Irrespective of our different personalities, we've all been in a place where, with everything weighing us down, with the pressures of life coming at us from every angle, we've reached breaking point. It's all up to me, but I just can't handle it! Now what?

You likely heard the common theory of Type A and Type B personality types.

Type A people are highly driven, competitive, and constantly racing the clock — success fuels them, but stress often ensues. They push hard, feel urgency, struggle with impatience. The more they take on, the closer they get to breaking point.

Type B people, on the other hand, tend to be more relaxed and unhurried. They take life as it comes, valuing balance over ambition, relationships over success. And while, on the one hand, they feel pressure less frequently, when they do, it's far more devastating for them.

In reality, we're all somewhere between those two extremes, each with our own personality shaped both by both nature and nurture. However you're wired, that "breaking point" is triggered through the delusion that it's all up to me! The flawed logic does something like this: It's broken. It needs fixing. I'm the only one who can make it right. But it's way beyond my power to do so.

So when you find yourself at that point, here's some godly wisdom to get you through:

Ecclesiastes 6:10-11 You are only what you were created to be—a human, and it is useless to argue about it. People cannot argue with God about this because he is more powerful than they are, and a long argument will not change that fact.

The bottom line is this: you're only human. Let God be God. He's the One with the power to make it right.

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

Have you noticed how just living life produces waste products. We breathe out Carbon dioxide. We perspire. We create rubbish. The same is true in life – and if we don't take out that rubbish, it can kill us.

I don't know if you've ever noticed but living an average normal everyday life creates dirt. I mean just eating and drinking and living, the most basic things, create waste products. Carbon dioxide that we breathe out with every breath, if we didn't get rid of that it would poison us. Perspiration of course and we excrete waste.

If we kept all of those things inside us you know they'd kill us in a pretty short time. And then there's our home. If you don't tidy up along the way it becomes a mess. If you don't clean it each week it gets dirty and for no other reason than we've been living life in it.

All good, all normal but life creates mess and dirt and waste products, it's inexorable. You have to wash out the shower or even the soap scum builds up so your shower becomes a mess. See on a global scale we call this pollution. It's a perennial problem; it's just the way it is.

For so many years I listened to these Christians talk about sin as though, "ah come on, get out of here, get a life, I don't need this guilt trip that you Christians put me on, I don't need to go to confession or to be absolved or any of that stuff, I'm basically okay. I haven't killed anyone; I haven't robbed a bank, so just leave me alone."

The notion of sin had no place in my reckoning. It was a dog eat dog world with plenty of dog to go around and I will tread on whomever I want to, to get where I'm going. That was kind of the attitude I had. I guess it's okay while life is going basically okay but you don't build many relationships and friendships that way and you know, as I was sharing on this program the other day I found out that there was no joy or satisfaction or contentment in living that sort of a life.

Now in today's world pretty much anything goes, if it feels good do it. There was an article in my local paper recently on pornography. The pornography industry was trying to make pornographic videos more widely available to reduce their level of restriction and classification.

See in this "anything goes" philosophy what people do in their own bedroom, well that's their problem but there are consequences, there are very clear consequences, that's what the research tells us when it comes to pornography and intimacy in marriages. And as a result many marriages are falling apart.

When I spend things on me, me, me, that's great but there's no real satisfaction and you don't get any satisfaction until you give of yourself, of who you are, what you have. It's not until we give sacrificially to someone who needs what we have that we really get satisfaction in life and that's where we discover who we are and what life is all about.

For many years I kidded myself. I kidded myself that I was okay but it didn't work. Just living my life created waste and mess and dirt and pollution and here's the rub, when we live the 'I am the centre of the universe' model we want everything to flow into us and that includes the waste and the mess and dirt, there's nothing there to clean us out. It stays inside and with everything flowing in it poisons our system and it ruins our lives. Do you get it?

Maybe you've heard me talk on the program before about sin and you've thought, 'Why does he keep labouring this point?' I'll tell you why, because sin poisons our lives, it robs us, it means that instead of being the me I was meant to be I let cancer creep into my soul and rob me of being the person and living the life that God planned for me and the same is true for you.

The word sin as it's used in the Bible literally means to miss the mark. A bit like an archer aiming at a target, his aim doesn't have to be off by much for him to miss the target all together. That's the idea of sin, it's mi

Do my habits matter? Healthy habits can be the difference between joyfully obeying God and struggling in a constant state of exhaustion. 

There's a question that rather a lot of people are asking: If God is indeed God, if He loves me like He says He does, why doesn't He show up the moment I'm in trouble? After all, that's what any good parent would do for their kids, right?

During World War II, André Trocmé was a Protestant pastor in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. When Nazi forces began deporting Jews, Trocmé and his congregation, motivated by their faith, turned their town into a refuge.

Over time, they saved more than 3,000 Jewish lives. Despite the constant risk of arrest, threats, and interrogations, Trocmé trusted God to preserve their lives and accomplish His purposes. He once said, "We don't know what a Jew is. We only know human beings." Through danger and persecution, God preserved him and fulfilled His purpose.

In a similar vein, three thousand years ago, King David of Israel prayed:

Psalm 138:7-8 If I walk into the thick of danger, You will preserve my life from the anger of my enemies. You will extend Your hand; Your right hand will save me. The LORD will fulfill His purpose for me. LORD, Your love is eternal; do not abandon the work of Your hands! (HCSB)

Look, God doesn't promise us a trouble-free life — but He walks with us through it all, protecting our souls, and completing His purpose in us and through us. Your suffering isn't the end; it's part of God's shaping process, rooted in His unchanging love. So, trust God's hand even when you can't see His plan, because He never abandons the "work of His hands."

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

Most of us have a sense of destiny – something that we're supposed to fulfil in our lives. But if I'm going to be the me I was meant to be, if you're going to be the you that you were meant to be, then we have to know who we were meant to be in the first place.

If you want to ask yourself the question, am I being the "me" I was meant to be, am I really fulfilling the destiny for my life, how would you answer? On a scale of one to ten how would you rate your life against that question? Well the problem is so many people can't answer it because they don't know who they were meant to be in the first place or where they're meant to be headed.

All they sometimes have is a nagging suspicion inside, a bit of an unsettling feeling that the answer is more a "no" than a "yes", more a one or two than an eight or nine out of ten. Am I being the "me" I was meant to be? Am I really fulfilling the destiny of my life? See they're really good questions.

I don't know how to talk about this except at least in part from my own experience because discovering your destiny is a profound issue of life. I'd like to share with you today part of my journey and something that began to answer those questions for me.

By global standards I was blessed, I grew up in a wealthy household, we had plenty of food, a roof over our head, I had a good education and one of my physical attributes, as well as being short, as well as having some grey hair, as well as being short sighted in one eye and long sighted in the other eye, is that I have a high IQ. So I did really well at school and I had the choice of doing anything that I wanted to do, medicine or law.

Back then I was interested in these emerging things that they called computers. So I left high school and I went to the Royal Military college Duntroon, the officer-training academy for our army, a bit like England's Sandhurst or the USA's WestPoint.

Now I graduated with an IT degree and spent ten years in the military and after that had well paying jobs and I owned a consulting firm for seventeen years in the IT industry and I travelled around and spoke at international conferences and lived the high life.

I basically had it handed to me on a silver platter. Okay it had its ups and downs, I had to work hard, I had to strive for things but by any standard I had it pretty good and I kind of enjoyed that stuff but all along I found that nothing ever really satisfied me.

I was so concerned about being the best, I was so concerned about what other people thought of me that I couldn't enjoy my life, I couldn't relax. I was successful on the outside but inside I had a deep sense of inadequacy and failure and the feeling of being a fraud and that's how I lived my life, day by day for many years and believe you me it's not a lot of fun.

Why is that? What's going on? I had this emerging sense that I wasn't being the me I was meant to be and that there was some destiny for my life that I hadn't yet stumbled across. Despite all the good things that were happening in my life I had this sort of vague distant belief in God I guess but even in my late thirties when I gave my life over to Him, when I became a Christian, there was still something, well it wasn't quite right.

I look back on it now and I know there was something missing, things I didn't really understand. For me the starting point of being the 'me' I was meant to be was knowing where I'd come from and who I'm meant to be. So, so many people in the midst of their lives aren't really comfortable with who they are or where their life's going and so you don't have a real sense of security, you're more like a cork bobbing around in the stormy ocean.

We're going to explore that today through Psalm 139 from the Old Testament of the Bible. I come back to it again and again and again in my own life because it reminds me of exactly who I am. What I love about this Psalm is that the writer start

How does God view discipline? Is He an angry taskmaster or a gentle shepherd?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in 1945 for criticising Joseph Stalin, enduring eight years in Soviet gulags — starvation, freezing cold, forced labour, and relentless dehumanisation. At his lowest point, he contemplated suicide.

But in the midst of that darkness Solzhenitsyn experienced a profound spiritual awakening, placing his hope in God. After his release in 1953 (shortly after Stalin's death) he wrote: "It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good."

His faith sustained him, and after release his writings exposed the truth about Soviet oppression, influencing millions.

Hopefully, you and I will never experience what Solzhenitsyn went through. And yet, we are surrounded by evil; by people whose self-interest causes oppression and harm; by world systems and institutionalised corruption with an untold human toll. Welcome to the world in which we live.

But there is hope, a great hope for the future. Writes the prophet to a remnant of God's people at a time of national and personal fear:

Zechariah 14:9And the LORD will be king over all the earth. On that day the LORD will be one and his name one. (ESV)

Sooner or later, this world will come to an end. Perhaps next Thursday … or in another 2,000 years. But it will come to an end. God will judge the living and the dead. Jesus will return. He will take His rightful place as King over all the earth.

And on that day there will be absolutely no doubt that the Lord will be one and his name will be one. He will take His rightful place and reign over all.  That's the hope that we have in Jesus Christ.

And that's God's Word. Fresh … for you … today.

Have you ever sat down and wondered – who am I? Where's my life headed? Am I being the me that I was meant to be? Well, you're not alone. We all ask those questions at some point.

I remember once a few years back being in the airport in Christchurch, New Zealand. My international flight from Australia was late in getting in and I had to race to make the last domestic connection that night to my final destination Wellington, New Zealand's capital.

And in the rush I left my passport lying in one of those luggage trolleys at the international terminal, something I didn't realise until I was checking in at the domestic terminal on my next flight. Panic attack, can you imagine losing your passport while you're overseas? No passport no identity, no identity now what?

How could I tell people I was me? I couldn't leave the country; I couldn't stay there. See it turns out that our identity is very important. Well I won't keep you in suspense the domestic and international terminal in Christchurch are about ten minutes walk apart so I raced down outside the domestic terminal but the taxi didn't want to take me because is was such a short fare. He said, "Catch the shuttle bus."

Of course I didn't have time to do that so I paid him thirty dollars and we raced back and I went into the police station off to one side of the international terminal in Christchurch. Now there was a young police woman on duty that night so I explained my problem to her and she said, "Well yes, an Australian passport has just been handed in." And then she asks me, just get this, "Do you have any ID?"

I couldn't believe it. I said "Yes", I was a bit stressed at this point, "it's my passport and there's a photo in the front." Oh yeah, it dawned on her. Anyway I received my passport and I just made my flight and all was well.

I've never forgotten that. You know, you can't travel without your passport, it's the clear and tangible evidence of your identity. And in a very real sense the same is true in life. We need to know the answer to that important question, who exactly am I and where's my life headed?

Other people need to know who we are; it's so basic, it's so fundamental. So many people though don't have a deep sense of who they are, it's a problem deep down somewhere and it's not something we talk about a lot but it's there. And as I talk to people I think it goes something like this.

Often we live our lives just day to day without thinking too much, just go along and do the things we do and go to work or to school or we look after the children, whatever it is that you do but bubbling away deep down somewhere is a sense of, what's this all about? Why am I doing this? What's the point?

The reality is we have just one life to live here on this earth. It's not a dress rehearsal, you can't hit the rewind button and play it again and change things, when today's gone it's gone and that's it. And every year, every week, every day, every moment that you and I have lived up to this point frankly is gone, we can never get them back.

The only thing left in our time here on this earth is the time between right now and when we breathe our last breath. Hey it's a sobering thought and at the same time most people have some sort of sense of a destiny, whether or not they believe in Jesus or some God even, they believe in things that are meant to be.

How often have you heard someone say, "Well that was just meant to be", or "If it's meant to be it will happen?" Whether it's karma or whether it's "que sera sera, whatever will be will be", we all have some sense of a future and a destiny to be fulfilled.

It's as though some intelligent destiny or design that we just can't quite put our finger on is out there for us. I believe that that's there because each one of us, you and I and everybody have been made in the image of God - each one of us. And when we look at the time that we have left here

There are times when we're confronted by circumstances so dire, so complex that, try as we might, we can't figure them out. And, let's be honest here, "figuring them out" means finding a way to get through them safely and successfully to the other side. In our book, yours and mine, "figuring it out" means winning. But we don't always get to win in this life.

Jane Haining, a Scottish missionary in Hungary, refused to abandon the Jewish girls in her care during World War II. Ordered to return home, she wrote, "If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more in days of darkness?"

Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died. Faced with impossible choices and no clear path, she simply trusted Christ. Decades later, she was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations. She didn't have all the answers—but God did. Her quiet faith endured when nothing else made sense.

What do you do with that? You and I … man, we want to win. We want to beat that cancer diagnosis. We don't want the bank to foreclose on our mortgage when we're faced with insurmountable financial pressures. But what happens when winning is no longer an option?

Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (NRSV)

Absolutely, do your best to overcome your difficulties. But when it's completely beyond you, don't overthink it. If it's God's will, then it will happen. If it's not, God has a better plan. Be at peace knowing that, because … he will make straight your paths.

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

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