Episodios

  • The Skilled Surgeon // The Spirit and The Word, Part 5

    The Skilled Surgeon // The Spirit and The Word, Part 5
    Nov 14 2025
    It's amazing how thoroughly we manage to delude ourselves about our own failings and weaknesses. We're actually pretty darned good at it. But God is a skilful surgeon capable of performing radical surgery. This week on the program, we've been looking at intimacy with God through His Spirit and His Word. And when you think about it, those are the two things of Himself that He has left here on this planet for you and me. His Spirit – God Himself, with a promise that if we believe in Jesus, He will make His home in us, dwell in us when we put our faith in Him. And His word – the Bible. I so often see people cringe when I mention that book. But as we've been exploring this week, this is the most amazing and awesome love letter God's left here for you and for me. Through His Spirit (we open that book), He speaks to us in the most direct and intimate and extraordinary way. And sometimes when we open that book and read it through His Spirit, it's like holding up a mirror to who we are. And I don't know about you but sometimes I don't actually like what I see in that mirror. Let's not kid ourselves. When things aren't going well, when we're under pressure, we blame everyone else. He did this; she said that; if he hadn't done this, I wouldn't have blown up in his face, you know the sort of stuff. It's amazing how much more quickly we'll forgive ourselves than we forgive other people. We are so quick to rationalise our own failures and yet to blame others for theirs and even ours. And the longer we delude ourselves about the things that we're doing wrong or our bad character traits or our bad habits or our anger or our fear or our insecurities, the more they're going to ruin not only our lives but also the lives of people around us. There's a great passage in Hebrews in the New Testament. The book of Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, says this: The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides the soul from the spirit, the joints from the marrow. It's able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and before God no creature is hidden but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. Boy, that's bad news isn't it? Who wants to read God's word? Sharper than any two-edged sword, it pierces, it divides the spirit from the soul, the joints from the marrow, it judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. No, thanks. I'll give that a miss, I think. I'll pass. But it's only bad news if we want to hang on to the bad stuff. If you or I want to hang on to our dishonesty, our critical spirit, our nasty attitudes or whatever, then this bit about God's word is bad news. But if we want to be set free from this stuff, it's fantastic news. In other words, we read God's word and it's like a mirror, it judges the intentions of the heart. It lays everything bare, it lays everything open. We can see in there where our intentions are wrong – where the way we think is wrong or hurting us or hurting other people and it happens to me all the time. When we let God do that, when we go to God's word and open it up and say, "Dear Holy Spirit, you wrote this thing. Will you now open it up for me, will you now hold it up, will you pour into my heart, will you show me who I am through your word"? When we let God hold His mirror up to our faces it changes us. Let me give you an example …there's a story about a woman caught in adultery. And the religious leaders whip up the crowd and they drag her out in front of Jesus for a good old-fashioned stoning. And it wasn't because of what she did; they were trying to trick Him. Jewish religious law prescribed that a person caught in adultery should be stoned to death. But Roman law, (remember at this point in the first century Rome had occupied the land of Israel), Roman law said, they weren't allowed to do that anymore. So whichever way Jesus answered, He'd lose. So Jesus pauses and squats down and doodles in the sand. Then He looks everyone in the eye, one by one, and He says: Whichever of you has never sinned, you pick up the first stone, you cast the first stone. (John 8:7) And one by one they all drift away. They all go embarrassed because they know that none of them can say that they have never sinned. And He's left alone with her and He says: "Woman, is there no-one left to condemn you?" And she says, "No-one sir.' And He says, 'Then neither do I condemn you. Go, go and sin no more." (John 8:10-11) That is brilliant isn't it? But I remember reading that and it was as though God's spirit was holding a mirror up to my face. God's spirit spoke to me and said, "You know Berni, the way you think, the way you act, you would have been one of the people in that crowd." And it was true ... I was so judgemental, I was so critical, I was so ready to jump down peoples' throats and tell them what they were doing wrong. And here I was reading God's word and through this beautiful story of ...
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    10 m
  • Understanding the Letter // The Spirit and The Word, Part 4

    Understanding the Letter // The Spirit and The Word, Part 4
    Nov 13 2025
    Once people get over the fact that the Bible isn't a bunch of do's and don'ts, the biggest thing that stops them from reading it is that it doesn't makes sense. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is, I guess, just being here with you today and knowing that through our time we've spent together (somehow), God's used that time to draw you closer to Him. Life's too short to live it without a passionate and a dynamic and a real and a beautiful relationship with Jesus. Some people may scoff at that. But deep down – right deep down in our spirit – we all hunger for God to touch us, for God to fill us, to give us His peace and His joy and His abundant life. And what's so sad for me is to see people living their lives as though all of God's blessing, as though God Himself is somehow a million miles away. When all along, He's closer, closer than even their deepest secrets of their hearts. This week on the program, we're looking at intimacy with God through His spirit and through His word. People make a mistake and say, "God is all about a bunch of rules and it's all about a bunch of doctrine and logic and so I've got to get all this head knowledge to know God." And hey, knowing God's word is fabulous. I make a living out of doing that. I try and let God use me to bless you by doing that. But there's more … there's God's Holy Spirit. If I just pick up His Bible and read it as a bunch of words and a bunch of rules and don't let God's Spirit work in me and lift the words off the page and put them into my heart, what I end up with is some sort of legalistic – religiously thing. Here, you and I are in the world that God created. Jesus in the flesh has been here and gone, He's promised to come back. But in the mean time God has actually left two things of Himself behind. Now sure, the world and the universe and all that's in it are God's but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the two things of God Himself that He's left here for us, here and now. What are they? The first is His Spirit, the promise of Jesus to His disciples and to you and to me (here and now) is to pour His Spirit out on us, to come and dwell in us. Through His Spirit God has left behind God Himself, the Spirit of God. And the second thing that God has left behind of Himself is His word, the Bible. Now many people cringe at that. But His word is His love letter to us, His story, His promises, His wisdom, His grace. And it's so sad to see people want more of God, to hunger for Him, to thirst for Him and they have a Bible on a shelf or in a cupboard somewhere and it's gathering dust. I often meet people like that and they see my enthusiasm for God, or they hear it in my voice and they say, "I wish I had that." No! I'm nothing special. In my own way, I'm just like you. Where do you get that real relationship with God that just bubbles over? And so I say to them, "When was the last time you read your Bible?" Hush … silence. The Bible (in my neck of the woods) is looked at with mistrust and negative connotations, fundamentalism, conservatism. There are more 'isms' poked at the Bible that we could poke a stick at. And so I say to people, "If God wrote you a love letter, wouldn't you want to read it?" Well, He did and it's called the Bible. "Yeah well, I don't understand the Bible. The Bible's hard to read. It's all over the place, who's Ephraim, what was Babylon all about? And who was Paul? And why did Jesus tell a story about a Samaritan? None of it makes sense to me so I just gave up. It was too hard." I understand that … so I'm going to share just four practical tips with you that anyone can implement and do in their lives to read God's love letter. And the first one is – to pray in the Spirit. The Bible says of itself that the Holy Spirit inspired every word that it contains. If the Holy Spirit inspired and wrote the thing through men and women, then the Holy Spirit can open it up and speak it into your heart and into my heart. And I tell you the truth, I never open that book without first asking Him, the Holy Spirit, to open it up for me. Dear Holy Spirit, I'm about to read your word, and I need you to open it up. And I need you to lift the words off the page. And I need you to feed them into my spirit because if they're just words, they're useless. But these are God's words and God I need you to feed me with your word. That's the first thing, to pray in the spirit to ask God himself to open the book for you. The second one is nowhere near as spiritual – get a Bible dictionary. What's that? You can get a Bible dictionary that's thin and small paperback. You can get one that's 27 volumes. I've got one that's 27 volumes but I've also got one that's one volume and it's called, "The Holman Bible Dictionary". And I just had a look online and it's under $50.00 or less than a pair of shoes. And it has pictures and diagrams and maps so when you come to read about Ephraim you can read two paragraphs and you know who or...
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    10 m
  • Love Letter from God // The Spirit and The Word, Part 3

    Love Letter from God // The Spirit and The Word, Part 3
    Nov 12 2025
    When you think about it God's gone to amazing lengths to preserve His love letter to us down through the centuries. You know the Bible. Yeah – that's it – His love letter. Sadly, these days we tend to send and receive very few letters. I mean personal letters, letters of friendship, and letters of love. There's something about receiving a personal letter in the mail. It's so much better than email, it has a stamp and a post-mark and you have to open it and then you sit down with a cup of tea and you read it. That friend who wrote it, you can see their handwriting, it's so personal, it's so wonderful! So much better than all the emails that flood in my in-tray. I wonder if you can ever remember receiving love letters. Well, what if we received a love letter that was thousands of years old, written by God himself and preserved down through the ages just for you, just for me, what if? That's what the Bible is; it's a love letter from God (sixty-six different books). Some of them stories, some of them songs and poems, some of them letters written to different groups of people at different times. Each one of them, written by someone that God handpicked – someone in whom He breathed His Spirit, someone to whom God spoke and was just the right person at the right time – this someone who listened to God and wrote one of the books, one of the sixty-six. Paul, the Apostle, wrote letters to Churches while he was in a dungeon on death row. Matthew and Mark and Luke and John wrote the four Gospels to different groups of people to tell them about Jesus. And God preserved them all over thousands of years from the first to the last with an incredible degree of historical accuracy. Before the printing press they were copied out by hand, by people called scribes. You know how thick a Bible is; it's a pretty big book. And you can imagine hundreds and thousands of scribes copying the Bible over and over and over again. It wasn't until the 30th of September 1452 that Johan Gutenberg's printing press published the first book on mass and that book was the Bible. Now, these days, when we look at all those different copies and translations and manuscripts there are almost no discrepancies in the hand copies and any that there are there are really minor and not very important. The Bible is this vast, amazing, confusing book, and story that begins right at the beginning with God creating the heavens and the earth. And tracks through the story of Israel in Egypt and their departure through the Red Sea and their forty years in the desert, into the promised land and all the turmoil and war, the exile and the return. And there are stories of people, Moses and David and Ruth and Esther and Paul and Timothy. And it's an account of God's Son, Jesus. And of the fledgling Church and the Book of Acts, the letters of Paul and Peter and John and others. This amazing array of God's stories spread over thousands of years, preserved for thousands of years more, now here, in your hand, in my hand to read. God's amazing love letter! Not a text-book, not a theological text, not a book of dry rules, not a book of dot points – but of stories and poems and people in pain and agony and fear, crying out to God. And people praising God and worshipping God, seeing God's hand in delivering them and protecting them. God's a heartbeat through it all, loving them. God's word's there for you and me, God's story there for you and me. God crying out through it all, 'I love you, I love you so much.' God's promises, God's power, God's mercy, God's wisdom all laid out in this vast story. This huge canvas which is a story of God touching people. It's the story of God revealing Himself. It's history; His story and not in a dry text, not just in words but through His Spirit. Every part of the Bible was inspired by God's Spirit. If we open that book and just read the words, we miss the point. But if we approach this love letter in prayer, in the Spirit of God and say, "God open it up to me. God, as I open it up speak to me today." The most awesome amazing spiritual reality happens as God pours His love and His spirit out through those pages into our hearts and our lives. People who stare at the Bible as some fundamentalist doctorial statement like Karl Marx's communist manifesto or Hitler's Mein Kampf, you miss the point or people who call themselves Christians who have a Bible or two or three or four that they never open, just collects dust. It's too hard to read or hard to understand, we miss the point. God's written a love letter. God's taken men and women and told their story and had them write it down and preserved it and put it in our hands to tell us about His love for us, "I love you." God is speaking to someone today; I believe that God today is crying out to you, reaching out from His heart into your heart saying, "I love you, read my love letter." Can I ask you a question? Do you want to know that love, deep in your spirit every minute of ...
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    10 m
  • The Law of the Spirit // The Spirit and The Word, Part 2

    The Law of the Spirit // The Spirit and The Word, Part 2
    Nov 11 2025
    No matter how much we want to believe that God is a God of grace, we all at some point end up living life as though He's a God of rules……the law of His Spirit and life can seem a long way off. When we talk about God, well that name "God" means so many different things to so many different people. Yesterday on the program, we looked at the notion that God is kind of a bunch of rules and sometimes people want to reduce Him down to being just that but that's not it. If God's a bunch of rules, then He's bad news not good news. It's an easy thing to do and some people do it, to pick up the Bible and read it as though it was a book of rules. And that's where people get this sort of Bible bashing, accusing, condemnatory form of religion. But that's not it. Jesus said: "I've come to set you free and if I set you free' said Jesus, 'then you're really free." (John 8:36) So how do we make sense of all that? If we read this book, the Bible, as the letter of the law then it's full of condemnation. But what about the spirit of the law? What does God mean by it all? And what about the law of the Spirit, which is what the Apostle Paul talks about? Is there really freedom in all of this? The way I try to understand that is looking at the three different ways that we can be a parent. To me there are three models: The first model is the model of being the tyrant dictator. I'm the dad or I'm the mum and these are the rules of the house. And if you don't like it, go and live somewhere else. It's rigid, it's inflexible, it's dictatorial and it doesn't work. We can force kids, I guess, to comply with rules but we can end up losing their hearts. We lose the relationship, we lose what it means to be a mum and a dad and a family. So that's one model, the tyrant dictator where being a parent is all about enforcing rules. At the other end of the scale, the second model is what I call the anarchistic model. No rules, anything goes. Messy room – fine. Stay up late – fine. Let the boyfriend or the girlfriend sleep over in the same room – fine. Smoke, drink, get drunk, be rude, be disrespectful, be lazy – fine. And that's the model where the parents abdicate responsibility, where there are no rules. Is that good for our kids? Is it a fun way to live as a family? The third model is the model that God always planned, the model of being a good parent. It's about love and relationship and affirming our kids, and caring for them, and honouring them, and respecting them. But at the same time setting some boundaries. Setting some rights and wrongs, saying, "No, in this house there are some rules". And letting them bump into those rules and live the consequences of bumping into those rules. Under those circumstances home is a place to live and to love and to learn. It's a place where it's okay to make mistakes and live out the consequences and still be forgiven and held and affirmed and nurtured. So the three models: the tyrant dictator, the anarchistic model and the good parent model. Which one makes sense? No one would advocate totalitarianism, no one would advocate anarchy, and it's pretty obvious, really. So why do we think that God is any different? Why do we say God is a dictator, God is a bunch of rules? It's easy to look at God that way but to do that is to miss the point. On the other hand, people try and see Him as a god of no rules, as a god who's being a sugar daddy and that's misses the point too. God's a good dad. God's a good parent, one that loves and wants to be in relationship with us, and wants to affirm us, and care for us, and honour us, and respect us. But still set boundaries of right and wrong. God's a good dad. And that's what the Apostle Paul's says when he writes: There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because the Law of the Spirit of life in Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8: 1-2) There's no condemnation because God has replaced the rules of law and said, "It's different now in Jesus because in Jesus you're one of my kids. In Jesus you're one of my family and I want to breathe my spirit of life into you. I want you to know that I honour and respect you and care for you." And in that relationship you get to grow because God did what the law, what a bunch of rules couldn't do – by sending His Son as a man to pay for sin on the cross. He did away with sin through Jesus so that the just requirements of the rules and the law could be met. And then He said, "Now that you're forgiven, walk in the Spirit. Here, let me breathe my Holy Spirit into you." Says God, "Be one of my kids." There's no condemnation because the law that God wants now is the law of the Spirit, the law of life, the law of being set free from rules and regulations dominating our lives. The law that says, "Jesus paid for our failures, we're forgiven." God's approach is the good dad model, not the tyrant, not to say there are no rules. God's a god that's a good dad. He's wiped the slate...
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    10 m
  • The Letter of the Law // The Spirit and The Word, Part 1

    The Letter of the Law // The Spirit and The Word, Part 1
    Nov 10 2025
    Sometimes we can look at God's Word – the Bible and think of it as a book of rules. But it turns out that this notion that God is all about the letter of the law is way off the mark. Sometimes we can look at God's word, the Bible and think of it as a book of rules. But it turns out that this notion of God is all about the letter of the law is way off the mark. The law's a funny thing … some people say the law's an ass, it's something that we both love and we hate. On the one hand, when we see a serious crime committed like a child killed by a drunk driver or a murder or a rape or terrorism, we want the perpetrator to experience the full force of the law. On the other, sometimes the law does indeed seem to be an ass. When people apply the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law, we can end up with silly, sometimes damaging outcomes. In a sense that's how we think about God. If God was God, holy and righteous (whatever that meant,) then I knew that I fell short of that. And therefore, God must be a bunch of rules that I'd fallen foul of. But my hunch is that, I don't know. If we understand God that way well maybe we're missing the point. I wonder if you recognise any of these: I'm your Lord, your God and you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or bow down and worship an idol. You shall not use the Lord's name in vain. You shall keep the Sabbath day of rest. You shall honour your father and your mother. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bare false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covert your neighbour's wife. (Exodus 20: 1-17) Well of course, we recognise those as probably the Ten Commandments – Gods law in a nutshell – the things that Moses brought down from the mountain on the tablets of stone. But actually, you may or may not know that in the Book of the Law (as the Jews understand the Law), which is the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the Torah, there a 613 commandments and prohibitions. So the Ten Commandments are just like the top ten. Then there's another 603 commandments and prohibitions on top of that … do this, don't do that, don't do this, do that. Some of them make a lot of sense – don't kill, don't steal, don't commit adultery, and don't lie. There's a whole bunch of other ones that we look at now and they'd make our stomachs turn like animal sacrifices and all that sort of stuff, things that don't make a whole lot of sense to us, (here and now, today). I mean, could you imagine going to Church and taking some animal and slitting its throat? Probably they'd come and lock us up for doing that these days. So some of God's Laws come naturally. They make sense and others don't. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't bare false witness – they make sense but the temptation's always there. Just run your eyes down those ten and most people have broken at least one of those in just the last 24 hours let alone the other 603. In one sense, the law does make sense. Imagine what our society's would be like without the will of law. Look at what happened in Bosnia, look at what happened in Rwanda, look at what's happening in Israel and Lebanon. Without law there's anarchy and innocent people get hurt and there's pain and there's oppression. So the law does make sense but you can take it to extreme. Totalitarian law is ugly and oppressive. People's freedom is taken away. So the law is a great servant but a terrible master. But (and here's the but), it's easy to think of God's Law as being like a totalitarian regime. If God's God, He is the ultimate totalitarian because He's all-powerful, so who wants to have a part of that? Who wants to have some rule-based God that's got all the power? No, thank you very much. Well, in fact, there was a bunch of people called the Pharisees. They were a bunch of religious leaders in the 1st century who lived at the same time Jesus did and the word Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word 'to separate'. They were religious separatists and they took following God's Law, those 613 commandments and prohibitions, to the most absurd and extreme lengths. What do you think God would say about that? Is God a rule-based god? Is God a god that says, "Yes, there's someone following my law, I'm excited about that." This is what Jesus said to these Pharisees. He said: Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites because you tithe mint and dill and cumin but you neglect the weightier matters of the Law. Justice, mercy, faith, it's these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others, you blind guides, you strain out a gnat and you swallow a camel. (Matthew 23:23) What's this tithing of mint and dill and cumin all about? Well, these days we go to the supermarket and we buy a bunch of mint or we buy some dill or we buy a jar of cumin and we think so what? Back then, mint, dill and cumin were pretty high priced herbs and ...
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    10 m
  • Be Filled With The Spirit // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 5

    Be Filled With The Spirit // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 5
    Nov 7 2025
    We chug, chug, chug through life – and pretty soon, we're running on empty. And then we try filling up with all sorts of different things. But running on the wrong fuel can have disastrous consequences. In a world that's hungry for some sort of authentic spiritual reality. It just blows me away that God has a plan. He's always had a plan, that plan is to pour His Spirit out on us, His Holy Spirit, a flood tide of His life, His love, His presence, rivers of living water, an overflow of abundance. You think I'm going a bit over the top? Well they're God's words not mine. Sometimes in our day-to-day desert existence we get a puny view of God and His plan, but that doesn't change the fact that God is a god of overflowing abundance. And the biggest blessing of all is to be so immersed in Him and His Holy Spirit that we can't wipe the smile off our face and adulation out of our hearts. That's why He urges us, "Go on, go on being filled with the Holy Spirit." We all go through times in our lives when God seems a long way off and the further away He seems the smaller He looks. The day-to-day reality crowds our vision, God ends up being a small speck somewhere in the landscape, you know what I'm talking about? Recently I had a large job to do, it was a huge job, now I'm involved full-time in this ministry of Christianityworks but I still do some IT consulting work because it helps us to cover the costs of producing these radio programs. And for four months I worked 12 hours a day and had literally only about 3 days off that whole time. Now don't try this at home, it is not a balanced existence, it's not to be recommended and you can't sustain that sort of thing but it was a season, it was something that I had to travel through. Fatigue and exhaustion really knock you around physically, emotionally and spiritually. I have to tell you some days, God felt like He was a long, long way away. So what does it mean, "go on being filled with the Holy Spirit". It's easy to say but when life's not easy you don't feel very spiritual, some days maybe we even despair, where is God? But what does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit when life's tough? Because that's exactly the time that we do need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. There's an interesting story of Jesus when He's ministering and Jairus the leader of the synagogue, whose daughter is dying comes to Him and there are crowds everywhere and he presses through and says, "My daughter's dying, quick I need you to come." But there's this other person, this woman, this woman who'd been bleeding for 12 years, she's unclean, she's an outcast, she's spent all her money on Doctors, she's in absolute despair and she hears that Jesus is in town and this is what she does. When Jesus crossed back over by the boat from the other side of the lake a large crowd gathered around Him while He was at the lake then one of the synagogue rulers named Jairus came there, he saw Jesus and fell at His feet and pleaded earnestly with Him, "My little girl is dying, please come and put your hands on her so that she'll be healed and live." So Jesus went with him and this large crowd followed and pressed around Him and a woman was there who'd been bleeding for twelve years. She'd suffered so much under the care of so many Doctors and she'd spent all she had and instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus she came up behind Him in the crowd and just touched His cloak because she thought, ' if I just touch His clothes I'll be healed.' Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering and at once Jesus realised that power had gone out from Him. He turned around to the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" His disciples went, "Come on, there's a whole crowd pressing in against you and you ask who touched me?" But Jesus kept looking around to see who'd done it and then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at His feet trembling with fear. She told Him the whole story. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go on, go in peace and be freed from your suffering. That power that flowed out of Jesus when she touched Him in faith was the power of the Holy Spirit and a small desperate seed of faith is all it took. It was an act of sheer desperation, just a single touch and a desperate faith. "Go on being filled with the Holy Spirit." Paul writes that, the Apostle, in Ephesians chapter 5, verse 18. He says: Don't get drunk on wine it leads to debauchery, instead go on being filled with the Holy Spirit. Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and sing spiritual songs and sing and make music in your heart to God, always giving thanks to the Father for everything in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ. We can try and fill ourselves with all sorts of stuff. Here Paul says, don't try and fill up with wine, that's not where it's at. Shopping doesn't soothe your soul. Winning at work doesn't make...
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    10 m
  • There Is No Condemnation // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 4

    There Is No Condemnation // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 4
    Nov 6 2025
    The biggest thing that keeps us from drawing close to God is the fear of condemnation. He's perfect and I'm not - so I'm in trouble. Makes sense. But fortunately, God's grace isn't logical. The biggest fear I ever had of getting close to God was the fear of judgement and condemnation. I didn't understand what Holy meant but I understood that if God was God then He was holy and He was good and He was perfect and I wasn't. And so the only logical thing for God to do if I let Him get close to me was to judge me. I could just hear Him, "Well now let's have a look at your ledger, hmm, no you're not worthy. No you're not good enough, no go over there and sit in the corner." That would be logical, it would be fair too, but fortunately, fortunately God's grace isn't logical and His mercy isn't fair, maybe that's why they call it the Good News. It's a bit of a dilemma isn't it? Because when we look in the mirror we know that there are things that we're doing wrong and when we talk about the Holy Spirit and Holy God, holiness means that God is perfect that's why this week we're having a look at the Holy Spirit and me. Who or what is the Holy Spirit? And if I'm meant to get close to God, which I am and you are, how do we do that? When God and His Spirit is holy, perfect and I'm not and you're not. The Holy Spirit is the most misunderstood of the three persons who are God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit and I guess that's because we can understand Dad, we can understand Jesus the Son but we don't have a picture in our heads about this Holy Spirit. Earlier on this week we saw that it was an amazing part of Gods plan for us to have a really close intimacy with God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and Gods desire to take our life, which is sometimes a desert and to bring it to life, to put rivers of living water through it. To fill it with peace and joy and life, that's what Gods plan, is and it comes to life in us and through us, through His spirit, His holy spirit but me, I look at God and I'm just not up to it. Now some people these days would laugh at that, "Come on Berni. We're all good enough, if it feels good – do it. We eat and drink for tomorrow we die so let's just get on with it." But get those people in a quiet honest moment and that sense of deep inadequacy, of failure, of emptiness, of uncertainty, it's out there in plague proportions. And that very need is so often the thing that keeps us from drawing close to God, from seeking Him out and having an intimate real relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit who, over the last couple of days on the program we've seen that God promises us, if we believe in Jesus, if we give our lives over to Him, if we love Him and obey Him, He wants to fill us with the Holy Spirit. He wants to come and make His home in us through the Holy Spirit. This problem of us being imperfect and God being perfect, is something the Apostle Paul writes about. If you have a Bible you can check it out later in Romans, chapters 7 and 8. He writes something along these lines, he says: "You know what my problem is, I know what's good and I know what's bad and I want to do what's good but the problem is that I can want to do what's good but I just cant do it, in fact this is how it works for me, whenever I want to do good, evil is right here with me. There's nothing good in me," says Paul, "Nothing, I'm so wretched and pitiful. Who'll save me?" Thank God Jesus will. In fact," he writes, "there's no condemnation for those who believe in Jesus. None because in Jesus God did something that rules and regulations can't do. He did away with sin because Jesus paid the price with His own body on the cross and now that struggle between good and evil isn't my problem anymore because Jesus set me free from that. So here's the choice that I have, if I set my heart and my mind on things that are wrong, that's where I'll end up, an enemy of God but if I set my heart and mind on the things of God, on the things of His spirit, that's where I'll end up, with abundant life. It's not a self-help program anymore, if I draw close to the Holy Spirit, He's the one that changes me, He's the one that brings life to my otherwise dead body, He's the one that makes the freedom that Jesus bought for me on the cross a reality here and now in my life today." Isn't that great, Paul's coming to a realisation. I mean, here's a man, God gets him to write almost half the books in the New Testament, he has the same problem that you and I do. He knows what's good, he'd love to do it, he just can't and that's our problem. The self-help program doesn't work. We can pedal and struggle and try but ultimately we can't change ourselves. Paul is saying here, "You know something; I've finally figured it out. Even though I've made mistakes, even though I continue to make mistakes, I believe in Jesus and Jesus is my salvation and Jesus is the one through whom God forgives me and because of Jesus dying on the ...
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  • Experiencing God // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 3

    Experiencing God // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 3
    Nov 5 2025
    The only way we really get to know someone is to live with them. Problem is that today, that can just mean shacking up. But God has a plan to make His home in us – and it's so much more than what the world has to offer. The only way really to know someone is to live with them in the same house, day after day, year after year. Boy meets girl and they get engaged, they get married and on their honeymoon they think they already know each other but the reality is they don't really and they're going to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure one another out. That's the wonderful mystery of marriage. When I signed up with Jesus, when I made that decision to give my life to Him, to follow Him, I thought, "I just don't want some Sunday religion thing, I want to know Him and the only way to know someone is to live with them." Nowadays living together, couples just moving in, is an accepted part of life in our society. Many people decide never to get married at all. In any case the whole marriage thing, well it ain't what it used to be, somewhere between a third and a half of all marriages end in divorce. The idea is that you move in on your own terms without any permanent commitment and if you want you can leave, it's the way of the world, it's a lifestyle choice. Sounds good until you talk to someone who's been through divorce or been through a separation, when a man and a woman share each others homes and lives and souls and bodies and when they sleep in the same bed they become one flesh, that's Gods plan. The two become one and when you tear that apart it hurts something terrible, it's an unbelievable pain. So what about God? If we want to know Him we have to live with Him and that's the way it goes but what does that plan look like? What if it ends up in divorce? How do we live with God? Jesus has a plan, it's a beautiful, eternal, wonderful plan for you and me to get to know Him. And it's not like the worlds plan that says, "Stay as long as you feel like it." It's a perfect plan, it's a plan made on God's terms and not ours. Have a look at this, this is what Jesus said. We looked at this yesterday and I'd like to look at it again today. He says, "If you love me you'll obey what I command and I'll ask the Father and He will give you another counsellor to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world can't accept this spirit because it doesn't see Him or know Him but you know Him because He lives with you and He will be in you. I won't leave you as orphans, I'll come to you, before long the world won't see me anymore but you will because I live you'll live too and on that day you will realise that I am in my Father and you're in me and I'm in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them that one loves me and the one who loves me will be loved by my Dad and I too will love Him and show myself to Him and we will come and make a home with them." A promise of Jesus to be with us, in us, make His home with us through the Holy Spirit forever and ever and ever, but it's not for everyone. Let me say that very clearly, I was talking to a man a little while ago who wanted God but wanted to live his life on his own terms. He wanted the relationship but he didn't want to live it God's way. Look at what Jesus said again: If you love me you will obey my commandments and I will ask the Father and He will give you another counsellor to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. In other words this is on Jesus terms. If you love me, you'll obey me. Jesus isn't some cuddly lap dog, some fluffy soft toy, not some buddy to perform tricks when we want Him to and to get us out of a pickle. God is God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Not a bunch of rules, not saying you've got to do all these things in order for me to love you but if we want to be in a relationship with Him we have to be in that relationship on Gods terms. He is looking for someone with a heart that's open to learn from Him: If you love me, if you really love me you will want to obey my commands and I'll send another comforter just like me. I love that second bit. I'll send you the Holy Spirit to be with you forever. Not shacking up, not a try before you buy arrangement, I mean I accepted God as a teenager but as I grew up into adulthood I turned my back on Him, I wandered so far away I didn't even know if He still existed but He was still there in my hour of need because the promise of Jesus was: I'll be with you forever. And I'd accepted Him and for eighteen years I wandered in this wilderness and forgot all about Him but He didn't forget about me. And the third part of His promise, firstly that God will send us another counsellor, Holy Spirit who's just like Jesus. The second part is that He will be with us forever; the third part is a promise of intimacy. Jesus says, "I won't leave you as orphans, I'll come to you. The world won't see me but you will and I'll be in Dad and you'll be in me and we'll be together and I'll come and ...
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