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
  • The Path of Simplicity // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 3

    The Path of Simplicity // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 3
    Nov 26 2025
    We all try to put our best foot forward in life. Fair enough. But eventually, we can find ourselves trying to impress people rather than being ourselves. So – should we try to impress God – or is it come as you are? One way or another, we all try and put our best foot forward. When we go for a job interview, we make sure that we're dressed well and our hair is combed and we go in with a smile and we say the right things. When friends come over to visit, we tidy up the house. And in one sense, there's nothing wrong with that. But we live in a world, well, it rewards us for how we look or what we do or the size of our pay packet. You know what I mean. And so we can end up on this treadmill. Whatever that looks like in our different circles or cultures, way deep down inside, we end up believing that life is about – impressing people. That's why so many of the experiences available out there in the spiritual marketplace are about getting off that treadmill – relaxation, massage, meditation, aromatherapy, feng shui to design a tranquil home. But what about God? Is having a relationship with Him about keeping up appearances or getting off that treadmill? This week on "A Different Perspective", we're looking at the whole subject of experiencing God. If you were with us the other day, we talked about the fact that there are two ways of knowing something. We can know it as fact, as head knowledge. And we can know it in experience. We can know that we should eat more fruit because it's healthy for us, it's good for us and it will reduce heart disease and diabetes. We know that. But it's not until we experience the fruit that we go, "Wow! That's really good!" Three thousand years ago, David said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 32:8) In other words, experience Him for yourself in a relationship. Yesterday, we spoke about desire. The need for us to have a God-given desire to want to have a relationship with Him. Any relationship needs to have an element of desire, a spark, a flame. Without desire a relationship goes nowhere. As the deer pants after streams of living water so my soul pants after you our God. (Psalm 42:1) Some psalmist wrote that three thousand years ago. Today, I'd like to talk about one of the biggest obstacles to experiencing and enjoying a relationship with God. It's the feeling that deep down inside (somewhere), "Well, I'm just not good enough. I have to get my act together before I can go and talk to God." It's that idea that somehow sitting down with God to pray is … well, it's like a bit of a job interview. You put your face on. You wear the right clothes. You say the right things. You smile. It's about appearances. There's a formula, you know, we need to impress God Well, is that right? Do we need to put on good clothes to talk to God? Do we need to impress God? Well, let's see what Jesus said. If you're interested, you can find this quote in the very first book of the New Testament, Matthew's gospel, chapter 11:25-26. This is what He said. He said: "Father, Dad" He loved calling Him Dad. "I praise you because you have concealed your ways from the know-it-all(s); from the people who think of themselves as being sophisticated and intelligent. But you spelled them out clearly to ordinary people." Question: What sort of people do you like to socialise with? I mean, do you like to hang around with hoity-toity people, the know-it-all(s), the people who always have a face on and they're part of the set? Or would you rather hang around with plain, ordinary people, no face, no pretence, what you see is what you get, no effort to impress. Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean it's much nicer to be around people, who are just themselves, who just relax, who don't have a need to always compete. And put their best foot forward. Well, so why wouldn't God feel exactly the same? It turns out that He does according to Jesus. And so we go to God, when we stand before God and say, "Lord, here I am". There are some really good things in our lives, some things that we do well, some things that we're enjoying. And there are some pretty lousy things sometimes in our lives. Things that in our heart of hearts we know that we're doing the wrong things that we know we could do better – failures, hurts. And we have a choice. We can either stand in front of God and try to impress him and put a face on. And what Jesus said was, "Father I thank you that you have hidden and concealed all your ways from the know-it-all(s)" – the people who think of themselves as sophisticated. So, if we go to God like that, here's a promise from Jesus, God will hide Himself from someone who comes to Him like that. Or we can go to God just as we are. But here's the crunch and you see it in the Apostle Paul as he was writing and as he grew in his maturity in his relationship with God. The closer we get to God, the more the light of His love and His presence shines into our hearts. The more painfully aware ...
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    10 m
  • The Spark of Desire // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 2

    The Spark of Desire // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 2
    Nov 25 2025
    Any relationship needs a spark of desire to make it fire. Friendships. Marriages. Families. Work. Desire is a key ingredient of a lasting relationship. Well – what about God? Relationships, they're a funny thing – boy meets girl, courtship, romance, engagement, marriage, honeymoon – what an exciting time! This passion, this desire, they enjoy each other to the full. Then they have kids. Sleepless nights, there's the mortgage, paying off the credit card, arguments, pressure and almost half, end in divorce. Of course, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. But somewhere along the way (somewhere), the fire goes out. The flame, the passion, the desire to be together – they evaporate. Not that relationships are all about passion and desire. But on the other hand it's pretty important. Wouldn't you agree, in making a marriage hang together? Well, what about our spirituality? Does desire, does passion have a role to play in our spiritual lives? When it comes to our spirituality, I believe that experience has an important role to play. Yesterday, on A Different Perspective we talked about the fact that there are two ways of knowing things. There's like head knowledge, a series of facts, a series of dot points and head knowledge is really important. But it's not until we marry that with experience that we can really say that we know something. Remember, if you were with us that we talked about fruit. It's one thing to know that we should eat more fruit because it's good for us. It's another thing entirely to bite into a banana or a mandarin or a peach and go, "Wow, that fruit is really nice!" Three thousand years ago, King David of Israel wrote this. He said: Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 32:8). When we look at the spiritual marketplace in the twenty-first century, crystals, eastern design of religions (you know, design your own), astral travel, the all-called "crossing over", "feng shui", you know, people designing their houses to be tranquil according to what they believe to be spiritual principles. It's all about taking spirituality and trying to experience it in life. And so sadly those same people will look at Christianity, they look at Jesus, they look at the cross and think, "No, no, no, no. That's boring, that's … I know the public image of that, that's just a set of rules." But what if God's plan is that we can have the most amazing experience of Him, here and now. I mean an authentic spiritual experience. All those other things; crystals and feng shui and the eastern design of religions; they involve things or forces or notions or feelings or idols. And yet, with God, with Jesus, it gets really personal. We forget sometimes … God isn't a stained glass window. He's not a book. He's not a bunch of rules. He's not pew, He's not a hymn. God's a person and we forget that. Deep in His mighty heart, God thinks, God wills, God feels, God suffers, God laughs, God cries. And if God's a person, then it follows that we can have a relationship with this person. Not a "thing" not a "concept" not a statue, a person. Jesus is the very image of God. It's Jesus who loved and laughed and cried and wept. That's God, that's what He looks like. There was a man by the name of A.W. Tozer who wrote in the mid twentieth century. He was a great writer. And at the time that he was writing, it was that whole time of science and post-war. You know, science was going to make things better. And it was all that head knowledge, it was all the go. And there the space race was starting and modernization and we were all getting kitchen gadgets and so on. He was writing straight into that and have a listen what he wrote into that space. He said: Look, where the modern scientists have lost God amid the wonders of His world, it's a real danger that we could lose God amid the wonders of His Word, the facts, the things we believe. We've almost forgotten that God is a person and as such we can have a personal relationship with Him. In this hour of all but universal darkness, one cheering gleam appears. Within the fold of conservative Christians there are people, increasing numbers of people, whose spiritual lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They won't be put off with words or shallow logic. They won't be content to busy themselves with nervous activity. And yet to still to know an inner emptiness. These people have a thirst for God. They won't be satisfied until they've drunk deep at the fountain of living water. There are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, they're just unable to reconcile themselves with this continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. There's a thirst to taste for themselves this piercing sweetness at the love of Christ about whom the prophets wrote and the psalmists sang. They want to taste. They want to touch with their hearts; they want to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God. I want deliberately to encourage this ...
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    10 m
  • Tasting and Seeing // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 1

    Tasting and Seeing // Taste and See That He Is Good, Part 1
    Nov 24 2025
    We should eat more fruit. We know that…..but it's not until we taste the banana and smell the mandarin – that we go – oh, that's good. It's the experience that seals the deal. But what about God – how do we know that He's good? We've all heard that nutritionists say that we should eat more fruit. It's good for us. There's the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals and the colorful fruits have antioxidants in them that reduce the risk of cancer. The more fruit we eat, the lower the risk of heart disease and on it goes. We know all that stuff. But somehow it doesn't sink in, we keep eating chocolate, biscuits, cakes. It turns out that all the head knowledge under the sun won't change our behavior, even if it's a life or death issue. Staggering, isn't it? Even though we could avoid diabetes or add even five or ten years to our lives by simply applying what we know, nothing much changes. So what will change our behavior? That's a good question. It turns out that there are kind of two ways of knowing something. The first is head knowledge. We go back to the fruit – there are a whole bunch of nutritional and health facts that are very important, but they're kind of uninspiring. On their own, facts are dry. And indeed, the facts can be a source of guilt and fear. I'm somebody whose father died of diabetes and so I'm prone to diabetes. I know that I should eat more fruit and more bran and all of those good things. And if I don't, the facts become a source of fear and dread and lurking guilt knowing that I'm eating my way to death. The other way of knowing something is through experience, experiencing something in real life. The way to experience the benefits of eating more fruit, well, is to eat more fruit. It's something that I've had to do given the risk that I have of contracting diabetes as I become older. It has been a really important source of motivation for me. But when you pick a banana up out of the fruit bowl – you know that beautiful, ripe and yellow. And it has that smell and you peel the back and you bite into that soft but firm texture of a banana – you can only get that taste, that sensation in a banana. Or mandarins – mandarins where I am are really good at the moment. You know, one of those mandarins that's soft and the skin's kind of bubbling away a little bit and you just put your finger nail in to break the skin and immediately this pungent odor fills your nostrils. I love mandarins, or a crisp juicy apple, or plums, sweet grapes. I love the Isabella variety; they have muskiness to them. They're made just to pop in your mouth. Is your mouth-watering yet? Do you feel like reaching for a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl? Experience is a way of knowing. So on the one hand, we have a pile of chips and chocolate and biscuits and cakes and junk food. And over here in the other pile (in the fruit bowl), we have all those beautiful fruits: mandarins, nectarines, apricots, bananas, apples and pineapples. And the way we go from a habit of junk food to a habit of good food, there are two parts to that: First is the important part – we kind of have to know that we need to do it. We need to know some of those basic nutritional facts to motivate us. But the second part is experience. The second part is tasting and seeing that the fruit is good. It's the good taste of the fruit. It's the pleasure that we get out of the fruit – it makes it habit-forming. I have to tell you, I'm going to have a mandarin when I go home today because I know there are a couple of really nice ones sitting in the fruit bowl at home and I know I'm going to enjoy them. When you look at it historically, over the last, well, umpteen centuries, the pendulum has always swung in the way that we know something. Back in the 1940's and 1950's and in the early '60's the emphasis was on head knowledge. It was on dot points. I remember at school we used to memorize things by lists of dot points. These days, however, the pendulum has swung almost completely the other way and we're not interested so much in the knowledge as the experience. We like to experience things, to taste life to its full. And it turns out that knowledge on its own is dry. Experience on its own, well, it's kind of vacuous, it's kind of empty. It's great for a while, but without the knowledge, there's no anchor. There's no foundation. People feel empty and skeptical. Look at Christianity, look at how we believed in God. Back in the '50's and '60's, it was a series of creeds. It was knowing the facts, it was the head knowledge. It was knowing the information that we believed in. And don't get me wrong, I think that's actually very important particularly today. I think it's important to know what it is that we believe. But if it stops just there, if it's just a series of dot points on a page or a series of chapters in a book, well, you can separate that right from life. You can take the book and put it on a shelf. You can take the page and leave it ...
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    10 m
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