In the busyness of our lives, it’s really easy to lose sight of the big picture. Why am I here, where am I headed, what’s it all about? So often it’s when we’ve been working so hard at life and one day we lift up our head and start asking those questions, that people have what they call their midlife crisis.

Are you familiar with that term, that saying that "someone’s lost the plot"? What it means is that we've lost sight of where we're going, we've lost sight of the objective, we've managed to get things completely out of kilter, out of balance or out of whack as we Australians like to say.

"Oh man ... hasn't he lost the plot?" I don't know about you but there are times in my life where I've lost the plot. Come on, there are times in your life too when you've lost the plot. And often it happens because we've become so focused on just one thing in our lives, maybe it's a single relationship or a single thing that's not quite right.

When we're hurting we focus just on that one thing that's hurting. Sometimes we lose the plot when we're so focused on making ourselves happy that we forget about everyone and everything else and somehow the more we try to make ourselves happy the more empty we feel. It seems to me that the one sure way of feeling depressed is trying really hard to make yourself happy.

Why? Because we don't live in a perfect world that all clicks into place around us to make us happy, we don't live in a world where everyone and everything bows down at our feet and says, 'Hey here I am, I want to make you happy, what can I do for you?' And so we try so hard to make ourselves happy that we simply lose the plot.

A good friend of mine in the UK, Derek Stringer, has a radio program called, "Finding The Plot", it's probably not such a bad name when you think about it. I think the reason we lose the plot is that we lose sight of the big picture.

We're so busy working hard in life, pedalling harder, working faster, especially when the storm strikes, especially when there's a head wind slowing us down, it's the easiest thing in the world to lose sight of the big picture, the context, the sense of meaning and purpose and direction that maybe once seemed so clear. We had it for our lives and now the harder we go at it the murkier it appears to be.

Once it was clear when we were young, now it seems blurry. Sometimes it's like living our lives in a fog, you know what I'm on about here right? And then one day you wake up and you think to yourself, hang on, I've lost the plot and that right there is a scary place to be.

I found myself in that situation when I'm busy, working hard, even when I'm doing things for God. None of us is immune here. I don't get some exemption ticket from this stuff just because I work in a Christian ministry. This is real life, this is real stuff.

What we're talking about this week on the program and in fact over the next few weeks is faith. There's a phrase, two simple words, "By Faith …" that appear over and over again in the Bible especially in the eleventh chapter of the New Testament Book of Hebrews.

Now we need faith for all sorts of things, we need faith in Jesus to be forgiven by God and to be set free to live an eternal life in His presence. We need faith to make it through trials and difficult situations and to get through to the other side and as it turns out we need faith to get a sense of the big picture, to get a balanced sense of perspective over our lives so that we don't lose the plot or so that when we do lose the plot we can pick it up again.

Now have a listen to this, it comes from Hebrews chapter 11 beginning at verse 3:

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

In other words, by faith we know that everything that was created was created by Jesus; He is the Word of God that's being referred to here. The worlds, the cosmos, the universe, the little ant that crawls across the floor, everything, the worlds were created by Jesus, God spoke them into existence.

"Let there be light”, He said and there was light, 'Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear' and it was so. And God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together He called seas and God saw it and it was good ..."

And on and on ...

He spoke the whole world into existence, the entire universe, a universe that with all our brilliant technology we can only see part of and the part that we can see with our radio telescopes is so big, it's so vast that light would take, travelling of course at the speed of light, a hundred and eighty six thousand miles or three hundred thousand kilometres per second, light would take fifteen billion years to travel from one end of the known universe to the other.

Now I don't know if you've had a chance to visit the NASA website lately and look at the magnificent images of galaxies and super nova's and all that stuff captured through the Hubble telescope, I mean they're totally astounding and they are huge. I mean just think about this, even the nearest star to the earth after the sun it's called Proxima Centauri is about four point six light years away. Now that doesn't sound too far does it?

But if you and I were to hop into a car, drive at say a hundred kilometres an hour and travel that distance of four point six light years how long would it take us? Only about seven and a quarter billion years and that's without toilet breaks. That's the nearest star after the sun and the rest of them are all much, much further away.

Why is this so important? Here's why. We live on this earth as though this is all there is, we know that there's a sun up there and we know it's really big and hot and it's about ninety three million miles or a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres away, we know that there's a universe out there and we know that it's huge but come on, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, don't we live our lives as though they don't exist?

We live life as though the only thing that exists is my own "here and now", this instant, what I'm working at, what I'm doing, what I'm trying to achieve, what I'm feeling, what I'm struggling through, what I'm ... do you see my point?

We completely lose sight of the big picture. I see it all around me. Can I tell you? Every time I travel from Australia to India, I came back with a fresh realisation that the narrow privileged lives that we lead here in this affluent blessed country we call Australia is completely atypical, completely abnormal in the big picture of the rest of the world.

And yet, every Australian seems to live their life as though, hey this is normal, this is the centre of the universe when we're really, population wise, just a tiny narrow fraction of the world’s population and when our condition is totally atypical of what most people on this planet are living through.

And it's in this narrowness that we lose our way. It's in this narrowness that we lose the plot. Let's look again at that verse on faith that I just read out before.

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Faith gives us the context we need, faith is about knowing in our hearts that there's a God out there who made it all. He is so big and so powerful and so intelligent and so loving that He created the whole cosmos, even the bits beyond what human science can see and He placed you and me here on this earth in perhaps the only inhabitable place in the cosmos.

That's the picture and so instead of telling our God how big our problems are we need to start telling our problems how big our God is. Instead of obsessing about this problem or that disappointment, instead of sweating over the little things in our lives we can stand back and we can see the big picture, the God picture, the faith picture, the picture through the eyes of the God who created this awesome universe.

By faith we understand that God made it all, by faith we can rest in this God who loves us so much that He sent Jesus His Son to die for us. By faith.