• Christianityworks Official Podcast

  • By: Berni Dymet
  • Podcast
Christianityworks Official Podcast By cover art

Christianityworks Official Podcast

By: Berni Dymet
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • There is such incredible power in God’s Word! Power to change. Power to make an impact in this world. That’s what Christianityworks is all about – in depth teaching straight out of God’s Word. Join Berni Dymet as he opens God's Word to discover what God has to say into your life, today.
    Christianityworks
    Show more Show less
Episodes
  • You can pick your friends but not your relatives // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 3

    You can pick your friends but not your relatives // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 3
    May 5 2024
    No doubt you’ve heard the saying – you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives. So – what do you do, when the people you’re closest to turn out to be amongst the most difficult to deal with? We’re All Different The first thing we notice when we look around at other people is that we are all different, aren‘t we? In a room of just ten people, even if two people are identical twins, we look around and we are all different. Even identical twins grow up emotionally quite different and they have different finger prints. So those differences are wonderful. That means you can do things that I can’t do and I can do things that you can’t do. But sometimes those differences can really grate on us. You know, Jacqui, my wife, and I are really quite different. We can be lying in bed at night and I’ve got the ceiling fan on and she’s got her electric blanket on. And when we get close to people, those differences, well, you know, they can grate a little bit if we allow them to. My strengths have a flip side to the coin, they have weaknesses underneath, and your strengths - the things that you are particularly good at, well, there’s a flip side to those. The under side of those can sometimes rub other people the wrong way. We all are a bundle (as I like to say) of strengths and weaknesses. Our own blubbering mass, if you like, of really good things we can do and the things where we aren’t so strong, where maybe we fall short. And in the daily grind, in the pressures and the conflict, those different personality types are hard to deal with. The psychologists say there are kind of four personality types - the sanguine, the bubbly, fun loving type - the choleric, the organised, decision maker - the melancholic, the temperamental, creative - and the phlegmatic, the peace loving, kind of ‘hippy’ - and you and I, we’re all kind of a blend of one or two of those, I guess. That’s ok, because people that are at a distance, that’s not so hard to deal with, but let’s look across our families at the moment - our immediate families and our extended families and what we know is, those differences in a family situation - in our homes, in the places we go to rest and relax and recuperate and be recharged - in those places, those differences can be painful and annoying. You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.| Even husband and wife, as they get to know each other - I mean, of course, we can pick our husbands and wives but once we get to know each others weaknesses, once the relationship develops and the marriage goes on for a few years, it’s easy to get to the point and say, “oh, why did I pick her, or why did I pick him?” Is anyone compatible really? We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We all know we’ve got mistakes, we all know we’ve got rough under-bellies that, you know, don’t quite measure up. We are in the middle of a series called, ‘Dealing with Difficult People’ and today we are going to look at dealing with the difficult people in our families - the people who are closest to us. The Bible says we should love people, the question is: How? How do we love people? It’s not enough to know that we should love difficult people in our families but it’s important to know how to love those difficult people, because how we love them will make a huge difference to our lives and in fact, the lives of all of those people who are close to us. And I guess I talk not only about our family, but people whom we work closely with. The ones that are really close to us are the ones - well, we can hurt them the most and they can hurt us the most. The more important that person is to us, the more they can hurt us because we open ourselves up; we expose ourselves. So I like to start reading in First Peter, which is right towards the end of the New Testament - First Peter chapter 2 beginning at verse 18, right through to chapter 3. You, who are servants, be good servants to your masters, not just to good masters, but bad ones too. What counts, is that you put up with it for God’s sake when you are treated badly for no good reason. You know, there’s no particular virtue in accepting punishment that you well deserve but if you are treated badly for good behaviour and continue in spite of it to be a good servant, that’s what counts with God. This is the kind of life you’ve been invited to. The kind of life Jesus lived. He suffered everything that came His way so that you would know that it could be done and also how to do it, step by step. He never did one thing wrong, not one thing did He say that was amiss. They called Him every name in the book and He said nothing back. He suffered in silence, content to let God set things right. He used His servant body to carry our sins to the cross so that we could be rid of sin, free to live the right way. His wounds became your healing. You were lost sheep - you had no idea who you ...
    Show more Show less
    24 mins
  • Under Fire from the Enemy // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 2

    Under Fire from the Enemy // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 2
    Apr 28 2024
    We all have some difficult people in our lives. You do. I do. So how do you deal with them – especially when you’re under fire from the enemy? It’s Easy to Fight Wars I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but dealing with people, sometimes difficult people, is a big part of life, at home, at work, socially. And conflict can take its toll. Sometimes we feel as though we’re under pressure - as though we’re under fire, maybe through circumstances, maybe through what other people are doing - and right in the middle of that difficult space, we still have to deal with those difficult people, under fire. And in one of those perverse twists of life, in a sense there’s meaning in conflict; in a sense there’s meaning and dignity when we sacrifice in the midst of a conflict. Most nations, my own, Australia and in fact, New Zealand, celebrate the sacrifice of their soldiers during war. In Australia it’s called ANZAC Day - the Australia New Zealand Army Corp and increasingly, that celebration is growing. About twenty or thirty years ago people said, “oh it’s all war mongering and it’s all about this and that and it’s going to die and we can’t possibly continue celebrating war. And it’s funny, but we celebrate a day, in ANZAC Day, which is a day of great defeat. It remembers - maybe celebrates is the wrong word - it remembers that eighteen and a half thousand Australian soldiers were wounded or missing and seven and a half thousand were killed. Five thousand New Zealanders wounded and missing, two and a half thousand killed in this Gallipoli campaign in World War One which was such an enormous disaster. And social commentators are saying, “look, the reason that these celebrations, right around the world, the reason that these sorts of days are being remembered, right around the world, where we are looking at our soldiers who were lost in battle, is that - well it’s not about war any more, it used to be about the glorification of war - but today it’s about sacrifice and hope. It’s all about the triumph of the spirit not about the victory in the battle. These sorts of days, where we remember fallen soldiers, say with a voice that grows louder each year that we expect to find something good to happen, that we are still capable of becoming the kind of society that would justify the sacrifice of those who thought we were worth fighting for. In other words, people today are looking back on the sacrifice of the soldiers of their countries and saying, “You know, there’s meaning in that sacrifice, you know there’s humility, there’s giving, there’s something spiritual when these men under fire, were prepared to sacrifice their lives for me.” There’s a large shopping centre near where I live, quite a new one - very ritzy, glitzy, you know - enormous, expensive clothes. And you see people milling around in that shopping centre, day after day, week after week, and that whole shopping centre - mall, shopping thing - is like an icon of our time. Yet as ritzy and glitzy as it is, it doesn’t have meaning and people are looking for meaning and it seems that in celebrations, like ANZAC Day, they’re finding that spiritual flame - that cenotaph, that bugle, that cool morning air, that shrine, that spiritual experience - people are finding meaning in sacrifice. Now you might ask, “why don’t they find that in Jesus? Why don’t they find that in church?" And you look at the public media image of the church, with this denomination fighting that denomination and the systematic cover-up of child abuse and Christians who don’t look any different, actually, from the rest of the world. The salt, at least in its public image, has lost its flavour. The light has stopped shinning when people look at what Christianity is through the media. And let’s face it, we construct much of our reality about life through what we see in the media - it may not be fair, but that’s the perception. So I can’t imagine why they’re not knocking down the doors of our churches searching for the truth, can you? A man whom I admire enormously, Michael Frost, once said to me - he said, “Holy living is mission.” In other words, the way that we live our lives as Christ followers, needs to be missional. We need to be salt and light, loving one another and as the shoppers are swilling around these shopping centers, what are they looking for? They’re looking for spiritual authenticity. They’re looking for sacrifice and love and community and acceptance, as they find on ANZAC Day. But you just don’t find that in shopping centers and as much as the ANZAC Day style of celebration around the world is a spiritual experience, it can never replace Jesus. Why are we talking about conflict and battle? - because life is sometimes conflict and battle and when people look at the church, when people look at you and me as Christ followers, and they say, “Is this person for real? Is this faith authentic? Is there...
    Show more Show less
    24 mins
  • The Most Difficult Person You'll ever Meet // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 1

    The Most Difficult Person You'll ever Meet // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 1
    Apr 21 2024
    So I wonder – who’s the most difficult person in your life right now? Chances are you can picture their face. Well I’d like to spend some time with you chatting about the number one most difficult person in your life. When People Look at Us Let me ask you a question: when the world looks at the church, what does it see? When people look at the church of Jesus Christ, what is it they see in the media image? Sexual abuse on the news, division amongst denominations, people who mean well demonstrating against this, that and the other! It sees a bunch of people who say one thing and do another. On the one thing we profess God‘s love, on the other, well, the church seems to be saying, in it’s media image, “do this, don’t do that, but by the way, don’t mind the fact that we have systematically covered up sexual abuse of children for decades." There’s a name for that and it’s called ‘hypocrisy’ and the world hates hypocrisy. You and I hate hypocrisy. What do people expect to see when they look at God’s people? What do people expect to see? Tony Campolo is a wonderful man out of the U.S., you may have heard of him. He just a wonderful minister of God’s Word and he often asks young people, when he meets them in universities: “What’s the one thing that you know that Jesus said?” and mostly people say this - mostly people remember that Jesus said: “Love your enemy!” And too often it seems that we as God’s people; as Christians, are kind of telling people how far they have strayed from God. You know, we talk about this social issue, or that social issue, instead of reaching out to people and telling them how close God really is in Jesus Christ. Well that’s the big picture; that’s the macro. What about the micro? What about you and me? When they look at us, what do they see? Do they see, ‘love your enemy’? First John chapter 4 verse 7 says this: Let us love one another for love comes from God ... And when you look at Jesus, when you look at how He dealt with people and what He taught and what He spoke about, the biggest thing for Him was that love-walk; the biggest thing for Him was valuing people and loving them into the Kingdom of God. We got a new revelation of who God is when Jesus arrived and then when you look at the rest of the New Testament, the Epistles that come after the Gospels, the letters that were written amongst the New Testament church when Jesus had risen again, more and more you see that revelation expounded as ‘walk in love’. Love God and love other people. John Grey, the author of that famous book, 'Men Are From Mars and Women are From Venus', makes a very interesting point in that book. He says that very few people ever grow in love. Why is that? Because loving is difficult. The people we love can be difficult sometimes. Forty five percent of marriages - almost half - fail. I wonder of those that are left, how many of them are lousy marriages? We want to love; it’s not enough to want to love, we actually need to know how to love, I really believe that. Let me just say that again. It’s not enough for us to know that we ought to walk in love; we actually need to know how to do that. And so on Christianityworks this week we are starting a series of four messages called Dealing With Difficult People. Because difficult people are all around us, difficult relationships are all around us and our ability to look like Jesus and be like Jesus and love like Jesus, depends on our ability to deal with the difficult people in our lives - those that Jesus referred to as our enemies. Let me ask you, who’s the most difficult person you’ll ever meet? Just close your eyes for a minute and visualise the most difficult person you ever met. I’m sure you can see their face and it stirs up emotions in you. Now open your eyes. If I had a mirror I’d be standing in front of you holding up the mirror and saying, “Here, look at the most difficult person that you will ever meet.” Take a good look, because we look at ourselves for five, maybe ten minutes in the mirror in the morning and then we spend the rest of the day looking at other people. Day after day after day, we look at other people and sometimes the better we know them, the better we know their faults and weaknesses and their blind spots and we experience the things that they do to hurt us, or the things that they don’t do to hurt us and we go from recognising their strengths and weaknesses to judging those. Now, it’s right to look at someone and say, "this person is good at this and not good at that" and to assess them. But we can step over a line, where that good assessment of someone turns into judgement and that line is called, ‘anger and resentment’. When all of a sudden, what other people do to us or say to us or omit to do to us - when those things get us angry and resentful and vengeful - we have stepped over a very important line and all the time we forget that in order for us ...
    Show more Show less
    24 mins
Ministry & Evangelism Spirituality
Show more Show less

What listeners say about Christianityworks Official Podcast

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available