What happens when the strength you’ve always depended on suddenly isn’t enough?

In an incredible universe of an estimated two trillion galaxies, each with an average of a hundred billion stars and two hundred billion planets, what, in your opinion, is the most powerful force of all? The answer, without any shadow of a doubt, would have to be … love.

The Big Bang Theory says that the universe began as a single, infinitely dense point around 13.8 billion years ago. It suddenly expanded—rapidly stretching space itself—and it's been expanding ever since. As it cooled, energy formed matter, leading to atoms, stars, galaxies, and planets.

Now, whether you believe that or not (personally, I have my doubts), so far as we can tell, the universe is indeed still expanding. As each second of the clock ticks by, stars, entire galaxies, are hurtling at inconceivable speeds over incomprehensibly vast distances, farther and farther… and farther apart.

Which brings me to the reason for my claim that, in this incredible universe of ours, the most powerful force of all is love.

Romans 12:10 Love each other in a way that makes you feel close, like brothers and sisters. And give each other more honour than you give yourself.

Why is love such a powerful force? Because in the face of a universe that's hurtling apart at speed, love is the one force that brings us back together.

That image of a rapidly expanding universe over ever-increasing distances is playing itself out in the way we treat each other. Countries, communities, even families are ever more divided by political dogma, by ideologies, by selfishness, by pride. We've never been further apart.

Listen. In this divided world of ours, love each other in a way that makes you feel close, like brothers and sisters.

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

She's flat out running the kids around, cleaning, cooking, all the stuff she thinks she should do. And he's just lonely. She never has time for me. He never helps me!

This week on A Different Perspective we're taking a bit of a look at what it means to communicate our love for one another in the context of marriage. You know I believe that marriage is just one of the most amazing gifts that God can bless us with, but sometimes husbands and wives get so frustrated because they don't know how to love one another. And that is just so frustrating because you're doing your best.

You think to yourself, "Man, I couldn't possibly be trying any harder to love my husband, or love my wife and yet they say they don't feel like I love them." And so often it's because we're speaking our love to them in one language but they need to hear it in another.

So this week we're working our way through the fantastic book by Gary Chapman, it's so insightful, it's called The Five Love Languages and today, today we'll be looking at the fourth of those, Acts of Service.

Jesus was visiting two sisters Mary and Martha. Now these young women were really quite different from one another. If you'd like to read the story you can, it's in Luke's Gospel, Chapter 10 beginning at verse 38. Jesus comes into their home and Martha, well Martha is working flat out, she's cleaning the house and cooking the dinner and doing all the things you need to do when you have a guest come into your home.

Mary her sister, on the other hand, Mary sits at Jesus' feet and listens to what he has to say, she's glued, she's riveted and Martha gets pretty frustrated, she says to Jesus, "Don't you care that Mary's just sitting there and leaving all the work to me?" Now that's fascinating because then you see a conflict between two sisters.

Mary obviously loves spending quality time; she's sitting there with Jesus and she's doting on what he's saying. Mary's primary love language is probably spending quality time with someone.

On the other hand Martha, Martha's gifting clearly is in Acts of Service. She's just one of those people who like to do all the busy things and to serve people. Some people are just hard wired doers, they jump up, they help, they cook, they cater, they clean, at home, with friends, at church, at the club, whatever they do, they express their love by serving them.

Now we should all serve. Jesus said it himself, "I've come to serve, not to be served" right. But Mary and Martha are clearly wired differently, somehow in their DNA, deep in their character, in their persona, they're quite different and that's life, we're all different.

This week so far, we've looked at three primary love languages, that is, that we all receive love in slightly different ways, for some people it's Words of Affirmation, they experience love when their husband or their wife encourages them and says, "you look fantastic, that was a great meal, thank you so much for doing that for me".

The second is Quality Time; it's what we see in Mary, some people experience love most when they and their spouse simply spend exclusive time with each other and focus exclusively on one other, and that quality time is how they drink in one another's love.

The third one, which we looked at yesterday, is Receiving Gifts. And each one of us has maybe one of the five that we're looking at this week, which is the main way that we receive love.

Today we're looking at Acts of Service, and the picture of Mary and Martha is a great one. But imagine if they were Max and Martha, imagine if they were husband and wife. And Martha is your hard wired acts of service type. For her to love is to serve, for her to love is to cook and to clean, for her to love is to do stuff.

But Max, Max is your gentle type, he's one that loves to spend time together. He doesn't care if the dishes don't get done. "We'll do that later,

From the refugee to the executive, each life carries the same worth before God.

Each day, in so many different ways, we have a profound choice to make: either to do good or not. It's a tough one. How much easier would it be to take the low road rather than the high one; to go with selfishness, anger, dishonesty, revenge, rather than a genuine love for others and a desire to do good?

In the 17th century, Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (present-day Angola) ruled during a brutal time of slave raids and colonial conquest. Portuguese invaders enslaved her people. Betrayal came from every side.

It would've been easy to execute vengeance, but Nzinga negotiated freedom for captives, sheltered runaway slaves, and even converted to Christianity to forge peace. Though a warrior, a fighter, she chose mercy over revenge. In a world where might makes right, she believed nevertheless that right could still be mightier.

When we're confronted with evil, our most natural response is hatred, punishment, revenge, isn't it?  And yet, intuitively, we know that Queen Nzinga had it right. Here's God's take:

Romans 12:9 Your love must be real. Hate what is evil. Do only what is good.

Three short sentences that pack so much power. When you and I approach tough situations with a genuine love, two things happen. First, out of that love, comes the courage to stand firm against evil without hating the people who perpetrate it.

Second, we end up doing what's right, difficult though that choice may be. And that godly goodness, born out of genuine love and a hatred of evil, changes everything.

Perhaps we do live in a world where might makes right. But the truth is that doing what's right is mightier still!

Your love must be real. Hate what is evil. Do only what is good.

That Neil Diamond song "You Don't Send me Flowers Anymore" says it all in some marriages. What happened to those unexpected gifts? What happened to the love?

This week on A Different Perspective we're taking a look at how to express our heartfelt commitment to our soul mates, our wives, or our husbands as the case may be. Imagine; boy meets girl, she only speaks Swahili, he only speaks Japanese, they get married but they still can't speak one another's languages, what sort of a marriage are they going to have?

Well there are two options; they either decide to learn one another's languages or things are going to fall apart because unless they learn to communicate, the frustration and the isolation would just tear them apart. That's how it is with different languages and love.

Gary Chapman's written a great book called The Five Love Languages, the last couple of days we've looked at the first two of those, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time, today we're going to look at the third, Receiving Gifts.

Anthropologists are a funny lot, they love to study human patterns of behaviour across different cultures, and in fact right down through history. And they look for common themes and patterns of behaviour. One of the most basic, one that appears in every culture is the notion that love is about giving.

My hunch is that in the garden of Eden Adam used to go out looking for flowers for Eve and pick them, and give them to her, no doubt, and we know for a fact that she loved picking fruit for him to eat! Well I guess no one's perfect! So over the last few days we've looked at the first few languages of love that Chapman talks about in his book, The Five Love Languages.

The first was Words of Affirmation. Some people's primary way of experiencing love is through words that other people say to them that affirm them. So a man who needs words of affirmation will need his wife to say, "Darling you look great in that suit. Darling, thank you so much for doing that." And a woman who needs words of affirmation will need exactly the same thing from her husband.

The second of those was Quality Time. It's a happy buzz phrase isn't it? But quality time is more than just sitting in front of the box and just being in a safe space together. Quality time is focusing our attention exclusively on one another, and there are some people whose primary way of receiving love is through the knowledge that their husband or wife spends quality time with them.

The third one, which is the one that we're going to look at today, is Receiving Gifts.

Now a gift, I used to think, "Well how can someone experience love by receiving gifts, isn't that kind of tacky and cheap and materialistic?" Truly that's what I used to think. But when you think about it, a gift is something tangible. You can hold it in your hand, you can look at it and say "he loves me", or "wow she loves me" and you'll look at it again, and again, and again.

It's a tangible tactile physical expression of the giving part about love, that thing that anthropologists discover is common to every culture that they've analysed. It's a symbol of a thought. We've heard the saying, "it's the thought that counts."

It's not the actual gift, it's not how much it cost, it's the fact that the gift represents something and it represents love, or friendship, or whatever. So this visual symbol of love is more important to some people than it is to other people.

Let me tell you about Berni. A gift to me will fail to express your love or your friendship to me precisely 100% of the time. If I never receive another gift in my life it'll be too soon. If nobody ever remembers my birthday again in my life it'll be too soon. When we were first married, Jacqui and I, Jacqui thought, "Ah I'll go and buy my husband a tie, or clothes, or aftershave," and I was absolutely horrified.

I buy my own ties, I buy my own clothes, I buy my own afte

Human nature pushes us to get the most while giving the least. That same mindset often shows up in our relationship with God.

Don't you absolutely hate it when those with power perpetrate evil? It's so wrong! The innocent are hurt because evil has crept out of powerful hearts into the lives of little people – the poor, the needy. And this isn't just something hypothetical. It's happening right now, right under our noses. So the temptation for us, for you, for me, is to hate those powerful people, rather than hating the evil that they're perpetrating.

Jacques Lusseyran was a blind teenager when the Nazis occupied France. He joined the resistance, helping lead a secret network that distributed underground newspapers. Betrayed and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, he nevertheless refused to allow the hatred that surrounded him to poison his soul.

Even in that darkness, he encouraged his fellow prisoners with hope, refusing to hate the guards. "Hatred," he later wrote, "blinds us more than any blindness." He could see what many sighted people couldn't: that evil must be resisted, but people must still be loved.

Which brings us to the verse we looked at yesterday:

Romans 12:9 Your love must be real. Hate what is evil. Do only what is good.

How fascinating. Here we are in the very Word of God, and we read about love and hatred all in the one breath. If it weren't for the first part – Your love must be real –  it'd be easy to interpret the second part – Hate what is evil – as a license to hate people.

But that's not it at all. Absolutely, evil must be resisted. But the people must still be loved.

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

He thinks he's doing a great job working hard, paying down the mortgage. But all she sees is that he never has time for her. He's working flat out, she's feeling unloved and it's all heading downhill fast.

This week on A Different Perspective we're looking at how to communicate love between husband and wife. Actually you can apply it to any loving relationship. So often a wife and a husband well, they want to love one another but they just don't know how. It turns out that all to often they're talking different languages.

He gives her flowers but all she wants is his attention; she want to spend time with him when he's dying inside because all he wants her to do is to stroke his cheek. These things are so deep; they're so buried in our DNA that it even hurts to talk about these needs sometimes.

That's why this week we're stepping our way through Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages. Because it's not enough for us to want to love our wives or our husbands, we need to know how, and today we're looking at Quality Time as the second of those five love languages.

Time poor is the trendy expression at the moment. Time poor takes busy and elevates it to, "wow you're important because you're time poor." There are so many things, you know. There's work, and there's entertainment, there's housework, there's shopping and there's spending and there's traveling and there's the kids. And a lot of it, as we've looked at it on previous programs of A Different Perspective is about accumulating stuff.

But stuff doesn't make us happy. We can go on a flash holiday and get there and still not be happy, you can spend as much money as you like on stuff, but it still wont make us happy because its relationships that bring us that satisfaction: relationship with God, relationship with husband and wife, relationship with family, relationship with friends.

And these days it seems that just keeping our heads above water takes 99% of our time, and the other 1% we're so exhausted we've got no time for relationships, we've got no time to give anything.

We're looking through that great book, and would encourage you to buy the book and read it because it is a really good book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. The five love languages that he lists are: words of affirmation, which we looked at yesterday; quality time, which we're about to look at today; receiving gifts, which we'll look at tomorrow; acts of service, the next day; and finally on Friday, physical touch.

And it turns out that for each one of us, one or maybe two of those are our primary love languages. In other words we need our wife or our husband, as the case may be, to speak their love into our lives using these languages. If my primary language is physical touch, which it is, then receiving gifts just never works for me. Or words of affirmation, I tell you I don't need them much, I need my wife to stroke my face and say "I love you" and that's how I experience her love, by and large.

Sure we need all of those things, but we're coming down to what's the primary way in which each one of us experiences love, takes it in. Now when we look today at quality time. Quality time is not about being in the same place together. You can be in the same place with your husband or wife but not have quality time because quality time speaks about attention. It speaks about focus.

A woman can be just yearning to have that undivided attention of her husband and he thinks "Ah I'll buy her some roses, that'll do it!" As though some how quality time and roses are equivalent. They are not to someone whose primary way of assimilating love is by spending quality time with her husband.

I'll let you in on a secret. I am not naturally good at quality time. It is not my primary love language, it is not what I do naturally. I'm a doer, I do stuff, I work hard then I rest, I'm a typical male specimen. I love to withdraw into mysel

What if your biggest mistake became the soil for your greatest growth?