I believe – in fact I know – that God has a stunning life planned for you. Problem is that you and I have this amazing ability to work against Him and when we do that, we miss out. So, I’d love to share some practical, rubber-hits-the-road tips with you, for cooperating with God’s plans for your life.

START LIVING YOUR GIG

When I was young, finishing high school and making my career choices, I came very, very close to making a couple of major mistakes. I was blessed to be fairly academically inclined, so I basically had my choice of whatever university course my heart desired.

There were three on my shortlist, medicine, law and an information technology degree. Now back in those days, medicine was by far the favoured career. It was seen as the pinnacle of achievement and certainly, my dad wanted me to study medicine.

Law was right up there as well. Both of those professions appeared pretty much to guarantee a big income.

This whole IT thing though was pretty new. The question was: which one to choose? As things turned out, I’d been accepted to train as an Army Officer, undertaking a four-year IT degree along the way, and I guess it was that sense of excitement of a military career which, as a young man, to be honest with you, swung me to that decision.

As I look back on that choice, I thank God that I didn’t choose medicine or law. I can’t stand the sight of blood pretty much, which is not exactly the sort of prerequisite you want to have a career as a doctor. And the law, as I discovered later, is all about detail. Lots and lots and lots of detail, and whilst I can handle detail from time to time, it’s just not my first love. I would have ended up drowning in all the detail.

I think back to that pivotal career decision that I made way back when I was just seventeen and a half years old, with not a lot of life experience to draw on exactly, and I shudder at how easily I could have chosen something that I just wasn’t suited to.

I literally could have found myself living my life as a square peg in a round hole, and that I imagine, would be an incredibly uncomfortable position to find myself in.

There’s a basic rule or life principle if you will, that goes something like this: square pegs belong in square holes, and round pegs, well … they belong in round holes. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out now do you? And yet, as I said at the beginning of the program, so many people are living life as a square peg in a round hole.

A large survey conducted in the US not so long ago revealed that only 19% of workers were satisfied with their jobs; which means that 81% weren’t satisfied with their job. Of those, 16% were somewhat dissatisfied, and the rest were really unhappy. That’s pretty much Pareto’s 80/20 law right there, with the vast majority, the 80%, going to work unhappy.

Another global survey found that over half, 56% of people, actually were looking to find a new job.

Now, there can be a lot of reasons for those terrible statistics. Pay and conditions, poor management, they are just two. But if I were a betting man (which I am not), I would put money on the table that one of the major reasons is that people are doing jobs that they’re just not suited to do.

You yourself know that there are some things in life that give you enormous satisfaction, and other things that leave you completely drained. Now that I’m getting older, I watch people who are grandparents. We have one couple who lives a few doors away on the same floor in our apartment block, who look after a different set of their grandchildren almost every day of the week, while their parents go to work.

Other grandparents, they just can’t stand the thought of having to look after children, because it’s just not what they enjoy doing. They’ve brought up their own kids, and now they want a break from all that.

And so wherever there is this mismatch between the requirements of a role and the natural motivations and talents and abilities of the individual – right there you have a square peg, in a round hole. And it’s generally not the hole that feels the pressure. The role is what the role is. The requirements of the position don’t change. It’s the individual who has to squeeze themselves into a role that they’re just not suited to.

When I was at Bible College many years ago, the Principal of the College, Dr Barry Chant, made us memorise one particular Bible verse. In fact, he used to joke, although I’m not sure it was so much of a joke, that unless we were able to recite this one verse, we simply wouldn’t graduate from the College.

At the time, I thought it was rather an odd choice of Bible verses. Why this one from among the 31,102 verses in the Bible? Well, here it is. Ephesians 2:10:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared beforehand for us to walk into.

The older and hopefully the wiser I’ve become since those days, the more I’ve discovered the wisdom of Barry’s insistence that we memorise this one verse. Because what it says, is that God made us; God handcrafted us; we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus and He made us, you and me, with a purpose in mind.

He in fact made us in order to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to do, literally for us to walk into. So picture your life – this journey over hill and dale. Just as you turn round the next corner, or come over the next rise, waiting for you right there is one of the good works that God made you to do, one of the ones that He prepared before time even began for you to make happen.

Now, do you imagine for one moment that God made a mistake? That He made you to do things that you weren’t good at doing? Or things that were impossible for you to do? Now way!! God knows exactly what He’s doing when He makes you. God knew, He handcrafted you to be a perfect fit to do what He made you to do. So why is it that we go and live a life we were never made to live?

You see it all over the place, you see people going and trying to do jobs that they are simply not good at doing. There are so many jobs that if I chose to try and do them, I would ultimately be a failure at, because I simply wasn’t made to do them.

Well sometimes its stubbornness, other times its ignorance, that’s why people do this. Or perhaps you’ve allowed circumstances to sweep you along in life, without ever taking a stand and saying to yourself: Hang on a minute; what I really want to do is … is this! My real dream in life is to go and be this and do that.

The most common question I am asked when I talk on this, which I do rather a lot these days, because like Barry Chant I’ve come to believe that being the me I was meant to be is absolutely critical in life … the most common question I’m asked is this: How do I know what it is that God made me to do?

Now that’s a fair question. Well, the answer is dead simple. Each one of us has something that gets us enthused in life, something that we’re passionate about. Something that we’re really good at, probably better at than anyone else that we know.

For me it’s doing what I’m doing right now. I love to tell stories. I get up mostly at three or four o’clock in the morning to prepare these radio messages. Why? Not because I have to, but because I love to! I love telling stories; I love seeing people’s lives transformed through those stories.

So let me ask you this: What are you passionate about? What do you absolutely love doing? What is it that you’re better at, than just about anybody else that you know? Maybe you love working with your hands and making things, or maybe you are great at looking after kids, or organising lots of detailed things, or … whatever it is that you are good at that you really enjoy doing, there is your pointer to what God made you to do.

No. It’s not always going to be easy, or convenient, or fun, or comfortable. Nothing worthwhile ever is. But there, right there, is the thing that God made you to do. Start walking in that direction and all of a sudden a whole bunch of new opportunities are going to open up.

Those opportunities are in fact the good works that God prepared beforehand for you to do. Get it?

PRAYER IS EVERYTHING

If you believe in Jesus, then you know that God is all-loving God and all-powerful. He is this God who can completely transform your life. If you don’t believe in God, then just humour me for a bit. Let’s assume that Jesus is who He said He is, that God is all-powerful and all-loving, the God who Jesus came to tell us about.

Then what follows from that is this: if God is all-loving and all-powerful, then surely He wants to make a powerful difference in your life and mine. And not only does He want to, He actually can.

Yet the lives of so many Christians simply don’t bear that out. There are so many people who love Jesus and want to follow Him with all their hearts, but for them, God doesn’t seem to be making any real difference at all, let alone a powerful difference. Why is that exactly?

In the first few months after giving my life to Christ at age thirty-six, I discovered something that greatly disturbed me. Not something that I uncovered only after years of study, but as a simple man with just a plain grasp of the obvious and a heart that was open to receive. It was something that rocked me to my core.

The discovery was this: that prayer that yields powerful results is normal in God’s sight. It sounds so simple and yet, the more I dwelt on that simple truth from God, the more it rocked me and it disturbed me.

Why? Because my prayer wasn’t yielding powerful results. I’d been through a cycle of delighting in prayer and then dreading it. In the first few months of giving my life over to Jesus, my prayer life was just awesome. I couldn’t wait to spend time with God.

It was a devastating time in my life, so much had fallen apart, that my times in prayer with God were the highlight, in fact the only light, of my life. But as can happen in any relationship, when the day-to-day post-courtship, post-honeymoon reality sets in, my communication with God had sunk to lows that I never expected.

I avoided Him. I prayed out of no more than a sense of duty. I would have been embarrassed in those days to tell anyone about my prayer life, if you could even have called it that. I was in every sense of the word, a pauper in prayer, absolutely bankrupt, so it seemed to me.

My prayer life was not what God set out in His Word as being the normal reality of the Christian life. If anything, it was the exact opposite. I felt so weak; I felt so inadequate; so sinful; so condemned. And over and over again I read about the powerful things that happened to people as they prayed.

In the Bible, the word pray (together with its derivatives: prayed, prayer, prays) appears around 350 times throughout the Bible. The very first appearance is in Genesis Chapter 20 which simply says:

… He will pray for you and you shall live. (Genesis 20:7)

So what happens in response to this prayer? What was the result of this prayer? Well, Genesis 20:17-18:

Then Abraham prayed to God; and God healed Abimelech, and so also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For the LORD had closed fast all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.

Hey, it’s a pretty powerful outcome don’t you think, for the first recorded prayer to God in the Bible?

And the second story about prayer just a few chapters later, Genesis 24:12-21 (we don’t have time to read it all now) has a similarly powerful outcome.

So, what about the third story about prayer in the Bible? Well, let’s take a look; just one verse, Genesis 25:21:

Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.

Now, call me crazy, call me whatever you like, but to me, there’s a definite pattern emerging here; a pattern that repeats itself over and over and over again right throughout the Bible. It is quite simply this pattern: prayer that yields powerful results is absolutely normal in God’s sight.

In fact, prayer that yields powerful results is the only sort of prayer that the Bible actually teaches us about. Sure, there are a couple of examples of ineffective prayer, but God hardly endorses those. In fact quite the opposite.

And the whole of what God has to say about prayer, from beginning to end, culminates in these few words from Jesus’ own lips. John 15:7, Jesus says to his disciples:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

Let me tell you something. I am not a natural pray–er. I want to race off and do things, not sit around and talk to God. I want to get up in the morning and answer my emails or start working on a radio program script or do something. But what I’ve discovered over these last twenty years or so in walking with Jesus, is this: the more I pray and the less I try to do things in my own strength, the more powerful things I see happening in my life.

You want to hear me say that one more time? The more I pray and the less I try to do things in my own strength, the more powerful things I see happening in my life. It’s that simple. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but to many of us, it is because we just don’t live our lives that way.

In fact, I became so passionate about this, that I wrote a book. It was the first book that I wrote many years ago now, called "Unlocking the Power of Prayer."

Now, what this doesn’t mean is this: God is not some lap dog of ours that performs tricks on demand. God isn’t some sugar-daddy who, upon request, will give us every comfort and desire that we ask for. "Oh God please make me rich" is not a prayer that gets answered all that often I’m telling you.

The key to what Jesus said is our relationship with Him. Listen to it again:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

In other words, if we’re close to Jesus, if we know what He wants and we listen to what He says, we’ll know what to ask for and how to ask. If His Word abides in us, we’ll be asking things in accordance with His will. And at that point let me tell you, the power of God starts to manifest itself in your life.

The sort of power that helps you love the unlovable and touch the untouchable and forgive the unforgivable. The sort of power that gives you patience when you don’t have any. The sort of power that helps you to hold your tongue when all you want to do is to rip somebody’s head off.

The sort of power to walk the difficult road with Jesus, carrying your own cross and sacrificing your own life. The sort of power you need to change the things you can’t change and to suffer through the things that you’re called to suffer through.

That’s the sort of power, my friend that changes our lives. That’s the sort of power that transforms us and restores us back into the original image in which God created us; His image.

Prayer changes everything. Prayer changes the most important possession that you have – your very life. Prayer changes your heart. When you do what Jesus said: pray for your enemy, Matthew 5:44, He doesn’t just change your enemy, He changes you.

Prayer isn’t some duty that we have to drag ourselves to. The more you pray, the more you want to pray, because you experience the joy of fellowshipping with God. You experience the peace that comes from resting in Him and waiting expectantly on Him. And you see things happen in your life and around you and through you, that you never thought were possible.

Listen to me, please listen. Prayer… changes… everything. The sooner you realise that, the sooner you start believing that, the sooner you start living that, then the sooner you’ll find yourself on that road to the stunning life that God has planned for you.

POWER + LOVE

As our time together draws to a close there’s one final thing that I want to share with you today. This God of ours, the same one who sent Jesus to die for you, is the God of the most amazing power. And like any loving dad, He wants to use all that He has to make a powerful difference in the lives of His children.

Have a listen to what the Apostle Paul writes to his friends in the church at Ephesus. Ephesians 1:17-20, he says:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance amongst the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

God put this same power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all the rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

So, what’s God got for us? According to Paul, certain hope, a glorious inheritance and the very same power for you, and for your life, that raised Jesus from the dead. That is simply stunning, right?

But the difference between what He has for you, and what the world has for you is that He knows how He made you. What your strengths are, the weaknesses and what suits you best. He knows what it is that will make you function and tick. He knows that it is only in a relationship with Him, only in His loving embrace, that you can ever find yourself and all that He has for you.

That sometimes means trials and wilderness experiences. That sometimes means great trials and long wilderness experiences. But when you and I trust ourselves in His loving hands, then it’s in that place that we discover and we experience the faithfulness of God.

It was when Jeremiah was going through a terrible trial, when all around him was destroyed, when all hope seemed to have been lost, that he wrote these words. Lamentations 3:22-24:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’.

It’s only when we get out there, taking God at His Word, believing that God is who He says He is and that He will do what He says He will do, in His Word, that we can discover firsthand the truth of those words.

That’s the context in which you and I live our lives – our specific gig in life. That’s the context in which we come to the Lord our God in prayer. Right there even in the middle of the trials and the devastations if life, the certain hope that you have in Christ, the glorious inheritance that God has prepared for you, and the immeasurably great power – the very same power that raised Jesus from the dead – these are all there for you, right there, as you put your trust in Jesus they are available to you.

And so right now, let me close our time together today with a prayer for you:

Father I know that there are so many people who are listening to Your Word today who are struggling with stuff in their lives. Broken relationships and health worries and financial pressures and any number of things that cause us to take our eyes off You.

So we thank you Lord that we can come to You in prayer, knowing that You love us beyond measure, knowing that our hope in You is rock solid. Knowing that this inheritance that You’ve laid up for each one of us is imperishable and undefiled and unfading and knowing that Your power is available to us here and now.

Father, please comfort and encourage and strengthen all those today who are struggling with things in their lives. You know who they are, You know where they are and You know what’s causing them pain.

Bless them Lord. Empower them. Fill them with Your Holy Spirit and fill them above all with and a peace and joy that is simply beyond anything words can describe. We ask this in Jesus’ mighty name. Amen.