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
  • Real Life Blessings // The Best of the Best, Part 5

    Real Life Blessings // The Best of the Best, Part 5
    Dec 5 2025
    A while back, we received a prayer request from Peter, who's been struggling with his weight – it's affecting his health, his family. It's ruining his life. Is Jesus in that place with Peter – and if He is, can He make a difference? Good day! Great that we can get together again. Well, it's Friday, and on Friday we always do something different. We look at somebody's prayer request that we have received. This week we received a request from Peter. He said, "I've been overweight for a long time now and have trouble with eating too much. I'm pretty lazy; I don't have any motivation. I'm on anti-depressants which doesn't help either. Please pray that I will have the will to stop myself from overeating and get off my backside and go for a walk. I have a lot of health issues surrounding my weight problem, and I'm sick of it. I want to be a fit dad and a good husband, and to do God's work to extend His kingdom. Thanks for the very powerful prayer ministry that you have in Jesus' name." There's a fine line, isn't there, between bad habits and addictions? Let's have a look whether God is in the middle of this weight-loss problem of Peter's. I've got another confession to make today. I love food. I always have and I always will. I grew up in a European household, and my mother cooked all these beautiful goulash dishes with cream and butter. I can't help it. I love food, and I love cooking shows on television. I love to watch Kylie Quan and Jamie Oliver, and they cook up these beautiful meals. But what always strikes me about friend Jamie and Kylie and others like them is the amount of olive oil and butter and sugar and cream that they pour into their cooking. And I've said once before on radio, and I'll say it again, if I ate that much fattening, sweet stuff, I would be the size of a house. The underlying kind of ethos that is behind that is that you can have it all and there are no consequences. Now we'd like to believe that, but it ain't true. My father was a diabetic. He died of diabetic complications, and it was one of the most horrible and ugly deaths I have ever seen. So if I follow wrong behavior in the area of eating, as obviously Peter is, there are consequences for me. And I am very likely to get diabetes and follow my father's footsteps and die an ugly death. The same is true, not just with food, but when we do stupid things or when we do wrong things or when we're addicted to bad things, it can ruin our life. The same is true, for instance, of work. If we work too hard, we don't have any balance in our lives, we become exhausted; people burn out. If we don't work enough, we don't have enough money to live. If we don't sleep enough, we end up being really tired. If we're lazy, if we're unreliable - all of those things follow the same life principle, as unpopular as it is, bad behavior leads to bad consequences. Let me say that again, bad behavior leads to bad consequences. To Peter, the consequences are health issues; there are emotional issues. He is on anti-depressants. He is sick of himself. Doubtless, his self-esteem is really low, because people look at him when he goes out. It's an impact on his marriage, on his family, on his health, and on his ability to do God's work all because, put very plainly and simply, Peter is putting too much food into his mouth and not exercising enough. It sounds simple, but Peter is addicted to eating. I relate to that. I've always struggled with weight all my life and had to go through a process of losing over 20 kilos because I was eating too much. And even now, if I have a really heavy dinner, I feel lethargic at night. I end up not sleeping well at night. And if I keep doing it, I will probably end up with diabetes. What to do? Peter is a man, who by his own testimony there believes in Jesus Christ. So if he dies tomorrow he has eternal life. All of these problems will go away and for eternity he'll live with Jesus. The question is, "Does he want to live the way he's living now between now and when he goes to be with the Lord?" And the answer from his email is absolutely no, and yet he lacks motivation. There's an old Chinese proverb, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." And it's that first step that is mostly the hardest. How to get motivated? Well there are some extreme ways to get motivated. I gave up cigarette smoking 24 years ago now, because I was with someone when they died of cancer. And though I was smoking three packets a day, I threw the packet of cigarettes into the bin at the hospital. And since that day I have never had a single cigarette. I guess it's extreme because it takes you to the end of your life. And you look at the consequences of your behavior and you say, "Do I want to end up like that"? That's a powerful thing to do. Do I want to end up like that? But what about the spiritual dimension? The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Philippian church in chapter 2, verse 13, "God is at work in us, enabling ...
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    10 m
  • Living a Resurrected Life Today // The Best of the Best, Part 4

    Living a Resurrected Life Today // The Best of the Best, Part 4
    Dec 4 2025
    If Jesus really rose from the dead all that time ago, if it really, truly happened….well, what does it mean to us today? What's the relevance? What's the point? This week on the program we are taking a bit of a look at this whole "resurrection" thing, because on the one hand it's so central to everything that Jesus talked about, and everything that Christians believe. But on the other hand, well, it can be hard to relate to that. I mean, how does it fit into real life today? I'm not sure where you are in terms of believing in Jesus and in particular in His resurrection. But let's assume for a moment that He did rise again from the dead; that's certainly where I'm at, it's kind of at the centre of everything I believe. Well, if He did rise from the dead, what does that mean to you and me, here and now, what relevance is there in all of that? Can the resurrection of Jesus Christ have an impact on your life and my life, here, now, today? Good questions! I mean why have a resurrection at all? Why did God plan it that way and why did He make it central to believing in Jesus? Yesterday we saw how the Apostle Paul said it was absolutely essential. Without faith in that there's no point. In Romans chapter 10 verse 9, he says, "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you'll be saved." And in First Corinthians 15:17 he says, "If Christ hasn't been raised, then you faith is futile." OK, well, that's the theology, if you like, let's take that at face value. But why is it so important? Why does God put it right at the centre of believing in Jesus - eternal life! I'm a pesky bloke; I keep asking these questions because people never really explained this stuff to me, in terms that I could really understand and grasp. And that made a difference in my life. All these Christians were talking about this whole "resurrection" thing like it was really important and I thought, "that's great, but why?" Believing in Jesus for me is a process, it's a whole life long thing. At some point I took a step of faith to believe in Him. I didn't understand everything, but what I discovered was there were lots of different parts of my life that just didn't fit with Him - selfishness, anger, being judgmental, all stuff that actually stunted my life. It's crazy how we want to hold onto that rubbish for dear life. But you know we do and it turns out all along, it's robbing us of life. I used to spend most of my time being angry with people because they didn't measure up to my standards - I'm a perfectionist - and they didn't see the world my way, and so I'd be angry with them all the time. And you know it robbed me of life - instead of peace and joy I always had anger and resentment in my heart. It's not rocket science but so many people do this stuff. It's one thing to believe with our head or our hearts in Jesus but it's quite another to believe with our lives. And to do that requires change and that's were the resurrection comes in. The Apostle Paul writes this in Romans chapter 8, he says: If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you. Let's unpack that for a minute. There was the death and the crucifixion of Jesus where He paid for our sins. He paid for the fact that we turned our back on God and we went our own way, and we missed the whole point of creation which was to have a relationship with God. And before you jump down my throat and say "sin" is an old fashioned word. That the Greek word that the Bible uses for sin, literally means 'to miss the point", and we looked at that last week. God is a loving God but He's a just God and we have all fallen short of His standard and His plan - we've all missed the point. And when we believe that Jesus died for us, the slate is wiped clean; we are forgiven completely by God, we're forgiven; we've a fresh start. And that's fantastic! But you and I know that getting rid of that rubbish that God calls 'sin' is a life long process. Come on, we are naturally selfish, we naturally hang on to the things - I wanted to be self-righteous - I still have someone pull in a car in front of me and I'll be angry with them and I want to blow my horn and I want to … you know, that's me. Someone does wrong and somehow we want anger and revenge and we want to pay them back, and Jesus said, "Well, you want to believe in me, believe in me with your life. Show me, go and love your enemy, in fact, go and pray for your enemy." I don't know about you but that way of living just didn't come naturally to me. It's a process of changing but changing those things is hard. It's very, very hard, and in fact, in some areas, it's downright impossible. We just want to hang on and hang on and hang on and let the poison get in our system and ruin our lives. Paul bemoans that very thing in Romans chapter 7, he says, "I can will to...
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  • Precious in His Sight // The Best of the Best, Part 3

    Precious in His Sight // The Best of the Best, Part 3
    Dec 3 2025
    We live in a time of mass production. Commodities are just churned out. People have become … just a commodity. But not in God's eyes…..that's what makes you so very special. I sometimes think about the times when Jesus was training to be a carpenter in his Dad's carpenter shop. The wooden things that he made, we don't really know but probably chairs and tables and doors and door frames, even coffins I guess, it's ironic that ultimately he was nailed to two bits of wood. I can't imagine he ever turned out any shoddy work, I can't imagine he ever made a table that wasn't straight or level or a chair that wasn't solid or a door that didn't fit into the door jam. Well what if he applied the same level of perfection to you and me? What if when we were created he was there? And what does that do to our view of Easter? Yesterday and again today we're looking at Psalm 139 because it's about Gods motivations behind Easter. Psalm 139 is to me like a door into God's heart, to see what was going on inside when He dreamt up this whole Easter thing. We had a look at the first part yesterday and we saw that God knows us so intimately and He's on the journey of life with us, not way off at a distance, not disinterested but right in the middle of it with us. Everywhere we go, even when it's dark and stormy and painful He's light shines in the middle of all of that. That's huge, to know that God is walking every step of the way with us, there's know where we can go and be alone or apart from God, if we go to heaven he's there, if we go to hell he's there if we fly to the farthest ends to the earth he's still there. But how is it that God knows us so well? I mean sometimes we don't even know ourselves that well do we? We can't explain why we do what we do or why we reacted to something the way we did, I mean you and I are pretty complex creatures; there is so many layers to our personality and who we are. Some things are so deep inside us that we can't ever really understand them ourselves or even talk about them. How does God know? Well, the Psalmist in Psalm 139 goes on to explain that to us, and we're going to read that right now. We're reading from Psalm 139 beginning at verse 13. "For you God, you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb, God I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are so wonderful I know that full well. My frame wasn't hidden from you when I was made in that secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed substance. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." This is one of the most precious passages in the Bible to me, as we look back on our lives what we see is a mixture of wonderful and desperate, beautiful and ugly, we've done some brilliant things and we done some really, really stupid things, there are great highs and there are dark valleys. But when you and I were conceived God was there, our innermost parts, who we are, our DNA blueprint, the way that we'd look and sound and all our gifts and abilities and strengths and weaknesses, all that complexity He created our innermost being. He knit us together in our Mother's womb; you and I are handcrafted by God, one of a kind, distinctive, completely, utterly amazingly, beautifully, wondrously made. Separate and different from every other person who ever lived, and every person who ever will live, intricately woven, each strand of DNA laid down according to His plan. And not only that God wasn't in control just of who we are but of everything that would ever happen to us. Look at this again, "all the days ordained for me, all the days set apart for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." That's why I so despair when I meet people who waste away there lives worrying and complaining about their lot. Yeah some people have better lives that others, some people seem to get all the breaks and the benefits and the blessings and other people seem to get handed difficult and painful lives, just like Jesus, just like the Apostle Paul. I was just talking, having a cup of coffee just recently with a couple and we were talking about just this, how come God does something mighty and powerful in this persons life and this other person God takes years to do what He's going to do? I don't know! But it's about God's plan, about God's glory. There's a wonderful poem call The Weaver, you may have heard me read it once before, have a listen, it's beautiful. "My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me. I cannot choose the colours as He weaveth steadily, Sometimes He chooses dark threads and I in foolish pride Forget He sees the upper and I the underside. Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly Shall God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why The dark threads were as needful in the weaver's skilful hand As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He hath planned....
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    10 m
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