Does God have one, specific path for your life—one that you might miss?

So many people, when they open their Bibles, run into a significant problem. They don't quite understand what's going on – that's certainly the problem I used to run into. It's not that I'm stupid, it's just that a lot of it didn't make all that much sense to me. So if you find yourself in that boat from time to time, stick with me, because today, we're going to make your Bible a whole bunch more accessible to you.

I have to tell you, that thing they call the Bible was a real problem for me. I mean, first coming to grips with the fact that it is what it says that it is, the Word of God but then, just getting into it. It's made up of 66 separate books written over about 1,500 years in different times, in different places and different cultures. So there are words and names and places and concepts and ways of thinking … well, we're not always familiar with them.

We're continuing in our series 'Power Unlimited' – because that's what God's Word brings into our lives so today, we're going to get down and really practical on just how to get into the Bible because unless we do, we're going to miss out on much of the power that God wants to pour into our lives.

Over the years I've discovered a few very simple helps or resources that have made such a difference in making sense of God's Word. You see, it turns out there's a whole bunch of people much smarter than me who have done some great research and put the information together in such easy usable ways and all their work makes getting into God's Word, the Bible, so much easier for the likes of you and me. Today I just want to share some of those resources with you.

I remember twenty or so years ago, just after I became a Christian, I started attending a tiny little Baptist Church in the southern suburbs of Sydney. A little place called Oyster Bay. Our pastor, Phil, was a passionate and gifted Bible teacher and that man has had a huge impact on my life.

Now as well as Sunday services, the Church used to have these little home Bible studies and we'd meet one night a week in someone's house. In our small group, five of us would gather together. And at the time, the particular little home fellowship that I'd joined, was studying the Old Testament book of Hosea.

So we'd lob in there each Wednesday evening, we'd have a cup of tea and some fellowship and then we'd sit down and do a Bible study together. And right through that book, over and over and over again, Hosea talks about Ephraim – that word is mentioned 29 times by Hosea. So I remember asking these people, most of them had been Christians for a good many years, "Okay, who or what is this Ephraim thing?"

I mean, Hosea kept talking about it and so it seemed to be quite central to what he was saying. But you know something, no-one could tell me who or what Ephraim was. Now it turns out the Ephraim was one of the tribes of Israel, Ephraim was one of Joseph's sons and there's a whole history around this tribe and how they rebelled against God, but we didn't know that in that Bible study so a lot of what God was saying to us, through this amazing, powerful book of Hosea, well it was frankly lost on us. And that sort of thing happens a lot more than you might think.

Consider the story of the Good Samaritan. It loses its whole meaning if we don't understand the Samaritans and who they were and what the Jews thought of them. Now when Jesus told that story to the assembled masses they all knew the Samaritan story but we don't, it's not natural to us. And there are names and places and concepts and ways of thinking in the Bible that are foreign to us, because we're separated from them by time and culture. It might have made sense to the people back then but not to us now. And unless we understand those things, we miss out on the richness, on the gravity, on the power of what God is trying to say to us.

I remember coming to grips with the Jewish system of blood sacrific

Let's face it, we like hanging out with people who agree with us; who say nice things to us; who, frankly, tell us what we want to hear. After all, who wants to be around those cantankerous individuals constantly pointing out our faults?

The problem with that is that we end up creating a bubble, a mutual admiration society, where we each reinforce the things that make us feel good. That's how street gangs descend into violence. That's how the rich end up ignoring the suffering of the poor.

It all began with the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. At first she resisted, saying …

Genesis 3:3-6But there is one tree we must not eat from. God told us, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden. You must not even touch that tree, or you will die.'" But the snake said to the woman, "You will not die. God knows that if you eat the fruit from that tree you will learn about good and evil, and then you will be like God!" The woman could see that the tree was beautiful and the fruit looked so good to eat. She also liked the idea that it would make her wise. So she took some of the fruit from the tree and ate it. Her husband was there with her, so she gave him some of the fruit, and he ate it.

As 19th-century theologian J.C. Ryle once said, "Eve found the serpent more trustworthy than God, not because of its credentials, but because the serpent said what she wanted to hear."

Be careful of surrounding yourself with likable, ill-credentialed people, intent on tickling your ego.

That's God's Word. Fresh … for you … today.

Desperation can be the place where God meets us most clearly.

God's Word is packed full of power … power unlimited … to transform your life. But one of the biggest problems people have with the Bible is understanding it. Making sense of it. Knowing where it comes from, and where what they're reading today fits into the big picture. Well, I think it's time we did something about that.

We've all heard of those word association tests that psychologists use. You know, they say 'black', you say 'white'; they say 'rabbit' and you say 'carrot'; day/night; God/mmm love; devil/mmm evil; Bible/hmm … Bible? How do you respond to that? Stuffy, old, irrelevant? Well, different people will have some different views but actually in Australia where I live, the Bible is one of the least trusted of all historical documents.

Over the last week and a bit on the program/ over the last few weeks on the program we've been talking about the incredible power that we unlock, when we read the Bible. But this thing that we call "the Bible", it's a big book, it's massive and it can be daunting. So today I thought it might be useful just to have a look to see what this Bible is exactly.

I want to share with you a secret, it's sad but true. I never read a book cover to cover until I was in my early twenties. I managed to get through school and university and did pretty well I might add, without ever reading a book from beginning to end. I remember at university, in first year English, we studied the book Wuthering Heights which absolutely bored me to tears, I'm sorry and I never opened the book once.

There are companies that publish crib notes, you know the summary of the book and a summary of what's in it and a summary of what some of the critics say, so I just quickly read those, crib notes, wrote essays and did, by and large, reasonably well. And I never, ever liked libraries either. You know how libraries have this kind of dusty, dank smell; all of them are the same. Every library on the planet has the same smell. I thought about it for a while, I thought 'Berni, why don't you like libraries? Why did it take you so long to read books?' The answer I guess has two parts.

Firstly, libraries for me always felt really big and inaccessible. They have tens of thousands of books and in the old days when I was at university, they had card systems for accessing, for finding things, I mean these days they have computers. The old card systems had what they call the Dewey Classification system and finding anything just took so incredibly long. And secondly, when you did find the stuff, there was always so much of it, there was so much time involved to, I don't know, look through all those books and research them. I mean, some people are natural book worms, well I'm not. I still frankly don't like libraries. I'm sorry if you're a librarian, I just don't like libraries. I haven't darkened the doorstep of one since I finished my last degree quite a few years ago now.

You know something; I think for a lot of people the Bible is exactly like that. It feels big and inaccessible. There are many, many people who wouldn't mind having a read but, for goodness sakes, where do you start? Well today let's break it down a bit, let's make it a bit more accessible. I remember when I started Bible College only a few months after becoming a Christian, everyone took for granted that we knew about the Bible. The reality was, I didn't and my hunch is, I wasn't alone. Let's unpack it a bit, let's demystify it a bit. All of a sudden you know it becomes a whole bunch more accessible.

The thing that we call the Bible is made up of 66 different books written by different people over somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 years. That's the kind of period over which the Bible was written. And it wasn't just written by different people but at different times and the last book was written, well almost 2,000 years ago.

There are essentially two parts to the Bible, this was complete news to me when I firs

You and I, indeed everyone who's ever lived on planet Earth (bar one), has stuffed up. We've all made mistakes. We've all fallen short. Not a one of us has ever kept all the rules - from road rules to simple kindness and common decency. There's a cheery thought.

Now, please don't take this the wrong way but I'm one of the most driven, conscientious, and hard-working people you'll ever meet. That said, the mistakes I've made, the people I've hurt … if I were to write them all down, they'd make for the longest book ever published in human history.

It doesn't matter how smart, diligent or hard-working we are, or what culture we grew up in, we've all made a mountain of mistakes. One response to that is to try harder, to do better, to keep the rules.

Here's the Apostle Peter speaking before the Jerusalem Council, addressing the issue of whether Gentiles had to follow Jewish laws to be saved.

Acts 15:10-11So now, why are you putting a heavy burden around the necks of the non-Jewish followers of Jesus? Are you trying to make God angry? We and our fathers were not able to carry that burden. No, we believe that we and these people will be saved the same way—by the grace of the Lord Jesus.

In other words, he's saying 'if we Jews weren't able to obey the law of Moses, why in the blazes would we lay that burden on others?' The answer - the only answer - is God's grace and forgiveness through the sacrifice of Jesus.

As Charles Spurgeon put it: "Sin is the great equaliser. It puts the king and the beggar on the same level ground before God. All have sinned. All need grace."

That's God's Word. Fresh … for you … today.

You have everything you need to be generous today!

So, we've been chatting on the program recently about laying hold of the unlimited power that God wants to give those who love Him. Great … but come on, how do you actually lay hold of that power? Well … the answer may not be what you think.

A few years ago now, I had the opportunity to speak with a group of high school students at the opening of their college and senior campus. The subject of my presentation was this: 'How to Get More out of Your Parents'. I just remember that when I was at high school, speakers at those functions were so boring. I wanted to grab their attention and it certainly did that.

A few of the parents, I have to tell you, were listening pretty closely as well but the heart of the presentation was this. Our parents, at least the greatest majority of them, are hard wired to bless us, but one of the things teenagers do, I know I did, is rebel against them and that stops the flow of parental blessing dead in its tracks.

I shared some insights with these young men and women about how, in a very practical way, they can respond to their parents' love at the same time as growing up, to get that relationship and that blessing flowing again. You could see some lights going on as they came to grips with how to respond to their parents. It turns out, our relationship with God is no different.

Over the last little while on the program, we've been working our way through a series of messages called "Power Unlimited". Over the last twenty or so years I've spent a lot of time studying God's Word, the 66 different books in the Bible and so I've had the chance to mull it all over. And whilst I know I've really just scratched the surface, the more I think about it, the Bible appears to me to be about 4 things. Who God is, God's will and purpose for us, who you and I are in his heart and fourthly, the thing I want to talk about today is, how we can respond to God. And as it turns out, that's the key to laying hold of the unlimited power that He has for us.

Now some people think that all the Bible has to offer, is a bunch of rules and regulations. But as I've read my way through the Bible, what I've discovered is that, how we can respond to God isn't the main thing, it kind of drops out of all the other three; it's a natural consequence of who God is, His will and purpose, who I am and as we get our hearts around those things, well for me at least, my heart just wanted to explode and respond to Him.

We're going to unpack this last one today because you know something; it's not a rules and regulations thing. I don't stay faithful to my wife because I have to, I do, but that's not why I stay faithful to her. I stay faithful to her because I want to; it's my response to her love and to our promise to one another. Not a difficult thing to do at all, because she loves me and one of the ways that I respond to that love is through my faithfulness to her.

It's the same deal with God but you know something, it's not good enough to know that we ought to respond or even that we want to respond, we need to know how to respond. So often in marriages the husband wants to show love to the wife and the wife wants to show love to the husband, but they're actually two very different people and they don't know how. A lot of marriages fall apart simply because people don't know how to love one another.

We were talking about teenagers earlier; nobody ever explained to me what was going on when I was growing up. You know, we start with a total dependence on our parents, we're a baby, we have breast milk, we're in nappies and progressively we grow to be independent of them.

It's a natural thing to grow up and become an adult and to be independent of your parents. Jesus quoted the Old Testament, he said:

Matthew 19:5 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they'll become one flesh.

In those teenage years, we're ki

We live in a world that's not only drifting further and further from the Judeo-Christian morals that have served us so well down through the centuries, but from God Himself. And whilst, in a sense, there's nothing new in that, I think you'd agree it's gathering pace.

As the world drifts ever more rapidly toward evil (go on, look around, tell me I'm wrong), there's one powerful truth that remains unchanged. It's this: that God is ever faithful.

Back in the 1st Century AD, the Apostle Paul was out telling people about Jesus, suffering all kinds of persecution as a result. So in a letter to his friends he writes…

2 Thessalonians 3:2-3 And pray that we will be protected from crooked and evil people. Not everyone believes in the Lord, you know. But the Lord is faithful. He will give you strength and protect you from the Evil One.

Paul was preaching good news to a crooked and evil generation. Not everyone believes in the Lord, you know. A faithless generation. But he didn't allow public opinion to sway him from his course. Because in the centre of his very being, he knew this: That God is faithful. That He will give us strength and protect us from the Evil One.

Don't be surprised when people come against you, ridicule you, ostracise you because of your faith in this Jesus who died to pay the price of your sin and rose again to give you a new and eternal life.

Don't be thrown off course. Because though you may be surrounded by evil, you're secured by grace. God has your back!

That's His Word. Fresh … for you … today.

What happens when we try to take God's place?