We tend to take the air that we each breath in and out 23,000 times a day very much for granted. And yet, without it you and I couldn't survive for more than a few minutes.

Every breath you take sucks in a trillion, trillion oxygen molecules that rush into your lungs, cross into your bloodstream, binding to your haemoglobin, and reach every cell in your body in less than 20 seconds.

Breath isn't just air — it's the spark of life coursing through you moment by moment. And yet, the one thing science has never been able to achieve - not for want of trying, I might add - is to create life from non-living matter. Never! But …

Genesis 2:7 … the LORD God took dust from the ground and made a man. He breathed the breath of life into the man's nose, and the man became a living thing.

The original Hebrew word for "breath," ruach, is also used throughout the Old Testament to refer to the Holy Spirit. It has the same meaning as the Greek word pneuma, used to denote the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Both words carry with them the sense of breath or wind - invisible, powerful, life-giving.

And just as God breathed life into your body (the only One who could), so the Holy Spirit breathes life deep within your spirit.

Like you, I've travelled through times where I felt like a zombie, the walking dead, as though the world had drained all the life out of me. But each time, when I've turned to God for help, His Spirit - His ruach, His pneuma - has breathed life back into my soul.

It's the Spirit who brings life. In fact, He's the only One who can!

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

You know I've heard all the theory – you don't have to be afraid – because God is in that place with you. Hmm. That's the theory. But how do I know – how do I know that I can rely on Him to be there and to be on my side and to act? Well?

Fear is something that, quite frankly, we don't much want to talk about. And yet it's something that's so very real for so many people in this world. We don't want to admit, to the rest of the world, that we're afraid. And so we kind of put on this brave face as though everything's fine. But on the inside, fear can be eating away like a cancer. So often it's the case that the things we used to place our confidence in, they're not working anymore.

People place their faith in all sorts of things. Their stock portfolio, until the stock market takes a dive. People place their faith in relationships until those relationships fail. And so we lose confidence and when we lose confidence, the deep rot of fear sets into our hearts.

Well truly I tell you, God wants to deal with that so decisively in our lives. Now that doesn't mean that we're not going to go through things and situations and challenges that aren't scary. Of course we are. That's life. But God's plan is that, when we do, that we'll be ready. That our confidence will be in Him.

Imagine a life where these times of fear are replaced with a quiet confidence in God Himself. That's His plan. That's why He keeps saying to us:

Do not be afraid.

Us being afraid falls so far short of His plan to fill us with His peace. That's why I really encourage you to stick with me over these next few minutes as we discover how to live out God's ideal of not being afraid.

I was talking with a friend recently. Great guy, one of "nature's gentlemen" as the saying goes. He's kind and considerate and competent. He's just a delight. I've worked with him about 15 years but over the last few years our paths have headed off into different directions. Now I had cause to call him about something. Expecting to hear his cheerful, bouncy voice on the other end of the phone. But what I discovered was a shell of the man I once knew.

His world had fallen apart. His family was gone, his career seemed over. It was an incredibly difficult and painful time for him. He said, "I'm sitting on a beach at the moment, wondering what, if anything, the rest of my life holds."

Now none of us want to have the stuffing ripped out of us. But you know something, it happens to all of us at some point. It doesn't matter who we are, where we live, what we believe. And you know, I've heard some preachers preach as though, "Well if you believe in God, bad things won't happen to you." That's a load of rubbish. Bad things happen to God's people too. In fact, sometimes especially they happen to God's people, they just do.

Take Israel, God's chosen people. They found themselves in this scary, fearful place. They'd been in slavery, exiled in Babylon for the best part of 3 generations. It's a long time. Only a handful of their elders can ever remember living in God's Promised Land – Jerusalem.

So what does God have to say to these people who are cowering in fear under the yoke of slavery? Have a listen. It comes from the Old Testament, the Book of Isaiah, chapter 41, beginning at verse 8:

But you Israel, my servant Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham my friend. You whom I took from the ends of the earth and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, 'You are my servant. I have chosen you and not cast you off. Do not fear for I am with you. Do not be afraid for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you up with my victorious right hand.'

See the first thing that God does is He reminds them of His promises to Abraham. When Abraham stood in that Promised Land, centuries before, this

What do you do when a friendship goes quiet after a hard conversation?

Life can be a tad chaotic at times. Making order out of the things that unexpectedly confront you, that unsettle you, can be a challenge. But behind the chaos lies a hidden order … if only we'll go looking for it.

Science has made huge strides forward since Isaac Newton posited his laws of motion back in 1687. In fact, the more science has advanced, the more evident it's become that the universe is governed by mathematical constants so finely tuned that even the smallest change would plunge creation into complete chaos.

If gravity were only a fraction stronger, stars would burn out almost instantly: Slightly weaker, and galaxies would never form. The same is true of the speed of light, the charge of electrons, and everything else.

Without doubt, this extraordinary precision — often referred to as the fine-tuning of the universe — points to a God of order, not chaos.

Genesis 1:1-3 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (ESV)

Do you imagine that the God who created this whole universe can't bring a bit of order to the chaos of this world, to the messy things you travel through in life?

The same Holy Spirit who hovered over the deep, who created everything from nothing, who fine-tuned the universe, is the One who, despite all that the world shouts at you, despite all the evidence that confronts you, will bring a wondrous order to your chaos. In fact, He's already begun.

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

You know something – the world can be a scary place. We all travel through times when fear eats away inside and it's right in the middle of those times, that we need to know what to do.

I don't know about you but as I look around, it seems to me that the world can be a scary place. Take spiders and snakes for instance. Depending on where you live in the world, they're dangerous or they're not.

Here in Australia we are seriously over-represented in the top ten list of the worlds most venomous creatures. So growing up as a child I had a good reason to be afraid of them. And still today, the idea of a spider crawling into my bed. Well it's one of the scariest thoughts that I can come up with.

Let me tell you a funny story. One of the most venomous snakes on the planet is called the Death Adder. Good name huh? When I was training to be an officer in the army, we had not only Australian students but New Zealand students. And if you know anything about New Zealand, you will know they don't have venomous snakes at all.

And we were training and we were doing a grenade practice. So we were down in the bunker. And one of the New Zealanders went up, out of the bunker, to throw his grenade. And while he did, we found a dead Death Adder. So we put it down right where he had to sit down. So when he sat down, when he came back, he saw it and I tell you, it was so funny. His legs were going before his backside was up off the seat, running out of the bunker. Terrible stuff isn't it? But there you go.

We can laugh but the world can be a scary place. Especially with friends like me.

That was a long time ago, I have to say. I was young and stupid then.

So this week we're starting a new series on the program that's called, "Do Not Be Afraid". There's a reason for that. There are lots of people in this world who spend much of their lives living in fear.

Sometimes it's because they're living in a war zone. I mean there are plenty of people today, listening, who know that only too well. There are people in the Democratic Republic of Congo for instance. And there are parts there where there's war raging right now. There are some people, sitting in their homes, listening to this program today, wondering whether or not they're going to see tomorrow or next week or next year.

Other times, life threatening things happen. You have a health scare. The morning I sat down to prepare this message was the morning of the funeral of a good friend of mine. He was just a few years older than me and he died suddenly of a heart attack.

It's easy to be afraid of things. And when we're afraid it rocks our confidence. And yet other people, they just kind of live life with a real sense of dread. Always something there for us to dread. Always something lurking out there that we can be afraid of.

For me, honestly, if I allowed it, I could be afraid of quite a few things. There are a few things in my life right now that could cause me fear. I mean this ministry that I'm involved in at Christianityworks. It's a global media ministry. We're just a small team of people and we don't know where the funding's going to come from to do all we have to do over this next year. We just don't.

So you either live in fear or you live in faith. If God doesn't provide that funding, we'll fall flat on our faces. That's the stark reality. And that's the thing, it doesn't matter who we are or where we live, we can live in fear. And that fear can rob us of life itself. And yet, time and time and time again, you read God's word and these are the words from God, that He speaks to His people. He says:

Do not be afraid.

And He utters them, invariably, right at the time when the people He's talking with have every reason to be afraid. The people and the circumstances that are confronting them, conspiring against them.

We experience fear to

There's an old maxim that politicians use in deciding on policies that'll win them the next election: if in doubt, back self-interest. In other words, pander to the self-interest of others and they'll vote for you. Sadly, self-interest is used to justify all kinds of abuse and injustice as we collectively shift the boundary markers that separate right and wrong.

During the so-called Highland Clearances in 18th and 19th century Scotland, powerful landowners forced thousands of poor tenant farmers off their ancestral lands to make way for more profitable sheep farming.

Boundaries were literally redrawn, villages were destroyed, and people who'd lived there for generations were driven into poverty, exile, or emigration.

It was, in essence, the moving of "ancient boundary stones"—ignoring heritage, community, and justice for the sake of profit. The vulnerable—often widows, orphans, and the poor—were left without fields or homes.

Proverbs 23:10 Do not remove an ancient landmark or encroach on the fields of orphans, for their redeemer is strong; he will plead their cause against you. (NRSV)

Self-interest is a powerful motivator for each one of us – perhaps the most powerful of all. So long as we're comfortable, who cares what happens to everyone else? Who cares about their suffering?

In this verse, God warns us against greed, exploitation, and taking advantage of the vulnerable by shifting boundaries for selfish gain. Greed that displaces the powerless corrodes both justice and society. And God will see that, in the end, His justice is done.

Don't move the ancient landmarks. Don't start calling that which is wrong, right. That's God's warning, and …

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

Support the show: https://christianityworks.com/channels/cw/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our capacity for self-delusion, for being led by the nose by this conspiracy theory or that radical dogma, is remarkable. Just look around. Amidst the swill of social media, many are being sucked into the deep vortex of delusion.

Imagine you meet someone who's convinced that the earth is flat or that aeroplanes spray chemicals to control people's minds. So you patiently sit with them, showing them NASA photos, explaining basic physics, even quoting trusted scientists.

But no matter what evidence you bring, your friend just shakes their head and says, "That's what they want you to believe." Your words of wisdom and truth wash over them like water off a duck's back—completely wasted. What do you do with that?

Proverbs 23:9 Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words.  ESV

Fool is such a harsh word. But sometimes, it's also the right one. Doing what I do, I receive a lot of hate mail from people who call me all sorts of names, accusing me of all sorts of things.

It really bothered me at first and I'd spend hours writing to each one, trying to shine the light of God's love into their hearts. But can I tell you, not a single one of them came round.

And harsh as it may sound, eventually you have to heed God's advice:

Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words.

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

For a woman quietly carrying the burden of caregiving, short daily messages of biblical encouragement became a steady reminder that God had not abandoned her in her hardship.