Life is a puzzle that, all too often, seems impossible to solve. You had plans. They were good plans. I mean, very good plans. Then … boom! Things inexplicably took a dark turn. We've all been there.

When you're faced with a dark, unsolvable set of circumstances so complex that you can't reason your way through, what do you do? Well, obviously, you ask God what in the blazes He's up to. Why would He let this happen … to you of all people?

It's 597 BC, a time of national crisis. Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonians. Judah's about to fall. Yet God … get this … instructs the prophet Jeremiah to do something astonishing; to buy a field in Anathoth. Really, God? It'd leave you shaking your head, wouldn't it? But this is how Jeremiah responds:

Jeremiah 32:17 Lord GOD, with your great power you made the earth and the sky. There is nothing too hard for you to do.

It's easy to think of yourself as a person of faith until that faith is tested; until God seems to be doing something dark and inexplicable, like allowing the Promised Land to be overrun and His chosen people, Israel, to be taken into captivity.

When God does something like that, allows something like that, presides over something like that, there are two options: either He's malevolent and untrustworthy, or there's something else going on behind the scenes that you and I can't see or comprehend.

So the next time you find yourself in that place, you can either panic or pray ...

Lord GOD, with your great power you made the earth and the sky. There is nothing too hard for you to do.

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

Becoming the "me" we were meant to be is – well – a life long journey. And sometimes, it's not until we stop to look back, that we can really see God's hand in all of that.

If I want to ask you, what's your destiny, what were you put on this earth to achieve to do, what impact are you meant to make on this planet of over seven billion people, what's the point of your life and is it heading in the right direction? I wonder how you'd answer those questions.

I ask those questions of people rather a lot and can I tell you the number of people who have a clear sense of their destiny and purpose and direction, well it's less than 5%, maybe one in twenty maybe. Now I'm not saying that we should each have our lives completely mapped out. Things happen along the way, there are twists and turns in life that are totally unexpected. The little things can change the whole course of a life.

I remember a long time ago now I was really sick one day with a high temperature. I was scheduled to speak at a function the following day but I was so sick. I should have rung up and cancelled. The next day came and I was still so sick and yet deep inside me I felt I should go. I did and that was the day I met my wife Jacqui. It turns out that that was the only day I would have ever have met her in the place. Going and speaking on that day despite my sickness completely changed my life. I wouldn't be married to her today had I stayed at home.

Just the other weekend a good friend of mine Paul, a magistrate, was swimming in the surf. It was a normal day, I'd chatted with him by sms an hour or two before to invite him over for dinner that night. A wave picked him up crashed him on his head in the sand, paralysed him and they found him floating face down in the water.

They only just got him in the nick of time. He survived, all's well, he can walk and everything but I'm sure that one experience has changed his perspective on a few things in life.

So we know things like that can happen. We can't map out our whole lives in the minutest detail and say, "yep that's what it's going to be", and yet deep down we need to have a sense of destiny. Another way of putting it would be a sense of the direction our life is meant to be headed and that destiny is invariably tied up with two things, our dreams and our abilities and skills.

If you're one of the majority – one of those people who hasn't yet cottoned on to the direction in which your life was always meant to be headed – then this is for you. Can you remember the dreams you used to have for your life when you were young? Can you? There are going to be some dreams that, well they were never going to fly.

If you're short and slightly dumpy and you were dreaming of becoming a famous basketball player, well that one was obviously never going to happen but so often there's a dream in people's hearts that's been there all along.

Here's a conversation that I've had so many times with people about this question of destiny. We get to talking about the direction which their life is heading and the person says to me something like this, "but you know I'm sure there's meant to be, I don't know, something else. Something that, I don't know, I'm meant to be doing but I don't know what it is."

Does that sound vaguely familiar? So I then ask them, 'well if you had no constraints, if money wasn't an issue, if you could be anything or do anything that you wanted what would that be?' And the answer invariably comes back along these lines. "Oh, oh, anything I want? Well you know, I've always dreamed of ... " And then they tell me the answer, they tell me about their destiny, it's already there, it's woven somehow into the fabric of their DNA.

Now of course there's a risk that this is a short dumpy basket-baller kind of dream and so then I follow up with my second question. What are the things you really enjoy doing? What are the things you're really goo

This story of a Bible, a love letter, and God's relentless pursuit will leave you amazed.

Have you ever tried to do something, but your heart wasn't really in it? It's dry, it's empty. You chip away at it out of habit. The sense of ritual is what takes over, and the thing itself becomes meaningless. You keep going because … well, that's what you do.

And some of those songs … man, they're awe-inspiring. Over half a million have been published over the last decade alone. But none of that - none of it - impresses God one iota if your heart's not in it.

Can I tell you, for a lot of people who call themselves Christians, that pretty much sums up their relationship with God. They might go through the motions, they might even drag themselves along to church now and then and stand there with everyone else singing all these great new worship songs, but deep down … their heart's not in it.

Isaiah 29:13-14 The Lord said: Because these people approach Me with their mouths to honour Me with lip-service —yet their hearts are far from Me, and their worship consists of man-made rules learned by rote — therefore I will again confound these people with wonder after wonder. The wisdom of their wise men will vanish, and the understanding of the perceptive will be hidden. (HCSB)

The executive summary? God's not impressed with us singing songs. He doesn't want our music, He wants our hearts. And that, some days, ain't easy.

As Charles Spurgeon put it, "There are some whose hearts are not right toward God who nevertheless are very zealous about the externals of divine worship. It's much easier to build a temple for God than it is to be a temple for God."

Worshipping God is so much more than singing songs.

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

It turns out that our priorities have an enormous impact on how we feel about our lives. So if we want to live an abundant, satisfying life we need to get our priorities sorted out; we need to put first things first. So – what should come first?

Most people these days live hectic lives, just making it through. I mean, for some people listening to this program it's a touch and go thing everyday just to find enough food. Others they're drowning in emails and more things on their list of things to do than they can possibly get done. Others are sinking in a sea of loneliness.

Whatever it is, whoever we are, wherever you're at in your life we can find so many things, really important things to clutter up our daily to do list. Personally my list of things to do is as long as my arm and then some. There are the personal things I have to do, things to do with writing and recording and producing this radio program, there's an organisation to run, people to meet, this project, that project, a new idea over here and a new idea over there.

And then I receive a few hundred emails pretty much every day, some of them are junk but many of them are people asking me to do this or get involved in that or can you answer this question for me please or can you help me with my new project, can you please write an endorsement for the book that I'm writing? Welcome to my world. Now don't get me wrong I'm not complaining and none of those things are terribly bad at all but the point is that with so many more things to do than I can possibly fit into my day, my week or even my year, my process for deciding what I do is absolutely critical.

One of the big mistakes I used to make was to answer my emails first thing each morning. I receive emails 24x7 from around the world so I used to sit down in the morning which given I'm a morning person is my most lucid and productive time and start answering emails. After a while I realised I wasn't getting anything else done because by putting emails first I was putting other people's priorities first, I was in fact dancing to their tune instead of sorting out for myself what was most important from my agenda, the things I needed to do first.

There's a well know principle of framework you read in a lot of management books that sets out the difference between what's urgent and what's important and what you discover is almost nothing that's urgent is important and almost nothing that's important is urgent.

And yet most of us are reactive, we react to the urgent things or at least to the things that other people say are urgent and so we spend most of our time doing urgent things instead of important things. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and before you know it your life is slipping away doing a whole bunch of things which in the scheme of things may well be making you extremely busy but how important are they really?

What of lasting value do they produce? What of lasting value does your life produce? You see my point here, how are you spending your life and are the things you're spending your time on important and worthwhile? I guess I'm asking those questions for you to ask them of yourself and to answer them, come on be brutally honest.

For instance making sure I have some time for my beautiful wife Jacqui is important. Making sure I encourage her, give her a hug and a kiss, spend some unhurried time with her in the morning over breakfast is really important but it's not urgent. It's not as urgent as say an email that comes in from a radio station from somewhere around the world that says, "we weren't able to download tonight's radio program from your ftp server".

And yet what I used to do because remember mornings are my most productive time, is get up really early and spend no time with Jacqui over breakfast and just work furiously through that time and by the time she comes home from work and I come home from work

If you've ever scrolled through your news feed or watched the headlines, you might feel like the world is in a constant state of crisis. Where is hope today?

From a very young age, we each try to figure out our place in the world, where we fit in the scheme of things, as we should. But there's one aspect of that to which we far too readily grant supremacy, to our own peril.

Have you ever met someone and thought, "Gee, they're successful. I wonder what they earn. Look at the car they drive, the house they live in. They've done a lot better than me."

I even heard someone say recently, after reading of the incredible success of one of their old school friends, "The first thing I thought was, I am such a failure."

In truth, we use outward measures - particularly wealth - as our gauge of success. I used to, too, and I can tell you, the undue supremacy we grant to our aspiration for wealth and the way we consequently compare ourselves to others completely ruins our life.

Contrast that with this reality:

Matthew 4:2-4 After fasting forty days and forty nights, [Jesus] was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"  ESV

So for Jesus, not even the basic necessity of food to nourish His starving body took primacy over His commitment to obey God. That casts our desire for affluence in a very different light, doesn't it?

As C.S. Lewis writes in his book, The Screwtape Letters, "Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels as though he's finding his place in it, when really, it is finding its place in him."

Don't allow prosperity to lead you astray.

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

Winning is everything. At least that's what everyone seems to think. But sometimes, the more we win, the emptier it all feels. Somehow, winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.

One of the things we're all pretty much conditioned to do in life is to come first. Now we all can't come first at everything right but it's pretty natural to want to be first, to be the best looking, to be the brightest, to be the most articulate, the fastest runner, the best football player.

Even when we think we have things under control in our lives that competitive spirit thing inside each one of us just wants to win, an argument, a situation, a minor conflict at work or at home, we want to have the final say. We want to assert our view, our way, our need, our whatever it happens to be. To be blunt we just want to win.

But sometimes winning comes at a very high price, let's face it, if I'm going to live out my destiny, if I'm going to be the me I was meant to be and if I'm going to live the life I was meant to live then surely I have to win at things right? I mean it stands to reason doesn't it?

But there are just a few problems with this 'I have to be first' thing. I mean for starters you can't always be first. If everyone was always first by definition none of us would ever be first because winning, coming first means that others have to come second, third, fourth and last and it sets up this thing where we become our own little demi gods and the moment things don't work out, the moment we don't come first we throw a little tantrum or a big tantrum for that matter.

To tell you the truth that's how I used to live. I expected everybody else to bow down and scrape to me and if they didn't I'd get upset, I'd roll over the top of them, I'd get offended and annoyed and disappointed because from as early as I can remember I've been programmed to win, to get the recognition, to win the prize.

And it turned out that all that stuff was robbing me of my destiny, it was robbing me of being the me I was meant to be and living the life I was made to live. I was this little tin pot god on my own little tin pot throne and I discovered it wasn't much fun up there or down there, wherever it was, especially when you're surrounded by other people with exactly the same world view. The paradox is that being first doesn't work. We need to let that sink in for a moment, the view that you or I are always meant to come first simply doesn't work.

Jesus and His disciples were travelling and the disciples were having this argument behind His back about which one of them was the greatest, you know that Mohammad Ali syndrome 'I am the greatest'. And when they came to Capernaum they went inside the house and Jesus said to them, 'So what were you guys arguing about out there on the road?'

But they kept quiet because on the way they'd been arguing about who was the greatest, in effect who would come first.

See there's nothing new here under the sun, this nonsense of wanting to win is as old as the hills.

And sitting down Jesus called the twelve of them over and said, 'Look if any of you wants to be first you actually have to be the very last and the servant of all.'

And He took a little child and He had him stand among them and taking this kid in His arms He said to the disciples, 'it's all about welcoming one of these little children'.

Don't you love that? They have this argument about who's the greatest, now I don't think for one minute that Peter was saying, "you know I think John's the greatest".

No, no, Peter was probably thinking, 'I'm the greatest' and John was probably thinking, "no, no, I'm the greatest". And these guys were playing a power game. Which one of us is on the top of the heap? And w

God is listening for your cry today.

It turns out that the more we try to fill ourselves up with all the fun stuff this world has to offer, the emptier we feel. When are we finally going to wake up to the fact that life's not just about "me"?

Life is full of paradoxes and contradictions and complexities. It's funny how we can see something one way, believe with all our heart that that's how it is and then in an instant you discover we had it all wrong. Like lemmings sometimes, we all rush in one direction and just in time someone says, "you realise that's a cliff".

People and societies chase after this idea or that belief; they believe it with all their hearts only to discover it doesn't work. Take just one thing, consumerism. The advertising industry has a single, very simple mantra that rings out through almost every advertisement and it's this, "if you buy me you'll be happy".

And to convince us of that each ad has glossy images of success plastered all over it, images of the things we aspire to: beauty, luxury, quality, comfort, happiness, a great marriage; a beautiful, happy, successful woman; a handsome, strong, driven man; delighted, well adjusted teenagers without acne.

In effect the ads tell us what to aspire to because they're defining success. Fine dining, business class travel, crystal clear wide screen televisions, big houses. Who doesn't want those things? But when we finally get there it's a case of, well so what? Great but now what's next?

Who doesn't want a good espresso coffee or sit in those wide comfortable seats at the front of the plane or to drive a nice car or to have a happy family? You know the ads that really, really get me, you see father's day and mothers day ads on television sometimes and they have images of happy well adjusted children, you know come in on mother's day or father's day morning and jump on mum and dads bed and they're all smiling, they're all happy.

What mother or father doesn't want that to be the story of their family? Or even the margarine advertisement, you know in the mornings and all these happy people, all well dressed and their hair groomed, having breakfast, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice, scraping margarine on perfectly cooked toast, just to sell margarine.

Or those watches that cost, you know up market, thousands of dollars type watches and you have images of multi million dollar racing yachts that appeal to the man inside the man. Or the four wheel drives. You notice they're always on beautiful wide country roads which lead towards freedom, never in the maddening peak hour traffic where most people drive them. Or the washing powder that will make your clothes whiter than white and brighter than bright. Or the showers that never need cleaning or the germ free sparkling toilets.

This incredible list, on and on and on, all with the same message, buy me and you'll be happy but the plain simple fact is, it's just not true. I mean most of the things they're good, there's nothing wrong with any of those things but they don't fulfil us, they don't fill us up. Our career, self actualising through our work and power and big salaries, whatever people want out of their careers. You see it doesn't matter what it is or how exciting or glamorous it appears ultimately all work becomes mundane and ho-hum.

You might be thinking, 'Berni what's the matter with you today? I mean why are you all down and pessimistic?' Well actually I'm not but I know a lot of people who are. They're living on this treadmill all their lives, round and round and round just to discover that it's hollow and it's empty. You know something, even the most wonderful marriage on the planet, if there's something not quite right inside one of those people there, it can end up being hollow.

The problem is we've been conned, this buy-me-and-you'll-be-happy thing we know it doesn't work but what's the alternative? I mean so often we don't know anything else so we just keep on g