If only I could start over. If only I could be free of the hurts, of the consequences of the past. Have you ever thought that to yourself. Sure you have. We all have. Well, the great news is this: a fresh new start is entirely possible. That's the whole point of Jesus coming to this earth. Mid life crisis are a well documented phenomenon. We laugh about them, you know the guy who's slightly podgy and hair on top is thinning and he has to go out sometime in his late 40's or early 50's and buy a racy convertible. Or the woman who looks in the mirror one day and doesn't like her life and her marriage and her job and her looks so she decides to kick up her heels and have some cosmetic surgery and sadly increasingly part of the whole mid-life crisis scenario is divorce. I totally believe that 99% of life is a grind. It doesn't matter how glamorous other people perceive your life to be most of it's a mundane grind. Of course that doesn't mean that we necessarily have to be dissatisfied with it it's just that most of life is mundane. I was listening to Hugh Jackman the famous Hollywood actor also an Aussie of course, being interviewed recently and he was talking about the sheer grinding hard work involved in shooting some of these action movies. Now we think Hollywood actor, wow, glamour, stardom, fame and sure there's that but for him a lot of the time it's just sheer hard work. That's what it's like for all of us. We do it over and over again without thinking too much about it and at some point what we want is a new start, a fresh start. Will someone please put me on a magic carpet and whisk me away of there somewhere, to some new reality without the cares, without the pressures, without all the tensions, without the sheer boredom of my present reality. Or we've made some serious blunders along the way which is what happened to me and we wish that we could somehow be absolved of their consequences rather than living out this hell on earth thing that we're travelling through. Whatever the reason we've all been there. I want a fresh start. Sometimes that manifests itself in a career change, a sea change, a long break, moving house, changing cities, changing countries. I've had three careers in my life, ten years in the military, seventeen years running my own IT consulting firm and now almost ten years doing what I'm doing here in the broadcasting area. Those transformations have been important for me but you know whilst they've been interesting and challenging and satisfying they don't actually meet the deep need way down inside somewhere to get this sense of 'yes this is the life I want to be living'. That sense of contentment and satisfaction. Our career, our relationships, where we live, what we look like, they're all great and they're all important but at the end of the day they aren't the things that make us truly happy and contented inside. They can add, they can detract but they're not the main thing. It's like last week, we were talking about signs and wonders and miracles that Jesus performed. Healing that paralytic man, the man born blind, I mean totally awesome stuff. And I imagine that if you were paralysed or blind and Jesus comes along and He heals you of that, well come on that's huge and yet can I tell you some of the most together, satisfied, dynamic people I know live life in a wheelchair or without their sight. These are inspiring people. See it seems to me the miracle's God's done on their inside are much more powerful than a miracle He could do but hasn't yet on their outside. I have tinnitus, constant ringing in my ears. It's socially quite debilitating because the moment there's background noise I find it very hard to hear people and so you end up tuning out, it's just too hard. I also have glaucoma, under control now but eventually it could send me blind in my old age. Would I like God to heal those two things? Of course I would. He hasn't yet, He may one day or He may not but the greatest miracle of all that He has ever performed for me is the fresh start that He gave me when I first believed and this is what it is, have a listen, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 16 to 19: From now on therefore we regard no one from a human point of view even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. Everything old is passed away and see, everything has become new.' 'All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. It's this idea, well it's not just an idea, it's the pervading reality of my life that in Christ I am a new creation and all the old things have passed away, everything is new. Anyone who believes in Jesus is probably familiar with this passage, it seems easy to read it and go, 'well yeah, that's fine. New creation? Oh okay' and just move on but hang on a minute, a new creation. All the reality TV shows on the planet promise that, they're all about transformation, our looks, our home, our lives, our careers, they're all about pedalling false makeovers and here's the real makeover, the question is do you really care? Does that stir up a yearning in you that says, 'I want that, that's what I've been looking for all my life?' Can I tell you honestly? For most people it doesn't, here's why I know. A while back we aired a series of messages called Healthy Living To A Ripe Old Age and the free booklet that we produced for that series was My Top Three Secrets For Losing 25 Kilograms. The response to that was completely unprecedented; we'd never seen anything like it in almost ten years of producing this series of A Different Perspective. We printed over fifteen times the usual number of booklets and had ten times as many downloads of the e-booklet compared to average. In fact I'll bet you a pound to a penny that the free booklet for this series that I'll be telling you about a little bit later won't go anywhere near the response that we had to that weight loss booklet, I hope it does but going by past experiences it probably won't. Now is it a good thing for us to get our weight under control? Sure it is, I did, twenty-five kilograms, fifty-five pounds. I'm a lot healthier, I'll probably live a lot longer, I look a lot better, I feel a lot better, zippity doo da. And yet God comes along and tells us that in Christ we have a fresh start, we're completely new, the one thing that people are hungering for, that people go looking for in reality TV, in body makeovers, in beauty makeovers, in home renovations, in career changes, they're looking for transformation, for a new start, a new life free from all the hang ups, all the regrets, all the hurts and the failures of the past. The one thing that people really want and the only place you can get that is in Jesus. But do we respond? Do we run and leap and praise God because He's given us a new life? Hallelujah! Nah, come on, what would your life look like if you lift it on the basis of what Paul is saying here that it's actually true? If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away and look, everything has become new. Every time the past rears its ugly head in your emotions, in your feelings, in your thoughts, in your actions, you turn around and say, 'thank you Jesus that I am a new creation in you. Thank you that the old things have passed away and everything has become new' and you simply refuse to accept delivery from the hang-ups of the past. It's like looking at the world early in the morning, just as the sun is coming up after it's rained all night with this sense of freshness and newness and filling your lungs with the sweetness of this new creation. What would your life look like if you lived it as though this new creation thing was true? Well?
