Question – would you let a lunatic into the driver’s seat of your car? Answer. Probably not. Driving’s a serious business. So … can I ask you who’s in the driver’s seat of your life. Because living is a serious business, right?

Driving a car, as it turns out, is a serious business. The moment we get behind that wheel we’re in control of a lethal weapon but how often do people actually think about that before they unlock the car door, hop in, hopefully strap on their seatbelt and turn the key in the ignition.

Most of us don’t think about it at all and to be honest I’ve been driving since I was seventeen and now I’m well into my fifties and until March last year I didn’t think too much about it either. I’d just hop into the car, turn the key in the ignition and off we go.

I was an aggressive driver because of my personality type. See, I want to get to where I’m going as quickly as possible so I’d tail gate people, I’d blast the horn. Yeah I still do that now and then. I’d zip in and out of the traffic without really thinking too much about the consequences. When I was young in my late teens, early twenties I had a couple of accidents, but nothing since then. A couple of speeding tickets that’s all. But in March last year everything changed.

My children bought me at my request an advanced driving course as a Christmas present and so along I went out to the race track to do my advanced driving course. Now somehow in my head I imagined I’d be learning how to drive faster still, how to zip in and out of the traffic more effectively. But instead they taught me about the consequences of driving like a lunatic.

The morning was spent in the classroom and the afternoon out on the race track in our cars. By the end of the day I came to the realisation for the past thirty years there’d been a lunatic behind the wheel of my car – me! A bit like that crazy gorilla I was talking about earlier.

It’s not that I’m an overly bad person. It’s not that I was intentionally being a lunatic about my driving and in any case my driving wasn’t all that outrageous. Plenty of people drive like that. But once I listened to someone who knew what they were talking about, an expert in their field, once I hopped into my car and participated in some control tests – what were in fact relatively low speeds and discovered the consequences of the way I’d been driving, well I was confronted with the reality that my behaviour behind the wheel, unwitting though it may have been, was putting my life at risk, the lives of the people I love most, my family, and the lives of other people on the road.

It was a shock I can tell you and that shock, being confronted with the deadly consequences of my behaviour resulted in an instant change in the way I drive a car. In fact these days I see people doing what I used to do and immediately I think, “how can you do something crazy like that?” Oh yeah, I remember exactly how.

My view, everyone who drives a car needs to do one of these advanced driving courses because they bring us face to face with the consequences of our actions.

Now if driving a car is a serious business then living your life is even more of a serious business. What we believe, how we see ourselves, what we think, what we say, what we do, our relationships, our loves, how we cope with adversity, how we cope with success, how we live our lives. That’s a serious business. Steering our lives through all the obstacles and hurdles this world throws up at us from beginning to end. Can I ask you a question? Who’s in the driver’s seat of your life? Is it a lunatic or is it someone with a good heart, a wise head, a steady hand?

Let’s say a bit like going to an advanced driving instructor, you paid a forensic psychologist to review your life: your attitudes, your successes, failures, how you handled them, the depth and effectiveness of your relationships, your whole life.

What might they find? What sort of score card would you end up with? If someone brought you face to face with the consequences of some of your wrong attitudes towards others, perhaps your own perception of yourself, your foibles, your insecurities and all that stuff, how would you go?

The sort of life we end up living comes back to who or what is in the driver’s seat. It comes back to the skill and the wisdom and the integrity and the insight of whoever is driving our lives. And even though most of us have had the opportunity to get some sort of education as children and teenager’s, it seems that the whole thing of educating us, how to drive our lives is left somewhat to chance.

Some cultures handle it quite well but others, in fact the more affluent cultures where people see themselves primarily as individuals rather than members of a family or members of a community, we don’t handle this life education stuff that well at all.

So where do you go? How do you get the sort of input into your life that sets your course in the right direction? Here are the words of the very first Psalm in the Old Testament of the Bible. Have a listen to this:

Happy are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers but their delight is in the word of God on which they meditate day and night. Those people are like trees planted by streams of water that yield their fruit in the season and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do they prosper.

The wicked on the other hand aren’t like that; they’re like chaff that the wind blows away.

I’ll be honest with you, academically I’m a pretty smart guy but when it came to actually living my life I didn’t have a lot of wisdom. Being smart and being wise are two entirely different things and so unwittingly I wasn’t living the sort of life that I had the potential to live. I wasn’t taking what I was smart at, what I was good at and using it for others with wisdom and compassion. So I wasn’t that happy at all.

The turning point came for me when I let someone else take the drivers seat. The turning point for me was when I let God drive for a while, for a long while. When I started listening to His words, what He has to say. Then all of a sudden my life started yielding the fruit it was always meant to yield in due season.

So let me ask you again, who’s in your driver’s seat? Huh? When we give our lives over to Jesus, all of our lives, every part, lock, stock and barrel it’s not that we become like automatons, like mindless zombies, it’s exactly the opposite.

Just stop and think about this, God made you and me who we are, He knows what we’re good at, He knows the things we aren’t good at and when we stop taking the advice of the wicked, when we stop treading the path that sinners tread, we stop sitting in the seat of scoffers as though somehow we’re in a position to judge the world, hey something awesome happens.

We discover the freedom we’ve been looking for: we discover that we were made with a purpose. We’ve been given some gifts and abilities that are absolutely unique and special and when we live out who God made us to be according to His wisdom and His ways, when we drink in His words and wisdom, the way a thirsty tree sends it’s roots down into the soil to draw up the water, then you can’t help it.

Fruit starts to appear, we produce the goodness and the yield we were designed and hand crafted to produce and look maybe you know something that I don’t but there isn’t one thing on this planet that I’ve found to be more satisfying, more fulfilling than being who God made me to be and doing what God made me to do.

Producing the fruit that others get to eat, the fruit He always planned for me to produce but it only started happening when I got out of the road and let Jesus hop into the driver’s seat. Can I ask you again, who is in the drivers seat of your life?

Question – what motivates you to get up out of bed every day and do the things you do? And secondly are those motivations resulting in the sense of contentment and fulfilment that you’re looking for?

So the alarm clock goes off again tomorrow morning, great, you switch it off, into the bathroom, get dressed, have breakfast and then we’re off and running. For some of us it’s off to work, maybe you have a long commute ahead or maybe you work from home. You get to your work place, pick up your tools of trade whatever they are, for me it’s a keyboard and a phone, and the day begins. Or maybe you’re a stay at home mother. Other people think, “boy wouldn’t it be great to be able to stay at home and not have to go to work”.

Hey, but the novelty of staying at home wore off ages ago. Kids are hard work right? Housework is boring and tiresome and no one, no one seems to appreciate it. If only the kids would say thank you from the bottom of their hearts that you made up their lunches. If only your husband would appreciate the clean house and the meal you put on the table at night.

Maybe you live alone, a lot of older people do. The day is going to be lonely and long and empty so you try and sleep in for as long as you can but, well somehow you seem to be waking up much earlier these days.

Some people seem to have such exciting jobs. I remember when I had a consulting firm almost every week I was off flying somewhere and people would look at me and say, “wow, I wish I had his job”. Little did they know I was so sick of taxis and airports and hotels, planes and landing and scrambling to get to my meetings.

I’ve been to the USA so many times I can’t count the number of times. I’ve flown over the top of the Grand Canyon and looked down from the plane and thought, “you know one day I’d love to be able to go and see that place”. And there’s a hotel in New Zealand, in Wellington where I’ve stayed one hundred and eight times. That’s a hundred and eight return trips between Australia and New Zealand.

So even what appears to be glamorous or desirable really ends up being a grind. So I’m going to come back to it, whatever your lot in life is, however you spend your day, however glamorous it may appear to other people, however boring it may appear to you, what motivates you to get up and get out of bed every day?

Is it just you have to get up, you have to go to work, you have to do that long commute and sit there in that cubicle and do that job because that’s what pays the mortgage and that’s what puts food on the table and that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’s always going to be?

Can I tell you, the tragic truth is that that’s precisely how it is for a lot of people. They’re stuck on this endless merry go round of life and drudgery and pressure and stress that has precious little in it to be motivated about at all. You might wonder, how is it that Berni can describe that reality so accurately. Well it’s because I lived a lot of my life just that way. There was nothing in it to motivate me and to give me satisfaction or joy.

Now let me just say I did have some motivations, I wanted to make a lot of money, and I was on the way to that. I wanted to be successful, and to some degree I was. I wanted to be a recognised leader in my industry and to be sure, people knew who I was and my consulting services were very much in demand.

Those were my motivations but there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They’re motivations, you’d think, that if realised would bring a great degree of satisfaction and contentment. Yeah there was a bit of that but it was fleeting, it was elusive, it didn’t last. Deep down at the end of each day when I laid my head on that pillow that sense of achievement and satisfaction of what I’d achieved that day simply wasn’t there and of course in just a few hours that alarm clock will be off again and off we’d go.

Come on, what are your motivations? What gets you up out of bed every day? What are your hopes and dreams? And most importantly are they the sort of motivations and hopes and dreams that are bringing you the sense of satisfaction and contentment and fulfilment that you’re actually looking for. That you’ve been spending most of your life looking for, well are they or aren’t they?

You know Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But that’s how many people, can I say most people are living their lives. Well you know, no, I’m not content, no, I’m not satisfied but if I just keep going, if I just keep working harder maybe it will come.

Can I be blunt here? Can I be really direct? No it won’t because 99% of that sense of satisfaction and contentment and fulfilment that everyone’s yearning for has to do with what’s going on inside your heart. And there is a simple yet profound switch that each one of us can flick on the inside that changes everything. Everything. Would you like to know what it is? Well here it is – the words of Jesus. Matthew chapter 23, verses 11 and 12:

The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

That switch is turning our lives around from filling ourselves, gratifying ourselves, satisfying ourselves to using who we are and what we are and what we have to serve others. It’s turning our lives around from dreaming about how successful we can be to harnessing our hopes and dreams to impact other people’s lives and when we do that here is what happens.

The things that we’ve been doing that seem so mundane all of a sudden they have a purpose outside ourselves and that purpose is to bless other people, to help other people, to use who we are and what we have to make their lives better.

That’s where the satisfaction is, that’s where the contentment is, that’s where the greatness is. I mean what is greatness after all? Greatness lives in the hearts of the people whose lives we’ve impacted, doesn’t it? And all those who try to exalt themselves, who try to build themselves up, who try to be someone will ultimately be humbled because in everyone else’s eyes they’re not that great at all. But all those who humble themselves, to be servants, will be exalted because they’re greatness will live on in the hearts and the lives of those people whom they have served.

It’s a simple switch. So let me ask you again, what motivates you each morning and is it giving you the satisfaction that you’ve been looking for? Oh Berni you just don’t know how boring, how terrible my job really is do you? You have no idea because if you did you wouldn’t say any of this rubbish to me.

No, I don’t know but God does and this is His word to you today if that’s what’s going on in your heart right now. Colossians chapter 3 beginning at verse 22:

Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while you’re being watched and in order to please them but whole heartedly fearing the Lord. Whatever your task is put yourself into it as done for the Lord and not for your masters. Since you know from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You serve the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Serving God ultimately means serving people. When we love Him and we want to serve Him with all our hearts He often calls us into difficult places and dark places to be the one light that shines there; to be in effect His light shining into the darkness.

And that’s what brings meaning to the reality of our mundane existence, that’s what brings purpose to our lives, a focus to serve Him and to impact others with His love. No people won’t always fall over one another to come and say thank you, we won’t always feel appreciated and yeah some days it’s going to be a really tough gig but that’s okay because when we do it for Jesus then it’s from Him that we’ll receive His inheritance as our reward.

When we’re in the business of serving Jesus that, I have to tell you, is where the action is. It’s the only place so far that I’ve been able to find the peace and the contentment, the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction that I’ve been looking for.

We’ve all heard that saying – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Fair enough. But sometimes that’s a cop out. Sometimes we use that to dodge the fact that something is broken in our lives. That there’s something that does need fixing.

There’s an old saying and I’m going to do it in Australian colloquial kind of way that goes like this. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It’s kind of a double edged sword that one, sometimes it’s absolutely true. People want to tinker with things that are working really well just because, well they want to tinker and they end up breaking them.

It might be a sales process in a business that’s working so well and someone tinkers with it and all of a sudden the sales start falling. Or a child’s toy or a bike or a car, some of us just like to fix things and in the end we end up breaking them.

But on the other side the ‘if ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality can be an excuse for not dealing with issues that really do need to be dealt with.

Let’s say there’s a great relationship, a great friendship that you’ve had and it’s kind of gone off the boil. Your wife or your husband sees it happening and says to you, “honey, you need to do something about that” and your answer because you don’t want to deal with the difficult issue, hey you may not even want to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong at all.

Your answer is, “well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” We’ve all done that at some point haven’t we? In fact we can take it to ridiculous lengths.

I was due to take a short plane flight from Sydney to Canberra a few years back, it’s kind of like a half hour flight so they use a small but sturdy propeller plane called a DASH – 8. Well it was Monday morning and Sydney airport was very busy as it’s prone to be at that time.

We boarded the plane, taxied out and there we waited for forty five minutes. As a result of the long wait with the propellers spinning round it turns out that something overheated and a warning light came on in the cockpit. So after all that delay the pilot came on and said, “ladies and gentlemen I’m terribly sorry but we’re going to have to go back to the terminal and have some maintenance engineers look at the plane. It’s probably going to take at least an hour.”

Well none of us were impressed, we all had meetings to go to and we were looking at all up a delay of at least two hours, I mean it’s only a three hour drive. What can you do? The joys of air travel but the guy sitting next to me he went ballistic. He called the steward, he abused her, he went nuts. “You know if we hadn’t been sitting here all that time this would never have happened. It’s only a warning light, it’s probably a false alarm. We should take off, I have an important meeting to go to, I could have driven there faster than this.” And on he went.

At which point the steward, I have to give her credit for the way she handled it, with no emotion on her face, looked him in the eye and asked him plainly, “So sir, are you really suggesting we put the plane up in the air, and at that point we discover that you’re wrong, that there really is a fault. Is that what you’re suggesting sir?”

She was very calm, very matter of fact at which point this belligerent guy next to me was totally silenced. It was pretty obvious wasn’t it? It probably was a false alarm but did you want to be at twenty thousand feet doing three hundred and fifty miles an hour when you discover that you were wrong? No not me, not anyone else really, not even this guy who really hadn’t thought through the consequences of his emotive argument until it was put to him plain and simple.

Like I said at the top of the program we’re absolute masters of self delusion and more often than not we can look at our lives in the same way as my fellow passenger looked at that warning light. And in life, as in aviation, when we ignore the warning signs we do so at our peril. Correct?

Keep ignoring the warning signs and eventually you’re going to crash. It’s a pretty good way of looking at life. Sometimes in life something’s broken, it doesn’t matter how hard we argue against it, when it’s broken it’s broken and when it’s broken it needs to be, well, fixed right?

It could be a wrong attitude that we have towards ourselves. Either puffed up with pride or completely wrung out by a lack of self esteem. Either of those two could end up completely ruining our lives. Have you ever tried to help someone deal with either of those problems? Pride or low self esteem? It’s almost impossible because they don’t want to hear. They’d rather deceive themselves and live with the consequences than be honest with themselves, admit their fault and deal with it in order to get rid of the consequences and live a better life – masters of self deception. But let me ask you; is that really any way to live your life? Well is it? Here’s how Jesus put it, Matthew chapter 6 beginning at verse 22.

The eye is the lamp of the body so if your eye is healthy your whole body will be full of light but if your eye is unhealthy your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness how great is your darkness?

The eye of course is the metaphor for how we see things and if the way we see things is unhealthy then we have a distorted view of the world and our lives will be full of darkness. And if we kid ourselves, if we delude ourselves into thinking that the darkness that we’re living in is really light, remember my friend on the plane, that’s exactly what he was doing, then boy what a pitch black darkness you’re going to be living in.

Listen to me, if it’s broken we need to fix it otherwise it’s going to ruin our lives. An attitude, a behaviour, a distorted way of seeing situations because something is broken inside us.

God often brings people along who’ll give us the advice. He often makes things happen to help us wake up to the truth but we don’t want to listen and why don’t we want to listen? Why is it that we just want to hang on to this rubbish that’s going to ruin our lives? Why is it that we don’t open up and look at a better alternative? I’ll tell you.

Because instead of taking constructive criticism on board, well most of us don’t handle criticism all that well do we? And so we don’t listen, we keep doing or feeling or thinking or saying the thing that’s ruining our lives and we live life with the consequences. But is that really any way to live the rest of your life? Is it? Listen to me; if it’s broken you need to fix it.

Immediately after that passage about light and darkness, true and false perceptions and consequences of the alternatives Jesus spoke about what is probably the single most sensitive subject of all – money. He was laying the ground work for giving His people some really tough advice with that whole healthy/unhealthy eye light/darkness thing and this is what He said:

No one can serve two masters. For a slave will either hate the one or love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve God and wealth.

Just think that one verse through, that one thing that Jesus said right there in the context of your life and I’m guessing that if you’re one of the majority that little one thing is going to make you squirm. It’s going to make you uncomfortable because if you choose God over wealth then He’s going to ask you to make some real sacrifices.

Sacrifices in the long term that will bring a huge benefit but as with all sacrifices in the short term it’s going to cost you but if wealth has a grip on your life, if it’s all about money, how much you have and how much you’re seen to be having, well my friend that’s surely going to be ruining your life as it ruined mine for many, many years in the past.

Jesus tackles issues in our lives head on, He doesn’t mince words, He’s direct, He’s in your face because He loves you. So when you hear Him speak to you about something that’s broken do something about it will you? For Gods sake and yours. If it’s broken you really need to fix it and Jesus is the one with the power to help you do just that. Really.