A Different Perspective Official Podcast Berni Dymet

Yeah we know about grace, we've heard about grace, it's a good thing but deep down inside, in our heart of hearts most of us harbour a sneaking suspicion that this whole 'God' thing surely has to come down to following a bunch of rules, right?
If I were to ask you, "are you living under a curse?" What would your answer be? I guess perhaps if you're going through some tough times you might be tempted to say yes but just for a moment set your circumstances aside, forget what's going on around you, in your relationship with God are you living under a curse?
Now that may seem like rather an odd question but actually a good many people who say they believe in Jesus are doing exactly that, they're living under a curse. A curse that God wants to remove from your life today, Galatians chapter 3 verses 10 and 13:
For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse for it is written 'cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law. But:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us for it is written 'cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree'.
That word curse is a very strong word. If someone says to you 'I curse you' that's pretty offensive, you take that pretty seriously. There's a venom, a sense of evil, a sense of fear, foreboding in that word curse.
Well, now listen this to this very carefully, God is saying to you today that if you're living your life under the lie that you can only be in His favour if you perform, if you deliver the goods, if you follow the rules. If that's how you're living your life God is saying to you today that you are living under a curse.
That's very strong and the reason I'm being so blunt and so direct with you on this is that God is making a powerful point to you and me today. But with the bad news comes the good news. They call it the Good News but frankly I think it's stunningly Good News, it's fantastic news, it's sensational news.
Jesus took that curse on His shoulders when He died for you. He became a curse for you as He hung on that cross so that you could be set free. Listen to me, stop living under the curse of trying to follow the rules and start enjoying the freedom that you have in Christ. Start enjoying the fact that God has put His Holy Spirit in you. Start enjoying the fact that you're forgiven, that God has a plan for your life, a good plan.
Back in the Old Testament it says that:
The joy of the Lord is your strength.
Have you heard the Good News today? Then enter into that joy, experience that joy, live in that joy, the curse has been removed, you are forgiven, you are free. That's fantastic news.
And yet we still struggle with this whole 'grace' thing don't we? Grace, Gods grace is such a difficult concept to wrap your heart around. Even if you can wrap your mind around it, wrapping your heart around it, believing in the grace of God is so hard because we don't live in a world of grace.
We live in a world that measures you on your performance. A world that says, "if you're wealthy, if you have a good job, if you live in a big house, if you drive a nice car then you're successful, then you have value, THEN you have worth." And the flip side of that coin is true too. If you don't measure up, if you don't deliver, if you don't fit into the world's mould of success, if you're not good looking and well dressed then you don't have much worth at all.
In fact all too often if you can't do something for people they just discard you, pass you by, throw you on the trash heap. So we have a performance mind set, we've been taught to equate performance measured by the world's scale, with value. That's the basic lie we live with and can I say even as Christians we kind of have this belief that what comes first in the Bible is the law of the Old Testament, the rule book if you will and it was only later that this idea of God's grace, made active in our lives through faith, came about.
Law first then grace bu

Let's face it, grace is a difficult concept to wrap your mind around. Maybe you get as far as the theory but the practice, actually living as though Gods grace in your life is real, well that's a whole different thing.
Have you ever tried to work yourself into Gods favour? You try and you try to do the right thing but still you just mess it up. Well if you've been there you're not alone. There's a fine line between responding to God’s grace and falling into the trap of trying to work your way into His favour. Here's how it happens:
At some point you realise what an amazing thing God did for you by sending Jesus to die for you on that cross. Amazing! And so you turn your life over to Him lock, stock and barrel. There's a joy, a euphoria almost but then life gets back to normal. You go back to your day to day business and you slip back into your old habits, the sin that's been robbing you of joy and peace for most of your life creeps back and guilt sets in.
So you say to yourself 'self, you have to do something about this, there are standards here, there are rules, I shouldn't be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that'. You start to work at it harder and harder and harder and before you know it you're pedalling so hard that it's just about killing you. Yet still that old sin keeps on tripping you up.
My hunch is that you know exactly what I'm talking about. Jesus promised you freedom but this doesn't feel like freedom. That's because it's not. Have a listen to what the Apostle Paul writes about trying to follow a set of rules, Galatians chapter 2 verses 15 and 16:
We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ and we have come to believe in Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by doing the works of the law because no one will be justified by the works of the law.
I am my father's son not because I followed a bunch of rules and worked my way into that position, no, I am my father's son because he is my dad and I'm his son. And as I grew up in that relationship my behaviour matured and improved as a response to his love not because I was good at following rules which by the way I wasn't.
The moment you and I put our faith in Jesus God becomes our Father and the more we grow in that relationship, the closer we get to Him the more we experience His love and the more our behaviour changes. See it's not about following a bunch of rules, it's about trusting Jesus and as we experience His love first hand, allowing His love, His grace, His mercy to change us, to set us free in a way that following a bunch of rules never ever will.
It turns out that living in freedom has everything to do with Jesus. A Scripture that is really familiar to many people is this one:
It's no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.
But as familiar as that may be to many I wonder whether we truly realise what it means. Freedom is such an elusive concept for us, we want it, we chase it but very few ever really experience it and I mean that especially for people who believe in Jesus. Because deep down inside most of us have this nagging sense that we're simply not good enough.
In fact the more you grow in your relationship with Jesus the more you see your own weaknesses and failings, it's just how it happens. The closer you draw in a rich dynamic relationship with Jesus the more aware you become, the more sensitive your spirit becomes to the things that break that fellowship. And sin, sin always disrupts the closeness, the intimacy between you and God, right?
I believe that God wants to deal with this in your life today, Galatians chapter 2 verses 19 to 21:
I have been crucified with Christ and it's no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God for if justification comes through the law then Christ died for noth

One of the things that robs us of freedom are our old habits. Old ways of thinking, old ways of behaving and you know those old habits; they can be more difficult to shake than you might think.
Okay the subject for today is circumcision. I know it's not exactly something you want to be thinking about but stick with me, there's an important point to be made. And what we're really chatting about is freedom, your freedom here, now, today. But first let's head back to 1st century Jerusalem.
See there's a rocky transition underway for those who believe in Jesus, from Judaism, the religion of their forefathers, to Christianity. From a life lived under a complex set of religious rules to a life of freedom in Christ. A lot of the things that seem pretty obvious to us today had to be nutted out back then, it wasn't easy.
One of them was male circumcision which to this point had been part of God's law for His people. Let's take a look at how the Apostle Paul puts it in Galatians chapter 2 verses 3 to 5:
But even Titus who was with me was not compelled to be circumcised though he was a Greek. But because of false believers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy on the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus so that they might enslave us, we did not submit to them even for a moment so that the truth of the Gospel might always remain with you.
See there's a tussle here between the old traditionalists who didn't believe in this whole nonsense about grace through Jesus and Paul to whom the Gospel of grace, the fantastic news of Gods unmerited favour towards us had been revealed by Jesus Himself. Circumcision was just the flash point, the real debate was between the slavery of living under the set of rules and the freedom that we have through our faith in Christ.
And it's a struggle that continues to this day in the heart of many a believer because grace is so radical, so counterintuitive. We live in a 'dog eat dog' world and there seems to be plenty of 'dog' to go around. Yet along comes Jesus and says in effect:
Look it's not about following a bunch of rules, it's about experiencing my love and so that you can I'm going to pay the price on a cross for all the things that you've done wrong in your life.
The reason Paul takes this so seriously is that it strikes at the very heart of the Gospel of grace, the truth. Besides have you noticed? It's pretty much impossible to follow the rules anyway, we all fall short, that's why we need Jesus. So if you've been struggling under a bunch of rules do yourself a favour, ditch them. Go to Jesus instead; start having a rich dynamic relationship with Him and your unbounded freedom will flow out of that relationship. Don't let rules enslave you!
And you and I, we aren't the only ones that suffer from this problem. Take Peter the Apostle, we think of Peter as one of the New Testament's 'A' list yet he made quite a few mistakes along the way not the least of which was political correctness. This age of rampant political correctness isn't something new in the 21st century, it turns out that there's nothing new under the sun.
Now look, it's absolutely a good idea that we shouldn't deliberately go out there to say or do things that will hurt others but it's a very bad idea to take that to the ridiculous nth degree, to the point where we curtail our freedoms in order to appease those with a agenda.
And that's exactly what was going on in the first century as Christianity was being birthed out of Judaism. There was a tussle between the two; there were difficult issues to work through. For instance, most Jews believed that the God of the Old Testament was for them and them alone. Many of the Apostles stayed in Jerusalem for that very reason but Paul was called to be an Apostle to the Gentiles, to take the good news of salvation in Jesus to people whom the Jews referred to as dogs.
So Peter is happy to dine with the Gentiles until some other legalistic old school Jews show up at which point he does

Freedom sounds like such a wonderful thing and it is. So why is it then that so few people experience true freedom in their lives? It turns out there are plenty of things that would rob you of your freedom, plenty.
Freedom is a tricky thing. So often we are our own worst enemy, our perspective, our thoughts, our behaviour, they all rob us of this elusive thing called freedom. Try as we might we just can't grasp it. You've had that experience right, you know what it's like? There's something in your make up, an Achilles heel if you will, that's constantly your undoing.
For each one of us it's something different but at the end of the day it trips you up again and again and again. Mine is perfectionism which has a tendency to fuel anger. Yours? Well you probably know what it is, maybe its insecurity, gossiping, a lack of compassion, selfishness; hey the list runs as long as my arm and then some.
God has a simple name for it, He calls it sin. The devil loves to rub your nose in it and just when you're feeling weak or tired, emotionally spent he pushes your button and there you go again. For the Apostle Paul it was an obsessive hatred of the Church. He was of course a Pharisee in the Jewish religion when Jesus came along and turned everything he'd ever believed in, everything he'd ever worked so hard for, completely upside down. No wonder he hated Christians.
But then, then he met Jesus and something changed in him. People were talking about it, Galatians chapter 1 verse 23:
... They only heard it said, "The one who was formerly persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy” And they glorified God because of me.
And he had been too, he was a terrible persecutor of the Church until that day he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. You can read about it in the Book of Acts chapter 9. Okay so he met Jesus but what happened to turn him from a man breathing threats against the early Church to the guy who ultimately wrote almost half the Books of the New Testament.
That's quite a turn around you'd have to admit. I'll tell you what happened - Jesus changed his heart. You know and I know that when we have a change of heart our thoughts and our actions flow out of that just as God promised in the days of old through Ezekiel chapter 11 verses 19 and 20:
I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them.
When you encounter Jesus on your road, when you draw close to Him, when His Spirit fills you to overflowing He does what you were powerless to do, He changes your heart which, as it turns out, changes everything. Sometimes though it feels as though nothing is happening, NOTHING.
So what? Has God forgotten me now? Has He left me on the shelf? We all want to feel as though God has some great plan for our lives so in those months, even years when nothing much seems to be happening it can be terribly disheartening.
Jesus: "I came to set the captives free”
You: "yeah right, it feels like you've forgotten me."
Other people, they seem to be powering on. You on the other hand feel as though there's nothing really exciting ahead.
Saul is on the road to Damascus, off to persecute some more Christians, he meets Jesus along the way, that's pretty exciting but then he loses his sight and for three days he's completely blind.
Now that doesn't sound like such a long time unless you've been struck blind in which case it probably feels like an eternity, adversity has a way of doing that. Which is why when you're feeling as though you've been left on the shelf it does seem like an eternity, am I right? Freedom? What's that? You ask yourself in this prison of inactivity.
When we get to that point there's something we need to be reminded of, it's what Paul says of himself in his letter to the Church of Galatia, Galatians chapter 1 verses 15 to 17:
But when

Freedom is something we all want but before we go asking ourselves how do you get it or where do you get it, first it might be worthwhile figuring out exactly what it is because freedom, real freedom may not be what you think.
Most of us, I guess, would define freedom as being able to do whatever we want whenever we want. And that definition right there is what brings a whole world of pain crashing down on our lives. I don't think there's a single person on this planet who doesn't want to be free. Do you want to be free? Well of course you do, me too but if freedom is that important to us you have to ask yourself, exactly what is it?
Sure there's political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the freedom to gather, to protest, to live where you want to live, to marry who you want to marry, to choose to have children or not. In this day and age we live in a world that's more and more fixated on our individual freedoms, our rights as individuals.
After all I'm entitled to enjoy my life, right? So it doesn't take too long to start imagining that freedom is being able to do whatever we want whenever we want. Anything that cuts across that is a restriction of our alienable right to be free. And yet if you travel to any place where that kind of freedom is practised what you discover is lawlessness and anarchy. There's no safety, there's no protection, there's no security because that 'anything anytime' kind of freedom is a terrible thing.
That's what the rule of law is all about, to keep us safe and secure. So when you think about it what we actually need is a different definition of freedom, one that really works. Try this one on for size, Galatians chapter 1 verses 3 to 4:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins to set us free from this present evil age according to the will of our God and Father.
It seems that God takes our freedom so seriously that He sent Jesus to suffer and die to set us free. From what? Well from our sin and from this evil age. So according to God real freedom, the sort of freedom that Jesus purchased for you on that cross is about setting you free from the devastating consequences of your sin and the evil that pervades every nook and cranny of this age so that you can live in grace and in peace.
Not such a bad definition when you think about it. So here's a question for you, what sin, what evil is robbing you of the freedom that Jesus came to give you because that sin, that evil is what God is calling you to hand over to Him today? His will for you is to be free to live in the grace and the peace of Jesus Christ.
But that's not always an easy thing to do. One of the things you discover when you set your heart on following Jesus is that the rest of the world is not going to be standing by and cheering you on. In fact far from it. Not long after I became a Christian, a few decades ago now, the IT consulting firm of which I was a partner had the opportunity to bid for a rather large government project in the developing world.
But the simple reality was that unless you paid the bribes to the various officials you were completely wasting your time in bidding. As you can imagine as a brand new Christian I was faced with a real dilemma and can I tell you I came under quite some pressure to compromise.
It happens in every corner of our lives because when you decide to believe in Jesus, when you decide to follow Jesus, when you decide to live your life for Him let me tell you the world is not going to be all that happy with you. They'll criticize you, laugh at you, persecute you, whatever fits best at the time.
You see those people want you to believe that their way is the way of freedom, of success, of enjoyment. The world wants you to believe that following Jesus somehow is going to rob you of your freedom. What do you believe? Who are you trying to please? Jesus? Or those naysayers around you?
Paul the Apostle made a very clea

So, when Jesus was choosing his disciples, he called them out of their businesses. Fisherman, tax collectors, and the like. He called them away from business into ministry. But could it be that these days Jesus actually calls people into business as well?
 
Berni:  I had an interesting guy on the program quite a few years ago now who ran a big coffee franchise business and it was fascinating that neither he nor his business partner needed the money. They didn’t need the hassle; they didn’t need to be in business. They were doing it with one purpose and one purpose alone and that was to fund Christian ministry around the world.
 
Alex: Fantastic. And that’s one of the defining features I think of a kingdom business. Is that it has a purpose beyond profit. Profit is essential by a long way. Absolutely.
 
Alex: You need to make a profit or you won’t have a business for very long.
 
Berni: Profit’s not a dirty word.
 
Alex: No, it’s a good thing.
 
Berni: It’s a good thing. What’s a kingdom business look like? Someone’s sitting there thinking I’d love to run my own web design business or my own digital marketing business. And when it ... I want to be a builder or a plumber. What does a kingdom business look like?
 
Alex: Yeah, well let’s think about the word kingdom for a moment. So a kingdom implies that there’s a king. And for Christians the king is Jesus. So when it comes to your business the king of your business and the CEO of your business is in fact Jesus. And we are his servants of that kingdom. So it’s having a very different way of looking at that business. Because the thing about business I think in the church in the past is we’ve seen business as a secular activity.
 
Berni: Yeah.
 
Alex: You go along to work. OK if you’re a Christian you should be a person that operates according to integrity but you use the money to fund ministry. But the reality is that a kingdom business is a ministry.
And so the perspective that Christians who have their own business or who are in business in general, they need to come to realisation that they in fact are in ministry. That is what a kingdom business is about; it’s an actual ministry.
Because if you’re a Christian you are in ministry, it just depends on where you’re at. We all may have different jobs but the clergy’s not the only ministry. A kingdom business is in fact a ministry.
 
Berni: We have this sort of dualistic view of the world that over here we do prayer and church and singing and Bible reading and stuff, that’s all the holy stuff. And over here we do work and taking the kids to soccer, and that’s all the profane stuff. And we separate those two, particularly in Western culture but you don’t find that in the Bible, do you?
 
Alex: No, exactly right. I mean, everything is spiritual.
 
Berni: Yeah.
 
Alex: I think we’ve somehow compartmentalised our life and we need to change that. You know, God should be through every aspect of your life ...
 
Berni: So ...
 
Alex: Business included.
 
Berni: Everyone who’s listening today who has a business, a Christian business, you’re actually in ministry. That’s a pretty exciting perspective. So if they‘re in ministry, does God move supernaturally in business? I mean can you do business supernaturally?
 
Alex: Absolutely, and look the thing about the word supernatural. Break it into two. We have a responsibility to do the things in the natural, we actually have to do something, actually have to turn up to things in order for your business to actually function and to perform.
 
Berni: Yeah.
 
Alex: God does the super. OK, now the way I like to tell people is through an example in my own life. I was in the United States back in February this year and I was attending a conference called the National Religious Broadcasters Conference. Our intention was to try and work out how we could get on US radio.
A funny thing happene