Pretty much all of us want to live not just a dull, boring life, but an extraordinary life. The sort of life that – given who we are and where we live and what we’re capable of doing – makes a positive difference in this world. A life that counts for something. And one of the most extraordinary things we can do is to pour out our gifts and abilities for others?

Now last week on the program we’ve kicked off a series that I’ve called, “How To Live An Extraordinary Life” because on this earth you and I only have one life to lead, it’s not a dress rehearsal, when it’s gone it’s gone and far too many people waste their lives.

They waste the opportunity to use their gifts and their abilities and their resources, the stuff they’ve been given to have a positive impact in this world; to leave a legacy that will live on and on with a ripple effect down through the generations.

Maybe that sounds a bit grandiose to you. Me? How could I have a legacy that ripples down through the generations? By having a positive impact on just one other person that helps them to grow or to change and then when that person has kids they pass that maturity and that wisdom on to them and before you know it you’ve impacted more people than you could ever imagine.

It’s exactly what Jesus did. Think about it. He came into contact with a few thousand people in Israel two thousand years ago and He’s impacted billions of people ever since. That’s why this series is called ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’. We’re taking a look at the different things that Jesus did to live His extraordinary life and seeing what we can learn from Him from the things He said, He did, in living our own extraordinary lives. Sound like a plan? Well let’s get into it today.

Over the past week we’ve seen that Jesus overcame His past which involved a pretty rocky start to life. We’ve seen that He drew a lot of His power from the fact that He humbled Himself and submitted to God. We’ve seen that despite the initial cost for Him He was a real team player and it’s the team that He built that ended up impacting this world. And we saw how focused He was on His mission and His objectives in the three and a half short years that He had.

There are some great insights so if you’ve missed any of them I’ll share with you at the end of the program how you can catch them up online. But today I want to kick the week off with an observation about how Jesus used His gifts to have an impact. Let’s pick up the story in Matthew chapter 4, verse 23:

Jesus went through Galilee teaching in their Synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread all throughout Syria and they brought him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains and demoniacs and epileptics and paralytics and he cured them and the great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and even from beyond the Jordan.

Now you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Well you know, I don’t have the power to heal people and cast out demons. If I did I guess great crowds would follow me too but I don’t so they won’t. So why are you banging on about this Berni?’

Am I right? Sure I am, we all think that but let me tell you what I think of the two most powerful, most profound words in that passage I just read and they’re not the words about curing every disease and every sickness, they’re not the words about His fame spreading or great crowds following Him. You want to know what I think what the two most powerful words are in that passage?

Well I think they’re the first two, these two words, “Jesus went”. And the reason they’re so powerful is that unless Jesus had gone, unless He got up off the sofa and left His comfortable, safe little carpenters shop and gone out throughout Galilee which by the way was the immediate surrounding area or the region of which He lived, then none of what He did would have been done and none of what He achieved would have been achieved and none of those people would have been healed. God wouldn’t have been revealed and it’s pretty certain that you and I wouldn’t be sitting here chatting about Him today two thousand years on, would you agree?

It all happened because Jesus went and would you please notice the other thing about this with me, He didn’t go to some far flung remote impossible place to start with, I mean He didn’t even go up to Jerusalem in the beginning, He started in His own home region.

Sometimes I think that in order to do something really extraordinary and worthwhile for God we think we have to set sail and go to the farthest place on this earth. Yeah sure, some people are called to do that, we call them missionaries but far more people are called to use the gifts and the abilities and the resources that God’s given them right in the place where they live and where they work and where they socialise.

It’s about just taking whatever we have in our hands and using it for the good of others. I know some people who sit there and say, ‘Well how come God doesn’t use me to have an impact in other people’s lives?’ Well my experience is that God is always up to something and when we’re not involved it’s probably a whole bunch more about us not going than about God not doing.

There’s a great guy who works in Christian media in the UK, he’s called David L’Herroux, he’s just one of the good guys. Recently he Tweeted this, he said:

The winds of God are always blowing but you need to set the sails.

It’s about hoisting our sails, it’s about throwing our hat into the ring, it’s about getting up off the sofa and going and just using what we have to hand. See it can be as simple as knowing that your neighbours just out of hospital and fronting up on their front doorstep without being asked and just taking a meal over to their house.

It can be as simple as offering to have a cup of tea or coffee with someone at work who’s looking a bit down and a bit distracted. Okay maybe God hasn’t given you or me the gift of healing but when we take stock of the gifts and the abilities and the natural strengths and motivations and inclinations and resources that we do have you start to realise how much He actually has already given us.

I was sharing this story of this ministry of Christianityworks that I work with in producing these radio programs with a group of business people at breakfast just the other morning and it’s an amazing story, from nothing to a weekly audience that numbers in the tens of millions. They were impressed and hey I’m totally gobsmacked every time I think about it or tell people about it.

But my point to them is this, we have a massive global team of eight people who work in the organisation and a handful of dedicated volunteers and none of us, none of us is anything special. We just got together, we each threw our gifts and abilities and resources into the ring, we just believed that God was calling us to do something special, we took some financial leaps of faith I have to tell you, other people might call them risks and off we went.

Did we have a strategic plan? Well yeah but we never imagined that God would do what He’s done. We never dreamed for a moment that we’d be sharing the good news of Jesus with that many people. The numbers and all the glory and all the impact, they belong to God, He did it, He’s still doing it, not us. We just kind of figured that if Jesus went well maybe we could follow along after Him, maybe we could step out of our comfort zones and go and have a impact in people’s lives too.

So let me ask you this, in your life right now, where you live, what are your opportunities? I mean just think for a moment, the people in your home that you live with, your husband or your wife, your children, maybe your extended family, maybe you have some older parents who need a helping hand, who don’t know how they’re going to get through, who are lonely.

What could you do to help them? To just touch their lives, to just make their lives a little bit better, to just shine a little light into a dark place and what about that woman just down the hallway on the right in that office who seems to be struggling? How could you make a difference in her life?

That’s what Jesus is calling us to do. So what are you waiting for?

There are three types of people. People who control you. People who drain you. And people who empower you. We all know which one out of those three we’d rather hang around, right? And if we’re going to live an extraordinary life … we all know which one out of those three we’d rather be, right?

Now no prizes for guessing which type of person I’d rather work with and you see this sharp polarization between manipulators and empowerers in every sphere and category of life. At home, with our families, at work with our superiors, our peers, our subordinates, you see it in social settings where some people try to be the beautiful people, the trend setters by manipulating you and other people, by causing conflict creating casualties just so that they can be king or queen of the castle.

Do you know people like that in your life? Yeah me too and it’s not a lot of fun being around people like that but here’s an even more horrifying thought, which category do you and I fall into? Are we manipulators or empowerers? Hmm?

Maybe that’s not a question that some of us are too comfortable in confronting but in a sense that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re smack bang in the middle of a series of messages that I’ve called ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and if we want to live such a life then this is an issue that we really, really need to get sorted out.

Have you ever been used by someone because they wanted something that you have? Some gift or ability that you have that suits their agenda. Maybe some money or resource that you have that they want in their pockets instead of yours and so they butter you up and they use you to their own ends and then they drop you like a hot potato when they’re done with you.

It’s not a nice feeling is it? You’ve just been manipulated and used. So now put the shoe on the other foot, if we become that manipulator in someone else’s life we may well end up leading an extraordinary life but for all the wrong reasons.

We want to live an extraordinary life for all the right reasons, at least I do, so what do we learn about this facet, this aspect of Jesus life? Well it turns out that He was very much into empowering people not manipulating them.

You may well know that famous Sermon on the Mount, in fact if you’re a regular listener you may remember we did a whole series on that a few months back on the program. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, all about God’s abundant blessing. But I want to take a look for a moment at the tail end of that sermon and just re-visit it again today from a different perspective. Let’s have a listen, Matthew chapter 5 beginning at verse 13. Jesus said to them:

“You are the salt of the earth but if the salt loses its taste how can its saltiness be restored? It’s not good for anything anymore but it’s thrown out and trampled under foot.

“You’re the light of the world. A city built on a hill can’t be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket but on a lamp stand and it gives light to the whole house.

“In the same way let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

Now that may well be a very familiar passage to some. The more familiar it is the more likely we are to skim over it than to stop and really think about it. So let’s stop, let’s think about it from a different perspective, from the perspective of the people who were sitting there on the grass by the side of the hill having a listen to what Jesus was saying.

Because this is absolutely one of the most empowering things that Jesus ever said when we understand the context and what it meant to the people who were listening.

See in their bland subsistence world, a world where they ate the same boring foods day after day, a world devoid of the culinary diversity of the affluent west in the 21st century, flavour was everything, flavour stood out, you noticed it and the primary way to enhance flavour, the way it stood out from the blandness was to use sea salt.

“You are the salt of the earth”

Jesus said to them and when the sun went down there were no city lights, no neon signs, there were no fifty inch plasma television screens, there were no electric lights in their ceiling, when the sun went down it was pitch dark except for some small candles and maybe a fire.

So candles stood out, it punctuated the darkness and a city, a city with all it’s candles and small fires, well that stood out for miles, I mean miles. You, Jesus said to them:

“You are the light of the world.”

Now put yourself in their shoes for a moment – poor insignificant peasants living the same bland and insignificant life that their forefathers had lived in the same place for generations; the same life that they were living in their thirty or forty years on this earth. The same lives that their children and their children’s children would surely live for generations to come. And Jesus says to them, can you believe this:

“You are the salt of the earth.”

You are what brings flavour, you are the light of the world, you bring light into the darkness. They were asking themselves what? What does He mean? This is us He’s talking to here, me? Salt? Me light? Insignificant me?

What did Jesus mean by this? Well here’s what Jesus meant. Jesus was saying to them, I’m here to turn your boring little world upside down because when you believe in me, when you hear my words and live them, when you follow the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, my Father in heaven, through me something happens to you, you change.

All of a sudden you become the salt in the bland, tasteless, unchanging, subsistence world of the people around you. All of a sudden through your relationship with me you add flavour to people’s lives because when they’re poor in spirit, when they’re mourning, when they’re powerless, when they’re hungering and thirsting for justice, when they’re being persecuted you can be the blessing.

You are the blessing because I’m in you and you’re in me. You stand out like salt on your lamb roast. It’s as though you became light in the dark world. Yes you, you are the light of the world because I’m the light of the world, you bring flavour and light and meaning and warmth and goodness and kindness and love into this dark, mundane, insignificant corner of the world in which you live.

You’re salt, you’re light. You the marginalised, you the oppressed, the simple, the uneducated, the lowest of low in the geopolitical scheme of things have significance because you are in me and I have something for you to do.

Do you see the scene now? Do you hear the power, the awesome power of what Jesus is saying? Do you see what it meant to those people who were there on that day who were listening?

What if you and I became empowerers instead of manipulators? What if we saw the good in other people and help them to grow the good in their lives which ultimately displaces the bad? Now you and I can apply that in any part of our lives and I read a great Tweet the other day:

“Management is getting work done through people; leadership is developing people through work.”

See that for me is exactly what Jesus was about and when we empower people all of a sudden we’re able to achieve so many more things because they appreciate it, because we’ve earned their loyalty. It seems to me that right there is what an extraordinary life is all about.

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Have you ever had that experience of being the “odd man out” if I can use that old phrase? Everybody seems to be in agreement about something … and you’re looking at this thing and what you really want to say us, “Ahh, excuse me but I think – I think the emperor’s got no clothes”?

So what do you do?

We’re continuing our chat again today about what it means to live an extraordinary life. I think deep down we all want to do that, but you know what it’s like, 99% of life is a humdrum. We just have to keep going and keep going and doing the things we have to do to make the whole thing tick over.

By the time we get home at the end of the day, we’re way too exhausted to think about living an extraordinary life. Well that’s a great formula for wasting your life, would you agree? We have one life to live on this earth you and I; it will either count for something or it won’t; it will either impact people in a positive way or it won’t.

It’s confronting isn’t it? Because the idea of wasting our lives is the most appalling thought, yet many people do and the way you do it, is a day at a time.

A great friend of mine, my former business partner and mentor for many years, Graham, had a great saying; he said that ‘mediocrity begets mediocrity’. In other words, as long as we go with the flow and stick with the masses in the grey middle ground and don’t ruffle too many feathers, we’ll be okay.

Mediocre people love being surrounded by other mediocre people. No one stands out. No one makes a difference. Everyone’s comfortable … and so this whole group think happens, we perpetuate the status quo, we all live quietly, unassumingly, uncontroversially wasting our lives. That’s how it goes, that’s what happens. Yuck!

Do you see what happens when we take a look at life from a different perspective?

Yeah it’s challenging, yeah it can make us feel uncomfortable, but hey sometimes we have to think about these things. Sometimes we have to make some changes because some of us are missing out on the extraordinary lives that God always planned for us.

Okay so where are we going with this today? What do we have to learn about this group think mediocrity thing from Jesus, today? Well here it is, have a listen and let’s chat about it, Matthew Chapter 5 beginning at verse 17. Jesus said:

Do not think that I’ve come to abolish the law, the prophets. I’ve not come to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you until heaven and earth have passed away not one letter, not one stroke will pass away from the law until all is accomplished.

Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of God. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of God.

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisee’s you will never enter the kingdom of God.

Now maybe at first, that passage doesn’t quite gel with what we’ve been talking about so far, which is wasting your life by participating in this group think, herd mentality, pervasive, compelling, comfortable mediocrity. But in fact that’s exactly what this passage is all about, here’s why.

The Jewish people had become complacent over the centuries until God sent them John the Baptist and now Jesus. He hadn’t sent them a prophet for three, four hundred years. That’s rather a long time.

So here’s what they’d settled into.

Well you know, we’re God’s chosen people after all and we have the Law of Moses, the Torah (this was their law) and we have our religious leaders. So long as we dot the I’s and cross the T’s and play the game and tick the boxes, hey we’re okay, we’ll just muddle along and God can take care of Himself.

That’s what was going on here and when Jesus came along and started calling a spade a spade, well the religious leaders who were powerful, who were wealthy, who had positions of honour and everybody bowed down to them (well come on, they’d made it) and Jesus all of a sudden comes along to threaten their power and their influence and their wealth and their comfort.

So what was the easiest thing for them to do? Rely on religion of course. Tell people that this radical Jesus who, by the way, had none of the religious credentials and breeding that they had, was speaking and teaching and preaching things contrary to the law of Moses, which was to the Jews sacrosanct.

That’s how you’d undermine Him right? And that’s why the first thing He does in this passage, is to set people right about this ridiculous allegation. Don’t think I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets; I haven’t come to abolish them but to fulfil them.

Truly I tell you until heaven and earth pass away not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

But now He goes straight on to challenge their comfort zone, the idea that they were pretty much okay because they were kind of obeying Gods law mostly. Okay I’m not perfect but who is? So I’ll be alright.

Not according to Jesus:

Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of God. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of God.

Stop doing this comfort zone thing, stop doing this grey mediocrity thing. Mediocrity is not okay. Either you’re falling short of the law and you’re in serious trouble or you’re fulfilling the law and keeping the law with all of its six hundred and thirteen commandments and prohibitions in which case you’re fine.

So people which one is that exactly? And then the absolute clincher. He strikes at the head of the serpent of mediocrity in their midst, the hoy-faloy religious leaders of the day:

For I tell you unless you’re righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisee’s you will never enter the kingdom of God.

See, striking at mediocrity was at the very centre of what Jesus was about. He confronted it, He addressed it, He challenged the people and you know what, it’s this one thing that He did that got Him crucified. That’s how much the world hates someone who challenges the steady predictable powerful base of mediocrity.

And whenever you or I stick our heads up from the crowd and stand out, whenever we reject mediocrity be it religious, be it professional, be it personal, someone’s going to come after us too with a meat cleaver because people are threatened by anyone who dissents from the creed of mediocrity.

But let me ask you this: do you think that mediocrity is going to get us an extraordinary life? Do you think that mediocre and extraordinary are comfortable bed fellows? And that’s the point isn’t it? It’s either one or the other, you can’t have both.

So your life … mediocre or extraordinary? Going with the flow or swimming against it? Sticking with the anonymity of the herd or sticking your head up and being different? They’re questions that matter.

The greatest lesson I ever learned was to stop judging myself by the response of other people. Now I don’t mean that we should be belligerent and arrogant and disregard good counsel, but if we spend our lives being people pleasers, we’re going to be mediocre because that’s what the crowd wants us to be. Because if we do the extraordinary, it rubs their noses in their own mediocrity.

That’s why they want us to continue to be part of the herd. That’s why mediocrity is always the enemy of the extraordinary.

So if you’re comfortable with the mediocre, if you’re afraid of going against the flow, if you’re concerned at what other people think when you use your God-given gifts and abilities to do the extraordinary, well that’s fine I guess.

But know this: you’re well on the way to living a wasted life.

Every now and then we run into a difficult issue in a relationship. Sometimes the right thing to do is bite our lip. Other times we let it wash by and we forgive and we move on. But sometimes, sometimes we have to address issues – tackle them head on. How … how do you do that?

Now I don’t know about you but over these last few weeks I’ve really enjoyed following Jesus around on the dusty highways and byways of 1st century Israel and just watching Him, observing Him, listening to Him because He lived such an extraordinary life, a really powerful life.

If you or I want to live that sort of life, who better to follow around, to observe, to listen to, to learn from than Jesus. Now our current series is called, “How To Live An Extraordinary Life” because we only have one chance at this life so we might as well make it a good one. In fact given how precious life really is lets make it an extraordinary life.

I think it’s easy to read the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament, all about the life and times and the deeds of Jesus and treat them more as a, I don’t know, as a text book rather than a relevant story about life.

But think about it, if Jesus was alive in the flesh today here and now and you were one of those twelve disciples you’d have a keen eye and a listening ear wouldn’t you? You’d be observing Him to learn as much as you could from who He was and what He did. I mean I know I would.

So why don’t we do that with the Gospel accounts of Jesus life? I think sometimes the more we read them the more blasé we become about them. I even had one pastor, a pastor mind you, say to me, “I don’t read the Gospels much”. When I asked him why he said, “I know how they end”. He was serious. So today again we’re going to get on the Jesus trail and see what He’s up to, see what we can learn from Him. Are you ready?

We’re going to pick up His story in Matthew chapter 5 beginning at verse 21. Jesus is talking here, He said:

You’ve heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder and whoever murders shall be liable to judgement’ but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister you will be liable to judgement and if you insult a brother or sister you will be liable to the council and if you say ‘you fool’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

So when you’re offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or your sister has something against you leave your gift there before the altar and go and first be reconciled to your brother and sister and then come and offer your gift.

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you’re on the way to court with him or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you’ll be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

I don’t know about you but on the occasions where I’ve had to tell someone something difficult, something they didn’t want to hear, it’s not always something that I’ve looked forward to doing.

I spent twenty years as a consultant working in hundreds of organisations and as a consultant often times it’s your job to tell people something they don’t want to hear. Over the years I’ve become more accustomed to it, I learned ways of preparing people for the bad news and delivering it in a way that wasn’t harsh or judgemental but it’s never something I relished, it was never something I looked forward to doing and it’s never something I enjoy doing but it’s something you just got to do sometimes.

Jesus did quite a bit of it, we don’t find out from the Gospel accounts how He felt about doing it, we don’t know if He experienced the apprehension which would be natural but all the indications are that it didn’t seem to faze Him much.

Jesus never minced His words, He didn’t mamby pamby around, if that makes sense, He wasn’t a shrinking violet. When something had to be said He said it. You see that over and over again, Jesus tackles the tough issues and that’s what He’s doing right here in this passage, He’s dealing with how we treat other people, He’s dealing with the way in which we judge other people harshly and yet we let ourselves off the hook.

How often have you thought to yourself, “Well you know, I’ll be right on the day of judgement, I’m not such a bad fellow or bad girl? You know I’ve never killed anyone, yeah I’ll be right, I’ll be right with God on that day”.

You’ve heard it said that those of ancient times said ‘you shall not murder and whoever murders shall be liable to judgement’ but I say to you, said Jesus, if you’re angry with a brother or sister you’ll be liable for judgement. If you insult a brother or a sister you will be liable before the council and if you say, ‘You fool’ you will be liable to the hell of fire

Hmm and then, then we are so prone to carrying un-forgiveness around in our hearts. We go to Church, those of us who do, we sing songs, we pray prayers, we listen attentively to the sermon, we come out feeling oh so holy yet there’s this one person at work who’d been driving us nuts and the last thing we’re going to do is forgive them.

In fact while the preacher has been droning on as sometimes he does we’ve been plotting our little scheme that we’re going to hatch when we get back to work on Monday. So when you’re offering your gift at the altar, if you remember you have something against someone, leave your gift there before the altar and go and first be reconciled to them and then come back and offer your gift to God.

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you’re on the way to court otherwise you might get handed over to the judge and the judge will put you in jail and you’ll be thrown into prison and truly I tell you you’ll never get out until you’ve paid your whole debt. In other words as Jesus goes on He says very plainly, unless we forgive others God won’t forgive us. Bam, right in the face.

Do you think people listening were shocked? Yeah sure they were. Do you think the Pharisee’s and the Sadducees, the religious leaders who ultimately plotted His assassination, they were shocked too. As far as they were concerned this was just another nail in His coffin.

Jesus knew that, He knew the consequences, He knew that by confronting the people with the truth they would assassinate Him but He came to this earth not just to die and rise again but to reveal God to us, to proclaim His central message:

Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

He came to tell us the way things really are and as we here in Australia would say, He called a spade a spade. Did He love people? Was He kind to them? Did He encourage them? Yes, yes and yes but He also spoke the truth to them directly and in love and sometimes my friend you and I need to do the same.

Does it require wisdom and sensitivity and a great sense of timing? Yes it does. But sometimes when we see people heading down the wrong path, in the wrong direction, doing something that’s going to hurt them or something that’s going to hurt others we need to be honest with them. Otherwise their blood is on our hands, it’s exactly what the Apostle Paul taught us in Acts chapter 20, verse 26:

Therefore I declare to you this day that I’m not responsible for the blood of any of you for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God.

I know, believe you me I know that telling people things that they really don’t want to hear is not easy. Often they react really badly when you and I share the truth about sin and salvation with people; when you and I point out to someone that they’re actually doing the wrong thing. Often they’ll react towards us exactly the same way as the religious leaders reacted towards Jesus.

They were the ones that had Him nailed to the cross because His truth threatened their power base which was based on doing the wrong thing. But in this life we are sometimes in a place and in a position when in our heart of hearts we know we need to speak out the truth, we know we need to admonish and when we’re in that place, when the spirit’s leading us there then that’s what we should do, just like Jesus no matter the cost.

The easiest thing in the world is just to go with the flow. Conventional thinking about things – truth morality – has changed enormously over the centuries. And not always, as people would have you believe – for the better. What we really need – is some true wisdom. Wisdom that works.

One of the things I love to do in my reading is to look historically at how we’ve morphed at what we consider to be the truth. Remember Galileo and Copernicus were persecuted by the Church for suggesting that the earth wasn’t flat but round and that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.

Of course sometimes in our advances of understanding truth has been positive in society but in many other ways the truth has been warped and distorted to suit the selfish ends that we have in our hearts.

I think of the sad times in America and in South Africa in particular but elsewhere too in the way that the Bible was used to justify the appalling treatment of those with a different skin colour from the people in power. Hey in Australia too in fact, we did some terrible, terrible things to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the name of religion.

And morality too has changed socially, sometimes for good and sometimes not. It’s wonderful to see that in many places in the world women are now being treated as equals, that’s awesome and yet so much of our morality is now based on anything on the anything goes maxim, if it feels good, hey lets just do it. Some see it as progress. I wonder what God would call it.

Pontius Pilate once asked, “What is truth?” In a world that is changing as rapidly as ours that you know is not such a bad question.

One of the ways people like to evaluate truth these days is whether or not it works. In fact that’s the principle way in which most of us evaluate truth. Truth used to be mediated to a large degree for us when we lived in smaller, more local societies without the intrusion of global media, the internet and all those external influences. People used to take pretty much for granted the mores and customs of their local society, their local tribe if you will, that’s what constituted truth.

And they rarely questioned it. In fact if you go to a so called primitive society today that’s still what you’ll find. I read somewhere that the way to tell whether you’re in an underdeveloped country or not is that that’s where children still obey their parents, that’s true.

Now of course with most kids having unfettered access to the internet in many parts of the world truth travels at warp speed and the greatest influence of what we consider truth to be is what the advertising industry tell us it should be. They’re masters of warping the truth in such an attractive and seductive way simply to get us to buy the product they’re selling us and we tend to consume that completely uncritically.

Don’t believe me, turn on your television, stand back and assess the very next advertisement that comes up and look at it critically and see if it presents you with a true reflection of life, of reality.

Look at any television ad from that perspective and you quickly see it’s a fantasy, it’s pure fiction and yet if I could take you back to that wonderful quote of an underdeveloped country being a place where children actually still obey their parents, you know something, real truth really does work.

If you want to live in a decent, humane society that fosters innovation, rewards hard work, punishes crimes, cares for the needy, real truth does work. If by something working we mean it fulfils my own selfish goals and ambitions and objectives, thats not really something that works.

But if by working we mean it’s right, it’s honourable, it’s fair, it helps me deal with the difficulties and the complexities and the ambiguities and the uncertainties of life then that truly is something that works. That’s why the ministry I’m part of is called Chrisitianityworks because it actually does.

This week on the program we’re continuing our journey in following Jesus around to see what He did, how He lived as our role model if you will. Because most of us want to live not just dull, boring, ordinary lives but in our own way, according to our own place and abilities and circumstances, what we really want to do is to live an extraordinary life.

Well Jesus by any standard lived an extraordinary life and so to my way of thinking that makes Him a great role model for us if our desire is to live a life that counts for something good in this world, that makes a difference in other peoples lives and it seems to me one of the things that Jesus did is that He wasn’t swayed by popular opinion, by popular thought, by popular versions of truth which were really untruths.

He was always digging below the veneer of social religiosity to discover real truth because He knows that truth works. In fact I like to call it wisdom that works. Have a listen to this bit of wisdom, Matthew chapter 5, verse 43, this is Jesus talking, He said:

You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy’, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your father in heaven for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends his rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

For if you love those who love you what sort of a reward do you have? Don’t even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters what more are you doing than others? Don’t even the gentiles do the same?

Be perfect therefore as your heavenly father is perfect.

Ask someone who isn’t a Christian, someone who doesn’t know much about Jesus or the Bible, ask them if that know or can remember one thing that Jesus said and the most likely answer you’ll get from them is this. Jesus said, “Love your enemy”. Fascinating.

Now loving your enemy doesn’t conform to the wisdom of our day, you’ve heard that saying ‘don’t get angry get even’. Hey we’re into justice at least for ourselves and so when someone does the wrong thing by us we want recompense, we want revenge.

We pat ourselves on the back when we’re nice to the people who like us and we want to go after the people who hate us with a carving knife, that’s the conventional wisdom of our day and it’s the conventional wisdom that means that at any time here on this earth there are between forty and fifty wars being fought on the planet. It means that tens of millions of children are in slavery, it means that a couple of billion people are starving even though there’s more than enough food for everybody.

Conventional wisdom is a bit like the television ads I was talking about earlier, look at it critically and you have to come to the conclusion that it’s a fiction, that it just doesn’t work. But if we actually loved our enemies, just stop and imagine what this world would look like.

Is it hard to swallow Jesus truth? Is it hard to live it out? Will it cost us something? Absolutely. The answer to each of those questions is yes but in our heart of hearts you and I know that if we just did that one thing in this world on mass, each of us one at a time, we would be living in a profoundly different world to the one we’re living in today, radically different: much less pain, much less suffering, much less bigotry and inequity and all those horrible things.

Jesus challenged conventional thinking with wisdom that works. He lived His life like that, He spoke to people like that, everything He was about was Gods wisdom, Gods way, wisdom that actually … I mean really truly, when you look at it in the cold hard light of day actually works.

It seems to me that that’s one of the key elements of living an extraordinary life. Not just going with the flow, not just going with the fiction, not just drinking the Coolade but living out Gods wisdom, a wisdom that truly works.