God doesn’t do things by halves, not at all. And in sending Jesus to die and rise again for you, He meant … He means to give you a whole new life. That’s not religious mumbo–jumbo. It’s for real.

NEW PURPOSE

It’s a sobering thought isn’t it? The time that you and I have left on planet earth is finite. It will come to an end one day, no doubt at a time that we least expect it.

Now, I run a busy diary in my life – I use an electronic one, that’s available on my computer, my tablet and my smartphone so that no matter where I am, I can check my diary, add in tasks and appointments and move things around. In fact, I really don’t know how I managed my life, before I had this diary that replicates itself instantly and automatically across all my devices.

This week and next week are pretty much all taken. You certainly wouldn’t get a meeting with me this week, and a couple of slots are left next week maybe for emergencies, and even the week after next is starting to fill up.

And there are diary entries for speaking engagements and all sorts of things that reach out over the next eighteen months. All in my diary. All colour coded – board stuff, broadcasting stuff, admin stuff, meetings, personal stuff, even the odd holiday – put in my diary way ahead of time so I don’t book anything else. All good stuff.

But think about this: the Lord could demand my life of me today, or maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning. I mean, I don’t know. I’m planning and working as though I have a long time left on planet earth. I feel like I have … but really, none of us knows. I don’t know and you don’t know.

I remember once a few years back, with an equally busy diary, I fell quite ill and ended up in hospital, I was really very sick. Do you have any idea how irrelevant that diary became to me as I was lying there in that hospital with tubes sticking out of me?

All the things I thought were important became unimportant. All the things I thought I had to get done this week, next week, the week after, they were left undone as I recovered. And I know this is going to shock you – NO, the world didn’t come to an end, and there wasn’t a rupture in the space-time continuum because Berni didn’t get done the things he planned to do.

And I imagine that one day the Lord will take me home, and that diary with all its appointments and tasks that were oh, so important – well, they’ll just get deleted off the computer, off the tablet, off the mobile phone, out of the cloud. And that … will be that.

And it’s going to be exactly the same for you. All the things that you thought were so important … won’t get done, will be no more and will be forgotten.

So now I want you to think about … what really is important? In the time that you have left, what is your purpose for being here on this earth? What is your principal purpose?

Because it’s that purpose that will start to guide the things that you put into your diary. It’s your purpose that’ll tell you which tasks and meetings are important, and which ones really aren’t. It’s your purpose that will decide how exactly you spend your years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds … between now … and when you breathe your last.

Now it seems to me, if our purpose is just to get stuff done here and now that we need to get done, to make money, to put food on the table and enjoy life, then … well, that’s a pretty myopic, short-sighted view and it’s a recipe for a short-term life, a life that stops dead, when your heart stops.

When Jesus was asked, which of the commandments (all 613 of them in the Old Testament) was the most important, this is what He said. Mark chapter 12, verses 29 to 31:

The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second one is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.

Now let’s imagine for a moment that you were to take that to heart. Let’s imagine that you decided, if you haven’t already, that with every breath that you take between now and then, you decide to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, with every fibre of your being. And similarly to love others as you love yourself.

Might I ask you, if that were true, if that became your purpose for living, how would it change the things that you put in your diary? How would it change your priorities? How would it change what you spend your time on?

What I’ve always found in my life, and I’m pretty sure it’s true in your life as well, is that nothing changes in what I say or do, until something changes in my heart. The reason I know it to be true is not just that it’s true in my experience, but because it’s precisely what Jesus said. Luke chapter 6, verse 45:

The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

There are many people today whose life isn’t going in the right direction. Often we don’t know why, we just know it’s not right. There’s a lack of joy, there’s a lack of fulfilment. Or perhaps there’s the pain of regret. And often we don’t know what the right direction even looks like.

And if perhaps you sense that that’s what’s going on in your life today, and you’re looking for a fresh start in this new year, then I want to encourage you with all that I am, I want to implore you … to have a change of heart, to establish YOUR purpose based on what Jesus said was the most important thing. And that is:

…to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength and to love your neighbour as yourself.

Because if that truly becomes your purpose in living, then God will set a new life before you. A life that, whilst hard some days, you’ll know is heading in the right direction.

 

NEW FOCUS

Back when I was in the Army, we used to use a 7.62mm SLR – now, that’s not a camera, it’s a rifle. A fairly large 7.62mm standard NATO round, in a self-loading rifle, which means you didn’t have to cock it each time you fired it. When you fired it, it had a mechanism in it that would harness the power of the gas in the muzzle as the bullet was flying out, as a back-force to automatically re-cock the rifle, putting the next round in the chamber, ready to fire it again.

Pretty clever stuff. We spent hours, and hours and hours in the hot sun out on the firing range, practicing hitting the target. Now the target was pretty big – it was one metre square, with obviously concentric circles and a bullseye in the centre. At the 25 metre mound, you couldn’t help but hit it dead centre. That became a bit harder at 50 metres and then 100 metres.

But let me tell you, once you got back to the 300 metre mound, it was the easiest thing in the world, to completely miss the square metre altogether. Just the slightest movement and you’d miss, which is not at all good, since you’re practicing to take out the other guy who, in a war situation, would be shooting back at you.

We didn’t have telescopic sights back then. So you practiced your breathing, you practiced shifting your focus from the target to the front-sight to the back-sight and back again, and then squeezing – not jerking – squeezing off the round. Mind you, when you squeezed the trigger, the percussion of the bullet firing would fair rip your shoulder off. A lot of that was to do with the physics around a large bullet, these days most armies use a smaller 5.56mm round so it’s n...