock the car door, hop in, hopefully strap on their seatbelt and turn the key in the ignition.

Most of us don’t think about it at all and to be honest I’ve been driving since I was seventeen and now I’m well into my fifties and until March last year I didn’t think too much about it either. I’d just hop into the car, turn the key in the ignition and off we go.

I was an aggressive driver because of my personality type. See, I want to get to where I’m going as quickly as possible so I’d tail gate people, I’d blast the horn. Yeah I still do that now and then. I’d zip in and out of the traffic without really thinking too much about the consequences. When I was young in my late teens, early twenties I had a couple of accidents, but nothing since then. A couple of speeding tickets that’s all. But in March last year everything changed.

My children bought me at my request an advanced driving course as a Christmas present and so along I went out to the race track to do my advanced driving course. Now somehow in my head I imagined I’d be learning how to drive faster still, how to zip in and out of the traffic more effectively. But instead they taught me about the consequences of driving like a lunatic.

The morning was spent in the classroom and the afternoon out on the race track in our cars. By the end of the day I came to the realisation for the past thirty years there’d been a lunatic behind the wheel of my car – me! A bit like that crazy gorilla I was talking about earlier.

It’s not that I’m an overly bad person. It’s not that I was intentionally being a lunatic about my driving and in any case my driving wasn’t all that outrageous. Plenty of people drive like that. But once I listened to someone who knew what they were talking about, an expert in their field, once I hopped into my car and participated in some control tests – what were in fact relatively low speeds and discovered the consequences of the way I’d been driving, well I was confronted with the reality that my behaviour behind the wheel, unwitting though it may have been, was putting my life at risk, the lives of the people I love most, my family, and the lives of other people on the road.

It was a shock I can tell you and that shock, being confronted with the deadly consequences of my behaviour resulted in an instant change in the way I drive a car. In fact these days I see people doing what I used to do and immediately I think, “how can you do something crazy like that?” Oh yeah, I remember exactly how.

My view, everyone who drives a car needs to do one of these advanced driving courses because they bring us face to face with the consequences of our actions.

Now if driving a car is a serious business then living your life is even more of a serious business. What we believe, how we see ourselves, what we think, what we say, what we do, our relationships, our loves, how we cope with adversity, how we cope with success, how we live our lives. That’s a serious business. Steering our lives through all the obstacles and hurdles this world throws up at us from beginning to end. Can I ask you a question? Who’s in the driver’s seat of your life? Is it a lunatic or is it someone with a good heart, a wise head, a steady hand?

Let’s say a bit like going to an advanced driving instructor, you paid a forensic psychologist to review your life: your attitudes, your successes, failures, how you handled them, the depth and effectiveness of your relationships, your whole life.

What might they find? What sort of score card would you end up with? If someone brought you face to face with the consequences of some of your wrong attitudes towards others, perhaps your own perception of yourself, your foibles, your insecurities and all that stuff, how would you go?

The sort of life we end up living comes back to who or what is in the driver’s seat. It comes back to the skill and the wisdom and the integrity and the insight of whoever is driving our lives. And even though most of us have had the opportunity to get some sort of education as children and teenager’s, it seems that the whole thing of educating us, how to drive our lives is left somewhat to chance.

Some cultures handle it quite well but others, in fact the more affluent cultures where people see themselves primarily as individuals rather than members of a family or members of a community, we don’t handle this life education stuff that well at all.

So where do you go? How do you get the sort of input into your life that sets your course in the right direction? Here are the words of the very first Psalm in the Old Testament of the Bible. Have a listen to this:

Happy are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers but their delight is in the word of God on which they meditate day and night. Those people are like trees planted by streams of water that yield their fruit in the season and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do they prosper.

The wicked on the other hand aren’t like that; they’re like chaff that the wind blows away.

I’ll be honest with you, academically I’m a pretty smart guy but when it came to actually living my life I didn’t have a lot of wisdom. Being smart and being wise are two entirely different things and so unwittingly I wasn’t living the sort of life that I had the potential to live. I wasn’t taking what I was smart at, what I was good at and using it for others with wisdom and compassion. So I wasn’t that happy at all.

The turning point came for me when I let someone else take the drivers seat. The turning point for me was when I let God drive for a while, for a long while. When I started listening to His words, what He has to say. Then all of a sudden my life started yielding the fruit it was always meant to yield in due season.

So let me ask you again, who’s in your driver’s seat? Huh? When we give our lives over to Jesus, all of our lives, every part, lock, stock and barrel it’s not that we become like automatons, like mindless zombies, it’s exactly the opposite.

Just stop and think about this, God made you and me who we are, He knows what we’re good at, He knows the things we aren’t good at and when we stop taking the advice of the wicked, when we stop treading the path that sinners tread, we stop sitting in the seat of scoffers as though somehow we’re in a position to judge the world, hey something awesome happens.

We discover the freedom we’ve been looking for: we discover that we were made with a purpose. We’ve been given some gifts and abilities that are absolutely unique and special and when we live out who God made us to be according to His wisdom and His ways, when we drink in His words and wisdom, the way a thirsty tree sends it’s roots down into the soil to draw up the water, then you can’t help it.

Fruit starts to appear, we produce the goodness and the yield we were designed and hand crafted to produce and look maybe you know something that I don’t but there isn’t one thing on this planet that I’ve found to be more satisfying, more fulfilling than being who God made me to be and doing what God made me to do.

Producing the fruit that others get to eat, the fruit He always planned for me to produce but it only started happening when I got out of the road and let Jesus hop into the driver’s seat. Can I ask you again, who is in the drivers seat of your life?

Can I ask you a question? What causes you to get up out of bed every day and do the same thing that you’ve been doing for goodness knows how long? What motivates you? What drives you?

So the alarm clock goes off again tomorrow morning, great, you switch it off, into the bathroom, get dressed, have breakfast and then we’re off and running. For some of us it’s off to work, maybe you have a long commute ahead or maybe you work from home. You get to your work place, pick up your tools of trade whatever they are, for me it’s a keyboard and a phone, and the day begins. Or maybe you’re a stay at home mother. Other people think, “boy wouldn’t it be great to be able to stay at home and not have to go to work”.

Hey, but the novelty of staying at home wore off ages ago. Kids are hard work right? Housework is boring and tiresome and no one, no one seems to appreciate it. If only the kids would say thank you from the bottom of their hearts that you made up their lunches. If only your husband would appreciate the clean house and the meal you put on the table at night.

Maybe you live alone, a lot of older people do. The day is going to be lonely and long and empty so you try and sleep in for as long as you can but, well somehow you seem to be waking up much earlier these days.

Some people seem to have such exciting jobs. I remember when I had a consulting firm almost every week I was off flying somewhere and people would look at me and say, “wow, I wish I had his job”. Little did they know I was so sick of taxis and airports and hotels, planes and landing and scrambling to get to my meetings.

I’ve been to the USA so many times I can’t count the number of times. I’ve flown over the top of the Grand Canyon and looked down from the plane and thought, “you know one day I’d love to be able to go and see that place”. And there’s a hotel in New Zealand, in Wellington where I’ve stayed one hundred and eight times. That’s a hundred and eight return trips between Australia and New Zealand.

So even what appears to be glamorous or desirable really ends up being a grind. So I’m going to come back to it, whatever your lot in life is, however you spend your day, however glamorous it may appear to other people, however boring it may appear to you, what motivates you to get up and get out of bed every day?

Is it just you have to get up, you have to go to work, you have to do that long commute and sit there in that cubicle and do that job because that’s what pays the mortgage and that’s what puts food on the table and that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’s always going to be?

Can I tell you, the tragic truth is that that’s precisely how it is for a lot of people. They’re stuck on this endless merry go round of life and drudgery and pressure and stress that has precious little in it to be motivated about at all. You might wonder, how is it that Berni can describe that reality so accurately. Well it’s because I lived a lot of my life just that way. There was nothing in it to motivate me and to give me satisfaction or joy.

Now let me just say I did have some motivations, I wanted to make a lot of money, and I was on the way to that. I wanted to be successful, and to some degree I was. I wanted to be a recognised leader in my industry and to be sure, people knew who I was and my consulting services were very much in demand.

Those were my motivations but there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They’re motivations, you’d think, that if realised would bring a great degree of satisfaction and contentment. Yeah there was a bit of that but it was fleeting, it was elusive, it didn’t last. Deep down at the end of each day when I laid my head on that pillow that sense of achievement and satisfaction of what I’d achieved that day simply wasn’t there and of course in just a few hours that alarm clock will be off again and off we’d go.

Come on, what are your motivations? What gets you up out of bed every day? What are your hopes and dreams? And most importantly are they the sort of motivations and hopes and dreams that are bringing you the sense of satisfaction and contentment and fulfilment that you’re actually looking for. That you’ve been spending most of your life looking for, well are they or aren’t they?

You know Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But that’s how many people, can I say most people are living their lives. Well you know, no, I’m not content, no, I’m not satisfied but if I just keep going, if I just keep working harder maybe it will come.

Can I be blunt here? Can I be really direct? No it won’t because 99% of that sense of satisfaction and contentment and fulfilment that everyone’s yearning for has to do with what’s going on inside your heart. And there is a simple yet profound switch that each one of us can flick on the inside that changes everything. Everything. Would you like to know what it is? Well here it is – the words of Jesus. Matthew chapter 23, verses 11 and 12:

The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

That switch is turning our lives around from filling ourselves, gratifying ourselves, satisfying ourselves to using who we are and what we are and what we have to serve others. It’s turning our lives around from dreaming about how successful we can be to harnessing our hopes and dreams to impact other people’s lives and when we do that here is what happens.

The things that we’ve been doing that seem so mundane all of a sudden they have a purpose outside ourselves and that purpose is to bless other people, to help other people, to use who we are and what we have to make their lives better.

That’s where the satisfaction is, that’s where the contentment is, that’s where the greatness is. I mean what is greatness after all? Greatness lives in the hearts of the people whose lives we’ve impacted, doesn’t it? And all those who try to exalt themselves, who try to build themselves up, who try to be someone will ultimately be humbled because in everyone else’s eyes they’re not that great at all. But all those who humble themselves, to be servants, will be exalted because they’re greatness will live on in the hearts and the lives of those people whom they have served.

It’s a simple switch. So let me ask you again, what motivates you each morning and is it giving you the satisfaction that you’ve been looking for? Oh Berni you just don’t know how boring, how terrible my job really is do you? You have no idea because if you did you wouldn’t say any of this rubbish to me.

No, I don’t know but God does and this is His word to you today if that’s what’s going on in your heart right now. Colossians chapter 3 beginning at verse 22:

Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while you’re being watched and in order to please them but whole heartedly fearing the Lord. Whatever your task is put yourself into it as done for the Lord and not for your masters. Since you know from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You serve the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Serving God ultimately means serving people. When we love Him and we want to serve Him with all our hearts He often calls us into difficult places and dark places to be the one light that shines there; to be in effect His light shining into the darkness.

And that’s what brings meaning to the reality of our mundane existence, that’s what brings purpose to our lives, a focus to serve Him and to impact others with His love. No people won’t always fall over one another to come and say thank you, we won’t always feel appreciated and yeah some days it’s going to be a really tough gig but that’s okay because when we do it for Jesus then it’s from Him that we’ll receive His inheritance as our reward.

When we’re in the business of serving Jesus that, I have to tell you, is where the action is. It’s the only place so far that I’ve been able to find the peace and the contentment, the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction that I’ve been looking for.

Most of us are masters of self-deception. Things are going off the rails in this area of our lives or that but somehow we want to tell ourselves that hey, it’s all fine, in any case it’s not my fault and so we blame someone else. Come on we have such a great capacity to fool ourselves and it’s time we did something about it.

There’s an old saying and I’m going to do it in Australian colloquial kind of way that goes like this. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It’s kind of a double edged sword that one, sometimes it’s absolutely true. People want to tinker with things that are working really well just because, well they want to tinker and they end up breaking them.

It might be a sales process in a business that’s working so well and someone tinkers with it and all of a sudden the sales start falling. Or a child’s toy or a bike or a car, some of us just like to fix things and in the end we end up breaking them.

But on the other side the ‘if ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality can be an excuse for not dealing with issues that really do need to be dealt with.

Let’s say there’s a great relationship, a great friendship that you’ve had and it’s kind of gone off the boil. Your wife or your husband sees it happening and says to you, “honey, you need to do something about that” and your answer because you don’t want to deal with the difficult issue, hey you may not even want to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong at all.

Your answer is, “well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” We’ve all done that at some point haven’t we? In fact we can take it to ridiculous lengths.

I was due to take a short plane flight from Sydney to Canberra a few years back, it’s kind of like a half hour flight so they use a small but sturdy propeller plane called a DASH – 8. Well it was Monday morning and Sydney airport was very busy as it’s prone to be at that time.

We boarded the plane, taxied out and there we waited for forty five minutes. As a result of the long wait with the propellers spinning round it turns out that something overheated and a warning light came on in the cockpit. So after all that delay the pilot came on and said, “ladies and gentlemen I’m terribly sorry but we’re going to have to go back to the terminal and have some maintenance engineers look at the plane. It’s probably going to take at least an hour.”

Well none of us were impressed, we all had meetings to go to and we were looking at all up a delay of at least two hours, I mean it’s only a three hour drive. What can you do? The joys of air travel but the guy sitting next to me he went ballistic. He called the steward, he abused her, he went nuts. “You know if we hadn’t been sitting here all that time this would never have happened. It’s only a warning light, it’s probably a false alarm. We should take off, I have an important meeting to go to, I could have driven there faster than this.” And on he went.

At which point the steward, I have to give her credit for the way she handled it, with no emotion on her face, looked him in the eye and asked him plainly, “So sir, are you really suggesting we put the plane up in the air, and at that point we discover that you’re wrong, that there really is a fault. Is that what you’re suggesting sir?”

She was very calm, very matter of fact at which point this belligerent guy next to me was totally silenced. It was pretty obvious wasn’t it? It probably was a false alarm but did you want to be at twenty thousand feet doing three hundred and fifty miles an hour when you discover that you were wrong? No not me, not anyone else really, not even this guy who really hadn’t thought through the consequences of his emotive argument until it was put to him plain and simple.

Like I said at the top of the program we’re absolute masters of self delusion and more often than not we can look at our lives in the same way as my fellow passenger looked at that warning light. And in life, as in aviation, when we ignore the warning signs we do so at our peril. Correct?

Keep ignoring the warning signs and eventually you’re going to crash. It’s a pretty good way of looking at life. Sometimes in life something’s broken, it doesn’t matter how hard we argue against it, when it’s broken it’s broken and when it’s broken it needs to be, well, fixed right?

It could be a wrong attitude that we have towards ourselves. Either puffed up with pride or completely wrung out by a lack of self esteem. Either of those two could end up completely ruining our lives. Have you ever tried to help someone deal with either of those problems? Pride or low self esteem? It’s almost impossible because they don’t want to hear. They’d rather deceive themselves and live with the consequences than be honest with themselves, admit their fault and deal with it in order to get rid of the consequences and live a better life – masters of self deception. But let me ask you; is that really any way to live your life? Well is it? Here’s how Jesus put it, Matthew chapter 6 beginning at verse 22.

The eye is the lamp of the body so if your eye is healthy your whole body will be full of light but if your eye is unhealthy your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness how great is your darkness?

The eye of course is the metaphor for how we see things and if the way we see things is unhealthy then we have a distorted view of the world and our lives will be full of darkness. And if we kid ourselves, if we delude ourselves into thinking that the darkness that we’re living in is really light, remember my friend on the plane, that’s exactly what he was doing, then boy what a pitch black darkness you’re going to be living in.

Listen to me, if it’s broken we need to fix it otherwise it’s going to ruin our lives. An attitude, a behaviour, a distorted way of seeing situations because something is broken inside us.

God often brings people along who’ll give us the advice. He often makes things happen to help us wake up to the truth but we don’t want to listen and why don’t we want to listen? Why is it that we just want to hang on to this rubbish that’s going to ruin our lives? Why is it that we don’t open up and look at a better alternative? I’ll tell you.

Because instead of taking constructive criticism on board, well most of us don’t handle criticism all that well do we? And so we don’t listen, we keep doing or feeling or thinking or saying the thing that’s ruining our lives and we live life with the consequences. But is that really any way to live the rest of your life? Is it? Listen to me; if it’s broken you need to fix it.

Immediately after that passage about light and darkness, true and false perceptions and consequences of the alternatives Jesus spoke about what is probably the single most sensitive subject of all – money. He was laying the ground work for giving His people some really tough advice with that whole healthy/unhealthy eye light/darkness thing and this is what He said:

No one can serve two masters. For a slave will either hate the one or love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve God and wealth.

Just think that one verse through, that one thing that Jesus said right there in the context of your life and I’m guessing that if you’re one of the majority that little one thing is going to make you squirm. It’s going to make you uncomfortable because if you choose God over wealth then He’s going to ask you to make some real sacrifices.

Sacrifices in the long term that will bring a huge benefit but as with all sacrifices in the short term it’s going to cost you but if wealth has a grip on your life, if it’s all about money, how much you have and how much you’re seen to be having, well my friend that’s surely going to be ruining your life as it ruined mine for many, many years in the past.

Jesus tackles issues in our lives head on, He doesn’t mince words, He’s direct, He’s in your face because He loves you. So when you hear Him speak to you about something that’s broken do something about it will you? For Gods sake and yours. If it’s broken you really need to fix it and Jesus is the one with the power to help you do just that. Really.

At some point all of us run out of steam. You know what I’m talking about. You’re motoring along at whatever it is you do in life, whatever it is that drives you and at some point we get tired, we get dejected, at some point we all want to pull over and give up.

I love what I do in life, particularly what I’m doing right now, sitting chatting with you through this program. I guess the thing that drives me is that I know that as each day we unpack a bit of wisdom. It makes a difference in people’s lives and my prayer is that it makes a real difference in your life.

The other day someone wrote to me and said, “thanks Berni for your hard hitting and relevant program. Your stuff is always so relevant in my daily grind.” Now that’s not a boast, I’m not particularly anything special, it’s just that I get to do the things that I really enjoy doing. There are some things in my job that I don’t enjoy doing so much, we all have those things in our mix, but by and large I love communicating wisdom, Gods wisdom and love into people’s lives.

What you may not realise though is that a lot of work goes into producing the almost five hundred different radio programs that I produce every year. Not to mention writing the books and the articles and the blogs and all that stuff.

I’m not complaining but the point I’m making is that even when we get to do something that we really, really enjoy, the daily grind, the workload, the pressures, the deadlines, the obstacles, they all take their toll. And frankly there have been one or two times over almost the last ten years that I’ve been doing this where it’s just all been too much.

And that’s if you’re enjoying what you do. A lot of people are on a path where they don’t so much enjoy what they’re doing and we talked a bit about that the other day on the program and for those people it’s even harder.

So what do you do when you just want to pull over and give up on your dream, your vision, that thing that you were hoping would be the thing that you were made to do? I remember a time when I came to one of those low points that we all inevitably come to in life. You know I felt really called by God to be doing what I’m doing. I left a pretty good job in the IT industry to take on running a not-for-profit organisation and for the first several years as tough as it was some days we saw a lot of growth.

From a standing start of being on precisely no radio stations at all we grew to be on a thousand radio stations around the world and hey anybody would be pleased with that and we saw so many doors open quite miraculously and really amazing stuff that I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for, it would be just ludicrous to do that.

No, God was in it and He went ahead of us and that was brilliant but then a few years ago there were a couple of major setbacks, a couple of things that happened with some key radio networks that made it so hard for us (the details are so totally unimportant) and on top of that when you’re working long hours and producing that much content, you do get tired.

It was a low point as I said and one of the reasons I’m sharing this with you so openly and so frankly is that the last thing I want you to think is, that just because I happen to be the guy on the radio talking about this stuff that somehow I get to live on a different plane to you, that somehow I’m immune to all the ups and downs of life, not at all.

And so I’m at this particularly low point, can I tell you that at that point it was so very tempting to fall back on my pretty lucrative business consulting skills, it would have been so easy, I mean really easy to turn my hand back to what I know, have a much easier life than what I have at the moment and go and do something else.

The temptation is to pull over to the side of the road, take a breather and think about turning back because at some point we all run out of steam. Now there are some people trying to do things that they were never cut out to do, there are some people in jobs that they just shouldn’t be in and if you’re in that boat to you I say what I said on the program yesterday, if it’s broken you need to fix it.

If you’re doing the wrong job go and find the one you were made to do, absolutely. If you’re on the wrong road find the right one but I knew in my heart of hearts that that wasn’t the case for me. I was doing something I enjoyed, something I was made for and something that I feel powerfully called to do.

So what do you do at that low point when you just want to give up? If in your heart of hearts you know that you should keep going, you don’t hear people talk about this stuff very often do you? But these are exactly the sort of questions and dilemmas that we face in life and that’s why I talk about them on this program.

Well at that point I did what I always do when I’m faced with tough choices. I went to God, I talked to Him about it and this is what He said to me, it comes from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Church in the New Testament of the Bible, 1 Corinthians chapter 9 beginning at verse 24:

Don’t you know that in a race the runners all compete but only one of them receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self control in all things, they do it to receive a perishable wreath but we an imperishable crown.

So I don’t run aimlessly nor do I box as though I’m beating the air but I punish my body and I enslave it so that after proclaiming to others I myself shouldn’t be disqualified.

Somehow that put it all into perspective for me. If God made me, if He knows what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, if He really has a plan for my life and I’m in the middle of living out that plan with all of its ups and downs, it just doesn’t make sense to walk away.

I read that passage quietly one morning in my study where I get alone each day to spend some time with my God and it’s as though, well it’s exactly like this, He lifted this huge burden off my shoulders. My heavy heart was filled with joy. My burdened demeanour all of a sudden it was a whole new start.

I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have to, it’s just that God came along and lightened my load. He came along and said, “well you know Berni, when you’re living out the plan I have for your life it’s bound to get hard sometimes and that’s not the time that I want you to give up.”

I’m a strong guy but I don’t have the strength and none of us does to follow the call in our lives, make a real impact in this world just on our own, its the way it is and you know what? I thank God that that is exactly the way it is.

Years later this same Apostle Paul is writing you his young protégé Timothy, looking back on all his trials in ministry and if you know anything of Paul’s story you’ll know that he had a really tough ride, he was locked up, he was beaten, people rioted against him, they tried to kill him, he was abused, shipwrecked, bitten by a viper, imprisoned for years on death row. So when Paul gets towards the end of his days on this earth how does he look back on it all? Well here it is, 2 Timothy chapter 4, verse 6:

As for me I’m already to be poured out as a libation and the time of my departure has come. I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I’ve kept the faith, from now on there is a reserve for me, a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge will give me on that day and not only to me but also to all have longed for his appearing.

You see at this point in his life Paul can look back on it all and see the link between that and the glory that he’s soon to experience as he goes to be with Jesus. The prize at the end of this long, long, long marathon we call life is an eternity in the presence of God Himself.

In my heart of hearts that’s what makes the difference. Not success today, not what other people think about me, not whether people are falling over themselves to help or standing against me in opposition. None of those things really matter, what matters is running the race that God sets before each one of us and it was at that realisation, at that point that I started up the car and kept heading down the road that God had prepared for me.

That’s my story, what’s yours?

Life can be just bubbling along fine and then all of a sudden there’s a huge upheaval, a discontinuity, something happens and things can never be the same again. For most people when that happens they see it as a threat but more often than not it’s an opportunity. A huge opportunity.

Probably one of the most devastating things that can happen to us in life is when we lose our soul mate, a wife loses her husband or a husband loses his wife. There are a lot of widows out there because we men have a tendency to die a bit younger than women. I like to think that’s because we men work a whole bunch harder than women. That was a joke, right? Please don’t write me any letters. Joke.

Anyhow there are many, many women who are widows and depending on what country and culture you live in there are plenty of men out there whose wives have divorced them. It’s hard to imagine something more devastating than losing your soul mate except perhaps losing a child. Now none of us wishes those things on anyone right? We certainly don’t wish them on ourselves but here’s one thing that I know, at some stage my beautiful wife Jacqui and I will be separated because for one of us our time on this earth will be over.

I’ve seen people react to that sort of loss in a few different ways. First of all, of course, there’s a time of grieving over the loss. That is normal and people should be allowed to grieve and that’s followed by a sense often of emptiness and loneliness. A void that it seems no one else can fill.

But after that, there are basically three different ways that people handle that sort of a loss. Firstly some never recover, they never get over the loss and they pine away, often they pass away soon thereafter. Then there are those who, well they never quite recover, they live kind of a half life, never really enjoying the rest of their life. And then finally there are those who whilst they will always miss their soul mate, get on and they live this new stage of their lives in a different way.

It may not be the loss of a soul mate, it could be that you lose your job, it could be that your house burns down and the only thing left is yourself, all your possessions, all those things you were sentimental about gone. I know a man who lives in a town where the whole place was wiped out by a terrible bush fire a few years ago and many people lost their lives.

I know a young woman with a young family who’s had two major cancer episodes and a limb amputated. Perhaps you’ve suffered an injury or an illness that stops you doing the things that you were once able to do. The thing is we never know what’s around the next corner and what’s over the next rise. Life is just going along fine and then bang, it seems to blow up in your face. Okay, so now what?

I know with absolute certainty that right now there’s someone listening to this thinking, ‘hey that’s me, that’s where I am in life’ and you know I also know that there are people listening today who next week or next month or next year are going to be hit by one of these terrible life changing episodes in their life and they’ll be left reeling and wondering what to do.

So what do you do? What’s the answer? I’ve been through a couple of those in my life and as I look back on them I would never wish them on anyone. In fact not on my worst enemy and yet those tragedies which have left their scars, in a sense they’re part of who I am. They’ve changed me, they’ve moulded me, they’ve shaped me into the person that I would never have become but for those tragedies, in a good way.

Of course I grieved, of course I struggled for a time and yes I needed the help of friends and loved ones, I needed support around me. But there came a point where I had a decision to make and that’s the bit I want to chat about with you today.

There was a three way decision, what will I do? Do I give up on life completely and just die? Do I live a grey half life, never really enjoying the rest of my life? Or do I get on with it? Do I grab life by the horns and get on with it and live it to the full? What am I going to do?

Tragedy has a way of immobilising us but I’m naturally your glass half full kind of guy, it’s how I see the world and so the couple of times in my life things have taken a twist that I would have never had dreamt of or never have wanted for myself, what I’ve discovered is this: a world full of new possibilities. Does that make sense? Tragedies take away something or someone that we love, that’s why it’s a tragedy but with the benefit of hindsight I can also tell you that when the dust settles, when the grieving is over tragedies inevitably remove limitations and boundaries and they open up new possibilities.

There was a man by the name of Job. In fact he has a whole book dedicated to him in the Old Testament of the Bible. He lost everything, a long tragic story, I mean the guy lost all his wealth, possessions, family, friends, health, his status, everything.

He was a really good guy, he was a man who honoured and obeyed God, it was devastating. His friends criticised him, he went to God to ask God why and God refused to answer him but at the end of those trials this is what happened, Job chapter 41, verse 10:

The Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.

Sometimes we’re so busy holding onto that which we lost that we can’t take hold of the new blessings, different blessings that the future holds. When Job was struggling through all his trials he could never had imagined that he’d end up getting double for his trouble.

Can I ask you something? What are you still grieving over? What is it from the past, something that you lost, something that hurt you, something that left you feeling worse off and you just can’t let it go? As long as you hold onto that thing from the past my friend it has a hold over you and as long as it has a hold over you, you can’t take hold of the blessings just around the next corner and over the next rise.

As long as we are grieving over the past that grief robs us of the joy we can experience today and in the future.

Sometimes things happen that aren’t fair, sometimes things happen that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves but I know with all my heart, with every fibre of my being that there are new blessings waiting on the other side of that. The only question is, whether you’re prepared to take hold of them.

The simple yet profound truth is that God is a God of blessing. Suffering and blessing visit all our lives. Jesus wasn’t immune, remember? He suffered, He died and yet through all of that God was with Him and at the end, Ephesians chapter 1, verse 20:

God put his power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in this age but also in the age to come and he has put all things under his feet.

Jesus is the name above all names, yes He suffered, Yes He died but yes He rose again and everyone and everything is under His dominion. The earth is His footstool and it’s the perfect hope we have in this risen Jesus that gives us back our future after a tragedy.

Let’s finish up with Gods Word all about hope. 1 Peter chapter 1, beginning at verse 3:

By his great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ and into an inheritance that’s imperishable, undefiled, unfading, being kept in heaven for you.

Rejoice in this even if now for a little while you have to suffer some trials so that the genuineness of your faith which is more precious than gold that though perishable is tested by fire, might be found to result in the praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.