This is so incredibly hard to believe but here we are at the first full week of a new year. And you know what that tells me? It tells me that my parents were right when I was growing up. Life slips away faster and faster as you get older.

Last year I turned 50, this year I’ll be 51. And whilst none of us wants to wish our lives away, it’s a sobering thing to stand back and look at how quickly life slips by. Each day, when it’s gone it’s gone: another week, another month, another year, another decade.

That’s why, this week, we’re going to be continuing our look at living the best lives that we can possibly give, because I don’t know about you but I want to live my life to the full. I want to live all that God has got planned for me. And not just to experience it all for my own satisfaction but to give it all for other people’s satisfaction so that others will be blessed.

So this week on the program we’re going to be looking at living out our best into some of the most important relationships that we have here on this earth, beginning today with a single most important relationship of all, our relationship with God.

Problem is, in our relationship with God, that, well, you can’t see Him. You can’t touch Him or feel Him. Everything else in our lives tends to crowd Him out. I mean work and family and all the things we do and paying the bills and playing sport and watching television, even going to Church.

See all those things we can see and experience. So we deal with them and we experience them whether they’re good or bad, up or down. If we look over our last week and what we were doing: me, well a bit of a holiday down here in the southern hemisphere, being summer; time to rest down at the beach enjoying the weather. But a normal working week I would have been rushing around, writing radio programs, recording them, finishing off the latest book and getting that off to the publisher.

And it’s so easy for us to get caught up in things, even really good things. Even, let me say this, things that we’re doing for God and yet miss out on that most important thing of all, the most important relationship of all, our relationship with God Himself. If I’m going to live the best life I can possibly live then I have to sort out my relationship with my Lord and my God, first and foremost. That’s what Jesus said when asked, ‘what was the most important of all the commandments?’ He answered,

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and then your neighbour as yourself.” (Luke chapter 10, verse 27)

Question is, how do we do that? I mean amidst all the busyness of our lives. All the troubles and conflicts and the things that drag us off course, how can we live out our best in our relationship with God? It’s an important question and yet it’s so often a question we don’t ask.

You know what we do? When something’s not quite right in our lives we go looking for a solution for that one thing that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s in our marriage relationship. We’re going to be looking at that in a whole bunch more detail tomorrow.

Things aren’t going well so we try and sort that out. Or maybe it’s in our finances or maybe it’s in a situation or a relationship at work. And so what we do is we try and go and work on those things and fix them. We might pray about them from time to time but essentially we see this symptom and we try to deal with it without first and foremost dealing with the underlying disease.

And the disease is this. When we don’t honour God, when we don’t treat Him as Lord, what happens is that the blessings start to dry up. That’s because God honours those who honour Him. 1 Samuel chapter 2, verse 30:

“Those who honour Me I will honour’, says God, ‘and those who despise me shall be treated with contempt.”

See we want God to be someone who serves us, someone who blesses us when we ask, like a sugar daddy. And of course He does want so much to bless us but like any dad, that blessing involves honour. That’s why the 5th Commandment has a blessing attached to it. Exodus chapter 20, verse 12:

“Honour your father and your mother so that your days maybe long in the land that the Lord has given to you.”

My friend, unless we first and foremost live out our best for God, then we don’t have a hope of living the very best life that we can live. It makes sense doesn’t it? So the question is, as we stand here on the threshold of a new year, a new decade, how do we do that? I mean exactly how?

Well, the answer comes to us, of course, straight out of Gods word. It’s in a concept that we find throughout the Bible but most often in the Old Testament. It’s this notion of the first fruits. Have a listen to this. It comes from Exodus chapter 34, verse 26:

“The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God.”

See this idea of the first fruits is about giving to God the first and the best of what we have; the first and the best of the harvest: the first and the best of the flock. The first and the best of our time and our attention and our money and all that He’s made us to be. And all that we have. It’s about honouring God with our first and our best. Not with our loose change we have left in our pockets. Not with the dregs that we have left over at the end of the day, but with the first and the best.

So, as you and I contemplate the year ahead. As we think about getting our house in order, the first priority isn’t our marriage, as vitally important as that is. It’s not our children. It’s not our job. It’s not our finances. It’s not our mortgage. There’s nothing else but God. Our first priority is God.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your will, with all your strength. This is the first and the greatest Commandment.”

So, as I reflect on that in my own life, getting my priorities sorted out for the New Year, there are 3 specific areas that I’m focusing on. My time. My talents. And my finances.

My time, because loving and honouring God involves time: time to pray, time to listen, time to read His Word, time to ponder what He’s saying. In any relationship, in any love, time is involved and isn’t that so often the one thing that we don’t give to God or if we do, it’s rushed. Or it’s not when we’re at our best.

If there were just one thing that I would encourage you to get sorted out this year, just one out of all the things that you want to get sorted out, it would be this: setting aside the first fruits of your time for God. That time when you’re at your best, unhurried, focused. That one thing, just one thing will radically transform everything else in our lives. This time of prayer and Bible reading, it is the most awesome thing.

The second thing is our talents: who we are; our abilities and our gifts. How can I use those? Not just for myself, not just for my family, not just to make money but use the best, the first and the foremost of who I am for God’s glory – the first fruits.

And finally, our finances. So many things God wants to do. He uses His people, generally, to fund His work on this planet and so many of those things are being held back because His people don’t give the first and the best of their finances – radically, sacrificially and missionally.

So there it is: our time, our talents and our finances; the first fruits given for God – the first and the best.

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After our relationship with our God the next most important relationship that we will live out on this earth is our relationship with the person who we marry. Now not everyone marries and not everyone is married right now but most people do get married because it’s the natural thing for us to do.

Last week and again this week on the program we’re taking a look at living out the best lives that we can possibly live. It makes sense. I mean we just get one crack at this life and I for one want to make it the very best crack. I don’t want to get to the end of this life here on earth and look back with regret and opportunities missed. The people I could have blessed but didn’t. The risks I should have taken but didn’t.

And for anyone who’s married our marriage is a huge part of our lives and today, today we’re going to be taking a look at what it means to live out our very best in our marriages. Not in some half hearted way but in a radical way. In a way that turns our world upside down. In a way that removes all selfishness and resentment and all the stuff that builds up like plaque in our marriages and ends up bringing hurt and pain and disease into that most important of all human relationships: the relationship of the wife and the husband.

Despite everything that’s gone on in the past, how can we live out the very best in our marriages, starting now, I mean right now?

The starting point for marriage is an attraction, a romance. There’s this attraction between two people that’s, well it’s kind of hard to put into words. Partly it’s physical but that’s only part of it. There’s a desire, a natural desire for the two to become one; for this young man and this young woman to leave their respective parents homes and to join together and become one and make a new home and a new family.

It’s an age old pattern of behaviour that’s not only ensured the survival of the human race but there’s a wonder and a beauty to this whole marriage thing. A deep mystery that, common though it may be, defies explanation.

But it generally doesn’t take too long for the romance and the lustre of the marriage to wear off, a year, two, three. And before we know it the cares of this world have taken over: the mortgage, the children, the long hours, the commuting, the financial pressures. And then, of course, on top of all that these two once starry eyed lovers discover that they see the world oh so differently on so many things.

Not only is she a ‘she’ and he’s a ‘he’ but they have different personality types. They have habits that start to grate on one another. There are arguments and unforgiveness creeps in and before long it seems like a brick walls grown up between the two of them, brick by brick.

What happened to the romance? What happened to the two becoming one thing that Jesus talked about? Is this all there is to marriage? Well, we all go through this to a greater or lesser degree. Reality sets in and it’s not what the glossy bridal magazines made it out to be. It’s not going to work out like the romantic comedies that Hollywood produces and suggests that it should work out.

It’s not going to be some great love affair that ends with a happily ever after the way a Bollywood movie does. And so one or other or both of them loses heart. They withdraw into their shells and become two people living separate lives under one roof.

No wonder almost one in two marriages ends up in divorce. No wonder so few people are ever fulfilled in their marriage relationships. And I know that there are many, many, many people listening today who so relate to what I’ve been talking about. And I know that there are many, many, many people who are kind of sitting there on the edge of their seats with their ears keenly tuned in to find out what comes next.

What is the answer? Is there, in fact, a solution at all? Well there is but it may not be the one that you’re looking for. It’s a glorious solution. It’s a God solution. And invariably God’s solutions to our problems involve sacrifice, great sacrifice.

I want you to listen to Gods own explanation of the greatest transaction of love that has ever taken place in the history of humanity, the giving of His own Sons life as a ransom for you and me. It’s a transaction summed up in a very familiar verse. John chapter 3, verse 16:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Most of us know that one backwards but listen to the subtext, listen to the explanation, the fine print if you like in the very next verse. Listen and let it sink into your heart in the context of your marriage.
John chapter 3, verse 17:

“Indeed God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world may be saved through Him.”

See, God had every right to condemn the world. He had every right to judge you and me and to punish us. He could have sent His Son to give us a good, swift kick in the tail and then to rain down fire and brimstone on us all because we all, like sheep, have gone astray. We all have wandered off and rejected God. We all have fallen short of the glory of God. We’ve all gone our own way. God had every right to judge and punish us but instead, instead He sends His Son to die for us.

Now, sure Jesus preached lots of sermons. He opened up the Scriptures. He told us what God’s like. He showed us what God’s like. He left us in no doubt what it is to honour and obey God. But His greatest sermon was preached with very few words. His greatest sermon was preached on the cross. It was a sacrifice through which we hear God cry out, ‘don’t you realise, don’t you realise how much I love you?’

My wife Jacqui is so different from me and I’m so different from her. And in those circumstances it’s easy for anger and discord to creep in – judgement; unforgiveness. Because, truth be known, we want our soul mate to be like us – to serve us, to do things on our terms, to meet our expectations; because our natural sinful state looks for what we can get out of marriage.

And when we don’t get what we want we start behaving badly. We start getting angry. We stop forgiving. But the marriage of which God talks in His Word, the Bible, says nothing, nothing about what we can get out of it. It talks only about what we can give in our marriage. Have a listen to these two verses. Ephesians 5:22:

“Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”

Ephesians 5:25.
“Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.”

Now neither of those two verses are popular because they speak of sacrifice and my friend, love is at its best, at its finest, at it’s most sublime in the midst of great sacrifice. We need only to glance back at the cross to know that.

How can you and I live the very best in our marriages? By taking up our cross and following Jesus. By laying down our lives, our selfish demands, our petty grievances and by giving the deepest thing that we can give – complete and unconditional forgiveness to our wife or our husband. Absolute.

It’s a sacrifice, it hurts but when we do that we are set free to live out our very best in our marriages. God didn’t give you to your wife or your husband to judge them. He gave you to her or to him to save them, to uphold them, to be there for them. To love them with a faithful and sacrificial love that speaks of the love of Christ into their hearts.

When I finally realised my job wasn’t to change Jacqui but to love her, then I was set free to live out my very best in our marriage together.

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Now last night my daughter Melissa came home from work. She’s a beauty therapist in a small business not far from where we live. And she asked me to help her design a brochure for the business. And she has quite a sales and marketing bent but I’m the one, I guess, in the family with a computer and graphic design skills. Not brilliant but kind of okay.

Anyhow, it was about 7.30 in the evening and I’d been up since 4.00 in the morning, working. It’s just how I’m wired I’m afraid. And I have to say I was really tired. I was looking forward to watching an episode of that great British comedy, ‘Yes Prime Minister’ and just kind of unwinding and relaxing in front of the television. And to tell you the truth, the last thing, the very last thing I felt like doing was helping her to design this brochure. And that’s often the way it is with us men. We put so much effort into our jobs that, at the end of the day we have very little left for our children.

We’re not all like that of course but many of us are and you mothers who work, sure you might cook dinner at night but our kids need more from us than just dinner. They need us to listen to them and to nurture them and to feel their hurts and to encourage them and to help them. That’s something my wife, Jacqui, has been teaching me over the years, she’s still teaching me.

So Melissa and I designed this brochure together and I rediscovered something that I already knew. That even though I was tired, it was great fun doing this thing together.

Last week and again this week on the program we’re looking at what it means to live the very best life we can live. Last week we looked at our circumstances and our attitudes. What does it mean to do and to be and to live our best? That was last week on the program.

And this week we’ve gone on to look at our relationships. We started off on Monday with the most important relationship of all, our relationship with God. I mean, unless we figure that out, well nothing else in our lives is going to be the best. Because, as James writes in chapter 1, verse 17:

“Every generous act of giving with every perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

And yesterday we looked at our marriages: the relationship between wife and husband, the most important of all human relationships that we’ll ever have. It’s amazing what an injection of radical sacrificial Christ like love can do to bring a marriage back to life.

And today, today we’re going to look at the next most important relationship we can have on this earth – our relationship with our children. And that’s a difficult one for many people. Feelings of guilt we have in a busy world; feelings of inadequacy as a parent. The world’s changing so quickly, our kids sometimes feels as though they live on a completely different planet to us.

Most people don’t feel like they’re very good parents. I’m not, I have to tell you, I’m not a natural father. See I’m a driven sort of individual. Outcome orientated. Goal oriented. And so I don’t handle immaturity very well. It’s just not my first love because other people’s immaturity slows me down. It’s just how I’ve been wired.

But by definition children are immature. That’s the whole point. God gives them to us in a family so that we can protect them and nurture them and guide them and teach them through their immaturity into adulthood, so that they can, in turn, be self sufficient and capable of bringing children in the world and doing it all again. I mean that’s what makes the world go round.

The whole point of putting them in our family is that they’ll be surrounded by our love and our protection and they require such a huge investment, don’t they?

Now our three, they’re 29 years old, 27 and 18. The two eldest are boys, young men now of course, who’ve gone their own way and being who I am, I so enjoy my relationship with them much more now than when they were difficult teenagers pushing the boundaries and flexing their muscles.

And our youngest, Melissa, she’s an apprentice and doing really well in her job and she’s so much more fun to be around now than she was even a year or two ago. Now the reason I’m being so brutally honest and direct about how I feel is that all too often we don’t talk about this stuff. We sweep it under the carpet.

We see all these super mums and super dads out there and in our heart of hearts we just know that we can never be as good a parent as they are. So we feel guilty, we get dejected and we just kind of continue along with our current patterns of ineffective behaviour towards our kids.

But these children, they’re our lasting legacy in this world. When we’re gone they’ll probably still be here and their children and their children’s children. What we teach them today, the patterns of parenting we give them will not only affect their lives but will be handed down from generation to the next generation, for generations to come in this fast, modern, disconnected, fragmented, technological world in which we live.

What’s the most important thing we can give our children? How can we be and give and live our best for our kids? Well it turns out that kids are pretty resilient. I mean most of us as adults look back on our parents, with hindsight we can see their imperfections. None of them were perfect but we appreciate what they gave us and we remember the good times.

Often it’s just the little things that we really remember. All kids really want to know is that we love them; that they are the apple of our eye; that they’re our priority.

On Monday we talked about the first fruits concept, giving our best and our first to God. Well, you know something, our kids need some of those first fruits as well. They need some of our best. I mean I, like any other parent, have made so many mistakes along the way but what I hope is that each of my kids knows that I would give anything and do anything for them.

Above all they need our time, our undivided attention. Not with one eye on the television and the other one on them, but our complete focus and our complete attention. Because you know what that does? It speaks to them of our love. It says to them, ‘you are a priority to me’.

And they need our discipline and our guidance. See too many parents give up on difficult kids. They just throw their hands in the air in despair and let the children get away with blue murder. But all that tells them is that you don’t love them enough to persist and to set boundaries and to help them through the difficult things they go through as they’re growing up. Proverbs chapter 2, verse 6 says this:

“Train children in the right way and when old they will not stray.”

Just some time and some attention and some help and some words of encouragement and a hug. If kids know that their parents will be there for them, when they need them, that’s what they really need. And if they know that we’ll lift them up and make them do things for themselves when they can and help them to grow and develop, that’s what they’ll remember in the years to come.

Being a mum or a dad is not rocket science. It’s hard work to be sure but actually it’s not rocket science. And for me being a better dad is something that my wife, Jacqui, has helped me with and coached me in because she’s a much more natural parent given who she is than I am, given who I am.

Bringing up our children may well be the most important job that God ever gives us to do. Do you realise that? It’s the most important job that God ever gives us to do and as we look forward to the New Year, hey let’s make that a priority. Let’s make parenting an important part of our lives.

Let’s take some firm decisions to take action to get our kids right up there on our list of priorities.

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From time to time we get to thinking how tough we have it in our lives. How difficult things are, financially, emotionally, spiritually. We can look at life from a whole different bunch of angles and think to ourselves, ‘poor old me’.

And to be sure there are many people listening today who are going through really difficult times. You’ve lost a loved one or you’re living in a war zone or you’ve lost your job. There are many, many people going through really, really difficult things.

You may have heard me make this point on the program before but many of the people listening today are actually living in war zones, in poverty. In fact by far the majority actually. If you’re listening in the wealthy west, well it’s hard to get a handle on that in your mind but it’s true.

There’s a lot of misery and difficulty and adversity in people’s lives. And we tend not to think too much about that until it impacts our lives. And then it can so easily cause misery. But there’s not a one of us who doesn’t have something that we would rather not have in our lives. You know what I mean. And it’s in that context today I’d like to share with you some thoughts, if I may, about living out our best for the poor and for the needy.

I was quite taken the other day by an email that I received from a man who’d been through more tragedy in his life than anyone should ever have to endure. The loss of his parents and brothers and sisters in a car accident when he was a child and then, as a husband and a father, losing his wife and children when a drunk driver hit their car. I mean, can you imagine?

But it was something that he said about his childhood, a special something that his parents handed down to this little boy, before they died, that really grabbed my attention and touched my heart. Let me read it to you.

He said, “We were a poor family and went without things most kids took for granted. But I’d been brought up to be generous even though I had nothing to give. So I would go and mow elderly people’s lawns or do jobs for nothing in a bid to help others.”

See, it was this attitude that his parents had of, well, even though they weren’t well off, even though they were poor, they were generous. Being generous when you’re poor doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, at least to the selfish mindset that we can carry around with ourselves these days.

And that’s exactly what this man found amongst Christians no less. When he was in desperate need as an adult, having lost his family a second time, he went from one Church to another and found no help at all.

Again this is what he writes. “I wonder about Christians sometimes. They read their Bibles, go to their Bible study groups, go to their conferences, raise their hands in the air thanking Jesus when the reality is that they’re either being taught rubbish or what they’re taught goes in through one ear and out the other.”

“I like the story of the leper in the Bible and I suppose I see myself as that leper a bit. There are two ways of reading the story. One as a literal interpretation of Jesus curing the physical disease. The other is Jesus healing the mans spirit, a man who is seen as an outcast by the rest of society who is seen as a leper and not a human being.”

“Jesus embraces a man that other people see as not human but Jesus doesn’t care. To Jesus he was Gods creation whether ill or not. Maybe I’m searching for the same type of attitude from Christians but to be honest I’ve given up. They’re all too busy worrying about whether we evolved or not and the finer points of theology. Things that don’t seem to matter too much.”

Well, I have to tell you, I can’t put it any better than that. This man who’d been through unspeakable tragedy, he went looking for help and comfort in God’s family, the Church. And he couldn’t find any. And you know why this is so difficult and so offensive? Because of exactly what he writes about the leper. Let’s read the story from Mark chapter 1. Let’s take a look. Mark chapter 1, beginning at verse 40:

“A leper came to Jesus begging Him and kneeling, he said to Him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with compassion Jesus stretched out His hand and touched the man and said to him, ‘I do choose, be made clean’. Immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.”

“After sternly warning the man He sent him away at once saying to him, ‘see that you say nothing to anyone but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded as a testimony to them’. But the man went out and began to proclaim freely and to spread the word so that Jesus could no longer go into the town openly but stayed out in the country and people came to Him from every quarter.”

See, in those days lepers were social outcasts. They were diseased. If someone who didn’t have leprosy came anywhere near them they had to yell out, ‘Unclean, unclean’. Jesus, listen to this, Jesus moved with compassion stretched out His hand and touched him.

See that’s the beauty and the wonder of Gods love. It was against the law for someone who didn’t have leprosy to touch someone who did. But He loved this man that everyone else rejected. The pattern of Jesus’ love is shown over and over and over again to outcasts, prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners. These were difficult people to be with. They weren’t easy people, they were difficult people.

I’ve been, in some respects, experienced what this man is talking about too. Gone to a Church, taken nine months for anyone even just as so much to invite us out for a cup of coffee. The Apostle Paul talks about us being ambassadors of Christ. Well by jingo, if we’re ambassadors we’d better look like Him and walk like Him and talk like Him.

And look what happens when Jesus heals this man. When the Son of God shows the love of God and demonstrates the healing power of God into this man’s life. Look what happens when this leper goes out and tells people what happened. Mark chapter 1, beginning at verse 45:

“This man went out and began freely to proclaim and to spread the word so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly but had to stay out in the country and people came to Him from every quarter.”

Hello! We wonder sometimes why people aren’t knocking down the doors of our Churches to discover the truth because they’re looking for the love and the power of God. And so often, not always, but often they just don’t find those things in the Churches they visit.

You and I, we can sit here, we can moan and groan and complain about the things we don’t have and what Jesus wants us to do is to give away that which we do have. Because when we empty ourselves and give all that we have, that’s when we discover what it is to live our lives to the full. Again listen to this. Luke chapter 21, verses 1 to 4:

“Jesus looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, ‘truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance but she, out of her poverty, has put in all she had to live on.”

We can be so bound up in our misery about who we are and what we’re going through and we can completely forget that living life to the full is about what we give and not about what we receive. The joy. The delight. The satisfaction. And the fulfilment come when we bless others with the little that we have.

And perhaps we only have a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread. That’s okay. Give them to Jesus and He’ll bless thousands with that small gift and there’ll be buckets and buckets left over. These three things remain, faith, hope and love but the greatest of these, by far the greatest is love.

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The world is full of self-help programs. In fact it’s a business that’s worth billions of dollars each year around the world. There’s a reason for that. Because somehow, when we were growing up we didn’t really learn how to live life: how to be a good and decent person, how to make the most of what we’ve been given and who we are, how to live out a life of significance and impact.

And so we race around chasing after this bit of apparent wisdom and that, believing this guru and that guru, hoping to discover the answers. Peter Trucker, the man who coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ back in the year I was born in 1959, also once said this. “The reason people use the word guru is because charlatan is too long for the headlines.”

Now, understanding ourselves better and getting a handle on some basic principles does help to a point. It’s just that self help isn’t the answer because things happen to us in our life that are so far beyond self help that it’s not funny. What we need is something much bigger than self. What we need is the power of God Himself.

I’ve been talking these last couple of weeks about living the best life we can possibly live. Both in the way we see the world, in our attitudes and our thoughts and reactions to things, and also in terms of our relationships. This week so far we’ve looked at our relationship with God, with our wife or husband, with our children and yesterday with the poor and the needy and the destitute. Today, today we’re going to finish off this series by looking at our relationship with ourselves.

Now that may strike you as just a little odd but actually who we are and how we see ourselves and whether or not we like ourselves, those things have a huge amount. In fact everything to do with whether or not we’re living the best life we can possibly live.

I want you to imagine for a moment that you were born as a racing car: sleek lines, red, capable of amazing speeds. The very best of the best – a Ferrari. But instead of finding yourself on a race track, you’ve been stored in an old farm shed owned by farmer Brown. And every now and then he takes you out for a short drive on the farm to pick up a bale of hay or to check on one of the cows. It would be completely possible to lose sight of the fact that you were a racing car capable of great speeds. Even though that’s what you really want to do, you look around at your circumstances and you realise that you’re nothing but a dusty old runabout.

So of course it’s a 21st century rendition, the Hans Christian Anderson story of the Ugly Duckling. And the power of that story, the Ugly Duckling, the thing that makes it a classic is in the way that it resonates so deeply in our souls.

A swan’s egg, by some strange set of events, finds itself in a ducks nest in a farm yard. And so a swan is born into a family of ducks. No-one really cares why or even realises that it’s happened. Everyone just assumes this little guy’s meant to be a duck. And all of his little life people reject him because for a duckling, he is one ugly bird. Everyone misunderstands him. Everyone rejects him. And it hurts. He’s alone. But amidst the bleakness and hopelessness of this world there is one thing, just one thing that makes his little spirits soar. Have a listen to the story:

“One evening just as the sun set amid radiant clouds there came a large flock of beautiful birds out of the bushes. The duckling had never seen any like them before. They were swans and they curved their graceful necks while their soft plumage shone with dazzling whiteness. They uttered a singular cry as they spread their glorious wings and flew away from those cold regions to the warmer countries across the sea.

“As they mounted higher and higher in the air the ugly little duckling felt quite a strange sensation as he watched them. He whirled himself in the water like a wheel, stretched out his neck towards them and uttered a cry so strange that it frightened himself. Could he ever forget those beautiful happy birds?

“And when, at last, they were out of his sight he dived under the water and rose up again, almost beside himself with excitement. He knew not the names of these birds nor where they had flown but he felt towards them as he had never felt for any other bird in his life.

“He was not envious of these beautiful creatures but he wished to be as lovely as they. Poor ugly creature, how gladly he would have lived, even with the ducks, had they only given him encouragement.”

At that moment he didn’t yet know who he was. He just knew who he wanted to be but because he didn’t know who he was, who God made him to be, he simply didn’t have a license to go and be who he’d been made to be.

And even when he finally encounters those birds again, he thinks he’s surely going to die. Surely that can be the only outcome. Have a listen again:

“I will fly to those royal birds”, he exclaimed, “And they will kill me because I am so ugly and dare to approach them but it does not matter. Better to be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry and starved with hunger in the winter.”

“Then he flew to the water and swam towards the beautiful swans. The moment they aspire this stranger they rush to meet him with outstretched wings. “Kill me”, said the poor bird and he bent his head down to the surface of the water and awaited death.

But then, then something happened that changed everything in an instant.

“But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image. No longer a dark grey ugly bird and disagreeable to look at but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born into a ducks nest in a farm yard is of no consequence to a bird if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.”

And you see it’s not until we see our image clearly, an image that reflects God Himself, that we discover how inconsequential the distorted images of the world’s misunderstanding reflects back at us. They’re so inconsequential. And it’s precisely the thing that God wants us to know when we walk out onto the stage called life, for as Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10.

“We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

It’s not for the world or for other people or for our circumstances to dictate to us who we are or what our dreams should be or what we are made, handcrafted by God, to do. Too many people are embarking on a new year. Squeezed into the worlds mould and wondering why it’s uncomfortable. Wondering why they don’t fit.

It’s not until we stare into the face of God that we know who we are. And we know who we were made to be. And we know what we were made to do. It’s not until then that we can be utterly delighted and satisfied with the choices that God has made for us. It’s not until then that we can actually like who we are and see ourselves through Gods eyes.

My friend, to the world we may well be ugly ducklings but in God’s eyes we are swans. And it is time for some people to set out on the New Year and see themselves through the eyes of God rather than through the distorted images that the world reflects back at them.

We cannot possibly live the best life we can live until we see ourselves from a different perspective. Until we see ourselves through God’s eyes and not the world’s eyes.

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