A Different Perspective Official Podcast Podcast Por Berni Dymet arte de portada

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

De: Berni Dymet
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God has a habit of wanting to speak right into the circumstances that we're travelling through here and now; the very issues that we each face in our everyday lives. Everything from dealing with difficult people … to discovering how God speaks to us; from overcoming stress … to discovering your God-given gifts and walking in the calling that God has placed on your life And that's what these daily 10 minute A Different Perspective messages are all about.Christianityworks Cristianismo Espiritualidad Ministerio y Evangelismo
Episodios
  • Who Am I Really? // Power Unlimited, Part 5

    Who Am I Really? // Power Unlimited, Part 5
    Apr 10 2026
    One of the most perplexing questions that each of us faces in life at some point, is: Who am I? What was I made to do? All too often we go looking for the answers in all the wrong places, and the image that we build of ourselves, the understanding that we have of who we are, becomes twisted and distorted. That one thing has ruined … is ruining … many a life. One of the things that many people ponder in life is this question, "Who am I?" We have so many pictures and images of who we should be thrust under our noses each day … and yet none of them ring true, so we end up feeling a bit like refugees, lost. The media and the advertisers, they want to define success for us. They want to tell us what it means to be open-minded. They want to tell us what we should aspire to. They want to tell us what a happy, well adjusted family looks like, and what beauty looks like and what we have to achieve, who we have to be, what we have to look like, to be successful. They tell us if we don't look like this, we haven't made it, but we will if we buy their product and I don't know about you, but I can get so lost in that maze because my life never quite looks like those images of success that they wave under my nose. And we compare ourselves with other people, people who look successful and so often we come to the conclusion that we aren't. And so that question, "Who am I?" rattles around in that empty, hollow void inside. Who am I? Have you ever been to one of those fairs, you know where they have Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds and amusements and sideshows? And in side-show alley, they have those distorted mirrors. You know, you walk in front of one and you look all tall and skinny or short and fat or all wobbly and wavy. They're good fun for a little while, about a minute or two. But imagine, imagine if our mirrors at home were like that, all distorted … not good. I remember when I was working as an IT consultant one of the clients I used to work for, the front door of their offices had this glass that was a perfect distortion of me. It just made me look a bit slimmer and a bit taller, you know I could have stood in front of that door all day and looked at myself. We'd like to have a mirror like that at home, wouldn't we? Or would we? My hunch is, whenever we get a distorted image of ourselves, of who we are, that's not a good thing even if we happen to like the distorted image better than the real one. For example, the distorted image that society puts up that you can be whoever you want to be, it's all up to you, it's all out there, just go and be whoever you want to be. I'm 5 foot, 9 inches or 174 cm tall, so it doesn't matter how much I want to be a basketball player, I'm never going to be a basketball player. In fact there are some things in life that I am decidedly not good at. If I try to be those things, it would be a bad fit. Maybe that's why so many people aren't happy, because they're trying to do jobs or be someone that they're quite simply not cut out to be. Aspiring to something that we're never going to be any good at is one of the worst things that we can do in the world. I wonder if that's why there are so many people, who literally hate their jobs. I was looking at a recent 'job satisfaction' survey on the internet. Have a listen to these stats: 45% of workers say that they're either satisfied or extremely satisfied with their jobs. You know what that means? That means that 55%, or over half, aren't. Of those 45% who said they were happy, less than half again, in fact only 20% said that they felt really passionate about their jobs. That means that 80% of people don't feel passionate about their jobs and 33%, fully a third believed they'd reached a dead end in their careers, there was no hope for a future. 21% were eager to change careers. I think that these statistics are a tragedy. The vast majority of people aren't passionate about what they do every day. So many people aren't enjoying their lives. But …. let's look at the flipside of that coin. There's a whole bunch of people wandering around in life, believing with every fibre of their being, that they're worthless. 'Oh, I'm only a stay at home mum. I'm only a clerk. I'm not as smart or as good looking or as talented or as successful or as wealthy or whatever as the next person.' So many people and advertisers and product manufacturers and self styled guru's out there want to tell us who we should be and how we get there and if we aren't we need to get onto their program. Amidst all of that, here's a question, who am I? Who are you? In the cosmos, in the scheme of things, how do you define your worth and who you actually are? And if you're living your life that way, then you are living a powerless life. A life that will, ultimately, count for nothing. In a very real sense, that was the life that I was living, until I discovered what God said about me. How God sees me. What His view of me from Heaven's balcony looks like. And ...
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    10 m
  • What are His Plans and Purposes for Me? // Power Unlimited, Part 4

    What are His Plans and Purposes for Me? // Power Unlimited, Part 4
    Apr 9 2026
    Many people, many Christians even, let me say, live directionless, rudderless lives. Their lives don't seem to be heading anywhere in particular. And at some point, as we realise that life is slipping by ever so quickly, that shocks us into realising that before long, this life will be over … and for what? You know one of the most common things that we all experience at some point or other in our lives, is this dilemma, this crisis if you will, of, well where is my life headed? I think it's because somehow we're hardwired to have hope for the future, to be able to look forward to a good future, to have a sense of significance, to make our mark in this world. Where is my life headed? … can become a question of quite some desperation. And for our lives to be headed in the right direction we need a few things to come together. The way we live, the things that we can control, and the things that go on around us, the ones we can't control. That's not easy. It's almost an impossible juggling act. But … what if God has a plan? What if He has a purpose in the things that we've been travelling through? What if there's meaning behind it all, and He does want to do amazing things and He does want to be involved in the choices we make today? What if? Wouldn't you want to tap into that? I mean, wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't you want Him to speak those plans and purposes gently into your heart and let them make a difference for you, here and now? Just think … what a powerful way that would be to live. Yesterday we saw that the biggest thing that we can get out of the Bible is discovering God Himself, who He is, what He's like, how does He react to different situations and things? To me that is the greatest prize of them all, God Himself, getting to know Him, having a wonderful, rich relationship that just gets deeper and deeper as time goes by. Today I want to look at the second thing that I think the Bible is about, God's plans and God's purposes, both the big picture and specifically for you and me. The big picture is so important. What's Gods big plan? What's He up to? A friend and colleague of mine, Dr Graham Pratt, he and I were speaking a few years ago at an IT conference in Singapore. We were talking over coffee about some technology thing and he said to me, "Berni, context is so important, in fact in understanding something, context is almost everything." I'll never forget it, it's a pearl of wisdom. We want to know where our lives are headed, my life, my little piece of the puzzle, right? If we want to do that we need to understand the big picture; God's great plan as well as His specific plans and purposes for our lives. You know, when I read the Bible, the stories and the things that happened a long time ago, somehow God's plan for my life becomes so crystal clear. For me, life was just a 'here and now' thing. It was about wealth and career. In reality, it was empty, hollow, directionless. Where was it headed? What was the point? But when I encountered Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible, when I started listening to Him by reading the Bible, I began to get a handle on God's big picture. A big picture that's best summed up in something that God says over and over again: I will be your God and you will be my people. (Exodus 6:7) From the beginning to the end of the Bible, you see God saying that and explaining it and sending Jesus so that it could happen. They're not just words on a page. This is the very heartbeat of God to call us back to Himself, to call us back home, here and now and for all eternity, despite our rebellion, despite the fact that we rejected Him, despite all our mistakes; to give us a new life, an eternal life that's not about rules and regulations but a relationship with Him. And right through the whole Bible you see Him engaging with people and drawing them closer, people just like you and me, people in their weaknesses and their failures and yet He loves them and touches them and reaches out to them. Okay, we see His anger too sometimes, you see God getting angry and yet despite that He still reaches out to people from in the midst of His anger and that's where we discover His grace and we see Jesus dying on a cross for you and me. As we read those stories over and over again, His heartbeat touches ours, His desire touches us, His grace wraps itself around us and through us. I've only just started to wrap my heart around that as I've spent twenty odd years listening to Him, hearing His words and His stories and His heartbeat in the pages of that wondrous book – the Bible. You know, you open the Bible and you read the story of Jesus dying on the cross and crying out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46) And from the pages of that book we hear God crying out to you and me, here and now; "Don't you realise how much I love you". And you know, as well as this big picture of God's engagement of all humanity and His plans for humanity as a whole, the thing...
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    10 m
  • Who Exactly is God? // Power Unlimited, Part 3

    Who Exactly is God? // Power Unlimited, Part 3
    Apr 8 2026
    God is so profoundly different to anyone or anything that this world has to offer. His ways are so different to our ways, and unless and until we have a personal encounter with the risen Christ, unless and until we encounter Jesus in our own, personal experience, our lives simply cannot be transformed. Who or what is God? Well you go out and ask different people and what you discover is that they have a picture of God in their heads that doesn't always have a whole bunch to do with who God actually is. It's almost like we reconstruct Him in our own image, to suit ourselves, to suit our own agendas, but let me ask you something, if God is God wouldn't it be worthwhile kind of figuring out exactly who He is? IF God has the power, is the power, to transform our lives, shouldn't we get to know Him? I mean, who is He really and how do you and I relate to Him? What if God is awesome and powerful and loving and kind and we spend the rest of our lives missing out on all that because we never really went after Him to discover who He really is? So how do we discover who God really is? This week on the program we're setting about laying hold of God's power to completely and utterly transform our lives. And the place that we discover that power, the place that God the Holy Spirit has made available for us to lay hold of that power – is His Word, the Bible. I mean reading the Bible was something I would never have done in a million years. What do you think I am, some wacky fundamentalist? But you know something, reading the Bible for myself has completely and utterly transformed my life. It didn't stunt me, it opened me up. It didn't narrow my mind; it opened me up to the wonder and the possibilities of life with God, to the power that God wants to unleash in my life. Over the last twenty or so years I guess I've spent a lot of time in that Book, in fact its 66 different books. I've had the chance to study and to learn and to think and to mull it all over and truly, in those twenty odd years I've really only scratched the surface. But the more I think about it, the Bible is basically about four things: Who God is, what He's like and how He reacts to things.What God's will and purposes are, what His plan is.Where my life is headed. It's about who I am, made in His image but how does He see me? Who did He make me to be?And … how I can respond to God. Some people think this last one, number four, is all that the Bible has to offer; just rules and regulations … but you know, as you read it for yourself, how to respond to God is quite simply not the main thing, it just kind of drops out at the end, it's the natural consequence of the first three. Those four things again are: who God is, what His will and purposes are, who you and I are in His eyes and how we can respond. That's what the Bible contains, it's real and it's practical, it's about life, it's awesome and it's exciting and it contains power … power unlimited to transform you, to transform your life, to heal you, to bless you, to empower you. Today I just want to look at the first one of those; who God is. I mean if God is God, shouldn't we figure out who He is? Who He says He is? Where better to do that, to search Him out, than that great love letter that He's written to you and to me, the Bible. It makes sense, doesn't it? When I first laid eyes on my wife Jacqui, when I first saw her from a distance, I was speaking at a Church and she was sitting in that congregation. As far as I was concerned, she was just another face in the crowd and had I never sought her out, I would never have come to know her and to have a relationship with her. So, I did seek her out and she responded to that. In a sense, picking up the Bible is seeking God out, it's the same thing, He responds. It's not a dead book written by men thousands of years ago. It's the living, active word of God and His promise is that when we pick it up, the Holy Spirit, God Himself, will bring it to life in our hearts. God promised that He would pour His Spirit out on all flesh and that He would write His words onto our heart. By far, the greatest reason for reading the Bible, is to encounter God Himself, to discover who He is, and how He sees things; what He's like and what He's up to. You see, it's easy to read this story or that in the Bible and say, "Well that was a story about King David" or "That one over there, that's the story about Moses or Peter or Paul". But so often in the pages of this great and mighty book, the great unseen player is God Himself and as I read every story, every verse, I keep asking myself, "What does this tell me about God Himself? What's He up to in this story?" Let's take just one example, it's a short story. God makes a promise to this man called Abram who is childless. You know, Abram's an old man, his wife Sarai is an old woman, they're childless and yet God has called them to go from their home on this huge journey. God's promised them children, a ...
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    10 m
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