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 missing the mark or as we might say these days, missing the point.

Can you imagine getting to the end of your life, on your death bed, looking back and thinking to yourself, 'You know the way I lived my life, I didn't love people the way I should have loved them, I didn't serve people, I didn't make a real difference, I haven't left behind a lasting legacy of good, I think I've missed the point of life.' Can you even begin to imagine what a tragedy that would be?

We're chatting this week about discovering who we were meant to be, our identity and laying hold of what our life was always meant to accomplish, our destiny. And we can't do those things if we miss the mark, if we miss the whole point of our lives, you just can't. You can't, I can't and if you were able to join me the other day you'll remember that we read something about what Gods plan for our lives is, our identity and our destiny

God you created my inner most being. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful and I know that full well because my frame wasn't hidden from you when I was being made in that secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before any of them came into being.

Seems to me that we can either co-operate with that plan or we can run hard against it. And whatever we may call it, whatever word we may use for doing wrong things, whether the word is sin or something else, you and I know when we're swimming against the tide, you and I know when we're into things that are selfish and angry and dishonest and just plain wrong.

Come on we do and if that's the way we want to live life then the last thing we're going to be doing is co operating with that plan. The last thing that we're going to be doing is discovering our destiny. The last thing we're going to be doing is being the person we were made to be and living the life we were meant to live.

Does that make sense to you? I mean does that seem like a particularly wise way of spending your life, this one precious life that you've been given to live?

The reason we're talking about this today is that the last thing I want for you and honestly the last thing God wants for any of us is to waste your life, to miss out on your destiny, to live as a square peg in a round hole because that's never particularly comfortable. And this thing sin, the wrong things in our life that's what robs us of our destiny, that's what robs us of our identity.

I can't say it any plainer than this, that's just about the dumbest thing that we could possibly do with our lives. Because the problem is that you and I are very good at rationalising our sin away, at justifying it, at defending the indefensible.

I was talking to a couple of smokers the other day, some builders out the front of my house. I used to smoke very heavily and as I talked to them about their smoking you know what their response was? "Oh yeah, we know it's wrong, we know it's stupid, we know it's going to make us sick but we just can't stop it."

See we get addicted to this poison, we get addicted to the poison of sin. We know it's wrong we just can't stop it so we rationalise it, we brush it off, we resign ourselves to it so it doesn't matter. And when others challenge us about it, when others confront us with the consequences of our sin we say, come on get off the grass, it's none of your business what I do with my life.

Well I guess it's not but if you and I want to live the life that God intended us to live, if you and I want to be the person that God made us to be you need to deal with this. Listen to me we need to deal with sin.

When we come face to face with Jesus Christ we know in our hearts the things that are wrong. There was that woman, you can read about in John's Gospel chapter 9 if you have a Bible, caught in adultery and they dragged her out to stone her in front of Jesus and they were going to do just that because they wanted to trap Jesus, there was a legal issue which we won't go into now.

But Jesus said, "Look if any of you is without sin let him be the first one to throw the stone." You know what happened? Those who heard began to go away. The old ones first until only Jesus was left with the woman. When we look at Jesus in the face we know the stuff that's wrong in our lives. Question is how do we fix it, how do we deal with that? That's what we're going to look at on the program tomorrow.